Babylon 5: Reboot and Zooty

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Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

If overacting isn't your thing, space opera is probably not the right genre for you.

Aw, come on. Babylon 5 is really bad on this front, especially in the first season. B5 is probably one of my top five favorite shows of all time, but the acting and writing ranges from serviceable to really atrocious.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2016 07:48

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:11

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Data Graham posted:

In episode 12, "By Any Means Necessary", holy poo poo has the writing come on by leaps and bounds since the first episode. Remember how I was grousing about clumsy partial/interrupted lines? This time that whole scene between the union boss lady and Sinclair/Garibaldi is just full of lines where they talk over each other and yell to cut each other off while the one who was interrupted keeps on going for a good five or six words that sputter out like a dying dirtbike. It's way more engrossing.

Of course I don't for a minute buy that any strikebreaking in history has actually gone down remotely the way it does in this play-acted googly-eyed rendition, but it was plenty entertaining anyway. And the B story of G'Kar and Londo fighting over a flower was dreadfully fun; they've both just disappeared into their roles.

Last time I watched B5, it occurred to me that this episode is really the first point where it's obvious that something isn't quite right with Earth. Earth Alliance is basically set up like some kind of future, global Spacemerica, but "By Any Means Necessary" just casually drops the idea that EarthGov is willing to run around breaking labor disputes with the military. It's a nice bit of world building and foreshadowing.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2016 08:03

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

MrL_JaKiri posted:

You have chosen... poorly

Here's a confession, then: I love Babylon 5, but I don't think I've ever seen more than one or two episodes of the fifth season. The fourth season just feels so... final. It's hard for me to convince myself that it's worth watching anything after that.

Someone convince me I'm wrong.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 01:10

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

I think Londo and G'Kar are pretty close to being my favorite tragic TV figures. Neither one of them is inherently bad, but it's also totally impossible to imagine their story playing out any differently than it does. Their whole arc is just really well written and both of them feel like fully realized characters.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 01:22

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Data Graham posted:

Yeah, that's true. I had in mind more like the atmospheric bits throughout the episode, like how Garibaldi got the last word with his "not everybody ends up blind and toothless, only the bad guys" thing; and how much weight and sympathy was given to the victims' families and their grievance for having been "cheated" of justice.

I'm not sure if I'd really agree with seeing Garibaldi as a mouthpiece for the writers here. He's pretty consistently written with a bit of a hard nosed conservative lean, so I'd say this is more just Garibaldi being Garibaldi. At most he's just being used as a convenient way to offer an opposing viewpoint.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 02:44

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Data Graham posted:

Whoa whoa whoa WHOA WHOA what the gently caress am I watching :printercarry:

This scene is a little weird, but I don't think it's as bad as you're making it out to be. Like, it's totally legit for Ivanova to be acting kind of strangely given what just happened and what Marcus was willing to do. That kind of thing would gently caress anyone up and it makes sense that she'd be seriously reevaluating their relationship in maybe not a totally reasonable and rational way.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2016 18:02

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Data Graham posted:

It'll be tough for the show to regain its momentum, especially with Ivanova gone. Looking forward to seeing how successful it is.

For what it's worth, I went years without watching S5 before this thread convinced me to do it like a month ago. The first half was pretty rough and I kept losing interest, but the back half is great. I don't think you're going to be terribly disappointed.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2016 04:16

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Timby posted:

Eh, it's a cool line if you watch it with the mentality of a 15-year-old. Straczynski was relatively good at plotting (although how militant he gets when people call him out for cribbing from other sources is rather distasteful), but he sucks at dialogue.

Yeah, I've recommended B5 to a bunch of people and I always feel like I have to warn them that the terrible dialogue is just something you have to accept. It always throws me for a bit of a loop when someone comes back and says that they didn't think it was all that bad, because despite B5 being easily one of my top ten favorite shows of all time I absolutely cringe at most of the dialogue that's supposed to sound poignant or badass.

I think what bugs me the most is that the content of the dialogue is generally good, but the phrasing just tends to be awkward and unnatural.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 22:47

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

It's kind of funny how insanely well-suited Babylon 5 fits into the post-Lost obsession with poring over and discussing every detail of a show, while also being so obviously dated in ways that would make it pretty unappealing to that crowd. Or maybe I'm wrong and things actually, properly foreshadowing future events and having concrete answers makes it less suitable for that kind of internet obsession.

Either way, I don't think you can really force someone to be a detail-obsessed watcher so imo pointing out little details and clues to first-time watchers isn't really productive. You can enjoy the show just fine without noticing how much everything is plotted out right from the beginning.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2023 22:55

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I think you have it backwards: there was a lot of internet obsession at the time. It initiated this kind of poring and obsessiveness. The Lurker's Guide was the first "media wiki".

