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Well, this thread got me to finally spend  on these dead comedy forums, when the history threads weren't enough to drag me in.I first watched the series some back when it came out on broadcast TV, then got into it heavily when I has able to record episodes (I think it was on either TNT or Sci-Fi channel at that point). I did a rewatch sometime in the early 2000s, but hadn't watched it since then, though I really should have during early covid. I've read the technomage, Centauri, and Psi-Corps trilogies, and think I still have all of the books around so I'll probably reread them too. I just started a rewatch of the DVD version and I'm enjoying it. Some general observations: My interpretation of what the options are in Londo's prophecy doesn't seem to be shared by anyone, I haven't seen anyone else floating my theory on what 'the eye that does not see' over the years of poking into B5 discussions. 1,2: The two that happened before Lady Morella are likely refusing to engage Morden initially and not having the shadows attack to start the Narn-Centauri war. 3: "You must save the eye that does not see" I think this one means that once Refa becomes the Shadows' contact, Londo needs to not kill Refa, and instead convince him that the Shadows are dangerous. There's a specific comment he makes to Refa about how Refa 'doesn't see' how dangerous working with the Shadows is, and Refa responds that they're keeping the Shadows at arms length and using them for advantage. Refa also mentions at some point that while Cartagia is completely insane, Refa's family in the Royal Court is manipulating him and keeping him under control. By killing Refa and discrediting his family, Londo removes the Shadows' current point of contact opening the door to them directly working with easily-manipulated Cartagia and removes the main check on Cartagia indulging his own insanity. There's no way Refa and his faction would allow the Shadows to set up bases on the Centauri homeworld, so Refa being alive is enough to prevent the Shadows setting up bases and sending the Drakh for direct infiltration, and if Londo actually did 'save' him by convincing Refa that the Centauri needed to distance themselves from the Shadows, it would be even better. I've seen people argue that this has something to do with preventing Cartagia from putting out G'Kar's eye, but I don't see how any reasonable way that he does that stops the chain of events that leads to Londo on the throne with the Drakh controlling him, while there is a fairly obvious chain of events set in motion by Refa's death that leads to the disaster at the end. 4: "You must not kill the one who is already dead." I think Morden is the one who is already dead. Killing Morden (and his Shadow bodyguards, and blowing up the Shadow island base) was a temporary setback for the Shadows, but also was viewed as a major betrayal by the Drakh. Without the betrayal, after the war Centauri would just be another former Shadow ally and the Drakh would have no reason to target them or Londo specifically for revenge. Als note that, while Londo doesn't know this, blowing up the shadows didn't cause the Vorlons to spare the Centauri homeworld, the planet destroyer didn't change course until it was recalled for the major fight, so it served no purpose. 5: "You must surrender yourself to your greatest fear," is letting G'kar strangle him in the end, which lets Sheridan escape and the Drakh be fully defeated in the end. I always considered In the Beginning as showing the story Londo is telling, not the actual events that happened. So the problem of "why don't the main characters remember each other" or "why do all of these people happen to be involved with each other briefly ten years before the series" goes away, since it didn't really happen that way. Like Franklin wasn't really involved, it was just some human doctor, but since Londo doesn't know anything about the actual doctor (and probably doesn't remember his name since it's obscure trivial history that even non-drunk Londo probably doesn't care about), he puts the human doctor that he does know into the story instead. Other people in this thread seem to like that too. I think Bester is a much more sympathetic character than most people do. He's a member of a persecuted minority who's put in the role of policing his own kind under threat of all telepaths being wiped out if he doesn't. He (and others in psi-corps) manage to infiltrate and partially control the majority group oppressing them, he's not acting out of a desire for power for it's own sake, personal power, wealth, or status, but basic survival. I sympathize a lot more with the minority who wants to be in charge so the majority will stop hurting, killing, and persecuting the minority than with someone like Londo who just wants to be on top of a slave-holding imperialist war machine for the sake of glory (even if he does eventually turn away from that). He's certainly not a nice person, and certainly does some very bad things, but I don't think he's nearly as 'black' on the moral scale as a lot of other people do. I liked to imagine a parody where Kosh is replaced by Beavis in an encounter suit, but everyone still reacts to him the same way. Like him telling Sinclair "huh-huh... there is a hole in your butt hehehe" instead of the real line, or when Sinclair comes into the room and he's watching human history scenes on a viewscreen, they're all porn from different eras instead of historical scenes. I'm partway through S1 at this point, and will probably keep posting impressions. Some things hit really differently now, since there's been a lot of real-world history, more than 2 decades of experience, and knowing a bunch of the reveals. Delenn comes off as really sanctimonious and hypocritical in S1 knowing that she personally ordered the genocide of the human race and only backed down much later. During the War Prayer she makes a comment to Sinclair about the nasty human propensity towards violence based off of the Home Guard branding her friend, but I think stabbing and branding one person (both of which are easily treatable with the medical tech available) is a bit less severe than deciding