Babylon 5

Glad you're still watching the show, even though you're no longer blogging about it. Season 3 and 4 is awesome.

You should spoiler that, he's only finished season 2.

edited 5th Nov '14 8:29:08 PM by nightwyrm_zero

So what'd you think of G'Kar's speech after he was stripped of his ambassador status when his homeworld was conquered?

edited 6th Nov '14 6:39:13 AM by maxwellelvis

That was in Season 2. "The Long, Twilight, Struggle".

And that speech is one of my favourite moments of the entire show. G'Kar is amazing.

edited 5th Nov '14 8:38:59 PM by WarriorEowyn

That speech was incredible. I am extremely tempted to quote it in an essay about the Russian Revolution.

Which one?

February 1917.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he was talking about which speech, not which revolution.

That too.

The one at the end of Season 2.

Also, am I the only one who found it hilarious that, in Passing through Gethsemane, it took four hours to Google something?

Had to sort through all that porn. The internet is 95% Porn, now imagine how that will look in 200 years.

Unless you account for Zeerust, porn would become procedurally-generated and tailor-made to the user.

Wouldn't searching the net on Earth from Babylon 5 not take longer due to it being subject to the light-speed-limit thing? I assume Babylon 5 is quite a bit away?

Oh. According to this it's 10.67 light-years away:

http://www.chronology.org/noframes/b-five/astronomy.html

I'm surprised they get results at all...

They have to send a signal through Hyperspace. I imagine they have similar limitations to the Hypernet users in the Mass Effect games (limited local storage, if they need info that they don't have, a request gets queued up and sent out the next time any traffic heads to other systems, then queued up to return on any ships headed back.)

And yet you still get Pak'mara porn.

Yeah, that makes sense, but it's still a bit jarring for someone watching it 20 or so years later.

You can always get lucky and get a copy of Snow White And the Seven Narn.

edited 10th Nov '14 11:17:24 AM by AFP

I love this show and would like to thank TV Tropes for making me discover it. I came across some quotes from Atonement, did some research and figured I'd like the show. It outlived my expectations in every way. Let's just say that I got into it because of the Earth-Minbari war. I found that story just as interesting as expected, but it took third place in what I was paying most attention to. The Shadow war comes second.

First place? LINCOLNI! Everything about the Narn-Centauri war just grabbed my attention and ran away with it. I've literally spent over one month geeking out about Sic Transit Vir. Somehow I found it obvious what Vir would do. Maybe that's because I always look for a character like that in a conflict and Vir seemed like a likely candidate. Just because of the huge canon development it's my all-time favourite episode, but I do have some complaints. Spoiler for anyone who haven't seen it (for those who still don't realize which episode I'm talking about, it's the mid-season 3 where Vir is engaged and we find out that Centauri have six... Well, they have six.)

JMS switched this and "A late delivery from Avalon" around since we needed something "lighter" after the previous episode. That's right, he saw it as comic relief, and it shows. Vir has been using his position on Minbar to smuggle Narns away and keep them alive. I don't know if it's because I was literally looking for someone who would do that, but Ivanova strikes me as uncharacteristically stupid in this episode. She doesn't even consider the possibility, she just goes straight to confront Londo after discovering the "dead" Narns. Notice how Vir tries to interrupt her in that scene? She doesn't even pay attention to it. I don't know, it just came of as "we need to reveal what Vir has been doing to Londo and the audience, but we can't think of a way to do it, so we'll have the commander act stupid". Then there's the fact that there's no scene of her apolgizing to Vir and, I don't know, maybe informing him that she'll continue Lincolni's work. My head-canon is that she did it off-screen, but it shows that the underground railroad was just treated as a plot device to get Vir back on the station.

If I hadn't gone into "read everything I can find"-mode maybe I wouldn't complain about this, but I have a hard time seeing this episode as a comedy. Sure, it has Vir in it. But Vir is so much more than the comic relief character. The "Centauri have six"-scene is funny. Sheridan commenting that Ivanova's dream could be worse is funny. Vir's interactions with Lyndisty can be considered cute the first time you watch it. There's just the little problem that she also happens to be a genocidal maniac. Vir starts falling for her before this is revealed. Then his railroad is revealed to Londo who immidently calls him back from Minbar. Vir outright states that his only regret if not being able to save more Narns. I spent some time wondering if I was the only one who had actually heard that since everyone seemed to jump from "They're not dead" to Vir losing his job on Minbar, so I googled it. Yeah... Not doing that again.

