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MrL_JaKiri posted:Agreed, it's better  Spoiler to both: Picard has a fundamental vulnerability that Sheridan never had, and there is character development for the torturer, as well. In the end, when Picard's free, we find out what we could have suspected, that he was about to crack; Sheridan is built up as too perfect to do that.
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May 14, 2019 13:26
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I prefer turn based intersections.
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May 14, 2019 16:39
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The ony way to improve Intersections would be if Patrick McGoohan had been available to play the interrogator (as I think was the original plan)
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May 14, 2019 17:45
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Absurd Alhazred posted:
Spoiler response (Intersections and ST:TNG Chain of Command): Sheridan has arguably cracked already in the following episode. While Picard says he could see a fifth light, Sheridan is hallucinating having escaped from imprisonment and being back on B5 having a conversation with Franklin. And the interrogator says he's close to giving them what they want. Look at the expression on Sheridan's face during the breakout when he kills a guard and tell me he's not unstable. The show does gloss over his recovery after that, although it could be argued that his resolution to go with the gambit he goes with is strengthened by the experience. Then again, Picard is back to normal in his next episode, too.
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May 14, 2019 18:57
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Absurd Alhazred posted:
Actual torturers don't undergo character development. They're completely emotionally detached from the process - like in Intersections. Telling the prisoner a story from your childhood where you showed weakness? What is this, amateur hour? It's stuff like that that make me prefer Intersections. It is genuinely harrowing at quite how hopeless the situation is, and as it occupies the entire episode...
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May 14, 2019 20:54
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One of the big lies of fascism is that it can be all cool and detached while instituting its brutality. I think both episodes are very notable in that it was common knowledge even back then that torture is only good for forcing false confessions, and somehow between then and now so much pop culture started just accepting the idea of torture as a way to get people to tell the truth.
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May 14, 2019 21:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:One of the big lies of fascism is that it can be all cool and detached while instituting its brutality. 24.
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May 14, 2019 21:41
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Actual torturers don't undergo character development. They're completely emotionally detached from the process - like in Intersections. Telling the prisoner a story from your childhood where you showed weakness? What is this, amateur hour?
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May 14, 2019 23:07
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Just finished Season 4. Fantastic show so far, can see that they thought this was going to be the last season because how the hell do you continue from that. I think I'm going to watch The Beginning and start Season 5 during the weekend.
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May 17, 2019 01:15
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Adnor posted:Just finished Season 4. IIRC, they originally planned for it to go 5 seasons, but there was some question about that so they tried to wrap up the big stuff at the end of season 4. But then they got a surprise final season 5 so stuff gets a little dragged out in the wrap up. Still good though. Glad you like it.
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May 17, 2019 01:26
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Every season, they thought "maybe we won't get renewed". Season 4, they'd gotten the story to a place that it could be concluded ... and the worry had changed from their own renewal to "is our network even going to be here next year?" (answer: no.)
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May 17, 2019 01:28
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Yep. Five season plan, show was cancelled at four, then it got picked up for a final season at the last minute. What would've been the early part of season 5 was compressed into 4, then 5 starts off with some new material before going on to the originally planned back half or so.
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May 17, 2019 01:28
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I can't recall where I saw this, but allegedly Intersections in Real Time was supposed to be the S4 finale, and the assault on Earth take up a big chunk of early S5. Talk about a cliffhanger. Edit: Here we go. http://jmsnews.com/messages/message?id=9182 jms posted:(blocked) asks: Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 01:40 on May 17, 2019 |
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May 17, 2019 01:37
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Which worked out pretty great because the show went on hiatus after that episode, so it was functionally the season finale anyway.
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May 17, 2019 01:57
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One of the things I think is a shame about the compressed Season 4 is the way-too-abrupt change of the dynamic between Londo and G'kar. It should have taken way longer for them to transition from enemies to enemies of the same enemy to sharing jokes with each other. More generally, unlike previous seasons where I feel like it wouldn't be impossible for someone to jump in at pretty much any episode and then catch up on background in reruns, S4 was very tight. It's the most Golden Age of TV season of a show that was in so many ways its progenitor.
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May 17, 2019 02:04
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Absurd Alhazred posted:One of the things I think is a shame about the compressed Season 4 is the way-too-abrupt change of the dynamic between Londo and G'kar. It should have taken way longer for them to transition from enemies to enemies of the same enemy to sharing jokes with each other. I think the idea was for The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari to happen near the end of S4. By the time they had the breathing room to show the breakthrough in the relationship, it was already in effect onscreen.
