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bartolimu posted:He and Andreas did a "radio" drama together for SciFi back in I think the early '00s about having their brains hijacked into genetically-engineered lemurs by aliens curious about humanity. It was awesome, and way more coherent than you'd expect from that description. IMDB is not a complete record. Who knew? In the documentory, Bill Mumy says that he’d love to play animated Lennier forever, because he doesn’t need the makeup. If the sales are good and WB wants more, I think the cast is all-in. I’d expect JMS to do things like the Earth being destroyed and other things too expensive for the live reboot, if it happens.
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Aug 17, 2023 04:41
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I just saw it (I pre-ordered two copies, one for me, one for someone else), and it was a neat little look at "what if" scenarios, and it was a nice formal goodbye to all the cast members lost over the years. Not really a big fan of the appearance of the Shadows, but I guess the animators needed to keep it really simple to have hundreds of them on screen at once. I only really have one minor minor annoyance (no, not the fourth-wall breaking joke). It was with the self-destruct sequence. At first I was wondering why Sheridan was just standing there watching the lights slowly creep up to the triangle when time was of the essence, but then I realized "oh, it's a safety measure, you HAVE to hold it down the whole time until the arrow gets lit up as part of the confirmation mechanism to prevent accidents. That makes sense." ...And then for the final one they just pressed it down once and they got killed, the lever stayed down without anyone holding it and the lights kept moving. If they'd died weighing the lever down, then no minor complaint.
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Aug 20, 2023 03:42
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Not really a big fan of the appearance of the Shadows, but I guess the animators needed to keep it really simple to have hundreds of them on screen at once. They were different than they were in the, er, live version of themselves, but I took it more as them trying to make them look scarier and spider-like. Their force shields looked a little goofy, but I suppose that's unavoidable to some extent.
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Aug 20, 2023 11:37
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I thought that was pretty good but I tend to like What If stuff anyway. Was nice to see Shadow infantry finally. I did notice it was implied near the start that /all of Earth/ celebrates Thanksgiving now. American cultural imperialism!
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Aug 20, 2023 19:29
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I was a little confused at the start where ISN is reporting about the end of the Shadow War, and it seemed to show footage of humans fighting Shadow infantry, when Earth wasn't even aware of the Shadow War at the time. Maybe they weren't humans though.
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Aug 21, 2023 11:32
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Didn't watch the show for a while, came back and watched a decent ways into S2, haven't watched the new one yet. Probably won't be watching as fast as I thought I would since other life stuff has come up. A few comments on the original show: Someone had commented before about the show seeming too small in crowd scenes and I didn't really agree at first, they seemed good. I kept an eye on it and noticed that some crowd scenes seem too sparse, and I think I realized what it is. When they can use off-the-shelf 90s human clothes or mostly generic alien outfits many of which are a robe and quick makeup or a mask, they can pack a room with people and it looks crowded. But when they need full makeup and/or specific, well-fitting costumes, they can only make a few and that limits how many actors/extras they can fit into a scene. For example, when you have the Centauri Emperor visiting, there are like half a dozen guards for him, which is just way too small of an escort for the head of a militant empire going outside of his own territory, so the scenes where they're greeting him look small. In the same episode, the reception with a bunch of different aliens in varied outfits looks appropriately packed in. I think JMS's 'no stun settings' is a really good idea since weapons that stun people reliably, quickly, at decent ranges, and with no side effects break a lot of worldbuilding and kill dramatic tension if they're really used. But I think he goes a bit too far in not giving station security any kind of nonlethal weapon, it's kind of silly how often the guards have to get in simple fistfights with people, some of whom are aliens that are likely tougher than humans. Not using chemical and taser-type weapons makes sense since it's easy to accept that chemicals or shocks that one species finds mildly annoying could be fatal to another and spraying noxious chemicals in a closed atmosphere is probably a bad idea, and super-sophisticated weapons move into 'set phasers to stun' territory. But they really should have some kind of nightstick or expandable baton and access to riot shields, that's old tech and really makes sense. It wouldn't need to change the outcome of scenes but I think 'station cops move to break up dockworkers riot with punching' and 'take him alive, rush in with PPGs drawn!' would look much better with some or all of the security people with clubs and shields. Maybe it's just a 1990s artifact (like Franklin's questionable medical ethics) that no one really noticed at the time, but it has