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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Sometimes the writer gets too much into fanfiction and has a few points that are, shall we say, quite generous to singular lines of text. Stuff like this: quote:And Psi Cops are first and foremost supposed to protect the normal public from telepaths - not the other way around. They're "supposed" to go after telepaths who use their senses "wrong", they're supposed to catch and arrest telepaths for going out in public without gloves or an insignia, they're supposed to arrest telepaths for expressing political speech in public or attempting to run for public office or hold proscribed professions - not disrupt and shut down international (or interplanetary) crime networks to traffic telepaths into slavery and sexual abuse. is clearly nonsense - it's internally contradictory (Are psi cops concerned with rogue teeps, or not? The first paragraph says that's all they care about, the second paragraph specifically says Bester goes alone to shut down the underground railroad) and relies on misunderstandings (the "no-one else" Lyta refers to is the mundane police force). (Also are telepaths banned from making political statements in general? In the show it's a scandal that the Psi Corps as a body endorses Clarke, but it's a government body. Nothing I can recall about individuals.)
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Jan 14, 2022 14:29
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I'd immediately dismiss the "Black Omega" as a bunch of try hard nerds. If you want military clout, pair a name like "Maintenance" with crazy high access and supply priority.
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Jan 14, 2022 16:28
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"rear end Maintenance"
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Jan 14, 2022 18:22
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There's also a whole lot of secret Psi-Corps programs that we see causing trouble throughout the show, Michael Ironsides, Dust, zombie assassins, sleeper agents, and that empath guy. That scene in Ship of Tears where Bester in his nicest way just lays out that he thinks telepaths are the future master race that must be protected while mundanes are expendable sure is something.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:47
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Doesn't Bester allude to being something of a human supremacist (and/or xenophobe) too, at one point? I can't help but think that in Bester's fantasy timeline where telepaths become dominant (or even that there are simply no more non-telepath humans at all), his ideal form of government is gonna be bad news for the non-human societies out there.
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Jan 14, 2022 21:41
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that guy posted:A Race Through Dark Places - Franklin is running a human trafficking "pipeline" for telepaths through the station. Bester tries to stop it, and all the "good guys" rally together to stop him. Then when he leaves, Sheridan, uh, quietly shuts the "pipeline" down. As for Franklin, no consequences. Some of that telepath stuff was an interesting analysis but this was too much to the extent it undermined the author's own point.
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Jan 14, 2022 21:53
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:Some of that telepath stuff was an interesting analysis but this was too much to the extent it undermined the author's own point. Also ignores that, while no doubt the Psi Cops were put in place to meet a desire on the part of mundanes to regulate and control telepaths, their purpose by the time of the show is clearly to regulate and control telepaths to ensure that they obey Psi Corps or are no threat to them. The casual way Bester murders mundanes when he can, because they are subhuman and their lives don’t matter, demonstrates clearly the limitations of any reading of him as a hero. Dumping a prisoner into hyperspace because mundanes aren’t worth anything is very different from fighting active agents of telepath oppression. For that matter, Bester is perfectly willing to kill rogue telepaths, and his concern for the telepaths employed by Sheridan in “Endgame” is entirely limited to the one he loved. That shows his true colors: “if your trick with the Shadow-modified telepaths got my lover killed, you won’t leave this room alive, but if you sacrificed a few dozen blips and none of them was my lover, that’s OK with me.”
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Jan 14, 2022 22:13
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I think the space Nazi that could make people suffer just by thinking at them was a bad guy.
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Jan 14, 2022 22:21
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grassy gnoll posted:I think the space Nazi that could make people suffer just by thinking at them was a bad guy. Hmm, controversial, inconvenient. Say hello to my little friend *Bester steps into the room*
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Jan 15, 2022 01:05
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From the Blind Watch thread (unspoilered for here):Jedit posted:B5 C&C has more than one Operations Room. There's a night shift that works from a secondary location, so the cleaners can come in without disrupting anything. For budgetary reasons we never see it, same as we almost never see a Medlab other than the main one where Franklin works. Even JMS isn't mad enough to do this, but it'd be funny if the reboot B5 series was set in other locations on the station with the secondary staff that we never get to meet in the original series, and we saw all the stuff that they had to deal with! "Sheridan just stopped a terrorist from destroying the station with bombs, and now we have to handle all the repairs." "Sheridan just broke away from Earth, and we have to fix a bunch of breaches in the hull." "Sheridan just nuked a massive alien artifact, and now we have to coordinate the debris clean-up for the next eight hours." "What do you mean, Garibaldi says there's a whole floor in Grey sector inhabited by a cult that's been siphoning off water and energy since the station was built? gently caress that guy!"
