Babylon 5: Our Last, Best Hope

There's a tendency in a lot of science fiction television to gear everything toward the dark and dystopian. Look at shows like Black Mirror, Dark Matter, Into the Badlands, and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Even Firefly, with all its humor and a likable cast, is set in a dystopia complete with both a totalitarian government AND environmental disaster.

Now, these settings are fun to play around in. But for my money, fiction needs hope to entertain over the long haul. Characters, and the audience experiencing the narrative through them, have to believe that their actions matter and that they can make the world better. How can this be done if the Alliance will implacably expand its reach, the Cylons are inescapable because we are the Cylons, and we can never, ever atone for our past?

In Babylon 5, by contrast, the future is a place of possibility and wonder, but to make peace a reality takes constant work from all sides. And hope is the fuel of such action. Characters change and grow because they begin to believe that they can.

This comes through in the very idea of the Babylon Project.

The series plays with this theme of hope in every season. Hope that peace can be maintained, hope that old wounds can heal, that relationships can be restored, that life can have meaning, that sacrifice is not without purpose, that our inheritors will find a better world than the one we were born into.

Part of this comes through in the show's handling of religion. Unlike the subversion or nullification of religion in the other shows, faith in the transcendent is a good thing in the Bab-5 universe. While some characters are shown to distort or misuse religion, legitimate belief is shown to be a source of strength and hope. And this lends motivation for action.

If hope is illusory, then characters can stoically suffer, party in antinomian denial, or kill themselves. If the wheel always keeps spinning, then the best you can hope for is to never see the shake-up in your lifetime. Every action of every character is futile, because nothing lasts.

But, if hope has real grounding beyond the material and if actions actually matter, then hope becomes the driving force behind the scenes and characters can dream and aspire.

In Babylon 5, characters find hope and share it with the viewer. And, to quote one such character, "Hope is all we have."