BYBS: Babylon 5

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Another BYBS about a good thing in my life that's fairly mundane: the TV show Babylon 5! This was a quirky bit of programming that ran from around 1993 to 1998 about a space station called Babylon 5. There were a lot of cool things about the show, but one of the aspects I loved was how they would address social issues couched in a different form.

This particular posting is about an episode called "Infection" that concerns some berserk gizmo that a bunch of Martians programmed to defend their world from invaders. The interesting bit is that the standard the guardians used to figure out who was an alien was so extreme that members of their own race were judged to be impure.

In true sci-fi form, the machines stop the invaders and then go on and wipe out the native population as well: after all, they're not "pure" enough.

There's a speech (more of a bit of dialog as one character is being chased around the station by one of the berserk gizmos):

They killed anything that was different. Alien. But we're all aliens to one another.

Flawed, impure, different!

Too tall, too short, too dark, too light! Imperfect!

B5 was not the first show to do this sort of thing; plenty of shows were made and continue to be made with this sort of plot. Furthermore, they had issues with incredibly fake looking props, some hokey acting, etc. For whatever reason, however, B5 managed to carry it off a lot better than the other shows of its time.

So if you're looking for something to watch for a few hours and don't want to feel like you've completely wasted your time, give B5 a try. As they say: "we've always been here." :-)

Technorati: BYBS, B5, Infection, Babylon 5.