So long Mira Furlan

Sad news space fans, Mira Furlan died yesterday. If you don' know who she was, she was on Lost, but I know her mainly from Babylon 5. The series, which went off the air in 1998, has lost seven of its cast members over the years. Seven, can you believe it? 

That's seriously like half the cast. Half.
Furlan is front row, second from the left.

The effects were on par with say,
clearance bin PlayStation 2 games.

Which, if you're not a fan, but are a huge nerd you should go watch it. In many ways it was ahead of its time, telling a long form, sophisticated story over five seasons. And in many other ways it was very much a product of its time, with so-so acting, wobbly sets, and CGI that's about as good as you'd expect on a syndicated television budget in the mid 90's. Which is to say not great, but it was sort of a soap opera for sci-fi fans and it was nice to dip into some off-brand Star Trek space malarky. 

"Was it though? Waaas iiiiiit?"

-J. Micheal Straczynski

Speaking of, the show was up against Star Trek: TNG and Deep Space Nine and had many, many surface similarities to the latter: namely a space captain who is put in charge of a numbered space station whose position at the mouth of a blue swirly portal makes it a galactic travel hub. The plots of both series revolve around shifting alliances between alien civilizations and space politics. And the series' leads are both humans who become major figures in an alien religion. Coincidence? Eh, maybe?

Babylon 5's aliens and space politics made
for an infinitely more plausible premise then
David Caradine as Chinese Kung-Fu master.

The story was that series creator J. Micheal Straczynski pitched his show to Paramount Studios in the late 80's only to have them turn him down and then produce Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a few years later. So yeah...ultimately, DS9 was great and holds up much better, but Babylon 5 was a scrappy underdog and I watched the shit out of it. More TV space opera was more TV space opera. Like, it was the 90's, what else was I going to do? Watch Kung-Fu: The Legend Continues? (pro tip: don't)

Wise and soft-spoken, but also badass,
which Furlan could seriously pull off.

Anyway, Furlan was always fantastic on the show as Delenn, a wise, soft-spoken alien from the Mimbari Federation whose light and not easily identifiable accent (ok, Yugoslavian, but unidentifiable to teenaged me) made her seem, you know, slightly not of this world. Her character was the moral center of the show and I get the sense that she played a similar role among her fellow actors. In convention appearances (around the 1h20m mark) and interviews, she was always gracious and a delight. 

Whoever's handling Mira Furlan's social media account posted something she said a few days before her death and it will wreck you:

Joe (Straczynski) was borrowing from Carl Sagan's line about
how the carbon in our bodies was once part of ancient stars and
that it will be again. See what I mean? Wreck you.