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Noah Chinn and Babylon 5
83 Plays1 year ago
The lads are joined by Noah Chinn, a Canadian writer of SFF, contemporary fiction and retro mysteries. (The latter two under the pen-name Noah J.D. Chinn.)
Mark kicks off the podcast by asking Joe and Noah if there was anything weird happening to their hair in the 90s, which is also when the groundbreaking science fiction series, Babylon 5 ran.
Noah loved that the series treated each episode as a chapter in a longer story, which was unusual in television at the time. And yes, there was a character with big hair in the show.
Noah tries to convince Mark, who never saw the show in the 90s, why he should check it out now. They talk about where it's similar to The Expanse, and where it differs, and how it had an impact on Noah's own writing.
In the end, Noah makes a strong case!
For more info, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Banter
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Joe, how are you? I'm good as usual. Nothing to complain about. I should never ask. You're always good. You're always just like steady state good. No, it'll be the one day that you don't ask, you know? And you'll say, no, Mark doesn't like me anymore. But I have to pretend, don't I? Because, you know, here we are in a podcast situation. Can I really say I'm really not doing well, Mark? You can to me, but yeah, maybe the listeners might not want to hear that. Yeah. No. Yeah. That's not what they're tuning in for.
Nostalgia for 90s Hairstyles
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:39
Speaker
So what they are tuning in for is they want to know what the hair situation was in the 90s. Yeah, that's what they're tuning in for. That's what they're tuning in for. Yeah, so you were working at the CBC at that point, so probably it wasn't too crazy, but just out of interest, you know, what was happening back then on top? With the hair? Yeah, what was your hair like? My hair. Yeah, what was your hair like?
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, it's kind of an interesting question. I went gray early. My first gray hair was when I was 12 years old. My mother was horrified. She's like, oh my God. And she went and she immediately plucked it out. And then I was fine until I was about 22. And then I was sitting in the radio and television arts lounge at Ryerson.
00:01:24
Speaker
And my friend Allison George from across the room, she suddenly shrieked and she left up and she she's like, Joe, the sunlight just reflecting off your two gray hairs that I see there. And I was like, what? And I ran to the washroom and looked in the mirror and I'm like, sure enough, there was two gray hairs at the age of 22. And for maybe 30 seconds, I was horrified. And then I was like.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, it looked like Steve Martin. Exactly. Steve Martin is a good role model. And as long as it doesn't fall out. I mean, you know, it started to recede, you know, kind of in the front. Yeah. Yeah. It's mostly still there. So that's, that's the segue of the hair. What about you? I was asking because back then my hair did go gray. It actually didn't go gray. I went white.
00:02:10
Speaker
So I have like white hair because I was a ginger. I guess I still am technically though. You wouldn't be able to know that from looking at the color of my hair. But yeah, I had the ginger hair and I did the long hair at one point. It was the 90s, right? And I wasn't in a professional setting for much of the 90s, so it was all over the place. At one point, I tried to grow it really long. It was horrible. I look at pictures and I go, oh God.
00:02:34
Speaker
I always wanted a ponytail because I, I thought guys who could rock a ponytail were, were cool, but I could never, I was accused of having kind of a mullet. Yeah. I didn't have a mullet, but it was, yeah, it was good. It wasn't a good situation. Yeah. So this is usually when we embarrass the guest and ask the guest what happens with their hair. Not always. Usually it's another question. This is the first time I've asked about hair.
Noah Chin's Writing Persona
00:03:01
Speaker
Noah Chin, welcome to the podcast. Welcome. Hello, happy to be here. Is this what we should be? Because I know that you have some initials in there in your name. JD Joseph Davidson. Yeah. So what do we call you? Are you Noah or are you JD?
00:03:16
Speaker
Depends on what books you're reading. Ah, okay. A while ago, like I remember hearing about a science fiction author by the name of Ian Banks, who also wrote mystery novels. And he would write his mystery novels under, I believe, Ian Banks or and his science fiction under Ian M. Banks. I just remember it being referred to as like the easiest pseudonym to break.
00:03:42
Speaker
And I thought, you know what, maybe something similar for me because I've got science fiction and fantasy type stories on the one hand, but then I have other ones that are sort of contemporary mystery or romantic comedy, modern day slice of life type stories as well. And so I figured I'd use that to differentiate it for the sake of the evil marketing algorithms that exist out
Noah's Personal Anecdote on Going Gray
00:04:06
Speaker
there.
00:04:06
Speaker
Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So the, without the initials is for what? Oh, so Noah Chin I use for my genre fiction and Noah JD Chin I use for my more contemporary stuff. Okay. And so before we get into more of a bio, which we'll ask you about shortly, you got to answer the question about the hair man. What was happening up top in the 90s?
00:04:28
Speaker
the 90s, not much. I've been cutting my own hair since I started university to save money. I've never been the sort of person who cared about that sort of thing. I do remember when I got my first gray hair, so it's a bit sad because it was when my grandmother who raised me, she had had a stroke and I had to fly back from England to Oshawa in order to be there for her.
00:04:54
Speaker
And during that flight back when I just wasn't feeling too good and went into the the lavatory, I was looking in the mirror in the on the airplane and just right there I saw two white hairs right on the front of my head there. And it just really struck me at that moment. Yeah, that is kind of a sad story. Yeah, I've never gone gray, though. I mean, I've still got I've got a tiny bit of salt sprinkled up there. But for the most part, I still got brown hair here. We ask how old you are of 50.
