|
Timby posted:"Acting is really not there" is definitely the show's biggest problem (O'Hare, Jurasik and Katsula were really the only ones who ever stood out), but as KHS said, Furlan's ability to emote is better than most of her colleagues. Her biggest problem is having to deliver some really, really rough dialogue while still tripping over her accent. Yeah, that's true- I think if Delenn's dialogue was a bit more on point and punchy she probably would've been easier to watch. I thought Bill Mumy did a pretty good job, too, as well as the first actress for Na'toth.
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 20:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
It's really a shame that the three major alien races stayed so shallow throughout the series. I mean, you get a general impression how their society works, but it rarely goes into detail. Like, I would have loved to see how Centauri live outside the nobility actually looks or what Narn do when they don't hate on the Centauri. But the worst are probably the Minbari, who get a major story arc dedicated to them, and their society still feels incredible artificial. The Civil War, which got teased, but never really explained, has a resolution, which is that the Workers Caste gets more seats, something I didn't even know was something they wanted or that there was problem with that in Minbari society in the first place, because I don't think we actually get a pov character for that. And the whole faux Vulcan vibe is only really something I got from Deleen and Lenir, other Minbari always came a cross a lot less monk like in their behavior. Also, it always bugged me that the whole cast system doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, the Religious Caste apparently had the means to build an entire fleet of warships and the ability to command them, so the whole fighting/praying/building thing couldn't have been that strict.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:12
|
|
|
I wish the castes had been given names. "The Religious Caste" and "The Warrior Caste" just sound contrived and unrealistic. Like, you know that's not what they would call themselves. But if they had made-up names (modeled on, like, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas and so on) they could have had religious or militant or labor-focused characteristics but come across more like political factions.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:18
|
|
|
Timby posted:while still tripping over her accent. Isn't that her natural accent?
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:26
|
|
|
neongrey posted:Isn't that her natural accent? She didn't speak English before she started work on Babylon 5, IIRC.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:32
|
|
|
e X posted:I mean, the Religious Caste apparently had the means to build an entire fleet of warships and the ability to command them, so the whole fighting/praying/building thing couldn't have been that strict. I always viewed it as a leftover from the Unification. You've got two superpowers fighting and a mismash of everybody else. After Unification, the Warrior Caste got to keep their societal and religious structure in tact as did the Religious Caste, though the Warrior caste needed to pay lip service to the Religious Caste's creed while the Religious Caste needs to keep its military weaker than the Warrior Caste. This suggests that the Warrior Caste won but similar to the American South, the losing Religious Caste was able to frame itself as the "real" Minbari and gain a lot of soft power influence that way. People descended from the "third world" in this case, exist to serve the two (now at least theoretically) unified superpowers. Nobody cares what they believe because cultural and actual imperialism keeps them in check.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:43
|
|
|
Party Plane Jones posted:She didn't speak English before she started work on Babylon 5, IIRC. Yep. She had just emigrated from ... Yugoslavia, I think, like a month or two before she auditioned for Babylon 5; Straczynski cast her because he felt her difficulties with the language made her feel more "alien."
