Hi All,
This article by a guy called Nick Eden. He's webpage can be found at:
http://www.pheasnt.demon.co.uk
Anyway, I think it describes my problems with Bab 5 rather well.
----
What Nick thinks about Babylon 5
I understand that there are some poor benighted fools who believe that the
best thing about Babylon 5 is the plot. I am sorry to have to be harsh, but
they are wrong. Hopefully, under New Labour, treatment for this affliction
will be available under the NHS. There are also people who believe that the
moon is made of green cheese, or that whales are fish. We should not seek to
condemn them, but should set out to offer the basic education that should
removed these troublesome beliefs, or failing that pump them full of drugs
and lock them away from sharp objects for their own protection.
There are a few, very few, who claim that the thing that makes Babylon 5
great is the background, which is more troublesome. There are the herds who
claim that the advantage of Babylon 5 is that it is not Star Trek. While it
is true that Babylon 5 is not Star Trek, neither is it Grand Opera or a plate
of fettuccini. These things are true, but just because they are true does not
mean that Babylon 5 is good. Or bad for that matter. There is probably
someone in the world who believes that what's good about Babylon 5 is the
quality of the script or the ability of the actors, but I think you'll find
that that person is already located in a padded cell. For our protection.
Many people say that the CGI special effects are very good.
The conventional way of making an American television series is to have a
producer or a writer think up an idea - "We could do a show about a Texas
Ranger who follows his quarry to London, England." He then writes a pilot
episode, the networks agree to buy it and the producer oversees a number
of writers producing stories about the Texas Ranger, in which he rides
about, fights crime and gets baffled by the way British police don't use
guns and get upset whenever he draws his - but are always glad that he was
able to shoot the baddie before they got shot. The producer may write a few
of the episodes, but most are written by others. Eventually the producer goes
on to other projects and the other writers begin to exert more control and
may loose track of the show's original vision.
Babylon 5 is a little different in that the original writer/producer didn't
just have an idea "how about a space station with lots of aliens on it" but
had a plan. The plan was to have a show that would run for 5 years, would
have a beginning, a middle and an end, and tell a complete epic story.
This is not, of itself a bad thing. Big stories can work. The plan was to
tell stories a bit darker than normal, where the heroes would all be
slightly flawed, and the villains would have enough good in them that there
would be no conflicts between "good" and "evil" but between individuals,
doing what they were doing for their own reasons. Which would be no bad thing.
The Cop shows of Steven Bocco, loaded as they are with complex characters who
might just turn up to work drunk, or have dealings with the mob are streets
ahead of nice safe shows were a policeman's uniform proves that he is a
morally upright citizen. Ambiguous characters make for interesting stories.
All of these things, while not essential to good storytelling, usually make
it easier.
So what's the problem?
The problem is that there is a single mind driving the entire show. That
single mind, belonging to J. Michael Straczynski, is thinking up every idea,
overseeing all the production and writing every script. And that single mind
isn't up to it. The single mind that should be providing creative vision to
the show is doing everything. The single mind is trying to see both the fine
detail and the big picture at the same time, and as we all know, trying to
do that means you don't get to do either very well and you get a splitting
headache out of it.
What's actually happened is that the big picture dominates everything,
drives every episode, every sub-plot, but at the same time there hasn't been
enough time to make that big picture work when you get down to the detail. A
conventional writing arrangement probably does things better - if the single
guiding intellect is able to just get on and guide then he's got the time to
make sure that the stories being told by the individual writers work as
stories and fit into the bit picture.
But that's not how it goes on Babylon 5, because everything's being done by
one man. One man who lacks either the time, the ability or the vision to see
any single episode of Babylon 5 as anything more than a tiny segment of a
five year story. He doesn't see stories, or characters, just pawns that are
part of a greater whole. Individual characters are routinely sacrificed
because the Plot demands that they go and do something, never mind that it
doesn't fit with what they were doing a couple of weeks ago. Episodes don't
have beginnings or middles or ends. They are just scenes in a tapestry. If
you've not been watching from the start then you'd better not risk starting
now. There are no jumping on points, only "bugger this for a game of
soldiers, I'm going to bed" points.
Babylon 5 characters are ciphers. The entire show is driven by a single plot.
This is does not bode well.
What makes things worse is that JMS is not much cop when it comes to
scripting. It's not simply that he's not much good when it comes to
writing stories, what damns him is that he's really not got much handle
on dialogue. His characters have this terrible habit of fixing their eyes
on the middle distance and delivering a five plus minute monologue about
whatever theme the episode was supposed to be stressing, or, more regularly
these days, explaining whatever plot holes have reared their ugly heads.
