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It didn't take much for me to get my now wife hooked on Star Trek, but Babylon 5 was always a tough nut to crack. I found out it was on Amazon so I rewatched it over the last month or so, sometimes she'd catch an episode or whatever, and I finally got her interested. It only took me 12 years. She watched The Gathering!
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Feb 27, 2019 07:12
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 22:34 |
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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?
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Feb 28, 2019 03:14
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It's a just punishment that TKO follows after Signs and Portents but honestly I don't hate it? And yeah I think maybe the Narn are played to be a warrior race in the begging so maybe you're supposed to think they'd try and take over the galaxy with shadow help but in reality they would just want what was once theirs.
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Feb 28, 2019 03:29
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On my first run through where my wife would catch a couple of episodes she saw G'kar being angry about something and was like "those are like the Klingons right?" but really they're much more like the Bajorans if you really think about it.
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Mar 3, 2019 02:33
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While it's true that if you cut out parts of the story you're missing out, it's also true that if you don't watch it you miss more. So it can take a while to get someone hooked, and it may be better to run someone through a condensed version of the core story until they get hooked and have the desire to slog through the less core stuff.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:09
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I have a hard time picturing mentally picturing any physical difference between Sheridan and Sinclair unless I'm literally looking at a picture of both of them. Even if I'm looking at one I can't really visualize how the other one looks different.
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Sep 21, 2019 04:09
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Wouldn't they still be "rotating" around the station at the same speed as the station rotates, at least while they're launching?
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Apr 25, 2020 04:13
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How dare you slander the tactical prowess of the hero of Setlik 3!
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May 29, 2020 03:18
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CainFortea posted:HIT YOUR BURNERS PILOT! I recently stumbled on some playthroughs on YouTube (linked from the Freespace wiki I think) and just hauntingly good, especially considering the limitations of PC games at the time.
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Sep 24, 2022 02:25
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On my latest watch through, I'm thinking about how they talk about how certain foods are so difficult to get on B5. Travel times are a bit vague, but it seems like in S4 when Lise visits the station to make a deal and then goes back to Mars that she leaves at night and arrives on Mars the next morning. But even if it's not that short a journey between B5 and Earth/Mars, it feels like they've forgotten about shelf-stable foods or refrigeration. I'd imagine some of the earth colonies are agricultural, so there has to be planets that are raising animals, so there have to be plenty of eggs and steaks and bacon going around. Eggs keep pretty well refrigerated, and you'd think a society that has figured out how to freeze a human and wake them up would be pretty good at freezing meats and thawing them. But no, even shelf stable products like canned anchovies or a bottle of olive oil are luxuries. Meanwhile, on the cargo ship that Franklin and Marcus take to get to Mars, half the hold is empty. There's plenty of room on these cargo ships, and plenty of advanced preservation and freezing technology to bring all the wonders of home to B5, but instead they're stuck eating flarn and blue oatmeal.
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Jan 18, 2023 15:04
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I tried over a decade ago to get my wife into B5, but I started watching it around her this time around since it's on HBO for a bit longer, and a combination of it just being on all the time, and me telling her that a bunch of the actors were dead was apparently enough to get her invested this time. Also lol sorry for starting a realism derail, we should send it STRAIGHT TO HELL.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:17
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Just finished up my rewatch, and remembered one thing that always sort of stuck in my craw is how Sheridan just kept harping on how the orders were illegal, rather than immoral. I kind of get that he's a military man first, and so that the legality of the orders would be of primary concern to him, but so much of his other actions seem more morally driven, so it just feels weird. Also, does anyone know if the Drakh/Centauri relationship was always intended to happen, or was that something rushed in to fill Season 5? The flashback earlier where Londo is drunk and has G'Kar kill him while his "Keeper" couldn't control him always felt like it was gonna be the shadows, but then again I'm sure it was always the plan that the Shadows would be defeated, even before he had to compress his plans for Seasons 4 and 5 into a single season. ALSO in stupid "mah realism" nonsense, in season 5 Sheridan brokers a deal where the Pak'mara share the excess from their agricultural colony with another race that's having a food shortage, but what the hell does a Pak'mara agricultural colony actually produce? Maybe they're raising livestock and slaughtering it and then letting it rot for 5 days before sending it along, and in the deal the Pak'mara would send along fresh products?
