Babylon 5: The Complete Universe [DVD]

Babylon 5. Ah you intriguing, sometimes frustrating, generally intelligent, often complex, sometimes wretched TV series. As a boy, I watched the first series on and off, missed most of the second series (Bruce Boxleitner's constant grin unnerved me) and then got completely sucked in by the third series and followed it through to the end.As this is the type of show that terrestrial telly will not show again, and if it does will take five years to show the whole thing, the DVD set of every episode was an esssential buy. That I also got Crusade and the various TV movies was a delightful bonus.The show's premise is that after a war in which the human race nearly got wiped out by the Minbari, after a diplomatic snafu, EarthGov created a space station (actually a series of space stations, though the previous four are defunct) that would act as a neutral ground for the many races of the galaxy so that they could come together and talk peace unto each other. But of course, people talk about peace even when they want the opposite and so life on Babylon 5 is always fraught. However there is more going on on Babylon 5 than just diplomacy. Ancient forces are rising again in the galaxy that threaten to decimate civilisation. Earth's Government falls into the hands of a tyrant and there is a human agency called the Psi Corps who routinely bully and oppress telepaths into doing their bidding.Watching the show again, I was surprised how good it was. You know how it is, things you loved as a teenager are often not so well executed as you thought, but in the case of Babylon 5 in seasons 3 & 4 at least, there's little else that touches it. And it is still painfully relevant. Much of the story is about the hard decisions military officers are forced to make at the behest of their government and how that plays against their personal morality. It talks about governments stamping over personal liberties under the guise of dealing with terrorism. It deals with the problems of blue collar workers, inter-species relationships and substance abuse. The humour is sometimes clumsy, but often inspired, and it has a 5 year arc, so that stuff you see in the first series pays off in all the following seasons. The acting ranges from adequate to fantastic (I'm looking at you Katsulas and Jurasik) and the SFX is basic but still effective. With every season, the show re-defines itself, retaining much of what works, solving some mysteries and creating new ones (something Lost should take note of). It is epic and it is brilliant.But that's just the main show. What about the TV movies? They're okay but not essential. In the Beginning, for example, just patches together the back story we were dripfed in the TV series, so don't watch it before you've watched the TV episodes. Crusade? Well, it has potential. Only 13 episodes were made before it was cancelled. After the main series ends, Earth is made subject to a virus that will kill everyone infected in five years. A small military force that was off-planet when the virus hit is given the job of finding a cure. But the characters just feel like reheated versions of characters from B5, emphasis is placed on the character Galen at the beginning, which means none of the other characters really develop, especially nominal main star Capt Gideon, and there's never, considering that the fate of billions of people is at stake, a real sense of pressure or urgency. I don't think that five years of searching for a cure would have worked but it's possible that the creator never planned for the search to go on that long anyway.If you've never seen B5, you might want to test the waters with a season box set first (the best are 3&4, though you may find yourself slightly in at the deep end, season 1 is fab but isn't a real taster of where the show ends up going, season 2 probably occupies the middle ground between the extremes), but if you're someone who has seen and enjoyed it, I think you owe it to yourself to buy this set. Although bear in mind that it's a pig to find somewhere to keep it.

Babylon 5: space-opera extrodinaire. Genius and visionary scriptwriting that encompassed every eventuality that could befall such an ambitious project combined with believable plots that worked their way through a pre-planned 5 year arc. At the time - the mid-to-late 1990s - this show was groundbreaking, fresh, and, above all, always watchable. Babylon 5 is is the type of television that DVD box sets are made for, especially as we will in all probability never see its like again.For those of you who aren't familiar with Babylon 5 - and since terrestrial TV don't appear to be in any rush to rescreen the series, I guess this may be the younger sci-fi fan who has been drawn in by its reputation without ever having seen the show - the titular object of the series is a giant space station somewhere in deepest space, the 5th of its kind (the 1st 3 having been destroyed by pro-Earth extremists; the 4th vanished in mysterious circumstances that become explained during the series). Babylon 5 is conceived as neutral territory for the various species that mankind has encountered; although a military installation ultimately governed by Earth, the station has its own council and serves to provide the needs of the various ambassadors and commercial transactions of the people that pass through it.Where B5 differed to other sci-fi shows that preceeded it was in presenting the stories of its inhabitants. From the command staff that run B5, to the alien ambassadors and other wanderers that drift in and out of the story as required, to the 'lurkers' who dwell in, and combine to become, B5's social underbelly, no-one is exempt from consideration. Add to this detail-driven backgrounds for the major characters, and the growth of relationships (both the good and the bad) with a complete disregard for the type of schmaltz and sentimentalism that typify much of American prime-time TV, and B5 was already streets ahead of its competitors. The addition of a believable backdrop to the Human empire (for example, a war against the Minbari that takes place about 10 years prior to the series adds an aura of tension to the show), and the slow revelation of other secrets held by the universe, further underline the mammoth task the writers had in order to sell the show to the TV executives. I can only thank them for their persistence. Even my girlfriend, notoriously anti-sci-fi, found herself spellbound at the first appearance of the Shadows (find out more by buying, sci-fi fans...)OK, in watching the show years later I realise that it wasn't perfect. At times, mainly during the 1st season, B5 does have a tendancy to fall back in to soap-opera mode, so much so that it can be like watching 'Days of Our Lives' with carrion-eating aliens in the background. But then, the 1st series was never an indication of the way the show shaped out to be, and the acting (especially from Andreas Katsulas and Bill Mummy) increasingly get better and better. As for the complaints I've seen about sub-standard CGI - pah! OK, compared to films such as 'Over the Hedge', or 'Toy Story', or any other multi-billion dollar budgeted, CGI reliant animation, B5 does come up wanting. But since the programme was aired more than 10 years ago - and the fact that CGI has evolved considerably since then - the CGI in B5 is fairly impressive; and some of the long-distance shots of the station itself still make my jaw drop.The only downside to the boxset is the lack of extras on the individual discs; but then again, I bought the boxset on the strength of the TV show, not the bits and pieces that I don't really miss having anyway. The inclusion of all 6 B5 feature films and the complete Crusade series more than make up for these anyhow. Babylon 5: it's sci-fi, Jim, but not as we know it...