Babylon 5

I'm seriously impressed by J. Michael Straczynski's work on Babylon 5. The series broke new ground in story-telling--JMS was audacious enough to plot a five year story arc, full of intricate twists and turns, foreshadowings in season one that didn't come to fruition until the last season, and impressive character evolution. JMS's dialog has been criticizes for being a bit stilted and unnatural, but I think that's because he writes best when his characters are declaiming grandly about broad themes.

A great example of Straczynski's oratorical style comes from Episode 38, "And Now a Word from Our Sponsor...", a sort of interstellar "48 Hours" documentary on the fictional "Interstellar Network". At the end, ISN asked various participants to respond to the question, “is it worth it?” I quoted Ambassador Delenn's reponse in my biography, but JMS gave Captain John Sheridan some remarkable words as well:

Humans share one unique quality: They build communities....

...everywhere humans go, they create communities out of diverse and sometimes hostile populations. It is a great gift, and a terrible responsibility. One that cannot be abandoned.

--Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari

Yes... The job of Babylon 5 is not to enforce the peace, it is to create the peace. 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. In the last few years we’ve stumbled...and when you stumble a lot, you start looking at your feet. Now, 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 are 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.

--Captain John Sheridan
Babylon 5, Episode 38, “And now a word from our sponsor...”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski

I like those words, in this context. Every day on the HabitableZone we discuss similar themes: Humanity's future in space, community-building, war and peace, the future...in recent months we've had a tendency to "look at our feet", as JMS wrote, riveted on our earthly problems and forgetting, sometimes, the vision of the future that brought us here in the first place. It's good from time to time to lift our eyes back to the horizon, to be reminded that "this too shall pass".