You remember poorly. I shall list “ways in which human society sucked in Babylon 5” until I am bored:
There’s plenty of poor, desperate people just…everywhere. There are entire sections of the station that are designated as gutters for poor people to lie in.
There are businessmen whose interests hold sway over as many lives as governments do, like the guy Geribaldi goes to work for.
More than once Dr. Franklin involves himself in some underground operation to help the poor or targeted because they have nowhere to go, I can think of a free clinic he ran and an underground railroad for telepaths on separate occasions.
The duly elected president of Earth is assassinated and his running mate installs himself as a fascist dictator, remaining in power for over three years.
The Psi Corps exists, which is simultaneously plotting against humanity at large while victimizing telepaths.
There’s that whole episode about a dockworker’s strike over pay and safety conditions, and a major plot point is there’s a law that allows the labor negotiator guy to order the military to violently break strikes “by any means necessary.”
There are apparently several groups of racist terrorists just…wandering around.
There are wars just…all the time. Lots of the cast are members of the military and all but the very youngest are veterans of at least one shooting war. There’s that whole episode about all those marines that stay on the station for awhile, and they pretty much ALL die. What was that battle even about?
They still use CRTs for everything.
One of the biggest attractions on the station is a large casino.
And that’s just focusing on the humans, let alone the episode where an entire alien species is wiped out by a plague their conservative faction associates with “decadence” and insists on praying away, or the Centauri going all Israel on the Narn.
Babylon 5’s setting was nowhere near as utopic as Star Trek’s “We’ve cured all diseases, solved poverty, eradicated greed, created clean energy and discovered the female orgasm” setting, it’s only a little grimmer than this week’s actual headlines given the fact that in-universe ancient eldrich beings were having their regularly scheduled apocalypse.
That said, compared to anything made after 2002 Babylon 5’s tone is much more upbeat and hopeful. The characters rise to the challenge, they grow and get better, they do the right thing whenever they can. Ultimately it’s a show about trying to be a good person. That doesn’t seem to get made anymore; Battlestar Galactica ushered in the hearburn drama era that ultimately led to me cancelling my cable subscription.
Babylon 5 was pretty utopian from what I remember
You remember poorly. I shall list “ways in which human society sucked in Babylon 5” until I am bored:
And that’s just focusing on the humans, let alone the episode where an entire alien species is wiped out by a plague their conservative faction associates with “decadence” and insists on praying away, or the Centauri going all Israel on the Narn.
Babylon 5’s setting was nowhere near as utopic as Star Trek’s “We’ve cured all diseases, solved poverty, eradicated greed, created clean energy and discovered the female orgasm” setting, it’s only a little grimmer than this week’s actual headlines given the fact that in-universe ancient eldrich beings were having their regularly scheduled apocalypse.
That said, compared to anything made after 2002 Babylon 5’s tone is much more upbeat and hopeful. The characters rise to the challenge, they grow and get better, they do the right thing whenever they can. Ultimately it’s a show about trying to be a good person. That doesn’t seem to get made anymore; Battlestar Galactica ushered in the hearburn drama era that ultimately led to me cancelling my cable subscription.