You wondered why the Police Chief's character changed completely at the
start of season 4? That's OK, have ten minutes of the telepathic secret
policeman explaining exactly what was going on. Have an episode where rebel
forces are about to engage loyal forces for the first time? Plop Captain
Sheridan down in front of the camera for five minutes to rabbit on about
how it will be difficult to fight my old comrades, but my cause is just.
You get the picture.
Faced with this sort of script it's a little hard to tell if the actors are
simply second rate or they're doing their best with awful material. I guess
it varies from actor to actor - some are good actors that manage to salvage
something from the wreckage, some are simply delivering lines that they
can't, that no-one could believe in. Most fall somewhere in between. A
couple of actors (Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas) are very good indeed,
even managing to make the five minute monologues bearable, some (Mira
Furlan especially) are simply appalling.
Everything is put aside for the big picture. Dialogue, characterisation,
comprehensibility. Everything hangs on that. Television doesn't have to
be easy watching to have merit - anyone else remember Johnny Byrne's
superb Your Cheatin' Heart? So is the big back story any good? It's
certainly ambitious - a five year storyline featuring the galaxy being
challenged by an ultimate evil and the government of Earth (who are
generally the good guys in things like this) being taken over by later
day Nazis until the central characters lead the rebellion that
ultimately overthrows them.
It's also true that this (sometimes) allows Babylon 5 to do things that
you couldn't do in other shows. Most TV shows are more protective of the
status quo. In something like ER or Casualty, should there be a treat of
a terrorist bomb likely to destroy the hospital, then you're pretty safe
to bet against it actually going off - except in the last ever episode
of the show when it's about 50/50. If Babylon 5 were to have a plot about
a giant space wombat that's going to destroy the planet Earth then you know
it might. It would forever alter the franchise, and piss off American TV
schedulers, who like to show episodes in any order, but since there isn't a
franchise to protect, you know that it might.
Unfettered ambition is a good thing, but when it comes down to the nitty
gritty, Babylon 5 fails despite it. There's this grand vision, this big
story, this epic high drama, but when it comes down to it the grand vision
doesn't amount to anything. Stories end, not with bangs, but with whimpers.
The big storyline just completed (at least on UK TV), in which the heroic
Captain Sheridan finally overthrew the evil President Clark, was a story
that had taken three years to develop. It finally wound up with Sheridan
plonking his ship in Earth orbit and broadcasting to every radio on the
planet "You do have a choice. Clark is bent. You know that. I know that.
I think you should tell him to get stuffed." At which point a woman in a
blue suit, surrounded by squaddies walks up to Clark's office, presumably
to tell him to get stuffed. But it's OK, since not only has the boy Clark
topped himself, but his final act was to program the planet's SDI network to
destroy everything on Earth, something the demonstrates that he really was a
bad guy. All the soldiers who served the legitimate government rather than
taking arms against their political masters get to see that what was done
needed doing and that they can all work together in the future. It's as
though the first RAF raid on Berlin dropped not bombs, but propaganda
leaflets which not only caused Hitler to kill himself, but gave the
German people directions to Treblinka first. Along with proof that none of
the SS actually working the camp realised that the gas they were feeding
into the showers was anything more than a mild disinfectant. We have no
idea who the woman in the blue suit was, but since she was able to walk
straight up to Clark's office, presumably she was either Eva Braun or
Himmler. I expect that in the world of Babylon 5 she'll now become President
of Earth and everyone will be happy.
We might even be able to dismiss this as a momentary aberration, except
that it keeps happening. In the Big War between Good and Evil (who's
apparent similarity to Moorcock's Law and Chaos is pure co-incidence.
Honest) everything was sorted out when (in modern terms) the inhabitants
of Burkina Faso asked the Cold War superpowers to go away and leave them
alone. "If you like," they said, and left the galaxy never to return. In
the Minbari Civil War, which admittedly didn't have three years of build up,
more like three episodes, all the inter-caste hatred that was destroying the
planet of the bald bhuddists was abated when someone went and stood in
the beam of a spotlight for a few minutes. Then the Minbari always were
a bit confused. Probably having a Warrior caste forming a third of a
population which for ten thousand years has never seen Minbari harming
Minbari will do that to a culture. "Father, we have stonking big guns and
jet fighters, but what are they for?" "Dunno son, but it says here that they
are our destiny, so keep practising."
