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wizzardstaff posted:I don’t know about the DVDs; it’s actually streaming from Amazon. I think they have a poor source material for the episodes though. There are lots of little of film reel errors, like the little spots and blips that appear on the screen in a movie theater. So wherever they got the episodes, it’s not high quality. I never noticed it but my DVD copy also has the spoiler in the opening credits. Doh.
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Oct 31, 2018 14:02
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I thought that was Claudia Christian, not Pat Tallman.
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Nov 17, 2018 19:59
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This thread inspired me to do my own rewatch (probably my sixth time through the show). I hadn't consciously noticed the subtle shift in Ivanova's behavior in season 2 in my earlier watching. With Sinclair she's a little stiff. With Sheridan, since they've served together before, she's more relaxed, and even willing to tease him.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:03
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Milkfred E. Moore posted: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. Are you sure the Omega-class could talk Minbari ships? I don't recall the show ever establishing that.
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Dec 11, 2018 04:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted: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. The whole point of that line in S02E01 is that B5's sensors can track the Minbari cruiser and they shouldn't be able to. That tips Sheridan off that there's more going on than meets the eye, which leads him to his unorthodox solution to getting those assholes off his porch. For the White Stars, I offer this retcon: they aren't fitted with Minbari stealth systems because those systems would add cost (problematic when you're building an entire fleet of ships without the full approval of your government) and wouldn't work against the Shadows anyway. Edit: Probably should have read to end of thread and seen MrL_JaKiri making this same suggestion. In dramatic terms it just has to work out the way it did. If nobody less advanced than the Minbari could efficiently fight the Rangers, it would suck a lot of the drama out of the later seasons of the show.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:22
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Anyone talking about tertiary characters needs to wait until the series is over and then talk to me about Neroon.
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Dec 20, 2018 05:31
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The roles are distinct, the makeup is totally different, but the diction remains the same.
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Dec 20, 2018 15:58
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There's nothing historically inconsistent about someone like Musante using sex that way. In 2018 it looks both bad and foolish, because the importance of not having inappropriate sexual relations seems so clear. The people who aren't worried about that are worried about women lying about harassment to make men look bad, which would also be a potential negative outcome of Musante's ploy. I think if I re-wrote that episode today, I'd either leave it out, or have Sheridan step to the other side of the room, turn on the computer and ask it to record, and tell her that while regs might ambiguously permit it, he thinks a romantic or sexual involvement between a CO and his political advisor would be contrary to the spirit of the rules and prejudicial to discipline.
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Dec 20, 2018 20:20
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Becoming the Shadows would have been Goonswarm's highest achievement. What could be finer than finding a bunch of up-and-coming alliances, convincing each of them that we thought they were our new favorite, and then letting them all fight it out for our entertainment?
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Dec 24, 2018 02:15
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Sleeping in Light holds up for me as the best series finale ever made. Peter David wrote an authorized trilogy about the the Drakh on Centauri Prime that closes out those events. I don't love those books, but Garibaldi gets to say, "What's up, Drakh?" and that is all the justification they require.
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Jan 6, 2019 04:20
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I love the way B5 dealt with homosexuality. In the future, nobody will care. No coming out stories, no bigotry, just ordinary relationship stuff.
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Feb 1, 2019 06:34
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I also got the idea that the Narn Regime wanted to be seen as the bad guys, within certain parameters. It's a new power, and a poor one, and it's good for them if people see them as dangerous, but not *too* dangerous.
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Jul 14, 2019 19:26
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Genre shows occupy a different place in American culture now, and a remake could get the budget to do vastly better on production values, and probably get a better cast overall. The problem is that you're effectively remaking a 70 hour movie. What if you get to season three before you realize that New Londo and New G'Kar just don't have the chemistry as actors to pull off the elevator scene? Unless some writer with tremendous talent wants to make a passion project out of a remake/relaunch, I think it's best left as-is.
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Aug 19, 2019 01:52
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My recollection of them is that the colors refer to sections longitudinally, so it's just a way of locating things in a grid within the basically cylindrical layout.
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Sep 23, 2019 14:50
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I always took "Chief" to mean something like "Chief Warrant Officer," and ascribed the rest to the fact that JMS never really got the military right.
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Sep 27, 2019 15:08
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I've been re-watching The West Wing lately, and there's a (small) common thread there. It's easy to rise up through a bureaucracy, taking your meetings, working your angles, and never really notice how far you've risen, right up until it matters. Suddenly your position paper gets to the President of the United States, and he changes his mind, and that thing you wrote for the sake of argument is now national policy. That time you decided to vent your spleen in a meeting turned into an attack that wiped out a colony. That's got to be a hell of a realization.
