I was aware of the television series Babylon 5 during its initial run back in the mid-1990s, but I wasn’t a regular viewer. The show was syndicated, you see, and as I recall, it aired around these parts in an inconvenient time slot… Saturday or Sunday afternoons, I think, when I was usually out of the house. Something like that. Anyway, I caught episodes here and there, enough to get some idea of the characters and the overall arc of the story. And of course I read and heard a lot about the show, especially the controversial charges that executives at Paramount had plagiarized key ideas from B5 when they developed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But I never saw the series in its entirety, not even in the later ’90s after the show moved to the TNT cable network for its final season and my lovely Anne recorded the whole damn thing for me. The stack of 20 or so VHS tapes that resulted from her efforts ended up in a box in my basement, waiting until I could find the time to watch them…

Well, I have no idea what inspires these things, but a couple weeks ago, I decided it was finally time to pull those tapes out of their long sleep and check out Babylon 5 from start to finish. (Yes, I still have a working VCR… after all, I am “an analog kind of guy!”) I’m now about midway through season two — the show ran for five years, plus a number of TV movies and a short-lived spinoff series — and so far, I’m enjoying it.

B5 isn’t a perfect series, by any stretch of the imagination. It suffers from many of the flaws common to syndicated television of its era: a low budget that translates into visibly flimsy sets, occasionally clunky storytelling, and performances that range from “good” to “adequate” to “what’d they do, recruit the craft-services guy for this scene?” Also, even though I’m not usually one to carp about the visual effects in older media, I have to say the computer-generated imagery in this series is sometimes pretty dodgy, even by the standards of the time. (In addition to pioneering the serialized “novel for television” style of storytelling we take for granted these days, B5 was also the first television series to make extensive use of CGI. Sadly, it was still a young art at the time, and again, the show’s low budget had an impact on its final look.)

In spite of these problems, though, there is something weirdly compelling about the show, and I think I understand why it has such a loyal cult following. I believe it’s because of the ideas at work in the series, more than the execution of those ideas. As much as I love Star Trek — and all my Loyal Readers ought to know how much that is — I think it can be argued that B5 is, in certain respects, a more realistic vision of the future. The crew of the Babylon station faces budgetary problems, overbearing (and distant) bureaucracy, labor disputes, an onboard population of homeless indigents, struggles with addiction and family and faith, mundane complaints like making the rent… all recognizable elements of the modern human experience that the crew of the Enterprise would merely dismiss with the breezy explanation that, “we outgrew that sort of thing long ago.” Star Trek’s optimism about humanity solving our social ills is, of course, a big part of its appeal, but it became far overplayed in the spin-offs, at least in my opinion. (The original series of the 1960s was a bit more grounded than The Next Generation and later Treks… again, in my opinion.) And while Star Trek posits a utopian future society in which religion has essentially ceased to matter (if not actually to exist), the Earth of B5’s 23rd century is as messily — and recognizably — diverse as our own. In one memorable early episode, the various alien ambassadors, whose species all have a uniform faith, are introduced to all the myriad belief systems of humanity. I found that moment unexpectedly moving, because it felt right.

Another thing about B5 that I especially appreciate is its acknowledgement of 20th century popular culture. On Star Trek, if the entertainments of our era were mentioned at all, it was accompanied by a disdainful sniff. Everyone in that future was into Shakespeare and Mozart, but it was if our culture — the present-day culture that produced Star Trek, after all — didn’t survive and didn’t count. Not so with B5, where one major character has a poster of Daffy Duck in his quarters. That seems to me a far more likely scenario, especially these days, when the Internet has demonstrated that nothing ever really goes away. Or at least, it never will again.

Consider the following scene, in which a news reporter asks the station’s commander, following a particularly harrowing incident aboard the station, if being out in space is really worth the effort. While I’ve always loved Captain Kirk’s answer to the same question — a high-minded ode to the spirit of exploration — Commander Sinclair’s answer is a bit more… prosaic:

This is a familiar argument for space buffs, that human beings must expand outward into the universe to assure our species’ long-term survival, but I love that he uses Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly as examples of the human experience that are worth saving… examples equal in stature to the great writers, philosophers, and scientists he also names. I love it because I believe it’s true. Why wouldn’t — why shouldn’t — our pop-cultural icons survive along with Shakespeare and Mozart? B5 appeals to my tastes by… well, appealing to my tastes. It is, as the kids say, relevant to my interests.

Don’t misunderstand… I’m a lifelong Trekkie and nothing is ever going to undo that. And I still have quite a bit of Babylon 5 to go; it’s entirely possible that I may really despise wherever the series ends up going. But so far, I’m finding it a refreshing alternative vision…

(Sorry, incidentally, for the quality of that clip… it was the only one I could find.)