On a private community, someone said they’ve just started watching “Babylon 5” on Season 2, and they want to know whether the show stays good.
I replied:
My memory of B5 is that the first season was wooden but there was something about it that made me stay with it. Seasons two through four were excellent.
As for the fifth season: As I recall, the series was initially supposed to go five seasons, but the showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski, got the word that the show would be canceled after four seasons. So he rushed Season 5 to an ending a half-season early.
Then JMS was told whoops, never mind, you get another half-season.
And that’s the way it looked to me onscreen—the first half of the first season was rushed and talky, as JMS was telling viewers information he would have shown if he had the proper amount of time.
Then the second half was just padding and bloviation. A main storyline involved a beautiful woman telepath falling in love with a male cult leader. He had Fabio hair. It just didn’t work for me.
For me, a lot of the fun of Babylon 5 was going on the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 website the morning after each episode aired to see what little easter eggs and plot tricks were hidden in each episode. The website is still online, so somebody just watching the show can have the same fun.
We started a rewatch not long ago, but it didn’t work for either of us. Maybe if we’d started with the second season we would have liked it more?
A spinoff series, “Crusade,” had Gary Cole, which is a plus in any TV show or movie. He played a heroic starship captain. It would have been EVEN BETTER if he’d done the whole thing as Lundberg, his character from “Office Space,” with the contrasting-collar shirt, suspenders, coffee cup, glasses and “Yeah, I’m going to need you to go ahead and… “
I did not love the series but I liked the mix of epic fantasy and space opera. Which I guess is a common trope but not one I’ve encountered before or since.
I do remember one gag I quite liked from that series: a character is a member of the secret Thieves Guild, and this becomes important to the story. Gary Cole confronts her and demands to know why she never told him this. And she rolls her eyes and says, “What’s the point of being a member of secret society if you go around TELLING people about it?” As I recall, the character who was a member of the thieves guild wore a sexy catsuit but her manner was pure Gen X slacker, like Daria Morgendorffer in spaaaaaaace.