Poverty, war, prejudice and disease haven't been eliminated - and beings of all races can be stupid, bigoted and greedy as well as altruistic and enlightened. Humans and aliens were depicted in a more gritty, realistic way. Characters die, are reassigned, or are forever changed by their actions and those of the people around them.īabylon 5 broke a lot of SF TV conventions, and not just because of the way all shows were interconnected in a 5 year arc.

The setting of the show is affected by events in each episode - the status quo isn't neatly restored at the end of the hour. Each episode is enjoyable on its own, but is also a piece of a larger whole, a chapter in a five year long novel for television. Unlike most television series, Babylon 5 is a single story, completely planned out from day one with a beginning, middle, and end. Humans are not alone.īabylon 5 is the story of the last of the Babylon stations, the result of a project intended to find peaceful ways of resolving conflicts between the various races.

'It was the dawn of the third age of mankind', in the middle of the twenty-third century. Marjean Holden may be trapped in Beastmaster, but I suspect the other actors would jump at the chance to play such complex characters.Starship Modeler: Babylon 5 Starship Reference Watch the series as it is broadcast here, and write Sci-Fi asking if they can't get new episodes. I liked Farscape - now I love it - but I LOVE Crusade. They took 13 episodes, no more, and at the time the Sci Fi channel had committed its financial future to Farscape. JMS went as far as he could, then told them to stuff it. They were responsible for the change in uniforms, and they demanded a new opener, one which gave away too much. They wanted a new character added, a female who 'explored' other species sexually. Basically, B5 was bought for TNT by the people who bought re-broadcast rights, but supervision for Crusade was taken over by people who supervised original series and evidently didn't like it - they were into westerns. The story detailed on all the chatrooms at the time. The series is now being rebroadcast in the order in which it was intended by Sci-Fi Channel, and after only a week it remains far more satisfying than it was two years ago. To those of you who only saw it when broadcast on TNT, the broadcast 'opener' was not in fact the true opening episode.

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