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Doctor Zero
Sep 21, 2002

Would you like a jelly baby?
It's been in my pocket through 4 regenerations,
but it's still good.

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

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VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
Since Fiction is divorced form the world it is created in, talking politics in fiction is dumb.

An Elf is an Elf is an Elf. Doesn't matter if it is in the Prose Edda, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Tolkein or Richard K Morgan. Any attempt to contextualize Elfs within their story and how that story came to be is super loving dumb.

I'm not sure how many times I've seen B5. Only once streaming but when it was on air I'd watch it regularly. From S3 on, I'd try to watch the whole thing from the start again while waiting for the new season when it was in syndication. Obviously there were plenty of gaps in the rewatches because I'm not going to prioritize watching a show I've been if there is something more compelling to do. This is a good and intelligent discussion with actual meaning. Talking about how many times I've watched a show instead of talking about the show is almost as important as discussing train schedules.

CainFortea
Oct 15, 2004


The fellowship of the ring books would have been way different if WH40K elves were in it instead of legolas.

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
Based on extensive research into Elf genitalia, I'm not sure that Slaanesh could have been born from Tolkein elves.

Edit: Given how B5 is LoTRs with the serial numbers filed off, do you think Delenn sounded Sheridan? Is that was the "Wahoo" was for? Asking for a friend but wouldn't that be funny?

Sedgr
Sep 16, 2007

Neat!

It isn't that hard to see where it comes from. The whole command staff are essentially idealized republican conservatives from 30 years ago. Sinclair/Sheridan/Delenn are quite literally the Holy Trinity, and Sinclair is Minbari Space Jesus.

Sheridan, Garibaldi, Ivanova, all no-nonsense, by the book military with gobs of common sense wisdom. They break the rules only when forced to do so by outside parties, and when they do, they are basically always right to do it because their cause is just. The ends DO justify the means, and they were sent by GodDestiny to fulfill prophecy and bring about peace and enlightenment through warfare.

The League of Non-Aligned Worlds functions as the UN and Sheridan et al constantly go around them, manipulate them, or lie to them to force them into making the 'correct' decision. They manipulate the media to their advantage where they can, but are simultaneously hostile to it when its used against them.

I mean its pretty telling in a political sense that even from the outset the Bab 5 command staff are also Earths representatives on the council. That really shouldn't be a thing. Why would Earth not have a dedicated Political Ambassador to handle that end of things? Even when we do get one, they are a tool of the oppressive Earthdome traitors and are portrayed as out and out evil.

The shows pretty prescient about how fascism can take hold in this sort of environment. Zack is actually a great portrayal of the type of good natured guy that slowly gets sucked into working for the nazi's and then eventually realizing it and siding with the good guys.

In the end its just fiction and a function of what story that they were trying to tell, but its not really that hard to dissect it and see how it parts of it would appeal to people on the 'Right'.

Reached the point where they break away from Earth in this rewatch and it really stuck out to me how super weird it is that Sheridan pretty much takes over and starts speaking for all of humanity when he can at best be said to be the leader of the humans on the station. An unelected leader at that. We cheer for him because hes a hero in the story and we know hes got the moral authority but looking at it now its pretty...yikes.

Jet Jaguar
Feb 12, 2006

Don't touch my bags if you please, Mr Customs Man.



Doctor Zero posted:

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

I have seen seasons 1 and 2 several times, we used to have watch parties in college. But that also means I've seen "Infection" more times than "Severed Dreams," which seems unfair.

Currently rewatching on streaming and I just finished season 3. Sinclair coming back is still great, I have some vague memory of the early outline of the show having Babylon 4 going back in time as a whole other show.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Doctor Zero posted:

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

I’ve done the whole thing three times, and there are a few eps I’ve watched more than that to show friends a particular thing.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Jet Jaguar posted:

I have seen seasons 1 and 2 several times, we used to have watch parties in college. But that also means I've seen "Infection" more times than "Severed Dreams," which seems unfair.

Currently rewatching on streaming and I just finished season 3. Sinclair coming back is still great, I have some vague memory of the early outline of the show having Babylon 4 going back in time as a whole other show.

I think the original plan was for Babylon 5 to be destroyed and for Babylon 4 to appear right afterward because it was warped forward in time when it disappeared, which explains why it moved forward in its appearance in season one

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Doctor Zero posted:

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

i saw it when it came out, starting with intersections in real time, then saw the whole series on !V!H!S! and then more recently watched the whole thing again with a goon buddy who was a star trek fan but had never seen B5.

