"I Was There at the Dawn of the Third Age" (Introduction)

"Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

                      -Narrator, Romeo and Juliet




It happens all the time in Hollywood. Someone gets an idea and by hook or by crook manages to get it into production. Someone else in the same business hears about it and "borrows" that idea for his own project, often using the fact that there's a similar project out there to get his moving. All of a sudden, you have Volcano and Dante's Peak, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, Armageddon and Deep Impact. In 1985 there were three variations on the "science gone wrong" comedy: Weird Science, Misfits of Science, and Real Genius.

It happens on television too, of course. It's claimed that Lost in Space borrowed heavily from ideas that Gene Roddenberry had pitched for Star Trek. Or the seventh season of Doctor Who, which is widely considered to be "Doctor Who does Quatermass." Any successful television show is likely to spawn a swarm of imitators. One need only look at the platoon of police procedurals that appeared after the success of CSI, or the wave of spooky, sort of science fiction shows that aired the season after Lost became a surprise hit.

So perhaps what happened with Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. Two science fiction shows, both airing for the first time in early 1993, both about the crew of a space station caught up in politics and war? That sure sounds like the usual Hollywood copycat game in play.

There was a difference this time, though. It lay in the nascent internet and in the mind of Babylon 5's creator, J. Michael Straczynski. You see, in the early days of the 'net, no one was quite sure what you could say and what you couldn't. Or, more to the point, what you should say and what you shouldn't. By 2013, certain standards have kicked in. Most everyone knows that if you're working on one show, you don't bash someone else's show. You give the same boring answers that everyone else does if you're asked.

"They're doing fine work over there."

"<insert name here> is a great <writer/producer/director/actor>, and I love <his/her> work."

"It's a great show, but we're going in a different direction."

And so on, and so forth. PR people for the various studios watch the 'net like a hawk, swooping down on any rogue Tweets, Facebook updates, or 'blogs to keep damage to a minimum and prevent any open warfare from breaking out between creators and their fans.

It wasn't like that in the early to mid-nineties. Back then, nobody in the Hollywood hierarchies had the faintest idea what the internet was. The 'net was wide open, and Straczynski, known as JMS to his fans, stepped into the gap.

Or perhaps it is better to say that he leapt in with both feet.

Because, in a feat never seen before or since, JMS went online with his thoughts about his show while the show was airing. And we're not talking about a blog post here and there as you got with Ronald Moore and the Battlestar Galactica remake, or John Rogers for Leverage. There are some seventeen thousand messages archived on the JMSNews website dating back to 1991. Some of them are announcements and pumping up hype for the show, of course, but the vast majority were a message board dialogue with the fans. What's more, they are decidedly not in the polite vein that one might expect from today's PR monitored producers. No, what Straczynski did was pour his heart and mind out online, not only about his show, Babylon 5, but about the show that he said was ripping him off: Deep Space Nine.

Here's part of a post made in early 1992 about the basic similarities:

"BABYLON 5 is a deep-space station located in a strategic sector of space that is heavily traveled, a jump point for journeys, with representatives from various civilizations on board.  DEEPSPACE 9 is a deep-space station located in a strategic sector of space that is heavily traveled, a jump point for journeys, with representatives from various civilizations on board.Funny...I don't see what's similar about them at ALL...even if there ARE some other points of comparison that I can't reveal for fear of compromising my OWN story. "

And here's part of a post JMS made in the middle of 1992:

"I am trying very, very, *very* hard not to lose it at this moment."

"Someone put the copy of the current ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY in my hands, with the DS9 cover story, and said "I think you should see this." And I saw some full-head makeup prosthetics that look an *awful* lot like ours. But worse yet...the sets. The Promenade looks amazingly like our bazaar; their casino/bar looks a lot like our casino/bar, on and on and on...."

"This is getting just a *little* out of hand. The visual aspect comes on top of the story aspect...that both shows are about a space station that functions as a port of call for businessmen, smugglers, diplomats and others, located near a jump-point/worm-hole, has an open marketplace, a casino, a bar, hookers, original draft screenplays in which a shape changer played a substantial role, a female second in command, a head of the station with the same initials (J.S.) both with the rank of Commander, and an attack scene near the end with the female second in command being in charge of the defense...oh, yeah, and both commanders carrying a trauma from a recent war or battle."

"And there are more points of similarity, those are just the ones that spring immediately to mind. And now they will even have much the same look, similar sets, similar makeups...."

"I'm calm. I'm quiet and collected. How that desk got tossed out the window is anybody's guess."

