Babylon 5 trivia and commentary
In November 2020, a remastered high-definition version of 1990s science fiction series Babylon 5 was released. By today’s standards, Babylon 5 is dated and corny at times, but it also has a depth of story planning and willingness to explore religion and politics in a way you didn’t see in Star Trek at the time.
You can find which services are streaming it by searching for Babylon 5 at Just Watch. The following guide contains spoilers, and if you haven’t seen the series yet you may wish to watch it first.
- The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5
- Similarities with Deep Space Nine
- The Gathering
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- Season 4
- Season 5
- Spinoff movies
- Crusade
- Further reading
The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5
Much of this information was gleaned from The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5, notably its Master Episode List, which I recommend following as you watch each episode. It must be one of the oldest websites still online in its original form, dating back at least as far as June 1994, according to its What’s New page. This makes it even older than Yahoo! Search (March 1995), Internet Explorer (August 1995), and CSS (December 1996).
A remarkable feature of the Lurker’s Guide is “jms speaks” section, collecting online posts made by series creator J. Michael Straczynski, many of them made around the time the episode aired. He often gives insight into the series’ development and corrects posters who claim to have noticed a plot hole or error.
Similarities with Deep Space Nine
Babylon 5 has several similarities with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, another science fiction series set on a space station a few years in the future.
The first episode of Babylon 5 season 1 aired on January 26, 1994. At this point, Deep Space Nine had already aired as far as season 2 episode 12, for which JMS blames Warner Brothers delaying production on Babylon 5 until they could justify it by seeing viewer ratings on the pilot movie, and Paramount rushing production on DS9 to beat the Babylon 5 pilot movie to airing by around a month.
The result is that, no doubt, a lot of viewers at the time perceived Babylon 5 as a clone of Deep Space Nine. Rather, a popular conspiracy theory suggests that it was Deep Space Nine which copied Babylon 5, and there may be some truth to this. JMS originally pitched Babylon 5 to Star Trek producers Paramount in 1989, and it’s not unthinkable that this influenced the decision to set DS9.
There are notable similarities between the two series. Both are set on a space station named with a number, in orbit around a planet and near an artificially created wormhole, located in neutral territory, which becomes tactically important in an upcoming war. Both feature a station chief with the rank of Commander who suffered trauma in a previous war and becomes an important figure in an alien religion. His first officer is a hot-headed female officer. There is an important alien leader named Dukhat/Dukat whose species fought humanity in the war, but who were responsible for building the space station. There is a red-haired woman named Lyta/Leeta. There is a station chief of security who doesn’t drink, and who tolerates an alien criminal organizer because at least he can keep an eye on him. A lot of the series takes place in a large shopping area. Both series end up with a war plotline in later series.
Many of these similarities are plausibly coincidences. Space stations appeared in Star Trek TOS and were an understood variant of a space ship in science fiction, which in turn lends itself to a more continuous style of plot. Stories set on the frontier of space draw inspiration from the popular American wild west genre, and let you tell exciting stories of conflict where our heroes can’t rely on civilization to solve their problems. War stories, likewise, make for interesting conflict.
Personally, I’m glad that we got both series.
Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha’s article on Babylon 5 also discusses connections between Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The Gathering
Babylon 5 began with a pilot movie, The Gathering, aired in February 1993, although if you watch it now on a streaming version it’ll probably be the re-edited version in 1998, which actually made a few retcons. The original cost US$3.5 million to produce, equivalent to around $6.9 million in 2022 money.
Babylon 5 has a significantly lower tech level than Star Trek, at least as far as humans are concerned. Ships need artificial jump gates to travel between star systems, human ships have rotating sections because artificial gravity doesn’t exist yet, there’s no teleportation, food must be grown the old-fashioned way without replicators, and so on. This makes it easier to tell a story rooted in current-day limitations (e.g. trade, limited resources) without simply overcoming those by hand-waving with magic-level tech. This was all part of an intentional decision to tell a more realistic science fiction story. The Space Frontier Foundation actually once gave Babylon 5 an award for “Best Vision of the Future” for these efforts.
