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Powered Descent posted:There's no set schedule or pace. My viewing partner travels for work, so there are times that I go on "hiatus" from seeing new episodes for weeks on end. Absolutely agree. And this show delivers on almost all of its storyline promises. There’s one thread I can think of that gets set up in S1 and then dropped, but it’s a sideline and all the critical parts of that story get continued in a different way. There’s almost none of the big twists that shows like Lost or BSG dropped which were clearly invented on the spot: just about every twist is set up well in advance, to the point that several of them are more like “yeah, obviously” and thus don’t feel like a twist at all.
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Mar 18, 2022 16:47
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Theoretically there's no spoilers here except for JMS' autobiography, but the quoted post was responding to Secrets of the Soul and you should probably skip if you haven't seen much of S5 yet.SlothfulCobra posted:I can't really track down the specifics, but JMS may have some weird sympathy for cults from his time being in one. He's led a weird life.. JMS spoiler not recommended before S5: JMS has several chapters in his autobiography about his time in a Christian cult. He was raised in an amazingly abusive household (his mother, the victim most of the time, tried to kill him once when he was a little kid, and his father was far worse), and in San Diego in high school in the early 70s he got lovebombed by a local cult. When he returned to San Diego during his college years, he ended up moving into one of their communes, partly to escape his home and partly because he had the hots for a cult member (who he almost married). The Elders of the church controlled everything about those in the communes: they handed over their money and received $5 a week allowance, and they couldn't make life choices. JMS needed Elder permission to continue attending college, and permission to marry. Then one day, he discovered the preacher at the head of the cult had shifted from doing one-on-one Christian cult therapy sessions with female members into full-on sexual affairs with many of them. He reported that to one of the Elders, who refused to believe him and basically threatened to expel him from the cult unless he changed his story. He refused, he got booted from the cult and ended up having to return home. It evidently took some years before the scandal finally blew up, eventually taking the commune down entirely. JMS' treatment in his autobiography is fascinating. He's an avowed atheist now, and it's clear he was already mostly there during his cult period (he tells a hilarious story about trying to start a commune in Illinois when they moved away from the first one, meeting the "big boss" of the Chicago Christian cults, and essentially establishing that the guy was using "inspiration from God" as an excuse to control people, which, yup). But he'd had essentially zero affection growing up from any of his family: he tells another story about holding a stray dog up so his mother could pet it, and her accidentally brushing his hand while doing so was the only affectionate touch he received from any of his immediate family. So the cult's tendency for lovebomb group hugs and the Elders' disdain for his father's threats must have made it seem appealing for a while. I wouldn't say he has any weird sympathy for cults, but I think he has plenty of sympathy for the people who get caught up in them, especially the ones who truly believe instead of exploiting the cult for their own power trips.
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May 4, 2022 03:40
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TK-42-1 posted:Except TKO…. Great B-plot in TKO, one that’s highly unusual even in serialized sci-fi today. There’s usually something redeeming in every B5 episode.
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May 20, 2022 14:51
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ultrafilter posted:You could always just use the production numbers. Oh, you mean the episode about autumn on another planet?
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Jun 8, 2022 05:19
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Angepain posted:On a related note, generally how much did the suits bother Straczynski and the rest of them? Where were they on the scale from total micromanagement to not giving a gently caress at all JMS has said he stopped getting notes from the network in S2. Past that point he was basically operating on his own. The reason is fairly interesting: Warner Brothers had a TV development arm that made shows for the networks, and it also had a TV syndication arm that sold old WB shows to stations. The syndication people decided that they'd try to create their own mini-network by using independent stations: if a station in every market across the country purchased a block of shows to air as first-run shows in prime time, they'd together constitute a kind of de-facto network (that they named PTN, the "prime-time network") but it would only need to program shows in a few time slots. The PTN package included B5. I think by the second year, B5 and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues were the only successful shows on PTN and the concept mostly petered out, leaving the indy stations purchasing two shows a week to air new programming. The established TV development arm had been in the early stages of what became the WB network. PTN launched in January 1993; the WB was announced in November. The TV development folks weren't real excited at the thought of being counterprogrammed in prime time by another branch of Warner Brothers. So far as I can tell, they not only refused to have anything to do with B5, they essentially blacklisted the show internally because the executives in charge of WB had had no role in the show whatsoever. If they had backed B5 to create a WB version of the Star Trek franchise, they'd essentially have been saying that the TV syndication execs could do their jobs better than they could. With the TV development people treating B5 as a pariah show, and with the PTN project essentially dead, there was little incentive for any executive at WB to meddle at all. It meant the show's renewal was always a last-minute affair--the show's fourth season was approved so late that they didn't have an assigned budget and would never have been able to meet deadlines if JMS and other producers hadn't taken on loans to temporarily fund things until Warner Brothers paid up--but it also meant that JMS had pretty unprecedented autonomy.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:48
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Chevy Slyme posted:The B5 Star Trek podcast dudes posted a live reaction video for in The Shadow of Z’ha’dum and Nerds Mad. They are not nearly as funny as they think they are. OTOH, I submitted a five-star review wherein I refer to them as "Star Trek bros" and they not only read it on the show, they admitted they were being described accurately. That's worth a few points in my book.