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May 17, 2019 02:12
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Absurd Alhazred posted:One of the things I think is a shame about the compressed Season 4 is the way-too-abrupt change of the dynamic between Londo and G'kar. It should have taken way longer for them to transition from enemies to enemies of the same enemy to sharing jokes with each other. I'm willing to let the "...not on the same page..." B-plot do a lot of the heavy lifting there. The initial steps happened on-screen. S5's interminable promos on TNT tended to repeat a line about our heros winning the war, but can they "win the peace," which is a nice way to look at S5. Sheridan was a great war-leader, but can he meet the challenges of leading people in peacetime? I also find myself being more and more forgiving of it as a final season as more and more shows arrive at unsatisfying final seasons that don't take any time to breathe.
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May 17, 2019 16:08
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SlothfulCobra posted:One of the big lies of fascism is that it can be all cool and detached while instituting its brutality. Do you have any allergies or illnesses I should be aware of ? Are you currently taking any medication ? Have you had any trouble with your heart ? Intersections would have been the greatest season-finale cliffhanger of all time. it's still one of my favorite hours of television.
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May 21, 2019 06:43
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Everything we know is a lie... https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1135587777477668866
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Jun 3, 2019 18:30
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seaQuest DSV of all shows managed to get a Bluray release and I can't imagine the profit projections from that were any better than B5's would be, if that really is the case.
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Jun 3, 2019 18:41
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If JMS is correct, there's no technical/profit problem, it's that there's at least one executive at WB with a specific vendetta against Babylon 5 and the other shows from PTEN who blocks any attempt to do anything with them. Until that's gone there's zero hope of any sort of higher quality releases or novels or anything to do with the property. JMS only owns the rights to do a theatrical release movie, which has never gotten anywhere.
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Jun 3, 2019 19:01
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Although, to be fair, there's a couple of things going on with B5 that weren't factors with seaQuest: - seaQuest's CGI was rendered at a higher resolution - not at what is considered "high resolution" these days, but better than 480 lines - so blowing it up isn't quite as jarring. Also much of the CGI was underwater shots where low light helped to obscure the limitations of the old models and textures. - seaQuest was never filmed for widescreen and never had a widescreen release. I could see a 4:3 release of B5 being seen by some as a step backward, and I could also see doing the same zoom-and-crop technique as was done for the DVDs as a waste. (Personally, given that WB is almost certainly not going to spend the money to re-do the CGI - even just to throw the assets into Lightwave and set the output resolution to 1080p - I'd take 4:3 as an acceptable compromise.) But that said I do still suspect there's still a grudge in play.
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Jun 3, 2019 19:03
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Got to meet Claudia Christian over the weekend at Denver Pop Culture Con. She is a very nice person to talk to.
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Jun 4, 2019 01:02
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I got linked to this article that seems like a pretty fair take on Babylon 5. Calls it the greatest, most terrible sci-fi series.
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Jun 14, 2019 07:22
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Rings pretty true to me. I particularly like this criticism of Star Trek.Jennifer Giesbrecht posted:We all know that the Federation is a glorious Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism paradise, right? I mean, it is—there’s nothing else it could be, but no writer has ever told us this directly. Starfleet Officers are awfully self righteous about a way of life that the franchise seems averse to actual spelling out in explicit terms. And if you don’t say something out loud, it turns out you don’t actually have a whole lot to say about it in the end after all. There's a lot of things that Babylon 5 tries and kinda fails at doing, but I can never really hold its failures against it, because it's not like anybody else was trying it. Even if you don't finish the race, you'll always be in first place if you're the only driver. Of course, part of that is the whole thing with genre fiction where trying to do things more elaborate or abstract than other fiction forces works to do things that seem otherwise stilted or shallow when judged by the standards of "normal" drama.
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Jun 14, 2019 18:48
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I got linked to this article that seems like a pretty fair take on Babylon 5. Calls it the greatest, most terrible sci-fi series. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Only qualm was the "capital F-fantasy" bit, which I think took some liberties.
