s3e10: Severed Dreams

If you value your lives, be someplace else

We’re watching the pioneering 90s TV show Babylon 5. If you want to join us, hit subscribe then go to your account and turn on the Let’s Watch notifications.

This is a very, very good episode of Babylon 5.

The build-up of tension is expertly managed. It remembers to have character moments amidst the bombast. The visual effects are absurdly accomplished, even watching in 2025. The sheer ambition of the storytelling is nuts.

Much as I don’t tend to consider the Lord of the Rings as three separate books (or films), I find it hard to separate ‘Messages from the Earth’, ‘Point of No Return’ and ‘Severed Dreams’. They’re a tightly interlinked trilogy of episodes that tell a single epic story, starting with the inciting incident, moving through rapid escalation, and climaxing with a massive fight. Taken together, they could almost be a movie.

For my tastes in 2025, ‘Point of No Return’ is my favourite of the episodes, I think. But I’m also aware that it only works because of what surrounds it. It’s the balance of the three episodes in terms of scope and focus that makes them work so well together.

There are two specific aspects to ‘Severed Dreams’ I want to consider in more detail.

First, there’s the presence of the Mainstream Media™️ throughout. ISN has been an important background detail in Babylon 5 from the very beginning, with ISN journalists guest starring in several episodes. ‘And Now for a Word’ was all about news media. It fulfilled its purpose as a piece of world building, but in ‘Severed Dreams’ is suddenly thrust into the foreground.

The scene in which the producer interrupts the regular newsreader, holding a random mic he’s grabbed from somewhere, and the camera awkwardly pulls back to reveal the small studio set and the technicians off to the side, is a clever bit of sort-of-fourth-wall breaking. The horror of what ensues, with the producer desperately trying to reveal the truth before it’s too late, and the newsreader’s rising panic and fear, culminating in the live destruction of the studio itself…it’s chilling and awful.

You can imagine it happening in 2025, in certain countries, right? We’re not far off it being a possibility. How many journalists are sat on information, worried and fearing for themselves and their families, keeping quiet, hoping it’ll all blow over. At what point do they have nothing left to lose? How far do they have to be pushed until we see a meltdown on live TV?

Of all the scenes in the episode, this is the one that gets me every time. It’s terrifying to watch, because it’s so relatable.

It’s the bombing of Mars which is the real ‘point of no return’ here, which tips the conflict from being a ragtag fleet of ships under Hague’s command to full-blown civil war. The slow-then-sudden escalation feels very real.

The other aspect of ‘Severed Dreams’ that I wanted to note was how it tears up the entire formula for the show. At the time, in the mid-90s, it seemed like an impossible promise. Babylon 5 had always had consequences, from the very beginning, but none of them had affected the core concept: the United Nations in space, a diplomatic mission, Earth Alliance running the place and trying to solve problems.

Suddenly, that’s no longer the case. And the show will stick by it: there’s no reset here, no resolution in a couple of episodes’ time.

It’s jarring that the protagonists of the television show are no longer in the Earth Alliance. The EA is now the enemy. They were supposed to be the good guys. And instead they elected a power hungry president who has used executive orders to undermine institutions, and has spent years putting his own people in key positions so that there would be no possibility of effective resistance.

Some of the non-aligned worlds were considered unpredictable, sure. But the Earth Alliance? Everyone knew what it stood for, how it behaved, what its core values were.

Until, suddenly, it changed.

Nobody really knows it yet, but President Clark is already compromised. He’s been in bed with the Shadows for years. They engineered his rise to power. It seems crazy that Earth would choose to side with an alien force previously considered the enemy, until you realise just how far back the rot truly goes.

And, I mean, I don’t have to work too hard to get this metaphor going, right?

It’s all right there, in the text, in a show that was written and produced in the 1990s. The playbook is there. An instruction manual. To paraphrase from another scifi show, this has all happened before, and it will happen again.

Next up is ‘Ceremonies of Light and Dark’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

This is more the pay-off of previous build-up. The Earth civil war will of course bloom into open conflict in season 4, and we’re heading straight towards the Garibaldi situation, everything on Mars, and the eventual retaking of Earth and the formation of the Interstellar Alliance. None of that is visible here, though: all we have by the end of ‘Severed Dreams’ is an awful uncertainty.

What’s easier to miss is the Minbari stuff. Delenn breaking the council will have rippling ramifications all the way down the show. Earth is the focus here, but the Minbari are due for their own internal conflict soon enough.

There’s a reminder here that Draal exists on the planet below, although apparently only useful as a PA system. Still, it’s handy to have that reminder again as we head closer to ‘War Without End’.