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McCloud posted:Londo s5 spoiler and beyond Well that’s heartening, I never read any of the books because mid-90s licensed genre fiction was almost 100% piss trash written by poo poo idiots. So I guess in the last episode Vir was just getting blasted as a tribute to his Animal House days! 
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Jun 5, 2020 21:16
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TraderStav posted:All these thoughtful and insightful posts are making me want to do a rewatch again damnit! Problem is I’m too occupied with my first watch through of a few other really good shows. How to balance this? Alternate episodes? I do something like that, mixing files I've copied off borrowed DVDs with  of other shows/movies/etc. as I'm clearing my storage drive. Watch The Gathering when you decide to make a change to what you're watching, then just watch an episode of Babylon 5 in between each episode of whatever else you've got going on.McCloud posted:Londo s5 spoiler and beyond I really ought to read the books once I'm done with my current rewatch. That sounds cool.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:17
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Midjack posted:Well that’s heartening, I never read any of the books because mid-90s licensed genre fiction was almost 100% piss trash written by poo poo idiots. So I guess in the lead episode Vir was just getting blasted as a tribute to his Animal House days! I haven't read them yet but the B5 books are supposed to be mostly good. The Centauri, Technomage, and Psi Corps ones particularly. I think they're all JMS approved and considered canon if that is a thing you care about.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:20
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Vavrek posted:
If you don't already own them, that could prove expensive. The last volumes of the three trilogies go for mad bank these days.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:20
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I think one of the compelling parts about Londo's fall is that we do see the Centauri empire really suffering from its decay. First episode, the Narn invade and almost conquer a world. In one episode, the Centauri dropping a blockade around one world let loose an unspeakable horror onto the station. The Centauri are stuck paying off bandit groups. It's not good. And of course, he did try to turn away from the path he walked a number of times. He cut ties with Mr. Morden. He poisoned Refa to get HIM to cut ties with Mr. Morden and stop the Centauri war from spreading. I would've liked for him to try harder to recant and make reparations for the war, but he was too busy dealing with what came next.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:29
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The_Doctor posted:S1ep10 - Beliebers Man I really hope this poster remembers they said this and comes back to it later. Say at around the start of s3
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Jun 5, 2020 21:30
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Midjack posted:Well that’s heartening, I never read any of the books because mid-90s licensed genre fiction was almost 100% piss trash written by poo poo idiots. So I guess in the last episode Vir was just getting blasted as a tribute to his Animal House days! Kinda, Vir loses a lot of his innocence in the between years. he drinks more, makes shady and immoral decisions for the greater good, even merks a few people. In the end, he was more similar to Londo than either would have liked, or preferred. I don't think the trilogy was that good tbh, but it was nice getting closure on that what exactly went down.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:37
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McCloud posted:Londo s5 spoiler and beyond Thank you. You just brought peace to this citizen. Oh god I love Londo.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:06
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sebmojo posted:I think you get better analysis when people aren't treading on eggshells though, like that magisterial breakdown of londo a few posts up. No harm in using spoiler blocks though. Well, we could do like the Dr Who thread and declare this one the spoiler zone.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:11
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Anyone else really excited to see which of the blind watchers mentions the anus in the Dark Star sign?
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Jun 5, 2020 23:27
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I can't wait for them to spot goatse
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Jun 5, 2020 23:29
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SubNat posted:And some plot threads really seem to simmer for a long time, it does make me wonder how it was to watch this in realtime, where it would have been months between Garibaldy's plot thread in S4 getting started, then put on the backburner, then started to get brought back into focus. It was exquisite torture. The wait for the next season has never since been as long as it was for Babylon 5. But I think the worst/best was the gap before the last 4 episodes of Season 2. Those were very CGI (and plot) heavy, so they neededa couple of months. And then the wait was over and people's minds were blown. Usenet exploded every week for a month. It was amazing.
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Jun 5, 2020 23:56
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We got 1-3 on reruns for quite a bit but no 4 for a while, I think, so that was really intense when it finally came over. Then I think there was a wait for 5, and we were... disappointed.
