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Vavrek posted:I believe JMS said something to the effect that he wanted episodes to provoke discussions or, if possible, fistfights. Considering some of the arguments I've been getting into lately with friends on their first B5 runs, mostly about Londo, I can totally believe this.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:24
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wizzardstaff posted:The psi corps commercial about little Johnny was so cheerily sinister. I love the little psi corps commerical. It's a standout moment in a show with lots of those. Also, I remember reading that JMS actually had to take care not to run afoul of rules/laws about subliminal messaging with the little TRUST THE CORPS blip in the middle of it
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Nov 8, 2018 03:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:Well if you're going to have a hyperspace dimension, you might as well make it weird and crazy instead of just normal space but fast. I read this post, and the Hyperspace music has earwormed me. I have no regrets.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:26
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Delsaber posted:Considering some of the arguments I've been getting into lately with friends on their first B5 runs, mostly about Londo, I can totally believe this. Londo did
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Nov 8, 2018 03:37
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Grand Fromage posted:Then again there are other episodes that suggest the show takes place across the entire Milky Way. Like all TV scifi series, it's not entirely consistent about space geography, even with as much planning as there was behind B5. If it's the scene I'm thinking of, then it makes sense Morden would be using a map that shows more stuff than all the active races are aware of. And if memory serves, they're dividing the galaxy up, which isn't quite the same thing as claiming that all of territory is inhabited or occupied right then and there.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:39
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Narsham posted:If it's the scene I'm thinking of, then it makes sense Morden would be using a map that shows more stuff than all the active races are aware of. And if memory serves, they're dividing the galaxy up, which isn't quite the same thing as claiming that all of territory is inhabited or occupied right then and there. This is what I was trying to get across before, sorry if I wasn't being more clear.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:42
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Come to think of it, has modern sci fi drifted away from the idea of psychic powers? They were all over the place in older material, and some works like Childhood's End and Warhammer 40k even went with the idea of them as the next step of human evolution, but now it seems like mainly they're only in vintage franchises, and mostly telekinesis instead of ESP or telepathy. Are people no longer interested in that sort of concept, or was interest in the first place promoted by a bunch of high-profile flimflam artists that have been run out of business?
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Nov 8, 2018 03:51
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That kind of thing really peaked in the seventies and early eighties, and petered out shortly afterward, if my media consumption's any indication.
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Nov 8, 2018 03:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:Come to think of it, has modern sci fi drifted away from the idea of psychic powers? They were all over the place in older material, and some works like Childhood's End and Warhammer 40k even went with the idea of them as the next step of human evolution, but now it seems like mainly they're only in vintage franchises, and mostly telekinesis instead of ESP or telepathy. It certainly has drifted away from that from my reading of (admittedly older) scifi. It was almost standard in 50s and 60s works, now if you want to differentiate people via ability it tends to be via some technical skill. Now you've got me thinking about what the Narn version of "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" would be like.
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Nov 8, 2018 04:00
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It definitely was a thing of its era. B5 is the most recent big thing I can think of that had it, which makes sense when you consider he was designing and shopping it around starting in the early/mid 80s. Mass Effect did too I suppose but all that Syd Mead-y design was of the psychics period.
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Nov 8, 2018 04:08
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SlothfulCobra posted:Come to think of it, has modern sci fi drifted away from the idea of psychic powers? They were all over the place in older material, and some works like Childhood's End and Warhammer 40k even went with the idea of them as the next step of human evolution, but now it seems like mainly they're only in vintage franchises, and mostly telekinesis instead of ESP or telepathy. I'd say psychic powers in recent sci-fi are less the 'semi-magical' kind in Babylon 5 and more like rigid sciences and disciplines, like biotics in Mass Effect. Although biotics started getting weird in the later games, too, where they went from mass/gravity control to space magic.
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Nov 8, 2018 04:14
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McSpanky posted:Yeah hyperspace is clearly more complex than just an x:1 compression of distance correlative to normal space, or else it'd be trivially easy to calculate routes through it and it wouldn't be so dangerous to travel without gates and beacons for reference. They talk about gravitational curves and other Isn't there also some sort of flow, or fluid dynamics, going on in hyperspace? I remember an episode where they were trying to find someone lost in hyperspace and kept drifting further and further out, but maybe that was just a mission on Freespace 2. 
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Nov 8, 2018 04:18
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stuff so there's some non-euclidian poo poo going on.
