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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like Babylon 5 really perfectly bridges the old-fashioned sci fi with new sci fi, and the seams really show. This is a very interesting take that I don't remember seeing so explicitly expressed before (apologies if I'm forgetting some other goon from earlier  ), and I am going to shamelessly steal this for my next "argue drunkenly about favourite sci-fi shows" night 
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Aug 7, 2018 10:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't think the show ever really addressed what life was like for the "common" Centauri, or maybe they've just twisted and turned so much with their society that everybody is some kind of aristocrat. That'd be a neat idea. There's all those guards hanging about, we don't see their life but they definitely seem to be on a lower rung of the ladder. Like a guy whose life's work is guarding a flower. Do we really see any of the main alien races' "normies"? G'kar has his cult followers who seem to be working class (if that even makes sense in an alien context), the Minbari scenes revolve around fairly politically powerful people and Centauri stuff is nobles fighting each other. Although aside from the space janitor episode we don't see that much of Earth's randos either. I guess there's that Rangers/Minbari episode with the young people being trained.
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Feb 3, 2019 18:12
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This conversation seems to warrant this image being reposted
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May 2, 2019 09:58
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:In my head, what this means is that the Minbari castes aren't firmly delineated. The Warrior caste isn't just made up of soldiers, but their support network and logistics chain and so on, too. So, in that sense, there might be 'Warrior caste workers.' Or there might be Religious caste warship crews. But I'd say the vast bulk of each role is performed by each caste and there are probably honor rules and traditions that mean that, like, each Caste 'takes point' on whatever issue concerns them or when dealing with outsiders. I think this is something Neroon maybe points out, that the religious caste crewing the White Stars was a disruption of tradition, but I'm not sure. I don't think this is mentioned either way in the show directly, but at least for the Warriors it'd make sense that the 'supporting personnel' are somehow integrated into the Caste. I guess similarly the Religious could have people whose jobs are to make pretty paintings of religious themes or somesuch. Do Minbari have art? None of the races in B5 really make sense as entire races of people, except maybe the Centauri.
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Mar 23, 2020 13:17
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ConfusedUs posted:Vir is probably my favorite character in the show, tbh. I get what you're saying, but at the same time when Londo and G'kar get stuck in an elevator together is sublime teevee.
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May 15, 2020 06:10
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Jedit posted:I don't think it was hyperbole from Vir. It's our first real sign that Vir loves the Republic not blindly and unquestioningly, but for what it can and should be. Londo says it himself, "today, mister Morden, today is a very different day" though!  I took it more as part of the elation Londo felt about thinking he got rid of the shadow influence at the time. And therefore, Vir's little gift was very much on the nose. They're a very... Passionate people, after all.
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Aug 2, 2020 05:42
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head58 posted:We’re going to record a remembrance episode for our podcast this weekend. What are some of your favorite Delenn moments (other than “If you value your lives, be somewhere else” of course). Asking Ivanova for help with the... Hair situation.
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Jan 22, 2021 12:43
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Babylon 5 has a lot of tropes being turned on their head; the "savage" and mean-seeming G'kar turns out to be something else, the Vorlons are actually Pretty Freaking Bad Dudes, even Sheridan is not the paladin of Earth Force he's introduced as. That said, there's clear underlying messages and themes in the show. Clarke seemed, when I was watching it as a kid, as an eerie parallel to Bush II later on, and nowadays, welp! And obviously the fascist trappings of the Night Watch, what they do with Sheridan when he's incarcerated, even Garibaldi's brain washing, are all more or less references to what earlier authoritarian regimes had done, and were portrayed as bad things. Garibaldi's whole redemption arc hinges on the idea that we accept that him being abused by Bester made him "bad", and now he wants to make up for it! The whole shadow-Vorlon-conflict is somewhat muddled, since as the show progresses we see that both sides (hah!) are actually terrible in their own way, and the GET THE HELL OUT OF MY GALAXY resolution is ambiguous, as far as contemporary politics are concerned, other than maybe judging colonialism? But on the other hand, the Centauri are clearly the most "conservative" of the main races, with their royal court and emperors and all that, and it's fairly obvious that the show criticizes how the court operates, even if at the same time it serves as a vessel for Londo's tragedy. I guess the Minbari are sort of "conservative" in their own ways since they have a heavy caste-system operated society and all that, but it's not as clear an analogue to Western politics as the Centauri, I think. And while the show isn't "profoundly leftist", we see actual tangible things like labour arbitration being portrayed on screen, even if it's for minor plotlines. The Earth civil war plot is expressly about Earth turning hard-authoritarian, and the colonies rebelling against that. I can sort of see how that could be construed as a defence of some idealized conservative world-view, but how overtly evil and oppressive the Clarke regime is portrayed as, combined with the heavy emphasis on xenophobia and the Night Watch, it seems hard to justify that this is anything but an authoritarian-right allegory, shown as the Bad Guys.