Going back from s5 to s1 it's interesting how much more vivid the station stuff is - it's cheesier but much more thrilled with how weird it can be. in later seasons the station stuff gets a bit gestural = here's a corridor, here's the undercity, etc.

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
Is there a series Bible for the future projects? I heard Crusade was supposed to have a twist that would have made it good.

Also, while Legends of the Rangers was terrible and obviously stupidly recycled from B5 (which seems like a bit of a JMS staple given what he wanted to do with V and Star Trek), was there ever a direction for the HAND?

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Doctor Zero posted:

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

I watched a few season 1 episodes with my dad back when it was originally airing, got interested early in season 2 and caught nearly all of the rest up to Season 4 as they aired. We didn't have cable so I didn't get to watch the last season when it moved to TNT.

I finally did a full watch through of the series borrowed from a friend's burned DVDs while I was overseas, came home and bought the whole DVD set to watch with my wife and now we're taking a few episodes at at time to go through it all the way with the new upscaling.

So, 2 and a half plus one ongoing?

Winifred Madgers
Feb 12, 2002

Doctor Zero posted:

hey, so how many times has everyone watched the television show "Babylon 5"?? I think I've watched it at least 6 times.

I've lost count but it's got to be approaching double digits. 8 or 9.

CainFortea
Oct 15, 2004


Number_6 posted:

Sorry to bug you about this again, CainFortea, but I'm curious what browser & OS you used for the Vudu screenshot of the remastered release? I only just discovered that Vudu doesn't allow full quality HDX anymore on a PC, unless you are using Edge or Safari. Some kind of DRM bullshit. So it's possible that's the reason why your screenshot from Vudu was blurry. OTOH, it could be any number of other things. Thanks!

Oh, hey, so guess what I just learend. You have to buy them in HDX for that to even be an option. Which I did for SCIENCE.

Turns out, their whole copy write thing blanks out the screen when trying to do a screen grab. But I can tell you that the HDX version on Vudu in Edge looks a lot like the Amazon one. The buttons look about the same quality.

Seemlar
Jun 18, 2002

VinylonUnderground posted:

Is there a series Bible for the future projects? I heard Crusade was supposed to have a twist that would have made it good.

The main twist I remember is that the plague would have been cured early in the second season allowing the show to shift towards other things, the biggest being the Excalibur would be declared rogue and forced on the run after discovering that Earth Force was continuing to exploit recovered Shadow technology

Polaron
Oct 13, 2010

The Oncoming Storm

Seemlar posted:

The main twist I remember is that the plague would have been cured early in the second season allowing the show to shift towards other things, the biggest being the Excalibur would be declared rogue and forced on the run after discovering that Earth Force was continuing to exploit recovered Shadow technology

What's always struck me about that plot point is...Who cares? Why is it inherently bad to study Shadow tech? Does anyone give a poo poo that the Minbari study and adapt Vorlon technology?

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos

Polaron posted:

What's always struck me about that plot point is...Who cares? Why is it inherently bad to study Shadow tech? Does anyone give a poo poo that the Minbari study and adapt Vorlon technology?

While the bad RPG thing linked earlier has a lot of horseshit, the idea that Shadows in their native environment incubate their young in another living creature is compelling in a Campbellian way. Life eats life, sure, but we are increasingly alienated from it. What if we couldn't be? So we invented new forms of alienation where we'd have a lobotomized cow incubator in our living room to nurture our young? Couple that with an r-strategy and the Shadow philosophy starts to make a lot of sense and can be seen from their point of view as baby eating. But that's gonna be a hell of a "Fruit of a poisonous tree" scenario. Using computer technology that requires stripping sentient lifeforms of their wetware is not pretty.

VinylonUnderground fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Feb 15, 2021

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Polaron posted:

What's always struck me about that plot point is...Who cares? Why is it inherently bad to study Shadow tech? Does anyone give a poo poo that the Minbari study and adapt Vorlon technology?

The show always gave the distinct impression that Shadow tech is inherently corrupting. Like it influences you somehow towards evil. In our LotR cribbing analogy, Shadow tech is the One Ring.

Assepoester
Jul 18, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Melman v2
Yes it is important to keep in mind that B5 is just as much Lord of the Rings fantasy as it is science fiction, so ancient psychic alien supertechnology is probably going to be an inherently corrupting influence, especially in a "technology when you are not ready for it is destabilizing and dangerous" sense...

http://retrophaseshift.com/2015/03/30/what-could-have-been-babylon-5-crusade-season-2/

quote:

He also mentions some general themes of the show in that interview. “The impact of technology on society” in particular is a pretty easy one to see, even with what we saw already.

