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discoukulele posted:
JMS was involved in some cult-y subcultures in Southern California in the 1970s. He knows his mindfucks, messiah complexes, and reality bending. That experience informs several episodes of the show. David Gerrold also uses his cult experiences in his fiction, huge chunks of the Chtorr series are derived directly from real-world cults.
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Jan 4, 2022 09:33
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discoukulele posted:s04e22 – The Destruction of Falling Stars It's a great episode, but I've never liked the bit with the monks. Why do people writing primitive future societies always think it's just going to be a carbon copy of the middle ages? I'm sure they could have come up with something more interesting than monks and abbeys and repeating the 1300s verbatim. It just feels so lazy. Sweevo fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Jan 4, 2022 |
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Jan 4, 2022 12:08
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It's a quote of the extremely excellent Canticle for Liebowitz
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Jan 4, 2022 12:18
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Sweevo posted:It's a great episode, but I've never liked the bit with the monks. Why do people writing primitive future societies always think it's just going to be a carbon copy of the middle ages? I'm sure they could have come up with something more interesting than monks and abbeys and repeating the 1300s verbatim. It just feels so lazy. Keep in mind we don't truly know what the world is like outside of that one monastery. Yes, there's a low tech society and Rome is still influential in a religious sense, but of the two characters we see, one is intentionally doing the whole preserving ancient knowledge thing and grooming the other for the role. It's shorthand maybe, but for a what, eight or ten-minute segment in a hastily-written episode, I wouldn't expect anything more fully fleshed out.
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Jan 4, 2022 13:56
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If you start watching the show knowing that all five seasons were made, you're not getting the real 90s watch experience. There was a threat of cancellation every year, but the show was renewed the first three seasons because the execs at PTEN thought it could continue to grow the audience. When it came time to sign for season 5, they didn't have that confidence, so they declined to renew it. Fortunately, JMS was able to strike a deal with TNT to do the fifth season. This did have some pretty significant effect on the end of season 4, though. Basically, JMS had to choose between either filming what he'd originally planned and risking an incomplete series, or cutting some material so that the show could have a resolution of some kind. He chose the latter, and so we got what could've been a series finale at the end of season 4. If all of this hadn't happened, s4e18 would've been the season finale.
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Jan 4, 2022 15:15
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sebmojo posted:It's a quote of the extremely excellent Canticle for Liebowitz which reminds me that's been on my reading list for awhile
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Jan 4, 2022 16:30
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ultrafilter posted:If you start watching the show knowing that all five seasons were made, you're not getting the real 90s watch experience. There was a threat of cancellation every year, but the show was renewed the first three seasons because the execs at PTEN thought it could continue to grow the audience. When it came time to sign for season 5, they didn't have that confidence, so they declined to renew it. Fortunately, JMS was able to strike a deal with TNT to do the fifth season. That isn't quite correct. B5 was canceled after it's fourth season because the "network" (actually a first run syndication package) it ran on, PTEN, itself was folding up shop. PTEN had been formed in '93 as a joint venture between Warner and Chris-Craft (a boating manufacturing company that owned a bunch of non-network TV stations) but by '95 Warner was founding the WB and Chris-Craft was signing up with Paramount to help launch UPN. So when the renewal deal came up for PTEN in '97, Chris-Craft bailed out to focus on UPN instead and PTEN ceased to exist. Chris-Craft ended up losing $500m on UPN, went bankrupt in 2001, and CBS-Viacom picked over the corpse and bought the rights to UPN for a measly $5m, and eventually teamed up with Warner in 2006 to merge the husk of UPN with the WB into the CW we know today in 2006. Shoulda stuck with PTEN, Chris-Craft. Maybe you'd still be around if you'd kept playing the B5 card instead of letting Voyager destroy you. 
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Jan 4, 2022 17:34
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sebmojo posted:It's a quote of the extremely excellent Canticle for Liebowitz Untrue. JMS has very publicly never read that book, heard of that book and, if you ask him, will in fact deny the book exists. So, of course, it could never have influenced him.
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Jan 4, 2022 20:27
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jng2058 posted:The CW we know today in 2006. Which is, ironically, the network financing the remake. History may not repeat, but it rhymes.
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Jan 5, 2022 00:31
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sebmojo posted:It's a quote of the extremely excellent Canticle for Liebowitz Somewhat: jms posted:Interesting aside...for the last 6-8 months, I've been doing a fair amount of research into medieval England, especially the medieval church, for a play I'm writing (which may become a novel if I'm not careful). Dumped several hundred dollars on a massive order from Amazon.com back a few months ago to fill out what I needed. That was what tangentially led me into the post-Burn sequence in "Deconstruction." My brain has been full of monks for the last 8 months or so, and knowing the role they played in maintaining secular knowledge from about 500 AD and for some time thereafter, that seemed the perfect route to go that would also resonate with the look of the Rangers and the religious caste Minbari and the whole feel we were setting up.