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Feb 14, 2021 08:14
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That sounds incredibly wild, but honestly I'm not sure how jarring it'd be to see Katsulas and Jurasik playing humans, on Babylon 5.
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Apr 6, 2021 08:24
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Do Rebo and Zooty count?
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Jul 5, 2021 17:38
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"I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite." Babylon 5, 1997 Babylon 5 didn't explore all of the media-cultural tropes of fascism, but the destruction of ISN and how the "media liaison" acted with Sheridan in private vs. public captured at least a part of it. I've always seen it as Earth turning violently inwards, and what we as the audience can see from Babylon 5 or Mars are just snippets of what is happening at large "back home". And then there is the positively Orwellian bit with Sheridan's interrogation, and you get at least a decent glimpse of how the bureaucracy (that's what the mustard man is, after all) has responded to Clarke's ideas. Portrayals of fascism don't have to be Star Wars-style Stormtroopers, banners and other parodied Nazi iconography, because that's sort of buying into the Nazi idea of "we look great in Hugo Boss suits and big honking buildings". Fascism doesn't have a core other than "might makes right", and the Clarke regime certainly played that up, and arguably even the Psy-core - Edgars - conflict relies on those motifs; Bester is a eugenicist monster and Edgars wants a genocide based on genetic lines. And Zack's story-line of first being seduced into the Nightwatch as an everyman who just "wants to do right" by what he perceives as his in-group, only to be disillusioned and turn against the fascists, well. 
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Aug 26, 2021 00:43
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sebmojo posted:I always thought delenn and Sheridan had the chemistry of a mossy stump tbh, though she did her best and sleeping in light was great. Sinclair was much more believable on the romance side. I like Delenn as a character, but the love-story arc was a bit flat. Except when they played it up for laughs ("yoo-hoo?"), but that just undercuts it more. But Sheridan's 100% the American everyman Joe just trying to do right, god damnit, and you get the Hell out of his galaxy, etc., so he's inherently more of a one-dimensional character than the interesting ones like Londo and G'kar, who actually either change or they don't, but it's an internal conflict either way. Or, well, external too, poor G'kar. But the point is, Sheridan, to me, always feels like the same hero archetype, who has things done to him at times, but his motivations as a character don't change all that much. Even though he fights a civil war, it's against a regime that is portrayed as literally infiltrated by aliens who want people to Do Bad Things. All that said, Sheridan's kind of this empty canvas that you can't really project an exciting love story on. He's just... There, being all good-guy'y, and I like what he does, but that is just the blandest dude to have a love affair.
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Sep 29, 2021 21:58
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Who facilitate people who want to do bad things to do bad things Well, right, the people who wanted to do Bad Things were already there and they got helped, arguably, by the aliens, all the while the aliens wanting to play everyone against everyone, it's just turtles, I mean bad persons, all the way down, really.
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Sep 29, 2021 22:03
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This is inconsequential, but doesn't someone point out that Earth Force has to use those big rotating thingies on their warships, but the Minbari have artificial gravity? I think it comes up with the White Star, but I'm not sure now.
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Oct 23, 2021 10:31
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Dec 3, 2021 00:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:So did Delenn marry her great, great grandpa in season 1? If you mean Sinclair, Valen was active about a thousand years before Delenn was born; if the average Minbari lifespan is roughly a hundred human years, it'd be the equivalent of meeting your ancestor from what, about 700 years ago? It gets a bit fuzzy, but for example pretty much everyone of European descent living today has the same ancestors from a thousand years ago, so either everything is incest, or it's meaningless.