to wipe out an entire species and culture based on one accidental incident between warships. (Especially when the incident was caused by Minbari approaching with gun ports opened while hitting the Earthforce ship with scanners strong enough to disable the Earthforce ship's own scanners). Psi-Corps is a really insidious idea by Earth Alliance. Back when I originally watched, I missed the implication of Ivanova hating the Psi-Corps for what they did to her mother. After seeing the whole series and reading the Telepath books, it's clear that the Psi-Corps was created by the Earth Alliance and mandated to force telepaths to be members (and follow certain rules about power use and wearing distinctive outfits) or to take sleeper drugs, with the threat 'if you can't control your people, we'll start the death camps back again'. But because EA made the Corps its own organization, people blame the Corps itself for things that happen instead of the government they voted in that actually made it happen. It's really the mundane-run Earth Alliance, who's military Ivanova proudly serves in, that's responsible for her mother's death by mandating sleeper drugs, but Ivanova (and presumably people like her) put the blame on psi-corps instead of the government they voted in and fight for.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:20
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Exactly! It's some really interesting worldbuilding, although I think a lot of it stems from JMS's belief that telepathy represents an existential threat to our society (and maybe it does, who knows) and Keyes picking up on it and just running with it. I think part of that in the B5 universe is that there's no technological help against telepathy. There are machines that can probe into someone's mind, hyperspace gives telepaths a big jump, and IIRC there are some telepathy boosting devices, but there are no thought screens that you can put on a person or ship to shut out telepaths and the ability for mundanes to block telepaths is very limited. If you have battery-powered electronic or mechanical thought screens like the Lensman universe has, then it's a lot easier for people to exist around telepaths. Also some of the worldbuilding falls flat - for example I find the use of telepath for scanning business deals really odd (and did back on first watch). quote:Someone who goes by Pallasite over on AO3 did a really interesting series of essays that they basically posit as a defense of the Psi Corps and, specifically, Bester and they're really interesting if you want to explore these ideas further. It points out small things that Bester was aware of the Shadow weakness to telepaths before anyone in the main cast was and how the MRA is seemingly nicer than the Corps, it actually annihilates telepath culture and prevents them from organizing as they did within the Corps (while subjecting them to worse violations such as monthly loyalty scans.) I've read some of his essays and they're interesting, but I don't really buy what he's selling. There's a number of places where he's exaggerating something from the books or shows wildly, and some of his interpretations are suspect - for example, at one point he says that scans being inadmissible in court implies that telepaths can't testify against normals, which just doesn't follow. I have read some of it and will probably eventually read it all, but I don't really think of it as a reference, he goes a bit too far and seems overconfident in his conclusions (too much 'it is this way' and not enough 'it might be this way, but also might be this less drastic interpretation). I feel like he's the kind of writer that you have to double-check before you rely on his conclusions.
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Jun 26, 2023 04:10
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Jedit posted:It's actually explicit text that unapproved telepathic scans are inadmissible as evidence - Talia says as much at one point. It's the same as how in the real world evidence obtained without a warrant is inadmissible. The court can order you to submit to a scan if there are sufficient grounds, and you can waive your rights and volunteer to be scanned, but a telepath can't just go digging. From this we can definitely deduce that it's at least very hard for telepaths to testify against normals, as a defence lawyer would simply demand that their testimony be thrown out as either it was obtained illegally or it's perjury. Like I said before, I don't see how you reach the end of that paragraph from the beginning. It's explicit that telepaths have other senses than telepathy - notably, Bester is still a capable investigator and combatant even when he's on sleeper drugs that shut off his telepathic abilities entirely, and there's nothing that indicates a fact or belief that their only sense is telepathy. In the real world the majority of evidence obtained without a warrant is admissible, it's only evidence obtained *from a search by the government* that *would not have been discovered without the illegal search* that's inadmissible without a warrant. If someone attacks me with a knife, my testimony that I saw them rush towards me while holding a knife and that I felt the knife stabbing into me is going to be admissible even though no court issued a warrant for me to observe it. If I enter a business deal with Bob, I can testify that he and I signed a contract, I can testify about what discussions we had, I can testify that I saw him collect cash but didn't see it go into the business bank account at the end of the day. A lawyer foolish enough to argue that my testimony should be thrown out because either it must have been obtained illegally or it's perjury would likely face sanctions for making frivolous motions, and there's nothing in the show or books to indicate that it would be different for a normal or telepath. Specific information obtained by telepathy like "I could see in his thoughts that he wanted to kill all teeps" or "Bob thought about how he was going to spend the money on a new Lambo" could be thrown out, but that doesn't lead to all testimony being thrown out, just specific testimony that could only come from a telepathic scan.
