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There's designs for B1 through 3 on the internet (probably fan designs?) and they are indeed red, orange and yellow
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Sep 22, 2019 23:41
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Sep 23, 2019 01:34
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Just watched TKO and honestly, this is the thing that stands out to me:Lurker's Guide posted:Guest star Greg McKinney died on April 12, 1998. Coincidentally, Sugar Ray Robinson died on April 12, 1989. The loving Babylon curse. A nightmare given form.
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Sep 23, 2019 09:46
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Wrapped up Season 1 last night. Seems like everything is in place for the real ride now. 1. Interested to see what happens with Londo. This shadowy weird group being represented by the kid on Saved by the Bell that was selling drugs to everyone is working some big unknown players, to everyone. I loved J'Kars reaction when he was ticking down all of the races that it COULDN'T be. 2. Casual genocide 3. Delenn's story just took a hard 90 degree turn and I'm on board. No clue where this is going. Somehow is in cahoots with Vosh, who finally gave a real answer. 4. Sinclair getting married? Nope. Not closing that loop. I know he's had major issues, but his daytime soap opera style always grated me 5. Sure...sure... going to do exactly what the dead President wanted to do...except that is the exact opposite based on his campaign right? This is very prescient given our current political climate and "fake news" control of the media. 6. The doctor continues to have no chill. "Yup, that dude is dead" 7. Get better Mr. Baldy 8. So people in the 'Down Below' (how is that a proper noun?) get heat off of some stolen space lantern like a bunch of homeless folks?
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Sep 23, 2019 13:28
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People in Down Below are homeless.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:30
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MrL_JaKiri posted:People in Down Below are homeless. Sorry, meant to say it seemed strange to me that they'd live and act exactly as you would as being homeless on Earth. Stereotypically huddled around a space-version of a burning trash barrel.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:35
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TraderStav posted:Wrapped up Season 1 last night. Seems like everything is in place for the real ride now. Yeah, Babylon was remarkably predictable in some ways.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:48
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TraderStav posted:Sorry, meant to say it seemed strange to me that they'd live and act exactly as you would as being homeless on Earth. Stereotypically huddled around a space-version of a burning trash barrel. That's the entire point of having them huddled around space-barrels. They're homeless.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:49
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Down below seemed like a JMS way of sticking up to the Star Trek utopia.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:57
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CainFortea posted:That's the entire point of having them huddled around space-barrels. They're homeless. But it's not like they're outside in the elements. Needing a campfire seems really strange on a (presumably) climate controlled space station. I guess the down below could be colder than the rest but just seems too much on the nose that they'd use some magical space orb to generate heat and huddle. Adaptabullshit posted:Down below seemed like a JMS way of sticking up to the Star Trek utopia. I never liked the Utopia of Star Trek, it really constrained a lot of potentially fantastic story lines and confused others by having to explain why the machine that replicates any part or food can't provide for everyone. Also transporters. Those also complicate storylines. Now that I think about it, I'm really happy that B5 doesn't focus on techno-babble to save the day.
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Sep 23, 2019 14:09
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TraderStav posted:But it's not like they're outside in the elements. Needing a campfire seems really strange on a (presumably) climate controlled space station. I guess the down below could be colder than the rest but just seems too much on the nose that they'd use some magical space orb to generate heat and huddle. The station is 2.5 million tons, 5 kilometers long. I doubt they climate controlled all of it. (Of course it would probably need cooling and not heating, as space is a lovely radiator but the theme is B5 is "all alone in the night" which implies coldness)
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Sep 23, 2019 14:21
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TraderStav posted:But it's not like they're outside in the elements. Needing a campfire seems really strange on a (presumably) climate controlled space station. I guess the down below could be colder than the rest but just seems too much on the nose that they'd use some magical space orb to generate heat and huddle. If I recall correctly, there's some passing mention at some point that Downbelow is basically unfinished sections of B5 located in the gaps between the inner and outer hull.
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Sep 23, 2019 14:21
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TraderStav posted:But it's not like they're outside in the elements. Needing a campfire seems really strange on a (presumably) climate controlled space station. I guess the down below could be colder than the rest but just seems too much on the nose that they'd use some magical space orb to generate heat and huddle. It's about visual signifier.The go to image for homelessness for an American audience is a bunch of people in ragtag clothes around a fire in a rusty barrel. So if you want to get across the message that these are homeless people, you'll use that, even if it doesn't necessarily makes a lot of sense in a scifi setting.