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Jun 5, 2020 23:58
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5 has some legitimately strong bits but the Byron thread was so botched it spread its long silky miasma over the whole season.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:00
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:Not quite, he had a file of index cards with episode breakdowns, but had to leave a lot of room for the expected unexpected production changes. For example, each character had an "out" in case the actor left, etc., like Talia being a deep-cover PsiCorps plant. And of course you always improvise some and take cues as the actors develop their characters. JMS wrote a eulogy for Jerry Doyle and included this gem: So apparently this isn't true at all? Most of my understanding of all the behind the scenes stuff has come from what I've read about in SA Babylon 5 threads.
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Jun 6, 2020 10:07
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mllaneza posted:It was exquisite torture. The wait for the next season has never since been as long as it was for Babylon 5. But I think the worst/best was the gap before the last 4 episodes of Season 2. Those were very CGI (and plot) heavy, so they neededa couple of months. And then the wait was over and people's minds were blown. Usenet exploded every week for a month. It was amazing. I didn't even have the internet when the first six episodes of S4 were leaked across to the UK on a set of grotty VHS tapes. We got them in pairs every fortnight for a month and watched them on a projector TV in a pub. Blurry as gently caress even allowing for American TV quality, but people were still OMGing all over the place.
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Jun 6, 2020 10:15
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I'm interested in the ds9/b5 comparisons bc my star trek nerdbud was seeing comparisons all over the place? I mean of course it diverges quickly, they're different stories, but the parallels seem inevitable?
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Jun 6, 2020 10:17
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pentyne posted:So apparently this isn't true at all? Most of my understanding of all the behind the scenes stuff has come from what I've read about in SA Babylon 5 threads. I'm going to have to dig around for the old posts. But basically there was a seven page original outline floating around that contained the original plot if Sinclair had remained on the show. The "production issues" I mentioned in that other thread was obviously Sinclair having to leave because of the actor's mental illness, as well as Talia Winters having to be written off because of inter-actor bullshit. So here is what I remember: -Sinclair is not Valen. The thing discovered by the Grey Council is that he is destined to "save" the Minbari by fusing their souls with humanity. This will be done by his son which he has with Delenn (who transforms as seen in the show). -BABLYON 4 IS SENT TO THE FUTURE NOT THE PAST This is one of the big ones I remember and actually is what the season 1 episode shows, but was retconned by the later season follow-up episodes. -Babylon 4 is sent to the future to help fight the Minbari Warrior caste, the central antagonists of the later seasons who ultimately destroy Babylon 5 in the last season of the show. -No order/chaos stuff. The Vorlons are just an ancient race that beat the Shadows and have been manipulating other races for 1,000 years. But they are very old and in decline, allowing the Shadows to return and wreak havoc. The Shadows manage to attack some 100 mile long Vorlon ship that contains their remaining population and basically finishes them off in a late season of the show. -No Kosh/captain bromance. -No Earth Civil War -No "first ones". The random ship that shows up in season 1 is just supposed to show that there are things out there that no one understands. The Vorlons and Shadows are never implied to be primordial races, just two old ones that fought a millennia ago. -Talia was a central character in ending the PsyCorp. The show also was supposed to end on a cliff-hanger with Babylon 5 being destroyed, and be followed up by another show, "Babylon Prime", which would be the adventures of Delenn and Sinclair on Babylon 4. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 10:20
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Speaking of, is it true that JMS was planning for S4 was supposed to be all Shadow War, and S5 was supposed to be Earth Civil War? Then when PTEN ceased to be and it was "show's over wrap it up" he put everything into season 4 and then when TNT showed up to rescue the show he put together the 5th season from his plans for other shows/tv movie etc.
