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Tom Guycot posted:s2 e8-9 messages from earth & point of no return This is season 3 you're watching, not 2.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:02
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Oh man that's such an amazing episode to missZorak of Michigan posted:This is season 3 you're watching, not 2. Fortunately that's just a typo and not missing and entire season 
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Mar 21, 2023 16:04
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Zorak of Michigan posted:This is season 3 you're watching, not 2. Oops, yeah, typo. MrL_JaKiri posted:Oh man that's such an amazing episode to miss I know I'm just sitting here kicking myself it had to be that, not 'londo dates a stripper', 'monster goes wild', or 'weirdo religious parents', it HAD to be that, of all things. God i'm so pissed at myself for ruining my blind watch of this show I almost want to throw up my hands and stop watching out of frustration for ruining the series for myself from one little mistake. Ugh!
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Mar 21, 2023 16:14
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These things happen, remember that it was a TV programme in an era without catchup or the expectation that the audience would have seen everything - it's why episodes like Messages from Earth exist, to get people up to speed. For reference, my first episode was The Hour of the Wolf back in the 90s when it was airing. When you get there consider how much I missed.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:18
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Tom Guycot posted:Oops, yeah, typo. Don't worry, yea that's a right kick in the pants but there's plenty more where that came from.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:18
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Tom Guycot posted:
If it's any consolation: on B5's original airing in the UK 30 years ago, the pilot movie wasn't shown until midway through S1. The only people who saw it in the correct running order were the few who had rented it out on video. Which was mostly Commodore Amiga owners - the S1 graphics were rendered using the Video Toaster, an industry specialist piece of hardware slaved to Amiga 4000 workstations, and the biggest word of mouth for B5 came from the Amiga magazines. So there was an entire country saying "what the gently caress?"
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Mar 21, 2023 16:35
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As to why Earth is one of the 'Major' powers that we see; (Only real spoiler spoilers to follow are season 1 stuff, extrapolated on a bit via extra-textual stuff - lurker's guide, books etc.) the short version boils down to "Earthers can't keep their nose out of everyone else's business", and when the Dilgar war happened (Remember Deathwalker?), the Earth Alliance basically rode in to the rescue of the non-aligned worlds, who had been severely beaten up by that conflict, and, much like the Americans after World War II, were in a position of some prominence in the new galactic power hierarchy that came out of that conflict. This was roughly a generation before the Minbari war - it's the war Franklin and Garibaldi's fathers fought in, for example. The League came to view the Earth Alliance as it's patron and protector and Earth took advantage of that status to expand into the galaxy until they ran headfirst into the Minbari and... well, the rest of that history we see in the show/movies.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:38
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Jedit posted:If it's any consolation: on B5's original airing in the UK 30 years ago, the pilot movie wasn't shown until midway through S1. The only people who saw it in the correct running order were the few who had rented it out on video. Only reason i got hooked was because i worked in a vid store; rented The Gathering, then bought that copy when it was no longer needed, still have it.  edit: back then it was Babylon 5, Wednesdays on Channel 4 at 18:00 Or was it Thursdays?  
Just Another Lurker fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 16:49
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Oh sorry, mobile typing sucks. I meant to say Londo and the Eye jewelry that he obtained in "Signs and Portents". This one is unnecessarily confusing because this is a real thing 
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Mar 21, 2023 16:51
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1x14: By Any Means Necessary. You know, shows like this are surprisingly insightful about labor issues. Garibaldi is a cop, so of course he would be pretty scornful of the workers' demands. The "Labor Committee", of course, doesn't work on behalf of actual organized labor but really on behalf of management to quash strikes in favor of management. "Illegal" strikes (they would hardly be effective in extracting demands if they weren't illegal) are squashed in the name of "security". It's all pretty much lifted chapter and verse from  101. What's disappointing is that in 240 some years, Earth has apparently failed to transcend beyond such a lovely and outdated economic organization.In any case, the resolution was a bit cheesy but fairly satisfying. If I had been a worker I probably would have wanted all of those promises in writing, because saying whatever it takes to get people to get back to work and never following through is also a pretty well known management tactic, even if Sinclair is a pretty trustworthy guy. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 21:23
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:1x14: By Any Means Necessary. Yeah "management is generous and your friend so it gave them what they wanted and everyone lived happily ever after" was kind of a cop out ending for an otherwise really really good episode about serious labor issues. Its one episode that really feels like It should have had a more realistic and unsatisfying conclusion. Make Geribaldi and Sinclair have to face the consequences and personal responsibility of what they're being told to enforce.