When it comes down to it, Babylon 5 is loaded to the gunwales with Big Vision,
but hasn't the faintest idea how to translate that Big Vision into watchable
television. When looked at in the cold light of day it's probably a barely
avoidable side effect making the man with the big ideas solely responsible
for translating those ideas into reality.
Faced with all this the next question really is "Why does anyone defend it?"
There are people out there who claim that Babylon 5 is wonderful, a
surprisingly large number of them. There are next to no people who'll
claim that Space: Above and Beyond was much more than a TV show with a
couple of halfway good ideas that never really got going. I have an
observation and a theory.
The observation is that the vast majority of these Babylon 5 fans do not
watch television. They have no critical vocabulary. If you asked them
"Which is better, NYPD Blue or Homicide: Life on the Streets" they will
look at you blankly and admit that they've never watched either. If you
try discuss whether Robbie Coltrane is better in Cracker or comedy then
they might just remember that they once say Coltrane in the Comic Strip
ten years ago "Wasn't he the fat Scots guy?" but don't know if he's worked
since. They may declare Babylon 5 to be brilliant, but since they don't
have anything to compare it with, that declaration needs to be taken with
a big pinch of salt.
The theory is one that works best by analogy. There is an organisation
called the Roman Catholic Church. Over the past two thousand years it has
done many things, some of which now appear shameful. Many people remain
members of it, find that it makes sense of their lives and do good things
because they are part of it. Yet there are people who were once part of
this organisation, and have left it. And these people are the most
vociferous critics of the Roman Catholic Church. Attacking the Pope is
morally good. Good works done by Catholics are wrong, simply because they
are done by Catholics. Anything wrong done by a catholic is latched onto
a proof that the entire edifice is corrupt, and the Pope should be strung
up from the nearest lamp post. No matter the topic of conversation, sooner
or later it'll turn round to the evils of Catholicism. You know the type.
If you're unlucky, you'll have been stuck in a lift with one.
Lapsed Catholics. Lovely people some of them, but for God's sake don't
talk about religion.
Babylon 5's committed (and some of them should be) fan base are
lapsed-Trekkies. They used to watch Star Trek, but for whatever reason
stopped. Now they watch Babylon 5. For God's sake don't talk about
television.
The CGI Special Effects are sometimes very good indeed.
-----
Laters,
Adam
This article by a guy called Nick Eden. He's webpage can be found at:
http://www.pheasnt.demon.co.uk
Anyway, I think it describes my problems with Bab 5 rather well.
----
What Nick thinks about Babylon 5
I understand that there are some poor benighted fools who believe that the
best thing about Babylon 5 is the plot. I am sorry to have to be harsh, but
they are wrong. Hopefully, under New Labour, treatment for this affliction
will be available under the NHS. There are also people who believe that the
moon is made of green cheese, or that whales are fish. We should not seek to
condemn them, but should set out to offer the basic education that should
removed these troublesome beliefs, or failing that pump them full of drugs
and lock them away from sharp objects for their own protection.
There are a few, very few, who claim that the thing that makes Babylon 5
great is the background, which is more troublesome. There are the herds who
claim that the advantage of Babylon 5 is that it is not Star Trek. While it
is true that Babylon 5 is not Star Trek, neither is it Grand Opera or a plate
of fettuccini. These things are true, but just because they are true does not
mean that Babylon 5 is good. Or bad for that matter. There is probably
someone in the world who believes that what's good about Babylon 5 is the
quality of the script or the ability of the actors, but I think you'll find
that that person is already located in a padded cell. For our protection.
Many people say that the CGI special effects are very good.
The conventional way of making an American television series is to have a
producer or a writer think up an idea - "We could do a show about a Texas
Ranger who follows his quarry to London, England." He then writes a pilot
episode, the networks agree to buy it and the producer oversees a number
of writers producing stories about the Texas Ranger, in which he rides
about, fights crime and gets baffled by the way British police don't use
guns and get upset whenever he draws his - but are always glad that he was
able to shoot the baddie before they got shot. The producer may write a few
of the episodes, but most are written by others. Eventually the producer goes
on to other projects and the other writers begin to exert more control and
may loose track of the show's original vision.
Babylon 5 is a little different in that the original writer/producer didn't
just have an idea "how about a space station with lots of aliens on it" but
had a plan. The plan was to have a show that would run for 5 years, would
have a beginning, a middle and an end, and tell a complete epic story.
This is not, of itself a bad thing. Big stories can work. The plan was to
tell stories a bit darker than normal, where the heroes would all be
slightly flawed, and the villains would have enough good in them that there
would be no conflicts between "good" and "evil" but between individuals,
doing what they were doing for their own reasons. Which would be no bad thing.