On the other hand, the existence of human telepaths makes it hard to tell a series about politics, since it’s easy to tell when someone lies or has an ulterior motive. JMS had to create the Psi-Corps to constrain their power to avoid telepaths from ruining plots or fundamentally changing the nature of human society. They also don’t explain why human telepaths exist until season 5.
A big innovation of Babylon 5 was the use of CGI, which was considerably cheaper than the large physical models used on Star Trek at the time, although the 3D graphics look dated nowadays. Much was created on Commodore Amiga computers using Lightwave, a considerably cost-effective platform priced more towards hobbyists. As a result, Babylon 5 was able to use considerably more special effects than Star Trek.
The movie is set in the year 2257, around the same year as Star Trek: The Original Series, and in fact coterminous with Star Trek: Discovery season 2. As a station, B5 is considerably larger than DS9: a population of around 250,000 million people, versus DS9’s stated capacity of around 7,000.
Ambassador Delenn’s character was originally intended to be male. The intention was to have her played by a woman, but with her voice digitally altered to be male. This digital voice alteration turned out not to work well, but Mira Furlan’s normal voice sounded well so they simply made the character female.
Delenn’s accent is real. Actress Mira Furlan was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, now part of Croatia. Londo’s accent isn’t real. Londo was criticized after the pilot aired as a ridiculous comic character. Most of the other Minbari and Centauri characters have no accents, and it’s not really explained why. It’s just one of those things.
Garibaldi is named after Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, also the namesake of the Garibaldi biscuit.
The notion of the “Third Age of Mankind” turns out to be just some thing Commander Sinclair invented. I seem to recall that the first age is before mankind discovered aliens, the second is after the discovery of aliens, and the third age is mankind being actually self-sufficient and powerful rather than relying on powerful aliens like the Vorlons or the Minbari or something.
When characters in Babylon 5 talk about the “nets” this may reflect JMS’ own usage of “nets” to refer to the Internet, rather than the “net” as as more commonly used in the 90s. This perhaps reflects the early Internet where the Internet was divided into competing commercial services (Prodigy, GENie, Compuserve).
The name of the series may have been influenced by Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, described by JMS as “one of my favorite books”.
Season 1
Each episode of the Babylon 5 series cost around $900,000 USD to produce, about $1.7 million in 2022 money. Star Trek DS9 had something like twice the per-episode budget.
The series replaced three actors who decided not to reprise their characters from The Gathering. Rather than re-casting the roles of the doctor, first officer and the telepath, their are replaced with a different doctor, first officer and telepath, who could simply be assigned the original characters’ plot points going forward.
The official reason why Ivanova doesn’t have a Russian accent is that she was educated outside of Russia.
Some fans questioned why Sinclair, station commander, would personally fly a fighter. JMS defended it as based on a real-world practice among higher-ranking US Air Force officers during and after the Vietnam War, who would log flight time to qualify for additional flight pay and to acquire the combat experience necessary to earn promotions.
“Born to the Purple” introduce’s G’Kar’s aide Ko’Dath (played by Mary Woronov), who appeared for only one episode as she had trouble with the makeup.
“The Parliament of Dreams” introduces G’Kar’s aide Na’Toth, and Delenn’s aide Lennier. The aides are important to a series where several main characters are ambassadors, because it gives the ambassadors someone they can trust to talk about their plans to for the audience’s benefit.
Lennier, of course, continued as a series regular (as well as appearing in DS9 episode The Siege of AR-558, on the condition that he didn’t have to wear any annoying prosthetics). I like his exchange with Delenn, where she says “I cannot have an aide who will not look up”; this is later revealed to have been something Delenn in turn learned originally from Duhkat.
Something else I like about this episode is that unlike Star Trek, which glosses over religion, it portrays Earth’s multitude of religions much as it is today. JMS mentions that Sinclair’s actor required only two tries to memorize the names of the line of people in the handshake scene.
The episode also won an Emmy Award for makeup design. This was perhaps not fully appreciated by actors playing Minbari, as the Minbari head bone covers the actor’s ears, muffling hearing. It turns out there’s a reason why most Star Trek aliens have ears in the same place as humans.
“Mind War” ends with the telepath Ironheart saying “I’ll see you again… in a million years.” They never actually see him again. You see Earth’s future in some episodes, but we never actually meet up with Ironheart.
