It was the Earth year 1993, and Joe Michael Straczynski had a plan.
“There has always been a plan for a series to follow. If anything, that was the point of the entire exercise...to tell a story. To create a novel for TV that would span five years, for which the pilot is the opening chapter,” Stracynzki wrote of Babylon 5, his sweeping space opera that he had been working on since the mid-1980s.
The picture he painted was of a grand war epic. He promised that fans would see “wheels within wheels,” and that “some of the established empires in the pilot will fall.” He said one character would undergo “a MAJOR change” that would send the show spinning on a very different axis. It was highly ambitious, and more to the point, the diametric opposite of Star Trek – the dominant sci-fi franchise of the time.
Straczynski, or JMS as he was known by fans, was a Star Trek fan. And like so many other Star Trek fans, the show’s decisions tended to make him crazy. He wondered why it didn’t have realistic space physics. He wondered why there was a kid on the bridge. Most of all, he wondered why the reset button was hit every episode.
While Straczynski cut his teeth on ’80s cartoons like Masters of the Universe and The Real Ghostbusters, he was a literary sci-fi and fantasy fan. His influences included famed writers like Michael Moorcock and Arthur C. Clarke, and he borrowed liberally from all of them, even going so far as to name one of his villains after Alfred Bester.
He envisioned a series about a space station that served as a crossroads between multiple alien empires, all of them with their own secrets and agendas. Actions would have consequences, whether for individual characters or for the arc as a whole. It would feature truly unique aliens, some of whom would be rendered using CGI. And it would be more grounded, with a more realistic military structure, authentic physics, and a grim and gritty “Down Below” filled with unhoused residents.
He summed up his vision with a simple rule: “No cute kids, no cute robots, ever.”
In short, Straczynski wanted to make the anti-Trek. There was just one problem: Star Trek wanted to make that show too.
‘But why do we need these guys?’
While Straczynski was pitching Babylon 5 on lots across Hollywood, Star Trek was grappling with an identity crisis of its own. Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision and social commentary was one of the franchise’s distinguishing features, but younger writers like Ron Moore were eager to experiment with more ambitious storylines. Moore and company railed against the franchise’s reluctance to focus on interpersonal conflict, which they saw as one of the main drivers of drama.
“Gene Roddenberry was an interesting figure because so much of what was doing was right, but he wasn’t always right…There are certain things of Star Trek that you get that are full Roddenberry, which are very earnest, very utopian style,” says Jordan Hoffman, former host of the Official Star Trek Podcast and writer at The Messenger.
Their desire for more sophisticated character-driven stories mirrored the trends across television as a whole. Erik Adams, who has covered TV for more than a decade across the AV Club and IGN, describes the television landscape of the ’90s beginning to take shape in the success of Twin Peaks, The Wonder Years, the launch of the Fox network, and targeted cable outlets like The Comedy Channel.
“It set the scene for a decade when audiences expected more from their TV, and expected to find it in more places,” he says.
Star Trek’s young guns would get their chance to shine with Deep Space Nine, a spin-off that took shape in the wake of Next Generation’s success through reruns of older episodes. According to New Frontiers: The Story of Deep Space Nine, Paramount chairman Brandon Tartikoff approached producer Rick Berman with the concept of a man and his son coming to a dilapidated frontier town on the edge of space. It would have “the country doctor, the barkeeper, the sheriff” and other familiar western tropes, but it would take place on a space station at the edge of space, and it would be grittier and more grounded than The Next Generation
Kathryn Drennan, who was Straczynski’s wife, was interning in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s writer’s room at the time. The concept for Deep Space Nine immediately set alarm bells ringing – so much so that she promptly excused herself from the meeting, much to the surprise of the Star Trek writing staff. That was the beginning of the conspiracy theory that the concept for Deep Space Nine was stolen by Paramount following Straczynski’s pitch in the late 1980s.