been pretty jarring to me. Also if I was head of security, by this point I'd use medical records to figure out an effective but safe knockout dose of an appropriate drug for each of the ambassadors and have a tranq dart gun or hand-held dispenser in the armory. At this point all of the non-Kosh ambassadors have tried to attack or kill someone important on station and station security has had to threaten two of them with lethal force, so having a 'stun setting' specifically for these violent VIPs who you really don't want to kill would be a good idea. I don't really fault the show for not doing that, but it was definitely something that occurred to me during the confrontation between Sheridan and J'kar. Earthforce's idea of secrecy keeps making me laugh. When they create a semi-lobotomized murderbot from a terrorist's corpse, they leave the record of his DNA unchanged so anyone getting a hair or skin sample can identify him as a supposedly dead terrorist (should change the record to point to someone generic). When they have a secret operation planned that requires a large body of troops in GROPOS, they have them layover by crowding into a station filled with people who will report on their movements to alien governments. When they're secretly looking for the doctor in Hunter, Prey their special agent doesn't find it suspicious that a random person knew who they were looking for. (A scam artist lying and trying to get money makes sense, but how would the scammer know the exact name of the secret target of their search?). I think a decent amount of this is deliberate, but I'm not sure if it all is. "Bio-scanners" that read "X life forms aboard" are a SF trope that doesn't make much real-world sense, but I realized when watching Hunter, Prey that they actually make sense in B5. In real-world settings it's not really clear what constitutes a 'life form', how they'd detect it, why it wouldn't ping on a tapeworm, lice, or rats, and how they'd detect 'unknown life form'. But in B5 there's clearly a 'life force energy' that gets used by the healing machine, the immortality serum, and captured by Soul Hunters and which is only on higher life forms. (If the energy is there for non-sentient life, the alien healing machine and immortality serum wouldn't have a moral dilemma since you could just drain life energy from pigs to fuel it). So the bio-scanner is just looking for that energy, and it makes sense to get a result of 'that energy is there but I'm not sure what it's from' when scanning the Vorlon ship. I still don't get how business telepaths are supposed to work in a broader sense, primarily why people are so willing to go into a negotiation where the other guy has a telepath and they don't. In "A Spider in the Web" this really stands out - Amanda Carter has some big secrets that she might think about when talking about plans for an independent Mars, so she should really want to avoid being scanned, but she is happy to be the rep who negotiates with Isogi with a telepath poking around in her brain. I feel like JMS just sort of figured Telepaths would do something in business, but didn't really think it through very far. The crew's attitude towards telepaths is really laid bare in their interactions with the Underground Railroad. They think that psi-corps is an evil organization that victimizes telepaths and is involved in a lot of plots, but at the same time everyone but Franklin seems just annoyed that they're trying to get away from psi-corps. The fact that Sheridan falls back on 'I have to follow the law' and makes it clear that he'll turn them in if he ever sees them on his station again when dealing with victims of an oppressive regime on one hand, while in the same episode refusing to obey the law that says he should pay 30 credits a week more for his quarters and eventually deciding to embezzle funds from the station really doesn't paint him in a good light. "I'm not going to break the law again to help escapees from forced reeducation camps , but if I have to pay a (presumably standardized) cost for quarters embezzlement for a minor personal benefit is fine" just doesn't seem like a good look. I think this is deliberate, and in S5 they call back to it by having Lyta in a similar situation (getting kicked out of her quarters) and showing that Sheridan has zero sympathy for a telepath in a worse situation than the one that prompted his theft of funds.
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Aug 24, 2023 23:43
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Didn't watch the show for a while, came back and watched a decent ways into S2, haven't watched the new one yet. Probably won't be watching as fast as I thought I would since other life stuff has come up. Something cool is if you look at the credits, "The Babylon 5 Players" are the people who play the random folks/aliens in the crowd shots. If you pay attention you can see them repeat in the same walking shot because as they'd pass the main characters, they'd run off set and go back around in a different order to try to evoke one continuous big crowd.
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Aug 25, 2023 00:41
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Just finished another rewatch It blows my mind how good Sleeping In Light is Has there ever been a better finale to any show? I think not *sob*
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Sep 5, 2023 03:47
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M*A*S*H comes close.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:22
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The Good Place is a contender. Newhart, though in a completely different register from the others. I didn’t watch Breaking Bad but hear that had a great ending.
