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E17, powerful delivery: The telepath prob... *Gulp* the telepath problem will finally be over E: you can see he just realized how wrong this is TraderStav fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 20:49
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| # ? May 16, 2024 18:53 |
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Welp, got my satisfactory tying up of The Garibaldi Concern!
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Nov 3, 2019 20:58
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Goddamned that's heartbreaking. JMS pulled it off.
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Nov 3, 2019 21:06
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TraderStav posted:Goddamned that's heartbreaking. JMS pulled it off. New thread title?
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Nov 3, 2019 21:08
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TraderStav posted:Welp, got my satisfactory tying up of The Garibaldi Concern! my friend i'm watching these with loves Gary with a deep abiding passion so these next few eps are gonna be a whole thing for her
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Nov 3, 2019 21:55
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TraderStav posted:Goddamned that's heartbreaking. JMS pulled it off. It's a great arc. I absolutely hate watching it because I love Garibaldi, but as a story it's perfect.
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Nov 3, 2019 21:56
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Regardless of the details involved in garibaldi's turn against Sheridan, it didn't really seem that weird to me the first time I watched it. Remember he's only known him for like 2 years. And then Sheridan starts talking about attacking earth instead of going off to do their own thing that seemed like a natural enough reason to stop following him.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:20
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The deniability is what makes it brilliant.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:21
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CainFortea posted:Regardless of the details involved in garibaldi's turn against Sheridan, it didn't really seem that weird to me the first time I watched it. Remember he's only known him for like 2 years. And then Sheridan starts talking about attacking earth instead of going off to do their own thing that seemed like a natural enough reason to stop following him. It would have been much better if they never showed him being taken but start showing flashbacks of it over the past fifteen episodes.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:30
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Absurd Alhazred posted:New thread title? Seconded. Current title's been around for a while, and the thread's more consistently active now than it was then, so it's less appropriate. edit: Put it in quote marks, as an attribution. So the title reads: pre:Babylon 5: "Goddamned that's heartbreaking. JMS pulled it off."
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Nov 3, 2019 22:46
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TraderStav posted:It would have been much better if they never showed him being taken but start showing flashbacks of it over the past fifteen episodes. That's what it'll look like in Vince Gilligan's reboot.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:51
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TraderStav posted:It would have been much better if they never showed him being taken but start showing flashbacks of it over the past fifteen episodes. But if he was never shown missing G’kar would never have searched for him and taken to alpha Centauri
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Nov 4, 2019 06:29
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President Sheridan! Someone spoiled that earlier but I assumed it was of Earth, but of course the obvious path was not taken. One more episode left in the season, strangely with this one having what felt like a wrap to the series in Delenns narration. Suppose I'll have to wait to see what JMS has in store for yet again breaking convention. Excellent excellent, just excellent to this point and if that were the last episode I would say it was possibly the best and most cohesive storyline told. Bravo, bravo TraderStav fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 03:52
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Stav's next episode is Deconstruction, isn't it? Oh, man.
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Nov 6, 2019 04:14
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Polaron posted:Stav's next episode is Deconstruction, isn't it? Oh, man. It is! Can't wait!
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Nov 6, 2019 04:25
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Found myself wondering just how large the station was, how easy to get around it is, because there's a comment by JMS about how long it'd take a medical team to get to some random spot of Downbelow without cars or trains. All they've got are transport tubes (which always seem to just be elevators) and the core shuttle. This interview with Ron Thornton explains that the "five miles long" line only refers to the habitable centrifuge area, not the entire station, and that the centrifuge is supposed to have a diameter of about a mile. This gives a basic internal area of 15.7 square miles, and a maximum point-to-point walk of a little under eight miles (walk a half-circle around, and the entire length down). For a quarter million people, the population density is 15.9 thousand per square mile, which is less than Hong Kong. And we know B5's got a lot of levels. As always, the details are plausible and consistent with the show's dialogue. ("Space is at a premium on Babylon 5," said half the cast at one time or another.) As a postscript, this interesting and irritating detail: quote:Q: John Copeland persuaded WB to shoot B5 using 35mm film to “future proof” it, with a hi-
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Nov 6, 2019 08:22
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TraderStav posted:President Sheridan! Forgot to mention how much of a loving PERV G'kar turned out to be. That giddy old man just straight up camming the happy new couple. Good Lord
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Nov 6, 2019 12:58
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TraderStav posted:Forgot to mention how much of a loving PERV G'kar turned out to be. That giddy old man just straight up camming the happy new couple. Good Lord Did you skip the early episodes? G'Kar has had three hookers at a time in his quarters and once propositioned Lyta Alexander. His perviness is hardly a secret.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:20
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Jedit posted:Did you skip the early episodes? G'Kar has had three hookers at a time in his quarters and once propositioned Lyta Alexander. His perviness is hardly a secret. He's an ambassador, and is expected to sample new cultures in a place like Babylon 5. How he chooses to do so is his own business  .
