Comparing god to a Narcissist.

[DeistPaladin]

I don't know about that. I dislike J. Michael Straczynski as a writer.

I'm not saying he's perfect. He really needed a primer on government types before he started naming his powers.

"Republic" means "no king" which also precludes an emperor. "Regime" is not a government type. "Alliance" denotes a confederation which, given Earth control of Mars, seems inappropriate. "League of Non Aligned Worlds" is an oxymoron. "Empire" means an autocrat who rules over more than his/her own people, which is inappropriate for the Vorlons who have minimal direct contact with any other race. That's my big beef with his work. I cringed every time they said "Narn Regime" or "Centauri Republic" etc.

And it all went to pot after season 4.

Still, I really enjoyed the political intrigue. The episodes followed a story arc and things changed over time, unlike with Star Trek where everything resets to 0 at the end of each episode. You could watch a season 1 TNG episode and then a season 6 and not have any trouble knowing what's going on in terms of continuity. The characters in B5 were also three dimensional in comparison. They would make mistakes and have to atone for them.

The future wasn't a pristine, Pollyanna vision either, as it is with Star Trek. Humans survive our current technological adolescence but we didn't become selfless angels either. There is still greed, still political corruption, still social injustice. In Star Trek, everything is clean, literally. The set looks immaculate and brightly lit. In B5, things are dirty, parts of the station aren't well lit, etc. In Star Trek, the only political corruption is hardly institutional but usually the work of one lone male white admiral. You occasionally got some political angst like with the episodes "Measure of a Man" or "The Drumhead", but mostly the episodes were about either some alien mind fuck or engineers solving engineering problems with techno-babble engineering.

TNG really got into a rut one season I remember. "Next on Star Trek, the Next Generation: Something is fucking with the crew members minds. Yes, just like the last six episodes. We've got the fish-eye lens out again. No, we're not putting it away."

And like the disciples following Jesus, no one seems to remember the last mind fuck or figure out protocols in how to deal with it. Neither does anyone remember how they reconfigured the warp coils to boost efficiency by 50% to overcome the something something tacheon emissions to tech the tech tech on the techno tech. Everything is reset to zero after each episode.

But I'm open to your criticism of B5. I've offered mine.