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Sep 5, 2023 05:07
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They might have great endings, but a single bar of music from SiL will set me off - and I imagine, a great many of us. How many finales can say that?
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Sep 5, 2023 08:42
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Spinz posted:Just finished another rewatch I just started season 5 of my rewatch and I'm really looking forward to seeing Sleeping In Light again.
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Sep 5, 2023 12:48
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Schitt's Creek had a drat nice ending.
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Sep 5, 2023 12:52
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Narsham posted:The Good Place is a contender. Newhart, though in a completely different register from the others. I didn’t watch Breaking Bad but hear that had a great ending. Breaking Bad was great, Better Call Saul might have been even better
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Sep 5, 2023 14:11
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ZekeNY posted:Breaking Bad was great, Better Call Saul might have been even better If you consider Ozymandias the series finale and Granite State and Felina to be bonus material, Breaking Bad ends even better.
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Sep 5, 2023 14:17
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I always remember not liking season 5 but whenever I rewatch the show I enjoy it. It's interesting how much being able to binge something changes the watch experience vs having to wait a week, or more, to see the next episode.
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Sep 12, 2023 15:37
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I actually liked season 5 when it first aired because having a show about how it might not be a good thing that the good guys triumphed was pretty much unheard of at the time.
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Sep 12, 2023 17:39
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Season 5 was great. The worst you can probably say about it is that it's not as consistently strong as many of the previous seasons, but I'm very satisfied with the fact that Sheridan's/the Interstellar Alliance's victory was Pyrrhic.
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Sep 12, 2023 17:50
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I think people tend to A) remember the Byron stuff being worse than it is--it's not good but it's not that bad and B) remember there being a lot more of it than there actually is.
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Sep 12, 2023 18:03
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It makes sense that S5 is better in retrospect or in rewatch, because the second half of the season is better than the first half, and the first half is setup for the second half. I think it's easy, the first time through, to look at the first half and think "is this all Season 5 is?" while you're watching it. You don't know that it gets better, and you don't know that what you're seeing is all going to be torn apart and tossed in the fire to fuel the second half.
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Sep 12, 2023 18:16
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The disruptive aspects of S5 are that the characters are in the same location, but in a radically different context. Sheridan and Garibaldi have radically different jobs; the G'Kar-Londo relationship has radically changed but so too have those two characters individually, and you can see them trying to renegotiate who they are and what their places are on B5 (the station and the show). Couple that with the lower budget, which means most characters appear in 13 of 22 episodes, and the degree to which the Telepath plot lands poorly, due mainly to the way in which it shows the vestiges of the original Byron-Ivanova pairing, and it's easy to feel like the show's changed radically or is wrong-footing you all the time. Whereas that's the theme of S5: not unlike the end of S1, "nothing's the same any more," only this time the triumphs of S4 turn out to be the end of one story but the beginning of a whole bunch of new stories, and our cast's successes in navigating the first story offer no guarantees with these others. I love, particularly, that Sheridan is the natural candidate for first ISA president, but also somewhat unsuited for the position. I love, also, that the show is refuting the way that narrative can lull us into a false sense of triumph. Winning WW II was a big deal, and some of what came afterward was wonderful (the GI Bill, for example). But some of the post-war boundary drawing created future crises, and existing crises (segregation and racism in America, for example) were still festering and largely unaddressed. If there's one failure, it's that JMS doesn't show us non-evil minions of the Shadows and Vorlons, people left behind and suffering whose needs, or even existence, were never taken into effect by the victors of that conflict. He does show us that Earth and Earthforce aren't somehow magically cured of their problems because Clark is gone, though much of that happens in the background because Crusade was a real possibility and that story would have been taken up later in its first season.
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Sep 12, 2023 18:38
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I also think that having each main character leave the station, one after the other, was a great move. It gave you a sense of loss (at least it did me). I'd still love to see the adventures of G'kar and Lyta (I need to find those books that detail their travels).
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Sep 12, 2023 18:49
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Grand Fromage posted:I think people tend to A) remember the Byron stuff being worse than it is--it's not good but it's not that bad and B) remember there being a lot more of it than there actually is. It's honestly p bad, but yeah it's only a few eps. My girl lyta got done so dirty, that could have been really interesting.