In “Survivors”, a dock worker mortally wounded in a blast incorrectly blames Garibaldi, and it’s taken as fact since surely nobody would lie with their dying breath. You imagine there must be some impostor going around, but there isn’t. The official word of JMS is that the worker just had a previous grudge against Garibaldi, and lied because he didn’t know he was dying. Then again, JMS didn’t write this episode.
I like “Grail”, where Delenn holds very high regard for Aldous Gajic, a man seeking the Holy Grail. It does not matter to her whether he ever finds the Grail, or even if it is real; only that he is a True Seeker, someone whose dedication is true; that virtue is more admirable to her and her caste than the success of his search. JMS would later call Delenn herself a True Seeker. Gajic is named for Mira Furlan (Delenn)’s husband, Goran_Gajić. Neither Gajic nor his successor ever find the Grail or return to the series. I previously mistook this episode for season 3’s “A Late Delivery From Avalon”, where King Arthur comes to the station and dubs G’Kar a knight.
The character who shoots Garibaldi never gets a full name. He’s known only as “Garibaldi’s aide”, later “Jack” in season 2. The character was intentionally introduced to take over Laurel Takashima’s betrayal plot after she was replaced with Ivanova, since JMS knew people online would suspect Ivanova as inheriting Takashima’s plot. A poll Garibaldi’s shooting is foreshadowed when Walker, the mutai fighter from “TKO”, warns Garibaldi that he doesn’t watch his back.
Season 2
Sinclair leaves the series after season 1. The reason for actor Michael O’Hare’s departure was not revealed at the time in 1994, but following his death in 2012, JMS revealed that he O’Hare had suffered from severe mental health difficulties, including paranoid delusions and hallucinations. This required substantial plot changes, especially since Sinclair had already been established as appearing on Babylon 4. The Gathering pilot movie was retconned in 1998 to remove a statement that Sinclair was the station’s final commanding officer.
Both Jeffrey Sinclair and his replacement John Sheridan have the same initials as writer J. (Michael) Straczynski. Sheridan, according to JMS, is descended from civil war General Philip Sheridan, for whom the Sheridan tank is named.
The triluminary and the system Delenn uses to metamorphosize into a part-human, according to JMS, were technology from the planet Episilon 3. Delenn’s new hair ended up being even more time-consuming for the makeup department than the original design. The initial plan was that she would be a male character who metamorphoses into a female character, although they changed this while making the pilot.
Na’Toth’s actress was re-cast in season 2, and the new actress (Mary Kay Adams, who plays the Klingon matriarch Grilka in DS9) lacked the force of personality of the Caitlin Brown’s portrayal, so the character was quietly retired. JMS had believed that most people would not notice the difference.
Claudia Christian (Ivanova) actually broke her foot.
The Egyptian blessing “God be between you and harm, in all the empty places where you must walk” appeared in Harlan Ellison’s 1985 short story Paladin of the Lost Hour; I suspect it’s not actually ancient Egyptian in origin.
The bagna cauda in “A Distant Star” real, since the actors had to eat it; but given the number of takes of any given shot, it became cold and unpalatable.
In “Soul Mates”, writer Peter David based Londo’s three wives on three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Daggair is Pestilence, Timov is Famine, and Mariel is Death; reflecting that, Timov’s name spells “vomit” backwards. Londo, by elimination, is War.
In “The Coming of Shadows”, the actor who played Emperor Turhan was named Turhan Bey in real life. He had previously auditioned for the season 1 role of the technomage Elric, a role which instead went to Michael Ansara (Kang from Star Trek). He subsequently played the Minbari Ranger instructor Sech Turval in season 5.
The Centauri “hands of friendship” greeting is inspired by a supposed Roman tradition to check someone for knives.
Regarding “Acts of Sacrifice”, JMS was asked at the time if G’Kar’s breakdown is laughing at the absurdity of his situation, or crying. He says it’s a bit of both. This episode has the most cringeworthy scene I’ve ever seen in a science fiction TV show. You know the one. Claudia Christian supposedly found the “Ivanova Dance” quite funny, as did the rest of the crew.
