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Baka-nin posted:Speaking of early B5 roughness, what was the deal with that Praying Mantis crime lord? I think they just dropped him without a trace because it looked terrible and I bet was a pain in the arse to get working. But it just sticks in my head. It was on the show right? I didn't just dream it up? I tried looking it up on the B5 fan wiki but couldn't find anything. It just kept linking me to the shadows. Yeah, N'grath. He appeared a few times in the first season but got dumped because they never felt the prop looked right. The costume ended up appearing on Buffy as a one-off monster.
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Sep 7, 2016 03:55
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Milky Moor posted:Yeah. It's kind of a shame how little EarthGov is really talked about. They're kind of sinister in some ways. If you get into the Psi Corps Trilogy novels, one of which sort of covers the rise of the Earth Alliance alongside the Psi Corps, it's basically stated that they flat out invaded and annexed certain nations who weren't willing to join the Alliance. I've always found it a bit odd that on one hand there's this running theme that Humans are Special because We Build Communities unlike the other species, but on the other hand, Earth itself isn't ever portrayed as particularly tolerant or open-minded. I mean, granted, I guess 'semi-authoritarian democracy' still looks good compared to 'caste-based theocracy' or 'imperialists with some genocide', but even at its best, the Earth Alliance is never really the Federation...
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Sep 15, 2016 08:49
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MrL_JaKiri posted:It's definitely better than Chain of Command; you don't "win" interrogations by being a badass prisoner like Picard does. ...you know the whole point of "Chain of Command" was the scene at the end where Picard admits he really did see five lights, yeah?
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Oct 28, 2016 03:33
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:The other part of Londo's story is in the Centauri Prime novel trilogy, which sadly is difficult to find these days. It's also terrible, don't bother trying to track it down.
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Nov 15, 2016 07:01
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Data Graham posted:Did they just have a scene with the ship getting literally humped on-screen by a giant space jellyfish Apparently added as a passive-aggressive response to the network wanting more sex in the show. There's a lot of Crusade that's basically JMS and the network screaming "gently caress YOU!" "NO, gently caress YOU!" instead of actually making something coherent and/or watchable.
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Dec 13, 2016 10:27
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Neddy Seagoon posted:...the flying camera drones following Sinclair... They show up elsewhere! The reporters in "And Now for a Word" and "Illusion of Truth" have them!
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Sep 20, 2017 13:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Rebooting B5 would be dumb, but the setting has plenty of room for another series in it. I think Crusade and Legend of the Rangers has shown that's not true.
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May 19, 2018 05:20
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You can't force surgery on an unwilling patient. Both the parents and the kid had made it clear they understood the surgery, understood the consequences of refusing surgery, and were still unwilling to proceed. It's a massive violation of medical ethics that should have seen Franklin lose his position.
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Jun 3, 2018 14:53
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A lot of the colonies in Star Trek seem to be weird ideological enclaves, like the Scottish planet or the Irish planet or the anti-technology planet. That at least makes sense - there's no economic reason to leave Earth, but you might want to get away for other reasons once interstellar travel becomes easy enough.
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Jul 7, 2018 07:41
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I think season 5 is stronger than its reputation; the Byron plot drags a bit, but you get tons of great Bester moments. And the second half of the season is pretty much all Londo, all the time, so... you know, good stuff.
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Jul 15, 2018 06:07
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Yeah, but it's not as bad when you're rewatching and going through a few episodes a night than when it was literally months worth of episodes that all seemed to be set in the same brown coridor...
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Jul 15, 2018 06:12
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jerry seinfel posted:I'm watching for the first time and just reached season 5 He looks better with the beard. 
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Jul 30, 2018 06:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't think fascism is exactly based on control so much as "control over the people" is a thinly veiled excuse for wild arbitrary acts of violence. Fascist regimes tend to be a mess organizationally with competing jurisdictions and underlings fighting with each other. We didn't really see much of that aside from the fact that Clark set up a secondary military organization within the military that tried to stage a coup. And empowered the Psi-Corps to operate as a military in their own right, at least on Mars. And the Corps itself was never a unified faction...
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Aug 20, 2018 16:25
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I have to say, I don't think cooperating with Bester's that big a crime, even if she is familiar with Garibaldi's experience. I personally think that, given what Edgars was planning, Bester's actions were somewhat justifiable - certainly, using Garibaldi like that strikes me as less morally dubious than how Sheridan used the cryo-frozen telepaths in the civil war. The rest of it, I agree with you - even if Lochley personally had clean hands, she stood by and did nothing to stop those that didn't, and never really has to step up and acknowledge that.
