Premise:
It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last, best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations.
Comments from The Patriot Resource: Babylon 5 appeared just as Star Trek: The Next Generation was growing stale. Unlike Star Trek and its spinoffs, the storyline progressed through episodes and seasons like chapters in a novel, so traumas to characters did not just disappear by the next episode, but were permanent. Each episode built on a greater story arc. The only question was whether the show would survive to run five seasons and complete the story arc, but it was able to do so and finish the story arc.
Rewatching the series lets one look out for the hints of foreshadowing that were intentional. Though the first season was bumpy, the threads laid out allowed the story to crank up in the second season and never slow down. In some mythic way, the show actually has whispers of the The Lord of the Rings in its storytelling. As a testiment to how successful the show turned out, it spawned four TV movies, a spinoff series (Crusade), a second spinoff pilot (Legend of the Rangers), a theatrical film (The Memory of Shadows) that made it to development and a straight to DVD release called Lost Tales: Voices in the Dark.
