In some ways, it’s how Babylon 5 was designed to be seen: as a single story built using hour-long dramatic episodes. That’s how long it took to re-watch the series, at the rhythm of roughly two three-hour DVDs per Saturdays. Would it hold up to the increased sophistication of SF in the past ten years? Would it still deliver the same jolts of wonder than it did the first time around? After receiving the first two seasons as birthday gifts, I realized that I would have to look at it once more. Revisiting Babylon 5 seemed almost blasphemous. I grabbed Firefly on DVD and quickly got over it. Ten years later, it still looks as if I’m right: the new Battlestar Galactical is reportedly getting worse after only two seasons, the new Doctor Who is still up in the air and Lost sounds padded. The investment in time just wasn’t worth it (especially given how I had, by then, graduated to written SF in a big big way), and my hunch was that no other show would be worth it. Once Babylon 5 ended after its five-year arc, I knew I would never be as much of a fanboy as I had been with Babylon 5. Don’t look in the Google Usenet archives, otherwise you may find embarrassing traces of me asking dumb questions on the B5 forums. (The Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 was one of the first good reasons to "go on the web".) For years, a good chunk of my mental space was occupied by the series: I could rattle off trivia with absurd ease, and kept wondering where each new piece fit in the overall arc.
Michael Straczynski was spreading the word about his new show on Usenet newsgroups (Do I sound old, already?) I did just about everything a high school student could do to see the pilot, and for the next five years kept dealing with inconsistent schedules, faulty VCRs (I still have all of the series, save for one episode, on VHS tapes!) and the changing nature of the Internet to keep up with the series. I was one of the very few people who got aboard the Babylon 5 train prior to the pilot, thanks to the fact that I got on the Internet just as series creator J. Don’t be fooled by appearances: I did my time in the geeky media SF fandom trenches.
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