BABYLON 5 IS ST00P1D

The nerds I know fall into three categories: Star Trek nerds, Star Wars nerds, and Babylon 5 nerds. By which I mean, that ONE Babylon 5 nerd. I watch Star Trek, and despite all its massive problems, it’s entertaining enough. I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies and aside from the terrible dialogue, they’re okay. I had never seen Babylon 5 save a few odd clips I’d chanced upon in the mid 90s. I’d always changed the channel after about 30 seconds, because I didn’t know what I was watching but it looked like a shitty Star Trek rip-off. I’d felt the same way initially about Red Dwarf, but that was parody and it was funny, at least before it forgot what parody means. Babylon 5 wasn’t parody and was only funny because it was broken. Shitty science fiction parody I’ll take; shitty science fiction rip-off can suck it.

I made the mistake of saying this to the Babylon 5 nerd I know. He got all indignant and demanded I hold my heathen tongue, at least until I’d seen enough of his favorite show to know emphatically why I thought it sucked. Because nerd fights are funny and the first two seasons of Babylon 5 are free on Hulu, I decided to indulge him.

So I’ve watched about four complete episodes of Babylon 5. And I can now say emphatically that Babylon 5 can not only suck it, it can suck it till it explodes in its idiot Star Trek-humping face.

Here’s why.

Babylon 5 is about this giant space station in the future. Like all giant space stations in the future, it looks like someone glued a bunch of broken battleship models together in such a way as to fulfill no practical purpose whatsoever, except maybe as a really kinky dildo for a planet-sized she-demon (a better set up for a science fiction show by far). The thing that sets Babylon 5 apart from all the other future space stations is that the whole thing exists entirely in a computer, as in it’s all CGI, as in it’s all shitty mid-90s CGI. PC space sims circa 1998 have better graphics, and plots, than this show. Now it’s not the show’s producer’s fault that rendering technology wasn’t up to the necessary standards. It’s just the show’s producer’s fault that he thought this didn’t matter, that for some reason he didn’t have to use professionally constructed models like Star Trek was doing at the very same time to make their show not look like…well, shitty Babylon 5.

  

But enough about the shitty special effects. If something is well-written, I’ll excuse the shitty special effects (see The Last Starfighter). But Babylon 5 is not well-written. Which is to say, Babylon 5 certainly had a writer, because even the dumbest actors on earth, improvising for peanuts, would not be this consistently retarded.

Babylon 5 is of course home to a varied cast of alien inhabitants, i.e., a bunch of nobody actors in castoff FMV game space jumpers, lumpy face prosthetics and frightening wigs. When they aren’t busy cleaning the thousands of unnecessary external vents and flashy lights on their ugly CGI space station, they’re having insipid personal problems. It’s like a soap opera, but not in the engaging way Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – the show Babylon 5 is trying hardest to rip off – is like a soap opera. No, Babylon 5 is more like a Mexican soap opera, where the cheap theater sets have been replaced with bad computer graphics, and the language you don’t understand isn’t Spanish, it’s something some guy made up. And instead of eroticism and crying, every story is packed with incessant whining and shots of people filling out space forms on space computers. Or whining about how they don’t want to fill out those forms, or don’t know how. Incessantly.

What is everyone whining and filing space paperwork about? Apparently the race of Lizard People and the race of Napoleon Vampires are going to war, because the Napoleon Vampires used to kick the crap out of the Lizard People, and now the Lizard People want revenge. And for some reason all the other things in the galaxy care about this, so humans and the Bald Elves have to get them to stop. Except that the Bald Elves used to kick the crap out of humans, so humans still hate them and it’s really hard for us to work with them. But we’re randomly allies with them now so we have to pretend we don’t still hate them. Shake thoroughly with ice, and it’s all tense and dramatic and everyone’s conflicted and bitching about all of it all the time.

