Back when I had my Cohost blog, I wrote a post about the Babylon 5 episode “Intersections in Real Time”. This is one of my favorite episodes of B5 and, in my opinion, some of B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski’s strongest writing ever. A total format shift and one of the only episodes to have no sequences on the titular space station, this episode has our hero, John Sheridan, imprisoned by Earth’s fascist government. Sheridan is tortured in the hopes that he will sign a false confession renouncing his beliefs and supporting EarthGov’s xenophobic platform. The episode is functionally a two-man play, a rhetorical war between Sheridan and the bland officious technician assigned to torture him.
The last time I wrote about this episode, I wrote about its most quotable climactic moment, in which John Sheridan insists that he can still win his war, even here, even alone, simply by never giving in to the demands of the state. I’m not going to repeat myself too thoroughly here – this is just set up for what I want to say now.
The torturer casts doubt on the idea that Sheridan’s faith in resistance to the evils of EarthGov will ever lead him to victory. Sheridan tells the torturer that he wins, “every time [he says] no.” Every refusal is a tiny revolution.
Foremost among J. Michael Straczynski’s works outside Babylon 5 is his autobiography, Becoming Superman. This is a book which I would genuinely recommend to almost anyone (over the age of, like, 13; it has some deeply disturbing scenes), whether or not they have any interest in science fiction television, comic books, or the screen arts. The core of the book is the terrifying abuse and misery which Straczynski undergoes as a child and the escape from it provided by his devotion to nerd standbys like Superman.
The insanity of Straczynski’s childhood is engineered and escalated by his father, a man of mindbogglingly low character who subjected his wife and children to an endless reign of terror. Straczynski’s father was a no-shit actual real life Nazi who helped do the Holocaust. That is the level of moral impoverishment we are discussing here.
Returning to B5 episodes like “Intersections in Real Time” after reading Becoming Superman, I saw so much of Straczynski’s personal story in the work. His firsthand experience with day-in, day-out torment. His desire to inoculate against fascism, thanks to a childhood spent imprisoned within it. His certainty that there is value in moral victory, even if that moral victory does not liberate you from your oppressor immediately.
There are other parts of Becoming Superman that I thought while rewatching the episode as well. Late in life/the book Straczynski is diagnosed as autistic, and so I pondered the ways in which embracing one’s abnormal subjectivity is another kind of resistance, one which must be constantly shored up against a world which says “But why can’t you be normal after all?” After Babylon 5, Straczynski collaborates with the Wachowskis, maybe the most prominent transgender film directors in Hollywood, to make work that highlights LGBTQ+ life. That’s not Straczynski’s personal experience, but by then he knows what it means to win just by living and still believing, and so I see how he and the Wachowskis might still be able to connect.
Death of the author is a major critical concept for a reason, and it is worth approaching work on its own merits and for the meanings you the interactor draw from it. It also helps you maintain a little distance from the creator, which is important in our current era of “hero-worship perpetually curdling into misconduct revelations”.
After reading Becoming Superman, though, I just can’t stop seeing the author in Babylon 5. Straczynski is the show in a very real way that’s hard to articulate. Later, if he gets busted for crimes, that’s going to make it suck a lot for us fans, but for now it’s a powerful relationship, a sharpening and a clarifying of what the show is for.
I recommend both Babylon 5 and Becoming Superman, not only for the chance to watch a great show and read a great book, but for the reminder that survival is a kind of bravery, one that is the first step towards achieving everything else we long for.