Not a Smut Queen . . . A Smut Khaleesi

"Really, we're just good friends."

Welcome to our fair city. I hope that you enjoy your stay.

But it was just a metaphor to describe my annoyance at nostalgic fanservice about a single character and a single era for the last 15 years.

In fact, why the hell didn’t he experience the effects of segregation? That would’ve been powerful and it would’ve shown the Doctor. The fact that he’s vulnerable now and he can’t just waltz in and do whatever the hell he wants. Kind of like how in the witches episode in 13’s era where she was run over and ignored as a woman and had to deal with it and got frustrated. We never get a sense of that. We never get a sense of him struggling with something so that way the kids can see hey this is still a thing and this is what Black people have to go through. No the dot in the bubble doesn’t count because that happened at the end of the episode when it was discovered and we are never exposed to it ever again almost as if it’s just a one off like racism only happens in this one era and that’s the only era that matters. It’s hard to take it’s anti-racism message seriously when the a writer don’t take it seriously in historical eras it could lead to death.

We never get a sense of danger. In the engine in the story, I’m told he prefers to hang out Lagos. Mainly because the person writing it is a person of color and surprise surprise. They understand the struggle as opposed to a white guy who does not understand the struggle because because he’s never experienced that kind of struggle and refuses to listen to anybody else because he thinks he knows best when clearly he does not.

I mean for crying out loud Rosa and 13’s era. Yes I’m going to bring up 13 era because it’s clunky as it was it did get its social messaging right when they landed in the Mississippi era just before Rosa with a coordinated effort of the NAACP started protesting the segregated bus car. There was a sense of danger. Ryan had to be careful. The things that he casually did in the modern era were dangerous. You got the impression that if he walked a certain way then he would get more than just a scorn and being ostracized and could be arrested worse. You got that sense that it was dangerous. So much so they had to hide. They probably had to tone it down, but the fact of the mannerisms is that they acknowledged it. And they used it to teach a lesson and well RTD is not interested in that. And that really undercuts the fact that the Doctor is Black because his skin color shouldn’t matter but the fact that the matter is, he’s a time traveler, he’s going to travel in the past and it’s going to matter. It’s still matters in fact. I’m not seeing that he should be subjected to racial abuse everywhere he goes, but the fact that doesn’t matter is is that it needs to be knowledge it needs to be said otherwise it becomes superfluous and it just feels toothless.

And then there’s his obsession with white blondes. I don’t know what his obsession is, but he seems to portray them as the most awesome thing ever at the expense of anyone who is a person of color. You start with rose and Martha, and even before I got on Tumblr and got into the discussions, I am my family member who watched that series both of agreed that she was treated like absolute crap. And this isn’t a matter of “oh she got on the Internet so now she’s into social justice crap.” No. I noticed before I got on the Internet and got into the discourse. I didn’t like it and I loathed it.

And hearing the discourse from other people made me realize “hey I’m not alone other people saw it too, and they thought it was crap too.”

[ID: A digital drawing of Teor Pridesire and Kattigan Vale from Critical Role. They're standing together holding beer cans, Kattigan with his chin resting on Teor's shoulder and a hand on Teor's waist. They're both looking off to the right with unimpressed expressions as Kattigan asks "Do you know what the fuck they're all talking about?" and Teor responds "No." End description.]

One of the reasons I have such a persistent chip on my shoulder about Babylon 5 has very little to do with fandom tribalism and everything to do with how hard the television industry worked to kneecap it before it ever had a fair shot.

This was not a case of two similar shows accidentally arriving at the same time. This was a deliberate and coordinated attempt by Paramount to undermine a competing series that dared to exist outside their control.

J. Michael Straczynski pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount first. They sat on the series bible and the pilot script for over a year before finally passing. Only after the show was sold elsewhere did Paramount suddenly announce Deep Space Nine in the trades. Not only that, they rushed production so DS9 would hit the airwaves first, ensuring that Babylon 5 would look like a cheap knockoff to anyone paying half attention.

That was just the opening move.

Paramount then used its weight to pressure local stations not to carry Babylon 5. This was not competition. This was strongarming. In the syndicated television landscape of the 1990s, that kind of pressure could absolutely determine whether a show lived or died. Paramount knew that. They used it.

And this is not paranoia or JMS reading intent into coincidences after the fact. Walter Koenig had lunch with a Paramount executive long before either show aired. That executive openly described the strategy. Koenig relayed that conversation to Straczynski. Later, there was a lawsuit that was quietly settled out of court. Corporations do not settle lawsuits like that unless there is something they do not want examined in daylight. What often gets left out of this conversation is that this was not a case of two creative teams independently arriving at similar ideas. Paramount had access to the Babylon 5 series bible and pilot script. They did not just know the premise. They knew the structure, the ambitions, and the long term storytelling plan. So when elements that Babylon 5 was built around later surfaced in Deep Space Nine, it is not unreasonable to question how those ideas migrated. No one is claiming DS9 copied Babylon 5 wholesale. But it is impossible to ignore that one studio had early access to another creator’s roadmap, and that access came before DS9 was fully defined as a series.

You do not have to hate Deep Space Nine to acknowledge this history. I do not hate DS9. I like DS9. But pretending these shows were born into equal circumstances is historically dishonest.

What really gets under my skin is that Babylon 5 was not just another space show. It was doing something genuinely new. At a time when The Next Generation trained audiences to expect a reset button, where no matter what happened you knew the characters and their relationships would snap back into place by the end of the episode, Babylon 5 refused that safety net. It told a long form serialized story with planned arcs from beginning to end. Consequences actually mattered. Characters evolved and sometimes broke. Friends could become enemies and stay that way. Characters could die and stay dead. Moral ambiguity did not resolve itself neatly in the final act, and nothing was guaranteed to return to normal just because the credits rolled. It was not comfort television, where part of the appeal of The Next Generation was spending an hour with familiar characters and knowing everything would be basically fine when you left them.

It challenged the narrative space that Star Trek and Star Wars had dominated for decades. And instead of allowing that challenge to stand on its own merits, the established powers tried to crush it before audiences could make up their own minds.

So yes, when people casually dismiss Babylon 5 as a ripoff, or refuse to engage with it at all, or act as though it only exists in the shadow of Star Trek, it makes me angry. Not because I need my favorite show to be validated, but because the history is being rewritten to favor the winner with the bigger marketing budget and the louder megaphone.

Babylon 5 survived sabotage. It survived network indifference. It survived budget constraints that would have killed a lesser show. And it still changed television.

Takehiro Hira as Hiroshi Randa, Wyatt Russell as Lee Shaw & Mari Yamamoto as Keiko Miura/Randa MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS (2023 - ) 1.09 "Axis Mundi" | 2.03 "Secrets"