Spaced S02E02 is a playful tale about the pitfalls of fandom. I have to say up front that I am at great risk of doing exactly what Bilbo Bagshot (Bill Bailey) cautions against:
“…Defending the genre with terminal intensity”
Yeah yeah, I know. In the episode Tim (Simon Pegg) gets himself sacked by Bilbo for bullying a child over The Phantom Menace (seriously, watch Spaced, it’s brilliant), followed by the amusing efforts of a remorseful Bilbo to get Tim to return by means of getting himself fired from his new job. Tim achieves this by informing his boss (Martin Treneman) that “Babylon 5 is a big pile of shit”, and getting dismissed on the spot.
I like Spaced so much that this opinion seeped into my conventional wisdom, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover that B5 really isn’t shite at all. I’m not a devout Sci Fi fan, I don’t know the genre especially well, but I do enjoy a bit of TV and Babylon 5’s great strength is that it avoids a lot of modern telly’s problems, namely the writer’s room getting lost (not an accidental word choice) in the whiteboard. Too many shows have a brilliant premise, great characters, and just don’t land it (LOST), characters that lose any consistency (Walking Dead) start plot lines they can’t hope to finish (LOST) or wander out into the dark, talking to themselves, never to be seen again (Westworld). B5 for its minor flaws avoids this. I think much of this is down to J. Michael Straczynski, who had a story to tell, and apparently doesn’t compromise in telling it.
Babylon 5 is unashamedly long-form. It isn’t perfect (S4 is fantastic but has very,very odd pacing for reasons I understand but won’t go into here) and I write this having started S5 which is polished but feels a bit redundant (again, there are known reasons why). The fans are tough on S5, but I am enjoying it and sticking with it. A little bit like Blake’s Seven, you have to get past the production glitter (It looks pretty naff early on in S1) and seemingly hokey characters (“Who the fuck is this Napoleonic looking guy with the absurd hair?”) to reveal some real depth, and great, even brilliant storytelling. I was surprised how much I liked it.
Spaced was made just at the beginning of the dot-com boom. Internet ‘culture’, was not yet ubiquitous, the show barely mentioning it. In 1998-2001 social media didn’t exist and fandom as we now define it hadn’t really taken off; IRC, chat, and forums were still king but it was all still very niche, however writers Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes were well aware of the ferocity that the subcultures were capable of. I wonder what they’d make of it all now, because now it’s fucking awful.
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