00:05:24
Speaker
Okay, yeah, but yeah, I mean, that's that's pretty normal. That's pretty. Yeah. Like I have, you know, like a pretty much full head of gray hair now, but I'm 111 years old. So that's. Yeah. I started losing my hair at 40.
00:05:39
Speaker
The worst thing that happened to me was actually with my goatee because I called it the soup stain, so I had a red beard except for this one patch underneath one corner of my mouth that was white. It looked like I constantly had spilled soup in myself.
00:05:58
Speaker
Oh, brother. So I'm
Exploring Babylon 5: Characters and Storyline
00:05:59
Speaker
guessing, uh, Mark, that you're, are you asking about the hair because of, uh, Londo and that's all I know about Babylon five is the crazy hair. Like I've seen pictures with Babylon five characters and that's all I go. I was like, that's like some crazy eighties level hair going on there. So I figured that was the right time to ask the hair question.
00:06:21
Speaker
So that obviously is what we're talking to Noah about today, Babylon 5. And so it has, did they, Londo's hair, it is Londo, right? Who has the crazy hair? Londo Malari, yeah. Yeah. Who plays that character, by the way?
00:06:34
Speaker
Peter Jurassic, I believe the actor's name is. A great performance. Did, did the hair put you off then, Mark? Is that what you've never seen the show? No, not at all. No. Um, no, it's weird if you, this is probably doubt what's going to happen, but it just hasn't happened yet. But there was a time period in the nineties when I just, I just wasn't watching television. Actually through the late eighties, I wasn't when I was at university, I really wasn't watching television.
00:06:59
Speaker
I didn't have cable and then undergrad living in Prague shut up. And yes, so I just never had a cable or ever had television. And then, you know, I got back to Canada and I was really busy.
00:07:12
Speaker
And again, I didn't really need it. So yeah, I just didn't watch television for probably at least 10 years. I mean, I'm aware of what happened and I've seen some of it, but all the Star Trek next generation stuff that kind of happened when I wasn't really watching television. So I've seen a lot of good TV. I did probably release a lot of good TV and Babylon five. This is apparently one of them.
00:07:36
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, Noah, you can, you can convert me and help me understand why I should go back and watch Babylon five.
Noah's Writing Journey and Bookstore Tales
00:07:44
Speaker
I will do my best. Okay. So before we do that, Noah, so what we do in this podcast is we ask our guests to introduce themselves to frame their own reality.
00:07:54
Speaker
Uh, so jeez, uh, let's see. Uh, well, I was born in Oshawa, Oshawa, Ontario, and I've never really forgiven it for that. Aside from that, I mean, I've traveled a bit. I bicycled across Canada back in 2000 from Victoria to St. John. After that, I moved to Japan with the woman who would eventually be my wife to teach English. And after three years, I didn't end up learning a single word of Japanese. Huh.
00:08:22
Speaker
Oh, boy. Something I'm trying to correct now with Duolingo. But then I was in England for about five years because I figured, you know what? It's like, you know how actors will they go to Hollywood because they want to make it big? You know, if you want to be an actor, you got to go where the action is. Well, there's two places that come to mind for writing that would be and that would be for publishing and that would be New York and London. So I figured, hey, if I'm in London, maybe I can get myself an agent.
00:08:48
Speaker
And the best I was able to do was work at a bookstore that was above a sex shop.
00:08:55
Speaker
Well, at least he had interesting neighbors. Indeed. To be perfectly honest, I think weirder people ended up going to the bookshop. I had to work in the sex store sometimes, you know, and the people down there were perfectly normal. But up in the bookstore, sometimes you get the really kind of like strange conspiracy theory type people lurking in the corners asking you for very like, you know, David Icky books and stuff like that.
00:09:20
Speaker
So were the bookstore and the sex shop owned by the same people? Yep, it was a chain actually. There's a whole bunch of them in London called Soho Original Books. Oh my God. I want to see the pitch deck for that business. This is before the death of DVDs, right? Downstairs it would be all DVDs and stuff like that. And then upstairs it was all bargain books and whatnot.
00:09:42
Speaker
I normally would be running up there I even did the ordering so I got to change the inventory around and make it my bookstore which was cool. Then every time the sale started going up there for some reason they shut the store down and move me to a different one. And did you order for the sex shop as well.
00:09:59
Speaker
No, different people work downstairs. I only sometimes went down there to cover them, you know, like if somebody was going on lunch or something like that. So if I have a question, was there like a beaded door and then the stairwell that led up to the bookstore and that's how you got to the like, it was the shameful thing was to go buy the books, not to visit the sex shop.
00:10:20
Speaker
sometimes admittedly sometimes you had people they would you knew you could spot them right away they would come in and they would do a like a casual oh yeah i'm browsing the bookstore walk around you know and then they would go to the stairs that led downstairs and just casually you know try to slip down without being noticed
00:10:37
Speaker
But honestly, most people would just, you know, there there's no there's no shame in it, really. I mean, honestly, we're all kind of like a little pent up about that sort of thing. And I think most people just they would just go straight down. I mean, where I worked in Kilburn, my coworker said he saw Stephen Fry come in and go straight down in there at one point. Don't know if it's true. I hope it is because I think that's awesome. It is odd, as I think others have pointed out, you know, that we can watch like the John Wick franchise.