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Mar 21, 2023 22:27
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E: removed s3 spoilers And don't read them in the quoted post immediately below this boofhead fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Mar 22, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 22:56
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Don't click the spoilers until you've finished watching Season 3. This is a discussion that's maybe better suited to the main thread, I think. Edit: Removed spoilers. Torrannor fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Mar 22, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 23:09
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Yes, please cut the discussion of future stuff with active watchers! I know it's insanely tempting, there's points I want to raise right now but this is a Clean Room.
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Mar 21, 2023 23:20
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Oops, sorry Edited the post
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Mar 22, 2023 04:28
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s3e10-11 Severed dreams & ceremonies of light and dark That was some pretty well one space battling considering the budget of this show, and really shows as cheesy as it can look, the CGI of the time really lets them do a lot more, and a lot more dynamically, than if they ever tried to use models. That fight would have been impossible on a shows budget to do. I'm surprised the minbari thing worked when she went off to speak with the grey council. I 100% thought her trip would be going there, and being told off and have to face that the grey council was 'no longer what it once was' or something, and she'd have to realize they'd also been effected like the rest of the galaxy by the internal political influence of the shadows. Really good episode though, things have ratcheted up like mad, and I don't see how they ever get earth back at this point. The Delenn kidnap episode was fine, but I mean something of a cooldown at this point. It was interesting to see the whole vibe of Ivanova and Talia wasn't just a weird artifact of the time, but actually something that was supposed to be there. I had wondered at the time but dismissed it as some innocence of 90's TV or something. Incidentally, its really weird Talia is just gone and dissected after they seemed to be setting up so much more with her with her mentor who went all energy being and gave her some 'gift'. I feel like the actor wanted to leave the show so they abruptly wrote her off.
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Mar 22, 2023 15:01
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Re: Talia, yes, that’s exactly what happened.
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Mar 22, 2023 15:31
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Yeah the early CGI can be difficult at times, but what B5 uses it for, they couldn't do that on their budget with miniatures. Star Trek at the time had its big fancy miniatures that rarely move and it was fairly rare for them to have multiple miniatures in the same shot, while B5 builds itself around whole fleet battles and fighter swarms and often ships will have their own individual animated bits on them. I think the only time I was really put off by the CGI was when they were marveling at Kosh's ship's extremely low res texture.
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Mar 22, 2023 17:42
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Which looked a lot better on a 22 inch CRT through broadcast television.
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Mar 22, 2023 19:16
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CainFortea posted:Which looked a lot better on a 22 inch CRT through broadcast television. Pretty sure whatever they did for the recent version that was on HBO (or perhaps it happened as far back as the DVDs) ruined those shots. The texture was very fluid back when it was originally aired.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:36
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ozmunkeh posted:Pretty sure whatever they did for the recent version that was on HBO (or perhaps it happened as far back as the DVDs) ruined those shots. The texture was very fluid back when it was originally aired. The composite shots (anything combining live action and CGI) were all absolutely butchered in the various attempts to transfer and upscale the content. The straight CGI looks primitive but great, and the regular film footage is fine, but anything combining the two is just a cavalcade of pixellated horrors.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:43
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The vorlon ship texture is actually super advanced space tech that's designed to trick future computers into thinking it's a rendering glitch and not an actual ship This is canon (It's not canon)
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Mar 22, 2023 20:52
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Yeah, it struck me as weird when I saw that scene recently because I'm pretty sure it's 100% CG so should have been fine. If I had anything that would play my old R2 DVDs I'd check them. Alas.
