Babylon 5 First-Timer's Guide

If you like scifi, are interested in the evolution of TV storytelling, or just like good TV and aren't put off by dated production values, you absolutely should watch Babylon 5.

I won't go into a ton of detail about why, since that ground has been covered masterfully by Rowan Kaiser at the AV Club. Read her review of Babylon 5's pilot, The Gathering--which you absolutely should not watch unless you're a fan or morbidly curious, because it is terrible, and even for fans it's more of a morbid curiosity piece than something enjoyable--for an excellent discussion of B5's place in TV history.

I'll quote a bit of it here:

Babylon 5 starts slow. It’s closer to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the pilot and first season demonstrate potentially innovative television shows struggling to find their voice and form. B5’s pilot is probably the worst of these, but it does get better (and probably faster than TNG).

Like those shows, and several others (especially The X-Files and Deep Space Nine), Babylon 5 fits within a group of 1990s speculative fiction shows known for experimenting with narrative complexity. B5’s main claim to fame within that group: It was designed to tell a five-year story with a strong single author. The “five-year plan” has gained a bad rap in recent years thanks to shows that had extensive plans but failed to account for anything like character growth, like FlashForward, but Babylon 5 actually pulled its plan off...

Those experimental narrative forms were all transitional, existing partway between the near-100 percent serialization of a Game Of Thrones or The Wire and the dominant procedural form of the past...

It’s a political show, where the characters are often at odds with one another. On Star Trek, a series regular like G’Kar would never be involved in a plot to implicate another series regular. We’re more used to this now, but at the time? Babylon 5 was set up as something different and more complex from the beginning, though at first, it had a bit more ambition than sense. What’s great about the series is that eventually sense caught up and the ambition never went away.

I say this with love, as this is a TV series that shaped me, and that I still return to frequently: a lot of Season 1 is excruciatingly bad. Almost unwatchably bad, unless you're already a fan. 

Unfortunately, one of the very things that makes B5 great also makes it hard to skip most of the first season. While B5 isn't a fully serialized show like Game of Thrones--where if you miss an episode, you won't have any idea what's going on in the next one because almost every scene is tied to other scenes in other episodes--its ambition to be a "novel for TV" does mean that even standalone episodes tend to slip in important bits of information or foreshadowing. And some of the worst episodes contain some of the best character moments. 

That makes it hard to do with B5 what a friend did for me with ST:TNG, which is provide newcomers with a handful of episodes from the first season to watch and simply skip the rest. 

So I've decided on a hybrid approach. I'll provide a handful of episodes to watch in full, and edited highlight reels of the important bits of the rest, to save you from most of the excruciatingly bad first-season stuff and get you into the second season (where things really get good) as painlessly as possible. 

Kaiser also does a bit of analysis that I haven't seen elsewhere that I think is really helpful in understanding B5 from a structural perspective (at the cost of some sort of abstract/high-level spoilers):

Babylon 5 is often considered to be one story told across multiple seasons—the show’s marketing as a “televised novel” encourages that concept—but it’s not so. Babylon 5 is really several dozen intersecting plots, which range in length from half a season to a little longer than a season. The stories go roughly like this:

• The mystery of the Battle Of The Line (the first season to the start of the second)
• Rising Human nativist sentiment/general feeling of Earth being bad (the first season, changing after Santiago dies)
• Narn-Centauri tensions (from the start of the series until “The Coming Of Shadows”)
• Return of an ancient evil (the first third of season two)
• Gathering of evidence against the conspiracy on Earth (early season two to early season three)
• The Narn-Centauri War (latter two-thirds of season two)
• Zack and the Nightwatch (mid-season two to early season three)
• Narn Resistance (end of season two to ?)

This isn’t entirely comprehensive: the telepath issues, for example, exist throughout the series. But it is a good way to understand how Babylon 5 gets its big events so right when other shows don’t always connect. In the case of “Severed Dreams,” there are four different stories which have been with the show for months.