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2017 21:47
|
|
|
Timby posted:"Acting is really not there" is definitely the show's biggest problem (O'Hare, Jurasik and Katsula were really the only ones who ever stood out), but as KHS said, Furlan's ability to emote is better than most of her colleagues. Her biggest problem is having to deliver some really, really rough dialogue while still tripping over her accent. Yeah, a common repeated remark a friend and I had when I was watching B5 for the first time was Mira Furlan deserved career hazard pay for some of the dialogue she has, especially once she starts being pushed into the box of "Sheridan's love interest". It always struck me as a bit awkward the main human character could only fall in love with an alien who was altered to be half human. Sends a bit of a weird message.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 02:41
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:Yeah, a common repeated remark a friend and I had when I was watching B5 for the first time was Mira Furlan deserved career hazard pay for some of the dialogue she has, especially once she starts being pushed into the box of "Sheridan's love interest". In general, space opera Sci-fi is always really bad about those sorts of messages. It's something I pointed out in the Geeky Star Wars Questions megathread when I was re-reading the X-Wing series, one of the few series of SW books to even point out relationships across species boundaries are probably a common thing. There's this arc between a human X-Wing pilot (Gavin) and his bothan squadron wing-woman (Asyr). They hook up and become sort of 'the couple' of the series and a big deal is made about how something like that even works, what it means for their cultures, how people react, and so on. Then the author swerves at the last moment in the last book in the series, has Asyr mock-suicide herself and never tells Gavin that she survived for a really spurious reason. Gavin then goes on to marry a nice human woman who never shows up in any other material and Asyr, despite going on to start an underground revolution, never appears again. If you read inter-species as an analog to contemporary inter-racial politics, which is all it really amounts to in Star Wars, then the message there is 'bigots win' and 'you might have fun with a girl from another race, but grow up and marry a good, white woman'. It's messed up! For all the talk big sci-fi franchises do about how humans and aliens are exactly the same (because they're just stand-ins for contemporary ethnicities and associated issues, really) they have this weird thing which comes across as an aversion to race-mixing. "Yes, we're all the same and worthy of respect, but there's no way in Hell that my son is going to date one of those boneheads!" It feels like a very academic, clinical approach to equality, and it's the sort of thing seemingly espoused by every big sci-fi franchise (Star Trek, Mass Effect, for example). B5, at least, often pointed out how a lot of the aliens species were a lot weirder than they appeared (Centauri had tentacles, for example). You've got Sheridan/Delenn, of course, but I think G'Kar is the only other character who crosses that line. Of course, B5 was made in a different time and probably couldn't have gotten away with much more than it already did.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 03:08
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:
B5 tried really hard. They did not get a lot right, but they tried. They were calling out fascism before it was cool and trying to blend "good TV" with "Soap Opera" in a pioneering way. Premature anti-fascist is a thing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 03:14
|
|
|
It makes you wonder if they would have gotten away with the original idea of 'Delenn goes from male Minbari to female Human' and how that would have been received in the 90s.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 03:16
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:It makes you wonder if they would have gotten away with the original idea of 'Delenn goes from male Minbari to female Human' and how that would have been received in the 90s. IIRC they got as far as makeup tests for Mira before realizing the prosthetics would be ugly as sin and the voice effect technology wasn't there yet.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 03:31
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:Hell yeah. I commented on that in my recent watchthrough; running it in slow-motion and setting it in counterpoint to "No Hiding Place" being belted out by gospel singers was one of those "Yep, we've arrived in the modern era of TV drama" moments, akin to the Miami Vice "In the Air Tonight" scene. Telling the others not to injure Refa from the neck up so the body can be identified is a real "Are they actually doing this?!" moment. Also when the singer says "Jesus" we see a close-up of G'Kar. gourdcaptain posted:Yeah, a common repeated remark a friend and I had when I was watching B5 for the first time was Mira Furlan deserved career hazard pay for some of the dialogue she has, especially once she starts being pushed into the box of "Sheridan's love interest". Originally all the expository dialogue in 'War Without End' was going to be shared by Delenn and Draal, but his actor was unavailable so she had to deliver it all, though it seems like her character shouldn't even know some of it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 03:55
|
|
Luigi Thirty posted:IIRC they got as far as makeup tests for Mira before realizing the prosthetics would be ugly as sin and the voice effect technology wasn't there yet. She also hated it. I remember reading that she was really upset about wearing the make-up and having her voice altered, like she wasn't actually playing the role.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 04:02
|
|
|
I get the sense though that Delenn was going through some pretty heavy weeabooing for humanity before the shadow war gave her something bigger to focus on, and it definitely didn't help that she seemed to be romantically pursuing Sinclair, and then when he got replaced she just went and jumped his replacement's bones. (and through it all Lennier does that weird Nice Guy thing. How are minbari-minbari romances supposed to work?) I don't think any of the romantic relationships of the show really worked for me. There was still a lot of allusions to inter-species sex, but never any sort of "legitimate" relationships besides Delenn and Sheridan. In fact, there's not really that many alien romances in general. The Centauri are the only ones that they show having relationships (but man, how they do show it).