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Isn't there also some sort of flow, or fluid dynamics, going on in hyperspace? I remember an episode where they were trying to find someone lost in hyperspace and kept drifting further and further out, but maybe that was just a mission on Freespace 2. If I remember right, it was more suggested that it was very hard to find any kind of navigational fix in hyperspace, apart from the beacons and gates (and hence the more sophisticated tech of races that'd been around for longer could do more interesting things). So if you'd going between A and B, you have a nice set of things to measure, but if you drift out of that line, you lose the ability to get back to it. There were only a few points in the series when some ship/fleet managed to put itself in some useful tactical position off that line, and it was risky.
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Nov 8, 2018 04:24
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No there's a drift, if you lose power you get slowly pulled deeper into hyperspace until you're gone.
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Nov 8, 2018 04:30
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Grand Fromage posted:No there's a drift, if you lose power you get slowly pulled deeper into hyperspace until you're gone. You're basically sailing through dense fog with a heavy current and no compass, while trying to keep track of a lighthouse. Lose the lighthouse and you have absolutely zero points of reference.
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Nov 8, 2018 05:04
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ConfusedUs posted:I love the little psi corps commerical. It's a standout moment in a show with lots of those. As I recall from the DVD commentary track, they contacted the FCC to ask the precise point at which something would be considered illegal subliminal messaging, and made this as close as possible without stepping across the line.
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Nov 8, 2018 05:13
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ConfusedUs posted:I love the little psi corps commerical. It's a standout moment in a show with lots of those. I must have wrecked that VCR tape going back and forth to check whether I'd actually seen a frame with text in it in that commercial.
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Nov 8, 2018 05:34
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I must have wrecked that VCR tape going back and forth to check whether I'd actually seen a frame with text in it in that commercial. I wore out my parent's VHS deck watching my B5 recordings when I was a teenager, I forgot about that until now.
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Nov 8, 2018 06:00
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:As I recall from the DVD commentary track, they contacted the FCC to ask the precise point at which something would be considered illegal subliminal messaging, and made this as close as possible without stepping across the line. They did. As memory serves two frames was considered subliminal, so they made it three frames long.
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Nov 8, 2018 09:09
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Isn't there also some sort of flow, or fluid dynamics, going on in hyperspace? I remember an episode where they were trying to find someone lost in hyperspace and kept drifting further and further out, but maybe that was just a mission on Freespace 2. I mean it's also a mission in Freespace 2
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Nov 8, 2018 11:35
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Regarding the size of "known space" in B5, I think, despite any inconsistency, we have to assume that we're seeing races from across the entire galaxy. When you look at the end of the shadow war, it's about the young races working together and coming of age, literally telling the first ones to get the hell out of "our" galaxy. That message punches a bit harder if we're seeing it delivered by a united cross-section of galactic races. If it's just a bunch of races from a 70 LY sphere, winning a fight most of the galaxy won't ever know about, it kinda takes away the galactic self-determination aspect.
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Nov 8, 2018 12:33
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MrL_JaKiri posted:I mean it's also a mission in Freespace 2 the best thing about that mission is you can just cheese it by just going in a straight line
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Nov 8, 2018 12:38
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Dirty posted:Regarding the size of "known space" in B5, I think, despite any inconsistency, we have to assume that we're seeing races from across the entire galaxy. When you look at the end of the shadow war, it's about the young races working together and coming of age, literally telling the first ones to get the hell out of "our" galaxy. That message punches a bit harder if we're seeing it delivered by a united cross-section of galactic races. If it's just a bunch of races from a 70 LY sphere, winning a fight most of the galaxy won't ever know about, it kinda takes away the galactic self-determination aspect. There are frequent references to the Rim of the Galaxy. It's definitely the whole place. But most of the main players are from the same region of it. There is also the possibility that the Vorlons and Shadows have been loving around so long with the genocide that B5's Known Space is the only remaining enclave of sentient species.
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Nov 8, 2018 13:17
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I just finished Exogenis in season 3. Were the Trill in Star Trek just a straight copy of the concept in this episode? A weird squishy alien symbiot that shares all it's memories with the host. The more I watch this show the more I get disappointed by what seem like blatant ripoffs that Star Trek did. A highly religious formerly occupied species called the Narn/Bajorans are in conflict with their former Centaurian/Cardassian occupiers. The empire built by these occupiers is fading until they receive outside help from the vastly superior forces of the Shadows/Dominion. All this plays out on a space station located near a Jumpgate/Wormhole. Hidden inside Hyperspace/The Wormhole there exist very powerful entities known as the Prophets/First Ones. I'm starting to think that I'll know what is going to happen before it happens. I still really like DS9 but I'm starting to wonder just how much that show ripped off B5. As an aside, what's the deal with everyone being left handed? Sheridan and Garibaldi both are and I just noticed G'Kar is too at the beginning of Messages From Earth. Just seems like a weird coincidence.
