Ancient Pop Culture is Dead to Me

The Guardian - home of the spoiler and the holier-than-thou BTL smart arses who think they're more intelligent than people who comment on the Daily Mail on-line - caused something of a minor cult controversy last weekend when it suggested that Babylon 5 had 'jumped the shark' (this was in a column about good TV gone bad and one that now seems to have to mine the deepest darkest past to be able to fill a page) at some point either during series four or with five (the final, often unknown whether it would happen, season).

Almost 95% of the comments posted lambasted the Guardian for suggesting B5 should even be considered a contender for the Jump the Shark column's ire; most everyone who is familiar with this now 25 year old series agreed that it should never have been granted a fifth season, especially as its complex stories had to be, hurriedly, tied up by the end of season four, but most praised it like it was a precursor to The Sopranos or The Handmaid's Tale.

Babylon 5 is remembered by a many people for differing reasons. Many compare it to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (a source of controversy and argument among both sets of fans for reasons I really can't be arsed to go into); others like to point out the wooden acting, the PS1-styled special effects or the fact that sometimes it was excruciatingly poor TV. The thing is, for all of its criticisms, B5 was a groundbreaking and prophetic SF series and in many ways is perfect for a re-imagining (the way Battlestar Galactica was brought into the 21st century).

But is it?

Most B5 fans you talk to will extol the virtues and brilliance of the Shadow War and tell you that if you thought Game of Thrones was a twisty and turny political drama with a fantasy backdrop then you missed the original. If you think Lord Varys was the arch-schemer then you need to meet Mr Morden. If you thought Jaime Lannister was the epitome of redemption, then you're not aware of G'Kar; or if you felt there were far too many tortured souls floating around Westeros then you need to introduce yourself to Londo Mollari - Babylon 5 was, at the time, the most sophisticatedly-plotted television series ever made but it was then enveloped in Pound Shop wrapping paper.

The truth is B5 was more than just a massive story arc about a space war between ancient races and the new kids on the block. For five series there was an underlying subplot about how Earth was actually not a very nice place; riven with corruption, hate and discrimination and despite being set in the same century as Star Trek, it was anything but a glorious utopia. B5 was not just about the United Nations in space, it focused on inequality while showing that equality was achievable.

The future isn't idyllic, the future is full of homeless disenfranchised people with no future, no hope, nowhere to live or call their own. B5 was about themes that current SF fan favourite series The Expanse focuses on such as xenophobia, the hate generated between Earthlings and those people born on colonies such as Mars or the Asteroid belts. B5 was rife with hatred, racism and other distinctly human traits. Whether the other alien races depicted in it picked up humans bad habits through osmosis or whether it was simply a universal thing wasn't really discussed; but the Narn, the Centauri, and the Minbari - the principal alien races other than humans, all had traits similar to their mammalian brethren. It sounds like it should be great...

The Shadow War, considered by many as one of the most original story arcs ever to appear in a TV series, is the thing many remember about B5, but as I said, all the way through the series it was really all about Earth and its inhabitants. It was about how Earth was not like Star Trek and the universe wasn't a nice homely Federation of Planets; how it was always extremely close to being a fascistic organisation and how it found going down that path extremely easy. It was about Psi Corps or the Ministry of Peace or the Night Watch. It was about assassinating the President of Earth so malevolent forces could dictate the agenda; it was about the hatred between Earth and Mars, especially after the latter ceded from Earth's control. It was about how massive inequality still existed below the surface and it was about corruption, massive fraud and genocide. The stories of 2258 to 2263 are the 21st century in microcosm and series creator J.M Straczynski either had a crystal ball or he knew that the drift towards right wing politics is something other generations of human beings are going to have to suffer...

I've recently re-watched chunks of the series and it amplifies the fact it was woefully made. The actors were poor; the sets were wobbly, the special effects were garish and infantile, but there was something about it; something under the surface that was allowed out every so often to remind us just how BIG 'the big picture' was.

The problem B5 had was those moments were few and far between and had it been produced in 2019 it would have dispensed with a lot of the superfluous filler; those dreadful Star Trek-lite episodes; or the ones made when all the budgets had been exhausted. It wouldn't be 22 episodes a series, it would be 13 and it would meld character building and the actual plot in a far more sophisticated way than was done in 1994. It would have state of the art special effects and actors who didn't seem like they were reading off of prompt cards behind the cameras. It would be wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am from episode one. But...

I'm not sure it would work in 2020. At first I put this down to logistics; in the 25 years since B5 first appeared thinking has changed. A space station is a stupid idea; it is essentially a sitting target. To believe humans would be the facilitators of a universal peace is also stretching it a bit. In fact, if you strip away some of the interesting things that make the series tick, you'd be hard-pressed to find any redeeming qualities.

The truth is it was made for a buck fifty; it was written by a man whose biggest claim to fame at that point was Murder She Wrote and however much you try and talk up the complexities of the series, if you watch it in the cold light of 2019 there are holes you could steer a star ship through. In fact, it's probably a damned sight worse than people who slagged it off in 1994 realised. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, the thing that actually hasn't aged is the struggle for the soul of Earth; probably because we're seeing a lot of the themes from B5 play out in real life - not quite with the melodrama or action, but some themes explored in seasons two and three of B5 would not seem too out of place in 2019, even if they're just updated versions of things that happened in Germany in the 1930s.

