Beastro wrote: ↑Thu Aug 09, 2018 12:25 am
FaxModem1 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 31, 2018 6:29 pm
Probably because they're screwing the pooch with Mars. Just a few episodes/weeks ago, Mars was having open fighting/revolution. Looking like you can't control your own colonies might be viewed as weak, so they want to bring down the hammer and make it look like Earth isn't ripe for the taking.
It's one thing to take an axe to your neighbor in your back yard, it's another to do it in front of the whole neighborhood at a public event.
I mean, even people like the Nazi's put on their best face when the Red Cross inspected concentration camps precisely because they didn't want anyone to know how nasty they were, even if news of their behavior was slowly leaking out of Europe.
Imagine it more as a parent slapping their child around as opposed to their neighbor. That's how they view their colonies, who are supposed to be supporting the homeworld/homeland, either through political prestige, financial gain, or off-setting whatever burdens the homeland is experiencing. As an example of this, Babylon 5 itself experiences a huge wave of migration from Earth from people who are looking for work, find none, don't have enough money to go anywhere else, and become the station's homeless/lurkers, exploited by the nebulous elements of B5. Therefore getting rid of some of the unemployed on Earth.
In later seasons, Earth Central is doing what it can to squeeze every credit out of Babylon 5 as a significant national investment, by making it's command staff pay rent, opening up a gift shop, refurbishing it as a forward command post, etc.
With Mars, B5, and Proxima III(the three main colonies that split off later in the show), these were their big colonies, had no voice in the Senate, were increasingly pressed by the Earth government for some reason or another, put under a police state, and silencing those who dissented. The Earth Alliance was obviously tightening it's grip too tight, and the nations rebelled.
A historical comparison might be to the relationship between the British Empire and it's hold on the American colonies, which due to lack of representation in government and taxation, which was in reaction to a giant war between the British Empire and another sizable Empire neighbor(France).
The big question for me is why this was considered a bad thing by JMS, but the guy himself has his own anti-authority itch to scratch like his mentor Ellison did. My only big problem with the post-B5 setting is a lack of a Vorlon loyalist holdout faction that mirrors the Drakh and the Shadows other minions.
If you mean the huge arm up, it was to the point that Earth was losing civil liberties in the process and becoming a police state to the suffering of their populace, wherein Earth just has a civil war to overturn an authoritarian regime.
If you mean aping Shadow tech, the technology gained by the Shadows is rather exploitative of others. Drakh keepers mind control people. Shadow ships destroy someone's original personality to turn someone into their CPU. Not to mention the mental screaming it does whenever it passes another ship(which can't be healthy for the crew aboard). Such things do not speak well of the culture who uses the technology.
