Save your rolleyes, guys. I was watching the episode with the nightwatch harrassing and arresting nonhumans, ISN pounding out government propaganda a la Fox News and so on.
:rolleyes: back atcha.
(Minor spoiler follows)
It was actually the music that finally hooked me. I’d seen the pilot, and was throughly unimpressed. Caught a few episodes, here and there, didn’t really make an impression on me. One thing that I thought was pretty cheesy was the opening narration: “The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. A self-contained world five miles long, located in neutral territory. A place of commerce and diplomacy for a quarter of a million humans and aliens.” yadda yadda yadda. Sounded like a bad rehash of Star Trek.
Finally, around season three, a friend talked me into giving it another try. I’m sitting there, listening to the cheeze narration: “The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace.” Yeah, whatever, same old same… “It failed.” Huh? And then the music changes: it goes from this sort of ethereal, music of the spheres stuff to this driving, violent rhythm, and a quick montage of space ships blowing the holy fuck out of each other. I had no idea of the backstory, no concept of what the plot was up to that point, zero involvement in the characters or story, but that just gave me full-body goosebumps. I was hooked at that very instant, have been ever since. I don’t even remember which specific episode that was, but I still vividly remember that moment of frission when I realized that there was really something special going on here.
Although I am a big fan of Chris Franke’s work, I shall now set myself up for a beating by admitting the following:
I like Evan Chen’s music for Crusade, to the point of buying the CD.
No one has yet mentioned this excellent companion website.
I like to say that I was born into the religion of Star Trek, but I saw the light and converted to Babylon 5.
I met Stephen Biggs at a convention. He signed a picture I bought as a gift for my sister. When I asked him to say something “medical” as he played a doctor and my sis is a pharmacist, he wrote “GIVE ME DRUGS!” on the picture!
Wait until you see Ivanova and the alien ambassador… ahem, well, it’s funny.
One of my favorite episodes is from the third season, “Passing Through Gethsemane” Brad Dourif and Louis Turenne were amazing.
In which episode does Nightwatch harrass nonhumans? They harass the hell out of people subject to EarthGov (read: humans), but it ain’t like they were getting into G’Kar’s face.
But you’re right. We’re living in an exact parallel. Consider:
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We only have one television news outlet (er…waitaminute).
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People are arrested for merely criticizing the government (how you’ve evaded capture for so long remains a mystery, gobear).
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Congress is dissolved and elections canceled (I’m still trying to figure out why Howard Dean was on Meet the Press Sunday).
And so on and so forth.
There aren’t enough :rolleyes: in the world. You guys who keep drawing these types of comparisons really need to learn a little perspective.
It was always my understanding the show was plotted out & written to be four seasons. Then the show got popular & they begged JMS to do a fifth, then started yanking the carpet back & forth on him. Totally buggered the fifth season.
Random commentary:
I always thought the clarke/nightwatch story was an interesting story about a creeping fascism. To use it as an obviously stretched political jab cheapens it.
I especially liked how it started out subtly - early in the second season you can see news commentators and such subtley work in certain propoganda and newspeak - but unless you know where it’s going, it’s subtle enough not to notice. Of course, later it became more obvious.
No one has mentioned it, but the sci fi channel owns the rights to play it, and they run an episode every day at 9am-10am. They’re in the middle of season 3 at the moment, and at Interldudes an Examinations.
And, actually, speaking of that:
This is the only show I can think of that has killed off main characters because it was necesary to telling the story, rather than just writing an actor out because of a contract dispute, or whatever. Kosh’s death is quite powerful, and later, Marcus’, is quite touching because you know that’s exactly what the character would really do.
I personally prefer the CGI from earlier in the series than to the later stuff. (The foundation stuff, not the netter digital stuff). It wasn’t as flashy or complex, but they really worked to get the physics right. Fighters acted totally realistically in regards to how they moved and when their thrusters fired, that sort of thing. Later in the series they seemed to get lazy and have them fly around more like airplanes, which is unfortunate, because it was the more realistic physics that made B5 fight scenes far more interesting than other sci fi series. (Star trek fight scenes are a total bore - a few seconds here of there showing one barely moving ship firing at another barely moving ship, and cut to scenes of the bridge blowing up because no one installed a fuse box. Compare B5 to DS9 or early voyager - comparable technology, but B5 did it better AND with half the budget).