00:11:07
Speaker
We have no trouble whatsoever. Well, maybe some trouble. I do have a bit of trouble with it, but a lot of people don't have any trouble watching John Wick murder hundreds, if not thousands of people in three or four movies. It sure seems like it. Yeah. That kind of violence and death and murder and whatnot is, I guess, okay, but watching the act of sex is not.
00:11:32
Speaker
God forbid you see a female presenting nipple. It is a strange kind of hypocrisy for sure. And there are a lot less uptight about it in England than they are in America and to a lesser extent Canada. Or maybe the same extent really.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny because I was imagining it was the reverse situation that the main entrance was through the sex shop and it was the bookstore that was the clandestine, secretive place that people were like, no one's watching, I'll dip into the bookstore now. It feels that way nowadays. So tell us about your writing, your books.
00:12:09
Speaker
Well, I've done a wide variety of genres. As I mentioned earlier, I mean, I mentioned I lived in Japan. Well, I wrote a book about a teacher in Japan at one point called The Professional Tourist. I've done, you know, like rom-coms and I even wrote a romance with her name's Lauren Smith, and she normally does Regency era romances. And she wanted to do a science fiction romance.
00:12:35
Speaker
and, you know, make a very sexy science fiction story. And she came to me with her first draft. And, I mean, I like the core idea of it, but the world building just sort of had this vibe to it that sort of felt like it was being made up as it went along. And so I asked her to give me her notes about the world building, and it was about three pages.
00:12:59
Speaker
And I turned that within a few weeks into about 30 pages. And it grew from there. And the reason I mention this is because I like the setting so much that I decided that, like, since we were co-authors on that book by the end, I decided I'm going to try setting my own science fiction stories within this same universe. And so I've got right now, I call it the Get
Self-Publishing and Marketing Challenges
00:13:22
Speaker
Lost saga. Right now it's consisting of two books, Lost Souls and Lost Cargo.
00:13:28
Speaker
And i'm working on the third book in the trilogy called lost lives. And yeah, it's all set from this same setting that started off as a science fiction romance setting. When do you know you'll be done when you when you write lost luggage? That could be that could be one of the little short stories. And how's the author book selling career going?
00:13:51
Speaker
Could be better. I mean, I'm a self-publisher. I have been published by a small press down in the States called Mundania. They're not around anymore, but I was published through there. When I was in England, I did have an agent for the book The Professional Tourist, but it never ended up finding a publisher.
00:14:12
Speaker
And just a couple of years ago, I decided, I mean, I was still trying and I just thought, you know what, forget it. I'm just going to try going the self-publishing route. It seems to be the way things are going right now. And so, yeah, I decided to do that and I'm learning a lot, but it is a bit of a struggle still trying to find your audience.
00:14:31
Speaker
So, and we will get to Babylon five soon because there's lots of talk about there, but I'm always interested in the, uh, in the author's journey. And, uh, so I want to ask you, okay, you're self published Mark and I we've been with the small publishers as well. And, uh, and currently do our own self publishing. Does it matter?
00:14:51
Speaker
It doesn't matter in the sense of, I mean, I'm getting the books out there to people, but it does matter in the sense of all of that weight is on me to get the books out to people. I have to be my own marketer and that's not an easy thing. It's really challenging, trying to get up a newsletter, trying to work up promotions, trying to do advertising.
00:15:15
Speaker
What works? What doesn't? All that stress is on you. And unfortunately, even with small presses, most of the time, all that stress is on you too. There's only so much small presses usually are able to do in that regard. At the very least, the one I worked with, most of the effort was put on me still. So it's like, well, if I'm going to be doing most of this work anyway, I might as well get more of the royalties.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah, precisely. Because I understand that's quite often the case with some larger publishers too, is that you don't, you still have to hustle. Yeah, you still have to hustle. I mean, it's only the darling sort of get the royal treatment. So trying to get to that point, that's the problem. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. One day we need to devote another entire maybe podcast series to that. But for now, onto Babylon five. So why did you want to talk to us about Babylon five?
Influence of Babylon 5 on Storytelling
00:16:08
Speaker
Well, the premise of your show is about works of art in whatever form of media that influences us as creative people. And when you first mentioned that, that was the very first thing that came to mind as to what had the most impact on me growing up.
00:16:26
Speaker
I mean, I grew up loving Star Trek, for example. As a little kid, back in the days when we had UHF and antennas and all that, I was picking up classic Kirk and Spock on UHF from Buffalo. That's how things started off for me.
00:16:43
Speaker
but i also knew that was the generation before i was picking up on something that was made for someone else not for me but in school that's when star trek the next generation first came out and you know like i knew that was being aimed at me and i was growing up with that and i enjoyed it but at the same time one of the problems i ended up having with television as a whole
00:17:04
Speaker
was the nature of syndication. I really had this problem with how shows were set up so that, and I learned later that it was done on purpose, that it didn't really matter what order you watched them in. Everything was meant to be stand alone because you wanted to get up to X number of episodes to hit syndication so that, you know, that's where the money was. And therefore it didn't matter what order stations necessarily showed things in, you know, like you'd always get what you wanted.