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Sep 12, 2023 20:41
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Season 5 was great. The worst you can probably say about it is that it's not as consistently strong as many of the previous seasons, but I'm very satisfied with the fact that Sheridan's/the Interstellar Alliance's victory was Pyrrhic. Pyrrhic is way too strong a word. There's no question the good guys won and a lot of badness was averted. It just didn't fix things for everyone, nor get rid of all the bad people in the universe.
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Sep 12, 2023 21:42
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Alhazred posted:I actually liked season 5 when it first aired because having a show about how it might not be a good thing that the good guys triumphed was pretty much unheard of at the time. It's not that it wasn't a good thing, it was a very good thing! It just wasn't the only thing. The point of season 5 is that, there's no "and then they all lived happily ever after." History doesn't end when the bad guy is defeated. All those things you fought for, all those people you fought to save? They're still there the next day, and their causes and their needs have to be met. Season 4 was about winning the war, season 5 is about winning the peace.
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Sep 13, 2023 00:44
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McSpanky posted:It's not that it wasn't a good thing, it was a very good thing! It just wasn't the only thing. The point of season 5 is that, there's no "and then they all lived happily ever after." History doesn't end when the bad guy is defeated. All those things you fought for, all those people you fought to save? They're still there the next day, and their causes and their needs have to be met. Season 4 was about winning the war, season 5 is about winning the peace. And how doing so completely and forever, happily ever after, is impossible.
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Sep 13, 2023 01:52
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Lemniscate Blue posted:And how doing so completely and forever, happily ever after, is impossible. Exactly; life goes on, nothing ever ends. Unless you're the Markab. 
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Sep 13, 2023 02:09
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McSpanky posted:It's not that it wasn't a good thing, it was a very good thing! The centauri would probably disagree.
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Sep 13, 2023 06:47
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Alhazred posted:The centauri would probably disagree. Eh, even for them, it's a short term vs long term tradeoff. If Emperor Vir can usher in an era of peace and prosperity, finally putting all the decades of strife with Narn behind them, the bodycount in the centuries to come will be lower. Also, in the long run, the Shadows' habit of kicking over anthills was bad for everyone.
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Sep 13, 2023 14:55
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I didn't hate season 5 on my original watch, I just thought it was the weakest season. Byron and the telepaths don't make a lot of sense and get annoying pretty fast, but they aren't that much screen time.
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Sep 13, 2023 17:26
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Something I've never understood: that Mark Twain lookin' guy that Sheridan meets at Kazaad Dum. What was his deal, and what does he mean by "same group, different department"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJT5XBT6oRM Like he sounds like he's implying there's a Shadow conspiracy pulling strings on Earth, or maybe he's just talking all people with power in general? Real weird. I guess it's neat that he recoils and deflects when Sheridan demands of him "who are you", since that's the Vorlon signature question.
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Nov 12, 2023 05:06
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He's supposed to be the other side of Sheridan's coin. So while Sheridan is out in the open and a known war hero on the front lines, he's doing cloak and dagger stuff in the shadows and no one knows who he is. His name is Justin btw and he wasn't on the Icarus according to JMS. He's just a guy who is there and probably got killed at the end of all that.
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Nov 12, 2023 05:59
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His description is actually somewhat literal: there isn't anyone that does all of that stuff, or even any of it. Who controls hemlines? A confluence of random factors that various people exert influence on, but no one person or group manages. In other words, fashion is a chaotic situation where competing ideas vie for dominance, which is exactly what the Shadows represent. That's how borders work, too; there isn't anyone that draws all the borders, they get established by various factions competing against each other. When he says it, it sounds like he's saying there's a vast conspiracy literally running everything and he's part of it, but of course there isn't any such conspiracy, and what he's part of is something that wants to keep it that way. The hemlines have to compete; how else will we determine the strongest hemlines that are most worthy of survival?