Horizon Burning
Oct 23, 2019
:discourse:

Sedgr posted:

It isn't that hard to see where it comes from. The whole command staff are essentially idealized republican conservatives from 30 years ago. Sinclair/Sheridan/Delenn are quite literally the Holy Trinity, and Sinclair is Minbari Space Jesus.

Sheridan, Garibaldi, Ivanova, all no-nonsense, by the book military with gobs of common sense wisdom. They break the rules only when forced to do so by outside parties, and when they do, they are basically always right to do it because their cause is just. The ends DO justify the means, and they were sent by GodDestiny to fulfill prophecy and bring about peace and enlightenment through warfare.

The League of Non-Aligned Worlds functions as the UN and Sheridan et al constantly go around them, manipulate them, or lie to them to force them into making the 'correct' decision. They manipulate the media to their advantage where they can, but are simultaneously hostile to it when its used against them.

I mean its pretty telling in a political sense that even from the outset the Bab 5 command staff are also Earths representatives on the council. That really shouldn't be a thing. Why would Earth not have a dedicated Political Ambassador to handle that end of things? Even when we do get one, they are a tool of the oppressive Earthdome traitors and are portrayed as out and out evil.

The shows pretty prescient about how fascism can take hold in this sort of environment. Zack is actually a great portrayal of the type of good natured guy that slowly gets sucked into working for the nazi's and then eventually realizing it and siding with the good guys.

In the end its just fiction and a function of what story that they were trying to tell, but its not really that hard to dissect it and see how it parts of it would appeal to people on the 'Right'.

Reached the point where they break away from Earth in this rewatch and it really stuck out to me how super weird it is that Sheridan pretty much takes over and starts speaking for all of humanity when he can at best be said to be the leader of the humans on the station. An unelected leader at that. We cheer for him because hes a hero in the story and we know hes got the moral authority but looking at it now its pretty...yikes.

one of the things i find disappointing about b5, but it's more because it's just not the show Straczynski was making than any failing of it, is that the show never really engages with some of the stuff sheridan does. you get a bit of lip service, sure, but it's from people like Garibaldi (literally brainwashed) and the corrupt ISN. but some of the stuff i find most remarkable are the little things, like how sheridan mentions in season 4 that no one hears about the losses his campaign endures and stuff like that.

and sheridan ending up as president of the ISA is a heck of a thing, too. dude leads a military coup against his government, then gets signed on to be head of the space UN (seemingly to help evade EA justice for his role in the civil war) by the alien powers who provided material and moral support to his coup and basically gets to dictate stuff to earth. 2261 QAnon would have a loving field day.

we like sheridan because he's the hero and B5 treats him as such but, man, i'd love a deeper look into the EA civil war and such

Angry Salami
Jul 27, 2013

Don't trust the skull.
The ISA is just an absolute mess if you think about it; Sheridan seems to be Earth's representative on the council, despite Earth having no say in his appointment, there's no sign it does anything to fix the problems of the League worlds being effectively voiceless, and the majority of the Alliance's military answers to the President's wife.

Season five kind of leans a bit towards Sheridan being totally out of his depth, but it never really acknowledges that the system he created is deeply flawed and the best thing he could do would be to stand down and play a Cincinnatus or Washington, rather than allow its problems to become institutionalized under his leadership.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Angry Salami posted:

The ISA is just an absolute mess if you think about it; Sheridan seems to be Earth's representative on the council, despite Earth having no say in his appointment, there's no sign it does anything to fix the problems of the League worlds being effectively voiceless, and the majority of the Alliance's military answers to the President's wife.

Season five kind of leans a bit towards Sheridan being totally out of his depth, but it never really acknowledges that the system he created is deeply flawed and the best thing he could do would be to stand down and play a Cincinnatus or Washington, rather than allow its problems to become institutionalized under his leadership.

We already know that it fails miserably from Deconstruction.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Sheridan coming to lead a coup against the EA government backed by a fleet of aliens is almost exactly what Clark’s EA accused him of preparing for in the ISN hatchet job interview.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Sedgr posted:

I mean its pretty telling in a political sense that even from the outset the Bab 5 command staff are also Earths representatives on the council. That really shouldn't be a thing. Why would Earth not have a dedicated Political Ambassador to handle that end of things? Even when we do get one, they are a tool of the oppressive Earthdome traitors and are portrayed as out and out evil.

