I watched Babylon 5 recently at the insistence of a good friend of mine (after successfully avoiding it for several years, sadly). DS9 is definitely superior (IMHO, at least) in various respects.... acting, production values, special effects, etc. But what really struck me were the deep parallels between the two shows, similarities that go far beyond the fact that both happen to be set on space stations in the distant future, both shows have numbers in their titles, etc. I'm sure this is by no means a complete list, but the ones I noticed include:

1) Captains Sheridan, Sinclair, and Sisko. Both shows start out with a lead character who's a commander, and end up with a captain (though in the case of DS9, of course, they're actually the same character). Both leads have a special relationship to a highly advanced, 'God-like' race of beings who guide them toward their respective destinies (the Vorlons in the case of B5; the Prophets on DS9). Both captains go off to be with the Gods at the end of their respective series.

2) The Cardassians, Bajorans, Narn, and Centauri. Like the Bajorans on DS9, the Narn have just emerged from over half a century of 'occupation' at the hands of a race of arrogant conquerors. Like the Cardassians, the Centauri eventually get what's coming to them, and end up being conquered or nearly eradicated themselves (the Cardassians at the hands of the Dominion, the Centauri at the behest of the newly formed Interstellar Alliance).

3) Gul Dukat and Londo Mollari. The respective 'villains' of each series (such as they are) are both prideful, status-obsessed men whose own arrogance and ego eventually proves to be their undoing. Both are manipulated and used as pawns by the show's real villains (the Dominion and Pagh Wraiths on one hand, Shadows on the other). Both are torn between guilt at the harm they've caused and a desire to be absolved, and arrogant insistence that they've been unfairly maligned. Both are eventually 'forgiven' by members of the race they nearly destroyed (Major Kira and Ambassador G'Kar, respectively).

4) Good and Evil Gods. Like the Prophets, the Vorlons are looked upon as 'God-like' by younger, less advanced races. Ditto the Shadows. Like the Dominion, the Shadows are a powerful, mysterious race who are far more advanced than the 'good guys' and initially seem almost ungodly formidable. Like the Vorlons and Shadows on B5, the Prophets and Pagh Wraiths are two groups of Gods who have long been at odds with each other, and use 'lower beings' as pawns in that ongoing struggle.

5) Pivotal moments. Both shows involve a pivotal episode in which the hero confronts his patron Gods and demands that they take a more active role in the struggle; in both cases, the Gods agree, but warn that a penance will have to be paid.

6) Putting differences aside. The central arc of each show involves the characters trying to convince a group of races who have traditionally been hostile to each other to work together in order to defeat a common foe.

7) Big freaky-looking holes in the sky. Both shows feature a 'wormhole' (or wormhole-like apparatus) near the station, that various ships and threats often emerge from.

And both shows feature a smoking hot 2IC who could rip your arm off and beat you to death with it if you tried anything. They wouldn't, because of protocol, but they could.

Well, sometimes they'd do it anyway. See: Kira beating Damar up in the cargo bay during the S6 arc.

Aaaand since I never watched B5, I think that'll be the extent of my participation in this thread.

Do we want to discuss JMS pitching B5 to Paramount (before Berman "created" DS9), or is that too touchy a subject?

Considering that JMS has publically said that the timing was too close to be anything but coincidence (he said that it would've taken at least another year for Paramount to have altered his series into DS9, plus the time needed to write the first dozen or so scripts, cast the show, set up a production staff, etc), I think this can be safely discounted.

I remember thinking that there were parallels at the time when I watched both shows - space stations, quite "political" etc. Babylon 5, for me, descended into a muddled mess laden with Lord of the Rings motifs and parallels - whereas DS9 held my interest to the end. It is interesting to note that both Captains Sinclair and Sisko have the whole messianic thing going on, though.

Both shows were rather arc-heavy, as well, although DS9 was a piker in that regard, compared to B5.

That may explain why I rank DS9 higher ... If you missed a couple episodes of B5, it might take forever to get back up to speed. DS9 was a little more forgiving.

That said, I enjoyed both shows.