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Nov 6, 2019 13:24
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Jedit posted:Did you skip the early episodes? G'Kar has had three hookers at a time in his quarters and once propositioned Lyta Alexander. His perviness is hardly a secret. I suppose I draw a strong distinction between those things. This last one just felt like such a huge violation.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:24
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TraderStav posted:I suppose I draw a strong distinction between those things. This last one just felt like such a huge violation. Lack of consent. Lyta was given the choice to say no, those three women were either hired or seduced.
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Nov 6, 2019 13:47
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Are JMS's comics any good? His post b5 work in tv has been very mixed. Sense8 was fun but felt very much like a wachowski vehicle, and the less said about legends of the rangers, etc the better. Did he just have one story in him?
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Nov 6, 2019 14:02
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Shbobdb posted:Are JMS's comics any good? His post b5 work in tv has been very mixed. Sense8 was fun but felt very much like a wachowski vehicle, and the less said about legends of the rangers, etc the better. Did he just have one story in him? The original 24.5 issues of Rising Stars are variable but mainly decent. I really liked Midnight Nation in parts. He's done good house work for Marvel.
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Nov 6, 2019 14:17
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His Spiderman run is highly regarded
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Nov 6, 2019 14:38
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What happened in them that was interesting?
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Nov 6, 2019 14:38
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Shbobdb posted:What happened in them that was interesting? "Straczynski’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN nails just about every aspect of what makes a good Spider-Man story. The storytelling was creative, featuring a great deal of ingenuity and flair; every character was fleshed out, each one receiving individual and powerful story arcs, and Straczynski’s run shook up just about every aspect of Spider-Man’s world. Calling it insanely groundbreaking would be a tragic understatement." From: https://comicsverse.com/straczynski-amazing-spider-man/
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Nov 6, 2019 14:43
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Vavrek posted:Found myself wondering just how large the station was, how easy to get around it is, because there's a comment by JMS about how long it'd take a medical team to get to some random spot of Downbelow without cars or trains. All they've got are transport tubes (which always seem to just be elevators) and the core shuttle. There's also a monorail running the length of the station near the middle, as we see in the Season 2 finale.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's also a monorail running the length of the station near the middle, as we see in the Season 2 finale. I think that's the core shuttle.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:43
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Neddy Seagoon posted:I think that's the core shuttle. 
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Nov 6, 2019 15:44
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MrL_JaKiri posted:His Spiderman run is highly regarded Well. Most of it was.
