From time to time, you will make mistakes. They're
inevitable. Sometimes those mistakes will be...huge. What matters is
that you learn from them. There's nothing wrong with falling down, so
long as you end up just two inches taller when you pick yourself up
off the floor. At times, you may end up far away from home. You may
not be sure of where you belong anymore. But home is always
there. Because home is not a place. It's wherever your passion takes
you. As you continue on your path...you will lose some friends and
gain new ones. The process is painful, but often necessary. They will
change, and you will change because life is change. From time to
time...they must find their own way, and that way may not be
yours. Enjoy them for what they are. And remember them for what they
were.There's not much left. Except... I believe... I really do believe
that sooner or later, no matter what happens...things do work out. Oh,
we have hard times. We suffer. We lose loved ones. The road is never
easy. It was never meant to be easy. But in the long run...if you stay
true to what you believe, things do work out. Always be willing to
fight for what you believe in. It doesn't matter if 1000 people agree
with you or one person agrees with you.It doesn't matter if you stand
completely alone. Fight for what you believe in. Which brings me to
the first piece of advice my father ever gave me, and now I'm giving
it to you. Never start a fight, but always finish it.
There is a darkness greater than the one we fight. It is the darkness
of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against
powers and principalities...it is against chaos and despair. Greater
than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of
dreams. Against this peril, we can never surrender. The future is all
around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of
revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will
take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.
J.M.Straczynski, ``Babylon 5: Z'ha'dum.''
J.M.Straczynski, ``Babylon 5: OBJECTS AT REST.''
Babylon 5 is a novel for television. It is made of two movies covering the beginning of the story, and a 5-season series telling the story from beginning, middle, to end. Nothing like it has ever been done on US television before. It portrays a future uncomfortably similar to the world we live in today and with problems like the ones we confront today. But also great hope for a better future. From a literary perspective, Babylon 5 is pretty much like the Lord of the Rings of Tolkien in space. In Tolkien's story, mythic elements like elves and dwarves, even birds like eagles, become real. Myth is made into reality, an entire universe with its own history is created, which is uncomfortably similar to our own world. Similarly in Babylon 5, mythical elements are taken in and made real, but in a more subtle way that makes them even more real. Babylon 5 is about legend and fantasy made real. But also it is reality that is made into myth and legend. Sheridan's words "teach me how to fight legends", his encounter with one of the most ancient beings in our Galaxy, the scene where G'Kar slices his hand with a dagger and as blood falls in droplets he says "Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! How do you apologize to them!". In these scenes, reality is elevated to symbol, legend and archetype. The timeline of the story spans 1000 years into the past to millions of years into the future. At that time, we learn how to fight legends, and after a million years it is shown how we crawled the hard way to become legends ourselves.
"It is said that in every age there is one singular event that forever changes the world around us. A nexus, if you will. It is said that the future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world. Because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past. But in the pain of that war, the future was born. A future that would one day have a name whispered on a hundred worlds. A final refuge for dreams. Our last, best hope for peace. Babylon 5"
The narration begins with an made-for-TV movie, on Centauri Prime in the year 2278. The homeworld of the Centauri Republic, destroyed and devasted, the Emperor, Londo Mollari, old and in bad health. He has sealed all the windows in the palace except his own so that no-one else can see the devastation of his homeworld but him. When he catches two children watching out his window, he asks them what they want. They say that they want him to tell them a story. And that's how the narration of the Babylon story begins:
"Very well, then. I will give you both what you want. A story about great deeds. About armies of light and soldiers of darkness. About the places where they lived and fought and loved and died. About great empires and terrible mistakes. A true story. You see, I was there, at the dawn of the Third Age. It began with the humans, you know. They are the quiet ones I mentioned before. They changed the universe. But in doing so, paid a terrible price. It began 35 of their years ago. Their homeworld is a place called Earth, located in a fairly uninteresting part of the galaxy. We'd never bothered much with that area before. It had little military or strategic value. But, as a culture grows decadent, it becomes intrigued by art, by trinkets, by eccentricity. The humans had art, trinkets and eccentricity to spare. But it was none of those traits that would cause so much death and pain. They have an expression: pride goeth before a a fall. Their pride was their undoing. I know. I was there....They did not listen, of course. Arrogant men never do. Sadly, arrogance has never been exclusively a human trait. It travels between the stars like solar winds."
(You can read this in more detail here. (spoilers for In the Beginning))
The narration continues in the year 2243. Until then, the humans have expanded into space, and encountered first the Centauri, then many other alien races, some more advanced than them, others less. In 2243 they decide to make First Contact with a mysterious very old alien race that they have heard about, the Minbari. The Centauri insist that doing so is very dangerous and that opposing the Minbari is something that they themselves never dared to do. First Contact leads to a misunderstanding, the misunderstanding leads to an attack, and the attack escalates to a terrible war. At the end of the war, both humans and Minbari decide that an interstellar war must never happen again and they build the Babylon station to be used as neutral territory in which alien races can meet and negotiate peace. An interstellar "United Nations". And now the real story begins. The station is sampotaged and destroyed while under construction. The same fate meets the next 2 attempts. The 4th station, Babylon 4 mysteriously vanishes 24 hours after becoming operational with all of its crew, never to be seen again. But Babylon 5, as it seems, endures, but under the ghost of uncertainty about what caused the fate of the other 4 stations. In an interview, the Captain of Babylon 5 explained the purpose of the station like this:
"The job of Babylon 5 is not to enforce the peace, it's to create the peace. And this place was built on the assumption that we could work out our problems and build a better future. And that, to me, is the key issue. See, in the last few years, we've stumbled. We've stumbled at the death of the president, the war, and on and on. And when you stumble a lot, you...you start looking at your feet. You know, we have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying, "Make my life have meaning." And to our inheritors before us saying, "Create the world we will live in." We're not just...holding jobs and having dinner. We're in the process of building the future. That's what Babylon 5 is all about. Only by making people understand that can we hope to create a better world for ourselves, and our posterity."The Babylon 5 series tells the story of that station, and how it became the Nexus that changed the universe for all of us leading us to the Third Age of Mankind.
On a more technical side, one of the innovations in Babylon 5 was the the revolutionary way in which it was produced. Now, in Hollywood, it's called the B5 model. My next door neighbour, Larry King has a kick-ass Babylon 5 web page of his own. The most authoritive sites on the show however are the Lurker's Guide and the Spoiler's Junkies Web page. Another cool site is Views from the Gallery that contains reviews for all the Bab 5 episodes that have aired up until now. Babylon 5 airs on Cable TV channel in the US. TNT