Saturday, 29 April 1989. I’ve been invited to Kris’s home.
One day, there was no Kris. Then, Kris was everywhere: Cub Scouts, Taekwondo, and even recess. I was minding my own business, and then I was surrounded…by Kris.
So he’d invited me to his home.
There was a cat called Daisy, strange salty noodles unlike anything I’d tasted previously, and—most alien of all—television at 10:30pm, long after I’d ordinarily be in bed. Kris’s dad, Mike, joined us on the couch as the peculiar music started alongside the prismatic titles, and we found ourselves on—
Wednesday, 25 November 1998. I’ve invited Deana to my home.
We met in my first college class, The Physics of Star Trek, two years ago, and she’d gone with us to Stellar Occasion V in September, where Stephen Furst gave his little wave and Ed Wasser walked around with a Muppet-like Morden head on a stick.
The us consisted of me and David, the high school friend who’d convinced me to give Babylon 5 a third try after The Gathering and “Revelations” failed to impress in ’93 and ’94, respectively. At Dave’s urging, I’d watched again and “War without End” had won me over in ’96. The conversion was religious, and it was a lucky thing for Dave because I had cable when the series transitioned from syndication to TNT the next year.
So we gathered in my room, David, Deana, me, and my mother; she often followed my lead when it came to television. My father would not watch Babylon 5 until 2009, when I was commissioned to write the Babylon 5 Encyclopedia and watching the show suddenly seemed like supporting my career.
As the familiar TNT adverts—seemingly the same every Wednesday night—played out just before 8pm Central Time, I cranked the Dolby Surround, switched off the lights, and settled in for—
—Varos, a former penal planet where torture was broadcast on television and the colonial governor put his policies to votes that rained cellular disintegration rays on him if the people wished it. Into this dystopian nightmare materialized the Doctor and his friend Peri, desperate for Varos’s rare Zyton 7 ore to restore the full function of the former’s TARDIS, a space-time machine cleverly disguised as a London police box from the 1960s.
So this was Doctor Who.
I was aware of its existence. The back of the Intergalactic Trading Company catalog was devoted to the series—which seemed to be about a sextet of intergalactic space policemen, maybe a strangely dressed Green Lantern Corps, with phone booths and a robot dog—but aside from recognizing the iconography, I knew nothing about it. I rarely ever got past the pages of the catalog devoted to Star Trek products at the front. The technical manuals and uniform patterns obsessed me.
I stayed up late the next Saturday, too, to watch—
Garibaldi’s voiceover: “The Interstellar Alliance, based on the homeworld of the Minbari Federation, was founded in the Earth year 2261, shortly after the end of the Shadow War. Twenty years ago.”
Minbar. A flood of memories. Sheridan, awaking, his end near.
Babylon 5 was ending.
This was new. U.S. television shows didn’t end; they were abruptly cut down or faded into oblivion. It was the nature of the beast—the business—that shows continued until economics intervened.
Sheridan’s friends gathered for a last supper.
It was the end, but the moment had been prepared for—
More Doctor Who. But a different Doctor. A change. A regeneration.
They weren’t six men at the same time—except when they were—but rather seven incarnations of one man. (We can fix that limited gender in ten years—thanks, Steven.)
This was unbelievable. The series had been running consistently for twenty-five years, the protagonist periodically dying and being reborn, thanks to the biological sorcery of his ancient civilization—
John and Delenn embrace for the last time. He’s already gone. He’s been dead for twenty years, kept alive by the biological sorcery of an ancient being. Nothing lasts forever, though, and he sets off for one last look around the place that shaped him, that he shaped—
Earth, 1963. The Doctor returns to Totter’s Lane, where he left the Hand of Omega lifetimes ago, at the very start of his adventure.
I’m no longer interested in the front half of the Intergalactic Trading Company’s catalog. The back has my full attention. Star Trek will win back some of my love in a year, when the Borg take Picard, but it will never again roll off my tongue when someone asks me what my favorite show is. From this point forward, the answer will be—
Babylon 5. The station, so tied to Sheridan’s destiny, is scheduled for demolition. There’s no more certain way to end a show than to destroy its namesake. (Ask Blake’s 7 or Robin of Sherwood.)
From the week of 13 May 1996 to this moment, 8:47pm on 25 November 1998, I’ve been obsessed with Babylon 5. It arrived at the perfect time.
There had been an article in the newspaper in 1994. A soap opera writer from Los Angeles was teaching a class at TCU where students were making their own television series. My father had pointed it out to me. “That’s where I’m going, and they’re going to make my show,” I’d said after reading it. He said words like “acceptance” and “scholarship” and “SATs” and “paying dues” and other irrelevancies, but I’d made up my mind.
They did a second television series in 1996, but I’d just arrived and I hadn’t had the right classes yet…and I didn’t like the script. My education was bifurcated, working my way through the Radio-TV-Film curriculum on one hand and reading everything by J. Michael Straczynski that I could find on the other.
Sheridan’s being overwhelmed by the light, going beyond the rim.
I’m writing a script. It’s called Slayday, set in a world where a national holiday is celebrated by murdering someone for the benefit of society. It’s a dystopian bureaucracy begging for—
Doctor Who has rewired my brain. I tried to find a technical manual, of the kind that proliferate in Star Trek publishing, but I ended up with a book about the making of the show. There were interviews with designers and producers and writers and directors and I was learning what they all did, the making of the show becoming as important to me as the product itself.
1982: As we walked out of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, I turned to my mother and said, “I want to do that.”
“You want to work in a movie theater?” she asked.
No.
Douglas Camfield. Terrance Dicks. Robert Holmes. Barry Letts. Philip Hinchcliffe. Chris Boucher. Roger Murray-Leech. Douglas Adams. Graeme Harper. Andrew Cartmel. Ben Aaronovitch.
What do they do? How do they do it? How can I do it?
I’m writing a script. It’s called A Study inSanity, about a man who’s grown up ignorant that his father was God, who dreamed up the universe he inhabits, only to die, setting in motion—
The end.
“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations…
“It changed the future. And it changed us.”
An understatement, though it didn’t work its magic alone.
2010: We’re sitting in the hall at Gallifrey One, and a guy dressed as the Doctor notes my shirt. “Babylon 5…that’s obscure!”
I smile, remembering Doctor Who’s demise, eight months after I discovered it.
Babylon 5 was built to end, and it did. Beautifully.
Doctor Who was designed to regenerate. And it has, more times than I could have imagined.
“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold.”
I’ve forgotten more about one than I’ve ever known about the other, but I won’t say which is which.