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Feb 17, 2023 04:54
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Tom Guycot posted:I don't think its pointless, I think the centauri have to be dealt with or they'll just do it all again, in 10 years, 20, 100, they'll eventually start it up again. When the nazis had to retreat back into german borders, it would have been foolish to not press on, to just say "oh they have their own problems, we need to be above revenge", because its not even about revenge, its about the fact they're just going to do it again unless they are stopped and their system that enabled repeated genocides is dismantled. Did the victims of the nazi violence 'deserve better' than to waste time and resources hunting down nazis and hanging them? If you put the centauri into historical terms it become inexcusable to preach a 'rise above it' message. Leaving the centauri and their government, military officers, etc, in place is irresponsible for the galactic community, and until it is dealt with they'll all just have to wonder "whos next?". S4, E5 "The Long Night" spoilers: To quote G'Kar from the end of the episode: G'KAR: [The Centauri] are a lost people. They are to be pitied. They are already on a course for self-destruction, they do not need help from us. We must redress our wounds, help our people, rebuild our cities... G'LORN: No! We must strike back! The debate isn't "do we let the Centauri get away with this or do we destroy them?" It is "do we spend what resources we have to rebuild our homeworld, or do we spend them on our military so that we can avenge ourselves?" You suggest that "the centauri have to be dealt with or they'll just do it all again," but G'Kar doesn't argue they shouldn't be dealt with, he argues that the Narn don't need to get involved for them to destroy themselves. The Centauri have a massive fleet. The Narn have a few ships. Neither the Minbari nor Earth have shown any interest in helping the Narn attack the Centauri; Earth might well come in on the Centauri side if the Narn launched an attack. The Centauri were fighting most of their non-aligned neighbors, and were supporting the Shadows instead of fighting with Sheridan's fleet. This isn't a situation comparable to the Nazis, who at the end of that war had almost no nation supporting them (aside from Imperial Japan, which really couldn't do much to help). The Centauri voluntarily withdrew from the Narn homeworld. This isn't the Nazi's being driven back into the German borders. It might be Imperial Britain withdrawing from some of its colonies, on the way to internal economic collapse. The Narn didn't win the war, they lost, and they have no ability to demand the Centauri submit their leadership to trial (not even as much as the real International Criminal Court can demand Putin turn himself in). The striking thing about the Nuremburg trials is that a grand total of 24 people were put on trial. So even the example you cite from history wasn't a matter of the victorious allies "hunting down nazis and hanging them." It was trying the leadership after setting up a tribunal following victory in a war. There have certainly been trials held since Nuremburg for concentration camp guards and the like, but that hardly seems to fit the rhetoric you're deploying here, even if you aren't really serious that genocide is the only solution to the Centauri Problem.
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Apr 1, 2023 17:44
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Tom Guycot posted:s4e9 attonement Same episode spoiler: Did you miss that we found out Delenn was the deciding vote in the Minbari trying to genocide humanity? Seems like you have fewer problems with her and the Minbari as compared to Londo and the Centauri. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, only that the show’s deliberately asking viewers to think about these sorts of reactions, in the same way it invited us to think of the Vorlons as the “good guys” while repeatedly showing us that they weren’t.
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Apr 2, 2023 15:38
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idonotlikepeas posted:If I recall properly, JMS posted that after being asked what spoo was dozens or possibly hundreds of times. For some reason everyone just got really curious about the nonsense foodstuff word and would not stop bugging him about it. Spoo was first mentioned in the original She-Ra cartoon when JMS was doing that. Whether that means B5 is set in the He-Man/She-Ra universe is left as an exercise to the reader. E:f;b. Also, if you're avoiding Youtube for fear of spoilers, I wouldn't risk those links. Narsham fucked around with this message at 00:08 on May 6, 2023 |
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May 6, 2023 00:06
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:4x21: Rising Star The part was played by Beata Pozniak, who was born and raised in Poland. So far as I can tell from a few minutes of her being interviewed, she appears to be using her real accent for the part.
