I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front.

It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.

I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.

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toast0 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've been watching B5 over the past year or so, and I came to the episode(s) where certain characters were pushing "you don't have to follow unlawful orders" about a week after Mark Kelly et al were pushing it.

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jeffwask a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's fascism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imMGchI1EWY

	▲	georgeecollins 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly! Gene Roddenberry vision of the future is hopeful. I grew up on it and the idea that in the future people would rely on reason and express kindness. The government in B5 seemed hokey and anachronistic to me. At that time.

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gostsamo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From the beginning, B5 is like the UN with all the pettiness included. As a political storytelling, it was magnificent. The characters were also very high level.

DS9 has some wonderful episodes and fantastic characters, but the overall plot was weak. The world building was plot driven while in B5 it is vice versa and it made all the difference for me.

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nobody9999 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself,

The series creator and chief writer, J. Michael Straczynski was explicit about that: The Earth Government story arc is lifted straight from the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.

A significant amount of which we're seeing rebranded as MAGA in the US and other far-right movements elsewhere.

A good example would be the "anti-alien" frenzy in Babylon 5 as compared with the far-right's ridiculous tropes about the undocumented in the US.

There are a bunch more like Trump's obsession with personal loyalty and lack of any empathy is quite similar to Babylon 5's President Clarke.

As I mentioned, that story arc is based upon the fascist regimes of the '30s and '40s, they even have a "Neville Chamberlain"[0] analog[1] who loudly proclaims "Finally, we will at last know 'peace in our time'."

The biggest difference is that in the Babylon 5 universe, the fascist scum are much more competent than those IRL today.

There's lots more, and I'll echo the plaints of others here that Season 1 is uneven and appears meandering, but many of the plot points brought up in Season 1 end up paying off much later in the series.

I heartily recommend watching the series, not just for the parallels with some of our current circumstance, but because it's a good story with the entire five season story arc fleshed out from the beginning, with good character development and character driven story lines.

It was also the first live-action Sci-Fi series that made use of CGI for the space scenes, which was both very cool, but was also limited compared to today's SFX given that 30 second segments could take hours to render on the Unix workstations of the mid 1990s.

Is it perfect, no. But it's worth the effort to watch it IMNSHO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain

[1] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Frederick_Lantze