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Mar 4, 2022 14:06
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jng2058 posted:JMS once said that originally Minbari just didn't do facial hair but Louis Turenne didn't want to shave his beard when he played older Draal, so JMS changed it to "older Minbari who choose to break with tradition and custom", so Draal, Dukhat, and Lenonn (the old Ranger leader from In the Beginning) had facial hair. It's another case of the show adapting to the realities of filming changing the original intent. There's also Neroon's friend who was too wimpy to die in the wheel of fire, episode 414: 
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Mar 5, 2022 02:44
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Narsham posted:4. Where's the muscle coming to replace losses for all these gangs? One guy gets offed on Earth, and there's dozens more where that came from. But every being on B5 had to either pay to come there, or be brought there by someone else who paid. Unless there's far more one-way traffic and making a living on the station is harder than it looks, finding this many drifters who are capable of operating as muscle seems improbable, and you'd expect more diversity instead of always seeing central-casting style "tough guys" plus a scattering of aliens. I'm almost certain that some episode that features lurkers mentions that people buy one-way tickets to Babylon 5 with all their savings, hoping to strike it rich there, and get stranded because they didn't hit the proverbial jack-pot and wind up as homeless people. That said, either I can't recall it or it isn't stated what the big pay-day is supposed to be that these people are betting their lives on, so this doesn't actually address your criticism, just adds another layer of hand-waving on top of it 
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Mar 12, 2022 20:13
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Leisure Suit Larry 8 was supposed to be set in space, but never got made. Babylon 5: Keepin' it sleazy
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Sep 19, 2022 22:55
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Skippy McPants posted:I think Richard Biggs is the only one who I remember still being meh in later seasons. He never really learns not to treat his lines like nails to which his voice is the hammer. I guess, but it also makes him a great straight man to Marcus's irreverent hi-jinks. A conversation that can only end in a gunshot, indeed
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Sep 25, 2022 16:25
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Rough for the rest of the Minbari that all courtship planet-wide had to come to a halt when he went to B5. I mean, they have video call technology
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Oct 14, 2022 15:43
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For the first one, Sheridan is now a Man on a Mission, and he wants these motherfucking snakes off his motherfucking plane. And the second part ties into the first one, since it's easy to see a Man on a Mission as someone with a Messianic complex. This isn't helped by rando civilians actually considering Sheridan "blessed" or whatever. Garibaldi was always a cynical skeptic, but Bester turned that knob to 11 because he figured Garibaldi's inherent mistrust of any authority would result in, well, hilarity from Bester's point of view. And it eventually did?
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Jan 4, 2023 05:02
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:There's also a pic out there of Jason Walker and Bill Mumy in a convertible while in makeup A little late, but hey  I'm sure these have all been in this thread somewhere already, so sue me  
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Jan 8, 2023 05:59
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Jan 8, 2023 15:42
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G'kar points out that the Centauri "plucked asteroids from their orbits and sent them plunging on our cities", and he contrasts this with the mass drivers, which were the thing Londo was supposedly witnessing far earlier in the series. We see, in fact, the Centauri war ships launching something out of themselves and into Narn  and this is conveyed to us (and Londo) as the genocide that occurred. But this does not portray the hurling of asteroids. Was G'kar using poetic license? Did the creators of Babylon 5 not consider all the implicit details in warfare in space? Was Babylon 5 largely a vessel for delivering really great monologues?
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Jan 18, 2023 18:01
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Right, but as a short-hand for the show, the Centauri war-ships just pooped out those blue spheres to stand in as "mass drivers". Grabbing asteroids and hurling them at a planet was not shown, but G'kar saying they did it makes about as much narrative sense as all the travel times portrayed in the show.
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Jan 18, 2023 18:33
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Grand Fromage posted:The first pic you posted is of an asteroid in the mass driver. The show does not establish that it is an asteroid, though, it's just a blue goop ball that comes out of that thing which is dubbed a mass driver. Grabbing an asteroid is never shown in the show. edit: The scene from which that screenshot is from specifically makes it so that the mass driver "gun" makes a glowy lights thing, which creates the blue goop ball, which is then fired out of the gun.
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Jan 18, 2023 18:36
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I don't understand how this is something that must be defended at all costs. Marcus sending Ivanova an egg is a joke, and it didn't really behoove the writers of the show to consider what makes and what doesn't make sense from a logistical point of view. The Centauri, as depicted in that scene, are shooting blue goop balls that are somehow within their guns, and it serves to illustrate the point that Londo is seeing that, being dismayed at what he has done, and we don't need a lesson in orbital mechanics, which would be involved in capturing asteroids!, to see that.
