Babylon 5’s Most Underrated “Filler” Episode Is More Important Than You Think

The fact that Babylon 5 was a heavily serialized sci-fi series was groundbreaking in the 1990s, but, what often gets forgotten is that like other TV shows of the era, each season necessitated at least 20 episodes. And that meant certain big story arcs became very, very slow burns. Today, fans of different shows might complain about a “filler episode” in a nine-episode season, but in the ‘90s, shows like Babylon 5 were nothing but “filler episodes.” Which meant, secretly, they weren’t.

Because instead of waiting to reveal various plot turns in one or two big episodes, Babylon 5 silently planted massive pivots in several fairly innocuous episodes. And exactly 30 years ago, during the week of March 1, 1995, Babylon 5 dropped an underrated, nearly forgotten episode, that was, nonetheless, quietly changed the entire direction of the series.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The Babylon 5 Season 2 episode “Hunter, Prey” probably doesn’t make it onto anybody’s top 10 lists for the entire series. If you ask a hardcore B5 head to name their favorite episodes, you’ll likely get some Season 3 bangers like “War Without End” or “Z'ha'dum” or even the Season 4 almost finale “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.” In the pivotal Season 2, many would cite the chilling episode “Comes the Inquisitor,” or the big reveal in “The Fall of Night.” But “Hunter, Prey” probably wouldn’t even be in a top ten list for Season 2.

But it should be. At first, this episode seems like a standalone filler story. A rogue doctor is on the run and is looking for a way to get away from Earthforce. This is a pretty standard Babylon 5 plot: Fugitive looks to hide away on B5, but the crew of the station eventually starts to think the fugitive is a good guy and the people looking for the fugitive are bad guys. Early in “Hunter, Prey” Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) even jokes to Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) that this exact same kind of thing has happened before.

So, in a sense, what J. Michael Straczynski did with this (and many B5 episodes) is to use the formulaic nature of TV to his advantage. You think you might know what kind of story this is, but really, the story in the foreground isn’t what you should be paying attention to. It’s what’s happening on the side that matters.

Smartly, the episode begins with Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) and Ivanova (Claudia Christian) checking out Kosh’s mysterious, semi-alive spaceship. Sheridan complains that the Vorlon ambassador has been on the station for two years and nobody knows anything about him, or much about Vorlon tech. And so, the B-plot of the episode involves Sheridan trying to figure out Kosh’s whole deal, while the A-plot focuses on the doctor who is seeking refuge on the space station. In the short term, audiences would never really remember the doctor in question, Everett Jacobs, and that’s not because actor Tony Steedman did anything wrong.

The entire purpose of this fugitive-on-the-run story simply wasn’t memorable on its own, and, arguably that was by design. From Season 1 through the middle of Season 3, Babylon 5 gradually teased out the slightly more authoritarian government that was taking hold on Earth. The story of an ex-Presidential doctor running from authorities was simply one clue in a larger mystery, that mystery being: just how corrupt was President Clark, and did he really assassinate his predecessor, Luis Santiago?

Like Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings novels, President Clark is one of those characters who wields a great deal of importance in Babylon 5 though we barely ever see him. Rather, we hear about Clark’s machinations until things get so bad in the middle of Season 3, that the space station secedes from the Earth Alliance. But, back in Season 2, the heat on that simmering pot is just starting to get turned up.

But, more pivotally is the call-to-adventure moment between Sheridan and Kosh. In this episode, Sheridan kind of demands to know what the deal is with the Vorlons, and Kosh continues to answer him in riddles. Central to B5 is the war of two questions, “What do you want?” versus “Who are you?” In the B5 moral paradigm, the Shadows are obsessed with the first question, while the good guys, including the Vorlons and the Minbari, ask the second question. And it’s in this episode that Kosh pushes Sheridan away from the Shadow path, and onto what, we think, is the righteous path.

In a standard Campbellian Hero’s journey structure, the hero needs a wise mentor (Gandalf, Obi-Wan, et al.) but, generally, the hero also briefly resists the call to adventure. Here, Babylon 5 fiddles with that a bit because Sheridan is very much answering the call, but it’s Kosh, who, at first, is reluctant to bring him in on everything. Though Kosh is later described as the Merlin of the Babylon 5 characters, the truth is, he's much more like Yoda at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. Sheridan has to prove to him that he’s not like other people who would only focus on the “What do you want?” question, but instead, work on themselves.

If this all sounds like a science fiction therapy session, that assessment wouldn’t be wrong. The brilliance of Babylon 5 is that although the basic plots concern massive space empires and thousands of years of interstellar battles, the basic stories are somewhat small. “Hunter, Prey” might seem like a generic B5 episode, but because of its balance between the epic and the personal, it’s actually a perfect example of what makes the show so great, three decades later.

Babylon 5 streams on Prime Video.