00:17:32
Speaker
at the same time that we're always single servings. And part of me wanted a longer story, wanted something that had consequences that carried on, carried forward.
00:17:42
Speaker
And then, lo and behold, this pilot comes out for a show called Babylon Five on a network that really shouldn't have existed. It was something called PTEN, and it was a desperate attempt to try and make a fifth network. You had ABC, CBC, CBS, and Fox, and there was somewhat, like, you know, the PTEN was trying to wedge themselves into that, and I think they were connected to Warner Brothers.
00:18:07
Speaker
But this pilot movie for Babylon 5 came out along with some other really bad science fiction things, something called Time Tracks that was a time travel science fiction and other stuff. I mean, the 90s was full of bad science fiction. But
00:18:23
Speaker
something about the pilot movie really stuck out to me and even though it wouldn't be for another year or two before the show actually got picked up and we would have a full season, I mean I watched that first pilot movie a half dozen times at least over the summer. Something about it really spoke to me because I could sense the possibilities that it was laying down for a long-term story. Yeah that's very cool because
00:18:50
Speaker
And that's so true because if you think about a lot of television that we grew up with, nobody ever really learns anything. They might learn something within the episode, but they've forgotten it by the start of the next episode. Hit the reset button. Yeah, it's like everyone's constantly resetting. Yeah, that's true. I remember consciously wondering about that and thinking about that with, I don't know if it was happy days or what it was that I was watching. And I'm like, yeah, why don't they remember what happened in the last episode?
00:19:19
Speaker
And so I know that Straczynski does that, and that's one of the groundbreaking things. Jim Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and main showrunner. But he wasn't the first one. Didn't it kind of originate with Hill Street Blues? I'm specifically thinking in terms of science fiction, of course. You said Hill Street Blues. I actually never watched that show. So it was the first for me.
00:19:41
Speaker
Oh wow, you guys both have some catching up to do. So you gotta watch Hill Street Blues and Mark has to watch Bible on 5. Both amazing televisions. So Hill Street Blues had like sort of a long-term arc to it? Oh yeah, yeah. Interesting. I just always assumed it was a police, law and order, police procedural type thing.
00:20:01
Speaker
No, it was a, it was a ground. Okay. So we're now talking about hill street blues for the rest of the night. Let's start with hill street blues. But yeah, no, it was one of the, one of the first two, uh, to have like the, the episodic memory. But I think where Straczynski, uh, really took it to the next level was hill street blues had the episodic memory, but Straczynski had the season long arcs.
00:20:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm and this and the series arc. I mean it was always planned that there would be five seasons I mean he was gonna be able to settle for four for various reasons But he planned it. He wanted it to be five and that thankfully eventually got the five seasons That's really cool. So that would have been 90
00:20:47
Speaker
like what, 94, 95 when the first season came out? I don't have the dates with me, but it was the early nineties. Yeah. So that's really pretty ahead of its time. Cause I don't think, was anyone else doing that at the time, Joe? I mean, I don't know. As far as I know, no other show had at that time had done something that had the idea of an arc where it would
00:21:12
Speaker
actually have a planned end to it because oftentimes, and it's still true often today, it's like, well, if the show's doing well, keep those seasons coming until everyone's sick of it. Yeah. One of the things I liked about Babylon 5 was that, I mean, as I was watching the first season, I sort of realized
00:21:32
Speaker
there was a strong Tolkien influence going on here. The show itself, I kind of started, now some of it's just superficial. I was just equating people like, oh, the Minbari are like the elves. And, you know, the Narn, they're kind of like the dwarves, even though they're tall, but they've got that dwarf vibe going about them. There was places like this,
00:21:54
Speaker
mysterious place that's overrun by evil called Zaha Doom, which is basically an anagram of Kaza Doom, which is the mines of Moria.
Tolkien's Influence on Babylon 5
00:22:04
Speaker
There was lots of little things in there and even just the idea of the overall arc because in Lord of the Rings,
00:22:10
Speaker
you have this story that is culminating, it's all about destroying the one ring. And it's a battle that can't be won through force of arms. The whole idea is they got to get this ring to the volcano, to Mount Doom, destroy it that way. That's what wins, not the idea of great armies. The great armies, if anything, are holding the line while that happens. And that's pretty much exactly what happens in the fourth season of Babylon 5.
00:22:38
Speaker
Likewise, the denouement of Lord of the Rings, the scouring of the Shire, is almost mirrored in Babylon 5 because after the main storyline regarding these great epic forces is resolved, there's still a matter of liberating Earth because Earth has sort of come under the fall of a
00:22:57
Speaker
dictatorship. And again, it's like it feels like the scouring of the Shire in that sense of how they have deliberated. So those ones are less superficial. Some of them are superficial, but I just as I was watching it saw so many tiny little comparisons to Lord of the Rings that just made me happy. And do you think that or do you know whether that was deliberate on Straczynski's prayer?
00:23:16
Speaker
I mean, the kazadoom, zahadoom thing, there's no way that was an accident. Even the way that if you look at the spellings of them, the way they were pacing it out, there's definitely homage there. But I don't think he was trying to make any kind of
00:23:31
Speaker
how to put it, Tolkien himself often said that he despised allegory in all of its forms. He preferred applicability when it came to the messages within stories. And I think Babylon 5, there's a lot of applicability to it in terms of comparing it to Lord of the Rings, but it's not meant to be an allegory for Lord of the Rings by any stretch.