“During the five years spent pitching Babylon 5 we’d given Paramount all of our development material,” Straczynski wrote in 2019. “This led to several discussions with the executives that seemed to be going in a positive direction when suddenly they went radio silent. It never occurred to us that someone inside Paramount might have looked at that material and thought, ‘Hmmm… a companion series to Next Generation about a space station, that’s a great idea. But why do we need these guys?’”
‘This isn’t some deep space franchise’
Whether Paramount actually stole the concept for Deep Space Nine from Babylon 5 remains up for debate. Straczynski says in his autobiography that he accepts Drennan’s belief that Star Trek’s producers were blameless. He does, however, seem to think that Tartikoff was ripping off Babylon 5 when he pitched Berman on the notion of The Rifleman in space.
Either way, the stage was set for a (perhaps one-sided) rivalry between the two shows. Straczynski was relatively unique among showrunners at the time in that he was very active on Internet newsgroups, and he regularly cast Star Trek as a juggernaut and Babylon 5 as a struggling but resourceful indie production. He hired legendary Trek writers like Dorothy Fontana to pen episodes. He even cast Star Trek legend Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original show, as the villainous Psi Cop Bester.
“JMS loved doing deliberate subversions of tropes people expected from Trek,” says Rowan Kaiser, who reviewed Babylon 5 for the AV Club. “The ‘no cute kids’ policy for one, but also taking Trek actors and having them play divergent characters. So Koenig, who was the cute lovable Russian on Trek, becomes one of the biggest villains on B5, and that only adds to his sliminess. JMS would do that again one-off with [Majel Barrett-Roddenberry], who instead of playing the comic relief Lwaxana Troi, is a dignified, even ominous character at a crucial point in the series. It's both fun stunt casting and also a signifier that for all their differences and rivalries, they are part of the same toy chest.”
The show wasn’t above tossing in jabs at Star Trek. In a second season episode penned by popular sci-fi writer Peter David, second-in-command Susan Ivanova looks around a popular gift shop filled with station merch and shouts in exasperation, “We’re not some deep space franchise, this station is about something!”
Despite all that, Babylon 5 didn’t seem all that different from Star Trek, at least not at first. With a handful of exceptions, its early episodes were deliberately standalone affairs designed to attract new viewers. Most of its aliens had funny hair and bumpy foreheads. Its main differentiator early on was that it featured computer-generated special effects – a then-novel strategy intended to keep Babylon 5 on an affordable budget.
That began to change just over halfway through the first season. In ‘Signs and Portents’, a mysterious visitor named Morden arrives on the station and begins asking each of the major characters what they want. Surprisingly, it’s Londo Mollari – the character with the peacock-like hair who spends most of the season drinking and playing the comic relief – who gives the correct answer. We then get our first glimpse of a mysterious ship that appears and carves up the Raiders, up to that point a major antagonist, with comparative ease.
Straczynski referred to such arc stories as “wham episodes,” as they were the moment when he would hit the story with a crowbar and send it spinning in a totally different direction. These wham episodes became more and more pronounced in the second season, and still moreso in the third. Babylon 5 won its first Hugo Award with The Coming of Shadows, a major second season episode that managed to fully turn the tables on the show’s debut, sending two major empires to war in the process. In so doing, Babylon 5 went from classic anthology show to sci-fi war epic to eventually something like The Lord of the Rings (Straczynski at one point even refers to Sheridan, who is introduced in Season 2, as the show’s Aragorn).
It made for thrilling television in the early ’90s – years before The Sopranos and Lost made serialized storytelling mainstream. Where Star Trek always comfortably returned to the status quo, it felt like anything could happen in Babylon 5. And Deep Space Nine’s writers noticed.
Television’s shifting center of gravity
While Babylon 5’s arc picked up steam, Deep Space Nine felt largely inert. Its featured quality episodes like Duet, which was lauded as a quality meditation on war criminals, but it otherwise seemed to struggle with the need for the action to come to the station rather than the other way around.
