B5 had a few alternate opening titles during its run but I don't think the DVDs maintain any of them.
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# ¿ Oct 31, 2018 15:27 |
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 10:48 |
Antifa Turkeesian posted:Stuff like G’Kar singing and doing the incredulous “these are G’Kar’s quarters; this is G’Kar’s table; this is G’Kar’s dinner” routine come out really clumsy and stagey, but it definitely gives the show character. B5 gets pretty stagey and theatrical at times, it rules.
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# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 02:01 |
his name was N'Grath you heathens
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# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 05:06 |
Torrannor posted:Oh yes, but it can be so amazing. Like in season 4, when Cartagia has G'kar whipped. It's just a dark room with a chair for Cartagia and something to chain G'kar to. It really focuses the scene on the characters, and makes it all the more chilling. yep, great moment. there's a heap of times where it's basically a stage play and it's great. i genuinely love how much of a play babylon 5 feels like at times, right down to the familiar rotating cast of extras and reused sets.
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# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 07:38 |
I think I remember preferring Caitlin Brown's Na'Toth to Adams' take, so, it follows.
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# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 13:34 |
SlothfulCobra posted:Come to think of it, has modern sci fi drifted away from the idea of psychic powers? They were all over the place in older material, and some works like Childhood's End and Warhammer 40k even went with the idea of them as the next step of human evolution, but now it seems like mainly they're only in vintage franchises, and mostly telekinesis instead of ESP or telepathy. I'd say psychic powers in recent sci-fi are less the 'semi-magical' kind in Babylon 5 and more like rigid sciences and disciplines, like biotics in Mass Effect. Although biotics started getting weird in the later games, too, where they went from mass/gravity control to space magic.
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2018 04:14 |
MrL_JaKiri posted:I mean it's also a mission in Freespace 2 the best thing about that mission is you can just cheese it by just going in a straight line
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2018 12:38 |
Continuing the left theme, Bester's bad hand -- the one that's permanently gripped into a fist -- is his left hand.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2018 15:11 |
Babylon 4 would've had extreme problems with the Drazi
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2018 03:49 |
Lemniscate Blue posted:Where did we find out the first Babylon Station was red? Did that get a throwaway line in an episode or did JMS say it at some point? We see it blow up in In The Beginning.
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# ¿ Nov 10, 2018 04:57 |
Expired Vitamin posted:I'm with Londo; I don't get the fuss about Rebo and Zooty. lol get a load of grandpa over here zooty zoot zoot is an all-time classic
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# ¿ Nov 12, 2018 04:57 |
I thought all the CGI stuff was lost to a warehouse fire which is why The Lost Tales had a bunch of inconsistencies in ship sizes and such because it was all sourced from fan-made stuff?
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# ¿ Nov 19, 2018 07:08 |
Also the Agrippa/Roanoke thing.
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# ¿ Nov 26, 2018 00:51 |
I'm not sure how Vir sank to Morden's level?
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# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 04:50 |
There are exactly two people who Vir displays antipathy and hostility towards: Morden and Cartagia. And even with the latter, Vir wanted to find another way before coming to accept that, to Cartagia's sadism and delusions of godhood, there was no other answer. Vir is one of the few - in fact maybe the only one without pre-existing knowledge such as Delenn and Kosh - who recognized Morden for the malevolent force he is.
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# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 09:55 |
Polaron posted:I'm like 90% sure JMS has mentioned that Earth would have won the Earth-Minbari War (or at least fought the Minbari to a standstill) if it wasn't for Minbar's stealth tech that kept Earthforce weapons from locking on. For all their technological superiority the Minbari aren't all that good at fighting and Earth warships were incredibly heavily-armed. It wasn't that, per se. I believe JMS said that Earth would be able to get the Minbari bogged into a war of attrition and would be able to out-produce them as their economy was more suited to ramping up for war production than the stratified Minbari one was. And, without the stealth, the EA ships would actually be able to hurt the Minbari ships consistently, which they did quite well in the first contact. I'm not sure how well it actually meshes with what we see in the show itself, though. Such as Sheridan dismissing any claim that Earth could stand against the Minbari, even with Omega-class ships and systems that could track the Minbari, as a delusion. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2018 05:17 |
Zorak of Michigan posted:Are you sure the Omega-class could talk Minbari ships? I don't recall the show ever establishing that. Well, yeah, that's the whole point. There's a bit in Season 2 (And Now For A Word, I think?) where some warhawk Senator claims that with their new ships and weapons they could handle the Minbari, which Sheridan dismisses as crazy talk. The Omega-class can track Minbari warships (Season 2, first episode) and can presumably hurt them better than the old Hyperion-class, but it still wouldn't matter because the Minbari still outclass the Earth Alliance by a significant factor and presumably have advantages beyond their stealth system.
