Babylon 5

I thought I'd take a break from being insanely critical, and mention a series that's awesome--Babylon 5. Now, it's been years since I've seen the thing, but I remember it pretty dang well (having seen whole swaths of it several times), and it's great. Let's break with my usual practice, and list the bad things first:

Um, Garibaldi referred to the Pope as "her," which is slightly religiously illiterate, and a fairly cheap way of establishing the "future-ness" of the whole thing.

The last season was sorta lame, most of the movies aren't that great, and the spinoff series was wretched, wretched, wretched.

And...that's about it!

A neutral point that's basically an objection but which doesn't count agains the show is that energy beings would not move like jellyfish, they'd move at lightspeed...and it's actually debatable whether they could interact with meat-people at all, without converting their energy to matter (how's that for a godlike alien trick?) But Star Trek's got the ridiculous energy beings too, and B5's don't appear ever to have had bodies.

Onward to the good things.

First off, the production values--come on, BSG, Firefly, where's your shame? This show from twelve years before you is eating your frigging lunch! The Minbari and Centauri alone are better than your entire productions! Every little thing on the station is believable, but recognizably different from ours. The costumes are amazing; it's very difficult to believe that G'Kar is not really an alien and Londo is not actually hung like a squid. The space battles have aged better than a lot of things, and the shadows and Vorlons are amazing, both their bodies and their ships.

Second off, the characters. Sheridan is the only believeable Chosen One in anything. Dilenn is one of very few women in anything made in the West in the last twenty years, that isn't just some feminist Mary Sue. Marcus can out-Aragorn Viggo Mortenson any day of the week, while wearing a leather stole. Lennier is an amazing combination of ever-so-slightly feeble but secretly badass bureaucrat and self-destructive unrequited lover. And could you even imagine a show having a guy like Londo Mollari now? And not just using him as vehicle for illiterate screeds against the Bush administration? Hell, I can't even imagine a show now able to conceive of an alien civilization not being a democracy or fascist dictatorship (the Centauri are a monarchy, the Narns seem to be an aristocracy, and the Minbari were a Brahmanocracy/Kshatriyacracy until Dilenn changed them to an "Aryatocracy", i.e. rule by the farmer-caste).

Third, the depth of the whole thing! Seriously, find me another writer who'd make a TV show based around Jungian archetypes! For that matter, find me another writer who'd have the stones to have a guy go to a place called Z'Ha'Dum, fall off a bridge while fighting something dark, and get reborn in the company of someone called Lorien! Or how about Emperor Katagia? That whole arc kept me on the edge of my seat, and was amazingly respectful of the viewers' intelligence. The Minbari caste-system is probably a reflection of the Indo-European Cattle-culture, that's why I used Sanskrit terms to discuss them above (India being the oldest example of that culture in essentially unmodified form).

Fourth, the realistic society. There's rock and roll, for God's sake, not just coffee-bar jazz and classical. People aren't just Yuppies in pajamas, they have mortgages and insurance and have to make money. The aliens do seem not to have multiple races (something nobody ever seems able to pull off), but they do have religions, and they're not all Ethical Cultural Jews (Vulcans) or Gary Gygax's version of Vikings (Klingons). The Minbari are some kind of panentheists, it would seem, while the Centauri religion looks something like Hinduism and the doctor is a Neo-Platonist (you say Foundationist, I say Neo-Platonist--seriously, look them up and tell me I'm wrong). Hell's bells, people have real relationships and fights, not either perfect happy-endingism or soap opera problems.

Fifth, PsiCorps. That's it, man, right there: what the hell else do you want? Anyone that remembers Walter Koenig as an offensive backwoods Russian who can't pronounce the letter V, should get a load of him as a telepathic Gestapo. "Ask me to say 'Nuclear Wessels' again, and I'll make you think you're Eleanor Roosevelt."

I still wonder to this day why people (other than the folks that made Farscape) seem to have seen the greatness of Babylon 5, nodded to themselves, and decided "That can never be allowed to happen again."

It was our last best hope for changing the shape of television science fiction. It failed.