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Mar 22, 2023 20:55
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CainFortea posted:Which looked a lot better on a 22 inch CRT through broadcast television. Compared to anything else outside of ILM movies at the time it was jawdropping, the amount of rewinding i did on my vhs tapes was obscene when it came to the combat footage (all viewed on a 26" Samsung).
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Mar 22, 2023 21:03
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They also do a great job with the composition and stuff so even though it's low res it still looks good. And the CG significantly improves through the series. It's also wild to think about what B5 CG looked like, which even at its best was still a bit rough, then how good BSG's space CG was, and remember that was a gap of like... three years? I'm not sure when they would've been doing the production for the miniseries.
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Mar 23, 2023 01:30
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1x15: The Quality of Mercy. I really liked this episode. Erasing someone's personality seems far worse than any of the penalties we have in the modern day. I liked the "quack" and the fact that she wrestled with taking a life - even the life of a Stephen Miller-esque sociopath. The C plot (Mollari and Delenn's assistant) was ridiculous but I like how the Mimbari are better able to defend themselves than they first appear. Londo using his....appendage to cheat at cards was funny but pretty gross, honestly. The '90s CGI doesn't really bother me. It's not good by today's standards but like C&C Red Alert 2 cutscenes, it has a retro charm for me. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 01:46
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3x22 Z’ha’dum They did a good job with the “Sheridan is being illogical!!” thing. I thought he was genuinely going along with it until they got to Z’ha’dum and I realized his request to Garibaldi was to put the nukes on the ship when he gave one of his two guns up. So, just being out in a shadow ship just…turns you evil? Are they like a borg hive mind type of deal?
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Mar 23, 2023 02:18
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holefoods posted:3x22 Z’ha’dum Not just being "in" it, being used as the control unit for it. I feel like it was pretty explicit by this point in the show. It's not particularly clear how it works, but those frozen telepaths that were captured by Babylon 5 were being prepared for becoming control units (maybe for telepath-proof shadow ships even). There was that lady who got thawed out and went nuts producing a web of cables and tech stuff. I guess that's kinda borgy. Presumably whatever it involves to be forcibly integrated into a shadow ship would be pretty intense and mess you the gently caress up.
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Mar 23, 2023 04:48
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I daresay that "By Any Means Necessary" is the best labor/management episode since DS9's "Bar Association". 1x16: "Grail". I've said this a few times before, but Garibaldi really rubs me the wrong way. The zeal with which he was ready to knock heads together on the lower levels to catch the Diet Zorg guy made my skin crawl. As soon as Warner said that his shepherd role was passed on and that he was the last, I knew how things were going to be resolved. What I like about the story is that it gives Thomas/Jinxer a chance for rehabilitation. The description for the next episode, "Eyes" ("Sinclair's loyalty is questioned") looks to be pretty spicy. I'm betting it will be a continuation of the questions he's faced over the last 24 hour of the Earth/Mimbari war. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 24, 2023 |
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Mar 24, 2023 01:40
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s3e12 sic transit vir, or schindler's vir It was good to see vir take a more backboned role, and its nice that all his misgivings about whats been going on manifest in some concrete action. U'm really confused about what happened with his bride and the narn tied up, though i suppose they'll let us know that at some later point. Still, i'm shocked he still wants to get married to lady gul dukat, i thought he would cut that off for certain. s3e13 a late delivery from avalon This felt like a total victim of "well we need to do 26 episodes... grab an idea from the wastebin". Really superfluous to anything going on, even if it had some cute moments. It felt like king arthur's stuff should have been the B story to the A story of an important treating, instead of the other way around. Maybe I'll be eating my words and somehow funny farm arthur has an important role to play later, but this episode really didn't need to exist.
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Mar 24, 2023 09:28
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Mimbari. You have no idea how many internet fights i had over the misspelling of Minbari. 
