Babylon 5 is free on YouTube, and you really should watch it
One of the best science-fiction shows of the 1990s has a new official home on YouTube, complete with free episodes and new material from its creator.
If you’re a sci-fi fan and missed Babylon 5, you’re in for a treat. Warner Bros. Discovery recently launched an official Babylon 5 YouTube channel, and full episodes of the classic science-fiction series are being made available for free. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/@Babylon5
Creator J. Michael Straczynski has also said the channel will include new commentaries, interviews and other material about the series. It’s pretty cool.
I should add, though, that so far, full-length episodes only seem to be available in the US. I don’t know if it will be available elsewhere (maybe it is somewhere), but I couldn’t see them in Thailand (where I was last week) or London (where I am now).
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll be smart enough to work out a way to watch it. And you’ll find it is well worth it if you do. I absolutely loved Babylon 5 when I first watched it, and despite some increasingly dated special effects, I think it still holds up remarkably well.
There is one warning, though. You may need to give it a little time.
Don’t give up during the first season
Babylon 5 began in 1993 with the feature-length pilot The Gathering, followed by its first full season in 1994. (The Gathering and the first 12 episodes are on YouTube as I write this.)
Set aboard a five-mile-long space station intended as neutral territory for different alien races, it initially looks like a fairly traditional episodic science-fiction show.
The first season is also probably the weakest. Which, if you’re a fan of Star Trek: TNG, DS9, and other shows that came out back then, you should be cool with.
There are great episodes and a huge amount of important groundwork is being laid, but if you watch the first few instalments and wonder why people have spent three decades raving about the series, keep going.
You haven’t really seen what Babylon 5 is capable of yet.
The computer-generated effects also look their age. They were ambitious and groundbreaking for television in the early 1990s, but nobody is going to mistake them for The Expanse.
Fortunately, the effects aren’t why people still love the show.
It was telling one enormous story at a time when that was rare
What made Babylon 5 unusual was the scale of what Straczynski was attempting.
Rather than simply resetting everything at the end of each episode, events had consequences. Political decisions mattered and relationships changed. Wars, alliances and betrayals could develop over entire seasons, with minor details sometimes becoming more important later.
That sort of long-form storytelling with multi-season arcs is pretty common these days. But in early 1990s television, particularly science fiction, it was much less so.
For example, Star Trek DS9 also came out in 1993, but it only got really good a few seasons in, when Worf joined, and the story arcs got longer. But Babylon 5’s five-season story starts straight away with Straczynski’s vision guiding the whole thing. The result is a show that becomes increasingly difficult to stop watching once its larger story begins to take shape.
Politics, religion, authoritarianism, propaganda and war all feature heavily, but the series never forgets that these things affect individual people.
Which segues nicely to the awesome characters.
Londo and G’Kar alone are worth watching for
There are plenty of memorable characters in Babylon 5, but two of my favourites are Londo Mollari and G’Kar.
When we first meet them, they can almost appear to be vaguely comical characters. But they don’t stay that way and their relationship, and the changes both men go through over the course of the series, form one of the best character arcs I can remember seeing in science fiction television.
It is difficult to say much more without spoiling some of the pleasure of watching it happen.
The other characters and aliens are superb as well, and I’m not being biased by the fact that I had an epic crush on Claudia Christian. All the characters are good, and they get time to shine and develop.
The same is true of the wider story. Characters who seem relatively straightforward when the show begins can end up in places you would never have predicted.
Babylon 5 actually has an ending
It’s sad this needed to be said, but it matters. At least it does to me. I can’t be alone in hearing about some series that came out a while ago and immediately Googling whether it finishes or was cancelled halfway through. Firefly obviously brings a tear to the eye, but it wasn’t alone.
I could rant about this for quite a while, but long story short – Babylon 5 finishes the story Straczynski wanted to tell.
Granted, the circumstances were slightly messy. Fearing the series might be cancelled, Straczynski accelerated parts of his planned five-year story during Season 4. But then a fifth season was then unexpectedly commissioned. So the pacing might feel slightly weird, but I didn’t know any of this when it came out, and I didn’t notice. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it.
Despite that disruption, the series ends with Sleeping in Light, an episode Straczynski had deliberately written as the conclusion to the story. And it was a proper ending. And it was great.
There have been attempts to revive Babylon 5 since then, most recently the animated film Babylon 5: The Road Home in 2023, but sadly, plans for a live-action reboot have so far failed to materialise.
Maybe I am being optimistic, but the fact that Warner Bros. is putting the original series back in front of people – for free – means something is in the pipeline. Who knows.
But if you’ve never watched Babylon 5, now is the perfect time to do so. Just give it some time, and enjoy.
You can see the new Babylon 5 channel here.
If you are impatient, you can check out the full show here. (Affiliate.)