The "I'm rewatching Babylon 5 on SciFi" thread

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1

I’ve been re-watching the entire Babylon 5 series as shown on weekday mornings on the SciFi network, and from comments in other threads I know others here have as well.

Currently, the episodes being shown are halfway through season three, where the war against the Shadows is now beginning to enter its active phase, and the station has recently broken away from Earth.

Of course, one of my favorite episodes was shown last week, “Severed Dreams”. for which the only thing I wish was changed was that character of Captain Hiroshi had been changed to be Laurel Takashima, the character who was in Ivanova’s spot in the pilot. Of course, this would have logistical problems with her rank, but what the hell.

So are there things others who have already seen the series before are looking for? I, for example, was quite pleased to be able to watch later plot elements be setup, such as Rangers being in the background scenes in the months before they were officially introduced.

Also, this is pretty much the part in the series where Sheridan goes into full on active mode. Generally, the best performances for the actor seem to come when Sheridan gets angry and bursts out. You can almost see him get two feet taller and begin to glow. ;)

2

I still think in a lot of ways this was one of the best series ever done. Writing is a little stilted on occasion, but your right, watching the setup being done is amazing. There are things mentioned casually in the first season that don’t come to fruitation till the fourth.

3

Knowing how things turn out in the end, all the little gestures of Lennier for Delenn have a lot of added meaning beyond the place of duty and loyalty. He’s just doing his job, but he’s doing it for more than his job.

But the rangers are very cool. From their introduction, they take a place as the holy warriors at the front of a crusade. Elite, cross-cultural, quiet. Very well-developed.

Few other sci-fi shows are as full of hints, set-ups and possible double meanings. A lot of threads aren’t followed, but there are no red herrings as such.

Troy

4

It’s my favorite SF show since the original Star Trek. It had the balls to do things Trek would never have thought of until B5 did it first. Yeah, it’s not perfect but episodic TV rarely is. Still, it had some great characters and events. Londo and G’kar are wonderful and together they were fantastic.

5

Weird–I was watching some episodes from season two last night (on DVD). I love this show, even though the acting and writing is sometimes not so good. I’m disappointed that more shows haven’t been produced that use B5’s “novel for television” approach, though it’s understandable from a risk perspective.

6

Considering that Stracsynzki had so many problems with renewals and contracts, I can understand the hesitancy to produce multi-season story arcs. The second to last season could have been the last, so the final episode of it was shot with that in mind. Then they get renewed, lose Claudia Christian in some misunderstanding and run another year to tie up loose ends - a final season that has glimmers of promise, but is pretty lame, mostly.

Kudos to him for keeping his vision in tact, but it was a huge risk. B5 could have easily been an unfinished symphony with lots of unresolved plot lines, resulting in near complete confusion in syndication. Or it could have moved to the more tried and true episodic formula that DS9 relied on - poorly done as it was most of the time.

Troy

7

I’ve always thought JMS was overrated as a writer (especially of dialog…he is terrible at that), but I like his vision. There are times in seasons 3-5 that I feel like I am in the middle of a Robert Jordan novel, there are so many twists and subplots going on. He holds them together fairly well too. The episodes that foreshadow other events are particularly interesting because you really feel like you are part of something bigger in those moments. There aren’t many television shows/movies that can feel quite so epic.

Too bad he blew it with Crusade, which was an awful show. I had high hopes for it too. But JMS suddenly tried to moralize and philosophize, which he isn’t very good at. Many episodes seemed like protracted monologues, with very little substance.

8

When the show got into “create a better world” with Sheridan as President and all that it goes downhill fast, I think.

9

I still feel that the first four years of Babylon 5 is some of the best television ever created. The problem was that after tying up all of the major plotlines at the end of season 4, season 5 just felt… empty. Losing Claudia Christian certainly didn’t help that either, because she really felt like the soul of the show to me.

It’s worth noting that a key part of Crusade being so bad was because TNT wrested creative control from JMS. They wanted more sex, more violence, more skimpy clothes (kinda sounds like what is happening to Enterprise). JMS just said fuckit and pulled the show altogether - if they weren’t going to let him do it the way he wanted to, he wasn’t going to do it at all.

10

Season 5 suffered because JMS didn’t know it was going to be produced until after Season 4 was well into production. He had to compress a lot of the storylines and shoehorn in the important elements into S4. If S5 had been a certainty then a lot of the plot and events in the last half of S4 would have been moved into S5. It would have been a more satisfying end to the show I think. My main complaint about S4 is that everything seems rushed, my favorite parts about S2 and S3 was the slow build up towards events.

11

And we’ll all avoid mentioning Legend of the Rangers, ok?

12

Heh. LOTR’s only good point was G’Kar. Specifically his point about the whole “living for the One and dying for the One”.

I agree with others that JMS is great at writing the overall arc and “macro-plots” but can really suck at crafting the specific scene dialogue.

Unfortunately, to pull off such a science fiction show in a day where no one would believe that anything without the Star Trek name was worth funding almost automatically required one with a large amount of ego and control tendencies to be in charge, which is why so few of the “non-arc” episodes had writers other than himself.

As for season five, I’ve found that if you pretty much skip the minor telepath arc stories within it, it’s actually not that bad. Byron was such a poor replacement for Marcus.

13

I think part of the issue with LOTR and Crusade is that JMS tried to continue writing very dense shows. B5 had a lot of detail in it. Different defined cultures, speech-patterns, philosophies. The neat part was that he let you picjk it up from the characters simply living it as the went for the most part, except for J’Kar and his book. I just don’t think JMS can devote the needed time to any of these projects if he has more than one project to attend to at a given time. Wasn’t he doing Joshua at the same time as LOTR?