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Jun 10, 2023 18:15
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Jedit posted:As I recall it was Sheen's last role before his late career resurrection in The West Wing. He's pretty class in it, unlike many of his other doldrums projects like Spawn. It should be noted Sheen was originally cast in the other major guest starring role, but insisted he wanted to play the alien instead.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:20
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:5x08: Day of the Dead And it's Emily Dickinson's line, which fits with what they were doing, anyway.
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Jun 27, 2023 00:49
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holefoods posted:Why are the movies so awful? Was JMS not super involved or…? I still haven’t finished my watch through so I haven’t explored the movies yet. Fans just like to be dramatic and absolutist about things. There's plenty of episodes of the show worse than River of Souls, and some episodes worse than Legend of the Rangers, though I don't think you can compare the last TV movie to the pilot of a series that never happened. If you judged B5 solely on the basis of the original version of The Gathering you'd think it was a pretty bad idea and we were lucky it never went to series. All the TV movies were written to be largely disconnected from the main story, meaning that with a few very minor details excluded, they have no real bearing on the arc. They're disposable. That said, River of Souls is pretty good (if you like that kind of thing) though I think the tone is off. Legend of the Rangers has some bad decisions but I think it's better than The Gathering was; it just never benefited from having a show come out of it. If you finish the series and then look up the movies and spin-off attempts and expect them to hold up in comparison, they won't. That doesn't make them awful, it just means that B5 the show really stuck the landing.
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Jul 22, 2023 18:20
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Riven posted:Just finished S3 S3 ending spoilers: On Delenn's warning, on the face of it, there's two possibilities. If Sheridan didn't go to Z'ha'dum is her past, she either urges him to go if she thinks that would improve things, doesn't bring it up at all, or tells him not to go. The last option is a bit odd to bring up if he didn't go in her past. Conversely, if Sheridan did go, she either urges him to go, doesn't bring it up, or tries to change the past by asking him not to go. Further, from past-Sheridan's perspective, it doesn't matter if she says "you did go to Z'ha'dum, but don't this time," because if he doesn't trust her advice not to go, how can he trust her claim about what he actually did? His parting concern that he listened to her and didn't go and that's why things went poorly is a bit of a misdirect, because what he's really deciding is whether he can trust her to give him the advice best tailored to improve the future outcome, or whether she might lie to him. If he can't trust her, he has to disregard her advice, whatever it is, and make an independent decision. And given that she already lied to him about Anna, he elects to do what he thinks is best. But the situation is even more interesting, because if future Delenn is in our current timeline's future, future Delenn knows that Sheridan met her in the future and that she warned him not to go to Z'ha'dum... and he went anyway. In other words, when she decides whether to warn him not to go to Z'ha'dum, she might be doing it to convince him not to go, but she might be doing it because she knows that's what she did. She might even be doing it to convince him to go! Obviously, that's not something anyone is in the position to parse at the end of S3, but this simple moment gets increasingly complicated if you ask whether Delenn is trying to change her past or trying to ensure it stays the same. That assumes there's anything she can do: Sinclair tries to warn past Garibaldi in War Without End part 2, but it doesn't work. Maybe future people can't change the past at all. Or maybe her outburst isn't calculated and she's just speaking her mind regardless of how it might or might not change the past.
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Sep 10, 2023 20:09
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Chevy Slyme posted:One thing that I really appreciate about B5, is that it doesn’t feel the need to shoehorn main cast members into plot lines where they don’t belong. Folks will disappear for a few weeks, then come back for a while, etc. I mean, the alternate explanation is that not everyone in the main cast was contracted to do all 22 episodes every season, so the show juggles who is or isn't appearing from this set. But you generally aren't going to detect this limitation as a problem. And it arguably makes up for that with recurring characters who only appear in a few episodes, but with such effect that you'd swear they appeared in twice as many episodes as they actually do. For every cringeworthy performance by a guest star (and there's a lot in S1), there's a sparkling performance; that's especially true with the aliens, where the preponderance of actors really nail their performances.
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Jan 20, 2024 19:26
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