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah. And maybe, because I know that very quickly, Shaczynski was writing all of the episodes. And he didn't write all of them in the entire series, but he did eventually write the lion's share of them. And so maybe it's possible because he had to come up with ideas so quickly that he had to have some kind of a template in his brain. And maybe that template was Lord of the Rings.
00:24:16
Speaker
I don't think so because when I mentioned before that he had a five-year arc planned, that is that he had it all written out. He didn't have the scripts written out, but he had right on his desk all of the story cards regarding all the points that would be hit along that five-year journey.
00:24:33
Speaker
Not only that, he had what he called trap doors for all the main characters because dealing with the reality of Hollywood television, you never know if you're going to be able to get the same actors the next season. Maybe someone gets a movie deal and he has to leave or something. So all of the main characters, he had reasons for them to leave and he had substitute characters ready to fill in for them.
00:24:56
Speaker
so he he may not have had the scripts written out all at once but he definitely had all the story beats written out at once so he planned that much of it right from the start so there there might have been a character called gulf dan that we just never got to see
00:25:13
Speaker
Well, there are these, there was in one episode, these people called techno mages, which they have like advanced technology and use that, but they, they hide it under the guise of magic. So it seems like magic, but it's actually technology. And yeah, that the main guy that led the techno mages gave me a bit of a Gandalf vibe. And there was a gray one or a blue one, a brown one.
00:25:36
Speaker
I still remember a classic line, one of the Techno mages omitted. I don't know it perfectly, but it was something along the lines of, I know 20 words that can make a person fall in love with me, and seven words that can make them fall out of love with me and feel no pain. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. Yeah, for Elric, I think that was the name of the Techno mage that said that. Yeah, that was a very cool bit. Yeah. People often asked this Drusinski what those words were.
00:26:04
Speaker
And does he have an answer?
00:26:07
Speaker
Um, I think he sort of hid a sort of answer in one of his replies to it. I don't recall right now, but it was more of just a matter that he was obfuscating direct honesty, making it seem mysterious when there is no mystery. Right. Yeah. Okay. This is where I have to reveal that, uh, I actually worked with, uh, Jim Michael Straczynski for, uh, several weeks back in, I want to say 2005. I think it was.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I asked him about those lines and I asked him about those words and he wouldn't tell me bastard. Probably because he has no answer. Well, I mean, I remember David Lynch talking about his movie Eraserhead and he said it was his most spiritual film and the interviewer said, can you elaborate on that? And he said, no.
00:26:59
Speaker
Watch the movie. You're missing the point, right? And I think that's kind of the thing is that having that mystery in there and you wondering what those words are is more of the point than actually, no answer could be satisfactory. Yeah. That is true. So Noah, can you, for the benefit of Mark and others who haven't seen the show, can you give a brief synopsis of the storyline?
Babylon 5 Political Setting and Dynamics
00:27:23
Speaker
Okay, so going from memory here, I'm not like a funny thing. Pretty much all of the history of Babylon five, when it was first being put out is still available on the same website. There's this website called midwinter.com that had recorded everything that, you know, as the shows were coming out, it was like a living memory, if you will.
00:27:47
Speaker
And if I wanted to, that would be a great place for me to pick up all the details here, but I don't have access to that right now. Anyway, Babylon 5 takes place, I believe, in the 24th or 25th century. You know, mankind's reached the stars and have found other major species out there.
00:28:05
Speaker
Very early on in our exploration, we started making a big name for ourselves being the new kid on the block and sort of taking on some big bad guys and punching them in the nose. Then we ended up finding these people called them in Bari and we kind of made a mistake with them and they almost wiped out all of humanity.
00:28:28
Speaker
So, yeah, they're like a thousand years ahead of us. They beat the crap out of us all the way back to Earth. They were on the verge of destroying all of mankind, and then they surrendered. Right on the cusp of when they were supposed to be wiping out the human race, they just dropped their arms and surrendered. And that's one of the big mysteries of the show. Why on Earth did the Mimbaris surrender right on the verge of their victory?
00:28:55
Speaker
This is one of those things when I was saying about the pilot, that mystery is mentioned in there and it's one of the things that made you realize, oh my God, they're going somewhere with this. There's a plan here. They're not just dropping that for no reason. So anyway, the show itself takes place 10 years after the Earth-Mimbari War.
00:29:17
Speaker
And it is about this place called Babylon 5, which is the fifth space station that they built to try and act as an intergalactic United Nations. The other ones either blew up or disappeared without a trace, which again laid down another mystery. I mean, the Babylon 4 just disappeared 24 hours after it became operational. No one knows what happened to it. So again, another mystery laid down in the pilot episode, what happened to it?
