Babylon 5 is very much worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet, though I do recommend looking up a watch list. Much of season 1 is extremely skippable, and so is a fair bit of season 2. But the stuff that works really works, and later seasons become some of the most compelling TV you’ll ever watch. This show basically invented much of the format of modern prestige TV, and it had to sort of do it on the fly, which is why it takes a while to find its footing.
I don’t normally like to use “It gets good” as a defence of anything, but in the case of something like Babylon 5 I think it’s merited, because this is one of the shows that was redefining what “Good” actually meant.
I’m watching for the first time now, so far on Ep 6, and I’ve read a lot about season 1 being bad, and specifically to use this guide to avoid the bad episodes, but I decided to watch the low rated ones anyway just to see and I actually found that I liked them quite a lot, even the monster of the week soul hunter episode I thought was quite well done.
I can see how some may bounce off the wooden acting of the main character/commander (and the second in command in the pilot who was really bad, but replaced with the other actress who plays the role far better. Though a shame they weren’t able to keep the doctor from the pilot, I thought they did a much better job than the replacement IMO), but overall I’m finding season 1 so far dramatically better than DS9, which I’ve bounced off like 3 or 4 times and never was able to enjoy due to how dull it felt.
B5 in comparison has such a rich 90’s soundtrack and is absolutely dripping with color and well framed shots, it’s a feast for the eyes, like a classic Baen book cover come to life. I also find I enjoy the characters far more than DS9’s.
It really does come down to your tolerance for the nineties style of television. Today’s audiences are used to stories that move with a very purposeful pacing, where everything that happens is interconnected with an ongoing story. Early Babylon 5 is more of the disconnected, episodic style, where we connect with a world for a moment to see a single slice of action within it. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s also not actually wrong or bad as a style of storytelling, just different. There’s a lot to be said for stories being more expansive, more open, with more room for sidetracks and digressions. The “monster of the week” episode gives you room to explore the characters in situations that they might not otherwise find themselves in. It gives you a means to test the boundaries of the world.
Babylon 5 is, in it’s best moments, actually a great example of doing this well. Episodes like Mind War are these self-contained little slices of story that still indicate or suggest really interesting things about the larger universe in which the story takes place. And those things can be important later, but they don’t have to be.
The watch guides will have you skip most of the first season on the assumption that what you’re really here for is a larger arc plot that will drive the story forward. B5 has one of those, but it doesn’t really start to kick in until season 2. This was actually a pretty big change for the time. Television was supposed to be disconnected and episodic, because viewers wouldn’t necessarily tune in for every episode. In fact, shows in syndication (repeats) were often shown out of order. The idea of a TV show having a chronology was something reserved for serials (hence the name serial; shows that had a specific, sequential, order to them).
A really telling detail is how TV shows used to be sold on tape. It was standard practice at the time to sell episode collections around a theme. Not “Here’s episodes 1 to 4”, but rather “Here’s four episodes about Giles.” B5 was, to the best of my knowledge, the first show to be sold in full season long collections with all of the episodes in order, something that later got adopted by Buffy The Vampire slayer and Star Trek. This is what I mean when I say that B5 was basically inventing most of modern television.
But yeah, as a show itself, when set against most TV of the time, it still stood out. There was some genuinely excellent casting (of the original line-up G’Kar and Londo are the obvious standouts) and a real desire to create television that felt cinematic; that used the craft of cinema in ways that most television did not. If you’re cool with a very different structure than what we’re used to today, and if you can appreciate it against the standards of what was normal at the time then yeah, there’s a lot to love even in those early episodes.
I’m not sure that entirely explains the reputation Babylon’s first season seems to have online, though.
As an example, TNG is almost entirely episodic and made in the same era, yet it’s generally regarded well. The first season there is also known to be bad, but more so because it’s actually poorly implemented until they discovered what works in season 2, which is still episodic.
The same for DS9, which has a poor season 1 that has to be pushed through as they find their feet. That too remains mostly episodic until the later seasons with the dominion war, yet I haven’t seen the same suggestions for watch guides to skip most of the early seasons to get to the serialized stuff, people usually still consider the good episodic standalones of DS9 to be worth watching, from what I can tell.
There’s something oddly unique about the Babylon 5 community suggesting watch lists to avoid any episodic content from the first season specifically, despite the show starting out on way stronger footing than either DS9 or TNG. At least for me, it gave a perception that the first season is nigh unwatchable dreck that most only tolerate once for the setup it provides, emphasizing to grind through it for the pay off.
But my actual experience with it makes the near universal dislike of it’s season 1 bewildering, especially as they are not entirely episodic in the sense that virtually all of them so far have seemingly contributed toward the bigger arc in some way, even the monster of the week episodes.
Sweet!
“This video is unavailable in your country” like… The fuck
Does it work through this Invidious instance? (it’s a youtube front-end/proxy based in the US, which played for me).
It works, thanks!
Hope you enjoy the show.
It’s a classic.
I think my favorite non-serious moment is when Deleen is introducing Draal to Mollari. A lot of the worldbuilding and character building happens in moments like that.
That or Garabaldi’s “beep beep”
Bah “not in your country”
OP provided an invidious link. Should work for you