Are you referring to the political officer from Voices of Authority? Because she's not there to serve as the ambassador; she's there in an advisory and oversight capacity, but Sheridan's still expected to serve as the representative of Earth.

I think the issue of an EarthForce officer also being the diplomatic representative can be partly handwaved as the Minbari initially insisting that Sinclair be the guy running the station, when ~everyone knows~ that even as cursed a place as the Babylon Project was, there were still a lot of elite officers and diplomats who would have leapt at the chance to be in charge. So maybe they insisted that as part of that structure, the CO of Babylon 5 (i.e. Jeff Sinclair) not only be in charge of administration of the space colony, but also be the legal representative of the Earth Alliance.

And we know that the Minbari issue stuck in the craw of Earth hardliners, and that Sheridan was picked with the intention that he appear to be sop to their sensibilities while also being much more than just the hard-nosed warrior that his service record seems to indicate.



Horizon Burning posted:

we like sheridan because he's the hero and B5 treats him as such but, man, i'd love a deeper look into the EA civil war and such

I think Stracyznski really undercut that approach when he decided to have EarthForce ships deliberately massacring civilian transports as the trigger point for Sheridan to go on the offensive, because between that and starving out Proxima it's just so egregiously villainous that we as the audience (or at least I) can't be bothered to give a poo poo about Lochley's rationale for not defecting. Like, sympathy for people who couldn't know that had even happened and weren't in a position to realize they were being fed a huge line of propaganda? Sure. But the "yeah sure we were burning down tens of thousands of civilians and starving many times that on the colony worlds, but nuhhhhhh soldiers are supposed to follow orders" line just rings incredibly hollow.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Midjack posted:

Sheridan coming to lead a coup against the EA government backed by a fleet of aliens is almost exactly what Clark’s EA accused him of preparing for in the ISN hatchet job interview.

I brought this up a while ago in this thread:

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Yeah, one of my watchthroughs got me thinking: the show has you rooting for a military rebellion against a democratically-elected government, and ultimately a coup d'etat lead by the same rebels. Couldn't this be a propaganda show made to justify the coup in retrospect?

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Absurd Alhazred posted:

I brought this up a while ago in this thread:

It literally is isn't it? It's funded by the Rangers.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Polaron posted:

What's always struck me about that plot point is...Who cares? Why is it inherently bad to study Shadow tech? Does anyone give a poo poo that the Minbari study and adapt Vorlon technology?

Vorlon technology doesn't use a sentient mind as a slave to run its OS, so far as we know. We get numerous examples of exactly how hosed up Shadow tech is, and it is certain that any R&D project looking at adapting it would have to require experiments on human beings who, to put it politely, are unlikely to be volunteers. In fact, we even see one in the show with Bester's girlfriend.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Absurd Alhazred posted:

I brought this up a while ago in this thread:

Democratically elected is a bit of a stretch since Clarke was elected but assassinated Santiago to take his office but otherwise yes.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Midjack posted:

Democratically elected is a bit of a stretch since Clarke was elected but assassinated Santiago to take his office but otherwise yes.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Yeah, if you believe what the show tells you.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007




Okay sure but that’s an unfalsifiable premise.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Midjack posted:

Okay sure but that’s an unfalsifiable premise.

That's what THEY want you to think! :tinfoil:

Horizon Burning
Oct 23, 2019
:discourse:

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

I think Stracyznski really undercut that approach when he decided to have EarthForce ships deliberately massacring civilian transports as the trigger point for Sheridan to go on the offensive, because between that and starving out Proxima it's just so egregiously villainous that we as the audience (or at least I) can't be bothered to give a poo poo about Lochley's rationale for not defecting. Like, sympathy for people who couldn't know that had even happened and weren't in a position to realize they were being fed a huge line of propaganda? Sure. But the "yeah sure we were burning down tens of thousands of civilians and starving many times that on the colony worlds, but nuhhhhhh soldiers are supposed to follow orders" line just rings incredibly hollow.

true, but that's only part of it. lochley was never a particularly great character and they didn't go nearly far enough in interrogating her defence. we also don't really know much at all about lochley's role in the civil war. i remember an old post in this thread that pointed out how, as far as we know, she didn't participate in any war crimes, didn't benefit from the clarke regime, and didn't fight for or against sheridan's fleet. we don't know where lochley was based or what her role was. the show really needed to explore what was going on in earthforce more than just having heroic sheridan vs war crime clarkists, especially given how president luchenko didn't side with sheridan and how a substantial number of 'liberated' earthforce warships basically 'sat out' of the civil war. what could earthforce realistically do after the civil war? court-martial everyone who didn't oppose clarke? all officers of a certain rank? etc. etc.

lots of interesting stuff to ponder there but...