“I remember agreeing with some critics that they weren’t taking advantage of the setting,” Hoffman remembers. “It was a little bit dull at first”
Heading into its third season, Deep Space introduced the Dominion – an empire that inhabited the worlds on the other side of the wormhole. The Dominion became a recurring villain as Deep Space Nine was retooled to put an increased emphasis on serialized storytelling, and the crew took to tooling around in the Defiant – a nifty little warship equipped with a cloaking device
Babylon 5 fans were quick to note that their show had also just added a cool warship in the White Star, and that Deep Space Nine’s serialized war drama seemed rather convenient in light of the arc that Straczynski had been building for several years at that point.
“Absolutely the two shows were aware of each other and watching each…I’m sure it was a two way street. How many other sci-fi shows were there?” Hoffman says. “I have no doubt that on Thursdays at 9pm, when Babylon 5 would air on the local affiliate, DS9 writers were watching. How could they not? But the writers at DS9 were very crafty and creative…It’s not impossible to think that two separate groups had similar ideas.”
He compares Deep Space Nine to Newton, who was accused of plagiarizing his theory of gravity. Television’s own shifting center of gravity made it natural for Star Trek to experiment with more ambitious storytelling. Roddenberry’s death in 1991 opened the way for Ira Steven Behr, who had a relatively free hand as Deep Space Nine’s executive producer, to experiment and try new ideas. In that light, Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine settling on superficially similar storylines wasn’t all that strange.
The truth was that Moore, who joined the show’s writing staff as a supervising producer in the third season, was tired of the Star Trek formula. He had been experimenting with serial drama as far back as The Next Generation, and like Straczynski, he had a penchant for hanging out online and interacting with the fans. Given an opportunity to reinvent Battlestar Galactica in the mid-2000s, Moore created a heavily serialized political drama that was itself the diametric opposite of Roddenberry’s Star Trek. In that sense, he and Straczynski were kindred spirits.
Whatever rivalry existed between the two series came to a head in 1996, when guest star Robert Foxworth abruptly jumped ship for a similar role in Deep Space Nine. Both shows were in the midst of a series of episodes that put their heroes in direct conflict with Earth, with Foxworth playing an admiral in one show and a general in the other.
“We had booked Foxworth long in advance. Later, out of the blue, a rep for the actor said that by accident he'd been double-booked on B5 and DS9 for the same period...and even though we had prior claim, because the other was a two-parter, more money, they went for that,” Straczynski groused online, before adding darkly. “One can only wonder when the other offer *really* came in…” [Note: IGN reached out to Straczynski for this piece but did not receive a response.]
Ironically, the previous episode had featured an appearance by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, revered as the “First Lady of Star Trek” by fans. The moment had moved Straczynski to write what he perceived as a conciliatory letter to Star Trek fans. In it, he alternated between calling Star Trek mainstays like Jeri Taylor “friends” and taking swipes at Paramount, which he claimed had “done everything possible to hinder the progress of Babylon 5.”
And while we're at it, another moment of history: me and Majel Barrett Roddenberry on-set during her appearance in the #babylon5 episode "Point of No Return," reflecting her desire to good-will a bridge between B5 and Trek fans. pic.twitter.com/p1pJYGL306
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) September 5, 2018
It’s a blunt and self-righteous letter which paints Babylon 5 fans and Star Trek fans as being in perpetual conflict despite their similarities. At one point he even excuses the bad behavior of certain Babylon 5 fans by claiming that they were just frustrated over the treatment over the show. It’s as clear a window as you’ll find into how Straczynski viewed Babylon 5 and its relationship with Star Trek.
It’s also worth noting, though, that Babylon 5 was also at its absolute best in this period. Stracyznski and company had overcome cancellation concerns, the loss of multiple cast members, and a whole host of other issues, and the seeds he had so painstakingly sewn in the show’s first season were flowering. He was both justly proud and more than a little arrogant.