I dislike how the show tends to be grouped with star trek, too, since it’s sci fi. It’s so much more meaningful that it’s not even comparable. Star trek, at least, in the last 10 years, probably longer, is just some monster-of-the-week dues-ex-machina series where nothing matters, the characters don’t change, and half the show is meaningless technobabble, rehasing the same stuff over and over because it still has a few million fans willing to watch whatever crap they throw at them. I used to like star trek as a kid, and still like some of it, but now? Horrible.
Babylon 5 told a tightly knit, meaningful story. Characters changed - hugely. Conflicts were resolved with methods that had consequences. No dues-ex-machina. Things had impact.
It was all the more amazing that the story was able to be translated from the original idea to the screen - practical things kept cropping up that threw a big wrench in the works.
For example, Sinclar was, in the original story, a/the main character all through the story. The production company mandated the change to a bigger named actor as a main character and JMS had to rewrite the whole story on the fly. Accomplishing re-writing your story in the middle of story telling with such a huge complication as the elimination of the main character, and making it work, is a big deal. Although it worked out well, I’m curious what was changed.
There were a lot of other practical things that caused changes like that. Hopefully maybe someday JMS will write a book about it.
Regarding season 5…
Most of the telepath/lyta thing was sort of a last minute alteration. Originally it involved Ivanova and her latent telepathy, and probably would’ve been far more interesting had it played out the way it was meant to.
It was, indeed, stretched out because of the aforementioned reasons.
Another factor is that JMS wrote a third of season one, half of season 2, and practically all of seasons 3 and 4. That was the most screen writing ever done by one single person in that amount of time - and I think he suffered from significantly from burnout.
Well, I’ll stop randomly ranting as it is. Keep buying the DVDs… I should probably get on that myself.
Regarding Crusade…
Originally, I was totally unimpressed and thought it totally unworthy of succeeding B5. I was a fairly regular reader of the B5 forums that JMS posted on, so I was well advised of the behind the scenes trouble on that.
I rewatched it a little more tolerantly, and the first few episodes (the ones that were written first, not aired first) were actually interesting. In themselves, nothing special, but it had some elements that promised to be interesting.
JMS said that the premise of Crusade wasn’t actually what the story was about, and that it’d fundamentally change hugely. And there are all sorts of interesting things in there - the name Gideon, for example, I think, was a biblical character known for going against his own army for a noble cause. Which makes me really, really curious as to what the actual plot of the show was going to become.
The Kosh-in-a-box… errr… apocalypse box was voiced by Gideon/Gary Cole, heavily processed. Interesting to see where that was going.
There were other things that I can’t really remember offhand because it’s been a long time since I watched it. Some of the characters were likable and I thought Gideon and Galen had good chemistry - and they could develop an interesting relationship.
Of course, the later written/earlier aired episodes are pretty crappy. But I think it was sour grapes. JMS decided to reject TNT’s interference, and to spite them, started writing badly, and incorporating their suggestions - as if to say “See? I included your crap. It’s terrible.” But he could’ve written better, even with the interference, had he wanted to. I think he made a stubborn artistic decision to spite them. In some ways, I respect that, but I regret never getting to see what crusade would’ve become.
That’s not true at all. JMS was on usenet since 1991 (on GEnie, even) posting about the show (and I have to give the guy credit, it took some balls to keep going through with that. There were several notable people who had nothing better to do than try to ruin his day to feel important, as minor a celebrity as he is).
For 6 or 7 years, he was a constant poster, and responded to fans as well as, well, almost cyber stalkers to explain some things and defend others. He said from the start that he’d stick it out, keep talking to the fans, and he did exactly that, despite constant attack.
That added an interesting layer to the B5 experience for me. I read the writer/creator/etc. on usenet within hours of watching a new episode. One of the many unique things about it.
Anyway, from the start, he’s always said it was a 5 year thing. TNT, to my understanding, actually pushed for a sixth season, both because it was the first series they had any sort of creative input in, and because it apparently did fairly well in ratings.
If anyone is curious, there’s an archive somewhere that stored all of JMS’ post on usenet. Several, perhaps. Search for “JMS usenet archive” or something to find one.
Three quick points:
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“You guys” appears to be one person on one side, and a couple on the other.
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How about taking this hijack to the Pit, where it belongs. Yeesh.