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2018 06:40 |
That makes the line where Sheridan has to ask what kind of sensor system Babylon 5 is using a bit strange, then. The fact that he asks about the hardware B5 has implies that the EA has the capability to detect them and it's a matter of tech. Otherwise, you'd think he'd just be mystified that they can detect them at all. In Season 4, there's mention made of the Agamemnon being able to track Sheridan's forces with their sensors, too. That and the several times where EA ships don't have much problem detecting, tracking, and shooting down White Stars, of course.
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2018 11:18 |
Also, JMS recollection of the line doesn't seem accurate with what Sheridan actually says in the show, which is very much past tense.quote:"One problem during the war was that none of our weapon systems could lock on to the Minbari vessels. They used some kind of stealth technology we were never able to break." Additionally, the line is uttered on the command deck, not in the conference room. In the conference room, Sheridan still couches it in language that basically says locking onto the Minbari was a wartime problem. "We tried everything, but none of our weapons would lock on to their ships." Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2018 11:32 |
Sheridan is phrasing the issue of being able to track the Minbari ships as a past wartime problem. "During the war"... "We were never able to break"... See, if this was still a present problem, Sheridan wouldn't need to present his answers in a historical timeframe. If the Minbari stealth tech is still an impossible issue, you'd think everyone in Earthforce would know about it. Why else would Sheridan need to explain it -- twice! -- to Ivanova? "We were never able to crack their stealth tech." "Uh, I know, Captain. We still can't. I took Minbari Threat Assessment 101 at the Academy." "Look, it's my first day and I still haven't had my orange juice." Maybe JMS wrote the line as "We've never been able to break", which would make sense if the EA still couldn't get past it. But 'we were never' is a completely different meaning, and that's the line that Boxleitner said. I'm sure JMS claims a reason for it, because that's what writers do when people find inconsistencies. I'm sure he also has an explanation for things like how Lennier says Minbari society has two castes, and how no one, not even Sinclair, recognizes the gunports open thing in Legacies - despite someone (I think Garibaldi?) noting that the death of Dukhat was an accident in the same episode. You could contrive an answer, sure, but in the end, it's just shaky writing. Funnily enough, the specifics of the destruction of the Black Star changes, too (Sol system, multiple ships, fake distress call -> other system, one ship, honest distress call). But B5 has never been concerned with particulars, especially when it comes to matters of war or terminology. B5's a big picture show. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2018 14:30 |
ConfusedUs posted:Draal is just the best. Zathras is close. Does Morden count as tertiary? He’s up there too, if so. I don't think he ever gets a name. ThingOne posted:Come the Inquisitor was interesting, at times it felt more like I was watching a play than a TV show. I'm not entire sure what the Vorlon's angle was. I guess they wanted to make sure Delenn and Sheridan weren't doing it for their own glory? Basically. The Inquisitor says something like So, what if you do this and you die alone, forgotten and unremembered, in the dark where no one knows you did anything at all?
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# ¿ Dec 20, 2018 05:46 |
wizzardstaff posted:It’s done. Finished season 5. Time to go back through the thread and look at spoilers. Maybe I’ll go find the movies. The original B5 outline is around online these days and, honestly, the series we got is better than the original outline. However, when you know that outline, you can definitely see it in the show. Season 1 was very much on track with it, but things changed when O'Hare left and JMS basically rewrote the whole series. Another significant change was how Season 4 was compressed and sped up as they didn't know they would be getting Season 5. The Shadow War would've taken a bit longer instead of being wrapped up in about six episodes and Season 4 would've ended on the episode where Sheridan is being interrogated, leaving Season 5 to have the end of the Civil War plot and, presumably, some Season 5 stuff as a denouement. Interesting, the point you say about turning the lights out -- JMS is the guy who turned the lights off the station in Sleeping in Light. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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# ¿ Jan 6, 2019 05:18 |
the technomages are one of the least interesting parts of B5
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2019 03:19 |
Kashia posted:Halfway through season 4 now, just finished the 'Racing Mars' episode, and...did this show from 1997 casually refer to marriage equality as a thing nobody bats an eyelash at in the future? Wow. I wonder how much further the portrayal of the Ivanova/Talia relationship would have gone if Andrea Thompson had stayed on the show. B5 does a lot of cool things like that. Like how, also in Season 4, Garibaldi angrily says of Sheridan: "He's not the Pope! He doesn't look anything like her!"