We should note that not all the information from EW proved to be completely accurate. The lead character on Deep Space Nine was named Benjamin Sisko, for example. The only hookers on DS9 are holographic, for another. And obviously, there is a degree of sarcasm involved in that first post. Still, most of the points made are correct. Even before either show had aired, Straczynski was calling foul on DS9's copying of B5.

There is, alas, no comparable resource from the producers and creators of Deep Space Nine, Rick Berman and Michael Piller. What we have is after the fact, and in many cases, way after the fact. Much of it comes from DVD special feature interviews or quotations from the "Star Trek: Deep Spare Space Nine Companion", a book published a year after DS9 aired its final episode. What's more, all that material relates only to DS9 and rarely, if ever, mentions Babylon 5.

If one looks hard enough, however, one can occasionally find something about the conflict between the shows from the DS9 side. Take this part of an interview that Berman gave in 2011:

"There was a time when, I don't know whether it was specifically Straczynski or other people, it was implied that he had pitched an idea similar to DS9 to Paramount and that it had been rejected and that, lo and behold, a year or so later DS9 came about. The implication being that Michael Piller and I perhaps stole all or part of his idea, which was always amusing to Michael and I because it was completely untrue. We had no knowledge of this gentleman. If he did pitch something to Paramount, we never heard about it. DS9 was a show that was created by Michael and me and Brandon Tartikoff, who was the recent head of Paramount at the time, without any knowledge of Straczynski or of anything that he had ever pitched. So when we were accused of stealing his idea it was a little sad but at the same time a little comical to us."

That's a pretty flat denial, isn't it?

So here we are, with two shows airing at the same time with similar premises and the accusation of plagiarism leveled from one show against the other. What are we to do?

"We count 30 Rebel ships, Lord Vader, but they're so small they're avoiding our turbo lasers!"

"We'll have to destroy them ship to ship."
       
  -Imperial Officer and Darth Vader, Star Wars



The way forward, as Vader commands, is to watch every episode of both shows. We'll examine the characters, settings, and evolution of B5 and DS9 both. As we find them, we'll point out the similarities and differences, and we'll see if we can come to some decisions along the way about the big questions.

Did one show rip off the other? Does it matter if they did? Which one was better? Can we even answer that? What else can we learn along the way?

I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Let me end this introduction with a few logistical notes. First of all, there will be no spoiler protection whatsoever. Both these shows are 20 years old, and are easily available at public libraries, through Netflix and Amazon Prime, or on sale on Amazon or EBay. I will also not be following a traditional "review" format. That is, there will be no episode summery followed by my opinion of the episode. Instead, I'll provide a link to summary pages for the episode at either Memory Alpha for the Deep Space Nine episodes or from The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 for Babylon 5. While there will be some discussion about what worked and what didn't for any given episode, most of what I have to say will be analysis. What was the episode about? How does it fit in to the broad strokes of the show? How does it compare to the other show?

Updates will be three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I've got a two week buffer already written, and my plan is to write constantly to keep at least two weeks ahead at all times.  Although the primary focus will of course be on the televised episodes, I do plan to divert every now and again to discuss the secondary materials for both shows, including novels, comic books, and games.  Putting it all together, this should take a little more than two years.

As I plan to cover the shows as they aired, we're going to end up with more DS9 than B5 in the long run. That's inevitable, because DS9 ran seven seasons while B5 went five. What's more, every season of DS9 besides the first had more episodes than the equivalent B5 season. Even counting the B5 TV movies and the spin-off series Crusade, there's still a good 50 more DS9 episodes than Babylon 5s. Worse, because B5 took a year off after airing the pilot to make some adjustments, a lot of those extra episodes are at the very beginning. There's a good season and a half of DS9 to get through before B5 proper starts up.

Fortunately, there is that wonderful archive at JMSNews. Early on I'll be drawing heavily on it to talk about what was going on in Grid Epsilon during the first season and a half of DS9. Once we get to January of 1994, things will even out quite a bit, and the back and forth between the shows will begin in earnest. I hope you're all still with me by then, because that's when things really start to get fun.

So I'm doing a soft launch.  I'll be taking the time through the start of B5 proper to get into the groove, identify and fix problems, and work out how this is going to go.  Along the way, I'll probably upgrade the site a bit, maybe see about getting some appropriate ads and post histories and the like.  By the time we get to B5's first season premiere, "Midnight on the Firing Line," we should be ready to really kick it into gear.

Speaking of problems, let me know in the comments or by email or Facebook if you come across any.  Things look fine in Chrome with the current formatting, but if it fails utterly in Firefox, I need to know that.  Drop me a line.  Thanks!

So first off, we'll be starting off with the DS9 pilot: "Emissary."  Come by on Wednesday to have a look.