00:29:45
Speaker
So the premise basically is that rather than Star Trek, where the enterprise is going off to all these different distant worlds, finding new things that no one's ever seen before, here you've got one static place and everyone is coming to them. And you're dealing with intergalactic politics and people with ulterior motives and whatnot, having to get past that. The ambassadors on the show are often the most entertaining people in it because
00:30:14
Speaker
of how you're seeing them deal with each other and their own little kind of, I guess you could say, scheming going on. But all the characters in Babylon 5 are just really well-developed. I mean, they have their own arcs, they grow as people, and sometimes they fall from grace spectacularly. But you always want to see something, you know, them to climb back out of it. It's very good in that sense. But in the midst of all this, again, another mystery,
00:30:42
Speaker
within the first season, you find out that there is this other race that no one knows about lurking in the shadows, which just happens to be their names, and they end up
00:30:56
Speaker
making themselves known in the first season, but they don't really become a factor until the second season. And it sort of makes you realize that Babylon 5 is the focal point for a much larger conflict that is going on. I think that's one way that I could just sort of sum up the premise of it without trying to give the whole five seasons out.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think, okay, you're making your case, man. I'm intrigued. It definitely sounds very good. I really like the fact that like all of the characters have an arc and they're all well developed. So how did this affect your own work on your own writing?
00:31:32
Speaker
Well, for one thing, it comes down to consequences. I mean, I always liked books that would, the events of one story leads into the next leads into the next. And that's what I'm currently writing now with the get lost saga. I'm now trying to tie up the threads from the first two into that. And when I was younger, I watched more TV than I did read books.
00:31:54
Speaker
So it had more influence on me because it was like it was behaving like a book, but it was on television. And it made me think, oh, my God, this is possible. You can actually do this. I've often said that without Babylon 5, we probably never would have got Game of Thrones. Someone needed to be first to show the viability for something that isn't just episodic, but will actually, you know, give a complete and satisfying story.
00:32:23
Speaker
although how satisfying Game of Thrones ended up being is a matter of debate. Yeah, that's about the time that I started watching television again was sort of late 90s, early 2000s. And I think the first thing that I saw that made me really rethink this was Mad Men, because there was the same sort of character development over time. And there was an arc to the story. But then Breaking Bad, that was just that's what blew me away was was that that
00:32:49
Speaker
the arc of that, and that was clearly same as you said with Babylon 5. Gilligan obviously had got the arc planned before he started writing anything. Yeah, I just finished watching Breaking Bad, actually, the whole series, and apparently Jesse was not supposed to be a regular character. He was only supposed to be in the first few episodes. Really? Yeah, but he blew them away. He was such a great part of that show.
00:33:14
Speaker
I can't imagine the show without him. No, yeah, either. Yeah, either. Yeah. Okay.
CGI in Babylon 5 and Comparisons to The Expanse
00:33:19
Speaker
So, so Babylon five, does it hold up? Ooh, good question. You know, always but one.
00:33:26
Speaker
And that's the CGI. I mean, the CGI is watchable, it's not that bad, but it's definitely one of the weaker elements of it. They were trying to, as opposed to use models like Star Trek's Next Generation was in Deep Space 9 at the time.
00:33:44
Speaker
they were trying to do all of their special effects via computer and it's not bad or anything but the problem is especially now you can't help but look at it and go man i wish i wish this could get updated i wish somebody could just redo all the special effects but for various reasons it seems like that's not really viable.
00:34:05
Speaker
Yeah, and they were the first science fiction series to really use CGI to that extent, weren't they? To that extent, absolutely. There were others, I mean, even Star Trek did use CGI in some things, not for the main ships, but sometimes like as time went on, some other ships might have been done like that, or some creatures and whatnot. But yeah, Babylon 5 is the first one to sort of do it extensively.
00:34:32
Speaker
But the problem is that you see the mesh when you see the cgi meshing with the live action sometimes you just sort of takes you out of it a little bit but hey it's not old school doctor who bad. But you watch you watch star trek the original series.
00:34:51
Speaker
the enormous boulders and whatnot that, you know, that- Styrofoam? Yeah, the, the, the styrofoam, basically the jiggles when every time somebody walks in the set. And yet the story is compelling enough to move you past that, I think. Part of it is also though, that even though those props look fake, they are at the very, you do see them as real. I mean, that's always the problem with bad CGI is that it isn't just that it doesn't look right. It doesn't look real. You may recognize that boulder as being styrofoam,
00:35:20
Speaker
but at least it's physically there right gotcha yeah so how much okay as we're trying to sell mark on watching this show yeah you've lost me now on the on the cgi i gotta admit because bad you get past it it's just it is you did ask and you know that is the one thing if i had to complain about one thing that didn't hold up it would as well as the rest it would be that so just fast forward through all the the space fighting scenes where all the ships are fighting
00:35:48
Speaker
Honestly, no, you wouldn't want to. For one thing to CGI, not only does it get better over time, this was a show that tried to use, it was one of the first to try to use real physics in how ships behave in there. So it was really cool to be watching ships where, for example, the fighters that are called Star Furies, they'd be flying around one way. They would use their thrusters to then flip around and the momentum would still keep them flying backwards, but they'd be facing behind them to shoot, you know, like using
00:36:16
Speaker
physics to a tactical way really helped immerse you in the sense of the reality of it. I mean, some of the science in it is, or the science fiction is so advanced that it might as well be magic. You know, the Minbari have artificial gravity, for example, but then again, so does the enterprise. Yeah.