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Oct 11, 2019 19:01
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But then they show the fighters getting released sequentially but coming out on parallel vectors, and you die a little inside.
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Apr 23, 2020 13:13
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The vectors would be radial, intersecting at the station"s axis of rotation. There ought to be either a simultaneous drop, or a series of maneuvers to get the group into formation. Edit: Radial is actually a completely wrong statement. WTF, tired me? Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 06:05
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There's a lot of cheap drama in the phrase "last of the Babylon stations," but not if you mean it was the last one built and the others are all chilling out elsewhere.
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May 19, 2020 14:27
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I thought that way until someone pointed out that gyroscopic forces would make such a ship almost completely unmaneuverable. I wish they'd had extra CGI capacity to show them spinning down for combat.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:01
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It's been a very long time since I studied any physics, but IIRC, while counter-rotating sections would neutralize the torque on the rest of the ship, they wouldn't help with maneuverability otherwise. Any rotating object resists torque perpendicular to its axis of rotation. Again, going from memory, the resistance is proportional in some way to both the speed and mass of the rotating objects, but I don't remember the name for all this science or the nature of the equations. Any rotating section would therefore make it hard to pitch or yaw the ship, even if they were counter-rotating. Counter-rotation would make it easier to spin them up or down.
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Jun 2, 2020 21:03
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sebmojo posted:Lol. I liked the way they handled that, it was v nbd. B5 did an amazing job of depicting a future free of bigotry. Nobody even talks about gay rights because it's a settled issue. Zorak of Michigan fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jun 8, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 20:57
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"A bomb is made to explode. That's its meaning. Its purpose. Season 5 is empty because you spent it trying to stop the bomb from becoming. And for who? For what? You know what a bomb is, Captain Lochley, that doesn't explode? It's a Byron soliloquy, buddy. "
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Feb 20, 2021 05:48
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I'm enough of a physics nerd to dislike spinny sections on warships, so even within B5, I like some of the other races' ships more than the Omega.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:07
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Shadow war question: how were Ivanova and Marcus able to recruit the other 'First Ones'? Wouldn't they know the whole thing was a bullshit proxy war? Why would they agree to participate? I think that the first ones usually treat the younger races the way we treat animals. You might notice one from time to time and think, "Oh look, a bunny rabbit!" You might think that bunny is cute, but you wouldn't decide to take an interest in changing the way bunnies live. If it gets eaten by a hawk, there will be other bunnies in other years. But if one particular bunny keeps coming around to your door and doing something funny, then all the sudden it gets hard to be philosophical about it. Ivanova managed to make herself seem interesting. Edit: You know how, in Matters of Honor, Sheridan complains that he hates Kosh's elliptical answers, and Kosh just says, "Good?" I feel absolutely certain that for the Vorlon, this is equivalent to the human game of pretending to throw the ball and watching the dog chase it. Hah hah! Silly human! He thought I was going to enlighten him! Isn't that adorable?
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Mar 17, 2021 14:52
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Qwertycoatl posted:Hard to make an encounter suit that doesn't interfere with showing expressions. I doubt it's a coincidence that B5 only used it for the mysterious aliens with unknowable thoughts, and for the black market insect that's basically a just vending machine for illegal stuff. I feel like that's an opportunity as much as it is a problem. Write it into the script! Let the main characters complain to one another about not being able to read the guy in the suit. I think that sort of thing, done to a certain degree, helps make the world feel real.
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Apr 1, 2021 16:49
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I endorse this notion entirely.
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Apr 1, 2021 23:46
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The Centauri PPGs seem to fire much faster than human models. There's no way to compare the power of each shot, but it seems possible that they had an easier time killing Shadows than the humans did Vorlons because their hand weapons are a couple centuries more advanced.
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Apr 24, 2021 14:37
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Did it leave a hole in your mind?
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Aug 8, 2021 19:08
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Cormack posted:I thought Narns also had to be strapped into their ships. This is my understanding as well.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:52
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Sinclair is Minbari Jesus, or will be in negative a few thousand years. Sinclair nearly got killed at the Line. The Line happened because humans started the Earth-Minbari war. Thus, through a long causal chain, humans nearly killed Minbari Jesus. This has been today's installment of  .
