“I hope the future will be like Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be like Babylon 5.”

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I was absolutely obsessed with Babylon 5 during it’s run, reading up on the Lurker’s Guide before and after every episode. I analyzed every plot detail and theorized about what everything meant and where it was going. I even made a mod for Strange Adventures in Infinite Space around Babylon 5. I just loved that show so much.

    Then after some years after it went off the air and I was able to get digital copies of the show, I tried going back through it, and it hadn’t aged as well. The CG is pretty outdated (was great at the time), the writing and dialogue was pretty hokey, but overall I still liked all the characters, even the ones I probably disagreed with politically (I still love Garibaldi’s arc in that show). I still have fond memories of it though, just the first time I remember seeing those sort of season-long story arcs like that in almost any show. It had Trekian problems of the week, but it felt like it was building towards something in the long-term, it was just mind-blowing at the time. So many characters that felt real, who changed over time, and so many memorable lines.

    “There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”