00:36:33
Speaker
But when you see the little things like zero G being handled correctly, that just always makes me feel warm. The only one, I mean, then you get the show, like the expanse. I love comparing the two shows, the Babylon five, the expanse, because if Babylon five is the Lord of the rings in science fiction, then the expanse is the game of thrones of science fiction. Yeah, I was going to ask the physics and logic even better in terms of how they handle space.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, because I'm really fascinated by how well they do that. I mean, I think that it's pretty well done. I'm not a physicist. So there's probably still little errors that you've made, they've made, but
00:37:13
Speaker
It also does the same thing in terms of characters, right? Like it's the characters have arcs and they develop and they don't forget what happened the week before. Yeah, it's great. Actually, you mentioned the physics things. In the first season of The Expanse, there was a bit where they're like clinging to the outside of a ship and one of them ends up letting go of a wrench when they were trying to repair something and it flies off. And after the fact, they realized that shouldn't have happened, right?
00:37:39
Speaker
You know, there's nothing to make it go flying back. It should have stayed exactly where it was. They're all going to the same event. But it added to the drama of the moment. But because of that, when they caught that mistake late, but because of that, they decided every season they worked that wrench back into a scene just as a kind of an homage to remind themselves about trying to do better, to not make those kind of mistakes. The wrench would show up again.
00:38:07
Speaker
Now, the CGI, was it not an issue in the 90s when the show was first out because the TV sets just weren't as good so you weren't seeing the mash? That certainly helped. What was it back then? 480p was what a CRT, a Catho Ray tube television set was typically using.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, like before HD, I guess you wouldn't see as much of a difference between those effects and say Star Trek Next Generation because of that lesser resolution, but it really does stand out more now.
00:38:39
Speaker
Right, yeah. I have been tempted to go back and watch Babylon 5. I saw the series premiere. I knew it was coming because I'd been reading J. Michael Straczynski and Writer's Digest. He had a column and he'd been talking about it. For some reason I was skeptical and I saw the pilot and I wasn't actually that impressed.
00:38:57
Speaker
So I didn't watch the series when it came out, but then a friend of mine at work said, you have to watch this. This is amazing. And he gave me all these VHS tapes with the series on it. And after watching two or three episodes, I was completely hooked and then watched it to the end because it was brilliant.
00:39:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, Straczynski was also one of the first people to sort of work social media in terms of getting his message out there before there even was a social media. I think he was using a thing called Usenet or something like that at the time, but basically message boards. He was using message boards at the time to try and engage with the potential fanbase, even before there was a show. He was trying to get people interested in the idea of it and getting them all worked up about it.
00:39:41
Speaker
And then when the show was going on, he would interact with them and talk to them about the show. And that's why the Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5, that thing from Midwinter still exists. That was one of the things that he ended up like sort of being interviewed on, if you will. But yeah, it's just sort of amazing that he sort of saw the importance of engaging directly with the fan base.
JMS and Early Internet Fan Engagement
00:40:05
Speaker
And when after the pilot episode happened, he was sort of working them to
00:40:11
Speaker
encourage Warner Brothers to get the first season paid. Yeah, he did so many things right. Yeah. And he was only in his 30s at the time. Just, yeah. Yeah.
00:40:21
Speaker
Mark? Yeah, I was going to say, I just, I just popped open the midwinter.com page and just to look at the guide. And if you want to see classic 1995 web design, bingo, we found a winner. It does not change. It does not age well. Looking on my. Yeah. It's like a time capsule. I'm glad you left it that way. It is a time capsule for that era. It is. And you know, and it's, you know, it loads fast. I'll give it that. Like there's.
00:40:48
Speaker
But it's like on my iMac screen, it does not age well. It does not look good. So Noah, do you have a favorite Babylon 5 episode? Let's see.
00:41:03
Speaker
Well, the finale, I mean, the finale makes me cry every time. Sleeping in Light, the very last episode that takes place 20 years after the series proper, that one's just so beautifully done. But now there's a lot of what JMS would himself call BAM episodes, like ones where various threads would sort of come together and just really hit you hard. You know, like for example, when
00:41:32
Speaker
So bad things are happening on earth. There's this dictator named Clark that has won the presidency by assassinating the like he was vice president. He assassinated the president and became president. But then so you have the earth turning into something very dark, if you will. And Babylon five decides to secede from the from the Earth Alliance at that time.
00:41:55
Speaker
And when that happens, Earth tries to come and take them back. And the Mimbari come to save the day. And that leads to one of the most iconic moments of the entire show. It just, you know, just gives you chills down your spine every time you see it happen. I can't really go into details. Otherwise, I'm just going to be quoting the show directly. Right. Well, I think you're doing a good job for the people who haven't seen it. You really haven't spoiled anything yet either. Like, I feel like I could just go watch the show and I'm not going to be
00:42:24
Speaker
I'm still going to be surprised. I hope not. I hope I'm not spoiling anything. No, no, and you're teasing it splendidly. You're teasing it really well, yeah. Good job. You obviously can mark it. If only I could do that for my own books. That's the problem, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:42:43
Speaker
Wow, okay, so apart from the series arc and the season-long arcs, and you know, and what Shrzezinski did well on social media and that sort of thing, what else makes Babylon 5 special and work so well?
00:42:59
Speaker
Well, the big thing is that it feels like a future that has been lived in.
Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek: Future Visions
00:43:05
Speaker
That was always how they describe Star Wars, for example. George Lucas wanted that world to feel lived in, as opposed to all the clean cut.