Essential episodes (accompanied by highlight reels):

-Midnight on the Firing Line
-By Any Means Necessary
-Signs and Portents
-A Voice in the Wilderness
-Babylon Squared
-Chrysalis

If you decide you don't want to do the highlight reels (why are you here, then?), are okay with watching a few whole episodes that have sections that are vital to the plot but have some pretty clunky inessential scenes, and are okay with missing out on some minor plot points and character moments, you'll want to add these:

-Mind War
-And the Sky Full of Stars

For spoiler-free analysis (assuming you don't read ahead to episodes you haven't watched yet), behind-the-scenes tidbits, and cogent summaries, I highly recommend the old Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. 

Episode summaries and highlight reels:

1. Midnight on the Firing Line - Watch in full
2. Soul Hunter - Watch excerpts
3. Born to the Purple - Watch excerpts
4. Infection - Watch excerpts
5. The Parliament of Dreams - Watch excerpts
6. Mind War - Watch excerpts
7. The War Prayer - Watch excerpts
8. And the Sky Full of Stars - Watch excerpts
9. Deathwalker - Skip
10. Believers - Skip
11. Survivors - Skip
12. By Any Means Necessary - Watch in full
13. Signs and Portents - Watch in full
14. TKO - Watch excerpts
15. Grail - Skip
16. Eyes - Watch excerpts
17. Legacies - Skip
18. A Voice in the Wilderness (Part 1) - Watch in full
19. A Voice in the Wilderness (Part 2) - Watch in full
20. Babylon Squared - Watch in full
21. The Quality of Mercy - Watch excerpts
22. Chrysalis - Watch in full

B5 Watchthrough: Midnight on the Firing Line

 

Since The Gathering aired a full year before the first season of Babylon 5, and was terrible, Midnight on the Firing Line serves as the series' functional pilot, if not its official one, and thus is an essential episode. The first half of S1 is really rough, but fortunately Midnight on the Firing Line is one of the better episodes in that run. 

For those wanting to go in-depth, both in analysis of the episode itself and in how it fits into the series--and the development of scifi television--overall, as usual I highly recommend Rowan Kaiser's analysis over at the AV Club:

Why should you watch Babylon 5?

There’s a partial answer in the first season première, “Midnight On The Firing Line.” The Centauri ambassador to the station, Londo Mollari, relates a prophetic dream where he dies alongside Ambassador G’Kar of the Narn, their hands around each others’ throats. These are two major characters. They’re both in the main credits. And they’re treated as deathly enemies, not just now, in this introductory episode, but in the future. That’s impressive for any TV show, let alone a pre-2000 series.

The prophetic nature of the dream also serves as a promise. It says “This will pay off. Keep watching.” Even though “Midnight On The Firing Line” isn’t the greatest episode—it’s fine, with some good and a few bad moments—that promise, that conflict, suggests that Babylon 5 is far more ambitious than it seems.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about it since you should watch the whole thing. Check out the Lurker's Guide entry if you want behind-the-scenes info and some analysis from (at the time) people who hadn't seen the rest of the series, so it's spoiler-free. 

Heads-up: Sinclair

A lot of people really hate Michael O'Hare's Commander Sinclair. I didn't have an issue with him, but I can sort of see it: he's a bit stiff. The good news, if you don't like him, is that he's only in command of B5 for the first season. He makes a few reappearances after that, but only a few. So you don't have to put up with it for long, if he's a barrier to your enjoyment. 

However, I would urge you--with hindsight and since we're moving through this season as quickly as possible and, like, I'm not arguing it's good or that his acting is good--to watch with compassion, because the back story to what was going on is both tragic and, I think, deeply moving in how it's a story about a lot of good people trying to do right by each other. 

In short, O'Hare was suffering from some intense mental illness. J. Michael Straczynski (the showrunner, "JMS") wanted to shut down the series rather than force him to perform when he was struggling, but O'Hare didn't want his cast and crewmates to lose their jobs. JMS promised to do whatever was needed to get him through the first season until they could bring on a replacement, and to take the knowledge of what was really going on with O'Hare to his grave. O'Hare told him that after he was dead, he wanted his story told. In an industry not known for its compassion, I think the obvious love, admiration, and care that these people had for each other is really beautiful. Here's JMS talking about it:

Watch on YouTube

 

B5 Watchthrough: Soul Hunter

"2-Soul Hunter" (Watch on Vimeo)

Soul Hunter is an interesting episode of B5, and an ambitious one. I can't think of many TV series in the 1990s that were ready to wrestle with questions like whether the soul exists, and who has a right to possession of it, in their second episode. Especially when the only success in their genre at the time was Star Trek, and the network didn't have a lot of faith in them. 

