Babylon 5 was a pretty good show. Except when it wasn't. A brand-new Babylon 5 movie is out on DVD, and RevolutionSF looks again to see if the show is as good as we thought it was. Here's a fresh look at the last, best hope for mankind.

Babylon 5 Sucks

The downside of continuity. The show was really hard to get new viewers involved in (I call it the Farscape Syndrome). There just was so much going on that even seemingly one-off episodes required some discussion of background before a novice Bab5 watcher could really understand what was going on. -- writer Matt Cowger

For every blow-your-mind episode such as "Into the Fire" or "Severed Dreams," there's an "Infection" or "Grey 17 is Missing" that you wish had never aired at all. For every great guest character like Sebastian the Inquisitor or Elric the Technomage, there's a "Vicker" or a Byron to make you claw madly at your burning eyes. Bleaahh. The highs were unbelievably high, but there were some pretty atrocious lows, too. -- writer Van Allen Plexico

Whew, the special effects look dated these days and the sets always had the problem of looking like . . . sets. They never could quite get the mix down between practical sets and CGI, but those were relatively new things as far as TV went. -- Matt Cowger

The network had Straczynski wrap the series up in four years instead of five, and then gave him another year wrecked the narrative of the fifth season. So much was crammed into year four, that we were left with the dregs for year five. Not to mention, the sacrifice of Marcus at the end of the fourth season meant NOTHING as Ivanova wasn't even there in the fifth season. -- Deanna Toxopeus

Throwaway guest stars. With a few notable exceptions most of the characters that showed up as secondary plot devices/ characters were completely forgettable. In some cases downright awful (don't get me started on the Penn & Teller guest shot.). This was probably why so many episode focused on the core characters. -- Matt Cowger

JMS promised us all the answers, and we're still waiting. Sure, the Peter David novels wrapped up some of the Centauri-related cliffhangers from the series. But what happened with the Drakh plague and the new rise of Shadowtech on Earth? And if you argue that that's from a different show, then please note that several episodes of the original B5, not to mention the new DVD, take place after that time frame. So the plague and the new Shadow-related conspiracy were both parts of the overall B5 universe, and were big set-ups for which we still haven't seen the payoffs. (And let's not even talk about the Telepath War!) -- Van Plexico

The telepaths secretly living in the basement of the station have better hair than those up top. No, honestly, they look like they stepped from a Vidal Sassoon ad. Is the gene for perfect hair tied to that for telepathy? -- Deanna Toxopeus

The acting. My god. Sinclair ("Old Wooden Head" I called him) was just the worst of the lot (unless you count Galen from Crusade), but bad-acting moments abounded throughout the series.

On rewatching recently, I was wincing at least once an episode, wondering how I could not have noticed before. And the bad acting was all so similar that it must have been encouraged by the director. It was stylized, pretentious and portentous, stiff and unnatural. It was like JMS was telling them, "You know Olivier in that old black-and-white Hamlet? I want you to sound like that. ALL THE TIME." -- RevolutionSF message board director Dave Farnell

Babylon 5 Rocks

If there was ever a show that gave us rich, well thought out characters, this is it. Ivanova. G'Kar. Londo. Vir. I could keep going forever. You fall in love with them, and you keep coming back no matter how bad the story lines get. -- Deanna Toxopeus

The story arc of Londo Mollari. In some ways JMS said the show was really about the rise and fall of Londo. He goes from ineffectual fop to harbinger of chaos to puppet ruler and Peter Jurasik makes you buy into it every step of the way. Molari is one of the truly great and memorable characters of science fiction. -- Matt Cowger

There's something for everyone. From little character moments such as the Londo/G'Kar feud/friendship, or Garibaldi's introducing Delenn to the delights of "Duck Dodgers," to vast cosmic events such as the Vorlons vs. the Shadows, this show runs the gamut. One episode might explore racism, religious extremism, or the rise of fascism, while the next might portray a gigantic space fleet action complete with planets being destroyed. The thematic and dramatic range of this show was ridiculously broad and grandiose, and that's one reason people love it so much. -- Van Plexico

Continuity. It actually paid to pay attention to the small details episode to episode and season to season. Things like the Night Watch plotline or the Telepath uprising didn't just appear out of nowhere, they had logical roots in earlier episodes and if you had kept your eyes open you could see them coming. Plus Vir waving at Morden's severed head was just fantastic payoff. -- Matt Cowger

They never hit the reset button! Things changed from one season to the next. Characters died and stayed dead! It was like reading a gigantic space opera novel, chapter by chapter, for five years. -- Van Plexico

This show was just so . . . different. Trek was getting dull. You couldn't really believe that these people were actually on a military/ diplomatic mission anymore. It had just become some kind of soap opera with phasers. And then came Babylon 5. That intro, that promised something HUGE was going to happen, that this show wasn't just being written on the fly but plotted out in a huge arc. We'd never seen plots that not only took 2 or 3 episodes to resolve, but YEARS. -- Dave Farnell

The humor. One thing JMS is good with is humor. Lines like "Marcus, this is a conversation that can only end in a gunshot" and "trust Ivanova, trust yourself, anybody else, shoot'em" carry their funny years later. It's a skill I'm sure JMS developed on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and then went on to refine on She-Ra and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors.

Because it kicked Star Trek: Deep Space Nine up the arse and got the producers of Star Trek to do more than stories that explored issues without changing any aspect of the Trek universe. Alright, Next Generation had done episodes where things had changed and had an effect on the Trek universe, such as "The Best of Both Worlds," but they were far and few between, and Deep Space Nine looked like it was going to do the same until we got Babylon 5. After its arrival Deep Space Nine had to pull its all-in-one polyester jumpsuit up and start telling stories across episodes and seasons, not just within seasons. Thus we got plot lines that dealt with those unhappy with the Federation (the Maquis), with continuing relations with both the Cardassians and the Bajorans, and of course, the war with the Dominion. -- RevSF games editor Matthew Pook

And the aliens: you could believe they were actually aliens. They had believable political goals. And there was this underlying mythic element that we could sense, but not see, until it was revealed little by little in jaw-dropping moments. This was the show the revolutionized SF for TV. It forced Trek to be better, and it laid the ground for Battlestar Galactica. -- Dave Farnell

Sheridan loved some nukes, didn't he? He nuked the Black Star giving Earth the only victory in the Earth/Minbar war. He nuked Za'ha'dum, hitting the Shadows hard and he nuked the alien gate in Third Space keeping the Lovecraft aliens away from our Universe. Sheridan is indeed an atom bomb dropping motha filker. -- Matt Cowger

Captain Kirk never declared himself the ruler of an independent "state." He never organized an "Army of Light" with himself and his girlfriend in command, nor did he ever construct a vast fleet of super-advanced ships with which to lay siege to the Federation government itself, overthrow it, and have himself declared ruler of the galaxy. Sheridan did all of that (AND came back from the dead, to boot). Plus, when Sheridan died the second time, we wept for days. When Kirk died, we scratched our heads and said, "WTF?!" Sheridan kicks Kirk's ass, and it's not even close. -- Van Plexico