BABYLON 5
It was the dawn on the third age of Mankind...and the start of a new age for the galaxy. It was the last of the Babylon stations...the last best hope for peace, and when that failed, the last best hope for victory. It was the mid 23rd century. The name of this place...
...was Babylon 5!
OK...so this show isn't around any more - but if I'm going to do a page on any one non-current show then I'm going to do one for B5. Why? Only because it's still the best scifi show in my memory and before I got into SG1, the only show where I'd really gotten into the 'fandom' to any extent.
The show's pilot episode was set in 2257, though by the time I saw it, I'd already caught a lot of the later episodes. It's last 'regular' episode was set in 2262 and it's last episode full stop was set in 2281 - though if you ask me, that was a waste of time. It's pilot episode was originally aired in 1993 and the show ran till 1998, the vast majority of the episodes written by the show's creator Joe Michael Stracynski - usually known to B5 fans as JMS!
Anyway, Babylon 5 was originally the last attempt in a series of space stations commissioned by the 'Earth Alliance' to help foster trade and peaceful relations between the main races of the galaxy in the aftermath of the Earth-Minbari war, during which Earth nearly got toasted by the Minbari(before the Minbari surrendered). Along with humanity and the Minbari, the other races in this interstellar melting pot were the Centauri, Narn(both of whom were always at each other's throats) and the mysterious Vorlons.
B5 was originally commanded by Jeffrey Sinclair and ex-EarthForce pilot with memory issues(or 'a hole in his mind' as a Minbari assasin referred to it in the pilot) from the Earth-Minbari war. His era was on the whole relatively chilled and JMS ran out of things to do with him so ditched the character only to bring him back in the third season two parter "War without End", as he went back in time with the contempory Babylon 5 crew to 2254 to steal Babylon 4 and take it back in time 1000 years, turning into the great Minbari prophet Valen in the process(the Minbari had discovered that Sinclair held a Minbari soul when the interrogated him during the war before his memory got wiped).
Sinclair did this for a very good reason - to limit the resurgence of an ancient race called the Shadows. Now commanded by captain John Sheridan, B5 and it's crew was on the front line of the war that broke out between the Shadows and pretty much everyone else. The Shadows were these dark spidery things which didn't appear to have any leadership until Sheridan travelled to thier home planet of Z'Ha'Dum to speak with some human representatives of theirs, got himself killed then revived by the first-ever-being-in-the-universe Lorien for 20 years. Not long after that the Vorlons started turning against the 'younger' races themselves, forcing Sheridan to set up a battle between Vorlons, Shadows and what was by then known as 'The Alliance of Light' forcing both the Vorlons and Shadows out of known space.
In the meantime, they had also wound up starting to fight a war on another front, as Earth President Clarke had fallen under Shadow influence and turned the EA into a dictatorship. In response, Sheridan broke B5 and most of the other colonies away from Earth, starting a civil war within humanity. It wasn't untill after the Vorlons and Shadows had been banished that Sheridan's 'Resistance' forces were able to concentrate on this conflict - winning it after Clarke commited suicide.
In the aftermath of this conflict, the Interstellar Alliance was set up, with Sheridan as it's first President. And so for it's fifth final season B5 effectivly ran out of fuel - for good reason. JMS always had a '5 year plan'. But it got messed about when the show looked to be cut short to four years - a fifth only being given on a different network at the last minute. And so the fifth season dealt with the beginnings of the ISA and it's military, the Rangers and was pretty much spent on cruise control. And then we had the last few episodes, when the Centauri, now secretly controlled by the Shadow allies the Drakh, broke away from the Alliance - causing the Narn and other races to go off-book and toast Centauri Prime.
The Drakh went on to start a trigger a delayed plague on Earth(which wouldn't have an effect for 5 years) in the 2265 set TV/video movie 'A Call to Arms'. This led into a spinoff called Crusade featuring the Earth Alliance ship Excalibar's attempt to find a cure for the plague but the less said about the behind-the-scene's messing up of that short-lived show the better. I never got round to catching it anyway. There have been rumours of further spinoffs based on the recent TV movie'Legend of the Rangers' and an on/off cinema movie but nothing solid at the moment.
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