Babylon 5: Season One

Anyhow, I promised this blog a description of Babylon 5 and why I loved it so much. So I'm going to try and write a small description for the first season today.

The first season of Babylon 5 had the station itself being introduced, along with some of the characters that we would follow to the end of the show. Why was it called Babylon 5? Well, Babylon 1, Babylon 2, and Babylon 3 were all destroyed through acts of sabotage when a worker named Thomas, and nicknamed Jinxo left the stations. He stayed until Babylon 4 was finsihed, and then left shortly afterwards, only to have it stolen through time and space, though no one at the time knew that; for all intents and purposes it just kind of disappeared. Jinxo would later go on to search for the Holy Grail of all things, after a wandering holy man gave his life for him, and entrusted the quest to him.

This first season revolved around certain key questions: What makes humanity special in a universe that is teaming with life? What happened at the Battle of the Line? What sort of darkness is rising up within the Earth Alliance? Who are you and what do you want? What are the Vorlons, really?

Humans build communities, this is cheating from a later season to explain what makes us special. All the other races do not tend to mix easily with one another, and there are a lot of anti-alien human groups; but no other race, one ambassador once said in a later season, would dare to dream of a place where all the races could meet with one another and trade peacefully. With the five mile long station known as Babylon 5, many races who normally would have little contact with one another would live alongside each other, a quarter of a million humans and aliens all alone in the night.

What happened at the Battle of the Line? The show's first season is set ten years after the Earth-Minbari War, where a mistake by a human expedition to find the Minbari resulted in the near extinction of the human race. The Minbari approached with their gunports open as was their custom, to show them their arms and that they respected them and meant no harm; unfortunately the human ships could only tell the gunports were open and nothing else through the heavy electromagnetic interference caused by Minbari scanners...and fired, killing the greatest leader since the near mythical Valen.

From that point on, the Minbari were on a holy war, wiping out the human military first at every colony, one by one. Saving the civilians for later, until the Battle of the Line. One last line against the Minbari in defense of Earth herself; of over a hundred thousand men and women who went into battle against the Minbari, only two hundred survived. They went in with no chance of survival, the Presidential address before hand asking them to buy minutes, because for every ten minutes another ship full of innocent people could flee to neutral territory, if the Minbari would honor such a thing.

Then one human pilot was brought aboard the flagship of the Minbari fleet and interrogated with one of their holy relics. That pilot was Jeffery Sinclair, the commander of Babylon 5 in ten years time, and what they found in him caused the war to end. The Minbari unconditionally surrendered, as they realized they had been breaking their most sacred law...Minbari do not kill Minbari. Sinclair held the soul of Valen within him, their revered leader from a thousand years ago. They took in more human pilots, and found more of the same.

This "hole in your mind" became a pivotal plot point for this season, and one of the ruling council of the Minbari, the Grey Council, Delenn, would go as ambassador to Babylon 5 for the express purpose of keeping an eye on Sinclair.

Meanwhile a cancer was eating at the insides of the Earth Alliance in this season. A constant problem for station security, under hard nosed (and ocassionaly relapsing alcoholic) Chief Michael Garibaldi was the attacks on aliens and smuggled goods that were captured again and again, including jammers set for the gold channel frequency of the Presidential starship, Earth Force One. Every smuggler, every anti-alien group, seemed to be able to escape custody at some point on the way back to Earth, and all of them seemed to share a common salute, no matter how disparate they were.

This leads to the two questions upon which the entire series turns; who are you, what do you want? The Vorlons, mysterious beings of ancient power always ask the former, and no answer is ever sufficient, or seems to be. They're all about Order, and they rarely speak, and when they do speak, it is in riddles. Their enemies however, the Shadows, ask the opposite question, what do you want?

Each ambassador is asked this in turn. G'Kar, the Narn ambassador, only want the Centauri who enslaved his world for a hundred years to die, and then for peace to reign. Delenn, the Minbari amabassador refuses to meet with their emissary when she realizes what he is, and a triluminary symbol glows on her head to tell her the Shadows are nearby. The Vorlon ambassador tells him to leave, they are not for him. The Centauri ambassador, Londo, a drunk and gambler who lusts for more power at all times, is frustrated at first, and eventually tells him that he wants the Centauri to become the lion of the galaxy once more, to take their place as the pre-eminent power amongst the stars and for lesser races to cower at their very name...and the Shadows discover someone that they can use.

Things quickly spiral downhill as Londo recovers an artifact belonging to the first Emperor of the Centauri Republic, only to have raiders steal it, and Mr. Morden's "associates" steal it back for him. Then after his nephew is nearly killed when the Narn take a Centauri colony, he asks Morden for help, and a major Narn military outpost is destroyed in turn.

The season culminates with Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari entering some sort of cocoon, the Chief of Security, Garibaldi being shot in the back by one of his own people for discovering jamming devices, and Garibaldi slipping into a coma as he warns Commander Sinclair that the President is going to be killed. Sinclair tries to raise Earth Force One, but every channel of communications except ISN, the news channel, is blocked. That's when the unthinkable happens, "The President was supposed to begin his New Year's address ten minutes ago...wait...something's happening, we're picking up a distress call-" and Earth Force One, silhoutted against Jupiter off of the transfer point by Io explodes in what is officially deemed an accident with the ship's fusion reactors.

The season ends with the ominous words after that, the loss of the Narn military base, and Delenn's cocoon being discovered, "Nothing's the same anymore".