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Jan 18, 2022 17:37
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B5's version of Lower Decks. Brown Squad. Grey Team. I can see it, oh yes.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:43
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Didn't they have an episode in S5 like this? I remember one of the maintenance guys saying the White Stars remind him of chicken.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:51
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tribbledirigible posted:Didn't they have an episode in S5 like this? I remember one of the maintenance guys saying the White Stars remind him of chicken. A view from the gallery, right? It was an okay episode with two cleaning crew guys wandering about while an alien of the week attacked the station for no reason.
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Jan 18, 2022 17:57
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Are you suggesting that after mentioning them several times in season 1, we will finally see Major Atumbe?
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Jan 18, 2022 18:42
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If we ever do, I require that they make Tino his first name.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:05
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I’ve just started watching B5 again in anticipation of the reboot. I haven’t watched since it was on TV in the mid 90s. I’m shocked at how many of the main cast have died. One thing I was wondering, is it a coincidence that Jeffrey Sinclair and John Sheridan have the same initials or is there something more to it that I’ve missed or forgotten about?
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Jan 20, 2022 08:30
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Mr. Apollo posted:I’ve just started watching B5 again in anticipation of the reboot. I haven’t watched since it was on TV in the mid 90s. I’m shocked at how many of the main cast have died. Joseph Michael Straczynski I assume, at least.
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Jan 20, 2022 08:33
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It's why I'm hoping for a Jessica Sherman or some such for the reboot.
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Jan 20, 2022 08:39
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^^^ The pitch already says it's following John Sheridan from the start. Making it clear that it's a reboot rather than a TNG.Narsham posted:From the Blind Watch thread (unspoilered for here): Babylon 5 is in space, and it's a cylinder. It doesn't have a West Wing.
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Jan 20, 2022 09:50
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Super Deuce posted:Joseph Michael Straczynski
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Jan 20, 2022 13:39
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Mr. Apollo posted:That occurred to me too. It’s the only thing I could come up with. For what it's worth, I remember JMS confirming this, but I have absolutely no idea when or where.
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Jan 20, 2022 13:49
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Dirty posted:For what it's worth, I remember JMS confirming this, but I have absolutely no idea when or where. I don't recall it, but I do know that Babearlon 5 was a gift from a fan of the show and the JS on it actually stands for "Joe Straczynski".
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Jan 20, 2022 13:58
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Jedit posted:^^^ The pitch already says it's following John Sheridan from the start. Making it clear that it's a reboot rather than a TNG. It could if its rotation axis was aligned along a planet's equator! 
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Jan 20, 2022 16:36
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Jedit posted:I don't recall it, but I do know that Babearlon 5 was a gift from a fan of the show and the JS on it actually stands for "Joe Straczynski". Dirty posted:For what it's worth, I remember JMS confirming this, but I have absolutely no idea when or where. That’s a neat bit of trivia. 
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Jan 20, 2022 17:43
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quote:I chose Strider as a temporary name because I'm a Lord of the Rings fan, and that image was a good one for me to hold in mind during the writing, but I always intended to change the name later, once we'd cast the actor and I could figure out what name fit. The initials JS would remain, however, because, well, that's my way of signing my work. From the script books
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Jan 20, 2022 18:04
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Apparently at a convention in 1995 he made the comment "I don't do cameos, my initials do."
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Jan 20, 2022 23:33
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Jedit posted:Babylon 5 is in space, and it's a cylinder. It doesn't have a West Wing. "Is it true Babylon 5 is five miles long?" "Yes." "That's one long walk and talk!" Jedit posted:I don't recall it, but I do know that Babearlon 5 was a gift from a fan of the show and the JS on it actually stands for "Joe Straczynski". Peter David, from the Script Books: Peter David posted:My then-wife was really into plush bears. Grateful that Joe had bought two scripts from me, and with the holidays approaching, she felt sending Joe a gift in appreciation was in order. After some thought, she decided that Joe would be sent a bear from the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. It would be clothed in a baseball jacket, carry the logo "Babearlon 5" on the back, and the initials "JS" on the front of the jacket. David goes on to explain how he and Bill Mumy got back at JMS on their series Space Cases, and how Joe tried to get back at him by sending him a dancing bear telegram at a convention, and how the back & forth got stopped only when a convention organizer told someone who recommended getting David as a convention guest that they couldn't because JMS was guest of honor and they hated each other, which led David to call it off and JMS to note that it'd be no fun if David didn't retaliate any more. This takes about four full pages in the script book. (A B5 episode is around 43 pages from start to end, to give you an idea of length. But with much more white space.)
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Jan 21, 2022 02:55
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Jedit posted:^^^ The pitch already says it's following John Sheridan from the start. Making it clear that it's a reboot rather than a TNG. True, but as an O'Neill cylinder it does have fixed points of reference that roughly correlate to north and south (coreward/hullward) and east and west (spinward/antispinward). It even has "the ends of the earth" (docking terminus and power terminus)!
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Jan 21, 2022 04:59
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Narsham posted:"Is it true Babylon 5 is five miles long?" I was actually at a convention in Dallas where JMS and PAD were on the stage together and went through the whole story from both their sides. For Space Cases, the protagonists of the show find the JS bear floating through space and one of them asks "What kind of a monster would space a teddy bear?" But then it turns out that the bear is a trap sent out by evil aliens called the Strazyn! Good times.