In the first place, I don’t know why the giant space dildo is called Babylon 5. I guess it’s because the word Babylon is really old and has a ‘y’ in it, so it sounds all epicky to retards, and space names always have to have numbers in them so somebody picked ‘5’. The pilot episode pulls some crap about this Babylon being the fifth Babylon because the first three blew up and the last one just disappeared. Riiiight. Because if you have a gargantuan space resort filled with millions of people and it all goes to shit, you’re just going to pull another trillion dollars out of your ass and set up another one. Four. More. Times.

It reminds me of that part in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Michael Palin is the King of Swamp Castle. Remember that? He explains how his castle is actually his fourth castle, because the first three burned down and/or sank into the swamp. That’s what the people who made Babylon 5 want us to believe happened in their show. Except that their swamp castle is in space, and every time it goes down, millions of sentient creatures and trillions of space dollars go up in iron-smelting flames. Not to mention the damage caused by an eight million ton fused steel brick landing on a nearby moon colony. Four. Fucking. Times.

You heard it right, kids. This is the distant future and humans are supposed to be super-advanced and making out with all these other super-advanced alien races. And with all of their super-advanced powers combined, they are worse at keeping their shit together than a bit character in a Monty Python routine.

Fuck damn, this show is stupid.

In Star Trek they would call the most important people on the show the Bridge Crew. Babylon 5 is on a space station so the place they all hang out is probably not called the bridge. It’s probably called the “Command Unit,” or some other phrase that sounds like something a nerd would call his genitals. So the leads on Babylon 5 are probably called the “Command Unit Crew.” But Babylon 5 couldn’t bribe its way into Star Trek’s paid toilet, so I’ll call the main cast of Babylon 5 the Babylon 5 Bridge Crew.

The Babylon 5 Bridge Crew has names, but I can’t remember all of them because I don’t care about this show, and the ones I do remember are stupid. It has six members, because both the Bridge Crews of the original Star Trek and Star Trek: the Next Generation had six members, and Babylon 5 had the same great idea. After Star Trek had it. Twice. Over twenty years.

These are, in probable order of importance:

Captain Angston Corporatecut, Whiner of the Stars. I don’t know how a flaccid wiener like this could become commander of a Volkswagon, let alone a gigantic space station. Except that this is Babylon 5, and on this show things like this happen. Over and over again. Maybe he fathered some impotent elder statesman’s son. Or knows who did.
Oh, there I go again, coming up with fake stories for Babylon 5 that are infinitely more interesting than anything they ever did on this stupid show! Do you know what it means when someone with my level of Hollywood script writing experience (zero times one-hundred) can’t help but accidentally come up with better ideas than a show that was on television for like five years? It means goddamn it, is what it means.

Vice-Captain Battleaxe Icecooch. When she’s not being a robot powered by liquid bitch, she’s threatening to assault people for…she’s threatening to assault people. When she does this, she and the person she’s threatening raise their eyebrows and smile like it’s a fucking knock-knock joke or something. “Knock-knock, who’s there, I’m a violent psychotic bitch.” Yeah, makes me laugh. In the first episode of Season One she says she’s screwed up because her mother was a psychic and the government forced her to take drugs to stop her eerie brain powers and this of course led to her suicide. But since that sounds like a lie I tell people when they ask me why I’m screwed up, I don’t buy it. Only thing I can figure is that she must be a rape victim who despises men only a little bit more than she despises herself, yet won’t get therapy because she thinks it’ll make her look weak. And everyone knows it and it’s become something of a station-wide joke. If I’m right, that means the producers of Babylon 5 think the untreated emotional trauma of a violent sexual assault is a kick-ass running gag with limitless comedic potential.

I guess that serves the 90s right for demanding more female leads in science fiction. Well, that, and Rob Liefeld.