A lot of shows would have played it conservative in those circumstances, and B5 did color within the lines in the sense of mostly doing self-contained episodes for its first season, slipping in touches of serialization in the form of character moments that would be referenced in future episodes, foreshadowing in newspaper headlines and TV news onscreen in the background, and continual teasing of the ongoing mystery of what happened during the Battle of the Line. But thematically? It wasn't conservative at all. And that makes for some ambitious choices even early in the series, which I find really interesting.

However, interesting isn't the same as good.

There's a lot of scenery-chewing here, and a lot of awkwardness in line readings (and, to be fair, line writing). I often talk about how, if you're familiar with The West Wing, it's interesting to watch A Few Good Men, because while that movie is full of Hollywood A-listers, they aren't native Sorkinese speakers the way the WW cast is, and while they give it their best, they don't quite have the rhythm down. The B5 cast, at this point, hasn't mastered JMSian.

Watch for Claudia Christian (Ivanova)'s line readings--like the rest of the cast, she's still stiff here, but she does have enough of a sly twinkle to her, and enough willingness to get her teeth around the Shakespearean melodrama of it all, that you can get hints of what the show will sound like when everyone gets comfortable with its style. 

Episode synopsis (scenes included in summary video are described in bold):

• Dr. Stephen Franklin, the station's new chief medical officer, arrives on B5 and is greeted by Sinclair and Ivanova. He replaces Dr. Kyle, who was transferred back to Earth, supposedly to work directly with the president, after being the only human to see a Vorlon out of its encounter suit. (Included as a major character introduction, and for a key tease about the Vorlons.)
• An alien ship of unfamiliar design, apparently damaged, is on a collision course with the station. Sinclair gets in a Starfury (small single-pilot ship) to attempt to intercept it, while Ivanova readies the defense grid to blow it up if he's unsuccessful. He succeeds, and the ship's unconscious occupant is taken to MedLab for treatment. (Partial inclusion as an Ivanova character moment.)
• Delenn offers to help identify the ship and occupant, since the Minbari are familiar with some alien species humans haven't had contact with.
• Dr. Franklin admits to Garibaldi that he's not sure if the alien is stabilized since he's not familiar with its physiology. Upon seeing the alien, the normally calm, helpful Delenn begins shouting in Minbari, grabs a weapon, and attempts to kill the alien.
• Later, Delenn explains to Sinclair that the alien is a Soul Hunter, a thief of souls that can sense impending death. Soul Hunters collect souls, preventing them from continuing on their journeys, something that the Minbari consider evil. They especially attempt to collect the souls they consider extraordinary--famous leaders, artists, etc.
• Three scenes are intercut:
  • Sinclair, Ivanova, and Garibaldi discuss how news of the Soul Hunter's presence has gotten out, and alien ships are departing the station, and alien station residents are hiding in their quarters.
  • A man cheats at a game of chance in Down Below, the station's low-income area, triggering another player to stab him.
  • The Soul Hunter wakes up and narrates the man's death to Dr. Franklin.
• Sinclair talks to the Soul Hunter.
• Ivanova and Franklin fire the body of the dead man into a nearby star and hold a brief funeral for him. (Included as an Ivanova character moment.)
• The Soul Hunter escapes from MedLab and kidnaps Delenn. Another Soul Hunter arrives on the station and informs Sinclair that the other Soul Hunter has gone rogue. 
• The Soul Hunter begins draining Delenn's blood to kill her and take her soul. 
• Sinclair rescues Delenn. While he's fighting the Soul Hunter, it says a few cryptic things about Delenn. (Partial inclusion for ongoing plot arc.)
• In MedLab, a barely conscious Delenn tells Sinclair, "We were right about you." In his quarters, Sinclair queries his computer as to what "Satai" means. (Included.)

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's review and analysis at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode entry.

Main takeaways:

• Delenn is more than she seems.
• The Minbari are somehow using Sinclair.