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Nov 12, 2023 08:55
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SlothfulCobra posted:Something I've never understood: that Mark Twain lookin' guy that Sheridan meets at Kazaad Dum. What was his deal, and what does he mean by "same group, different department"? I think it's basically what RocknRollaAyatollah said. Back when Sheridan has his weird Kosh dream, he was told two things: "The man in between is searching for you" and "You are the hand." Delenn points out that these two things might be related, and the man in between is therefore Sheridan's equal and opposite. Justin identifies himself as "a sort of middleman." That is to say, a man in between two things. Sheridan is the guy who is bringing people together as an ordered coalition, whereas Justin is the voice of chaotic evolution. And I'm not sure how well it works, because while Justin comes across as Sheridan's opposite (old versus young, intense vs frail, known vs unknown, both like tea), I don't think he really comes across as his equal, nor exactly why he's looking for him/doesn't know where he is prior to that point. The other thing that complicates is that when I think "a sort of middleman" for the Shadows, I think of Morden. That's not to say Morden was ever intended to take the Justin role or anything, but just that Justin's position within the Shadow entity is really unclear. Morden is the guy who goes around covertly and has people make deals with the devil, Anna was in a Shadow ship until a few days prior. But what the heck does Justin even do? Was he the Morden to Clark's Londo? Either way, it feels like the deaths of Justin and Sheridan could be why the Shadows and Vorlons both go into open battle -- their chosen generals have failed, time to go direct. It's also complicated by the fact that there is an explicit Shadow conspiracy back on Earth, and it's a pretty prominent plot point. I feel like JMS dropped the ball a little on whatever was intended for that idea of Sheridan's equal and opposite among the Shadows.
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Nov 12, 2023 10:19
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I like how weird it is that there's this mark Twain looking motherfucker just drinking tea and fomenting galactic conflict
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Nov 12, 2023 20:30
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It makes a whole lot of sense to me. At the heart of all the Shadows' evil is a banal little man, not really different than someone who might be the CEO of a defense contractor in the US, who is pulling the strings. I've always enjoyed how the scene comes across like a weird business proposal - because it is!
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Nov 12, 2023 20:40
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sebmojo posted:I like how weird it is that there's this mark Twain looking motherfucker just drinking tea and fomenting galactic conflict I started the clip playing as I caught up on posts and just at this post (which I agree with): Sheridan: "Who are you?" "Now ... that's really not ... important." Sheridan: "Who are you?" I forgot that Sheridan's almost-first words to him were literally just The Vorlon's Question.
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Nov 12, 2023 23:52
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Vavrek posted:I started the clip playing as I caught up on posts and just at this post (which I agree with): And that Justin refuses to answer it in precisely that way.
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Nov 12, 2023 23:58
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:It makes a whole lot of sense to me. At the heart of all the Shadows' evil is a banal little man, not really different than someone who might be the CEO of a defense contractor in the US, who is pulling the strings. I've always enjoyed how the scene comes across like a weird business proposal - because it is! It's such a good scene. I've always drawn a mental connection between him and Edgars for much of what you said.
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Nov 13, 2023 00:12
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Justin didn't work all that well for me. He is implied to be Sheridan's peer pulling all kinds of strings, but we don't see him actively doing anything before this episode. To me, he just reads as the human mouthpiece to talk about the Shadows' philosophy, not as someone important in his own right or driving anything. I also agree that the 'searching for you' bit didn't hit for me, he shouldn't need to search since Sheridan's location is public and his buddy Morden has visited exactly where Sheridan is. I like the scene as a whole, but I don't think of Justin as a real character in his own right and I think he was supposed to be. The Shadows' philosophy does seem to fall apart if you look too closely at it (they want beings to develop strength through evolution, but when Sheridan evolves a stronger way to do things they object and stop it), but I think that's deliberate and part of showing how Shadows and Vorlons have lost their way. One piece I don't like about the whole Za'ha'dum sequence is that Sheridan sneaking in the backup PPG makes the shadows look bumbling and incompetent rather than Sheridan looking clever. I think the backup personal weapon bit to escape to the shaft would have worked better if he had acquired some sort of hard-to-detect gun in an earlier episode (maybe something a person snuck onto the station, or maybe Delenn/Kosh offered it) or if he brought something low-tech that wouldn't show up on an energy scan (like a modern firearm). The Shadows planning to betray him but not bothering with the basic scan B5 does on everyone who comes into the station makes them look bumbling and incompetent, I think spending a minute to have Sheridan use something other than a gun he wouldn't be able to sneak into the lower-tech, less-paranoid human station would have been better.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:21
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