He summed up his vision with a simple rule: “No cute kids, no cute robots, ever.” And it would be more grounded, with a more realistic military structure, authentic physics, and a grim and gritty “Down Below” filled with unhoused residents. It would feature truly unique aliens, some of whom would be rendered using CGI. Actions would have consequences, whether for individual characters or for the arc as a whole. He envisioned a series about a space station that served as a crossroads between multiple alien empires, all of them with their own secrets and agendas. Clarke, and he borrowed liberally from all of them, even going so far as to name one of his villains after Alfred Bester. His influences included famed writers like Michael Moorcock and Arthur C. While Straczynski cut his teeth on ’80s cartoons like Masters of the Universe and The Real Ghostbusters, he was a literary sci-fi and fantasy fan. Most of all, he wondered why the reset button was hit every episode. He wondered why there was a kid on the bridge. He wondered why it didn’t have realistic space physics. And like so many other Star Trek fans, the show’s decisions tended to make him crazy. Straczynski, or JMS as he was known by fans, was a Star Trek fan. It was highly ambitious, and more to the point, the diametric opposite of Star Trek – the dominant sci-fi franchise of the time. He promised that fans would see “wheels within wheels,” and that “some of the established empires in the pilot will fall.” He said one character would undergo “a MAJOR change” that would send the show spinning on a very different axis. The picture he painted was of a grand war epic. To create a novel for TV that would span five years, for which the pilot is the opening chapter,” Stracynzki wrote of Babylon 5, his sweeping space opera that he had been working on since the mid-1980s. If anything, that was the point of the entire exercise.to tell a story. “There has always been a plan for a series to follow.
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