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Vavrek posted:I believe so, just ... a year before the start of season 1. I remember setting time aside to watch The Gathering, and then waiting that drat year for the rest of the show to finally air.
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Nov 4, 2018 21:48
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The pilot seems to be missing from amazon, so I just started with the first episode and have kept up fine aside from a sense that there’s an extra thing or two I should understand about Kosh’s status or what others think of him. But I feel like anything about him that’s part of the original premise will be recapped when he starts becoming more important. The pilot is on Amazon, it's just at the very bottom of the list on the first season and is listed as Bonus: Babylon 5 The Gathering.
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Nov 4, 2018 22:22
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Vavrek posted:Question: By "pilot episode" do you mean Midnight on the Firing Line, the first episode of the first season, or The Gathering, the two-hour long pilot movie where all the alien characters' prosthetic foreheads are slightly different? I mean The Gathering. I actually liked the look of the Minbari in the pilot. Looked more imposing.
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Nov 4, 2018 22:26
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Pick posted:Man it bums me out when people rag on him, he's a great writer and made a great show I love a lot. I love Babylon 5 but his output since then has been really hit and miss, especially on the comics side. He tends to reuse the closed time loop a lot in different works, particularly in origin stories.
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Nov 4, 2018 22:32
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I wouldn't call Strazynsci a hack or a one hit wonder - he did yeoman's work on TV scripts for decades - but I do tend to think he had one great idea, B5, which he's been recycling or attempting to recapture since.
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Nov 4, 2018 22:37
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Pick posted:Man it bums me out when people rag on him, he's a great writer and made a great show I love a lot. I'm not ragging on him, but he has quirks and one specific one I noticed is pretending like nothing in B5 has any outside influences. At least that's what I gathered from reading along the JMS posts on the Lurker's Guide, he may have chilled out about it since.
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Nov 4, 2018 23:28
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hope and vaseline posted:I love Babylon 5 but his output since then has been really hit and miss, especially on the comics side. He tends to reuse the closed time loop a lot in different works, particularly in origin stories. Changeling is one of my favorite movies.
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Nov 4, 2018 23:59
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Narsham posted:During production it must have been frustrating. Either a sci-fi show is run by someone who has avoided fantasy and sci-fi (and often, their ignorance and contempt show through), or it's operated by a fan. We know JMS was the latter, so would expect a show to have lots of little in-references and influences all over the place. Something that must be remembered, and is hard to believe 30 years later when Supernatural has been running for almost half that time, is that when B5 was first pitched in 1987 no SF drama had ever survived more than three seasons on US TV and 98% of them didn't get past S2. The idea of making a five year space opera with narrative continuity in S1 which wouldn't pay off until S4 was widely considered insane, and not without justification. It's arguable that B5 could not have been made until 1992, when Trek TNG reached the five season mark and at least proved it possible.
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Nov 5, 2018 00:50
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm not ragging on him, but he has quirks and one specific one I noticed is pretending like nothing in B5 has any outside influences. At least that's what I gathered from reading along the JMS posts on the Lurker's Guide, he may have chilled out about it since. It was touched on, upthread, but there was a huge stigma associated with "being derivative," or even being an interpretation of another work, back then. So many films and shows were obvious rehashes of old stories, but that was hidden from or not told to General Audiences because they thought that meant it wasn't worth seeing. Now, both mediums are sloppy with remakes, re-imaginings, soft reboots, and near-parody to the point that audiences don't want to try anything new anymore. I think he may have taken a different tack in the current era, and if he's still on that "rawwr it was all original" kick, then it has to be a hold-over from the 90s because lol.
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Nov 5, 2018 00:51
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Well he's since mentioned having the sperg so a lot of his posting makes more sense now.
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Nov 5, 2018 00:56
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Vavrek posted:Question: By "pilot episode" do you mean Midnight on the Firing Line, the first episode of the first season, or The Gathering, the two-hour long pilot movie where all the alien characters' prosthetic foreheads are slightly different? You can absolutely skip The Gathering and start with Midnight on the Firing Line. There's maybe five minutes of content relevant to the series, and it all gets accounted for in season 1.
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Nov 5, 2018 01:28
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I do think it helps make season one look well produced in comparison.
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Nov 5, 2018 01:31
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Grand Fromage posted:I do think it helps make season one look well produced in comparison. Sure, but it's not a great litmus for the rest of the show when you're trying to get others into it.