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Sep 19, 2018 06:05
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Eh, I'm kinda skeptical. The main similarity in the set-up of the two shows is the Centauri-Narn conflict mirroring the Cardassian-Bajoran conflict - but they're similar mainly in that they're both reflective of real colonizer-colonized conflicts. And the Bajoran;'s history had already been established years before on TNG, and I suspect the decision to make them a big part of DS9 had more to do with the desire to spin-off Ensign Ro onto the new show than anything else. As for the later arcs - well, the problem there is that there's plenty of evidence that Paramount and the producers didn't want Ds9 to have long arcs, and the writers only got away with it because Paramount's focus most of the time was on UPN and Voyager. I think the connections are more coincidental than anything else. That being said, I do want to see a crossover where Morden and Weyoun hang out...
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Nov 9, 2018 13:08
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I just finished season two, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the cg overall for something from 94/95, especially given how ambitious it must have been to do a show all in cg back then. Yeah, there's some stuff that hasn't aged well, and it's a shame they never pulled off any good shots that got across the scale of the station's interior. But it was all very impressive back in the mid-90s. One thing I always appreciated is that there's not much in the way of reused effects shots - compare to, say, DS9, where even when they switched to cgi, there was one shot of a Federation ship being destroyed that ended up showing up in every battle. B5 only really reused the station exterior shots, and even then there was a fair bit of variety - I like that after the Centauri cruiser damages the station in the season two finale, the exterior shots in the season three opening show work crews making repairs.
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Nov 25, 2018 12:09
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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. There's a visual parallel between the Grey Council watching the Battle of the Line from their flagship and Londo watching the bombardment of Narn, and it's pretty much pure chance that Delenn didn't also end up with a genocide on her conscience, but that doesn't really ever get addressed seriously.
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Feb 3, 2019 04:44
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epenthesis posted:That sequel show was an insane idea. What network was ever going to try out a series planned to end on a cliffhanger and depend on a spinoff to resolve the story of the main characters? I don't even understand what the point of making it a 'sequel' was supposed to be. Was it literally just "We can't call it Babylon 5 after we blow up the station, so we'd have to make it a new show rather than just B5, season six"?
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Mar 4, 2019 11:03
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Just skip straight to Sleeping in Light, the other episodes are just filler.
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Mar 11, 2019 14:13
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Jedit posted:However, only Accusations and The Touch of Your Shadow... should be avoided at all costs. Accusations features a chapter where Sheridan is called Sinclair for several pages. I believe he switches back to Sheridan mid-paragraph.
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Mar 12, 2019 04:17
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Or, given that the Vorlons are big-time telepaths, how the assasin's disguise fooled him.
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Jun 25, 2019 14:49
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Right, but once you notice it, the pattern of "Michaelangelo, Picasso, Vax'azarb" gets really loving annoying after a while. Star Trek is guilty of this too. Star Trek, Babylon 5, Forbidden Planet: The Next Generation...
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Jul 10, 2019 05:45
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It also works better to have the super-teep on the show be someone empowered by the Vorlons rather than someone empowered by some guy who was never going to show up again. Narn religion is the B plot in "By Any Means Necessary", so I assume that's why it's not part of "Parliament of Dreams".
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Jul 14, 2019 06:23
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Based on the existing pattern, orange and yellow.
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Sep 22, 2019 09:15
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Green sector is the diplomatic wing and officer's quarters, blue sector is the command deck, docking bays and most residential sections, red sector is commercial, brown sector is the slums, grey sector is industrial and maintenance. Man, I've got a lot of useless trivia crammed in my head. I always figured brown sector wasn't just abandoned due to lack of funding, some of it was also intentionally left open for future expansion - it'd be a major project to expand the station in any way, so it'd be smart to leave some room to grow when you first build it.
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Sep 23, 2019 16:18
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Absurd Alhazred posted:My problem with View from the Gallery is that it has an opportunity to veer off of the Great Man Theory of the series to actually follow the lives of ordinary folks, but they instead spend most of their time talking about how awesome the main characters are. It's weird too because Season 5 is generally a bit better in general about going against Great Man ideas - Sheridan, Londo and G'Kar all at various points find themselves swept away by movements out of their control - but the one episode that really should be best suited for that sort of thing doesn't do that at all.