B5 Watchthrough: Born to the Purple

"3-Born to the Purple-1" (Watch on Vimeo)

Born to the Purple is a Londo episode. In theory, you could skip it, since it doesn't do much that's important to the larger arc(s). We get a few more bits of info about how PsiCorps operates and hints of negotiations that affect the larger Narn-Centauri conflict. Future episodes will flash back to moments in this episode, but you'll be able to get the gist from the flashbacks themselves (though it will be more resonant if you've seen this ep).

Ironically, while this is very much a Londo episode, the main carry-over into other episodes is an Ivanova storyline, which will come back in force in TKO.

The plot is pretty simple: Londo falls in love with an exotic dancer, who's actually enslaved under Centauri law, and who steals key information from him for her captor. Our heroes figure it out, Talia uses her telepathy to figure out where the woman's captor is holding her, and Londo pays for her freedom. She goes back to Centauri Prime to heal. He gifts her with a brooch that belonged to his ancestress and tells her to "wear it proudly as a free woman," and to come back to him. This all takes place against the background of negotiations between the Narn and Centauri.

While it's a fairly rote combo of betrayal-by-a-woman and damsel-in-distress, it does do some nice character development on Londo and Vir, and has the aforementioned Ivanova B-story.

The Gathering and Midnight on the Firing Line set up what seemed to be a straightforward dynamic: G'Kar as mustache-twirling aggressor (although I'll almost always be sympathetic to colonized peoples over colonizers, the first few episodes leaned hard into the idea of the Narn as aggressors) and Londo as buffoon.

Londo and G'Kar's characters undergo rapid character development in S1, and the power balance between them will continue to shift throughout the series, so keep an eye on it.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• Peace negotiations with the Narn and Centauri are being overseen by the Earth Alliance, represented by Sinclair. 
• Londo believes himself to be "a washed-up old republican, dreaming of better days."
• Ivanova's father, from whom she is estranged, died while on a video call with her, begging for her forgiveness. 

B5 Watchthrough: Infection

Infection is an episode I remembered as unwatchably bad, and a lot of it is. Heck, JMS himself even cites it as a low point in S1. It was the first episode written for the season, a year apart from The Gathering, and it shows.

That said, the parts of it that aren't terrible actually accomplish a considerable amount of worldbuilding, which is why I've included 13 minutes of it. A big part of it is establishing Babylon 5's somewhat fraught relationship with Interstellar Network News (ISN), and through it, with the public.

I love Star Trek, but one of my main gripes with it is that we rarely get much of a sense of humanity outside of Starfleet. Star Trek's various captains and commanders may have to worry about what Starfleet thinks of them, but they don't often have to deal with opinion polls, conflicts between the military and civilian government, or social media. (Similarly, one of my main gripes with DS9 in particular was that I never really got a feel for station life outside the experience of the main characters and their families.)

Infection's A-plot is cheesy and so inconsequential that I'm not going to even bother rehashing it. The only important part is that there's a company called Interplanetary Expeditions, which will come back in the future. It seems to be mainly about archaeologists digging up ancient alien ruins, but Infection notes that it's basically a front for bioweapons research. It will, in the course of the series, unleash something even worse.

The B-plot, however, which focuses on an ISN reporter who's come to B5 to do a feature on the place, does a fairly good--and subtle, since it's a B-plot and mostly treated as humor--job of easing you into the larger universe of human politics.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• There doesn't seem to be much faith in B5 from the general public. 75% of them predicted it would fail immediately, and Lloyd's of London put the odds of success at 500 to 1.
• Babylon 5's leadership is somewhat of a collection of people who didn't work out elsewhere (much like the West Wing crew). Sinclair may not have the confidence of the military, and hasn't covered himself with glory in interviews past. Garibaldi's been fired like a million times. No word, as yet, about Ivanova.
• Garibaldi is one of Sinclair's few close friends, and he's worried that Sinclair's war experiences have given him a death wish. He's keeping an eye on him for self-destructive behavior. 

B5 Watchthrough: The Parliament of Dreams

I almost included The Parliament of Dreams as a must-watch episode. There's a lot of character development here for a lot of characters, and even some major arc elements like the presence at Sigma-957. Ultimately I decided on just doing excerpts, because I was trying to keep the must-watches to as few as possible.

But if you're inclined, you might want to watch the whole thing.