In “There All the Honor Lies”, where Sheridan is accused of killing a Minbari warrior, his lawyer Guinevere Corey is played by Caitlin Brown, the original season 1 Na’Toth. The teddybear in the episode actually originated as a gift from the episode’s writer Peter David to JMS: JS actually referred to his initials, not John Sheridan. In revenge, JMS wrote this scene into his episode. The other props in this episode were made by the prop department. The line “This isn’t some kind of Deep Space franchise; this place is about something!” was written by Peter David as a subtle dig at rival Deep Space Nine. The bear was his wife’s idea.
The ISN episode “And Now For a Word” contains a subliminal message during the Psi Corps ad which says “The Psi Corps is your friend. Trust the Corps.” You need to freeze frame to see it. The FCC rules forbade subliminal messages of 2 frames per second, so to avoid this the episode shows the message for 4 frames, or one fifteenth of a second. The frame was cut entirely from the French broadcast. There’s later an episode where the plot insolves a hidden message transferred in a freeze frame in a video).
“In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum”, is one episode where the viewer appreciates that when a character makes a prediction, there’s a very high chance of it coming true. When Vir says he wants to see Morden’s head on a pike and wave at it, we can rest assured he will survive at least long enough for that to happen. Vir’s wave later appears in the opening sequence of a later season.
“Confessions and Lamentations” was remarkable for killing off an entire species, rendering all the expensive prosthetics produced for that species useless. It’s a very costly episode, in that regard.
JMS has a lot to say on “Divided Loyalties”, the episode where Talia is revealed to be the telepathic sleeper agent Control, leaves the series, and her role in the series is replaced by the original telepath Lyta Alexander from the movie, whose actress (Patricia Tallman) had only recently given birth to a son. JMS revals that the original plan was for Takashima to be Control, and when she left, they moved the Psi-Corps plan plot to Lyta’s replacement Talia.
In “The Long, Twilight Struggle”, some online at the time doubted the realism of a Centauri policy of executing 500 Narns for each Centauri killed. JMS points out that the Nazis indeed did such a thing during World War II at certain times and places.
Season 3
Season 3 onward have fewer really goofy lines.
In “Messages from Earth”, Marcus buys Ivanova bacon and eggs, which have to be imported at great expense. He goes to all this effort but forgets that Ivanova is Jewish.
Kosh’s death in “Interludes and Examinations” surprised even the writer, which is an unusual-sounding concept that makes perfect sense to some writers. JMS would occasionally answer questions by asking the character in his imagination and seeing what his imaginary conception of that character would respond. In this instance, he also surprised himself with the plot development that Kosh would be killed off. I’ve heard writers before say that they don’t control their characters, but their characters act of their own volition, even when it’s a problem for the plot.
Kosh’s replacement is also named Kosh, but technically, he’s actually a Vorlon named Ulkesh, who appeared in a Babylon 5 novel. JMS posts that most people don’t even notice that the new Kosh is a different Kosh, or that the original Kosh’s ship left the station.
When the Narns kill Refa, JMS explains that the usual penalty of 500 Narns was probably waived in order to cover up Refa’s trip and thus avoid embarassing the Centauri nobility. Refa also did’t bring any bodyguards for this reason. So characters can make impractical decisions for the series, but when it’s practical, they can also carry the idiot ball. JMS wanted to bring back the actor William Forward as another alien, but it never happened.
It is bizarre that Sheridan travels to Z’ha’dum despite very clearly being told in a prophecy that he would die if he did so.
JMS wrote every episode in seasons 3 and 4. There’s a scene where he makes a cameo being wheeled into medbay while clutching an awfull anachronistic 20th century PC keyboard, apparently having collapsed from exhaustion from writing the entire series.
Season 4
Babylon 5 was originally intended to be five seasons long. My personal theory here is that this may have been because Star Trek: the Original Series was three seasons, and when Babylon 5 was greenlit in 1991, TNG was just moving into its fifth season. Most viewers probably expected TNG would end at five seasons, two more than TOS, not extend to seven seasons.
When Babylon 5 was in season 4 it looked like it may be cancelled, so the show sped through the plot to wrap it up by the end of season 4. It was given a fifth season anyway, which necessitated the invention of new plotlines after season 4 finished all the main story.