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Sep 23, 2019 14:40
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TraderStav posted:But it's not like they're outside in the elements. Needing a campfire seems really strange on a (presumably) climate controlled space station. I guess the down below could be colder than the rest but just seems too much on the nose that they'd use some magical space orb to generate heat and huddle. Space is cold, and they're living in sections that were never intended for human habitation. The Brown Sector areas are largely leftover from when they were building Babylon 5 and are meant to be sealed off and forgotten.
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Sep 23, 2019 15:12
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No, I don't think Brown sector is the in between spaces. I think it's just unfinished/undeveloped decks, because of aforementioned budget issues. If B5 had been a fully-funded and fully-resourced project I think Brown would have basically been like another Red sector. I don't think it's meant to be mechanical/engineering spaces either because that's what Gray sector is for.
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Sep 23, 2019 15:18
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:No, I don't think Brown sector is the in between spaces. I think it's just unfinished/undeveloped decks, because of aforementioned budget issues. If B5 had been a fully-funded and fully-resourced project I think Brown would have basically been like another Red sector. At the end of S1, should the different colors for sections have any meaning for me? Feels like I've heard passing mention of location by color and number, but no definition on them yet. Is that yet to come?
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Sep 23, 2019 15:36
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TraderStav posted:At the end of S1, should the different colors for sections have any meaning for me? Feels like I've heard passing mention of location by color and number, but no definition on them yet. Is that yet to come? The only one that's really ever plot-relevant is Green Sector, where the diplomat quarters are kept.
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Sep 23, 2019 15:45
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My recollection of them is that the colors refer to sections longitudinally, so it's just a way of locating things in a grid within the basically cylindrical layout.
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Sep 23, 2019 15:50
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The only one that's really ever plot-relevant is Green Sector, where the diplomat quarters are kept. How dare do you ignore Grey 17 is Missing!
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Sep 23, 2019 16:13
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Green sector is the diplomatic wing and officer's quarters, blue sector is the command deck, docking bays and most residential sections, red sector is commercial, brown sector is the slums, grey sector is industrial and maintenance. Man, I've got a lot of useless trivia crammed in my head. I always figured brown sector wasn't just abandoned due to lack of funding, some of it was also intentionally left open for future expansion - it'd be a major project to expand the station in any way, so it'd be smart to leave some room to grow when you first build it.
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Sep 23, 2019 16:18
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Memorizing all the different colors definitely isn’t necessary though. All it will gain you (aside from feeling connected to the world and its inhabitants) is a few moments of prescience between hearing the words “I’m heading to Blue 5” in dialogue and seeing the character walk onto the command deck in the next cut.
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Sep 23, 2019 16:34
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Angry Salami posted:Green sector is the diplomatic wing and officer's quarters, blue sector is the command deck, docking bays and most residential sections, red sector is commercial, brown sector is the slums, grey sector is industrial and maintenance. I thought blue sector is strictly EarthForce-only, green sector is diplomatic quarters and offices. (It's also entirely possible the series is not 100% consistent on this.) That does make sense about parts of Brown being open for future expansion. There is a part of me that wonders how long Down Below persisted after the ISA came into being. On the one hand you'd think the relatively benevolent ISA would at some point be willing to step in and say "alright, the whole notion of having thousands of people stranded on a space station with no way out is kinda hosed, we're flying them off the station so we can get rid of the blighted crime-ridden slum zone causing problems here" (since the whole premise of Down Below is that they're people who flew to B5 to try to make a buck, failed, and now cannot afford passage back to Earth or wherever they came from), on the other hand it would be very in-character for the show to say "yeah well President Sheridan tried to do it and those fuckers at Earthgov and half the alliance pushed back and refused to let them fly back and basically made the Down Below people stateless refugees"... which then creates the interesting problem of where they went when the station was being decommissioned.
