For those who have watched both Babylon 5 and Star Trek TNG- which did you like better?

marginalia_nu 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a hard comparison. They are both very good, in wildly different ways.

B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.

TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.

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layer8 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TNG, because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives, whereas B5 is really about the past (and present), about politics, recurrence and mysticism. It’s a bit like which do you prefer, science-fiction or fantasy? Much of B5 could have been done in a pure fantasy setting.

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gspetr 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

B5 in a fantasy setting wouldn't make much sense, the key issue is the namesake.

What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse? Both have been done, but I've never heard of one actually being the centerpiece and the namesake of a series. There's also the issue of "porting" B4 into such a setting.

Having a series of "prototype" worlds or prototype floating islands would likely make the series overly contrived.

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krapp 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

TNG isn't actually about science, though. There is precious little actual science in the series, or even the franchise as a whole. Ironically the most scientifically grounded series is TOS because they didn't have a ton of franchise tropes to lean on and actually hired science fiction writers now and then. I remember one episode where they encountered a (Romulan?) cloaking device for the first time, a major plot point was the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the fact that such a cloak couldn't be perfect - it had to vent energy somewhere, somehow - which is a degree of scientific rigor no subsequent series would even attempt. And then in another episode they fought Space Lincoln so YMMV. By the time you get to TNG any pretense at science is abandoned for "teching the tech" and inverted space wedgies and whatever nonsense Q gets up to.

That said, B5 absolutely does wear its fantasy pretensions on its sleeve, and I think you're correct about the "forward looking" versus "backwards looking" themes. The technomages are wizards with robes and mystical incantations and everything - it's explained away as "technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic" but they wouldn't be out of place in any D&D setting. Mystical prophecies, gods, demons, "light vs. dark" motifs, the Minbari being so elf-coded it's ridiculous, the Great Man heroic ideal, sacred tomes, eldritch ruins, crystals crystals crystals. All the trappings are there. Crusade went even further in this regard. The hero ship in Crusade is named the Excalibur ffs.

	▲	hollerith 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>>[I prefer] TNG because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives >TNG isn't actually about science I agree with your point that TNG is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but TOS and TNG are very good at creating positive feelings about science and technological progress. Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they evaluate the goodness or badness of literally everything that happens. (Jesus and dismantling oppression are other examples.) In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the only 2 that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology. (TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent or scarce and unimportant inside the Federation and that strife between people had mostly been eliminated. During a conversation about communism, someone cited the kind of society depicted in TNG as the sort of society we should strive for and probably could achieve.)

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c048 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Babylon 5.

When people asked me what I preferred, "Star Wars or Star Trek?", I've always responded with "Babylon 5".

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Jare 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I couldn't stand TNG at first, and in fact didn't really watch it until a decade ago. To me the first 2 seasons, and pretty much anything involving the Q character, are unwatchable, but once I learned to skip them the rest became really interesting. For the sake of comparison, I loved the old TOS movies, DS9, and liked Voyager as a purely episodic "watch whenever I catch it" show.

Babylon 5 still lords over all of them.

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shadowalker97 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They were, for me at least, too different to compare like that.

TNG was the hopeful future - something an idealist would like to imagine society could achieve.

Babylon 5 was the realistic future - where fascism and racism are issues still prevalent in society, but largely left unaddressed.

If you ask me to pick between them I'd have to go with Babylon 5 but only because of the writing. There were so many times that JMS foreshadowed events literal years in the future on the show and it was such a huge payoff as a fan.

Star Trek just wasn't structured as a show in a way that can compete with that level of world building that was all interwoven in the same kind of way.

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jmclnx 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I liked B5 far more, it tended to show people as real people.

A good example is Walter Koenig, to me he was amazing in B5, at times you hated and loved his character, even at the same time.

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munch117 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TNG, by a country mile. B5 has "writer identifies too much with the main character" written all over it. It's the story of how Our Great Leader does the right thing and saves the world, over and over again.

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shantara 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Babylon 5 was my childhood defining TV series, the one that left an impact for the rest of my life. TNG is “merely” a great show.

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gushie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It would depend on what mood I'm in! Although if I forced to only pick one, it would be DS9

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calf 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Babylon 5 was space fantasy in the vein of epic literature, like a Lord of the Rings in space, and influenced modern TV productions like Game of Thrones, whose author says that he was indebted to the former.

Both TNG and B5 have significant cultural value, but for different reasons. More people should watch them.

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ndsipa_pomu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

On average, TNG has better episodes, but it doesn't come close to the multi-season story arc of Babylon 5 and I think the character arcs of Londo and G'Kar are possibly the best of any drama that I've seen.

Also, Babylon 5 later seasons are directly relevant to modern political developments and fascism.