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Jan 18, 2023 18:43
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Powered Descent posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4b37ygojw It is all just "space wizard did it", but asteroids have their own orbital elements, and momentum, and so on, which can't just be shoved into a cannon that shoots blue goop balls. It's fine that the Centauri have blue goop balls, but it is a narrative disjoint for G'kar to call them asteroids. None of this diminishes what the show wants to portray.
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Jan 18, 2023 19:06
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Grand Fromage posted:It's not defense as much as I don't understand what you're confused about. You're saying there's no asteroid and it's a "blue goop ball", but: You can't just pick up a thing out of orbit like that. I know it's out of fashion nowadays, but Babylon five made a name for itself back in the day for having believable physics. If your argument is that the Centauri, here, are just breaking physics for the sake of the story, that's great! The sake of the story is what drove the weird travel times, too!
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Jan 18, 2023 19:09
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Powered Descent posted:They. Have. Spaceships. They went out and found some space rocks of about the right size. They flew up to those rocks, grabbed them, and put them in the mass driver cannons. Then they flew to Narn and shot them at the planet. I started out on this voyage of discovery trying to illustrate how non-sensical travel times happened. Apparently, I failed. It takes a lot of momentum and a lot of mass-energy to divert asteroids from their orbits. It's fine that this was treated as a no-consequence, since a lot of other things were, too. And we know they have pew-pew guns that do not make any sense anyway, and artificial gravity, so I guess bitching about travel times is more valid than discussing asteroid bombardment 
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Jan 18, 2023 19:14
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sebmojo posted:They landed on the asteroids and slowed them with centauri asteroid slowing devices, then chopped them up to be used as projectiles with centauri asteroid chopping up devices. I talked to jms and he confirmed this is how it happened. Right, and Marcus getting someone eggs was performed similarly! 
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Jan 18, 2023 19:14
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Grand Fromage posted:Centauri ships have inertial dampening, artificial gravity, FTL engines, infinite delta-v. They can do whatever they want. Right! So travel times not making sense are not a deal-breaker. Or I guess they are.
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Jan 18, 2023 19:19
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I fought the power, and the space lasers won. Sorry for being a bother, everyone!
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Jan 18, 2023 19:29
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I apologized!
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Jan 20, 2023 12:29
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Happy 30th!
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Feb 22, 2023 15:59
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I'm sad that the mantis dude never showed up again Sure, the Centauri have their hair and whatnot, but a mantis? This is where I will be clowned and someone will demonstrate that the mantis was present at the formation of the Alliance or something, isn't it 
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Mar 10, 2023 01:29
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Isn't that the point of the show? You scream at your screen "Londo, what the gently caress are you doing?", but you still sort of like Londo, and it's all very  Now Refa, that guy can just gently caress off. But Londo was there for the mass drivers blowing up Narn and he's definitely a war criminal.
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Mar 14, 2023 06:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:The thing about Londo is that at the start of the show, he's right. As the show goes on, you see all his motivations, and they make sense. Continued Narn expansion is a thread, they nearly killed Londo's nephew with their conquest. The Centauri Republic is decaying, their quarantine on Na'ka'leen Feeders was lifted as a cost-cutting measure, endangering the galaxy. On the day Morden comes, he has to hand over a bunch of the Republic's cash over to some criminal dingus to recover a lost artifact of their former glory. You can see where he's coming from, and it's subtle at what point he slips into being wrong and doing wrong, and even when he changes his mind, he just can't turn things around. Is it enough that they made sense for Londo, though? He was a racial supremacist, and he just plain forgot about Na-toth for years. Yes, Londo was representing a failing empire which he wanted to fix, and drives a lot of the narrative, but was he ever in the right of any argument? The Centauri were a dying people.
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Mar 14, 2023 17:09
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The Chairman posted:I think someone else said this earlier in the thread: Londo consistently makes the worst decisions in pursuit of a noble goal, while G'Kar consistently makes the best decisions in pursuit of selfish goals I think this stops being true after G'kar is tortured and loses his eye. Or even before that, because he goes to find Mister Garibaldi for selfless reasons? Londo is a war criminal. G'kar aspires to be one, but he doesn't ever make it that far, does he. I said come in! posted:The fact that many of the main characters were deeply flawed but had good intentions and were not maliciously evil, was really great at the time. Very groundbreaking writing back then. Also this.
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Mar 14, 2023 17:40
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