It really does come down to your tolerance for the nineties style of television. Today's audiences are used to stories that move with a very purposeful pacing, where everything that happens is interconnected with an ongoing story. Early Babylon 5 is more of the disconnected, episodic style, where we connect with a world for a moment to see a single slice of action within it. That's not everyone's cup of tea. But it's also not actually wrong or bad as a style of storytelling, just different. There's a lot to be said for stories being more expansive, more open, with more room for sidetracks and digressions. The "monster of the week" episode gives you room to explore the characters in situations that they might not otherwise find themselves in. It gives you a means to test the boundaries of the world.

Babylon 5 is, in it's best moments, actually a great example of doing this well. Episodes like Mind War are these self-contained little slices of story that still indicate or suggest really interesting things about the larger universe in which the story takes place. And those things can be important later, but they don't have to be.

The watch guides will have you skip most of the first season on the assumption that what you're really here for is a larger arc plot that will drive the story forward. B5 has one of those, but it doesn't really start to kick in until season 2. This was actually a pretty big change for the time. Television was supposed to be disconnected and episodic, because viewers wouldn't necessarily tune in for every episode. In fact, shows in syndication (repeats) were often shown out of order. The idea of a TV show having a chronology was something reserved for serials (hence the name serial; shows that had a specific, sequential, order to them).

A really telling detail is how TV shows used to be sold on tape. It was standard practice at the time to sell episode collections around a theme. Not "Here's episodes 1 to 4", but rather "Here's four episodes about Giles." B5 was, to the best of my knowledge, the first show to be sold in full season long collections with all of the episodes in order, something that later got adopted by Buffy The Vampire slayer and Star Trek. This is what I mean when I say that B5 was basically inventing most of modern television.

But yeah, as a show itself, when set against most TV of the time, it still stood out. There was some genuinely excellent casting (of the original line-up G'Kar and Londo are the obvious standouts) and a real desire to create television that felt cinematic; that used the craft of cinema in ways that most television did not. If you're cool with a very different structure than what we're used to today, and if you can appreciate it against the standards of what was normal at the time then yeah, there's a lot to love even in those early episodes.

It works, thanks!