Director: Richard Compton
Cast: Michael O’Hare, Tamlyn Tomita, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Although I think I only did so long after the final season of the series aired.
Did I Like It: There’s a couple of things one must reckon with on a re-watch of the 1990s television sci-fi epic, Babylon 5. It’s given a lot of credit for telling a fully serialized genre story on television at a time when that was resolutely not done. Granted, you would have to ignore contemporary shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* to think of it as uniquely ahead of its time. One can’t help but admire the ability of the show to tell its full story, given the fact that the cast—especially with the main cast—was in constant flux and the loose network that aired/syndicated it folded during the fourth season.
But really, the special effects do not age well. At all. They’re almost unwatchable now, especially in the early going, where most explosions have all of the physics and nuance of a hastily produced Atari 2600 cartridge.
And that problem hangs pretty heavy over even this, the special edition of the pilot for the series. Nothing looks right, including ships, sets, and makeup for various aliens. There are only the faintest glimmer of the larger story which brought be back week after week later on in the series. Every series is going to have to shake off a little bit of jitters during a first episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”, I’m looking in your direction), so this ninety minute spell spent on the Last Best Hope For Peace isn’t the kind of experience that will pull you into the five-year saga. The season that follows has its moments, but I had to be firmly in the second season in my current rewatch of the show before I felt engrossed in the proceedings.
*Controversy lasts to this day as to whether Paramount pilfered writer J. Michael Straczynski’s pitch for the series to create their own tale of a space station in the middle of a massive intra-galactic war. Some say it’s just an instance of parallel development, although I don’t have a hard time at all imagining the executives at Paramount urging the Trek powers-that-be to follow that basic logline in order to bring to series a product that would undercut the possibility of another Space Opera franchise.