Chief of Security Squarehead Goofoff. Every space show needs a chief of security, because Star Trek: the Next Generation had two. The first was Tasha Yar, who as a kid got raped by a biracial crack-addled Vietnam War vet alien or something, so that when she grew up she decided to be Batman on a spaceship, only she sucked at it and got killed. The second was Commander Worf, a Klingon raised by humans who acted all tough and snarly to prove to himself and other Klingons that he was in fact all tough and snarly. These were well-rounded characters who behaved in ways that made sense (compared to Image Comics characters, anyway). Of course Babylon 5 has “cutting edge special effects,” so it doesn’t need any pansy-ass character development. CoS Squarehead Goofoff is either bumbling around like a significantly less funny Chief Wiggum, or standing ramrod stiff at all the high-level administrative meetings assuring everyone that he will keep them safe NO MATTER THE COST, GOD DAMN IT. Sometimes he does both in different scenes of the same episode. Perhaps there really are people working in security who are Secret Service agents when they’re not too busy chasing down pie thieves with the other Keystone Kops. But would someone like this ever become Chief of Security of a trillion dollar space port? Especially when he’s the ONLY security officer we ever see? Come on, Babylon 5. Even Kirk had a dozen Red Shirts with phasers on the Swingin’est Ship of the Stars, and the biggest threat he ever faced was his own belligerent incompetence. You really want Squarehead solely responsible for the health and well-being of high level alien diplomats? What if it’s his comic relief hour? He might trip over his own bootlaces and knock Ambassador Pointless Apostrophe into a giant cake. And nothing gives a would-be assassin a bigger hard-on than hearing his target presently has eyes full of whipped vanilla bean. Explains why the plot of every episode of Babylon 5 is about some alien diplomat getting killed on the station. You think they’d stop coming after awhile, or at least insist CoS Goofoff be reassigned. But no. Because that would make sense.

It makes you wonder why the character of CoS Goofoff is on the show to begin with (you know, other than the Star Trek thing). He’s not developed enough for any law enforcement commentary, and he’s not fat or black enough for token comic relief. Which raises another question: why does a space soap opera need token comic relief? Maybe test audiences didn’t find Battleaxe the Twisted Rape Victim as funny as the producers did.
Admittedly, she usually lashes out at poor Squarehead. So I guess that fixes everything. If you don’t know what the word ‘fixes’ means.
Maybe he’s the one who raped her. That would be funny.

Oh, there I go again…!

Blondie the Psychic Nazi Skank. She’s blonde and wears a knee-length skirt and heels – on the fucking space station – so I assume she’s supposed to be the requisite hot one. Relatively speaking, she is. I admit to falling victim to her calculated sashay and that filthy way she narrows her eyes and smirks at everyone wishing her a friendly hello. But the only other women on this show are Battleaxe and that one Bald Elf chick, so I may have been grasping for the longest of the very short straws. After all, her clothes and hair proudly proclaim “Women’s Death Camp Guard,” and the ridges on her throat and her sallow cheeks clearly indicate several years lived quite actively on the wrong side of thirty-five. Not that I’m personally against middle-aged Nazi women skanking it up whenever they’re so inclined. If I’d spent my prime child-bearing years lying to Undesirables about showers, I’d want to spend my free time pumping off the pole too. But the fact that I even have to think about something so fantastically vile means that someone, somewhere, royally fucked up. As if that was still a question on a show where a fat bald guy is suddenly a space alien because you gave him Dracula fangs and a giant peacock tail wig. Jesus Christ.
Oh, and by the way, Blondie has inexplicable psychic powers. Or so the characters keep repeating. I guess the show will get around to actually making this part of the plot when it’s good and fucking ready.

Ambassador Napoleon Vampire. I don’t remember his name or the name of his “race,” but you can be sure both of them have a few unnecessary consonants separated by even more unnecessary apostrophes. The fat bald guy who plays him thinks he’s in the most spectacular stage play ever, so when he isn’t dragging down every scene with overly pronounced, set-chewing emogasms, he’s yanking people around by the lapels and screaming like a pirate with a lisp. If you’ve ever seen a crappy high school production of Shakespeare, you’ve seen your share of frantic lapel yanking. Comparatively, if you’ve ever experienced real life, you’ve probably noticed that no one ever grabs anyone by the lapels for emotional effect, and probably never has without getting their ass swiftly plastered.