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Nov 9, 2018 00:45
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Hazborgufen posted:As an aside, what's the deal with everyone being left handed? Sheridan and Garibaldi both are and I just noticed G'Kar is too at the beginning of Messages From Earth. Just seems like a weird coincidence.  I never noticed that, across ... four? full watch-throughs of the series.Could be pure coincidence of the actors' actual dominant hands. It'd be strange to have it as a character trait choice by JMS. As for DS9 drawing on B5, or the reverse, I note that sometimes shows have similar themes just because they're echoing the same real-world issues, or are drawing on the same antecedents in the genre. (An example of the first kind: my favorite description of the Bajorans is that when DS9 was written, the mujahideen were the good guys.)
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Nov 9, 2018 02:24
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Hazborgufen posted:I still really like DS9 but I'm starting to wonder just how much that show ripped off B5. This is a rabbit hole you're better off not going down into. I think it's more than likely Paramount cribbed some Cliffs notes when JMS was shopping it around, but we are way past re-re-re-litigating that and frankly I'm pleased we have two really good shows *cough* B5 is better If it helps, the Trill were introduced on TNG before B5 began.
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Nov 9, 2018 03:23
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I think it’s drat near certain that Paramont ripped off the original idea but the two series diverge dramatically almost immediately.
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Nov 9, 2018 04:04
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B5 and DS9 are two conceptually similar shows that went down very different paths and are both excellent in their own ways. Being a kid and watching both of them airing concurrently was loving fantastic even if a lot of the themes went way over my head at the time
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Nov 9, 2018 04:14
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Doctor Zero posted:I think it's drat near certain that Paramont ripped off the original idea but the two series diverge dramatically almost immediately. Yeah there are enough background similarities scattered around to make it suspicious but I don't think it matters at all. The vibe is totally different and the plots have nothing to do with each other. And DS9 is the best Trek series so if B5 triggered its existence, well, that's a net benefit for everybody.
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Nov 9, 2018 07:16
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It's easy to see a pattern in Star Trek where TNG kept becoming more focused on the boiling international relations around the galaxy, so a show in a fixed point on the border region makes sense...but that's also Babylon 5's whole schtick, international relations in space. They both set up some kind of weird religious arc featuring the main character that both didn't really go anywhere, they both had the outbreak of war among "traditional" powers that "nontraditional" powers interfered with/hijacked, and they both had bits where there is a coup on earth and separatist movements throughout humanity although those plots went very different places. Their command staffs share a number of similarities, angry chief of security, doctor, military officer in charge of the station, and Ivonava and Jadzia share a number of traits. Babylon 5 also borrows heavily from a lot of other sci-fi aesthetically, and the human uniforms with their simple geometric designs and block colors look a lot like Starfleet uniforms. Even the Cardassian/Bajoran relationship bares some shallow resemblance to Centauri/Narn. But then again, there's a lot that doesn't line up if you try to work out the timing of who copied who. DS9 only flirts with some of the concepts that Babylon 5 makes its centerpiece. Babylon 5 is very clearly going for a totally different thing with their set design and alien design. Aliens are more anatomically different from humans than they are aesthetically and sets are more detailed and expansive. Babylon 5 has bars and shops, but it never sinks into the realities of small business ownership like Quark does. Most importantly: DS9 resolutely maintains a lot of Star Trek mainstays. It still does something like half of its episodes as planet-of-the-day with the characters reacting to whatever wacky new culture they've never heard of until that moment, whereas Babylon 5 maintains its continuity more. Nothing is ever "new", it's always been there, just the characters haven't noticed them yet. They are all proactive through a persistent persistent world, and no matter how one-off an episode is, it is forming extra lore that will still be there in the background, and they'd never do something like drop the space Dalai Lama off on some uncharted planet never to be seen again.
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Nov 9, 2018 08:32
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Vavrek posted:
It's pure coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a symptom of him casting unknowns. A left hander might find less work because we put things in different positions (affecting set design) and move in different ways (affecting shot framing), and trying to move like a right hander is awkward. It did, however, lead to Andreas Katsulas being cast as the One-Armed Man in The Fugitive movie. In the original series the part was played by Bill Raisch, who had lost his right arm in the war; when making the movie they wanted to keep that, but also have the character fight with Harrison Ford. This required casting a left handed actor in the role.