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Nov 5, 2018 01:33
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I originally started watching the show on one of the gazillion reruns they had for the first three seasons while rights were being secured for the fourth in Israel. The first episode I saw was Divided Loyalties, from Season 2, which is hard to make full sense of without having seen the first season, and then I continued watching and it slowly drew me in. Knowing what the future would hold pulled me through the rougher first season when the rerun cycle went back there. So I would say, if someone has never seen the show, and you want to make a good case for it, just start them on a good set of concurrent episodes and then let them develop the desire to look back to see where certain plot points were set up.
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Nov 5, 2018 02:13
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Platonicsolid posted:I wouldn't call Strazynsci a hack or a one hit wonder - he did yeoman's work on TV scripts for decades - but I do tend to think he had one great idea, B5, which he's been recycling or attempting to recapture since. NINJA ASSASSIN not a ninja who is an assassin, mind AN ASSASSIN... OF NINJAS...
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Nov 5, 2018 02:48
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Neddy Seagoon posted:You can absolutely skip The Gathering and start with Midnight on the Firing Line. There's maybe five minutes of content relevant to the series, and it all gets accounted for in season 1. We've had this conversation before! It's all there, in the earlier pages of this thread. Besides, those five minutes are spread throughout The Gathering and my video editing skills are not sufficient to make some kind of cut-together "this is stuff that shows up later" recap vid. I'd be more likely to make a video of all the Significant Things that're never referenced again.
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Nov 5, 2018 05:27
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Platonicsolid posted:I wouldn't call Strazynsci a hack or a one hit wonder - he did yeoman's work on TV scripts for decades - but I do tend to think he had one great idea, B5, which he's been recycling or attempting to recapture since. How much of Sense8 was his conceptually vs the Wachowskis? Because I’d call that show about 80% fantastic.
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Nov 5, 2018 05:45
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Sure, but it's not a great litmus for the rest of the show when you're trying to get others into it. I thought it was great to watch halfway through the first season, when you are familiar enough with the show that you know what is going to be relevant and what doesn’t leave the pilot, but you aren’t so advanced in the plot yet that it feels like a regression.
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Nov 5, 2018 05:50
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Vavrek posted:We've had this conversation before! It's all there, in the earlier pages of this thread. Besides, The Gathering has all kinds of amazing, inane stuff that needs to be seen to be believed, like the 90s drugs PSA opener, hermaphrodite extra-pointy Delenn or the giant dustbuster PPG cannons. And you'd be amazed what a difference a year makes for the CGI quality, it will make you appreciate the graphics come season 1.
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Nov 5, 2018 06:01
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I’ve been making my way through half a dozen episodes of early season 2 this week and nothing really special has jumped out at me from any individual ones except for this dialogue, which is 100% a real exchange that occurs in canon: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Kosh.” “Kosh who?” “Gesundheit!” (Actually this whole episode is pretty good, I’m midway through it. Bester returns to the station to investigate the telepath underground railroad. All the Psi Corps episodes so far have been good ones.)
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Nov 5, 2018 06:56
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head58 posted:How much of Sense8 was his conceptually vs the Wachowskis? Because I’d call that show about 80% fantastic. If you read the script books JMS talks about wanting to do a series about what it would be like to be telepathic and in someone’s head all the time. That commentary predates Sense8 so I’m assuming a big chunk of the concept is JMS.
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Nov 5, 2018 16:44
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I like to think JMS contributed all the sci-fi and conspiracy plot aspects and the Wachowskis did all the interpersonal stuff as well as everything lgbt and the group orgies. God Sense8 is the most magnificent mess and in a better timeline it would have gotten 5 seasons but I'm happy with what we did get.