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Nov 6, 2019 21:30
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OK, checking in about two thirds to three quarters or so of the way through season 2! Spoilering because why not? It's a huge improvement, like everyone said. I'm so glad they replaced Sinclair with Sheridan! He was absolutely one of the worst parts of Season 1 and sucked the energy out of nearly any scene he was in. Sheridan isn't amazing, but he's solid. I actually buy him as a military man -- he looks and can talk like one, and has that type of persona. The season started out strong, though there were still problems. I did start to lose faith during some of the weaker episodes. Delenn's transformation into a half-human hybrid hasn't really make that much sense (along with that gross date she went on with Sheridan), and her doing so in defiance of the grey council, as it turned out, needs more explanation. "A Distant Star" reminded me of a Season 1 episode -- the Cortez's captain had a really weak performance, the whole episode was pretty muddled and poorly written. "The Long Dark" was just bad. Dr. Franklin was a disgusting creep, hitting on a vulnerable, traumatized woman with nowhere else to go -- while she was his patient. Just gross. I liked that Garibaldi called him out on it. The Talia episodes centering on her relationship with the Psi-Corps were meh, though it's always nice to see Walter Koenig. All the psi-corps renegades combining their powers was also cringey. I'm not totally sold on Talia -- she's always getting tossed around, held hostage, or traumatized. I suppose Bureau 13 is something to worry about going forward, but so far it isn't particularly interesting to me, and that Martian cyborg was a little too close to Robocop. The season really picked up with "The Coming of the Shadows," which I've seen mentioned a number of times here and elsewhere. Watching the dynamic between Londo and G'Kar there was excellent -- and goddamn did Londo take this whole thing too far. When he's just this goofy drunk aristocrat, you don't really think he'd just say "gently caress it" to getting tens of thousands of innocent people killed (or more) to further a right-wing coup, but there you have it. Peter Jurasik does a great job conveying Londo's loneliness, his ambivalence about the choice's he's made, and his conflicting emotions in general. GROPOS was a pretty good human-focused episode, primarily because of the (admittedly cliched) scenes with the soldiers, though even the scenes with Franklin and his father were alright. I've got to say that I'm otherwise getting pretty sick of Stephen Franklin -- he's involved in every conspiracy, not only the "Underground Railroad," doesn't listen to anyone, meddles in everything that isn't his business, and is just this hugely smug pain in the rear end all the time. At least he's consistently obnoxious. I appreciated the really ominous ending to the GROPOS episode. The rest of the humans... still meh. Ivanova and Garibaldi are fine, whatever. They just aren't particularly interesting. Londo and G'Kar are excellent, and they're the core of the series as far as I'm concerned. Andreas Katsulas' performances have really brought immense value to the show. I would even describe them as brilliant. I appreciated G'Kar's haunted behavior early in the season, but when he announced the Narn declaration of war, he stepped it up. I think the best performance from anyone in the show so far was in "Acts of Sacrifice," when G'Kar was desperately trying to convince the humans and Minbari to intervene on their side of the war. His response when the Minbari and humans agreed to some mealy-mouthed, and secret humanitarian aid was just perfect. And this after we see the heroic self-sacrifice of a Narn battleship to defend a fleeing transport vessel from Centauri attack (in a genuinely exciting space scene), and watch G'Kar defeat a fellow Narn in hand-to-hand combat to avoid a diplomatic incident. All in an episode featuring Ivanova inventing a goofy sex dance for a random alien ambassador. Then, in "And Now For a Word" we find out some details of just how horrific the Centauri occupation actually was -- and that he himself experienced it first hand, not only including the brutal execution of G'Kar's own father for spilling some soup -- holy poo poo. I appreciate the different attitudes Londo and G'Kar have toward their own people. G'Kar feels a real solidarity with all of the Narn -- he fights for them as whole, he cares about them, it looks like it hurts him physically when Narn die. Londo, on the other hand, doesn't really give a poo poo about most Centauri. He has friends who he generally looks out for (though even this has limits, as we saw in Knives), he cares about his family, and some members of the aristocratic class. Londo doesn't appear disturbed when Centauri ships are destroyed -- and when they catch the Narn who murdered a Centauri dude on Babylon 5, Londo was like "welp, he has no family. Who cares?" Londo cares about the Centauri Republic/empire as an idea, something to take pride in which embodies greatness and power, rather than the actual individual people who make it up. Delthalaz fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 21:39
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Polaron posted:Well. And then he used a wildly biased graph to slam his successors on Spider-Man, which prompted this amazing burn from Mark Waid: quote:Dick move, Joe. Flat out, a dick move, and you know it. Either your point was to show people how awesome you were, or to show people how things have deteriorated since your absence. There’s no other way to interpret your post. None. Are you really that hard up for approbation and fan love that you can’t rise above that sort of poo poo? I understand Wacker’s frustration. Maybe he overreacted a bit, in the way good friends DO react when they perceive their friends and employees being attacked by a bitter man with a bottomless ego, but you made the first move, and it was a dick move. And if anyone doubted you were doing it for anything other than informational purposes, adding “Just sayin'” was the snarktacular icing on the cake. No one says “Just sayin'” unless they’re doing exactly the opposite of “Just sayin’ (It's a reference to Straczynski's incredibly terrible Superman arc in which Superman walks across America, and the whole thing was abruptly dropped.)