00:43:14
Speaker
sterile white is ship interiors and all that kind of stuff. You wanted to look like that. If you were in an X-wing, if you look down in the cockpit, you might find an empty beer can down there or something. That kind of a vibe. And I think Babylon 5 does something similar. It doesn't take the utopia approach of Star Trek. Everything looks functional. Everything looks plausible, real, and lived in. I mean, the uniforms have pockets. There you go. End of story. Unlike Star Trek.
00:43:43
Speaker
Uniforms, that's a logical thing to have, pockets. Is it your favorite science fiction series, television series?
00:43:52
Speaker
It was, for the longest time, it is now tied with the Expanse. The Expanse is easily also my favorite, but for completely different reasons. It's like the two occupy two different parts of the science fiction spectrum. The Expanse feels more gritty and realistic, and yet at the same time there is, despite the very dark themes that it goes into, there is a strong element of hope to it. I heard some people refer to the Expanse in terms of the genre of hope punk.
00:44:21
Speaker
which is sort of what meant to be the anathema of grimdark. Because sometimes, like, to me, Game of Thrones is more grimdark. It's just meant to be, yes, it's realistic, but it's also meant to just sort of beat down your expectations of positivity because it's like, nope, nope, we're bastards, we screw each other. And in the expanse, that's there, but there is always this sense of, but we could do better.
00:44:46
Speaker
And the main crew of the Rossonante live up to that. There is that realism, there is that sense of, yeah, you're just a cog in the machine and greater forces are you are at play and you can't always win, but we can do better. And Babylon 5 was great at doing that too. It wasn't a utopia. It's not Star Trek where there's no such thing as money. Nope, money is important. Greed still exists.
00:45:10
Speaker
But there is always this sense of we can do better. And that made it a very not just so I said it felt like a lived in universe, but it also made it feel like despite its flaws, it was one I would like to live in.
00:45:23
Speaker
Right and and i feel like a part of that spirit came from commander Sheridan which then begs the question to me uh do you have a favorite character from Babylon 5? Sheridan and Delenn's romance is definitely one of the high points of the show and you gotta love Sheridan's arc because he starts off very
00:45:42
Speaker
I won't say naive, because he's been through the ringer. He was a survivor of the Earth-Mimbari War, and he's been engaged in combat plenty of times, but when he takes over Babylon 5, he does have this kind of optimism to him.
00:45:57
Speaker
And JMS warned him to enjoy that while you can because he's going to put him through the ringer over the next few seasons. And he does. And while it does change who Sheridan is at the same time, it more, if anything, hardens
00:46:13
Speaker
the values that he did have before as to why they were important, you know, like that. So the optimism may not be there. He may be a bit harder and whatnot, but the goodness within him has remained, which is really important. It's just been crystallized as a result of what he's gone through.
00:46:29
Speaker
Huh. Wow. Yeah. Mark, is there anything else you need to know? No, it's a great way to motivate your characters. Like that's a great motivation for a character is like that we can do better. I mean, that's the expanse for sure. Like some of the main characters, there's definitely, that's what drives their decisions sometimes. Especially the lead character, I think. But yeah, no, I can't think of anything else to ask because I think you've convinced me
00:46:55
Speaker
If I can find it, I'll maybe watch it. Yeah, I would say Noah Chen, you have made an excellent case for Babylon 5. Oh, thank you very much. Anything else you care to add before we part ways?
00:47:10
Speaker
Well, no, not so much. I mean, I was just thinking in terms of my own writing and how it influenced it. And that was the balance of humor and seriousness. Because in my own writing, for the Get Lost saga, I have a hard time trying to explain to people about the role humor plays. Because it's not a comedy, but there is a lot of humor.
00:47:35
Speaker
And I guess you could say it's sort of like comparing Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, comparing that to Brendan Fraser's The Mummy. The Mummy is a much funnier, not quite as serious adventure, but at the same time, you wouldn't call it a comedy.
00:47:51
Speaker
So Babylon 5 manages to have a very strong sense of humor at times, especially like when it comes to Londo Malari and Jakar. There's things that happen in there are just hilarious, but you would in no way refer to this show as a comedy just because it knows when to have levity. And that definitely influenced my own writing in that sense because I got a strong sense of humor, but I'm not afraid to kill characters off.
00:48:16
Speaker
So if if we were to point to potential readers that one book to start with with your work what would it be. Probably lost souls that's the one i'm most proud of at the moment i mean i've got lots of books i'm proud of but at this moment what i'm doing with the get lost i got is really making me happy because of how everything's connecting and lost souls is the first in that series what i like about how i approach the humor in it is that.
00:48:44
Speaker
It comes from a point of not making the universe absurd, but pointing out the absurdities that already exist. I mean, it's like the real world in that sense. You can make a silly modern day universe, or you can look at how things actually are and realize, nope, it's already pretty darn absurd as it is.
00:49:05
Speaker
How do we satirize this? This is crazy. There's no need to, all we need to do is point out the reality from a certain point of view and it becomes absurd. Yes. I'm sorry, the genre of law souls is science fiction? Space opera, science fiction. Okay, cool. All right. Noah, thank you very much for joining our podcast, Recreative. Thank you for having me. Great job.
00:49:41
Speaker
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00:49:57
Speaker
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00:50:21
Speaker
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00:51:15
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Raynor and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney. Web design by Mark Raynor. Show notes in all episodes are available at recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney.donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.