We've wandered into a Babylon 5 rewatch at home, which we do every few years. It's the show we most consistently go back to, beating even the delightfully nutty Farscape. We've seen it so many times that this time I found myself watching it differently, paying more attention to the building blocks, foreshadowing, and how it's put together. The show was planned with a five year arc that had to adapt to cast changes, such as the loss of Michael O'Hare (Commander Sinclair) after season 1 and Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson) in season 2, and yet elements ot that arc are seeded in right from the beginning. The sheer amount of craft in writing the thing is astounding, and that got me thinking I should probably write these thoughts down somewhere. Needless to say there will be spoilers, but the show's 25 years old so I make no apologies.
Because this rewatch was a spontaneous thing due to having to resort to *gasp* DVDs for an evening, and needing something that fitted into less than an hour, I haven't actually rewatched the pilot yet. I'll go back to it, but for now here's the start of season one.
S1 E1 - Midnight on the Firing Line
This episode has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Airing for the first time nearly a full year after the pilot it has to re-establish setting, the various alien cultures, reintroduce established characters, and introduce new ones. It does that mostly by treating everything as business as usual. The station isn't new, it's been open a year or so at this point, so everyone's had time to settle in and get used to each other.
Everyone except Lieutenant Commander Ivanova, who became first officer at an unspecified point in the year after the pilot. The change of personnel isn't mentioned, but nodded to in a conversation between Ivanova and Security Chief Garibaldi that reveals she hasn't been around quite long enough to have learned the station commander turns off his link for ten minutes every day and heads off for some peace and quiet. It's a nice note of characterisation that later Garibaldi is able to tell someone looking for Ivanova where she can be found after her shift finishes. This is a man who notices how people behave.
Also new on the station is the resident commercial telepath Talia Winters. She's supposed to present herself to the first officer on arrival, but Ivanova's been avoiding her for weeks. When Talia finally catches up, Ivanova is curt and rude. At first glance this looks like your standard genre everyone-hates-telepaths bigotry, except that no one else reacts to her that way. At the end of the episode Ivanova reveals she doesn't have a problem with Talia but with what she represents - the Psi Corps that destroyed Ivanova's mother on discovering she was an unregistered telepath. It's an understandable reason to be hostile and I get the feeling this was laid out upfront, rather than dragging it out for the sake of tension, to cement early that Ivanova's no bigot.
The episode also puts the politics front and centre (in case you couldn't guess from the opening voiceover). The inciting incident is the Narn invasion of the Centauri colony Ragesh 3, and subsequent forcing of the colonists to publicly declare allegiance to the Narn government. The fact that it's Ambassador Mollari's own nephew who makes the statement is used to discredit his appeal for the other races to intervene. The Narn are clearly being set up as the villains here, but as Commander Sinclair tries to find a peaceful solution it's revealed the two races have a long and bloody history, with the Narn homeworld being subjugated by the Centauri Republic until relatively recently. It also introduces the Babylon 5 Advisory Council and the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, where all the inter-species politics are hashed out in a neutral space.
In the end the situation is diffused with sneaky machinations, some more successful than others. But although the immediate problem is solved it's clear that there's a lot of history between the species, and it's going to make itself known.