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Nov 5, 2018 16:48
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Got through a big chunk of season 2 in the last few days: S2E9, The Coming of Shadows - The Centauri emperor comes to visit. This had a heartbreaking moment when G'Kar tries to befriend Londo not knowing that he just called in a strike on the Narn colony. You can just see the tension and misery in their faces when things come to light. Really helped set the Narn in my sympathies. I thought I was doing an edgy hot take earlier when I said I favored them, but I'm really coming to believe it now. S2E10, Gropos - Franklin's father houses a bunch of troops on the station. Notable for the throwaway mention that Babylon 5 is getting a weapons upgrade. Huh, wonder if that will ever come into play. Also, at the end I was certain that the father was gonna die. I mean, no one says "we'll talk later when I come back" and actually comes back. And then when he was on the news in front of a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, I knew in my heart I was going to see someone die on "live" TV. Glad that didn't happen. S2E11, All Alone in the Night - Sheridan gets abducted and rescued; Delenn talks to the Grey Council. This felt mostly like a "connective tissue" episode, setting up some tension with the Earth and Minbari governments as well as bringing Kosh back in the spotlight. Felt mostly unremarkable otherwise. S2E12, Acts of Sacrifice - This episode hit hard. It made me mad. Just going to spoil the whole paragraph to make it easier. It opens with the Centauri obliterating a Narn outpost. Not the Shadows but the Centauri, actually getting their hands dirty. And while the episode later introduces some doubts about whether the outpost was purely a civilian target, the intro makes it clear that the defending Narn believe it is, and that they sacrifice themselves to let a ship of civilians escape. And then we see drunk Centauri assholes instigating a barfight, with station security slapping them on the wrist and hauling away the Narns they provoked. That whole situation is redone and escalated until people start dying, and all the while the humans and Minbari are all "there are many bad folks on both sides" about it and dancing around not providing aid in the larger conflict. And then there is the side plot of Ivanova dealing with the racist xenophobic ambassador, who only starts respecting her when he sees the underclass in Down Below being treated as a disposable labor pool and eugenics dumping ground. If both of those aren't just as relevant today as they were 20 years ago then I don't know what to say. The redeeming lightness of this episode, and what made me smile at the end, was Ivanova doing a When Harry Met Sally fake orgasm dance and all but fist-bumping the ambassador's servitor in recognition of him getting dunked on. S2E13, Hunter, Prey - EarthGov comes to the station to hunt a political fugitive. Also more reminders that Kosh and the Vorlons are mysterious. More connective tissue about ongoing Earth politics, but I liked this one a bit more than the last. Maybe I need to stop thinking of them as supporting episodes and re-orient my perspective on how another story is being told in the background? I feel like there's space for an entirely different spinoff series to be told about the Earth and Psi Corps plotline. In that story, Babylon 5 is just a footnote and references to it serve to tie the main plot together. S2E14, There All the Honor Lies - Sheridan gets jumped by a Minbari and defends himself physically and legally. Lennier has some good moments in this episode, I'm coming to like him. But the real star is the station merchandising B-plot, which has Ivanova making a jab at Star Trek: "We're not some deep space franchise! This station means something!" And when Londo complains about a figurine not being anatomically accurate she says, "Oh, so you feel you're being symbolically cast-- ...in a bad light?" She gets the best lines.  Not connected to any episode, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where the station exists physically. All the intros say "neutral space" and it's orbiting an unknown planet so it can't be too close to Earth. But there are several episodes where people imply it's a staging ground for Io, which would put it close to Jupiter. Maybe the presence of jump gates makes physical distance less relevant? Still kind of weird that there would be nothing else in-system. I know that it's probably just a case of the writers (or writer; was it 100% written by JMS?) wanting a recognizable planet to name-drop, but in a series that is otherwise pretty tight it feels like a weird oversight.
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Nov 7, 2018 17:33
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The station is in Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years from Earth. The area of the galaxy B5 takes place in is fairly small, hyperspace travel is FTL but not crazy fast like a lot of other scifi.
Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Nov 7, 2018 |
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Nov 7, 2018 17:39
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The station is orbiting Epsilon III, which implies at least another two planets in the system. The staging point off Io is a completely different location, which is in the Earth solar system
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Nov 7, 2018 17:45
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It seems like Io is where the solar system's jumpgate is. Makes sense you'd want to keep it at a distance for defense and because uh, they can explode.
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Nov 7, 2018 17:51
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Platonicsolid posted:I wouldn't call Strazynsci a hack or a one hit wonder - he did yeoman's work on TV scripts for decades - but I do tend to think he had one great idea, B5, which he's been recycling or attempting to recapture since. Lets not forget a little series staring LUKE PERRY! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_(TV_series)
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Nov 7, 2018 17:52
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wizzardstaff posted:The redeeming lightness of this episode, and what made me smile at the end, was Ivanova doing a When Harry Met Sally fake orgasm dance and all but fist-bumping the ambassador's servitor in recognition of him getting dunked on.[/spoiler] This is probably one of my favourite scenes in the whole series. Especially that bit at the end.
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Nov 7, 2018 17:53
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fist4jesus posted:Lets not forget a little series staring LUKE PERRY! Oh yeah...I remember that, but I haven't watched that since I was a teenager. I remember liking it, but is that youthful nostalgia or does it hold up? At this point it's just a hodge-podge of mish-mashed plots in my mind, because nearly every story beat of that show has been iterated/eaten up by other post-apocs since then... Okay...you've convinced me, I'm finally re-binging this. 