I rank DS9 higher mostly for sentimental reasons, but I do think the writing and production values were better from episode to episode, as opposed to B5, where the genius was in the overall arc, but a lot of the dialogue and acting in specific episodes was just downright painful. Despite the many parallels (which do sort of beg the question of whether one was guilty of plagiarizing the other), the two shows are really not all that similar.

They both broke away from the tradition of technology being inherantly a "versus religion" thing and tried to show cultures that were still very religious advancing alongside more secular ones. But they both had the same angle, which was that in order to keep the Bajorans/ Minbari from just looking like a bunch of creepy religious nuts, they had to show us that the Prophets and Vorlons were real races, and then to keep it feeling like science fiction instead of utopian fantasy they had to give those "deities" their own agendas, in which the religions they manipulated were only one part.

I think of the two, B5 got more out of playing with religion. DS9 kept it all pretty vague, so "Prophets Good, Pagh Wraiths Bad" remains a feasible synopsis, although we don't have the slightest idea what either side's ultimate goal was, and other religions on the show, aka Klingonism and Juda-cough! sorry, Ferangiism were kept so two dimensional that to this day I honestly don't know which of Worf's rituals were supposed to be funny and which weren't.

B5, on the other hand, managed to start out with what looked like an obvious Angels versus Demons riff and shift it into a brilliant satire of the Cold War effect on third world countries (interestingly, the Shadows would be the Americans and the Vorlons the Communists, in spite of the Shadows being the "more bad" guys) while meanwhile, still having the Narns maintain a high level of spirituality while NOT being led along by superbeings. And human spirituality also remained well-represented in the B5 universe. I don't mind the Star Trek future; I'm really not a big fan of religion. But considering that we're supposed to be dealing with reasonably free societies only a few centuries from now, the B5 one is more feasible.

Also interesting to note that both shows had a sort of planetary female pope (Satai Delenn and Kai Opaka) who in one way or another switched over to a different race or culture early in the series.

Sorry for the late reply, but I'm finishin up my DS9 "rewatch: as I speak.
Some well-thought out and thought provoking ideas in here.



Agreed: in B5, religion was more of an organic part o the overall story, as opposed to DS9, which liked to play the religion card only on occassion.



Yeah, but the Prophets/ Pagh Wraiths were almost peripheral to the larger DS9 arc, whereas they were inextricably intertwined in the storylines of B5 (The Vorlons were one of the two warring races)

DS9 would have been a completely different show if the Prophets had truly been a driving force like the Vorlons.

I actually like B5 better than DS9. ::ducks flying objects::

I liked the overarching plot, and while I liked DS9, I feel like a lot of the potential was untapped, and some of the more interesting plotlines dropped. I still really like the show, but for lack of a better term, on a lower level than B5. I also think that the writing of B5 is really quite good, and the characters very well developed. I never saw Londo as a villain. There wern't really villains among the regular cast. They were all people with weaknesses and strengths, who I loved but who made mistakes-sometimes really big ones. Dukhat has moments where we get to see his side of the story, but mostly he's seen from the point of view of people who really don't like him. Londo was always portrayed as a whole, rounded person. IMO, anyway.

I also prefer DS9, in the end.

Apart from the obvious differences in acting, production, humor and the like, some of the arcs stand up better, and a lot of the political stuff stood up as more compelling.

One obvious strand both shows tackled was Earth goes fascist evil. Babylon 5 obviously carried that through a lot longer then DS9, but I feel they undercut their position by 1) tying Clarke directly to the Shadows 2) making Clarke at the end pure, deranged evil 3) relying too much on historical parallels.
1] There's an obvious element of irony in making the xenophobic, human obsessed law-and-order government be in league with the chaos-promoting aliens. However, it's not clear that this element was necessary to the narrative, and all that really came out of it was using the fleet of Shadow-enhanced EA warships. The premise of an indigenous human conspiracy and dictatorship is more engaging then yet another Shadow ploy, likewise it would be better to stand alone since Earth was never involved in the Shadow War, and no one was every concerned about how the Vorlons might blow up Earth as well as Centauri and Coriana.
2] The thing that tips the scale is the effort to destroy Earth's populations rather than surrender. Yes, rulers in the past have made such desperate and nihilistic attempts, but to actually have a defense system purely under his control that can change and target Earth seems too comic-book doomsday. Also, Clarke's suicide, the non-resolution with the Corps and quick change of leaders made the political fallout of the conflict too easy.
3] The main elements emphasized here were the rise and operation of the Nazis, and American McCarthism. Both parallels were lifted too directly, without consideration for how the different strategic reality would provoke a different political reaction. For one thing, I'd think the phenomena of outer colonies and some that are trying to break away would make the operations of politics different. Also, we're broadly expected to believe there's been no meaningful political alterations in Earth apart from unification in two centuries, which just doesn't hold up, contrast the way the United States was in 1808 with the present.