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Jun 6, 2020 10:39
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That's certainly what I've always heard; s4 was meant to end on intersections on real time which would have been one motherfucker of a cliffhanger
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Jun 6, 2020 10:44
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pentyne posted:Speaking of, is it true that JMS was planning for S4 was supposed to be all Shadow War, and S5 was supposed to be Earth Civil War? Then when PTEN ceased to be and it was "show's over wrap it up" he put everything into season 4 and then when TNT showed up to rescue the show he put together the 5th season from his plans for other shows/tv movie etc. I always heard that the Shadow war was supposed to be wrapped up in early S4, as JMS felt that it would only be padded out by more battles and didn't feel that was the point. As sebmojo says, the line seems to be that S4 would end with Intersections, with the Earth war wrapped up early/mid S5. For me, the question is what would the original S5 have gone with? I would assume still the Centauri arc, and just dropping the Byron stuff?
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Jun 6, 2020 10:48
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pentyne posted:So apparently this isn't true at all? Most of my understanding of all the behind the scenes stuff has come from what I've read about in SA Babylon 5 threads. It's more what you said about JMS having written the series in advance. He did write out a treatment, which was then thrown in the bin when O'Hare left the show. The Babylon 5 that is adored and acclaimed isn't really anything like the show JMS pitched. Anonymous Zebra has outlined the main points. Up until the end of Season 1, Babylon 5 was going on with the 'original outline.' There's actually a lot in the first season that doesn't quite mesh with the later seasons (typically anything to do with the Minbari or Valen) but was forced into place. The Babylon 4 stuff is especially clumsy. JMS has maintained that Babylon 5 was written as-is and completed as he always intended. It's obviously a lie, but I think that's the kind of thing a showrunner needs to do when B5's position was as precarious as it always was. What gives people confidence? "Sinclair is gone and I'm rewriting the whole show" or "Sinclair's departure was always intended, after a fashion." pentyne posted:Speaking of, is it true that JMS was planning for S4 was supposed to be all Shadow War, and S5 was supposed to be Earth Civil War? Then when PTEN ceased to be and it was "show's over wrap it up" he put everything into season 4 and then when TNT showed up to rescue the show he put together the 5th season from his plans for other shows/tv movie etc. Yes. And JMS claims that all of his Season 5 notes were destroyed in an accident which is partially why it's a bit of a mess. sebmojo posted:I'm interested in the ds9/b5 comparisons bc my star trek nerdbud was seeing comparisons all over the place? It seems pretty clear that Paramount read the Babylon 5 bible or whatever when JMS pitched and someone high up nudged the creatives of DS9 here and there ("Wouldn't it be cool if there was..." sorta thing.) There's way too many similarities to be a coincidence. However, it gets very complex and complicated very quickly because DS9 aired before B5 and B5 became a very different show when O'Hare left. So, yes, a lot of DS9 borrows from the original B5 outline. However, the later seasons seem to have a bit of tit-for-tat between the two studios. DS9 and B5 both got an advanced hero ship in their third season first episode... But DS9's third season aired a year before Babylon 5's did. I think I've done a post about the DS9/B5 comparisons in this thread or another one before, and at this point I think Paramount was absolutely 'inspired' by JMS' outline, but there's so much weirdness that it seems like they were borrowing from each other. And I'd say given that neither one of them has sued the other, I'd say both studios knew what they were doing. Section 31... Bureau 13... There're a lot of comparisons and similarities, though.
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Jun 6, 2020 12:24
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Anonymouse Mook posted:For me, the question is what would the original S5 have gone with? I would assume still the Centauri arc, and just dropping the Byron stuff? The Byron stuff takes up very little time. What would have been lost would have been the obvious filler episodes like "two young rangers come to Babylon 5 to learn the importance of beating people up", and, sadly, the episode from Bester's pov
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Jun 6, 2020 12:25
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pentyne posted:So apparently this isn't true at all? Most of my understanding of all the behind the scenes stuff has come from what I've read about in SA Babylon 5 threads. It is true. JMS talks about it quite a bit in the script books The TP role was always supposed to be Lyta. Then Pat Tallmans agent was a douche and they brought in Talia. Talia was supposed to take Lytas role with Ironhearts gift being the basis. That’s why that thread never went anywhere. However IIRC Talia was always supposed to be the mole. The odd scene with Abbut was basically Kosh ‘making a backup’ of her real personality so she could be saved in the end. Which would imply Kosh knew about her situation. Every character had an “escape clause” though. Which is why the show reacts better than most when major characters leave like Sinclair, Ivanova etc.
