Babylon 5. Oh yes indeedy. The future of TV Sci-Fi? God, I hope so. The great thing about B5 is that the whole thing's planned. All 5 (hopefully) years of it. Normal stories intermix with `arc' stories to form a greater whole. While Trek may have recurring enemies and certain storylines are spread over a few episodes, B5 dwarfs such attempts. I won't go on about it here; there're links on my dediated B5 page to sites which do the job far better than I could with my limited resources. Hopefully the spin off series being planned, along with the 2 movies, won't detract from the feel of the original series.
As I mentioned, I've grown up with Sci-Fi and Fantasy. I LIKE escapism. It's good for you, and a damn sight healthier and cheaper than doing drugs etc. I'm not trying to preach, that's just my standpoint. Good Sci-Fi should leave a part of itself lodged in you after you've moved on. I recently went to a Sci-Fi convention, and I will tell you now that the world would be a better place if the creators and actors involved with shows like B5 were in charge. We need visionaries like them; we need idealists. Now, I'm not idolising them, but they're good, decent people, and they're not letting their status rob them of their own values.
X-Files. Another great show. Why? Because it's a quiet kind of Fantasy. Primarily it's about two FBI agents looking into unexplained and unexplainable cases. People can grasp that. It's similar to any other detective show, and yet it's the subject matter under investigation, the question mark at the end of most episodes, that draws you to it. The fact that it made the move from BBC2 to BBC1, the main station here in the UK, is an indication of its widespread appeal to non-nerds (!) Why is it so popular? Probably because, in my opinion, the best Sci-Fi is that in which you see a reflection of the real world. The general public sees Sci-Fi fans as nerds, tech-heads, and yet all it tends to be is the same old stories set in a different time, a different place, provoking thought. The X-Files: you hear about statues drinking milk. The Scully in you says no way. Must be a logical explanation. The Mulder in you gives a different explanation, and faced with the facts the Scully in you can't help but agree. Just sometimes, life can be stranger than fiction, and let's face it, some of the fiction out there can be pretty strange. In such a technological age, I'm glad that science still doesn't quite have all the answers; life would get pretty boring if there was nothing left to wonder at...
For those of you who might be interested, some of the photographs I took at the convention I attended, primarily Babylon 5 based, called Wolf 359: The Gathering can be viewed here. I'll be going to Wolf 359: The Alliance in July of this year...
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