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Nov 10, 2019 14:37
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Sinclair got both jobs because the Minbari wanted him there, Sheridan just got grandfathered in. Command-level officers would absolutely have first-contact training because Earth hasn't been out in space all that long (relatively speaking) and there's plenty of new cultures to stumble into. Plus wherever they are has to be a looong way from the nearest civilian ambassador for the job, so they need to be able to achieve something. Even if it's just "Please do not shoot us, we come and will leave in peace". They mention early on - I think it's Soul Hunter - that Earthforce regs require a command-level officer be present if there's a possibility of a first contact situation. Given that the Minbari war was the result of a miscommunication during first contact, it's not surprising Earth would have policies to make sure any future contacts are handled by someone who knows what the hell they're doing...
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Nov 11, 2019 13:40
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Doctor Zero posted:WRT Sheridan and Lyta: I was actually paying attention to that on a rewatch because I thought it was jarring too. If you pay attention, he’s pretty much always treated her as a tool, he was just more polite about it earlier on. Yeah, like in "Epiphanies", he threatens to turn her over to the Psi-Corps if she disobeys him. Or how she was unceremoniously tossed out of her quarters because the Vorlons weren't paying for them anymore - after Sheridan threw a complete childish fit when Earthforce wanted him to move to smaller quarters. Or how nobody even bothered directly telling her Kosh as dead. She really gets treated like crap throughout the series. (And, of course, there's Sheridan's use of the cryo-teeps as human bombs... Dude really isn't a champion of telepath rights.)
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Dec 4, 2019 05:57
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Of course, it would be entirely in-character if the Minbari still haven't cleared up that miscommunication, and ten years after the war, humans still don't know why first contact went so horribly wrong...
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Mar 23, 2020 12:49
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Seemlar posted:...at the same time Sinclair just choosing to leave Delenn and their son doesn't strike me as something that would have been especially satisfying. My God, DS9 really was ripping off B5!
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Jun 7, 2020 09:07
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Don’t try and track it down, don’t even look for a plot summary. It’s that bad.
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Jun 21, 2020 18:04
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Morden should be louder, angrier, and have access to the Great Machine.
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Jul 1, 2020 07:20
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SlothfulCobra posted:Although there's more thought about it in Babylon 5, since I don't think the idea that Galactus looks somehow different to different alien cultures has ever come up since that moment. It came up in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! 
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Jul 19, 2020 05:15
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The hell kind of crazy people say you should skip "Passing through Gethsemane"?
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Jul 31, 2020 07:23
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I can't imagine Hague would have been around for long even if the DS9 thing hadn't happened - the whole story in "Point of No Return"/"Severed Dreams" is Sheridan and the crew trying to find excuses to avoid going along with Clark's new policies without directly confronting them, only to realize the situation isn't going to resolve itself and they need to take a stand. Hague's death and the failure of the military counter-coup plays into that story perfectly; I'm willing to bet he'd have died or been taken out of action in Severed Dreams regardless of what happened.
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Sep 19, 2020 07:02
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The ISA is just an absolute mess if you think about it; Sheridan seems to be Earth's representative on the council, despite Earth having no say in his appointment, there's no sign it does anything to fix the problems of the League worlds being effectively voiceless, and the majority of the Alliance's military answers to the President's wife. Season five kind of leans a bit towards Sheridan being totally out of his depth, but it never really acknowledges that the system he created is deeply flawed and the best thing he could do would be to stand down and play a Cincinnatus or Washington, rather than allow its problems to become institutionalized under his leadership.
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Feb 15, 2021 07:15
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Jedit posted:Vorlon technology doesn't use a sentient mind as a slave to run its OS, so far as we know. We get numerous examples of exactly how hosed up Shadow tech is, and it is certain that any R&D project looking at adapting it would have to require experiments on human beings who, to put it politely, are unlikely to be volunteers. In fact, we even see one in the show with Bester's girlfriend. On the other hand, Vorlon ships are presented as being alive in their own right, but enslaved to their owners. Did Kosh's ship choose to kill itself when he died? Either answer has troubling implications.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:39
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I always thought it was a missed opportunity that Byron's group was all human. It would have been interesting to get some perspective on how the other governments treat their telepaths, and would make it feel more like a reaction to the ISA's formation - now you've got an interstellar government, you start to get pan-species activist groups and alliances emerging in response.
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Apr 12, 2021 11:31
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pentyne posted:I would question if they can really do an older adult themed military sci-fi show on the CW though. I imagine there's going to be a couple of youngsters, like spoiled diplomats brats or station families who get caught up in the chaos. It's finally Keffer's chance to shine!
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Sep 28, 2021 05:24
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The Psi Corps trilogy is very good. The Technomage trilogy is... decently written, but a lot of it doesn't really feel like it fits in with the show. The Centauri trilogy features a subplot where Vir mind-controls one of Londo's wives into falling in love with him. It's garbage.
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Nov 18, 2021 04:34
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