With DS9 the coup attempt was a lot shorter and didn't have nearly enough follow-through, but it had Leyton as a genuinely independent person thinking he was doing the right thing. He took advantage of fear and disturbance launched by Changeling terrorism and fear of the Dominion, but he wasn't a conscious pawn of the Founders. He was just taking extreme measures that in his own mind were justified to protect the Federation, but as Sisko pointed out risked civil war, the essence of 'destroying paradise in order to save it'.

Another thing that seemed less convincing with Babylon 5 was the Narns and effect of Centauri occupation. They apparently recovered from a grueling enslavement very quickly and for a while were past the Centauri Republic in power. They didn't seem to have to have issues of sectarian violence, a power gap, political chaos, they just became a mini-imperialist power in their own right. Also, given how horrific Centauri violence is described, the Narn resistance both before and during the series never seemed gritty enough, in contrast with all the Bajor flashbacks. Additionally the issue of collaborators never seemed to be taken seriously, and there's moments like Sheridan assuming that the new Narn puppet representative, handpicked by the Centauri, would of course be willing and yearning to fight in due time to free his people. The Bajoran reactions seemed a lot more...human, in a word.

I also buy the Dominion more as a coherent, self-interested state trying to secure it's own protection, rather then devoting their whole society around "Order" or "Chaos" in some undefined fashion. On the counterside, the Centauri arc and Londo were consistently awesome, Reefa made a great Machiavellian puppet-master, and the Psi-Corps/Bester were a very interesting presence.

A lot of the similarities seem irrelevant or superficial until taken into context; things like the fact that it originally stared a commander, was on a space station, used multi-season arcs, etc. It would be easy to dismiss as coincidence, except for the fact that Star Trek had never done any of these things before, and would never do them again. The you compare DS9 (both in terms of style and quality) to Berman's other two Trek series, and it becomes even more obvious.

In the end, they both went in different directions, and both were amazing shows, so I'm not going to complain. Now, if you want even more obvious parallels to B5, compare it Stargate SG-1.

Funny thing is, that even though JMS got screwed over by Paramount, sci-fi fans one. Had Paramount picked up B5, they almost certainly wouldn't have made DS9, at least not they way it was. Assuming that there even was a third Trek made, it would have been competing for Paramount's resources, and since Trek is more popular, it's likely that B5 would have been sidelined. But, since Paramount did what they did, we ended up with two excellent shows instead of just one.



That's because the Dominion wasn't anywhere close to as advanced as the Shadows or Vorlons. Neither B5 race needed to worry about their own protection. The Alliance only "won" the war because the First Ones came in and put a stop to it. Also, the Vorlons and Shadows didn't orient themselves around order and chaos, they saw their philosophies as means of improving the other races; they Shadows weren't creating chaos for the sake of chaos, they saw conflict as a way of ensuring survival of the fittest. On the other hand, the Dominion, while powerful, could easily be threatened by the Alpha Quadrant, and they didn't want to improve the other races; they wanted to suppress them.

That assumes societies only follow security concerns and a sort of paranoid military action when there's a measure of military parity. Looking at the legacy of European imperialism, that doesn't seem to be the case, societies can generally be pretty brutal about protecting their interests and members even if there's no legitimate chance of a real threat.

