If you were to watch the music video for the Flight of the Conchords song “Fashion is Danger,” from Season 2 of that series, you’ll notice that Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are, in fact, wearing uniforms worn by members of the Earthforce in the Babylon 5 universe. Technically, McKenzie is wearing an Earthforce uniform from the B5 spinoff Crusade, but Clement is straight-up wearing the regular Earthforce uniform worn by most of the main human characters on Babylon 5 until the middle of Season 3. But, in a pivotal episode which aired during the week of April 8, 1996, Babylon 5 had the cast shed their familiar Earthforce uniforms for new, sleeker uniforms, representing the new independence of the titular space station. Basically, Captain Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner) took off his Earthforce uniform in 1996, so Clement could put it on in 2009. But, either way, “Ceremonies of Light and Dark” proved that on Babylon 5, changing fashions wasn’t just dangerous; it was crucial for the show to move forward.
One of the most under-discussed aspects of Babylon 5 was just how good the show was at embodying space opera tropes and subverting those tropes at the same time. Like Star Trek, we’re given a group of space heroes in familiar roles: doctor, captain, first officer, security chief, etc. But nothing in the series really plays out the way anyone might have expected, and the episode just previous to “Ceremonies of Light and Dark,” “Severed Dreams,” took the show from a general Star Trek vibe to a Star Wars vibe. Granted, this is a pretty reductive way to describe two and a half seasons' worth of serialized storytelling and complex interplanetary developments, but it’s still worth asking the question: If a Star Trek show had featured characters who decided to break away from Starfleet and those characters were the main characters, what would they wear in the subsequent episodes? More to the point, are there other sci-fi series in which uniformed characters get radically different uniforms for a really symbolic, thematic, and plot-driven reason?