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Jan 5, 2022 00:41
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Polaron posted:Which is, ironically, the network financing the remake. History may not repeat, but it rhymes. That's just a straight up rights issue. The B5 DVDs are published by Warner Home Media, and Warner still has the TV rights to the show, so of course they're going to air it on the network they've got 50% control of. It might have been nice if they'd gone the other possible distribution chain...through HBO, if only to get a sniff of those HBO stacks of cash rather than CW pocket change...but then we'd be looking at 8-10 episode seasons. 
jng2058 fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 00:57
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jng2058 posted:That's just a straight up rights issue. The B5 DVDs are published by Warner Home Media, and Warner still has the TV rights to the show, so of course they're going to air it on the network they've got 50% control of. It might have been nice if they'd gone the other possible distribution chain...through HBO, if only to get a sniff of those HBO stacks of cash rather than CW pocket change...but then we'd be looking at 8-10 episode seasons. :shrugs: B5 on HBO: More than just Londo's dick Jows fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 15:32
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CW makes a bunch of great shows on a shoestring budget, B5 will very much be at home there. HBO would drain it of all optimism and melodrama to make it "gritty" "realistic" and "grown up". We have enough shows with muted color palettes about hard men making hard choices against the forces of adversity.
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Jan 5, 2022 16:36
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jng2058 posted:That's just a straight up rights issue. The B5 DVDs are published by Warner Home Media, and Warner still has the TV rights to the show, so of course they're going to air it on the network they've got 50% control of. It might have been nice if they'd gone the other possible distribution chain...through HBO, if only to get a sniff of those HBO stacks of cash rather than CW pocket change...but then we'd be looking at 8-10 episode seasons. Jows posted:B5 on HBO: More than just Londo's dick Seriously.  Vitruvian Manic posted:CW makes a bunch of great shows on a shoestring budget, B5 will very much be at home there. HBO would drain it of all optimism and melodrama to make it "gritty" "realistic" and "grown up". We have enough shows with muted color palettes about hard men making hard choices against the forces of adversity. I think I agree, but I'm moving why to the other thread... Discussion continued on the regular B5 Thread here so I can be more specific.
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Jan 5, 2022 17:04
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Yes please, let's move back to this being a clean room for new watch friends 
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Jan 5, 2022 19:41
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I've been really surprised by the CW's quality recently. I actually really dug the 100 (for all of it's quirks) so I'm interested to see what they do. Watchin In The Beginning with my friend right now (who also just finished season 4) and it owns so far.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:09
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I've never watched anything on the CW but I'm sure JMS would not have agreed to do a B5 reboot if he wasn't happy with the level of creative control. He's been through enough fights with networks and isn't hurting for work so bad he'd just take any offer.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:22
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I'm just loling at the fact that they're aging everyone down by giving them dorky hair. And I'm also really happy that we get an Ivanovna cameo.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:27
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I'll have more thoughts later, but yeah, In The Beginning owned. I loved the extra context about Sinclair's capture and why exactly the Minbari surrendered. The ending (with Londo facing death) killed me. Especially his line to the Centauri woman where he's like (paraphrasing) "I wish I could walk with you on the beach for five minutes. I never thought I would want something so simple in the end." On to Thirdspace!
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Jan 6, 2022 04:34
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So we're watching Thirdspace and my friend asked a question about Mira Furlon so I looked up her Wikipedia and I didn't know that she just died last year. drat 
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Jan 6, 2022 04:53
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discoukulele posted:So we're watching Thirdspace and my friend asked a question about Mira Furlon so I looked up her Wikipedia and I didn't know that she just died last year. drat Yeah, it kind of came out of nowhere and surprised everybody a few months ago.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:54
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discoukulele posted:So we're watching Thirdspace and my friend asked a question about Mira Furlon so I looked up her Wikipedia and I didn't know that she just died last year. drat A full half of the cast is gone.
