*steeples fingers, obtains lighting from below*

Eeexxxcellent.

Friend, you are so close.  I need to send you a flash drive or something, you are Going To Love This, I can feel it in my fucking bones, like, when I finished the series, I thought “Of all the people I interact with frequently on Tumblr, tinsnip and lostthehat are going to Love This.”    

You have joined me for every other fucking fandom obsession I’ve taken this blog through, I think it would be breaking tradition for you not to dive into this too~~~   

(I maintain my offer to facilitate this.  I will burn burn it onto discs for you if you want, because I pretty much Need You To See It and then draw Londo Mollari with me.) 

I am not sure what you want me to tell you here, friend.   I can’t tell if you’re telling me you do not like the series one bit, or you do not like just what is happening in that episode, so I’ll just tell you some general things that may help.  

I guess the first thing is that B5 is like this perfect exercise in ‘life is too short to do things you don’t like’ and 'patience has its rewards’, because yeah, the beginning is some Painful 90s Wow I Can Predict Every Terrible Line of Dialog and I’m Sick Of Everyone’s Tragic Past Love Interests, and then come season 2, some actual shit is going down.   I started watching it properly as an adult on the heels of DS9, and it was legitimately a hard adjustment.  I don’t know if I would have kept with it if I hadn’t had childhood memories of loving the Ambassadors and nothing else to watch.  I’m SO glad I did, of course.  

The first season of Babylon 5 is like the first seven episodes of Princess Tutu, for anyone who gets that reference.  It is some bait and switch kind of bullshit where they want you to think you have the show and its people figured out, you know who everyone is and what vague role they’re going to play in The Usual Narrative.  There are times when you pick up on the fact that it’s going to do something else, and when I realized it was honestly outside of the narrative itself.  The biggest one for me was looking at Londo and G'Kar - or more specifically, Peter and Andreas - and thinking, 'Shit.  These guys are really fantastic actors being given some kind of ridiculous and pointless shit to do, what is going on that they’re mostly just playing weird slapstick hate rivals when they clearly show an amazing capacity for subtlety and range?’   

And the answer to that question is The Rest Of The Show.  

A lot of shows have a 'growing into their own’ season to start off with (I can’t count the number of times people have recommended me something and then said, 'but maybe don’t watch the first season’), and B5 definitely has that happening.  There are episodes that are entertaining and episodes that are a complete snore.  There are characters that are great and characters that you wish would just be dropped out an airlock somewhere.  For most of the first season, I was living episode to episode on whatever scraps of the Ambassadors I could get - particularly Londo.  The big relief for me, though, was that it all gets better and there comes a point when you no longer need to live for a single character to muddle through.  

There aren’t nearly as many 'love interest of the week’ episodes after season 1, and I was in fact surprised to see that a few that I thought were love interests of the week came back and were not totally forgotten after they served to be allegedly titillating for a one-shot.  All that shit they did with Sinclair and his on again off again ex whatever, blah, I didn’t like any of that either, it was predictable as fuck and a complete snore.  I thought, 'Oh, how nice that they didn’t default to her being white,’ and that was about the only feeling I could summon for that entire thing.  

This show really likes 'on again, off again’ past romances, I think legit almost everyone in the credits has one.  I think Garibaldi’s is boring, Sheridan’s is boring, Ivanova’s was BAFFLING, Talia’s were boring…  JMS has a thing, apparently, and I evidently Always Find It Boring.  It’s not super realistic to have a crew that are fresh and have no romantic baggage, but I think the entire crew having a complicated strained old romance is fucking ridiculous.  It’s like the dull 90s Hetero Tour, so I’m feeling you on this, trust me.  

One of the other things you get super frequently early on is the Relevant Social Issues of The 90s Allegory Episode.  We have the Jehova’s Witness blood transfusion allegory episode, the homosexuality allegory episode (luckily, we get Actual homosexuality later that isn’t played for laughs, though it has to be kind of covert because 90s), the AIDS allegory episode, the global warming, the terrorism, probably something about vegetarianism, I don’t know.   But it’s seriously like a clip show of issues from that decade.  When I first started watching this show, I called it 'The 90s In Space’ which I contrasted with 'Space In The 90s’/DS9.    

Luckily, it grows out of that too. 

It benefits later from being like 90% written by the man who created the whole thing, so there are fewer episodes that are just people standing around delivering dialog and more where you feel like a real conversation is happening.  Also more that have weight and substance and plot rather than 'lol, today these two get up to shenanigans! also serious telepath business is afoot, but only today.' 

So it’s like any show, really, in that it’ll have episodes that make you roll your eyes so hard they fly into orbit, and episodes that you want to rewatch before you’ve even finished them.  

The last person who talked to me who wasn’t sure about the show, I told them, 'If at any point, you’ve enjoyed a character even a little, keep watching just to see what they do by the time the second season rolls around.’   The characters in season 5 of this show are not even remotely interchangeable with the characters in season 1 of this show, there is so much growth, change, and development.  And a lot of that change is actually painful for the characters and the people watching them.  Watch people rollercoaster around between 'I love him so much’ and 'I can’t stand anything you do’ and 'I possibly need to rethink my life based upon your example’.  From 'eh, you’re okay’ to 'i possibly want to erect a shrine to your personality’.   

I’m the kind of person who has the ability to put up with a lot because I want to see what they do with a few smaller elements of a thing.  Sometimes that has served me well, and sometimes it hasn’t, but it’s a useful thing for first season B5, for sure.   I definitely say if you like any of the Ambassadors enough to think, “I wonder what they’ll do with that character”, stay on board just to see that, you will be Blown Away.  (And then the rest of the show will catch up to how amazing they are.)

All that said, if nothing else gets you through the groan-worthy episodes, play some kind of 'ugh, this is so fucking 90s’ bingo to get you through the first season, and then you will be free to watch some Beautiful Shit Go Down. 

Holy shit, high five!   I don’t think anyone has ever recognized my blog title before - not that they’ve told me anyway!   I LOVE Vanilla Ninja, I was so excited when I found them and they were singing about things that I wanted to hear women singing about and in a style that was angry but melodious~    Everyone I’ve played Kingdom Burning Down for has really liked it and been impressed with it, and it ended up being massive thing for me so it’s the title of pretty much everything I touch on the internet.  

  How nice to see someone else who likes this band~~!