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Jun 6, 2020 12:33
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Doctor Zero posted:It is true. JMS talks about it quite a bit in the script books Laurel Takashima was the mole.Then she left, and it went to Talia. Laurel was going to be the person who shot Garibaldi at the end of Season 1.
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Jun 6, 2020 12:46
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Laurel Takashima was the mole.Then she left, and it went to Talia. Laurel was going to be the person who shot Garibaldi at the end of Season 1. Well I guess it depends on at what point in the series development you want to look at. Regardless, he did have plans for each actor's exit. What's not true from the Younger Races thread was that is was a detailed treatment. wrt S4 and S5, The War was always supposed to end late S4, just later than it did. Sebmojo is right S4 was supposed to end on Intersections in Time which would have been a loving masterstroke.
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Jun 6, 2020 13:03
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Doctor Zero posted:Well I guess it depends on at what point in the series development you want to look at. Regardless, he did have plans for each actor's exit. Which was the main justification for the ambassador's assistants
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Jun 6, 2020 13:08
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Doctor Zero posted:Well I guess it depends on at what point in the series development you want to look at. Regardless, he did have plans for each actor's exit. What's not true from the Younger Races thread was that is was a detailed treatment. Yes, still pretty impressive work from JMS part. Angry Lobster fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 14:00
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It's not entirely fair to say the original treatment was binned - despite the very large deviations, parts of it exist right to the very end of the series and many things are still based on it. It's just that JMS definitely operated on the Obi-wan Kenobi theory of "what I said was true, from a certain point of view" as to what that actually meant over the years. As the most obvious example, Sheridan is a combination of elements from the original treatment's Sinclair (eg, the shortening of his lifespan from the events at Z'hadum came from Sinclair's lifespan being greatly reduced by bringing Babylon 4 into the present, Anna Sheridan was a replacement for Catherine Sakai and so on) and his son David (rapid aged into adulthood by the trip on B4) who would have become a major character that would have been the equivalent of Entil'Zha before becoming the founding president of the Interstellar Alliance at the end of the Shadow war - so it's all stuff that was meant to happen in his plan, just not explicitly as some pre-planned Alternate-Sinclair. It's less he had perfect plans for everything and more than he had a pretty solid outline and did a good job of creatively hammering a bunch of square pegs into round holes when things went sideways on him to get it to the destination he always had in mind from the beginning.
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Jun 6, 2020 14:25
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Honestly, "having the entire thing planned out" is too limiting anyway. It's good to have a plan to fall back on, but you should always be open to future-you having better ideas.