Beyond that, I'd say we learned too little about the Shadows/Vorlons, for all the time they were on screen. What did they do, apart from their foreign policy? What kind of political system or organization did they have? What type of leadership or religious identity did they have? What was the origin of their society? Their long term vision? An issue with the First Ones as allies or antagonists was that they seemed so mythical and epic that they were hard to relate too, they came across as quasi-transcendent forces fighting a cold war rather then a coherent polity. Likewise, if they were so hardened they were willing to kill billions of the younger races to save them, it seemed a bit too easy that Sheridan/handful of First Ones could put pressure on them and make them just go packing. The Dominion only folded their presence in the Alpha Quadrant after a long and gruelling war that united everyone against them, infected their leadership with a virus and had their main allies launch a full scale uprising. The Shadows and Vorlons...just left.

Well I think B5 was the first sci-fi series that really worked out where it was going from the start - that DS9's plot arc worked as well as it did was rather fortuitous (in fact, considered from the viewpoint of the final episodes of both, DS9's arc actually worked better, since B5's final season was a bit of a mess).

Unlike the Shadows/Vorlons, the Dominion really did have a reason to seek control - Changelings had been oppressed and they had the Galaxy's biggest case of abused children becoming abusers by seeking to oppress everyone. Which may be a bad reason, but at least it was a reason. The Shadows and Vorlons, as Delenn pointed out, had been fighting for so long they'd actually forgotten why they were fighting in the first place ("How can you guide us when you've lost your way?").

Though I wish Sisko could have come up with a line as awesome (if cheesetastic) as "Get the hell out of our Galaxy!"

I personally liked them remaining mysterious. That's what they were - old, powerful, mysterious races that nobody could really understand. They weren't one of us; they were the outsiders - above us and never ones that we could relate to. The story was about the races that we could relate to coming together and establishing themselves. Had they gone into too much detail about them, then they would have been just another race, except with more powerful weapons. And that would have undercut the entire point.



In terms of awesome cheese, nothing will beat Sheridan's earlier line of "Morning, gentlemen. This is your wakeup call." right before detonating several nuclear weapons.

However by mid season four the point had been made that the Younger Races were in the right, that the Vorlons/Shadows had no moral authority beyond superior technology, and that it was time for them to be expelled. For my money; if the main antagonist(s) remains vague and largely undefined, it has a tendency to make conflict with them more two dimensional. Which, incidentally, would be one of the many reasons the Pagh Wraith/Prophet struggle ultimately fell a bit flat.

When it comes to actually posing as deities, the interesting thing in B5 was that it was the "Good" guys who did it and the "Bad" Guys who thought they were "cheating" by showing themselves as angels (as revealed to Sheridan during the S3 Finale Zahad'Dum). In DS9, it was more traditionally the bad guys (The Dominion) who posed as Gods, while the actually rather more Godlike Prophets didn't seem to care as much (though they did say at one point, "We are of Bajor," so they do feel some connection) - the only way in which they interfere with "our" Galaxy is through the orbs (which are a bit random - Kai Winn has never had a vision while "Weirding the Tear") and they don't normally talk to people passing through the Wormhole.

DS9 suffered from the end of episode reset button, though not as much as other Star Trek series, while B5 had more compelling and progress-focused arcs. Finishing a detailed, extensive and compelling novel is always going to be more enjoyable than a series of short-stories. That being said, I understand that most viewers don't like to think deeply about TV shows or follow arcs that last more than a couple episodes, so DS9 is much more palpable for the masses.

One other thing. Comparing JMS to any of the DS9 writers is like comparing the Boston Celtics to your local high school JV basketball team.

That only works if you refer to a certain student in Emsley Laney H.S. in Wilmington, NC in 1980....

'Cause Ron D. Moore is awesome. Plus, as much as I love JMS and his careful planning, I love a series better if it lets its plot grow organically. Sure, RDM was just learning in DS9, just as the aforementioned student was getting better and learning his trade back in High School, then he got better! :-)

That's how BSG lost me. Somewhere during the third season, I suddenly realized I didn't know these people anymore (or maybe I never did); they seemed to be acting completely randomly—or in ways designed solely to shock or surprise the audience. DS9's characters grow, but they remain who they are at the core. When I went back to season one for a second trip through the series, I noticed they seemed younger, simpler, more naive (Bashir), more idealistic (Sisko), angrier (Kira); but still recognizably the same people.

I think we can say character development is much better handled in DS9.