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Jun 26, 2023 14:17
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For all of the people saying that they think the prophecy refers to saving G'kar's eye, can you explain what Londo should have done to save G'kar's eye, and how that would cause events to play out differently? I don't see anything that he could do to save G'kar from having his eye put out that would lead to the Drakh and Shadows off of Centauri Prime without a grudge. The 'consensus view' may be G'kar's eye, but I've never seen someone who takes that view explain what saving G'kar's eye would look like and how saving it would save Londo. I'm not saying 'write me an episode long script or I won't believe you', just a line or to like I did explaining how I think sparing Refa and Morden would lead to a significantly different outcome. And the only way 'do not kill the one who is already dead' can be Sheridan is if you don't think that G'kar strangling Londo was his greatest fear. If Londo did take one of the chances at redemption before the final one in the prophecy, then he would already be redeemed wouldn't need to surrender himself to his greatest fear. Having a last chance in the prophecy that never occurs is certainly possible, but I think it that Londo did miss two chances and had to resort to "if you have failed all the others, that is your final chance at redemption."
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Jun 27, 2023 00:46
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Thanks for the answers. My interpretation of the eye is the one I'm sticking with, but both 'Londo would have been killed which results in Centauri Prime being saved' and 'it would have been an act of faith' are solid explanations and I understand why someone would go with one of those now.Jedit posted:Londo could have acted to save G'Kar, but if he had then Cartagia would have had him killed. Similarly, if Londo hadn't killed Morden then the Vorlons would have destroyed Centauri Prime and Londo with it. Neither of these are good outcomes for him, but he would have avoided the fire. Nah, if Londo didn't kill Morden, then the Vorlon planetkiller would have approached Centauri Prime, then pulled out when called to the larger battle just like it did in the episode. It was still approaching after the Shadows and Morden were destroyed, and only turned around when called to the battle, seeing the shadows destroyed and hearing the broadcast that they were no longer on the planet didn't sway the ship. He didn't know that at the time, and I don't think any of the non-Vorlon characters would ever know that's what happened, but that was what I took away from the scene from the 3rd person omniscient view we get watching the show. SlothfulCobra posted:Lately I've been feeling like the part of the prophecy that seems the weakest is the last one. Sure it's poetic, but I don't think dying is Londo's greatest fear. He's literally willing to die to kill G'kar in the first episode, he gladly risked death back when he flew Draal and Delenn to the planet below B5 (there's a moment that's easy to forget after the rest of the series). He's not particularly cowardly for his own life. My read of the situation is that Londo is afraid of dying at G'kar's hand, but also thinks it's inevitable, so is willing to take big risks since he 'knows' he'll survive until the strangling. In the early episode, he's willing to risk death in an attempt to kill G'kar, but he says after Garibaldi stops him that he knows he wasn't going to succeed anyway. I don't think he's fundamentally cowardly, but I also think his bravery gets a big boost from 'knowing' that he can't die for another 20 years.
