Question above. My only experience is with a handful of episodes from the original series. They were OK, but I'm not sure I want to watch the whole thing. It's a little too low budget for me. Can I just jump into the movies or one of the later series?
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I don't care if Straczynski had the idea for B5 first: DS9 was simply better. It had better writing, better acting and more believable characters. It explored themes that none of the other Star Trek series would ever touch, especially when it came to exposing the dark underbelly of the supposedly Utopian Federation, and it did so with a subtlety and a naturalness that B5 could never imitate.
Straczynski laid on his broader themes so thickly and oppressively that I always felt beaten down by them. He has no fialr for subtlety at all: even for 90s camp, that show was melodramatic, transparent and frankly pretty shallow. His dialogue was completely unrealistic and his characters were unrelatable as a result. Everyone in that show feels more like an archetype than a real human being. B5 simply wasn't very good.
I didn't say Babylon 5 was great, but rather that it's the cause of DS9 being a confused mess whereas B5 actually has a story.
Just look at the Babylon 5 plot synopsis vs Deep Space 9 -- the former tells a story, the latter is described as "plot elements" because it's a jumbled mess of nonsense.
Saying you like DS9 more than B5 is like saying you like Burger King better than McDonald's; they're both crap. Oh BK improved on crap, that's a real hot take.
I disagree about DS9. The discovery of the Gamma Quadrant Wormhole leads to a confrontation with a powerful, relentless enemy that's more technologically advanced than the Federation and leads to a years-long story arc that is pretty consistent, where fighting the war forces the DS9 crew and the Federation to question and reaffirm their commitment to the ideals that underpin their whole civilization and way of living. The whole Section 31 arc, the idea that Federation expansionism created more problems than it solved: a whole lot of that was explicitly anti-statist. Gene Roddenberry was too much of a pie-in-the-sky lefty futurist to have ever allowed that to go ahead while he was alive.
And even before that, the discovery of the wormhole and its connection to the Bajoran religion, the portrayal of the Bajorans as a hardened, jaded people recovering from a military occupation which they themselves fought to a stalemate with almost no help from the Federation, the constant assertion that their religion is the only thing holding them together: all of that is the opposite of woke. Even the portrayal of the Pa-Raiths as seeking to rule through corruption and subversion while the Prophets were the ones who largely expect you to solve your own problems was much more in tune with traditional Christianity than any leftist interpretation of it usually is.
That's a lot of words to say "Federation bad". Basically, a Picard-light version of Star Trek.
In fact one of the things people always cite is Sisko agreeing to let somebody go then killing them anyway 'for the greater good'... or something like that.
That's great if you like the Federation pulling people's eyes out as torture for fun. That kind of navel grazing introspection of the dark side happened because they couldn't "go where no man has gone before" since it's set in a fixed place with no story.
You sure like to read a lot of things that aren't there.