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 05:26
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I get the sense though that Delenn was going through some pretty heavy weeabooing for humanity before the shadow war gave her something bigger to focus on, and it definitely didn't help that she seemed to be romantically pursuing Sinclair, and then when he got replaced she just went and jumped his replacement's bones. (and through it all Lennier does that weird Nice Guy thing. How are minbari-minbari romances supposed to work?) I don't think any of the romantic relationships of the show really worked for me. I am pretty sure they showed G'kar banging centauris and wanting to bang humans.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 05:35
|
|
|
bobkatt013 posted:I am pretty sure they showed G'kar banging centauris and wanting to bang humans. It was mentioned in some season 1 episode (I forget which) that G'kar has a...fondness for human females
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 05:44
|
|
|
hangedman1984 posted:It was mentioned in some season 1 episode (I forget which) that G'kar has a...fondness for human females  and yeah. they also did that thing where G'Kar tries to get Talia to agree to a Narn human telepath breeding program, where its played ambiguously as to whether he thinks this will actually work, or if he just wants to have sex with her.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 06:23
|
|
|
I get that but that also seems . . . normal to me? I know plenty of people who are like "Oops, I only happen to date this particular race" which is somewhere between "mildly skeevy" and "legitimate preference" depending on how they present it. But when they "enrich their chances" by, for example, moving to a country/area where that is the dominant flavor* it gets real weird real fast . . . but so what? My first real impression of the woman who is now my wife was "I bet this chick would let me gently caress her in the rest room of this bar." Ignoble beginnings can lead to great things. So, she's got human-fever. So what? *In my experience this doesn't work proactively. For example, my buddy who loved loving asian women had a blast when he moved to Beijing. Two other friends of mine went to Japan because they wanted to find their perfect lover and instead found a deeper level of loneliness than they had in the States. In my mind these are extreme examples but there are plenty of other ones to fill in the trend line.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2017 07:10
|
|
|
We're nearing the end of season 4. The problem is, although he turns out to be evil, Edgars is right when he diagnoses the major problem with EarthGov: it's not Clark, it's PsiCorps. It's the deep state problem we have today with unelected bureaucrats holding much of the actual power, but can you imagine if the press, deep state, and the ostensible power holders were all unified?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 18:42
|
|
|
Edgars is right, but the way he goes about fixing it is very much reminiscent of blaming every Jew for the action of some supposed elite banking cartel.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 18:50
|
|
|
That's also the period where we get Sheridan using the modified telepaths as unwilling suicide bombers and kind of killed my like of his character from then on out. But my main investment in B5 is in the Centauri/Narn plot, where while there's all sorts of awful people (Londo a lot of the time, for one) its portrayed as such and not Hard Men Making Hard Decisions. Villains are still worse though. I'll acknowledge this might be a bit more arguable depending on your personal reading of the state of those telepaths, but I kind of had a viceral reaction to it. It's also weird to me how little Bester cares once he finds out Caroline wasn't used for it but he may just be more self-serving in his evil than I'd pegged him as. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Mar 7, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 18:53
|
|
|
Am I the only one who likes Boxleitner's acting? Sure, he doesn't have much range, but within his limited range he's pretty good.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:14
|
|
|
CountFosco posted:Am I the only one who likes Boxleitner's acting? Sure, he doesn't have much range, but within his limited range he's pretty good. Love the dude's acting. He can "send me straight to hell" any day!