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Sep 23, 2019 18:34
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head58 posted:I’m one of the dudes on The Name of the Pod and I’d say we’re okay to not terrible. I think we may have been a bit harsh on season 1 but lightened up as the series progressed. We don’t do recaps, mainly analyses and discussion. We’ll be starting season 5 in a few weeks - if there are any topics folks would like to hear about let me know. By the way, I've been listening to your podcast since I've started to the watch and it's the first one I fire up when I finish an episode. I've enjoyed it quite a bit. Now I'm consistently trying to guess which one of the two you are by your comments that may show your gooniness.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:03
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TraderStav posted:By the way, I've been listening to your podcast since I've started to the watch and it's the first one I fire up when I finish an episode. I've enjoyed it quite a bit. Glad to hear you’re liking it. I’m the one that doesn’t say smart things.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:06
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head58 posted:Glad to hear you’re liking it. I’m the one that doesn’t say smart things.  I've been listening to both yours and The Audio Guide to B5. The contrast between the two shows is pretty funny. They're a bunch of old Doctor Who fanboys who started a pod but definitely don't go as deep as you guys. I thought you guys did a great job of breaking down why 'By any means necessary' was bad, it was very well thought out and interesting (aside from the awful acting of the negotiator, but the whole premise that they could just bus in a bunch of scabs to replace the most critical function of a 200k floating piece of metal at the edge of the territory) and I went to their show and they were all 'I liked it! Great to see real world issues in space!'. Almost unsubbed there. I want to say that they also defended TKO.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:11
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The B plot of TKO, Ivanova dealing w her father’s death, is actually very solid. It’s the catastrophic mismatch with the terrible, terrible A plot that is baffling. That’s a sin the show commits waaaay too often.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:23
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:There is a part of me that wonders how long Down Below persisted after the ISA came into being. On the one hand you'd think the relatively benevolent ISA would at some point be willing to step in and say "alright, the whole notion of having thousands of people stranded on a space station with no way out is kinda hosed, we're flying them off the station so we can get rid of the blighted crime-ridden slum zone causing problems here" (since the whole premise of Down Below is that they're people who flew to B5 to try to make a buck, failed, and now cannot afford passage back to Earth or wherever they came from), on the other hand it would be very in-character for the show to say "yeah well President Sheridan tried to do it and those fuckers at Earthgov and half the alliance pushed back and refused to let them fly back and basically made the Down Below people stateless refugees"... which then creates the interesting problem of where they went when the station was being decommissioned. I think it's a very realistic concept, since that's a real-rear end problem in the real world, it's just like Hawaii's homeless problem. Ideally you would build up some kind of welfare system to help them out of their situation or ship them out somewhere else, but the only way to actually stop the problem entirely would be to shut down immigration and private enterprise on the station altogether, which seems like a nonstarter. Although viewing them as a security risk that needs to be physically removed from the station and sent somewhere else as opposed to a social problem in need of welfare seems like a perspective that's more politically relevant now than it was in the 90s. It is disappointing how many problems the world of Babylon 5 has without solutions in sight, but it does provide such an edge of realism compared to Trek's assumption that most problems will be solved offscreen at some indefinite point in the future. Life is just a big series of intersecting problems to have to find solutions or workarounds for.
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Sep 23, 2019 19:41
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e X posted:It's about visual signifier.The go to image for homelessness for an American audience is a bunch of people in ragtag clothes around a fire in a rusty barrel. So if you want to get across the message that these are homeless people, you'll use that, even if it doesn't necessarily makes a lot of sense in a scifi setting. They'd have used bindles, but importing them was prohibitively expensive and barrels were conveniently left-over from the original construction.
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Sep 23, 2019 22:08
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TraderStav posted:
I always get that confused with the The Babylon Podcast, which is so ancient in podcast terms it predates Skype calls being a thing - whenever a guest called in they had to ring them on an actual phoneline. They did manage to get a good number of the principal cast and crew to talk to them though (although it probably helped that one of the presenters had actually worked on the show).