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Jan 21, 2022 17:53
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I've read a bit about how Michael O'Hare didn't get along with a lot of the cast and I can't help but wonder how much of that was due to what he was going through that no one else knew about. I remember reading a Reddit AMA where Claudia Christian was asked about that. She replied with something like "Everyone knew about his illness. He was still an rear end." Mr. Apollo fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 21, 2022 |
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Jan 21, 2022 18:48
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Mr. Apollo posted:I've read a bit about how Michael O'Hare didn't get along with a lot of the cast and I can't help but wonder how much of that was due to what he was going through that no one else knew about. Yeah, Claudia, and you're an alcoholic. I'll forgive you both for being asses because you weren't well.
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Jan 22, 2022 02:00
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Jedit posted:Yeah, Claudia, and you're an alcoholic. I'll forgive you both for being asses because you weren't well. She's working through it on the Sinclair Method.
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Jan 22, 2022 02:22
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:She's working through it on the Sinclair Method. I hope it's working for her because the back half of her bio being dedicated to that was a bit of a swerve.
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Jan 22, 2022 02:49
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Looked up my B5 books and turns out I can't find two of them, first books in the psi corps and techomage trilogies. Damnit where'd they go....
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Jan 22, 2022 09:48
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His Divine Shadow posted:Looked up my B5 books and turns out I can't find two of them, first books in the psi corps and techomage trilogies. Damnit where'd they go.... I'm in the same boat - I can't find Psi-Corps volume 1. Technomages is on the shelf, thankfully.
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Jan 22, 2022 09:52
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Mr. Apollo posted:I've read a bit about how Michael O'Hare didn't get along with a lot of the cast and I can't help but wonder how much of that was due to what he was going through that no one else knew about. I recall Jerry Doyle listing a few specific examples of O'Hare being pretty awful - I read it over a decade ago, I don't know where I'd find it now (fake edit: oh wait this looks like a repost of the same thing I read) - along with a not-mutually-exclusive account of him being a nice guy in one of the comments. Some of it could generously be read as Doyle just being defensive, much of it... not so much.
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Jan 22, 2022 15:09
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Dirty posted:I recall Jerry Doyle listing a few specific examples of O'Hare being pretty awful - I read it over a decade ago, I don't know where I'd find it now (fake edit: oh wait this looks like a repost of the same thing I read) - along with a not-mutually-exclusive account of him being a nice guy in one of the comments. Some of it could generously be read as Doyle just being defensive, much of it... not so much. The OP frequently refers to O'Hare in exceptionally derogatory ways so not really on that side, esp given that Doyle was a famously massive dickhead
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Jan 22, 2022 15:39
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Dirty posted:I recall Jerry Doyle listing a few specific examples of O'Hare being pretty awful - I read it over a decade ago, I don't know where I'd find it now (fake edit: oh wait this looks like a repost of the same thing I read) - along with a not-mutually-exclusive account of him being a nice guy in one of the comments. Some of it could generously be read as Doyle just being defensive, much of it... not so much. This kind of inconsistancy in behavior isn’t uncommon among either those with mental illnesses or alcoholics. More to the point, even the outright abusive can sometimes be charming and generous. It’s probably more useful to think of people on the basis of their behavior to a wide variety of audiences. For example, one actor might be consistently generous and giving to members of the audience while being a monster to cast and crew behind the scenes, while another might be short-tempered, impatient, or painfully shy when meeting fans while being personable and lively with fellow actors. Without trying to diagnose a cause, I’d suggest that both Doyle and O’Hare had mixed records behind the scenes, and that it seems likely given their personalities that they wouldn’t like one another. By all accounts, Richard Biggs was pretty awesome and generous; Christian I know less about behind the scenes, but what I do know leans toward the positive. Perhaps the key point here is style and approach. O’Hare sounds more introverted, and stylistically was more focused; there’s some behind the scenes footage from the Boxleitner years where you can see that the other human performers were very informal and outgoing, dropping character the instant a scene is cut and bantering with each other constantly. O’Hare likely would have been uncomfortable in that setting even without the illness. Conversely, the lead alien performers bantered less and tended to be more focused on character between scenes, though obviously that varied from Katsulas staying near his character all day while Jurasik liked to joke around, though even in his case it was often in very “Londo” ways. Furlan was the one most frequently moving between those two “worlds,” and was definitely more on the quiet/stay-in-character school, but much better equipped to get away with that than O’Hare would have been, even setting aside that he was the “star” and de facto leader of that segment of the actors.
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Jan 22, 2022 16:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can imagine Delenn getting taken in by some ridiculous human scams. Probably some kind of hair care MLM scheme.
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Jan 22, 2022 18:49
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tbf on her world magical crystals actually do things
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