But I blame the genre for this nonsense more than I blame the unfortunate wearing the Dracula fangs and a wig that looks like pubic hair fanning out around the stubbiest penis ever. Star Trek itself started this idiot crap back in the 60s. Why do aliens have to be people from crappy high school Shakespeare? They don’t use normal contractions, they wear knee-high boots and jerkins, and they wave their hands around and grab lapels as they’re giving obvious rehearsed speeches. Which would make a little sense if they were proper ambassadors in session. But they do this shit down in the station lounge. “Who ordered the Jack-and-Coke?” “I did, fair maiden, and beseech thee kindly to hand it o’er, for I am much famished for yon chill succulent succulence.” “Okay. Here you go.” “[Grabs her lapels] It’s WARM, curse you! Take it back, forthwith! I have never been so insulted in my two Earth-centuries life! S’woons!”

Watch the writers of Babylon 5 sue me for quoting more than 3/4ths of a scene. And then the writers of Star Trek will sue them for their piece of the action.

If you get that last joke, you’re a fucking astronaut. Now quit smirking, nerd.

Ambassador Shellless Turtleman. Not only does Ambassador S. Turtleman fulfill every expected Shakespeare alien stereotype, he’s also driving the “Persistent Usual Alien Suspect” train. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Thirty seconds into every show you know he and his evil race of evil Lizard People are 253% responsible for whatever this week’s evil crisis is. And you also know that it’s going to take everyone else on the show fifty TV-punching minutes to finally quit it with the moral relativistic hand-wringing and pin every murder on the sneering lizard man and his sneering lizard man superiors. And then promptly forget the whole thing, so that when the bastards kill someone else at the start of the next show, it’ll take another fifty minutes to “figure out” who did it. While we the viewers are left to figure out whether this whole idiotic process is supposed to tell us something about who we really are as people, or if it’s just aggressively bad writing.

I love it when, after awhile, the writers finally realize how stupid this is and try to have the characters explain it away. “I know the Lizard People seem persistently evil to us,” the commander will say, “and I know they’re responsible for every single fucking problem we’ve ever had up here, and probably always will be. But,” the douchebag frowns, “diplomacy is a delicate process with blah blah blah U.N., ancient Earth Wars, talky talky greater understanding, and have sex with them, in the name of interstellar peace.” And everyone just nods like they know there isn’t time to do anything about it before the short shuttle arrives to take them all back to the satellite for assisted living.

“In the name of interstellar peace,” Commander Missing Chromosome? Know what promotes interstellar peace? Not letting the fucking Lizard People kill the janitor every time he happens upon their plans to conquer all the surrounding Spice mines! Doing something a bit more proactive than shaking your head when you find another ten children’s carcasses stuffed down the garbage chute, covered in Lizard People drool! If the fucking Lizard People are murderous genocidal jerk-offs, then no, we don’t have to be nice to them in the name of interstellar peace. In the name of interstellar peace, we need to eject the Lizard People’s ambassador from the station and declare war on the fucking Lizard People, and nuke their homeworld a half-dozen times until they finally see the benefit of not using other people’s mouths as toilets whenever they’re so inclined! I level the same complaint against the game Mass Effect, which proudly rips off as much of Babylon 5 as they can legally get away with: human beings would not realistically put up with this shit. We don’t put up with it from other humans, so we’re ESPECIALLY not going to put up with it from people who look like the spawn of Godzilla and Jamie Lee Curtis. I don’t care how many corvette gunners the Lizard People are rumored to have in their space fleet. We’re not going to shrug our shoulders and keep Ambassador Turtleman under “closer surveillance” in his compartment adjacent to the station commander’s. Ambassador Turtleman kills someone on our turf, and he’s just earned himself a helmetless trip through the airlock. And if his “people” think it’s worth shooting about, welcome to Genocide Alley, motherfuckers.

Think I’m joking? Ever seen a dire wolf or a cave bear or a Neanderthal in your back yard? No you haven’t. That’s because this one time the three of them put their toothy mauls together and came up with a plan to eat this caveman’s wife. You’ll notice how Commander Caveman didn’t shrug his shoulders and tsk, tsk, tsk the cave bear ambassador for not minding intercavern peace.

Fucking Christ giblets, this show is stupid.