Similarities between Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
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The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series bore a number of close resemblances to the series Babylon 5:
- Both series premiered in 1993, and were set aboard space stations which were hubs of interstellar trade and politics.
- Both stations were located beside portals to distant places. (B5 guarded a hyperspace "jumpgate"; DS9 guarded the mouth of a wormhole.)
- The person in command of each station lost his wife when he confronted a powerful enemy.
- The commander of each station eventually became a religious figure, advised by enigmatic aliens who were regarded as spiritual beings.
- The second-in-command of each station was a woman with a hot temper who had lost a family member in a war.
- Central to each series were two alien races, one of which had until recently occupied and oppressed the home planet of the other. The oppressed race was a deeply religious one. The oppressors in both series were later manipulated by a mysterious alien race to achieve its goals; the plot of each series eventually centered around a war against the oppressors and those who manipulated them, wars which resulted (in the same war as with the manipulators in one case, in a subsequent conflict due to a force related to the previous manipulators in the second) in the devastations of the former-oppressors' homeworlds.
- Each series added a small, tough starship, each the first of its kind, during the third season: DS9's Defiant and B5's White Star.
- Each series includes a sinister organization working within the humans' government: DS9's Section 31 and B5's Psi Corps and Bureau 13.
- Each series had a male character named "Dukat" (though B5's is spelt "Dukhat") and each series had a female character named "Lyta" (although DS9's is spelt "Leeta").
Some Babylon 5 fans contend that DS9 plagiarized the premise and details of B5. They point out that Paramount Pictures, the studio which produced DS9, had been approached with the idea of producing B5 and had been given a copy of the series "bible" in 1988, several years before production on either series began. On the whole, most of the similarities are surface items only, especially as the two shows exhibited many significant differences between the series. It has been noted that the groundwork for the DS9 series (the Cardassians, the occupation of Bajor) was established in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
DS9 was the first Star Trek series to break with the traditional standalone-episode format and adopt serial storyline arcs across several episodes, a format central to the B5 series. There are allegations that it only adopted the arc format in the later seasons however its producers contend that the entire series was one long story arc.