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Nov 7, 2018 17:57
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Grand Fromage posted:It seems like Io is where the solar system's jumpgate is. Makes sense you'd want to keep it at a distance for defense and because uh, they can explode. Exploding a jumpgate is not the smartest thing anyone ever did, though.
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Nov 7, 2018 19:04
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wizzardstaff posted:S2E12, Acts of Sacrifice - This episode hit hard. It made me mad. I believe JMS said something to the effect that he wanted episodes to provoke discussions or, if possible, fistfights.
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Nov 7, 2018 19:04
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Bieeanshee posted:This is probably one of my favourite scenes in the whole series. Especially that bit at the end. "What happens now?" "Old style, you roll over and fall asleep. New style, you go out for pizza and never come back." There's not enough in the galaxy.
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Nov 7, 2018 19:42
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Oh yeah...I remember that, but I haven't watched that since I was a teenager. I remember liking it, but is that youthful nostalgia or does it hold up? At this point it's just a hodge-podge of mish-mashed plots in my mind, because nearly every story beat of that show has been iterated/eaten up by other post-apocs since then... I've been rewatching the series on Amazon since the digital broadcast channel Comet started a rerun cycle and I couldn't catch every episode, he just passed where they are now. I believe they aired "GROPOS" yesterday. Grand Fromage posted:The station is in Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years from Earth. The area of the galaxy B5 takes place in is fairly small, hyperspace travel is FTL but not crazy fast like a lot of other scifi. I believe in the first season the Narn homeworld was stated to be 12 lightyears from Epsilon Eridani and B5 is implied to be approximately equidistant between the major powers so yeah, it's a small galaxy after all.
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Nov 8, 2018 00:35
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Then again there are other episodes that suggest the show takes place across the entire Milky Way. Like all TV scifi series, it's not entirely consistent about space geography, even with as much planning as there was behind B5. In general it leans much more to the small area of space side though.
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Nov 8, 2018 01:05
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There's a later S2 episode that establishes that hyperspace is very strange, and not shaped like realspace. Two points can be close in hyperspace but very far apart in realspace.
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Nov 8, 2018 01:23
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Grand Fromage posted:Then again there are other episodes that suggest the show takes place across the entire Milky Way. Like all TV scifi series, it's not entirely consistent about space geography, even with as much planning as there was behind B5. I think this is actually pretty consistent and a combination of two known quantities in the series. One is the jump gate beacons that allow hyperspace navigation; when someone finds a beacon from an ancient/undiscovered gate they essentially get a DS9-style wormhole to a previously inaccessible area of the galaxy, but unlike that show there isn't another FTL method to explore around after popping out of it. Those huge explorer ships then use those to expand the jumpgate network manually by surveying around distant gates and building more in the region. The second is political allegory; later in the series there's a lot of talk of "dividing up the galaxy" and such and to me it reads a lot like colonialism in the Age of Sail, or America making the Louisiana Purchase -- people broadly know where things are on a map and they can draw lines divvying up this or that territory in negotiations or war spoils, but whether anyone's actually been there and staked a defensible claim is another story. E: "DS9-style" is overstating it, probably a couple dozen lightyears beyond well-explored space at the most. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Nov 8, 2018 |
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Nov 8, 2018 02:33
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I mean it could work that the various planets are actually very widely dispersed throughout the galaxy and hyperspace makes it irrelevant but whenever they give a firm distance it's always very close together. There's a line at one point implying everything is within a 70 light year sphere.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:38
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Well if you're going to have a hyperspace dimension, you might as well make it weird and crazy instead of just normal space but fast. My favorite version of that is Star Control, where they totally mix around the galaxy into their own map.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:57
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Haha, the next episode after the ones I posted about is framed like a news broadcast, and they very clearly say it's at Epsilon Eridani in the intro. Guess I could have waited another 30 seconds. It was a good episode, lots of background info about Centauri and Narn history. And I am always a fan of gimmicky framing devices. The psi corps commercial about little Johnny was so cheerily sinister.
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Nov 8, 2018 02:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well if you're going to have a hyperspace dimension, you might as well make it weird and crazy instead of just normal space but fast. Yeah hyperspace is clearly more complex than just an x:1 compression of distance correlative to normal space, or else it'd be trivially easy to calculate routes through it and it wouldn't be so dangerous to travel without gates and beacons for reference. They talk about gravitational curves and other  stuff so there's some non-euclidian poo poo going on.And no matter how broadly the galaxy is settled, Londo chopping off an entire spiral arm for the Centauri on that holographic map was wildly optimistic, Shadow backing or not.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:07
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