The premise of the main plot is that G'Kar gets word that an old enemy, on his deathbed, paid to have G'Kar assassinated. G'Kar doesn't know who the assassin is or when they will hit, but his new attache has just arrived on the station and seems highly suspicious. (Na'Toth, the new aide, is a recurring character who gets written out mid-S1, which is unfortunate, since the actress is quite good.)

The backdrop to this is a festival in which all of the alien cultures represented on B5 will show off traditions from their dominant religion. Sinclair, in addition to dealing with all the visitors attending the festival, has to figure out how to represent Earth's "dominant religion."

We get a glimpse in Centauri culture, which hints at what B5's humor looks like when it gets its feet under it, and which actually seems pretty fun, but the main work of this episode is nuancing G'Kar as more than a villain.

The conclusion, and Sinclair's solution to the problem of representing Earth's dominant religion, is a good example of how deeply intertwined B5 was with what I consider some of the best of 1990s liberalism, back when we all still had optimism and hope and faith in humanity. It's easier for me to watch than the West Wing, with which it shares an ethos, since B5 is far less smug and admits it's fantasy.

I also appreciate, given how bad SF/F usually is at religion, that the portrayal of Earth religion is actually *real.*

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• Delenn gets a new attache.
• G'Kar gets a new attache. He likes to sing while he cooks. 
• Londo's an affectionate drunk.
• Sinclair has an on-again-off-again relationship with a woman named Catherine Sakai. It's been tumultuous.
• The Minbari religious ceremony seemed weirdly focused on Sinclair. 

B5 Watchthrough: Mind War

I almost included Mind War as a must-watch episode. It introduces my favorite B5 frenemy, Alfred Bester (named for a scifi author I love). He's played by Walter Koenig, best known as Star Trek: The Original Series' Chekov. Bester joins Ivanova, Mollari, and G'Kar as a character whose actor immediately grasped the tone that's most effective for your average B5 scene: a bit arch, a bit sly, and willing to tear into the scenery with gusto, taking the Shakespearian melodrama up to 11.

It also gives us the first episode to really bring PsiCorps to the forefront, rather than just dropping ominous hints about them.

I didn't include it as a full-watch episode, however, because every bit of the main plotline that isn't Bester is very, um, Season 1. The actors are all doing their best, but there's really no way to deliver Ironheart's dialogue that's not going to look and sound ridiculous.

Plot synopsis:

In some ways, Mind War is a perfect follow-up to The Parliament of Dreams. If TPoD had a largely positive view of the search for transcendence, in the form of religion, Mind War is a dark mirror reflecting the inherent cruelty of commodifying such a search. (Capitalism, yo. It wrecks everything.)

Two PsiCops, telepaths charged with hunting down telepaths who've gone rogue, arrive on B5 to apprehend a telepath named Jason Ironheart. He was one of Talia's instructors at the Academy. They were also shtupping. They interrogate her, after which Ironheart contacts her. He informs her that he's been subjected to experiments designed to create a stable telekinetic, which has long been PsiCorps' white whale. The experiments seemed to have worked, but it turns out PsiCorps wanted a telekinetic for nefarious purposes. However, Jason's powers have continued to grow. He's having trouble controlling them, and he's also transcending his human form. The PsiCops eventually confront him. He accidentally kills the non-Bester PsiCop and becomes some sort of giant non-corporeal star-man. He gifts Talia with telekinesis. Sinclair rather testily orders Bester off his station. Bester gives him an odd salute and smarms, "Be seeing you."

Some of the best moments in this episode come from Claudia Christian, fairly seething with dislike for PsiCorps and facing off against an archly superior Bester. "Good old Psi Corps. You guys never cease to amaze me. All the moral fiber of Jack the Ripper! What do you do in your spare time, juggle babies over a fire pit? Oops, there goes another calculated risk!" It's awkward on the page--as someone who's written and edited a lot of VO dialogue, I'm sorta wincing looking at it--but Christian makes it work. 

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• PsiCops are a thing.
• PsiCorps is dabbling in undetectable telekinetic assassinations.
• PsiCorps can "program" telepaths with a code that, when another telepath sends it into their brain, causes them to fall unconscious. 
• Ivanova really, really hates PsiCorps.