Was Babylon 5 really as good as people say? I picked up the Season 1 DVD so I’d have something engaging to watch while exercising, but I’m finding it excruciating in many ways. Does it improve enough to justify sitting thru the first season?
YES!
To expand: Season 1 was crippled by a wooden lead, the need to lay groundwork for the whole arc, and writers who weren’t JMS. Season 2 takes off with a roar, and Seasons 3 & 4 are just down-right genius. Season 5 drops back to hit-or-miss, but there some good episodes nonetheless.
My suggestion is to skip to the last five episodes of Season 1, then roll right into Season 2. You can go back and pick up the missing episodes later if you feel like it. But the last five are essential.
After they dumped O’Hare for Boxleitner, things got much better.
Good feedback, thanks.
The first season is famously painful in parts (esp. the girlfriend! the horror!), but it’s worth watching for the plot points that will come up later–it also improves later in the season. Season 2 is a big improvement, and 3 is plain great. 4 is good, 5 has some serious problems owing to the series cancellation fake-out and Ivanova’s resignation. It’s still worth watching except for the Goth telepaths, though.
I posted about it recently:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9348114&postcount=17
I bought the DVDs a few years ago when I’d just finished getting through DS9 and needed something to fill the void. Man, did I regret it. I HATED B5 from start to finish. It was AWFUL. The writing was atrocious, the acting was high-school-play bad, and the effects looked like Saturday morning cartoons. I know, I know, it was made in an earlier era, but they were still bad.
I am, of course, in the minority.
What silenus and dangermom said. A lot of Season 1’s middle episodes aren’t all that vital, but the really important stuff starts in episode 18. You definitely don’t want to miss 18-22, and you can always double back and watch the other ones later. Episode 13, “Signs and Portents,” is worth seeing too. An important character is introduced in that one.
The series over all is very much worth watching.
Remember when she gets all seductive with the captain and talks about the “frictionless bedsheets” she bought on her latest voyage? Really? Frictionless bedsheets? How, precisely, does one even stay in a bed made with frictionless bedsheets, let alone have sex in it? Heck, for that matter, how do you get the sheets on the bed in the first place?
Anyway, I agree with (most) of the other people in this thread: skip to the end of the first season, then pick it up with the next season and run with it. It’s the best space opera ever made for television.
Halfway thru the first season I’m in agreement, but how far into the series did you get?
I’m curious about this too, because this series contains some world-class performances (especially from the actors playing Londo and G’Kar), and by the third season or so the effects were excellent.
As others have said, just skip most of the first season and watch “Signs and Portents” (absolutely essental) and then then final 5 episodes. Some of those final five aren’t even all that great (such as the two-parter) but they do set up a lot of essential stuff which pays off in spades in the future. (As do “Legacies” and “Eyes”, which are both decent and introduce some ongoing characters and issues, but they’re not essential.)
Even some second season stuff is skippable - I could happily never see “A Distant Star”, “The Long Dark”, “A Spider in the Web” or “GROPOS” again. But they’re not as abysmal as the bad season 1 stuff. And by the time you finish watching “The Coming of Shadows” you should be as hooked as the rest of us.
But definitely watch “Signs and Portents”, “Babylon Squared” and “Chrysalis” from Season 1. Then let the good times roll!
And more specifically, you should watch those episodes not only because of the great plots and scripts (I can’t honestly say the production values or the acting of certain regulars improves all that much) but because that’s when you start to see the grand, rolling epic that Babylon 5 becomes really shift into gear. Big stuff happens - big, galaxy spanning events are put into motion, and people lives start to careen down trajectories they (and we) could never have imagined at the start of the series. That’s where Babylon 5 really excels - in its vast, complex, epic over-arching storyline which, despite the cardboard sets and the outdated effects, will drag you in and up and along whether you like it or not.
I slogged through the whole damn thing. I’d bought the DVDs and heard nothing but good about them, so I kept waiting for it to get watchable. It never happened for me. I also read all 10 volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series. I have a bit of a masochistic streak in me.
By the time you get to Season Three, it will be worth having watched through the pain of Season One. Season Four kicks ass also.
Yes there are campy, throwaway episodes throughout the series. But remember this series was the first of it’s kind in terms of the five year story arc, and TV execs were skittish about not following your standard STNG format.
I’ll agree with pretty much everyone.
Watch Season One, but realize it’s not nearly as good as the rest of the show. Season 2-4 are some of the best Sci-Fi television you can get.
I was raised in the church of Star Trek, but as an adult I converted to B-5. It’s the best television show I ever watched. “Passing Through Gethsemane”, in the third season, is my favorite single episode of television.
I used to look down on folks who watch soap operas, and got so involved in the lives of fictional characters. Then, in season four, I found myself hollering at Mr. Garibaldi “Michael! Don’t take that drink! Please!”.
Watch it all, even the lesser episodes are better than most of the crap that’s on television currently.
Season three was epic SF television. 2 and 4 were very good. 1 was mediocre and 5 sucked.
I loved this series, especially for Londo Mollari and G’Kar - ambassadors from a declining great power and a prickly former colony of that power, respectively. Watching how their characters develop over five years is a thing of beauty - and Mollari’s combination of ambition and genuine, heartfelt patriotism makes him a wonderful classic tragic character. This is a good man who does horrible things, then finds the strength to become a better person, but
still ends up paying a heavy, heavy cost for his mistakes.
G’Kar’s path is equally interesting - and you really do get to care about these characters. I highly recommend B5.
Also, Delenn is the hottest character on any science fiction program, ever. Hell, any television program. (Not in the first season, of course. But still.)
It’s Lyta I had the hots for. Something about telepathic redheads who can destroy the galaxy with a thought turns me on.
God these two get on my nerves though. If nothing else for the fact that they’re straight out of the “just give 'em a weird haircut and an accent” school of alien race design.