14

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how anyone can say JMS is terrible at writing dialogue. G’kar and Londo say some of the best, and sometimes most profound, stuff that I have ever seen on television.

15

Yeah, but mostly in set-pieces or political speeches. JMS is good at those. And the occasional witty remark.

But sustained dialogue between characters that has emotion and meaning…he’s not so good at that. Sheridan and Delenn is a sweet romance, but their dialogue was awful. A lot of the interpersonal relationships are based on dialogue - the entire crew dynamic - but it rarely rings true. Often it’s eye-rolling bad.

Compare it to Star Trek: TNG. It has the opposite problem. Picard never sounds so stupid as when he’s trying to make some earth-shaking point. The interpersonal dialoguq, on the hand, was outstanding - as far as these things go.

But that’s OK. B5 is a political story. It’s like one of those Shakespearean histories where everyone has an agenda and a chance to show off their soliloquy chops. But there aren’t many love stories in the Henry IV series.

Troy

16

Another example of how JMS can do one aspect of scripting excellently and another horribly would be in today’s episode “Ship of Tears” (which for some odd reason is listed at SciFi as ‘Ship of Texas’). The overall idea of the telepaths being weapons components is good, but the fact that the telepath they take out of the deep freeze just happens to be Bester’s lover is just cheesey.

Oh, Legend of the Rangers was dense alright. (Cheap shot, sorry. ;))

Personally, LOTR suffers from the same thing that bugs me about ST: Enterprise. In both cases you have a show that has so much potential in telling about the exploration of the galaxy, the creation of the Federation / rebuilding of the Alliance worlds after the Shadow War, and yet we go straight back into the need of having a “big-bad enemy” and follow many of the same plots that we’ve seen before in previous series.

Enterprise borrows heavily from plots already used in TNG, and LOTR replacing the Shadows with The Hand? :( So much potential wasted.

17

Oh, Legend of the Rangers was dense alright. (Cheap shot, sorry. ;))

Personally, LOTR suffers from the same thing that bugs me about ST: Enterprise. In both cases you have a show that has so much potential in telling about the exploration of the galaxy, the creation of the Federation / rebuilding of the Alliance worlds after the Shadow War, and yet we go straight back into the need of having a “big-bad enemy” and follow many of the same plots that we’ve seen before in previous series.

Enterprise borrows heavily from plots already used in TNG, and LOTR replacing the Shadows with The Hand? :( So much potential wasted.[/quote]

(Shrugs)
I don’t know that enough of an audience would gather to watch a “serious” space show without some sort of action. Lights flashing, jaws clenching, all that. IIRC the first season of Bab 5 didn’t do all that well until the threads of conspiracy started kicking in. Of course it seemed like that show was always in trouble of some kind or other.

18

I’m collecing the DVDs. Picked up Season 2 about a month ago. The scene that sticks with me from that season is the end of “Comes the Inquisitor.”

19

The action or even seriousness wasn’t what I was complaining about, but more the odd need to rehash the same storylines and plot elements all over again.

For Legend of the Rangers, you have a storyline that takes place after the Shadow War, when the Interstellar Alliance is more talk than action, and most of the galaxy is still wild and lawless. There was plenty of room there for action, adventure, romance and even comedy, but instead we get a rather generic enemy in “The Hand” which is so blatantly just a Shadows rip off that it’s painful to watch.

The same is true with Enterprise, which has this wide open, wild and lawless universe to explore, without even the eventual Federation to back them up, and yet we fall back on “temporal cold wars” and a number of episodes that are near perfect duplicates of previously written Next Generation episodes. On top of this, the “time tampering” has been given as an excuse for drastic and unneeded changes to the established history of the series. If you’re going to just ignore everything that was supposed to have happened, why even bother setting the series in the past?

20

Yeah, but mostly in set-pieces or political speeches. JMS is good at those. And the occasional witty remark.

But sustained dialogue between characters that has emotion and meaning…he’s not so good at that. Sheridan and Delenn is a sweet romance, but their dialogue was awful. A lot of the interpersonal relationships are based on dialogue - the entire crew dynamic - but it rarely rings true. Often it’s eye-rolling bad.

Compare it to Star Trek: TNG. It has the opposite problem. Picard never sounds so stupid as when he’s trying to make some earth-shaking point. The interpersonal dialoguq, on the hand, was outstanding - as far as these things go.

But that’s OK. B5 is a political story. It’s like one of those Shakespearean histories where everyone has an agenda and a chance to show off their soliloquy chops. But there aren’t many love stories in the Henry IV series.

Troy[/quote]

That was well put! I think it is completely accurate as well. There are plenty of great lines in B5, but many of them only work because you know the characters very well. Try getting your wife (or someone who doesn’t know the show) to watch an episode in the middle of season 3 or 4. You’ll find yourself defending a lot of dialog that sounds pretty cheezy. Here is a GREAT example:

“Who am I? I’m Susan Ivanova. Commander. Daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart. I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you’re ever going to see. God sent me.”

Commander Susan Ivanova, Between the Light and the Darkness

Also, in this mornings episode, where they return to Babylon 4 Sheridan says, after hearing about the Vorlon tech in the White Star: “As my great-grandfather used to say: ‘Cool!’”

The first is a political speech of sorts, and is VERY cheezy and poorly written. The second is more interpersonal. While I give examples of both types as being bad, Troy is right overall. JMS has little speeches or phrases that are great for quoting. But the overall dialog is pretty bad. This becomes even worse (WWWWAAAAYYYY WORSE!!) on Crusade. On that show, even the monologues become disastrously bad.