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2019 08:22 |
Fairly sure it's the worst bit of B5 media created.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2019 00:12 |
Angry Salami posted:I feel Delenn's role in the Earth-Minbari war was never resolved particularly satisfactorily. Lennier finds out about it, but she never really has to confess to any human characters how much she was involved, or apologize like she did to G'Kar for her decisions. Do you think it ever came up between her and Sheridan? Okay, he's Mister Black Star 2247, but she's literally the person who unleashed the Minbari war machine.
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# ¿ Feb 3, 2019 04:59 |
Neddy Seagoon posted:Which one was that? Point of No Return, I think. The "Respect the chain of command" bit Sheridan uses against Nightwatch.
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2019 15:56 |
ThingOne posted:That's a hell of a take Garibaldi . Electric bleachers? JMS has said he wrote that in based on a genuine comment from Jerry Doyle.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2019 02:18 |
Pick posted:same but cried a Lot
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2019 07:08 |
FISHMANPET posted:So watching Signs and Portents again, and wondering Why did Morden/the Shadows decide to help the Centauri? Had they decided before they sent in Morden? Did the answers to his question lead them to pick the Centauri? Wouldn't helping the Narn potentially cause just as much chaos? Did Morden ever ask the humans what they wanted? The Narn and Centauri were similar, yes. I don't think the explanation is directly given in the show, but the evidence is there. G'kar's answer ended with the destruction of the Centauri, that was all he wanted. Meanwhile, Londo, had an answer that was more ambitious than just destroying his old enemy - he wanted the Republic to return to its rightful place. Kosh stopped Morden before he could ask the humans. "Leave this place, they are not for you."
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2019 03:19 |
Neddy Seagoon posted:Wasn't part of it that they had a lot of liberated Centauri ships and weapons on their hands as they kicked them out the door that gave them a kickstart into galactic colonization. Yep. It's why they're so happy to sell weapons to the humans during the Minbari War -- if the Minbari figure it out, they'll find Centauri weapons.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 03:25 |
hope and vaseline posted:I think it's supposed to be an alternate future, maybe one where Sheridan didn't detonate the nuke in Z'ha'dum. Although it could harken to the original treatment of the show where it's supposed to end with B5 getting destroyed and the whole Babylon Prime sequel show. Bingo. But it was also repurposed into the alternate future (I think the footage is reused during War Without End) and the ending of Sleeping in Light is reminiscent of it.
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 05:31 |
evobatman posted:Did Jerry Doyle ever talk about how his personal politics compared to those of Garibaldi? JMS has basically said they're one and the same.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2019 11:02 |
Timby posted:Doyle also died from alcoholism. I think Garabaldi's alcoholism came from Doyle. I think during Season 5, it was Doyle who suggested that Garabaldi should end up drinking again and it should end up really affecting things (the bit where he's drunkenly passed out and war breaks out).
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2019 01:54 |
I assume you mixed up the two Presidents there?
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# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 08:47 |
That list trims out way too much. Like, it trims out Shadow Dancing and Comes the Inquisitor! There's trimming out nothing but the vital episodes, and then there's trimming to the vit
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2019 12:29 |
Absurd Alhazred posted:I had the second novel in the Psi Corps Trilogy, I thought it was good enough to reread a few times. It follows Al Bester's live from birth to head of Psy Corps. Written by Gregory Keyes (as J. Gregory Keyes). Wishing I hadn't thrown it away, I think it's considered kind of rare now? Or maybe that's the first one which I've never read. i think they're a pretty rare series, yeah. and they're probably the three best babylon 5 tie-ins. the first book is especially interesting in how it tells the story of the emergence of telepaths, ending with bester's birth. the second was great for really getting you into bester's mindset. the third was about his fate post-telepath war. basically all the babylon 5 books are rare. they went out of print probably twenty years ago and they were hard to find even then.
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2019 02:43 |
Lemniscate Blue posted:Larry G. DiTillio, who served as executive story editor for Babylon 5, has died. there was something JMS said on facebook about how he worked with ditillio for two seasons, then had to let him go because he was carving out his own pocket universe inside the babylon 5 universe (but he didn't go into any more detail than that). it sounds like he was pretty heavily involved as, essentially, JMS' editor and 2IC initially.
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# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 07:28 |
Something about the B5/DS9 ripoff conversation that I haven't seen brought up before, and only occurred to me a few weeks back, is that what JMS shopped around as Babylon 5 is not the B5 that was actually aired past-S1. As strong as some similarities are between the two shows, B5 got reworked pretty extensively when O'Hare left the show, and I doubt the people at Paramount were in on any of that (especially given that DS9 hit the airwaves first). Seems like it might've just been a bunch of weird coincidences, unless I've gotten something wrong.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2019 13:30 |
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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 10:48 |
Neddy Seagoon posted:The other big coincidence is both of them getting a Cool Pew-Pew Combat Ship. Both in the first episode of the third season, no less.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2019 16:13 |