The In the Beginning movie was pretty good, both the framing story and the story it framed. I haven’t seen any of the others, though.
Don’t bother. They are crap. Thirdspace is a bad Halloween episode run amok and the less said about River of Souls the better. Crusade was a cheapening of the whole universe, and the Lost Tales are last-minute huckstering by everyone involved. Stop no while you still respect and admire what JMS accomplished.
Good for you! I know how you feel.
Did the finale make you cry?
Too much! In movies they often cut out the goodbyes, but you saw every moment of the heartrending goodbyes. That is a hard episode to watch.
To counter the previous opinion, I thought the movies were for the most part rather good (Legend of the Rangers had a lot of issues though). As said before, In The Beginning is excellent (even considering that it is at least partially a clipshow), and I thought Thirdspace stood on its own rather well (just don’t try to figure out where it fits in continuity).
Your opinion of it might sag a bit if you realize that having to budget for all the SFX shots in that movie and In The Beginning was part of why we had so many telepath episodes in the fifth season: No budget for special FX shots.
For whatever faults it may have had, River of Souls had Holobrothel!Lochley, which has to be considered at least breaking even.
Call To Arms is the de-facto pilot for Crusade, which was basically B5 doing Wagon Train To The Stars (so yeah, it was B5 doing Star Trek). Crusade suffers from getting cancelled during the first season (to compare, let’s judge B5 as if the series began with the pilot and ended on “Signs and Portents”). The show was cancelled before they got to kick off the plot (from what I understand, much of the plot that got cut short was used in the spinoff novels, such as the Technomage Trilogy and the Centauri Prime trilogy).
The movies, aside from In The Beginning and Legend of the Rangers, play like long episodes for the most part. The Lost Tales pretty much plays like two fairly talky episodes back-to-back, and I think how you judge that one will depend on how you like talky stand-alone episodes.
Crusade suffered from massive amounts of interference from network executives who promised that JMS would get to run it his way and then demanded he do things their way, which involved adding lots of “action” and dropping lots of “think”, because the audience, they said, would be bored otherwise. The episode they reportedly hated the most, The Path of Sorrows, is the one that most fans cite as being the one they loved the most.
The nitwits had no idea what they had, and instead of trusting the creator of the show who had a proven track record to run it, they meddled and meddled and meddled to make it something they understood.
No, I’m not bitter at all. Why do you ask?
I want more Marcus. If there is no more Marcus, I admit I don’t really care to watch a movie about the Rangers.
I did wish they had a little more about Lennier, though. And G’Kar and Lyta. I feel they kind of left their stories unfinished.
Forgive me, but Sinclair’s line was just so much empty-headed romantic twaddle. The sun will not die for billions of years; it’s extraordinarily unlikely that anything recognizably human will still be living on Earth then. I’m not referring to war or disease - we’re talking about the sort of timescale on which simple evolution will tend to create a huge degree of divergence from anything now living. (Quick! Point me to a multicellular organism that’s existed unchanged for billions of years! Not millions, but billions!)
If life on Earth is even intelligent in a few billion years, it certainly won’t be human, and its history will not be human history; they can deal with the death of the Sun or not, but it won’t be our problem in any event.
I believe some of these stores are covered in the tie-in novels, although I haven’t read them. JMS also wrote several short stories, one of which provides a sort-of happy ending for Marcus and Ivanova (Amazing, Summer 2008, Issue 602, “Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic”).
Congratulations on missing the point! Completely!
-Joe
Thanks - I was thinking the same thing. 
There’s no Marcus, but there is Galen, who doesn’t have as much hair but is still pretty cute…
Didn’t Garibaldi get revenge on Bester in one of the books?
Yes. He finally gets Bester arrested and jailed for life, with his psi powers suppressed by drugs.
Not to mention one of the best take-down lines in all of fiction (and keeping in-character with his WB posters). I strongly recommend reading the Psi Corps triology, and the Centauri Trilogy.
You know, I never finished the Psi Corps trilogy, I really should fix that, given that I made it 66.6% through it.
I read them when they came out and remember almost nothing about them. I seem to recall Lyta having a crappy end. As I always liked her, that pissed me off.
-Joe
What’s the line?
So, just re-watched “Grey 17 Is Missing”, and I just realized why this episode is so bad.
It’s not that it’s a Monster of the Week episode a long time after B5 stopped doing those. It’s actually got a fairly important plot about Delenn becoming head of the Rangers, and the increasing internal tensions among the Minbari. Unfortunately, it also spent way too much of the episode on a Monster of the Week plot that just wasn’t a very good one, especially by B5 standards (while “Infection” is infamous, B5 did have some very good MotW episodes, such as “The Long Dark”).
Also, it had Lennier spend way too much time explaining that he was basically abusing a loophole in Delenn’s instructions, when he could have just told Marcus what was happening, and told him not to tell the other humans.
And Garibaldi’s steam gun just bugged me. Pretty sure all of the bullets would have gone off at once. Assuming that it wouldn’t just explode horribly in his face like he predicted it might.
It is much more likely that one of the cartridges would have gone off, pushing the others out and probably exploding the “gun” in Garibaldi’s hands. The way they showed it was basically impossible.
Truly horrid episode, despite the arc-related stuff.