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I just finished a two-year weekly watch of Babylon 5 (someone else was rewatching it so I jumped on board because I missed that one back in the day). Shit was pretty good in some ways, and definitely shows its age in others, and you could see how DS9 lifted some of its concept from it (even down to the highly entertaining antagonistic frenemy/bromance thing with Londo and G'Kar, though very different from Odo and Quark). DS9 was ahead of its time, B5 was of its time. DS9 wove in social issues to go with the political, B5 mostly kept it political. DS9 seemed to have a larger plan but seemed scattershot in how they got there, B5 was intricately planned and executed to the point where even extenuating backstage circumstances and cast changeover that changed the storyline felt like it was planned that way. The episodes where all those plot threads finally unraveled were pretty awesome. I think it could've been better if cut down from 22 episodes to 15ish but it's also the '90s so it's harder to hold that against it. Season 5 of B5 felt like a big waste of time though, I guess J. Michael Strackjasfkjasfasfjkaski had planned it to be 5 season but they didn't know if they were getting the 5th, so they wrapped up the major storylines in the 4th, got the 5th later and then kind of just set up a bunch of new adversaries and future storylines that we never got to see play out. And unlike DS9 where the characters maintained or increased their likeability over time, a decent amount of the main cast had become unlikeable through their actions (half the time it felt like if you weren't in the room with them knowing they had good intentions, you would look at just their actions and think they were the villains). A lot of B5 really reminded me of how Mass Effect's universe was set up. There's way too many coincidences for it to not have heavily influenced it. It's a 3.75/5 series, maybe a 4 discounting the 5th season.