Babylon 5
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Babylon 5 is the one space station television ever built that behaved like an actual city: a neutral port where ambassadors scheme in corridors, dock workers strike, and a bartender pours whiskey for everyone about to make a terrible decision. J. Michael Straczynski planned a novel for television that ran five years, before prestige television was a phrase, and the show kept to that plan through a broken pilot, a studio threat to shut the production down, and a five weeks hiatus bought with the cast’s own time.
The result rewards patience the way almost no nineties show demanded it. Season one is a learning curve, then the machine locks: The Coming of Shadows, 24 Hours in Space, Sleepwalker, Z’ha’dum are hours that still land like punches. Minbari war guilt, an Earth Alliance drifting toward fascism, and Londo Mollari’s slow slide from vain comic relief to tragedy make up a political plot that predicted its decade. Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas carry one of the great friendship and feud arcs between two aliens on television, and Mira Furlan’s Delenn earns every minute of her transformation.
The effects budget was a children’s science fiction hour and you can see every dollar of it. The writing keeps outrunning the money, which turns out to be the right trade. Watch past season one and television’s best long game is waiting.
Our score: 8.5/10.