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Haraksha posted:Does anyone have the list of "essential S1 episodes" handy? I'm starting a rewatch and I want to cut the fat. Depends on what you mean by essential. For purely story arc, I would go with: 1, 8, 13, 18, 19, 20, and 22. Characters that are introduced come up in 3 (Adira), 5 (Catherine Sakai and Lennier), and 6 (Bester). Franklin comes in on episode 2 but I wouldn't wish Soul Hunter on anyone. 7 has some backstory on Londo and his wives, and other Centauri things. 21 introduces that alien energy transfer machine that comes up a few times later. I've been introducing a friend to the series with my own fan edit of season 1, and it seems to be going well so far. The only real complaint so far is that there's no real resolution to Catherine Sakai's story, or the "secret marriage" between Delenn and Sinclair. It's also frustrating to watch Babylon Squared with someone who knows you know the answers to all the questions. What a mindfuck that one is for newbies. e: I've seen season 1 far more times than anyone ever should The Big One fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jun 19, 2010 |
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Jun 19, 2010 19:07
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Viivac posted:I quite enjoy season 1. Perhaps I'm weird. I don't hate it; there's some really great early Londo and G'Kar moments, and Signs and Portents and Chrysalis are great too. I've just seen S1 far more often than I've seen the later S4 kick-rear end moments, unfortunately. But yeah, basically most reviews I've ever read of S1 admit that it's the weakest season. Axiem posted:Somewhere JMS is recorded as saying that was a red herring, and the ceremony really was just a rebirth ceremony or whatever. Nothing special. Didn't stop friends from being confused about whether or not two of the main characters were suddenly married! The reaction is pretty much "if they're not actually married, why put it in at all?" Especially since getting married to a Minbari is actually insanely complicated, as we learn later.
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Jun 19, 2010 23:28
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Doctor Zero posted:I scored volumes 3-12 of the script books off eBay! gently caress yes. I recently got vol. 15 off there, just waiting for it to ship. It will be glorious.
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Jun 23, 2010 05:33
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Got outbid by someone on the last two, unfortunately, but I'll have to just keep my eyes open for them in the future (unless someone here wants to sell theirs).
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Hard Clumping posted:I watched through all of Deep Space 9 recently, and I'd tell my big Trek nerd friend which episodes I was running through, and sometimes he'd go "Get ready for some AC-TING!" I thought, oh poo poo, this is gonna be good, but then the parts he were talking about came and went, and I was left thinking "this wasn't that bad" (most of the time) This place... great makers, this place... NO! I see death. Destruction. Fire. Babylon will fall, this place will be destroyed Fire. death. pain. fire, death, pain, no! NO! (faints) Signs and Portents is still a great episode, though
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Jun 24, 2010 03:02
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I was reading wikipedia for post-series information about the characters, and I found out a few things that might interest people: - A pdf linked directly from Ivanova's article about what happens to Marcus' body after all those years of cryogenic suspension, written by JMS. I thought it was an interesting read: http://www.mediafire.com/file/wvwyu4tb4nj - Sheridan is supposed to be a direct descendant from Civil War General Philip Sheridan, but I looked up his family tree and there are apparently no direct descendants after 1950ish. I thought it would be cool if some descendant today found out that trivia and realized he was the great-etc-grandfather of a ficticious character, but no luck 
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Jun 26, 2010 04:19
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I thought the situation was kind of like when the audience at a comedy show start laughing at the comedian before he/she even says anything funny. Like the expectation of comedy overrides the reality of it. Maybe Rebo and Zooty really are hilarious when they try to be. In other news, I've finally gotten my hands on script book vol. 15. It's autographed by JMS! The contents include: - B5 Original Treatment - "Writer's Bible" - Production Draft for "The Gathering" (the pilot) with handwritten notes - Alternate draft of "And the Sky Full of Stars" (1x08, when Sinclair is abducted into a virtual reality) - Infamous lost draft for Soul Hunter - Practical joke script featuring G'Kar and Londo as lovers - Memo describing the 5 year arc with Sinclair still present - Inventory of variances between the scripts and dvds I skipped straight to the 5 year arc bit. Everything up to the end of season 3ish is the same, but 4-5 go really off-course, and the spinoff was going to be completely different. One thing that was pointed out that I guess I either didn't notice or forgot was that Delenn and the Grey Council (the ones that didn't think it was an abomination) planned her change specifically so that she would have a child with Sinclair. I thought they said on the show that her change was simply to offset the Valen thing, and that getting with Sheridan (Sinclair) kind of just happened.