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Sep 23, 2019 23:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think it's a very realistic concept, since that's a real-rear end problem in the real world, it's just like Hawaii's homeless problem. Ideally you would build up some kind of welfare system to help them out of their situation or ship them out somewhere else, but the only way to actually stop the problem entirely would be to shut down immigration and private enterprise on the station altogether, which seems like a nonstarter. I don't think that's necessarily the case; I think there are mechanisms that could help prevent at least some strandings, like requiring visitors to have purchased some kind of non-transferable voucher you can buy that will get you passage off the station. quote:Although viewing them as a security risk that needs to be physically removed from the station and sent somewhere else as opposed to a social problem in need of welfare seems like a perspective that's more politically relevant now than it was in the 90s. That's a good point and I feel a little skeevy for having framed it in that sense. I guess I don't typically think of Babylon 5 as a "normal" city in space, despite the usual line about a quarter of a million residents; for example, I have a hard time imagining very many people would choose to live out their retirement at B5. There are also hardly any children ever seen unless a story directly calls for one, which also leads me to think it's not really a complete community. That said the show also seems to consistently portray a lot of lurkers' biggest problem as being that they just literally cannot afford to leave the station, so from that perspective I guess my assumption was that most of them would want to leave if given the chance. Really though I think it's still a very interesting question whichever way you go: those lurkers had to have gone somewhere by the end of Sleeping In Light.
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Sep 24, 2019 00:39
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:There is a part of me that wonders how long Down Below persisted after the ISA came into being. On the one hand you'd think the relatively benevolent ISA would at some point be willing to step in and say "alright, the whole notion of having thousands of people stranded on a space station with no way out is kinda hosed, we're flying them off the station so we can get rid of the blighted crime-ridden slum zone causing problems here" (since the whole premise of Down Below is that they're people who flew to B5 to try to make a buck, failed, and now cannot afford passage back to Earth or wherever they came from), on the other hand it would be very in-character for the show to say "yeah well President Sheridan tried to do it and those fuckers at Earthgov and half the alliance pushed back and refused to let them fly back and basically made the Down Below people stateless refugees"... which then creates the interesting problem of where they went when the station was being decommissioned. I think that would be a universal problem rather than a Babylon 5 specific problem. In all of Outer Colonies and even the home system colonies there probably were people that flew there for work, maybe with corporate backed tickets and then work dried up or they got fired and simply didn't have the money to leave. So sending them somewhere else doesn't actually fix the issue which seems to be an economical issue with extreme boom and bust cycles on colonies which leads to mass homelessness.
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Sep 24, 2019 01:26
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kilus aof posted:I think that would be a universal problem rather than a Babylon 5 specific problem. In all of Outer Colonies and even the home system colonies there probably were people that flew there for work, maybe with corporate backed tickets and then work dried up or they got fired and simply didn't have the money to leave. I can see this easily happening on mars for example, which from what we hear about it just a big company town, but like, planet sized.
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Sep 24, 2019 01:31
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Hrmm. You guys seemed to be using Lurkers as a proper noun. There's a popular website called "the lurkers guide to Babylon 5". Starting to think that this is important. Firing up S02E01.
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Sep 24, 2019 01:41
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Really though I think it's still a very interesting question whichever way you go: those lurkers had to have gone somewhere by the end of Sleeping In Light. Let's just say they went in all sorts of different directions.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:03
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TraderStav posted:Hrmm. You guys seemed to be using Lurkers as a proper noun. There's a popular website called "the lurkers guide to Babylon 5". Starting to think that this is important. FWIW as a first-time viewer last year my experience with that website was split between finding it very useful and insightful and being irked by it trying to be too clever with leading rhetorical questions that contained more spoilers than intended.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:06
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TraderStav posted:Hrmm. You guys seemed to be using Lurkers as a proper noun. There's a popular website called "the lurkers guide to Babylon 5". Starting to think that this is important. It's a nod to the website.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:15
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Half way though s02 opener and wow is this a real change of pace in a positive direction. All of season 1 was worth it to launch from this point on here. E: Callain seems like he would be a goon
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Sep 24, 2019 02:20
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wizzardstaff posted:FWIW as a first-time viewer last year my experience with that website was split between finding it very useful and insightful and being irked by it trying to be too clever with leading rhetorical questions that contained more spoilers than intended. The episode synopses are also super detailed but yeah, avoid that site if you’re spoiler sensitive.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:28
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Yeah, the Lurker's Guide isn't something I'd show to a newbie. It's a nice compilation of episode-per-episode JMS usenet posts to read along with a rewatch.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:35
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TraderStav posted:Half way though s02 opener and wow is this a real change of pace in a positive direction. All of season 1 was worth it to launch from this point on here. The openers and how they evolve over time makes b5 openers some of the best ones for television.
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Sep 24, 2019 02:36
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