Picking sides.

[gabolange]

Share your favorite piece of original canon.

My favorite?

Okay, fine. I will not overthink this. Babylon 5 is the show of my heart.

It was not my first love (Star Wars) or my first fandom (Star Trek) or the fandom where I've made and kept the most friends (BSG, Stargate, Wheel of Time) or the fandom eating my brain right now (For All Mankind) or the one that broke my heart hardest (The Doctor Blake Mysteries) or even the one where I learned the most about myself (Call the Midwife). I have never written the story of my heart for it, the way I have for so many others (what isn't on this list? Leverage!, Strange New Worlds!), though I have come close.

And yet, and yet. It is first a story about storytelling, about how the "worst first season ever" actually frames everything that comes next thoughtfully and brilliantly while still being kind of bad. (All the prophecies come true.) It is a story about choice and destiny at a personal and galactic scale, and it is a story about the kinds of choices that will allow redemption and the kinds that won't. It is a story about friendship, the complicated and messy kind that doesn't fit easily into boxes but which undergirds the universe. It is a story about love.

It has my favorite scene of anything ever filmed, when Delenn rides in with righteous fury in "Severed Dreams" and saves the station with just a few words but the power of a decade of destruction living within them. It has my favorite character of anything ever filmed, or one of a top few, because Delenn's ability to force the world to bend to her will while wearing a smile and insisting (and possibly believing) she would never do any such thing is a masterclass in point of view.

It also does this while still being kinda cheesy 90s sci-fi with some monsters of the week and a King Arthur obsession that I never think fits as well as some other people do. And, like The Next Generation before it, it uses its tone to its advantage, so when the really bad moments come, you are surprised along with the characters.

I found B5 initially in college (2003?) and watched with friends. I came back to it in my early LJ fandom days (2007?) and tore through everything on Jumpy and across webrings and on journals. I made a couple friends, though I have now lost track of them. And then I came back to it in 2021 after Mira Furlan died--I put on "Severed Dreams", which was coincidentally the first episode I ever watched--and I just kept watching. For eleven months.

I was worried it wouldn't hold up, that it would be cheesy or uncomfortable. But instead I found it even more prescient and relevant; perhaps that is the value of the archetype. G'Kar will sadly always have a proxy as the voice of an oppressed people. The fate of the Markab will always be too close for comfort. Londo, well. As I get older, the more I understand and hate Londo in equal measure.

And Susan and Delenn will always be the ones who survive, who exist with triumph and loss as equal partners in their heads and their hearts. We will with them always raise a glass to absent friends, in memory still bright.

To this show, which I love, which changed my life.