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Nov 6, 2019 21:42
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Delthalaz posted:OK, checking in about two thirds to three quarters or so of the way through season 2! Spoilering because why not? There is still quite a bit about this that you have yet to see and unpack. Actually that goes for a lot of your post, but this very much more than most.
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Nov 6, 2019 21:44
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Delthalaz posted:and goddamn did Londo take this whole thing too far. Londo.txt
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Nov 6, 2019 21:54
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CainFortea posted:There is still quite a bit about this that you have yet to see and unpack. Actually that goes for a lot of your post, but this very much more than most. Yeah, I know there is. But of the three major aliens (four I guess including the Vorlon), I find them the least interesting. Yeah, they have these castes where the warriors are angry all the time and the priests are always drinking tea and talking about souls, but.... Hey, I like Lennier. He's good people.
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Nov 6, 2019 22:01
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The Minbari are politically isolationist, which really kills their appeal. Really locks them out of most of the interesting political interplay. Their involvement in Babylon 5 is to them a huge outreach. I don't think Franklin ever really shines throughout the series. At his best, he can be a hub for drama, but I don't think the show ever made me care for him personally. Everything about Londo and G'kar is great, especially all the parallels. Londo gets everything he ever wanted, but it doesn't do him any good. G'kar's old ambitions directly work against him. I would like the series to talk more about what kind of war machine the Narn empire was at its height, but it does make clear that the Narns were directly trying to antagonize the Centauri before the thing. In that episode in particular, Londo saying that the victim had no family and being dismissive about the whole thing was him actually doing the command staff of B5 a favor. He's desperate for somebody to come and be his friend now that things are starting to go his way, so he's not going to play up his pomposity when trying to win back friends. It doesn't really work though. Which again, is neatly paralleled by G'kar cashing in everything he could to reach out to Earth and the Minbari, and then being totally dissatisfied by what little Delenn and Sheridan could offer after they cashed in everything they had to help him. I don't think we ever find out what happened with any Narn refugees though. Everybody makes a big deal about assisting evacuations, but we never see where they've evacuated to. MrL_JaKiri posted:"Straczynski’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN nails just about every aspect of what makes a good Spider-Man story. The storytelling was creative, featuring a great deal of ingenuity and flair; every character was fleshed out, each one receiving individual and powerful story arcs, and Straczynski’s run shook up just about every aspect of Spider-Man’s world. Calling it insanely groundbreaking would be a tragic understatement." Dang, I think this was the Spiderman run that was happening when I was in high school. One of my teachers had a bunch of spiderman comics in his classroom that I read. I guess the totem stuff wasn't that bad back then, but later it got built up into Morlun and his wacky extradimensional family which I really didn't like when it was the core of the whole spiderverse crossover event (my aversion to which kept me from seeing Into the Spiderverse for a very long time despite it being a great movie). Oh, and it even intersected with Peter David's run on Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman, and Spiderman has way too many concurrent books.
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Nov 6, 2019 22:25
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CainFortea posted:There is still quite a bit about this that you have yet to see and unpack. Actually that goes for a lot of your post, but this very much more than most. Good write up: I think you're going to enjoy the rest of the show a lot.
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Nov 6, 2019 22:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't think we ever find out what happened with any Narn refugees though. Everybody makes a big deal about assisting evacuations, but we never see where they've evacuated to. They're all hanging out at Abrahamo Lincolni's log cabin
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Nov 6, 2019 23:06
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Just finished Deconstruction. What the gently caress? I mean, I get it, but JMS was on some serious poo poo to bake this one up. Was the final dedication at the end throwing shade on critics? By the way, Sol is expected to go nova in 5 billion years, not 1 million, right? I did enjoy the cycle of life (BSG copied it!) and that they humans basically became the Vorlons This show is such a trip
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Nov 7, 2019 03:17
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TraderStav posted:By the way, Sol is expected to go nova in 5 billion years, not 1 million, right? I did enjoy the cycle of life (BSG copied it!) and that they humans basically became the Vorlons The sun is too small to explode. It will gradually expand into a red giant, shuffle off most of its atmosphere, and become a white dwarf which just kinda sits there for trillions of years. The sun was intentionally blown up in B5 but I don't think anything ever gets into that future in detail.
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Nov 7, 2019 03:22
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