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:18
|
|
|
Yeah, the series doesn't really have a good answer as to what to do about psychics. Clearly, nobody is comfortable with the what psychics can do, so they have to be regulated, but the psycorps are also a problem, and there's not...really...a viable alternative presented. Then there's the whole thing with eugenics where certain abilities literally can't be developed without selective breeding...it's all weird. The show also really suffers from not feeling free to build up a stock of secondary characters, so things very quickly start feeling empty on this station full of people when the main characters start splitting up. After Talia left, there's no more psychics on the station. Dr. Franklin treats all patients himself, but still somehow has time to act as part of the command staff. I keep expecting this Zack guy to get offed somehow, because I'm rewatching and have zero memory of him after the Night Watch.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:23
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:The show also really suffers from not feeling free to build up a stock of secondary characters, so things very quickly start feeling empty on this station full of people when the main characters start splitting up. After Talia left, there's no more psychics on the station. Dr. Franklin treats all patients himself, but still somehow has time to act as part of the command staff. They don't spend enough time building up secondary characters, but SlothfulCobra posted:I keep expecting this Zack guy to get offed somehow, because I'm rewatching and have zero memory of him after the Night Watch. one of the really major ones (Zach spoilers: becomes chief of security in S4, is the last person left on B5 before they blow it up in Sleeping in Light) you just don't remember anything about?
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:34
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:Edgars is right, but the way he goes about fixing it is very much reminiscent of blaming every Jew for the action of some supposed elite banking cartel. Hence why I called him evil. Sheridan's use of the telepaths is questionable at best, but it's not out of character for him. He is changed after going to Z'Ha'Dum, and not all for the better. Garibaldi, even with his own problems, is also right, to a degree.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:46
|
|
|
CountFosco posted:Am I the only one who likes Boxleitner's acting? Sure, he doesn't have much range, but within his limited range he's pretty good. Yeah, that's my feelings on Boxleitner. It does make his more morally questionable moments (like the one I mentioned above) kinda creepy for me because he didn't switch modes enough so it comes off like he only has that mode in-universe in an unsettling way. He's an improvement over O'Hare as Sinclair, who as a friend and I decided, always sounds like Leslie Nielsen in Airplane delivering the "I just want you to know we're all counting on you" line. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Mar 7, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:51
|
|
|
turn left hillary!! noo posted:Hence why I called him evil. Something you seldom see even now aside from a few prestige shows is the willingness to make the central characters and villains more complex and nuanced then good vs bad.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:54
|
|
|
pentyne posted:Something you seldom see even now aside from a few prestige shows is the willingness to make the central characters and villains more complex and nuanced then good vs bad. Yeah, if the show had treated Sheridan a bit more harshly on that I'd be fine, but Garabaldi's opposition is dismissed as mind control and Deconstruction of Falling Stars basically goes "Sheridan did nothing wrong and thinking so is wrong". It's probably my least favorite episode of B5. Also, it's hilarious Franklin folds quickly in the telepath case despite being massively stubborn on smaller ethical problems in the past.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 19:55
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:Yeah, if the show had treated Sheridan a bit more harshly on that I'd be fine, but Garabaldi's opposition is dismissed as mind control and Deconstruction of Falling Stars basically goes "Sheridan did nothing wrong and thinking so is wrong". It's probably my least favorite episode of B5. I think these are consequences of squishing the end of the Earth civil war arc into the end of season 4, some of the nuance and subtlety got lost. I mean when Franklin is talking with Lyta about it, and he's like, "but he's right, there's no other way," that's pretty blatantly a shortcut. Winifred Madgers fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 7, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
CountFosco posted:Am I the only one who likes Boxleitner's acting? Sure, he doesn't have much range, but within his limited range he's pretty good. He's fine when he's being the badass action hero captain or whatever, but he's awful in quieter moments. Much like Doyle was a poor man's Bruce Willis, Boxleitner has always come across to me as a poor man's Michael Douglas. If you want to give yourself cirrhosis of the liver, do a re-watch of the series starting with season 2 and take a drink every time Sheridan says, "nonononono." You'll be needing a liver transplant by War Without End.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 20:16
|
|
|