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Jun 28, 2010 23:40
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CommunistMojo posted:Specifics you drat tease. There's a really good write-up here: http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=53739 The only things I have to add at the moment is that it seems that G'Kar isn't a huge character in the later seasons; he leaves at the end of season 3 to help the Narn resistance and doesn't come back until season 5 to reveal Londo as the one working with the Shadows. I'm not sure that they were originally going to be begrudging friends at all, which I've always thought was one of the high points of their character development. And Babylon Squared wouldn't have been resolved until the spinoff, entirely dependent on the original series' success. I'd say what we got was a lot better than the stuff with their rapidly-aging child and massive Vorlon ships blowing up. It is surprising how much of Londo's character he did plan and follow through on. He even included the bit where Londo is saddened that he didn't see a religious figure like everyone else at the end of season 2.
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Jun 29, 2010 00:21
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The "everyone" bit and the Kosh reveal is one of the best of the whole series. And there is some information about how he looked as an angel in the original arc writeup, actually. The angel is supposed to not be "stereotypical" but have some alien aspects: larger eyes, menacing wings, and bronze skin. So if you thought the angel looked a little weird, it was because that was JMS' intention. e: I also looked at the beginning of the writer's bible. It's intended to be read by the writers coming in to do their episodes in season one, before JMS decided to just write all the episodes for the rest of the series. I thought this part was kind of funny: quote:If your story has a point of view, has something to say (without hammering it home like a ball peen hammer between the eyes), those we especially like. In other words, we won't do a "Racism Is Bad" or "Gays Are People Too," because if people haven't figured that out by now, one hour of television ain't gonna change that Guess the writers behind "TKO" and "The War Prayer" didn't get that memo  We're all alien........to each other.
The Big One fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jun 29, 2010 |
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Jun 29, 2010 02:15
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Doctor Zero posted:those races go "dawwwww, they look kind of like angels! A lot of conflict might have been avoided if only the Shadows looked like puppies 
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Jun 29, 2010 03:34
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bobkatt013 posted:Ya but then the puppy would tell you to kill your neighbor. So the Son of Sam was not crazy but just talking to a Shadow? Well the Vorlons got Jack the Ripper. I'd like to think the Vorlons and Shadows got bored after all their friends left and started picking up weird hobbies, like snatching up serial killers, creating religion, and messing with telepaths. Not for any ideological or political reasons, just pure boredom.
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Jun 29, 2010 08:35
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ashpanash posted:I definitely think it's interesting that people use Babylon 5 as a model for a television series that "knows where it is going in advance" in order to denigrate shows like X-files (deserving), BSG (less deserving) and Lost (even less deserving, if you exclude the whole sideways part) when it's pretty clear that the original Babylon 5 plan was radically different then what ended up on screen. For the better, as JMS has said. I don't think it's that Babylon 5 was a series that was "all planned out" that earns praise, but that JMS wasn't one of those showrunners struggling to produce new and even more exciting plot twists after blowing their creative wad on the first season. Heroes is a great example of that method of writing. Maybe I'm a bit of an apologist for B5, but I think if Crusade had continued as planned, there wouldn't have been a huge shortage on ideas that was painfully apparent in Heroes (and many other shows), even if it was radically different than Babylon Prime I would have definitely preferred if Delenn was the calculating bitch that the original treatment made her out to be, though. Taking advantage of Sinclair in his grief over his mind-raped fiance/wife(?) for the sole purpose of having his offspring, then abandoning him and their son to go back to the grey council? Way better than the self-righteous do-gooder we ended up with.
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Jul 5, 2010 10:14
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Riso posted:I say Delenn has the worst acting in the show. I try to skip any parts with her. Ironically one of the few actors from the show to do anything high-profile after Babylon 5. (Lost) deadguy posted:I'm watching B5 for the first time. Someone on page 1 said you could watch episodes 1, 8, 13, and so on from season 1. Somebody please tell me the acting gets better. It seems like an interesting show but the acting is terrible. Well, I wrote that list for someone who only wanted a refresher on the season. There's still important character fleshing that goes on in the other episodes, and really the only way to remember everyone's name and get a sense of who they are is to watch them on screen. I'd say if you want to rush through season one, that's cool, but once you once you watch season two to episode 9, if the show is something you want to really dig into, you should go back and watch the other episodes of season one. The Big One fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jul 7, 2010 |
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Jul 7, 2010 08:50
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Doctor Zero posted:I need an animated gif of B5 being scuttled. Help? The full sequence is almost 30 seconds long. The resulting gif would be much much larger than waffleimage's 1mb limit.
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Sep 24, 2010 17:51
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