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Mar 24, 2023 10:12
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Just Another Lurker posted:You have no idea how many internet fights i had over the misspelling of Minbari. It's a natural product of connected speech, so younger you should definitely feel bad for harassing those poor internet dweebs
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Mar 24, 2023 17:48
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s3e14 Ship of Tears Interesting to see they need the absolutely untrustworthy and shady psi corps as their only weapon against the shadows. Is Chekov going to get a redemption arc out of nowhere when he's a total psycho? If they go that route its about the last thing I expected to see, I figured it was psi corps pulling the strings of the earth takeover working with the shadows.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:50
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Just Another Lurker posted:You have no idea how many internet fights i had over the misspelling of Minbari. Wait until you hear about the autocorrection that led to The Minibar War.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:58
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s3e15 interludes and examination Ah good old Londo, letting himself get roped into more poo poo to doom everyone else. Good job getting caught out by babies first manipulation you dillweed. I'm glad theres at least a prophecy of Londo dying because man he sucks, lol. It was nice to see someone finally push back at Kosh and all his side talking cryptic bullshit, even if it did end up getting him killed. I hope the Vorlon sending someone else will answer the question if Kosh was just a vorlon or the last of the older ones, because they've seemed really iffy on that point. I hope he was just another vorlon though, because otherwise it seems a terrible waste to let him die, and for kosh to not take any precautions or want anyone this might happen if they showed themselves. I still wonder how they can win this war, like, yeah they have the Vorlons now (or at least for one fight), but from the power of those ships, it basically seems like the vorlons are the only ones who can do anything and the rest are paper airplanes flutting around, even if they mass together. I'll need to see some of the younger races win a battle with the shadows before I'm convinced theres even any point to anyone but the vorlons fighting.
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Mar 24, 2023 19:47
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1x17: Eyes. The Babylon 5 equivalent of TNG's "The Drumhead", but with some important differences. Most notably, Zayn was so scene-chewingly ridiculous from the start that he lacked the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' nature of Admiral Satie. Whereas Satie losing her cool and revealing too much about her motives was the climax of "The Drumhead", here Zayn started at 9 and by the end of the episode was at 11. He also was a complete buffoon. If you're a sorta-kinda undercover agent looking to sniff around about the commander of a station, it seems like your opening move should not be to walk up to the first civilian and say something along the lines of, "Hey, I'm a normal Earther. What can you tell me about Commander Sinclair?" But credit where it's due: I have grown to really like Ivanova. She started out as a bit too "Beep...boop" for me, but I have immense respect for her resistance to being mind probed. I'd be the same way; a person having the ability to look into your mind and read your thoughts is the epitome of dystopian. I've also grown to really like and respect Sinclair. B5 is almost something of a MASH 4077: a crew of misfits who bend the rules but ultimately make things work for them. Sinclair's ability to recognize his people's abilities while not busting them for poo poo that doesn't matter (e.g: Garibaldi's motorcycle) is the mark of a good commander. This episode wasn't as good as "The Drumhead", but I enjoyed it.
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Mar 24, 2023 22:02
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:1x17: Eyes. The Babylon 5 equivalent of TNG's "The Drumhead", but with some important differences. Most notably, Zayn was so scene-chewingly ridiculous from the start that he lacked the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' nature of Admiral Satie. Whereas Satie losing her cool and revealing too much about her motives was the climax of "The Drumhead", here Zayn started at 9 and by the end of the episode was at 11. Agreed 100%. I even made the exact same Star Trek comparison on my own first watch-through.  Powered Descent posted:s01e17 - Eyes
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Mar 24, 2023 22:37
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Background on 1x17: I believe the actor playing Zayn had recently gone through a breakup and he was pretty much channeling it into his performance
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Mar 25, 2023 00:43
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Fair enough. I don't think it's his acting so much as the writing. They even gave Zayn a Blofeld-esque scar to make him seem especially sinister. It's a good episode but it pales in comparison to "The Drumhead".
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Mar 25, 2023 00:46
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Tom Guycot posted:s3e15 interludes and examination I'm honestly not sure what is throwing you here, but (spoilers up until the episode Tom is asking about, but mostly from season 2 episode 6) Kosh was the Vorlon ambassador, but not the only remaining Vorlon or the last First One. The Vorlon race was the one First One race who stuck around after the last Shadow War that Delenn was referring to in 'In The Shadow of Z'ha'dum'. Delenn's next sentence during that reveal is "For centuries the Vorlons stood alone, the last remaining guardians".
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Mar 25, 2023 04:37
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