4. Real Worlds, Real Issues
Another touchy subject tackled by Babylon 5 was that not everyone in the twenty-third century, despite what Kirk or Picard or Sisko might say or think, lives in luxury without a care, "working for our own betterment", as I think Jean-Luc once put it. Those who wish to make a new life on Babylon 5 came to the station using the last of their money, and when it was gone they had no way to get back home, even if there was something for them to return to. So with virtually no resources they are forced to live in "Downbelow", the station's equivalent of a slum or ghetto, where the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned and the just plain down-at-heel live and eke out an existence, many through petty crime. And what's painfully honest and pragmatic about this is that it's acknowledged with the understanding that there is nowhere else for these people. Babylon 5 (I think also Earth, certainly in Clark's time anyway) has no social security, so if you have no job nobody gives you money. Although the likes of Dr. Franklin practice free clinics in Downbelow, nobody does anything about the darker, seedier underbelly of Babylon 5. Garibaldi, the security chief, wants to send in teams to take out the criminal element, but as Sinclair points out to him, where would they put them? They can't send them home, and when he jokes about spacing them --- pushing them out an airlock --- Garibaldi's not-really-joking reply is a terse "Don't tempt me!" So Babylon 5 exists in a permanent flux of grey, shifting from light to dark, sometimes in the one episode. Two pivotal characters are the aforementioned G'Kar and Londo, who each undergo what has to be the most complete and profound reversal of ethics, outlook, belief and character over the course of the five seasons. When we meet G'Kar he is belligerent, out to advance the cause of his people and if possible to destroy the Centauri. Londo is a drunk and a gambler, fed up with his backwater post and not really interested in much of anything. By the end of the series both have undergone a cathartic and painful metamorphosis --- in two completely different ways --- which has changed each irrevocably. You find yourself marvelling at how one character could start out as pathetic and unimportant, comic relief almost, and end up being responsible for so many deaths, his name cursed across the galaxy, and yet, and yet... you feel some sympathy and pity for him, when you see how Londo has been used by forces far beyond his ken.