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Horizon Burning posted:

true, but that's only part of it. lochley was never a particularly great character and they didn't go nearly far enough in interrogating her defence. we also don't really know much at all about lochley's role in the civil war. i remember an old post in this thread that pointed out how, as far as we know, she didn't participate in any war crimes, didn't benefit from the clarke regime, and didn't fight for or against sheridan's fleet. we don't know where lochley was based or what her role was. the show really needed to explore what was going on in earthforce more than just having heroic sheridan vs war crime clarkists, especially given how president luchenko didn't side with sheridan and how a substantial number of 'liberated' earthforce warships basically 'sat out' of the civil war. what could earthforce realistically do after the civil war? court-martial everyone who didn't oppose clarke? all officers of a certain rank? etc. etc.

lots of interesting stuff to ponder there but...

She was really underused in s5, like lyta.

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






Absurd Alhazred posted:

I brought this up a while ago in this thread:

In light of that, the hologram propaganda segment of "Deconstruction" is probably the endpoint of a campaign against the ISA/alien cooperation faction that started with simply telling the B5 story in a fairly straightforward manner and going "hey, I'm just asking questions here but...".

Horizon Burning posted:

lots of interesting stuff to ponder there but...

That's the problem with bringing in new main characters that late in a show, they either steal too much focus to explore them or not enough and they remain ciphers. The only practical solution is to trim the main cast elsewhere to make room for them, which clearly wasn't going to happen.

Angry Salami
Jul 27, 2013

Don't trust the skull.

Jedit posted:

Vorlon technology doesn't use a sentient mind as a slave to run its OS, so far as we know. We get numerous examples of exactly how hosed up Shadow tech is, and it is certain that any R&D project looking at adapting it would have to require experiments on human beings who, to put it politely, are unlikely to be volunteers. In fact, we even see one in the show with Bester's girlfriend.

On the other hand, Vorlon ships are presented as being alive in their own right, but enslaved to their owners. Did Kosh's ship choose to kill itself when he died? Either answer has troubling implications.

Milkfred E. Moore
Aug 27, 2006

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'
One of the interesting but subtle points of the EA civil conflict is that some of the ships that defect to Sheridan or claim they'll go sit out of the war during the battle at Proxima 3 are actually present on Clarke's side at the engagement in orbit of Mars. I think it's specifically the Nemesis and Heracles.

As for the rest of Earthforce, President Luchenko says that they'll put on trial anyone who directly performed war crimes in service of the Clarke regime, but that they need time to figure out who was a "willing participant" and who was only doing it out of fear of retribution and/or following orders. She also offers amnesty to anyone who defected to Sheridan's coup but, yeah, that is not exactly a great outlook. Even disregarding that there probably weren't many people in Earthforce who committed war crimes (the bombing of the Mars domes, the Proxima massacre, what else?) the fact there's such a proviso to her statement makes it seem pretty clear that, even post-Clarke, Earthforce would've had a lot of people who had fought for Clarke within it.

Milkfred E. Moore
Aug 27, 2006

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'
Also, the ISA's whole 'you must let Mars go free if over half the population vote for it' to Earth is kind of hilarious in a post-Brexit context. Like, there's no way Mars is a self-sustaining colony, right?

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

As for the rest of Earthforce, President Luchenko says that they'll put on trial anyone who directly performed war crimes in service of the Clarke regime, but that they need time to figure out who was a "willing participant" and who was only doing it out of fear of retribution and/or following orders. She also offers amnesty to anyone who defected to Sheridan's coup but, yeah, that is not exactly a great outlook. Even disregarding that there probably weren't many people in Earthforce who committed war crimes (the bombing of the Mars domes, the Proxima massacre, what else?) the fact there's such a proviso to her statement makes it seem pretty clear that, even post-Clarke, Earthforce would've had a lot of people who had fought for Clarke within it.