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Jun 6, 2020 14:38
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Doctor Zero posted:It is true. JMS talks about it quite a bit in the script books The part about Pat Tallman’s agent is absolutely false. Both JMS and Tallman are consistent in their account of what actually happened between the pilot and S1: one of the WB suits had hit on/sexually harassed Tallman, she rejected his advances, and he was either the guy in charge of contract negotiations or buddies with the guy who was. (While pretty candid in their accounts, neither are willing to name the guy.) Tallman was offered (through her agent) SAG scale (minimum wage for actors, about $1200 per episode according to Tallman). She had 24 hours to respond to the offer, and they wouldn’t move on the price. Then JMS was told Tallman had asked for double the salary she received for the pilot, which would amount to $10,000 an episode. When she called him after rejecting the offer and corrected the story, he looked for an opportunity to bring her character back and eventually got her back on the show. I should add that the Harvey Weinstein-alike in this account was, according to Tallman, an old college friend she’d called when she first arrived in LA and who had been very helpful to her career until she declined having an affair with him on the grounds that he was married. So this was personal in a way that some of these stories aren’t.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:17
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The show as aired diverges radically from The Plan, but just the fact that JMS had been thinking about the show for 10+ years gave him the tools needed to make everything look smooth even when it wasn't. When I write something I always have an ending in mind, and 100% of the time that is not the ending I write because by the halfway point everything is different from the plan. But the exercise of planning still has huge benefits.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:52
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Narsham posted:The part about Pat Tallman’s agent is absolutely false. Both JMS and Tallman are consistent in their account of what actually happened between the pilot and S1: one of the WB suits had hit on/sexually harassed Tallman, she rejected his advances, and he was either the guy in charge of contract negotiations or buddies with the guy who was. (While pretty candid in their accounts, neither are willing to name the guy.) Tallman was offered (through her agent) SAG scale (minimum wage for actors, about $1200 per episode according to Tallman). She had 24 hours to respond to the offer, and they wouldn’t move on the price. Ah okay. JMS’ account in the script book is different but maybe he didn’t know the whole story then. Or I could be misremembering. Where did you see that? (Not challenging you I’m just interested in reading about it).
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Jun 6, 2020 17:20
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Worth noting that the TV landscape that B5 aired during was one where overarching narratives across a series was fairly rare and usually pretty barebones when it happened. Having a plan at all for where the show was going to go was pretty rare, and it probably would've been the savvy thing to do to be flexible on it. And even these days, many of the ongoing storytelling shows don't really have that much of a long-term plan and just come up with poo poo on the fly. I think some of the stuff in the original treatment might've been better; I personally never liked the chaos/order stuff about the shadows and vorlons philosophically guiding the younger races, but the Earth civil war was pretty cool, and it would've been a bit too weird for me if Sinclair and Delenn had a kid and he got supernaturally aged to become part of the cast.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:12
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The thing I'm arguing about isn't the idea that JMS had a good plan floating in his head, it's the absurd "exit strategy" nonsense people keep posting. No, he did not have plans for ways to write characters out. After "The Gathering" (which was kind of a disaster on its own), he wrote up plot arcs for several key characters that were to appear in the series. These were Sinclair, Delenn, Londo, G'kar, Talia, and Garabaldi. Losing Sinclair was nearly a death blow, but he was able to rejigger things and made a new character in Sheridan who could do lots of the Sinclair plot points. However, this left hanging threads from Season 1 and thus he rear end-pulled the Valen stuff. If he had lost Delenn it would have probably killed the plot entirely. Talia having a secret hidden identity was not an exit strategy. As mentioned above, it was always part of her plot, and it was going to be reversed by Kosh. When she left the show they just had it happen earlier and replaced her with Lyta. Ironically, the Londo/G'kar plot is almost unchanged from the original treatment, which is not surprising because those two actors stuck around.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:11
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Honestly, "having the entire thing planned out" is too limiting anyway. It's good to have a plan to fall back on, but you should always be open to future-you having better ideas. Honestly, I think the best way to look at it as a very well-designed somewhat railroady campaign module run by a highly reactive game master. The analogy breaks down where say, actors didn't really have meaningful character choices, but episodic writers did, and actors can and did just quit.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:25
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Anonymous Zebra posted:The thing I'm arguing about isn't the idea that JMS had a good plan floating in his head, it's the absurd "exit strategy" nonsense people keep posting. No, he did not have plans for ways to write characters out. I don't know why you keep saying he didn't. Please cite your sources. He talks about his exit strategy for characters quite a bit in the script books, including what would have happened to people who didn't leave. I'm fairly certain he talked about it on usenet as well.
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Jun 6, 2020 22:44
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjGAHoE8Es Re-render from season 3. CatHorse fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 22:51
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Is there a better payoff in all of sci-fi than the "No Hiding Place" scene in season 4?
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Jun 6, 2020 23:16
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Is there a better payoff in all of sci-fi than the "No Hiding Place" scene in season 4? Yes - Vir getting his wish in S4.
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Jun 6, 2020 23:27
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