The Cop shows of Steven Bocco, loaded as they are with complex characters who
might just turn up to work drunk, or have dealings with the mob are streets
ahead of nice safe shows were a policeman's uniform proves that he is a
morally upright citizen. Ambiguous characters make for interesting stories.
All of these things, while not essential to good storytelling, usually make
it easier.
So what's the problem?
The problem is that there is a single mind driving the entire show. That
single mind, belonging to J. Michael Straczynski, is thinking up every idea,
overseeing all the production and writing every script. And that single mind
isn't up to it. The single mind that should be providing creative vision to
the show is doing everything. The single mind is trying to see both the fine
detail and the big picture at the same time, and as we all know, trying to
do that means you don't get to do either very well and you get a splitting
headache out of it.
What's actually happened is that the big picture dominates everything,
drives every episode, every sub-plot, but at the same time there hasn't been
enough time to make that big picture work when you get down to the detail. A
conventional writing arrangement probably does things better - if the single
guiding intellect is able to just get on and guide then he's got the time to
make sure that the stories being told by the individual writers work as
stories and fit into the bit picture.
But that's not how it goes on Babylon 5, because everything's being done by
one man. One man who lacks either the time, the ability or the vision to see
any single episode of Babylon 5 as anything more than a tiny segment of a
five year story. He doesn't see stories, or characters, just pawns that are
part of a greater whole. Individual characters are routinely sacrificed
because the Plot demands that they go and do something, never mind that it
doesn't fit with what they were doing a couple of weeks ago. Episodes don't
have beginnings or middles or ends. They are just scenes in a tapestry. If
you've not been watching from the start then you'd better not risk starting
now. There are no jumping on points, only "bugger this for a game of
soldiers, I'm going to bed" points.
Babylon 5 characters are ciphers. The entire show is driven by a single plot.
This is does not bode well.
What makes things worse is that JMS is not much cop when it comes to
scripting. It's not simply that he's not much good when it comes to
writing stories, what damns him is that he's really not got much handle
on dialogue. His characters have this terrible habit of fixing their eyes
on the middle distance and delivering a five plus minute monologue about
whatever theme the episode was supposed to be stressing, or, more regularly
these days, explaining whatever plot holes have reared their ugly heads.
You wondered why the Police Chief's character changed completely at the
start of season 4? That's OK, have ten minutes of the telepathic secret
policeman explaining exactly what was going on. Have an episode where rebel
forces are about to engage loyal forces for the first time? Plop Captain
Sheridan down in front of the camera for five minutes to rabbit on about
how it will be difficult to fight my old comrades, but my cause is just.
You get the picture.
Faced with this sort of script it's a little hard to tell if the actors are
simply second rate or they're doing their best with awful material. I guess
it varies from actor to actor - some are good actors that manage to salvage
something from the wreckage, some are simply delivering lines that they
can't, that no-one could believe in. Most fall somewhere in between. A
couple of actors (Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas) are very good indeed,
even managing to make the five minute monologues bearable, some (Mira
Furlan especially) are simply appalling.
Everything is put aside for the big picture. Dialogue, characterisation,
comprehensibility. Everything hangs on that. Television doesn't have to
be easy watching to have merit - anyone else remember Johnny Byrne's
superb Your Cheatin' Heart? So is the big back story any good? It's
certainly ambitious - a five year storyline featuring the galaxy being
challenged by an ultimate evil and the government of Earth (who are
generally the good guys in things like this) being taken over by later
day Nazis until the central characters lead the rebellion that
ultimately overthrows them.
It's also true that this (sometimes) allows Babylon 5 to do things that
you couldn't do in other shows. Most TV shows are more protective of the
status quo. In something like ER or Casualty, should there be a treat of
a terrorist bomb likely to destroy the hospital, then you're pretty safe
to bet against it actually going off - except in the last ever episode
of the show when it's about 50/50. If Babylon 5 were to have a plot about
a giant space wombat that's going to destroy the planet Earth then you know
it might. It would forever alter the franchise, and piss off American TV
schedulers, who like to show episodes in any order, but since there isn't a
franchise to protect, you know that it might.
Unfettered ambition is a good thing, but when it comes down to the nitty
gritty, Babylon 5 fails despite it. There's this grand vision, this big
story, this epic high drama, but when it comes down to it the grand vision
doesn't amount to anything. Stories end, not with bangs, but with whimpers.