President Luchenko's first words to Sheridan are that half of the General Staff wants him shot, and when the twist that he's been elected at the ISA's President comes down, the first thing that happens is that some nameless General storms into the office they're holding him in looking to snatch back the Presidential Pardon covering his subordinate officers because he's basically evaded whatever retribution they had planned for him in the wake of his resignation from the military. And of course, nobody seems to have a problem that the next commander of B5 was on Clarke's side of the war, and is extremely Loud And Proud about it.

Earthforce and EarthGov clearly did absolutely NOTHING to get the Nazis out of its ranks in the wake of the Civil War. I mean poo poo, in the first conversation with Sheridan Luchenko's first priority is to drum up excuses for why nobody else did anything about Clarke as a preface for explaining why he needs to be punished for saving Earth from being entirely scoured of life by Space Hitler.

Its actually incredibly depressing when you think about it. I mean, think about the level of crimes Clarke directed, from the assassination of his predecessor to his collusion with the Shadows to the orbital bombardments and starvation tactics to the incredibly public shootout to seize ISN to deployment of a psychic gestapo to implementing Orwellian torture and brainwashing facilities to ultimately trying to basically wipe out of the bulk of the human race... and his followers were largely not purged from civilian OR military leadership, to the point that the very first thing that happened to the guy who saved the human race from his tyranny was an act of political retribution for having done it and the #1 talking point of the new government being "Lets all move on."

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Also, the ISA's whole 'you must let Mars go free if over half the population vote for it' to Earth is kind of hilarious in a post-Brexit context. Like, there's no way Mars is a self-sustaining colony, right?

Eh. I feel like there wouldn't be a Free Mars movement on the scale we see in the show if its impossible for the Colony to sustain itself. And there's a pretty consistent implication that Earth squeezes the poo poo out of its Colonies in a very oppressive manner. Marcus brings up his own home's woes to build credibility with the Martians. I think there's even some implication that Proxima is doing better than a lot of other colonies before the war because it has more autonomy because of "The Proxima Treaty."

Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Feb 15, 2021

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Angry Salami posted:

On the other hand, Vorlon ships are presented as being alive in their own right, but enslaved to their owners. Did Kosh's ship choose to kill itself when he died? Either answer has troubling implications.

Delenn describes Kosh's ship as being a part of him, and although we can't know for sure there is a strong possibility that it was actually Kosh's encounter suit that was poisoned in the pilot. So the contrast is that where the Shadows put unwilling others into their machines, the Vorlons put themselves into them.

Torrannor
Apr 27, 2013

---FAGNER---
TEAM-MATE

Sanguinia posted:

President Luchenko's first words to Sheridan are that half of the General Staff wants him shot, and when the twist that he's been elected at the ISA's President comes down, the first thing that happens is that some nameless General storms into the office they're holding him in looking to snatch back the Presidential Pardon covering his subordinate officers because he's basically evaded whatever retribution they had planned for him in the wake of his resignation from the military. And of course, nobody seems to have a problem that the next commander of B5 was on Clarke's side of the war, and is extremely Loud And Proud about it.

Earthforce and EarthGov clearly did absolutely NOTHING to get the Nazis out of its ranks in the wake of the Civil War. I mean poo poo, in the first conversation with Sheridan Luchenko's first priority is to drum up excuses for why nobody else did anything about Clarke as a preface for explaining why he needs to be punished for saving Earth from being entirely scoured of life by Space Hitler.

Its actually incredibly depressing when you think about it. I mean, think about the level of crimes Clarke directed, from the assassination of his predecessor to his collusion with the Shadows to the orbital bombardments and starvation tactics to the incredibly public shootout to seize ISN to deployment of a psychic gestapo to implementing Orwellian torture and brainwashing facilities to ultimately trying to basically wipe out of the bulk of the human race... and his followers were largely not purged from civilian OR military leadership, to the point that the very first thing that happened to the guy who saved the human race from his tyranny was an act of political retribution for having done it and the #1 talking point of the new government being "Lets all move on."

It's of course entirely realistic, when you consider "denazification" in Japan or Italy for example, or even the allegedly successful examples in Germany. So many former fascists or fascist supporters ended up in high levels or government.

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Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Torrannor posted:

It's of course entirely realistic, when you consider "denazification" in Japan or Italy for example, or even the allegedly successful examples in Germany. So many former fascists or fascist supporters ended up in high levels or government.

What we really needed was a subplot where the Minbari were secretly sneaking the Shadow Tech Experts off Earth in the chaos of the post-war cleanup and then one of them appears with Minbari Walt Disney to give a fun presentation about how Mind-Machine Interfaces work in primetime.

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