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Oct 24, 2021 17:56
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Horizon Burning posted:i'm sorry but the whole canticle-inspired "great burn" thing is really dumb and doesn't really make much sense in the context of b5, which kinda makes me think JMS did lift it as a deliberate nod or homage. earth gets burnt to pre-industrial ludditism by an unknown side of the second human civil war and then just kind of left there. where's the rest of the EA? unknown. why is the entire surviving population of the planet being punished for the actions of the anti-ISA faction--a war kicked off, i should add, by a pre-emptive strike by the pro-ISA human faction. imagine that in today's world. 'oh, sure, we bombed these people so far back that they don't know how to build a combustion engine and only understand their culture in religious myths, but now we're going to take the time to raise them the right way. the way that just so happens to correspond to our ideology.' how many people died? how many people continue to die on earth's post-apocalyptic husk? why aren't the rest of the EA colonies helping earth? it's just bewildering when you start to think about it. it echoes the vorlons (which we even see humanity kind of become) but without an ounce of self-reflection given, y'know, that kind of obedience-or-punishment talk was a bad thing. I didn't think post-burn Earth was actually luddite, just involuntarily pre-industrial. The brief clip we see doesn't really give much room for exposition. Since the Rangers are trying to do something, I assume that represents the entire IA trying to help. Why aren't they doing more? Nobody can say right now, unless JMS wants to trot out some authorial dictates, but I can easily think of reasons. One obvious one would be that the planet is still in widespread conflict, even if it's only over ruins. If the IA helps one side over another, they're taking sides in that war. There may not be a side worth empowering that way at the moment, in which case the responsible thing to do might easily be to (try to) aid all sides evenly, to make life more humane without tilting a balance of power. That's a slow and tedious process. Of course, that's just an explanation I made up on the spur of the moment.
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Oct 25, 2021 18:49
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This is one of those times when the show obviously decided that a few hours away is a few hours away and didn't want to get drawn into the weeds. Trying to sit there with a show bible and a team of astrophysicists to say "OK, the fuel capacity and engine performance of a shuttle means that the travel time from B5 on June whatever 2258 to the Epsilon 5 - local star L3 point == three hours" would condemn future writers to madness.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:22
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If we ever do, I require that they make Tino his first name.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:05
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Importing a comment from the blind watch thread:Powered Descent posted:[*] So the White Star has Vorlon biological technology and grows and strengthens and adapts. And no one thought to tell the Captain (or the audience) about this until literally in the middle of a battle? i really hate it every time someone surprises Sheridan with relevant information about the capabilities of the force he's commanding. What kind of officer takes command and doesn't get a thorough briefing? JMS really struggles to capture military logic sometimes.
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Mar 7, 2022 05:12
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Narsham posted:And B5 does too. The conversation started with a complaint about any exposition at all about ship capacities. That one actually didn't bother me. The original complaint was from War Without End, where the White Star takes fire and then Lennier thoughtfully explains to Sheridan that the ship is protected by the Vorlon defense system. They could have done the exposition without making Sheridan sound nearly so uninformed by having him say, "Mr Lennier, I know this ship has Vorlon defenses, but how many of those can we really take?" The one that really bothers me was from season 4, where they're about to lead the fleet into battle, and then Delenn shows him the Minbari communication and control system, which he clearly hasn't seen before. It's the largest fleet ever assembled, going into battle against a superior force, and yet they've never shown their commander how their comms work? My old paintball team wouldn't have made that mistake.
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Mar 8, 2022 19:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think the biggest way I could describe JMS's issues with vocabulary/lexicon is that he kind of defaults too readily to vaguer terms and talking about "the good guys", but I'm not sure how else I would describe it. "Resources" is the word that drives me nuts. People need resources, B5 has resources, nobody ever says what they are. Re the little sacks of money, I thought those were usually casino chips, since they took be used most often to settle gambling debts or demonstrate winnings.
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Mar 13, 2022 18:14
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MrL_JaKiri posted:That's in S3, Shadow Dancing. Lower key engagement than Into the Fire. I am both wrong and not convinced that I'm wrong!
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Mar 18, 2022 20:26
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Jedit posted:On a combat mission? Heck no. He was a Marine reservist who flew F-18s, and he got photographed doing what reserve pilots do when they're not deployed.
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Sep 21, 2022 17:44
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| # ¿ Jan 15, 2026 08:09 |
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One of the things I like about the B5 vision of the future is that nobody ever says bi or gay. In that season 4 episode where Marcus and Steven have to pretend to be a married couple, nobody ever says "but I'm not gay," they go right to mother-in-law jokes.
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Sep 27, 2022 13:43
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