The Missing Show- Babylon 5

As you might have guessed, I’m a big sci-fi space opera fan. Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Stargate are all shows I’ve loved over the years. You might notice an absence from that list of a well regarded sci-fi series that has aired in the same time frame of the others. No, not Farscape. I liked the first season or two but didn’t really get into it.

I’m talking about Babylon 5.  I never really watched it when it aired. I’m not sure why to be honest. My Dad is a big sci-fi geek too and he got me into it and I was only an early teen then so still watching tv with him.  My friends watched it.

I saw a few episodes here and there but never regularly watched it. Once TV on DVD became a thing I tried to give it another go. But I couldn’t past the first few episodes. Part of it might be that I started with “The Gathering” which I’ve heard is questionable.  I also found it hard to get attached to Commander Sinclair, knowing he was gone for the rest of the seasons.

But recently, I had a lot of people encourage me to watch it. So my wife and I decided to give it another go. We added the show to our Netflix queue and started last week. Again the first few episodes were kind of painful to get through. We skipped “Soul Hunter” because I had a vague memory of it and not enjoying it. I almost tapped out on “Infection” and decided to check around for episodes to skip.

I liked “Parliament of Dreams” and liked seeing Chekov as a bad guy enough to not hate “Mind War”. From there things started to turn around. I started to get into the setting and stopped seeing it as a cheap 90’s show or a Star Trek knockoff. Instead, I’m beginning to see what the show does that is unique to it, while still having some homage and inspiration from Star Trek.

Now, we’re still only about half way through the first season but from what I can tell the really good episodes are yet to come. It’s been kind of cool recognizing the guest stars from their appearance on Star Trek. It’s been common to see stars from one sci-fi show appear in other shows (such as the plethora of Star Trek actors who appeared in Stargate). But it’s interesting to see other actors who were guests on TNG or were in the TOS movies appear on a show. And in their prime since this is running almost concurrently.

I’m ready to see where this goes now. I’m still not ready to call this quality television but it’s definitely on par with first season Deep Space 9 or season 2 TNG. It’s far and way better than first season TNG. If it picks up come season 2 like those did then we’re in for a fun ride.