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Jan 24, 2023 17:19
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Speaking of moral vs legal orders, when Lochley is explaining to Garibaldi why she sided with Clark, her defense was "you follow the orders you're given until they violate your morals" and that's kinda wild using that to justify siding with the side that shot down civilian ships. What the hell are your moral limits, Lochley.
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Jan 24, 2023 20:48
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Yeah, "It's not the military's role to dictate policy" as if dissolving the duly elected senate was just a "policy choice". Yeah not really a fan of what her character is doing and supposed to represent. If she really is supposed to just be a brazen fascist then it's not really addressed in any meaningful way. I guess par for the course for Season 5.
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Jan 24, 2023 21:34
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So was there ever any indication of what a reboot would actually be? You couldn't really reboot it like Battlestar Galactica where you just take the premise and tell a new story, since with B5 the premise is the story. Just retelling the same story doesn't feel worth the effort. On my latest rewatch I really got the impression that the overall "message"/"lesson" of B5 is pretty relevant to our current societal situation, so we really don't need B5 to to tell a new culturally/politically relevant parable. So, like, what would be the point?
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Feb 1, 2023 23:01
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It can be weird watching with someone for the first time. You know something's coming up that's gonna be important later, but often that payoff comes from how insignificant it seems at first. So do you draw attention to it and ensure they get the payoff, even if a little diminished because they're expecting it, or just let things go, and hope they get interested enough to do rewatches every couple of years and start catching these things themselves?
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Mar 17, 2023 15:32
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Dirty posted:The "custom CGI" in this is substantially worse than what we get in the show. Yeah I really got a "video game engine" vibe from that, felt like it worked as a proof of concept, but needs like another pass to "soften" the hard edges of the polygons or something.
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Mar 29, 2023 14:36
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I hope we're finally able to buy that merch (especially the dolls) from the station gift shop.
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Apr 27, 2023 12:28
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"Love letter to the fans" sure gives me a bad taste after season 3 of Picard, but I think I'd still trust JMS as the original show creator vs Matalas as someone who is "just" a fan.
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May 3, 2023 17:42
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The genius of Babylon 5 is that it was a fully planned out arc with a planned end. Everything that was in the show served a purpose. But that's the curse, is that it's hard to find a thread you can pull on to tell a new story. Like, I think the discussion here about "Vorlon society" is a good example, if a bit extreme. A lot of fans of franchises enjoy exploring the universe, but if you pull those threads in B5 things just start to unravel, because those threads were written to serve a very specific purpose for the B5 arc, and won't really stand alone on their own. Something like "more Star Trek" works because Star Trek is a general purpose cinematic universe. "More B5" doesn't really make sense because B5 isn't a general purpose universe in that same way. The "essence" of Star Trek is pretty simple, exploring the human condition through alien allegories. The "essence" of B5 is a pre-planned arc with lots of call-forwards and long term payoffs that ends up being incredibly prescient 20 years later. I'm not sure any creator can pull two rabbits out of their hat like that in their career, nor should they even try. All that being said, maybe the structure of this will mean that JMS isn't forced to pull on a single thread for the entire series, and is instead able to just pull on pieces as much as can be reasonable to flesh out the universe. Although if JMS wants to sketch out a 5 year plan of a show that deals with Earth coming to terms with the fascism of the Clark administration maybe that would satisfy the prescient nature of B5.
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May 12, 2023 00:57
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T.C. posted:No, that's Zathras Easy mistake to make, but it's actually Zathras
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Jun 10, 2023 13:57
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 22:34 |
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Powered Descent posted:Except that we see plenty of ships that can open their own jump points (White Stars, Cortez, Minbari warships, etc.). And besides, the gates had to be built in the first place somehow. If there was a need for a lot of traffic to go to Markab again, there's no reason it wouldn't be possible to build a new one. I think the Cortez can even build jump gates, but even that ship can get lost in hyperspace. So even for a ship that can open its own jump gate, you can't just plop one open wherever in hyperspace and hope for the best, for whatever reason. If even a ship that charts unexplored space and builds new jump gates can get lost without a beacon, it really makes you think how hyperspace was first "discovered" and hyperspace travel "invented". But since it's Babylon 5 you can pretty easily hand-wave that away that it was the First Ones that figured it out billions of years ago and has since been passed down from race to race. In contrast to something like Star Trek where Warp Drive is purely a technology that you can invent from whole cloth.
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Jun 23, 2023 19:44
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