The big storyline just completed (at least on UK TV), in which the heroic
Captain Sheridan finally overthrew the evil President Clark, was a story
that had taken three years to develop. It finally wound up with Sheridan
plonking his ship in Earth orbit and broadcasting to every radio on the
planet "You do have a choice. Clark is bent. You know that. I know that.
I think you should tell him to get stuffed." At which point a woman in a
blue suit, surrounded by squaddies walks up to Clark's office, presumably
to tell him to get stuffed. But it's OK, since not only has the boy Clark
topped himself, but his final act was to program the planet's SDI network to
destroy everything on Earth, something the demonstrates that he really was a
bad guy. All the soldiers who served the legitimate government rather than
taking arms against their political masters get to see that what was done
needed doing and that they can all work together in the future. It's as
though the first RAF raid on Berlin dropped not bombs, but propaganda
leaflets which not only caused Hitler to kill himself, but gave the
German people directions to Treblinka first. Along with proof that none of
the SS actually working the camp realised that the gas they were feeding
into the showers was anything more than a mild disinfectant. We have no
idea who the woman in the blue suit was, but since she was able to walk
straight up to Clark's office, presumably she was either Eva Braun or
Himmler. I expect that in the world of Babylon 5 she'll now become President
of Earth and everyone will be happy.
We might even be able to dismiss this as a momentary aberration, except
that it keeps happening. In the Big War between Good and Evil (who's
apparent similarity to Moorcock's Law and Chaos is pure co-incidence.
Honest) everything was sorted out when (in modern terms) the inhabitants
of Burkina Faso asked the Cold War superpowers to go away and leave them
alone. "If you like," they said, and left the galaxy never to return. In
the Minbari Civil War, which admittedly didn't have three years of build up,
more like three episodes, all the inter-caste hatred that was destroying the
planet of the bald bhuddists was abated when someone went and stood in
the beam of a spotlight for a few minutes. Then the Minbari always were
a bit confused. Probably having a Warrior caste forming a third of a
population which for ten thousand years has never seen Minbari harming
Minbari will do that to a culture. "Father, we have stonking big guns and
jet fighters, but what are they for?" "Dunno son, but it says here that they
are our destiny, so keep practising."
When it comes down to it, Babylon 5 is loaded to the gunwales with Big Vision,
but hasn't the faintest idea how to translate that Big Vision into watchable
television. When looked at in the cold light of day it's probably a barely
avoidable side effect making the man with the big ideas solely responsible
for translating those ideas into reality.
Faced with all this the next question really is "Why does anyone defend it?"
There are people out there who claim that Babylon 5 is wonderful, a
surprisingly large number of them. There are next to no people who'll
claim that Space: Above and Beyond was much more than a TV show with a
couple of halfway good ideas that never really got going. I have an
observation and a theory.
The observation is that the vast majority of these Babylon 5 fans do not
watch television. They have no critical vocabulary. If you asked them
"Which is better, NYPD Blue or Homicide: Life on the Streets" they will
look at you blankly and admit that they've never watched either. If you
try discuss whether Robbie Coltrane is better in Cracker or comedy then
they might just remember that they once say Coltrane in the Comic Strip
ten years ago "Wasn't he the fat Scots guy?" but don't know if he's worked
since. They may declare Babylon 5 to be brilliant, but since they don't
have anything to compare it with, that declaration needs to be taken with
a big pinch of salt.
The theory is one that works best by analogy. There is an organisation
called the Roman Catholic Church. Over the past two thousand years it has
done many things, some of which now appear shameful. Many people remain
members of it, find that it makes sense of their lives and do good things
because they are part of it. Yet there are people who were once part of
this organisation, and have left it. And these people are the most
vociferous critics of the Roman Catholic Church. Attacking the Pope is
morally good. Good works done by Catholics are wrong, simply because they
are done by Catholics. Anything wrong done by a catholic is latched onto
a proof that the entire edifice is corrupt, and the Pope should be strung
up from the nearest lamp post. No matter the topic of conversation, sooner
or later it'll turn round to the evils of Catholicism. You know the type.
If you're unlucky, you'll have been stuck in a lift with one.
Lapsed Catholics. Lovely people some of them, but for God's sake don't
talk about religion.
Babylon 5's committed (and some of them should be) fan base are
lapsed-Trekkies. They used to watch Star Trek, but for whatever reason
stopped. Now they watch Babylon 5. For God's sake don't talk about
television.
The CGI Special Effects are sometimes very good indeed.
-----
Laters,
Adam