“Over a late dinner with Majel, I observed that after the original Star Trek, which for the first time presented truly *human* characters, with all their flaws and frailties and bravery and nobility, in a science fiction series, the ball was dropped, and no one picked it up again for years,” Straczynski wrote. “She agreed with this...For all these and other reasons, I hope you'll give Babylon 5 a try.”
It was a new age
Babylon 5 would ultimately finish its five-year mission, but it did not have the staying power its fans would have hoped. Its primitive CGI, simple sets, and sometimes painful acting in some ways made it an artifact of its era (when I showed it to some friends their very first comment was, “This show is ’90s as hell”). Its special effects looked terrible on high-definition televisions and for a long time it was very difficult to find on popular streaming services.
Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, flourished. Fans returned to the show to find a compelling war story that played an enormous part in growing the Star Trek setting. When Moore moved over to Battlestar Galactica, he brought that legacy with him.
“It’s the very unique storytelling and the broad spectrum of characters,” Hoffman says. “TNG at its greatest never had a character like Garak or Damar. Even Worf was fully-formed when he stepped on to DS9, but he only became more interesting. It had a knack for creating really interesting characters…It’s a great workplace show. You feel like you’re hanging out with them.”
Still, Babylon 5 remains a compelling chapter in television history in its own right. Its run coincided with similar successes like The X-Files, and it injected TV with a much-needed dose of hard sci-fi that Star Trek simply couldn’t match. Its cheesiest moments were matched by some truly shocking highs, with perpetual frienemies Londo and G’kar being two of the most memorable characters in sci-fi television history.
“TV’s a trend-chasing industry: Once a great, lauded, popular blend of long- and short-form storytelling like The Sopranos rolled around, serialization gained a newfound sheen. DS9 and B5’s multi-episode arcs walked so the ducks in Tony’s pool could fly – but not every show (and certainly not every contemporary multimedia franchise) is equipped to reach those heights,”Adams observes.
Indeed, even when compared to more modern shows, Babylon 5 was notable for how well it executed its overall plan. The television landscape is littered with abandoned and bungled arcs, but Babylon 5 ultimately kept most of its promises amid extraordinarily difficult circumstances that included being canceled and then un-canceled in the eleventh hour. Where so many other shows cram their conclusions into very rushed finales – including, it must be said, DS9, Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse – Babylon 5 managed a remarkably graceful denouement.
“The thing that makes Babylon 5 stand out is a discussion that's changed over time in ways that I think represent how SF television and TV overall has changed,” Kaiser says. “At the time, the big difference was serialization with a goal, which was novel at the time and B5's ‘five-year plan’ was something that nobody else had really tried, while Star Trek was conventional proceduralism incarnate.
“But more recently what stands out to me is the similarities instead of the differences. Star Trek has created a model for SF TV where the default mode is, roughly, ‘What would western liberalism do if it encountered something weird?’ Most Star Trek episodes are about that. So are most Babylon 5 episodes, as well as the overarching plot of the series. (So are most Battlestar episodes, for what that's worth). The key difference is that the B5 characters are allowed to be wrong, to make long-term mistakes, and the story progresses from there. ‘Characters can be wrong’ is a subversion of the form, but it's still part of the form.”
Recently, Babylon 5 has enjoyed a mini-renaissance with the release of an animated movie, the announcement of a complete physical release on blu-ray, and a possible reboot. Straczynski, conspiracy-minded as always, claims the reason the show was held back for more than 20 years was that a Warner Bros. executive hated Babylon 5 and nothing could happen until they left. But in the end, faith managed.
One way or another, Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine remain inextricably connected. If Straczynski is to be believed, one literally would not exist without the other. We should be so lucky. If Paramount did indeed use Stracyznski’s ideas to create Deep Space Nine, it would seem that it unwittingly created two of the greatest sci-fi shows ever, and in so doing helped inaugurate a new era for television.
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