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The shameful levels of smiley abuse really discredit all of arguments presented. If your whole post is based around the smilie function, maybe you shouldn’t hit [submit reply] in the first place.
Now back on topic:
Was horrible. JMS can engage in revisionist history all he wants, he made the calls of both follow up shows, and both really, really stunk. Bad plot, bad acting, silly gimmicks, lackluster direction and poor production quality- everything B5 wasn’t.
Nope see Senor Beef’s post for accurate details, but the summary is this: The show came damn close to be cancelled after the 4th season. Nobody but the fans were begging for a fifth season. The ratings were never really that good, and costs were relatively high.
While there are lost of excuses for why Season 5 was so much worse then the rest of the series, the basic issue was that the plot and writing really kind of stunk. This trend followed into the two failed follow-up attempts so to me it was the trend, not a one time thing.
Still for 4 seasons, it was the best Sci-Fi ever made.
Several episodes in the 3rd season, including “Ceremonies of Light and Dark” and “Messages From Earth”.
Rupert Murdoch is working on that.
Read The Economist lately?
If Bester, er, Ashcroft gets his way. . .
Hmm… what does In the Beginning spoil about S3 and S4? It shows the answer to the big question that IIRC only gets answered in S2 on the show, but what does it spoil for S4?
And the Clarke-Bush comparisons are about as silly as the Clarke-Clinton comparisons I saw back when the series was on air, especially when the person compares Bester to Ashcroft or Reno - someone can at least complain that Fox/CNN is just parroting what Bush/Clinton want them to and vaguely relate it to the story, but Bester and the AG?! I don’t think any AG has been working towards a goal even roughly analagous to the one Bester was shown to be working towards later on in the series.
Bester wants rule by telepaths and the destruction of the mundanes, Ashcroft wants rule by fundamentalists and wants the destructtion of gays, leftists, non-fundies. .
And I’ll stop the political hijack now.
In the Beginning contains a minor spoiler for season 4, because that’s when we found out exactly what Delenn did during the war.
To clear up what war ultrafilter is referring to,
[spoiler]
We don’t find out until season 4 that Delenn is essentially the reason that the Earth-Minbari war started. She could have voted to go back to Minbar and discuss, but she was engraged, and voted to “Kill them, kill them all!”
In the Beginning also has spoilers regarding the Shadow War (kinda, more like spoilers of the aftermath.) Plus, you see Delenn with her hair already, and learn that her and John are married and have a son, and that he goes to Zahadum, etc…[/spoiler]
I agree that Babylon 5 is one of the greatest TV series ever made. I love it, and just need to save up enough money to buy the first two seasons on DVD.
I think that my fav. episodes are War Without End, Endgame, and The Fall of Night.
on a side note, talking about JMS posting to usenet - I subscribe to a digest that forwards me all his postings and people’s responses to those posts. I have been saving them since December of 1998. I have 1,671 of his usenet posts archived in a *.pst file 
Mars the B5 geek
Exactly which part of gays, leftists, and non-fundies does Bush fall into? While your assertion about Ashcroft’s goals is unsupported by those inconvenient things called facts, it’s at least something that a good number of people can and fairly commonly do go on hysterical rants about and as such is fodder for GD or the pit and not Cafe society. I am not, however, aware of any significantly sized group that asserts that Ashcroft is secrectly working to destroy Bush and all others like him (whichever of the Bad Categories he falls into). That rather breaks the analogy, as does the fact the Bester didn’t occupy any position in Clarke’s government, certainly not a position comprable to Attorney General.
In other words, your comparison of Bester and Ashcroft falls apart even if I accept the standard hysterical claims about Bush and his administration as fact.
On In the Beginning, which I now agree has a significant S4 spoiler:
OK, I had forgotten that Delenn’s role doesn’t get revealed until S4, that is a real spoiler. I don’t consider the view of Centauri Prime in flames a spoiler since it doesn’t reveal anything; it’s just a glimpse of something that doesn’t get explained until the third Centauri book, much like in War Without End. Delenn gets her hair in S2 so that’s not a spoiler, and you’re mixing up WWE and ItB with the last bit - Sheridan and Delenn’s conversation, along with “Do not go to Zahadum” are actually in War Without End, not the movie.
Also, I’m not sure that the S4 spoiler is worth delaying it for; I think I’d go ahead and watch it… hmm, in the middle of S2.