The wife and I have been going through Babylon 5 ever since our honeymoon (ever since Valentine’s Day of 2005, in fact), but we had only just begun Season 4 when she had to check into the hospital (on Halloween of 2005, as it happens) for three months of bed rest — three months that came to an end last February with the birth of our beautiful, adorable, and ever-so-cute twins.
Alas, finding time to watch the show since then has not been easy, and we only finished Season 4 a few weeks ago. But I was struck by this scene from near the end of that season, in which Garibaldi meets a man who tries to persuade him that the telepaths and the Psi Corps pose a threat to their society. At one point, he says:
How many people actually belonged to the Nazi party? The Communist party? The Jihad party? A very small number. But there were always plenty of other people who were happy to do the work for them, and others afraid enough to let it happen.
Like, wow. The IMDB says this episode, titled ‘The Exercise of Vital Powers’, originally aired June 2, 1997. And the producers could see, even then, that the next great existential conflict of our times — following the struggles against Fascism and Communism — would be the struggle against militant Islam. How did they know?
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