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Nov 9, 2018 09:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:Nothing is ever "new", it's always been there, just the characters haven't noticed them yet. They are all proactive through a persistent persistent world, and no matter how one-off an episode is, it is forming extra lore that will still be there in the background, and they'd never do something like drop the space Dalai Lama off on some uncharted planet never to be seen again. This was my favourite thing about Babylon 5. The world felt real and fully-formed, and it didn't casually toss in epoch-defining discoveries like gods, superweapons, world-changing technologies etc. for the sole purpose of making a 45-minute point. The Star Trek universe feels like a circus sometimes, everywhere you look there's something astounding and improbable, to the point where nothing is, and nothing matters when the episode ends. I know that's a pretty stale thing to say at this point - Star Trek is at it's core episodic, but in 1994 everything was episodic, which made every plot twist and escalation in B5 very exciting. I remember watching the Earth Force destroyer ramming sequence in Severed Dreams and thinking "holy poo poo, they're really doing it, everything's about to change". 18-year-old me hadn't seen TV like that. 40-year-old me has seen a lot since then, and I can see how B5 might be a hard sell to a modern TV watcher - it broke some ground at the time, but you don't get that from it today. But I still think it's drat good and there's nothing quite like it.
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Nov 9, 2018 11:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's easy to see a pattern in Star Trek where TNG kept becoming more focused on the boiling international relations around the galaxy, so a show in a fixed point on the border region makes sense...but that's also Babylon 5's whole schtick, international relations in space. They both set up some kind of weird religious arc featuring the main character that both didn't really go anywhere, they both had the outbreak of war among "traditional" powers that "nontraditional" powers interfered with/hijacked, and they both had bits where there is a coup on earth and separatist movements throughout humanity although those plots went very different places. Their command staffs share a number of similarities, angry chief of security, doctor, military officer in charge of the station, and Ivonava and Jadzia share a number of traits. Babylon 5 also borrows heavily from a lot of other sci-fi aesthetically, and the human uniforms with their simple geometric designs and block colors look a lot like Starfleet uniforms. Even the Cardassian/Bajoran relationship bares some shallow resemblance to Centauri/Narn. It’s not about lining up the timing. In the script books JMS comes about as close as he ever will of saying Paramont stole his pitch and the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning. Of course he doesn’t have a memo in which they say “Hey, let’s take this pitch and make our own series. Tell this Stratovarius guy to gently caress off” This was years before both shows even started so that’s why I think on the surface they seem similar but once DS9 went into production, it turned out very different. I say all this without malice to Paramont. I love DS9 so it’s all good, I just find it an interesting show biz story. E: one of the most telling tidbits we learn from the script books is that, lo and behold JMS originally pitched the show with a shape changer character. They eventually decided to change it for various reasons and it ended up being manifesting as the changeling net in the Gathering. Hmmm, what other show has a shape changing character? 
Doctor Zero fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Nov 9, 2018 |
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Nov 9, 2018 12:21
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Eh, I'm kinda skeptical. The main similarity in the set-up of the two shows is the Centauri-Narn conflict mirroring the Cardassian-Bajoran conflict - but they're similar mainly in that they're both reflective of real colonizer-colonized conflicts. And the Bajoran;'s history had already been established years before on TNG, and I suspect the decision to make them a big part of DS9 had more to do with the desire to spin-off Ensign Ro onto the new show than anything else. As for the later arcs - well, the problem there is that there's plenty of evidence that Paramount and the producers didn't want Ds9 to have long arcs, and the writers only got away with it because Paramount's focus most of the time was on UPN and Voyager. I think the connections are more coincidental than anything else. That being said, I do want to see a crossover where Morden and Weyoun hang out...
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Nov 9, 2018 13:08
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I think I groaned out loud when the wraiths showed up on DS9.
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Nov 9, 2018 13:12
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Angry Salami posted:And the Bajoran;'s history had already been established years before on TNG, and I suspect the decision to make them a big part of DS9 had more to do with the desire to spin-off Ensign Ro onto the new show than anything else. The problem with saying that something was established in TNG is even that isn't enough from what I've read. TNG ran from 1987 to 1994. From what I've seen, the Babylon 5 script was sent to Paramount in 1989. Which by that point hadn't established the Bajorans and Trill yet. TNG was my favorite Star Trek for the longest time, but honestly the first two seasons were pretty bad. It's interesting that TNG got better after Paramoubt received the B5 script. This really is a rabbit hole.
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Nov 9, 2018 13:42
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It's conspiracy theory. You don't get magically better writing - about unrelated topics - because you read a treatment for another programme.
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Nov 9, 2018 13:52
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I vaguely recall reading somewhere that B5 was going to have a Garak-style character but I have no idea if it was true or not.
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Nov 9, 2018 14:18
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Ok, now this is weird. I'm partway through Messages From Earth and I noticed Ivanova is only wearing one earring and it's on her left ear. First I notice left handed characters and now that. Is "left" a theme I should be paying attention to?
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Nov 9, 2018 14:40
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Every left-hander is sinister by default. Makes you think...
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