https://www.tor.com/2023/08/09/babylon-5-is-a-perfect-terrible-series/
"
Babylon 5 is one of the best science fiction shows ever made. It also kind
of sucks, and that’s okay.
“I hope the future will be like
Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be
like
Babylon 5.”
This is how a friend convinced me to watch
Babylon 5 close to a decade ago,
and it’s a statement that gets both more and less prescient by the day.
Babylon 5 depicts a future rife with stratified poverty, union busting
corporations, xenophobic hate crimes, colonial legacies blossoming into new
conflicts, and the tide of fascism rising right in our own backyard. In J.
Michael Straczynski’s imagined future, the smug neoliberal western hegemony
that arose from the ashes of the Cold War really was “the end of history”, and
the results are simultaneously anodyne and horrific. Psychic powers are real,
but those born with them are enslaved by the state. There are ancient terrors
lurking on the edges of the map—civilizations who long ago ascended but refuse
to let the children of the galaxy play unattended in the sandbox. People who
live on the titular station still have to pay for their freaking healthcare in
the year 2258.
And, of course, let us not forget what happened to San Diego."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
