Creator J. Michael Straczynski's ambitious and complex futuristic space opera charts five years in the lives of those aboard the five-mile-long space station of the title, where personal drama plays out against a tense political backdrop of looming war between bitter enemies the Centauri and the Narn.
I am in the middle of watching B5 for the fourth of fifth time, this time with my seven year old son, and having recently read much in the way of early epics all at once (Beowulf: A Verse Translation (Penguin Classics), The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (Penguin Classics), The Saga of the Volsungs (Penguin Classics), and the Mahabharata) as well as books on the epic format (Orality and Literacy (New Accents) and The Singer of Tales). Eventually I noticed that the format was not that of a … more