In “The Long Night”, the episode uses the season 3 ending theme. This was taken by some as a symbolic vhoice of some point, but it was in fact completely by accident.
There’s a fantastic piece of scheming and counter-scheming in this episode with a bizarre official explanation. The plan is that when G’Kar appears in front of the emperor in chains, Londo has bribed the guards to replace them with weaker chains so that G’Kar can escape them to create a distraction for the emperor’s assassination. It’s revealed at a dramatic moment that the emperor had his men replace the chains with stronger ones. G’Kar breaks out of the chains anyway.
My assumption here was that there are one of two possibilities: Londo’s men replaced the chains second, or the emperor’s guards betrayed him and lied about replacing the chains to allow the assassination to go ahead. According to JMS, neither of these are true. G’Kar is just so strong and determined that he can break out of the stronger chains.
Propaganda episode “The Illusion of Truth” opens with the now amusingly incorrect prediction of a lunar colony in 2018. The term “Helsinki syndrome”, incorrectly used for Stockholm syndrome, is a joke that previously appeared in 1998 movei Die Hard; in both cases it’s used to demonstrate that the incompetence of a television “expert”. The names of blacklisted people are references to actual people blacklisted in the Red Scare of the 1950s.
“Racing Mars”, where Dr Franklin and Marcus go undercover by posing as a recently married gay couple, was remarkably forward-looking in its prediction of gay marriage, which for example would not be legal across the United States until 2015, and is still only legal in 29 countries as of March 2022. In 1997, when the episode aired, even acknowledging gay equality on television was seen as a radical position.
The customer in “Moments of Transition” who tries to hire Garibaldi is Scott Adams, creator of comic Dilbert. Dilbert was a huge deal in nerd culture in the late 90s, especially since it was one of the newspaper funnies available for free online.
The season finale tells a science fiction concept of religious orders preserving science for generations in a post-apocalyptic world, as in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Season 5
New stories had to be developed for season 5 when season 4 finished the originally planned main plot. Despite Marcus sacrificing himself for Ivanova at the end of season 4, Ivanova left the series and was replaced with a similar female station commander.
The telepath leader Byron is played by Robin Atkin Downes, who previously played Morann, the Minbari who made the fateful decision to approach the first Earth ship with gun ports open. You would imagine that the ship carrying the leader of the Minbari faction would be better defended against a single Earth vessel. Metal Gear fans will also know him as the voice of Miller in MGSV and Peace Walker. The original plan was for Ivanova to become involved with Byron, but when she left the plot was moved to Lyta.
“Day of the Dead” was written by Neil Gaiman.
The finale for season 5, “Sleeping in Light”, was originally filmed as the finale for season 4, but when season 5 was greenlit, that finale episode was be bumped back to season 5. The finale concept was planned as early as April 1992, according to a post on the GEnie internet service.
After the series was finished, JMS planned to quit the television and return to writing novels. There’s a great deal of “jms speaks” on the Sleeping in Light page at The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5.
Spinoff movies
There were a few Babylon 5 movies produced after this: In the Beginning, which goes into the background story of how the Minbari War began; Thirdspace; The River of Souls; A Call to Arms; and The Legend of the Rangers. In 2007, they released Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a few independent stories which had much better CGI, being released many years after the original. They’re all generally worth watching.
Other Babylon 5 works including novel are mentioned at the Wikipedia page Babylon 5 (franchise).
Crusade
As I write this, Just Watch does not list the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade as available on any streaming service, although it is on digital sale in some countries.
The series wasn’t great, and it was cancelled after 13 episodes had been produced. The resulting attempt to produce some kind of finished coherent series out of this led to some absolutely terrible CGI even for the late 90s, and numerous continuity errors.
In one episode, they orbit an alien planet that there was no time or money to render, so it’s literally just a model of Earth. Another time there’s a truly terrible attempt to render the technomage character entirely in CGI (spaceships could be rendered in the 90s, but realistic humans were beyond the their capability, and yet this did not stop them from trying). Because of the airing order, they occasionally discover or develop technology one episode after the one where they use it. The uniforms change for some reason halfway through the series, making it difficult to re-order the episodes for better pacing.
Further reading
- Babylon 5 at Wikipedia