I know, but what I'm saying is that nothing on the internet at the time that B5 aired could even remotely be called mainstream. B5 pre-dated the phenomena being something that was a part of popular culture instead of a nerd obsession.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2023 00:59

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

I always interpret the way things go down in the end as kind of a massively degenerate state of affairs. The Vorlons went crazy because they got forced into the conflict directly and weren't willing to go right at the Shadows, but that wasn't part of their plan. If the younger races just followed along then it would have been objectively better (from the standpoint of death and destruction) to work with the Vorlons than with the Shadows. You're being manipulated either way, but one side's philosophy forces them to pursue extreme violence.

So Sinclair going back is a "good" thing if you assume the conditions weren't right 1000 years earlier to kick the Vorlons and Shadows out. You've only got two options, and one of them leads to a much more chaotic and violent environment than the other.

# ¿ May 6, 2023 23:21

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Yeah, I don't think the Shadows or Vorlons being unrecognizable as societies is an accident or a problem. Like, what are all the First Ones out there doing in their big ships that just hang around in random parts of space? Who knows! It doesn't matter, because the idea is that these are incomprehensible civilizations playing at being gods.

I don't think you gain anything by making them more understandable or relatable because the whole point is that they're not. The part of the Vorlons and the Shadows that you get to see is the part that's specifically designed to interface with the younger races.

# ¿ May 8, 2023 16:44

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Rappaport posted:

Do the Vorlons have trade treaties with any other race? Not sure what they'd be selling, so maybe not.

Don't get me wrong, I would love just living as an energy being on a huge space-ship that is shaped like an eyeball from the 1970's, but it is at odds with what the rest of the series is saying about societies. What the Narn and the Centauri go through is important, while it is also a plot device to give Londo and G'kar major character arcs. It is important that humanity has a huge civil war. And the Minbari are still somewhat comprehensible, even though especially early on they are unreliable narrators about everything.

But they all have societies. Delenn's later admission of the "reformed" Council is that the worker caste is important, presumably because they make stuff. The Centauri destruction of Narn Prime is explicitly called as "bombing them to the stone age", indicating they had a society which produced doo-dads and doo-hickeys. The Centauri society itself is portrayed as very much one that is producing things and having an economy, and Londo has a story or two about it.

The Vorlons are portrayed as occupying a large chunk of space, they participate in Babylon 5 which is explicitly a diplomatic vessel for peace, but what would a junior Vorlon do in their society?

It's fine that they are incomprehensible, until suddenly it's just order versus chaos and gently caress you buddy, but in-universe I feel it'd be more satisfying if they had some semblances of normal life about them. If the Shadows are just asleep all the time when they're not out and about kidnapping people, I guess OK? But new creatures are born every now and then, and there will have to be schools, helping new-comers adapt to their respective societies, and so forth. This is even an under-lined theme with the Psy-Corp, since Corp is mother and Corp is father.

I may have forgotten some techno-babble about the Shadows and the Vorlons not breeding, but this won't be the first time I make an idiot of myself in this thread.

To be honest, I think this is kind of a limiting world view.

There don't have to be schools. The Vorlons don't need to have a society that's comprehensible or understandable, with a hierarchy that has any meaning to humans. There are a lot of potentially very intelligent animals on Earth and we can't really comprehend their social structures or the experience of being them, outside of very general terms that probably aren't even correct since we're viewing them through our own experience.

Like the Founders in Deep Space 9 have a totally incomprehensible society and social structure. They go into a big loving pool where they're all one organism, maybe, except they're not. What I just typed is gibberish and it means nothing, and that's okay because the point is that the human experience may just be totally incompatible with understanding certain modalities of being.

# ¿ May 8, 2023 18:00

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:11

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

Yeah, my read on the Minbari has always been "what if it turned out the Space Elves were actually morons?"

They're constantly shown making rash, short-sighted, or just outright bad decisions while presenting a completely aloof appearance to outsiders, and it doesn't feel like that's poor writing or a mistake. A lot of the mysteries around the Minbari turn out to have really dumb or even just kind of racist answers, so I think the takeaway is supposed to be a really advanced civilization held together by a bunch of outdated concepts and duct tape, with the whole thing ready to just fall down under the slightest stress.

I mean they went collectively bonkers and launched a war of genocide over a single diplomatic incident

edit-

To add to this, I think it's actually a reasonable depiction for that kind of civilization. They're at the top of the heap when it comes to the "young" races and they've had the Vorlons whispering in their ears about their destiny for a thousand years. They don't want or need to interact with anyone else except for funsies and to fulfill their prophecies, so their culture and government don't really have any external stressors. It's the perfect recipe to create a civilization that looks wildly stable from the outside but that's actually becoming more and more brittle every day.

Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jul 6, 2023

# ¿ Jul 6, 2023 15:20

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