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Jan 6, 2022 05:48
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Chevy Slyme posted:A full half of the cast is gone. Well drat
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Jan 7, 2022 05:03
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Jumbled thoughts about the two movies (I wasn't actively taking notes) In The Beginning Loved it. One of the best B5 experiences so far. I loved the way that it gave us some missing context for major plot points (more details about Sinclair's Minbari encounter, Sheridan's war hero moment, Delenn's plot to end the war, etc.). My only complaint is that there were a few things that didn't feel like they gelled with the series so far, specifically with characters evidently interacting in the past but having no apparent history together in the show. I'm thinking specifically of G'Kar, Franklin, and Sheridan going on their diplomatic mission together, and Delenn interacting with Ulkesh. As far as I can tell, none of that was even hinted at by the series until then. It's not a big deal, but it did stand out. And like I said, I loved Londo's moments a lot. I love that this series continues to add context to scenes that you've already seen before, and that was one of the best. Thirdspace I thought this was a whole lot of fun, and so did my friend (he's seen the series before, but not all of the movies, so this was new for him). Both of us are fans of sci-fi horror, and I'm a big Lovecraft nerd, so we ate it up. I was really missing the horror elements from B5; they kinda vanished from the series after a couple of seasons. I also loved the extra information about Lyta's journey to Vorlon space, as well as Zack's elevator scene with her. My only real quibble with it was the ending - so, half of the people on B5 have no memory of any of this (fair), but the other half who weren't ensorcelled witnessed some major, widespread disaster and destruction within the station, but everyone just acts like none of this ever happened going forward? Kinda similar to my complaint about In The Beginning. But, I get that both movies happened during the move to TNT and so they're a little bit apocryphal, so whatever. In the end, Thirdspace was a lot of schlocky B-movie antics and I was absolutely here for it. So yeah, I thought they were both great in different ways and I had a lot of fun with them. I also loved getting to see some Ivanova cameos in both movies after her departure at the end of S4. On to season 5, hell yeah let's go
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Jan 7, 2022 05:17
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discoukulele posted:So we're watching Thirdspace and my friend asked a question about Mira Furlon so I looked up her Wikipedia and I didn't know that she just died last year. drat West Nile virus, of all things
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Jan 7, 2022 05:42
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Erulisse posted:^ Also, DS9 is all about promenade (the ring itself that appears to be what, ~500m dia tops?) whereas B5 entire inside surface appear to be inhabited, that is apparent from a few shots. The "inside surface" is mostly parks and stuff like that. Most people live between it and the outer wall, which is 40 stories tall and is mostly living space and offices and the like. B5 is a skyscraper that is ~1.25x8km wide that has a nice rooftop garden, that has then been bent into hollow cylinder and had the ends closed off.
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Jan 7, 2022 11:31
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discoukulele posted:In The Beginning I've always felt exactly the same. Those characters are basically there just because they are main characters and the writer/studio decided they had to be included somehow, and it makes no sense story wise - particularly for G'Kar. Sweevo fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Jan 7, 2022 |
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Jan 7, 2022 11:46
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discoukulele posted:Jumbled thoughts about the two movies (I wasn't actively taking notes) I always justify that by them being younger and all aliens looking the same to them. The humans together doesn't not work even if it isn't totally perfect. All narns are just G' this or Ja' that.
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Jan 8, 2022 00:25
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Sweevo posted:I've always felt exactly the same. Those characters are basically there just because they are main characters and the writer/studio decided they had to be included somehow, and it makes no sense story wise - particularly for G'Kar. Londo's also the one telling the story and probably inserted people he knew to make things more interesting
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Jan 8, 2022 02:24
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Polaron posted:Londo's also the one telling the story and probably inserted people he knew to make things more interesting I hadn't thought of that but it makes a lot of sense.
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Jan 8, 2022 02:30
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Polaron posted:Londo's also the one telling the story and probably inserted people he knew to make things more interesting Oh yeah, I like that.
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Jan 8, 2022 02:56
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The Zack and Lyta Elevator scene in Thirdspace is hilarious when you consider how it came about
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Jan 8, 2022 04:38
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oh my god that's amazing lmao
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Jan 10, 2022 03:26
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s05e01 – No Compromises
s05e02 – The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari
s05e03 – The Paragon of Animals
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Jan 10, 2022 03:27
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s01e19-20 - A Voice in the Wilderness, Parts I and II This is going to be really brief since I saw these two episodes in pieces over the last few weeks and didn't have a chance to do my usual "record my thoughts during or right after watching" thing.
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Jan 11, 2022 01:44
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Powered Descent posted:
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Jan 11, 2022 07:36
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s01e21 - Babylon Squared
2001:  B5:  If that IS the exact same suit, it's still in drat good shape considering it'd be around 25 years old at the time this episode was made.
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Jan 11, 2022 17:52
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(See below.)
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Re: space suits, It was a leftover from the 80's 2010 film as that's what they got from the props company
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Jan 11, 2022 18:05
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Re: space suits, It was a leftover from the 80's 2010 film as that's what they got from the props company Yeah, that makes more sense. And you'd think I would have remembered that that movie existed, considering I quoted it in this very thread just last night. 
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Jan 11, 2022 19:00
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Powered Descent posted:s01e21 - Babylon Squared I'm not sure how spelled out it is, but all throughout the season there were hints dropped that Delenn was some bigshot in Minbari society, way above the level of the other ambassadors within their governments. Most prominently in episode 17 when she resolves the tension of some warrior caste bigshot causing trouble by just dragging him into a room and using her authority to just order him to stop and apologize.
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Jan 11, 2022 19:04
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