turn left hillary!! noo posted:I think these are consequences of squishing the end of the Earth civil war arc into the end of season 4, some of the nuance and subtlety got lost. Probably true, although they could have cut the telepath unethicality thing if they couldn't do it right. Also, I don't remember the full context because it's been a while, but when they announce the Interstellar Alliance, didn't Sheridan say he was elected president? By whom? They just announced it! Queue the friend and I who watched it around the same time calling Sheridan "President-for-Life" through season 5.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 20:21
|
|
|
Timby posted:He's fine when he's being the badass action hero captain or whatever, but he's awful in quieter moments. Much like Doyle was a poor man's Bruce Willis, Boxleitner has always come across to me as a poor man's Michael Douglas. "I just wanted to say... that I love you, Delenn." "Now get the hell out of my galaxy!  "
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 20:22
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:Also, I don't remember the full context because it's been a while, but when they announce the Interstellar Alliance, didn't Sheridan say he was elected president? By whom? They just announced it! Queue the friend and I who watched it around the same time calling Sheridan "President-for-Life" through season 5. I think they say the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, when it agreed to dissolve and form the Alliance, just basically named Sheridan president.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 20:27
|
|
|
Maybe he's better at VA but Boxlietner did some really good voice acting recently-ish in Spec Ops: The Line which was really, really far away from an action hero role. Spoiler I guess but the fact that his final scene still works with replacing the game's models with Team Fortress 2 models speaks to the strength of the performance (and the rigging of the TF2 models) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjdDyvGE8gE He also voiced Tron again in the Tron: Legacy animation and while that is definitely more of an action role it managed to fit in a fair bit of character work for him to do in a single season of 30 minute episodes where Tron wasn't even the main character. He probably got better since B5 of course.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2017 22:42
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:Yeah, if the show had treated Sheridan a bit more harshly on that I'd be fine, but Garabaldi's opposition is dismissed as mind control and Deconstruction of Falling Stars basically goes "Sheridan did nothing wrong and thinking so is wrong". It's probably my least favorite episode of B5. I'm not sure Deconstruction of Falling Stars actually does that, though. The episode filters Sheridan's achievements through the lens of a society that is looking for a way to 'justly' go to war with their neighbours; but particularly in the hologram scene, there's consistently more than a grain of truth to what is being said via the characters. The point of the episode, as far as I'm concerned, is that any society sufficiently removed from events can use them to further their own agenda. Sheridan did a whole bunch of stuff that makes a lot of sense to the viewers of the show and the people who were in/around B5 at the time, but as the show points out, very few people on Earth were aware of the Shadows/Vorlon war and the way that the propaganda shield evaporated when Sheridan If the average person on the street doesn't have an annotated autobiography for Sheridan going into detail about everything he did and why, I can easily imagine it being easy as gently caress to spin that he did it all because he hated humanity. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands of humans; those deaths wouldn't have happened if he hadn't intervened; I can't imagine the transition from police state to democracy being a smooth one, so add in a whole bunch of crimes. All because Sheridan listened to aliens. Not sure if that makes sense, I'm tired and slightly drunk.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2017 01:33
|
|
Kibayasu posted:Maybe he's better at VA but Boxlietner did some really good voice acting recently-ish in Spec Ops: The Line which was really, really far away from an action hero role. Spoiler I guess but the fact that his final scene still works with replacing the game's models with Team Fortress 2 models speaks to the strength of the performance (and the rigging of the TF2 models) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjdDyvGE8gE I don't think Boxleitner was ever a bad actor but he's also not great. I like him a lot. But a big draw of him is his voice, it's really quite cool and distinctive. So, it doesn't surprise me that he can do better VA work than straight acting. I had no idea he was in Spec Ops, I should play it!
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2017 01:55
|
|
|
CountFosco posted:Am I the only one who likes Boxleitner's acting? Sure, he doesn't have much range, but within his limited range he's pretty good. I love his acting. Everyone seemed kind of morose before he arrived, and then he shows up and he's clearly relishing it. He's not a great actor, but he's an enormous amount of fun and its really entertaining to see him.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2017 02:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
I think there's a very real problem with the show sometimes having Sorkin-y moments where the main characters have The Right Opinion while anyone opposing them is just a dumb idiot, and then mixing them in with moments wehere there's genuinely morally complex moments, and then not really making it clear when they're doing one or the other.
|
|
#
?
Mar 8, 2017 02:20
|
|