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Jun 14, 2019 19:01
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Habibi posted:Yeah, I enjoyed it. Only qualm was the "capital F-fantasy" bit, which I think took some liberties. It was good. I objected more to misspelling Richard Bigg's name as "Briggs," than the science fantasy distinction, which was really driven by the author's belief that the show was both depicting the world we live in and yet simplifying or denying it. It did make me realize that the whole B5 series could be compared to the Millennium Falcon: she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:16
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May I please have a good Babylon 5 video game that is next-gen?
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Jun 14, 2019 20:45
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I got linked to this article that seems like a pretty fair take on Babylon 5. Calls it the greatest, most terrible sci-fi series. There's enough factual errors about the show that the analysis is kind of thrown off, but enough of it is fundamentally right that it rings true. So all in all the piece is itself a metaphor for the show.
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Jun 14, 2019 22:20
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I said come in! posted:May I please have a poo poo, I can take JMS barfing out an RPG Maker game at this point. There was that one Sierra tried making but I think Sierra was folding at that point and thus the game was never made. I think it was called Into the Fire or something like that.
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Jun 15, 2019 02:09
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Honestly B5 might make for a mapgame I'd actually play, or a good space RTS, or an old school space-fighter game. Or hell, an RPG might be good.
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Jun 15, 2019 02:31
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I played the hell out of the board game in college. Still have it, although I'm not sure it holds up. Very fiddly and late 90s/early 2000s.
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Jun 15, 2019 02:33
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Airspace posted:poo poo, I can take JMS barfing out an RPG Maker game at this point. The E3 demo of Into the Fire got leaked to the Internet a few years ago. It looks like it might've been an actually decent sci-fi flight game had it not been canned.
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Jun 15, 2019 02:47
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Stellaris is probably the closest we will ever get since the devs are unapologetic B5 fans. There are advanced “fallen empires” like the Vorlons and Shadows and with the right expansions, you can get War in Heaven events where they wake up and try to take the younger races into the fight.
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Jun 15, 2019 03:39
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Honestly B5 might make for a mapgame I'd actually play, or a good space RTS, or an old school space-fighter game. 
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Jun 15, 2019 03:58
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Honestly B5 might make for a mapgame I'd actually play, or a good space RTS, or an old school space-fighter game. I think a paradox-style mapgame would really go against the spirit of the show, seeing as how the show's pretty firm on how bad opportunistic expansion is, and opportunistic expansion is the whole point of mapgames. A spacefighter game like freespace would fit pretty well into things, or maybe a strategy game like Homeworld, but a whole zoomed-out perspective might really miss out on the tone of the series. Some kind of point and click adventure game might be neat, a detective story tracking down a mystery in the station while weaving through political intrigue. Only problem is, all three of those genres are mostly dead right now. The real temptation would be to shoehorn the setting into a currently-popular genre like a third person cover shooter, which would take a fair amount of rewriting. Maybe give the player some direct control over some important political decisions in the setting. Throw in some semi-optional sex scenes too, those sell like hotcakes...and I've just pitched Mass Effect. Either way, I'd sure love more things with interstellar politics. MrL_JaKiri posted:There's enough factual errors about the show that the analysis is kind of thrown off, but enough of it is fundamentally right that it rings true. What in particular was wrong? Nothing stood out to me.
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Jun 15, 2019 04:02
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SlothfulCobra posted:Mass Effect. I don't think it's a stretch to say the franchise was heavily influenced in the first place. There were definitely moments that I felt like 'this is the closest I'm gonna get to playing a pew-pew B5 RPG.' I will say that I wished that feeling had extended into 3. After playing through that game, I immediately went onto youtube to watch the president's address from In the Beginning and just kept asking myself why they couldn't have just gone for a straight rip-off with not-so-slight modifications-- like Earth just getting straight-up annihilated instead of, at least in ME3, being the focal point of the galaxy for no discernible reason.
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Jun 15, 2019 04:08
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Aside from Mass Effect the other avenue that springs to mind would be a Telltale adventure game, but uh, whoops.
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Jun 15, 2019 04:35
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John Murdoch posted:Aside from Mass Effect the other avenue that springs to mind would be a Telltale adventure game, but uh, whoops. I'd rather have a game where you had actual power to change the narrative, not just a meaningless "G'Kar will remember this."
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Jun 15, 2019 04:37
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:The E3 demo of Into the Fire got leaked to the Internet a few years ago. It looks like it might've been an actually decent sci-fi flight game had it not been canned. Part of the soundtrack got released too, and it whips rear end https://youtu.be/2hAtD3zqJMU
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Jun 15, 2019 05:13
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