Babylon 5

I realize this is a bit late but I just finally got a copy of The Road Home. I'm curious to know your thoughts. I think it's enjoyable and it's clearly setup to be the springboard for a new series. Despite that I think it works well as a standalone story. My main complain is a lot of the comic relief is forced and ill fitting, but JMS has always struggled with humour.

I liked it, a lot of it was the "reintroduce everybody" thing that happens when a franchise comes back after a while. Plot itself was a little light, but yeah, it felt like a jumping-off point for more stuff.

On my third attempt to watch this series, so far my main question is why the Narn are treated like villains. It sounds like they got screwed over by the Centauri and are just trying to get back what they lost.

How far are you?

The answer really is that speech that Sinclair says at some point. "You've overcompensated. Your liked bullied children who have grown big enough to do it to someone else".

Basically they're not just trying to get back what they lost but even more and be the big swinging dicks on the block in charge of everyone and they're not.

Are the Narn treated like villains? Or are they treated like everyone else, taking their turn on the aggressor/aggressed against wheel?

Early on, they are treated like villains, because they're connected to most of the dirty dealings on the show. The last third of season 1 and most of season 2 revolves around recontextualizing them and the Centauri and messing with your expectations.

Also, Londo just seems like a jolly drunk for a lot of the first season and G'kar has a really obvious agenda going on, but Londo rapidly gets in over his head and G'kar turns out to have a really good reason for behaving the way he is.

The Narn are absolutely set up as the villains early on, which is what makes the twist so great. Note that the arc villains make their offer to G'Kar first as well.

I mean, all the real villains make their offer to everyone, don't they?

On my third attempt to watch this series, so far my main question is why the Narn are treated like villains. It sounds like they got screwed over by the Centauri and are just trying to get back what they lost.

Yeah, you’re right. It becomes really, really clear by the second season, but it takes the human characters longer to catch up. The Narn were brutally colonized by the Centauri and their world was devasted and strip-mined; they are, understandably, mad. The Centauri (some of them) feel humiliated by losing their empire and want it back. There is no moral equivalence between those things.

Yeah, “Signs and Portents” is the big signal to viewers to re-evaluate what they think about G’Kar and Londo.

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 15th 2024 at 5:40:42 AM

So far all the Narn have done is take back one of their farming worlds, but psychic girl is like "Ooh the Narn mind is so evil". Meanwhile Centauri ambassador bought a religious symbol out of spite, and Mimbari ambassador almost got the station blown up over an ideological difference.

Or as the Minbari call it, a normal Sunday.

You mean the time they conquered a world, held its leadership at gunpoint and forced them to lie and claim they were invited in to solve a civil conflict? Let's not whitewash that. There's a reason our protagonists and the Narn Regime were in conflict in the early part of the series and it wasn't (or wasn't just) their lack of knowledge of the history.

Edited by ECD on Feb 16th 2024 at 9:42:59 AM

Lets not forget that the Minbari were totally willing to genocide the entire human race over an unfortunate diplomatic blunder. Every species in this series has their flaws. To some extent, the better they appear, the worse they tend to be.

Conquering Ragesh III also came with a reveal that the Narn were arming the raiders who were attacking all the shipping in the area and almost destroyed a refugee ship.

Yeah, I’d say the show treats the Minbari as better than they really are and the Narn as worse than they really are.

What really gets me is what we learn about the Earth-Minbari War in the “In the Beginning” prequel movie, that the Minbari were still trying to destroy Earth as humans were broadcasting their unconditional surrender on repeat. Getting into a war because a diplomatic misunderstanding led to the death of your beloved spiritual leader is understandable; trying to genocide a species who want to surrender is horrifically evil. It makes the hatred of some humans for Minbari during the show seem less like senseless bigotry and more like a pretty normal reaction.

It is a thing over the course of the show though that the Minbari are framed as being stubborn to a nearly pathological level on a regular basis. Delenn is a bit less so, but a lot of the Minbari civil war comes from one of the castes just being completely unwilling to admit that maybe they're wrong about something.

The other element is that, due to the caste system, you run into this weird situation where most of the "nice" Minbari we meet are in the priest caste and a few are in the worker cast, but the shitty ones are all in the warrior caste.

I mean the Religious Caste was all into the genocide (Delenn was the deciding vote).

It's really the Religious and Warrior Castes who are fuck up (To no one's surprise). Workers just want to do their thing but the other two keep fucking things up.

To be fair to B5, I appreciate how the Minbari are kinda the only alien race with a really "alien" way of thinking (Outside the Old races). Their Blue-and-Orange Morality sets them apart from the Narn and Centauri who are otherwise very "human" in their way of thinking.

Like, remember how they have a grudge against Sheridan for check notes having won a fight against check notes a ship that was coming to finish off the wounded.

We do meet a few shitty religious caste folks as the show goes on, around the same time one of the more prominent warriors turns out to be not shitty at all. Not everyone here is as they seem, and all of that.

Given how the Minbari acted towards the humans in the Earth-Minbari War, a lot of the human attitude towards them is understandable. The humans using that as a springboard to become a xenophobic fascist dictatorship is still arguably a Bad Thing™ even if we understand some of the reasons they ended up going down that path. That's a whole theme in the show, with folks who get hurt wanting to hurt their attackers back, thus renewing the cycle of hate and pain.

Heck, Londo is the first one to point that out, IIRC. And he's responsible for perpetuating a lot of that cycle.

Oh, no question, the path that Earth goes downs in unequivocally a Very Bad Thing. That was one of the show’s gutsier moves, having Earth be the main antagonist in Season 4.

What gets really fun, is in the postscript movies/shows, Earth and the Drakh become enemies, which is ironic because they were both allies of the Shadows.

Works to carry the show's metaphor of dealing with abusive parents a bit further than we got in the main show.

I don't think anyone can be allies with the Drakh. You are either their enemies, or their slaves.

Clearly the Shadows were their allies.

And if you expand to stuff JMS said, so were the Dilgar

And clearly the Drakh were allies of Clark since the entire point of putting a Keeper on Jack was to undermine the martian resistance.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 19th 2024 at 5:40:02 AM

The Shadows are their overlords, not their allies.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 19th 2024 at 12:23:05 PM

Are they though? Coz that's not really how the Shadows operate. Heck the Shadows' entire thing is opposition to the Vorlon-style dogmatic dictate of what can and can't be done and imposed order.

That's not how they act with the humans, or with the Centauri.

There's no reason to assume the relationship with the Drakth is different. Nor any evidence that it is.

The Shadows' entire philosophy is to give the kids around the playgrounds guns and let them do what they want and see who comes out alive.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 19th 2024 at 6:57:13 AM

Man, Sinclair's political contacts are fucking useless.