Collaborating with a writing staff that includes veterans of the original Star Trek, Straczynski is tapping into the sort of thing hard-core science-fiction fans love: the careful delineation of an endlessly complicated, rigorously thought-out alternate world. Michael Straczynski (Murder, She Wrote) has worked out an elaborate back-story. That might be ascribed to the fact that scenes involving the requisite futuristic special-effects would be expensive, but I actually think it’s more by design that Babylon is a talky bore. As a result, there’s relatively little action. Londo and other freaky-looking types argue with, threaten, and scream at Sinclair as they jockey for status. Elsewhere.) We’re supposed to think of the space station as a small universe unto itself, overcrowded with competing races. (His even-more-gabby assistant, Vir, is played by Stephen Furst, who once had a good job, as earnest Dr. There is, for instance, the Centauri Republic’s Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik, from Hill Street Blues and Beverly Hills Buntz), who, in what one must suppose passes for wit in Babylon 5, is a jabbering loudmouth with a ridiculous fright-wig hairdo.

He is, in short, a bland fellow who must be surrounded by more colorful characters. Like all outer-space overseers on television, O’Hare takes his cues from Star Trek’s William Shatner-he’s a big, craggy log, virtually devoid of emotion but somehow conveying nobility and honesty. Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian (Hexed)). Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) and his second in command, Lieut. (The 23rd-century alien races all sound as if they took their names from 1950s doo-wop groups.) The earth contingent aboard this massive tub is led by Cmdr. Dark and claustrophobic, this new series is set in the year 2258 aboard a five-mile-long, 2.5 million-ton space station, the Babylon 5, which was conceived, a narrator tells us, as ”a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully.” Babylon 5 is basically the barroom segment of the first Star Wars movie expanded to a weekly hour, with scene after scene of nuttily costumed actors portraying extraterrestrial members of clans such as the Minbaris, the Narns, and the Vorlons.

Rarely has a television series been more aptly named: babylon 5 (Wednesdays, syndicated, 8-9 p.m.) is science fiction as nonstop babble, a riot of miscommunication between intergalactic cultures and creatures, some of them earthlings.

Babylon 5 vs star wars