The next thing that goes wrong for Vir is Lyndisty's attempt to comfort him... By explaining how everything is the Narn's fault and how she was helping her father kill Narns. When I first watched it I had a hard time thinking of a way to have things get any worse. Then she tries to give Vir the "honor" of killing a Narn who had a blood oath against her. The line about the Narn recovering in Medlab was accidentally cut. Due to Vir no longer working on Minbar Lyndisty is called back to Centauri Prime for her family to reconcider the marriage. Vir makes a sarcastic comment ("what relationship doesn't have it's ups and downs") after having spent the latter half of the episode with an absolutely heartbroken expression on his face. The writing doesn't include anything with Ivanova explaining what she's planing (did she suffer from temporary hearing problems while Vir stated that he wanted to save more Narns or what do the writer expect me to believe?). Then I'm supposed to walk away and feel like I watched a comedy. Sure, I walked away feeling like I had watched a great episode with two funny moments. However, Vir's story grabbed my attention much more than everyone saying "naked" around Ivanova, and I have a hard time seeing it as funny. I feel more like JMS wrote a great story and then didn't realize how great it was.

edited 18th Dec '14 5:23:38 AM by Meppe

I never got the impression that it was a comedy episode, just that it was lighter than, well, "A Late Delivery From Avalon", which itself had plenty of funny moments, such as Arthur and the Red Knight celebrating after a clear victory against the bad guys.

That was indeed awesome.

"I have friends, do you?"

"HE HAS ONE NOW!" *Cue curbstomping*

Yes that was awesome.

Maybe I ended up reading to much into the comments. English isn't my first language, so it's a likely explanation. The story hits close to home for me, so I can get rather passionate. My complaint about the lack of that scene with Ivanova still stands, and I'm contributing that to the writer simply not realizing what kind of a position Vir had ended up in. Seriously, he would be convinced that he would've gotten to keep his job if he had remained quiet and let Ivanova and Sheridan yell at Londo. It's not like anyone who had any say in the matter would've called him back for what it looked like was going on.

I'm thinking about watching Babylon 5 for the first time. I've considered skipping Season 5 except for the finale since I heard it was a post script season. I also heard Season 1 isn't really good either. Should I watch that anyway or at least a few key episodes?

edited 2nd Jun '15 4:44:32 PM by DS9guy

I strongly encourage you to watch B5, it's great. Strong plot arc, and fantastic, complex characters.

You should at least watch some of the key episodes of Season 1 in order to understand what's going on; it's decent, though not as good as the later seasons.

At the least, in Season 1, you should watch:

- Episode 1, "Midnight on the Firing Line". It's a good introduction.

- Episode 8, "And the Sky Full of Stars". Answers some of the questions that are central to the season, and raises other ones.

- Episode 13, "Signs and Portents". Each season is named after one of the episodes in it; Season 1 is named after this episode. It's central to the storyline of the first two-thirds of the show.

- Episodes 18 and 19, "A Voice in the Wilderness," parts 1 and 2.

- Episode 20, "Babylon Squared". It's okay if this one feels extremely confusing. It will make more sense later.

- Episode 21, "The Quality of Mercy".

- Episode 22 (Season Finale), "Chrysalis".

You should watch Season 5 for the storyline involving Londo and G'Kar, which is fantastic.

edited 2nd Jun '15 5:33:16 PM by Galadriel

I'd say give season 1 a shot just because it lays a lot of the groundwork for the later seasons (JMS had a serious Long Game running with this show from the word go). That said, if you want to pick up with Season 2, they have a new lead (the original station commander was played by Michael O'Hare, who ended up having to leave the show due to medical concerns) and the first couple of episodes are basically spun around him being the new guy in town and having to get used to everything (making them a pretty decent place to jump into the show).

That said, I love the first season's more Post Cyber Punk / Love Craft Lite gritty feel compared to later seasons.

5th season is take it or leave it, a lot of Passing the Torch themes and unfortunately lackluster episodes. Whether you watch it or not, I'd say watching the series finale at least is mandatory (and can be done with relatively few issues from not watching season 5, aside from a few fill-in-the-blank bits due to plot points that happen in between).

Ah Babylon Five, Firefly before Firefly: tl;dr Screwed by the Network not once but twice.

The Fifth season has it's good points, but there is The Scrappy of the season, Byron. No spoilers, just a warning that he's a Love It or Hate It moment of the show.

The Amiga was the first time "desktop publishing" made it to primetime. The Amiga would have been a popular home computer, but like betamax it never took off. However the video toaster board/software combo was used for the SFX on the show. Nowadays it's not unusual for PC's to do SFX, look at RWBY for instance. But back then it was like nothing on TV.