I approached the series the same way I approached it 10 years ago when I last watched it, with an open mind and devoid of criticism and I saw beyond the shitty production values for about 20 episodes. I was focusing on the episodes that focused on the Shadow War and for a while I saw a symmetry I'd not really seen before; that the Earth subplots were all loosely tied into the Shadows story. This was probably the only positive revelation I garnered, because for most of the time I was gobsmacked by how awful it was.

Any sympathy, empathy or association I might once have felt towards lead characters evaporated - the way TV has become more sophisticated over the last 20 years saw to that. Instead of laughing at the jokes or smiling at the interactions between central characters, I started to cringe a little - would people really be like that in 300 years? Obviously, for something made in the 1990s it's going to have certain anachronistic problems; I managed to see past that; what I didn't expect was to find myself tearing plots apart, with consummate ease, no less.

Looking back, I now believe the Shadow War was a brilliant idea that sometimes was executed perfectly, but at other times was contrived and simply makes me think that my once mad devotion to the series blinded me from glaring holes in the plot and story?

The thing is the Shadow War was actually at its best as a preamble - a subplot. It kind of lost all of its cohesion when it became the main story. But even in the episodes before it became the main crux, it seems that common sense was ignored in favour of tension, suspense and action. In 2019, looking at how fascistic some things are now, the naivety of the 1990s appeared to forget about bureaucracy, unless it was a necessary device. The word 'contrived' keeps springing up in my head, as well as the phrase 'a means to an end' and it seems that both of these things were prominent in B5. I appreciate in some ways, fantasy TV depends on these kind of things, especially when you're dealing with so-called prophecy, but the lack of genuine continuity - even when most episodes were written by the same guy - made it feel 'manufactured'; there is little or nothing 'organic' about it.

I got to the stage where I didn't actually want to carry on watching it. How I'd missed such glaringly obvious plotting mistakes three times previously really annoyed me. I used to explain the sometimes uneven feel it had to the production and budgetary constraints but words are rarely affected by budgets. I struggled to understand why - comic book style - it liked to give a precis of the general story whenever it could; having characters tell other characters who were as versed in everything what was going on and for every genuine bit of dialogue, there was a ham hock of wince-inducing bollocks.

The worst thing was the realisation that the Shadow War actually didn't make a lot of sense and its conclusion kind of contradicted itself... The Shadows believed in evolution through chaos; the Vorlons (the other ancient race still hanging around with the little kids) believed in a more peaceful way, through genetic manipulation and covert means and while the Shadows went around getting all the races to have wars with each other, the Vorlons stood around being cryptic and frankly not doing much at all (which you kind of understand at first). The problem was, when push came to shove, the war was all about the Shadows and Vorlons resurrecting an ancient war and getting someone else to take all the losses. The rest of the universe became collateral damage as they fought each other, forgetting their reason for being there. That might have been the plan, but for races billions of years older than us, it all seemed a little like the meeting of two bullies in the same school yard and the sensible teacher having them both expelled for the future safety of everyone else...

That aside, B5 has always been called a series that has equality at its very heart, but it doesn't. Women are still stereotyped in a 1970s fashion; aliens are often used as a substitute for race or culture and religion appears to supersede everything else - suggesting the discovery of aliens reinforces mankind's belief in God, not destroys it. In fact, in many ways, it was simply business as usual - human dramas played out with prosthetics.

Babylon 5 was every criticism levelled at it. It was like the US version of late 1970s Dr Whos. You felt the sets would eventually collapse in on themselves. The overblown dialogue would eventually spur someone into saying 'this is bollocks, no one would ever talk like this'. It pains me to say this, but B5 was a graveyard for has-beens, D-list actors and basket cases and with the aid of time were allowed to con us into believing we were witnessing something great. It might have been once or maybe it could have been, but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. We don't need to know how it might be re-imagined. What we need is for people who remember it fondly to never watch it again (for fear of realisation) and to defend its corner, the way I once did. I feel it deserves that, if nothing else.

I want to be able to say with the confidence I had in the late 1990s that B5 was something special; the problem is the only thing that elevated it above awful was the ideas it played with. It executed those ideas piss poorly, but it doesn't detract from the fact that JMS (and others) had them in the first place. To attempt to do something like B5 is far more worthy of praise than to actually critique the show. The fact they were allowed to tell such a strange story from start to finish, with so much interference, is something to be held in high esteem... 'In the face of adversity' should have been the series' subtitle.

The problem is, it is the memory of it that has grown in our minds. If you love B5 for all the reasons I thought I did then I urge you to never go there again. Lock your DVDs or illegal files away - burn them, if necessary; just don't be tempted to re-view something important from a period in your past that can't be changed, because under (not a lot of) scrutiny it falls apart and becomes something you wish you could unsee; it makes you want to remember it how you did, not how it is.