As discussed previously, one of my father’s favourite TV shows in the 2000s was Carnivàle, a Gothic high fantasy nominally about a semi-feral circus troupe, but really about a high-stakes Manichean conflict between a sartorially elegant Dark Priest and a scruffy and reluctant Healer. I say one of, because I can’t verify this was his favourite show of this decade, even though, being cancelled after just two seasons which promised but never quite revealed the show’s deep lore and cosmic mythos, it was almost certainly his most missed show.
When it comes to the 1990s, there’s much less doubt as to his favourite TV series.
It was Babylon 5, a sci-fi show, created by J Michael Straczynski, set on a cylindrical spinning space station which functions as something like a cross between a model UN and a cosmopolitan city.
Diplomatic Sci-Fi
In the title I described the show as ‘Diplomatic Sci-Fi’, as surfacing and resolving conflict between alien factions through skilled negotiation and compromise forms much of the narrative backbone of the show.
Negotiation and compromise between whom? Well, Babylon 5 focused mainly on four factions (including humans), each of which is represented by one character playing a leader/ambassador and (mostly) one character playing their aide. This is shown in Figure 1.
So, for the most part, this is a symmetrical arrangement of senior-junior dyads operating in parallel across four (initially, broadly) equal groups.
The Dyad Engine
JMS was a prolific scriptwriter by the time Babylon 5 was ideated, commissioned, and written, and this (broadly) 4-by-2 structure for the central characters is surely no accident. Instead, it’s a mechanism for scenes and dialogue. How so? Because it creates a lot of dyads: ways of placing characters together which have distinct dynamics, similarities, differences, and scopes for both commonality and conflict. As discussed in my post on Frasier, the number of distinct dyads can be worked out using combinatorial mathematics. If we’re looking at 9 principal characters, and just considering scenes involving any two of them, then the number of two-hander scenes that emerges is \(C(9, 2) = \frac{9!}{2!(9-2)!} = \frac{9 \times 8}{2} = 36\).
With 36 basic dyads involving principal characters alone, as well as frequent additional guest stars and secondary characters, this is beyond the realm of a typical basic character study or sitcom (maybe 3-5 characters), and instead is in the deep ensemble territory of a soap opera (albeit set in space. So, a Space Opera?).
Indeed, strip away the (now endearingly retro) CGI space scenes and the reference to very high off-screen stakes (10,000 troops here, a planet there), and focus instead on some of the slightly am-dram performances and costuming, the shaky sets, the cobbled-together props, the 20+ episodes per year, and Babylon 5 probably really is, ultimately, at least at the level of scenes, a soap opera.1
Tentacle Economics
With such complexity and range of characters built into the show from the outset, and so much of it being created and written by just one person, it might be surprising if there weren’t some ways in which aspects of the show were simplified in order to keep things manageable. Not everything about a fairly niche midbudget show delivered, on average, with about a fortnightly cadence for half a decade, can or should be dialed up to 11. Not if they wanted to keep delivering product to the network on time and on budget.
A minor example of this: in one episode midway in season one the main antagonist is a mind-eating tentacle monster.2 To avoid building a full mind-eating tentacle monster, this creature is never shown in full, instead inhabiting an identical encounter suit to the Vorlon ambassador; thus allowing an already-built complex prop to be reused. And when this monster wants to feed, it’s represented by a single latex sucker on the end of a green tentacle, puppeteered (I’d guess) by some strings. During this same episode Londo, the Centauri ambassador, expresses exceptional aversion to this type of monster, sequestering himself to his quarters until it’s confirmed dead.
Then later in the season, Londo, this same tentacle-monster-fearing Centauri ambassador, is shown cheating at poker, using an alien appendage that he slyly slips from his own suit: which appears to be the same latex sucker used to represent the monster earlier in the season during its feeding cycle. So, not only is the Vorlon encounter suit dual-purposed in order to avoid creating a complete monster body, even the single appendage that had to be constructed for the earlier episode gets reused, saving yet more money, and creating another layer in the lore of Babylon 5. (Could the Centauri fear the tentacle monster in part because it looks like their own ‘appendages’?)
A Rhyme in the Designs
This prop reuse was something I noticed back in the 1990s; at the time I was more willing to assume the reasons were not primarily budgetary. But something that passed me by until I started rewatching a couple of weeks ago was a kind of rhyme in the designs of the principal alien races. This rhyme was not something that saves on props and masks per se, but instead may draw from JMS’s own biases as to what an intelligible and intelligent humanoid alien species may look like.
Let’s start by looking at the Minbari, presented as the most culturally and technologically advanced of the four peer species.
So, a very high forehead, no hair on top, and a crest of something - antler-like - around the back and sides.
Now let’s look at the Centauri:
So, a very high forehead, no hair on top, and a crest of hair erupting proudly upwards from the back and sides, like a majestically metastasised comb-over.
And then, finally, there’s the Narn:
Well, they’re just bald…
As with the prop-reuse case earlier, there are clear practical reasons for this kind of design: baldness plus protrusions around the back and side provides a place for the actors’ actual hair to be hidden. But three balding or bald principal alien species felt like more than a mere coincidence, especially when all three ‘balding’ species had their hair/antler located around the back and sides, i.e. the places where hair tends to remain in those experiencing male pattern baldness.
So, I had a hunch, and decided to look up images of JMS:
Exhibit A. An advanced lifeform with a very high forehead and tufts of hair fighting for survival around the back and sides.
QED: JMS created not one, but three alien species roughly in his own image!
Footnotes
I’ve written before about the concealed genre of ‘the sweary soap opera’. Babylon 5 is strictly PG-rated in terms of language, but the power fantasies inherent in the plot operate, I’d suggest, similarly to that of ‘bad language’ in SSOs: to conceal the genre and give licence to, primarily, male viewers to enjoy watching a soap opera.↩︎
Exactly the kind of subplot you might find in later seasons of Brookside.↩︎