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Jun 27, 2023 02:29
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I just got up to A Voice in the Wilderness 1 and 2, and noticed a (literally) glaring tech anachronism. When Ivanova and Sinclair go down to the planet, they bring flashlights with them. The flashlights are big, bulky, boxy things with what's presumably a large battery pack and an incandescent bulb that's not especially bright. Today you'd have some kind of LED that is much brighter and smaller, uses a tiny battery for longer life, and is less inconvenient to carry (probably mounted on a head strap or their PPG, if not something more wand-sized). The screens being CRTs rather than flat screens like you'd expect now I expected, but the flashlight really jumped out at me as being 'not from the future, not even from the present' when it certainly didn't during the original run. I enjoy spotting things like this, it's not quite as interesting as the daily printed newspaper but is still fun.McSpanky posted:Yeah, the telepaths may have gotten a raw deal from Earth society and Earthgov, but they sure didn't waste any time going full fash with their little gestapo club. Secret hyperspace bases, murder initiation rites, all manner of sleeper agents, routinely illegally scanning civilians, trapping people in endless psychic nightmares, eugenics programs... JMS himself said of seeing Bester's 'good side', "Even Hitler painted roses." What I don't get is comparing Bester to Hitler for this sort of thing and not any of the other major characters who do actual Hitler-like stuff like genocide, wars of aggression, slavery and forced labor, and massive-scale atrocities like that. Delenn is not usually even considered a monster, but she cast the vote that decided on war with humans over an incident caused by Mimbari arrogance, and personally ordered it to be a genocidal war to exterminate all humans rather than just a minor war. Even though she eventually shied away from killing all X billions of humans, she was cool with it and only actually turned aside when the triluminary triggered on Sinclair, and she was still responsible for over 250,000 dead humans. Londo conspired against the legitimate Centauri government to put in place an aggressive regime that immediately invaded Narn using weapons of mass destruction to set up labor and death camps, then spread the aggressive war to other nations, all along with a major motive being to put the lesser races in their place. G'Kar did less himself, but was an eager member of the ruling body of the Narn regime when it was engaged in aggressive wars of conquest against it's neighbors. It seems like for everything in the list, the major players have done something as bad or much worse. All of the major players are fine with secret bases, not even sure why that's in the list. Sure a murder initiation rite is bad, but is it really worse than a genocidal war that killed a quarter million people before stopping or Sheridan using a few dozen incapacitated telepaths as human bombs? And how much worse is Bester's one murder than Ivonova's attempted murder of a telepath for no real reason? All of the major players are fine with scans on non-consenting people - B5 command staff have Talia, Lyta and IIRC some others do it at various points. G'kar is big on breeding Narn Tel. Sheridan is fine with Death of Personality as punishment for a guy who killed the person who killed his own family, which I find worse than trapping a serial killer in an endless nightmare like Bester did. Londo is fond of Eugenics programs to create more docile Narns, while G'kar is working on a Eugenics program to create Narn telepaths. I don't think that Bester is some sort of white-hatted hero with clean hands, but I don't understand the justification for saying he's qualitatively or quantitatively significantly worse than the other major players. Gyrotica posted:Like probably everyone here I've spent a lot of time thinking about Londo's motivations. Clearly he wants power - but I think only insomuch as it gets him respect. And respect for what? Thinking about it, respect for trying to serve the Republic. This all sounds good when you stay cagey about what 'Centauri not crumbling' actually means, and I think the part of Londo's answer to Morden that you didn't quote is pretty telling: "I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars! I-I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. [your quote] I want us to be what we used to BE! I want…I want it all back, the way that it was! Does that answer your question?" Londo pretty clearly wants the Centauri to go back to conquering the lesser races and making sure they know their place, to exploit their worlds for the benefit of the Centauri, and to continue to enslave people. He's like lost-causers in today's world - if you say 'heritage, not hate' then the position sounds reasonable, but what he actually wants is for a slave-holding empire to put the lesser races in their place. His 'necessary evils' aren't even an incidental step on the way, they're the core of what he tries to put in place.
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Jun 28, 2023 21:17
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sebmojo posted:An excellent post. Delenn really gets a very easy ride, though you do get the sense that her transition is in some sense an act of repentance. Interesting thing about the original idea about her turning from male Minbari (or neuter? IIRC they hadn't decided before they dropped the idea) to female human hybrid is that it didn't surprise me o hear from JMS that it didn't get executive pushback the way that the Talia-Ivanova romance did. At the time transgender people weren't on the radar as a target for conservative groups so 'changing sex/gender' wouldn't immediately flag as political the same way it would now, and the implication of her using advanced alien technology to undergo a unique change would put it more into the 'aliens do weird stuff' category than 'this is a statement about modern humans'. Milkfred E. Moore posted:The thing about Bester (and the Psi Corps) is that JMS seems to genuinely view telepathy as an existential threat to humanity, one that will flip a switch in people and turn them into monsters... JMS just has a weird blind spot, and I feel like that's part of the reason the Telepath War has never really been detailed because the idea of the Psi Corps just... launching a coup of the Earth Alliance is a little silly. And also immediately runs into the problem that not every single person in the Psi Corps is an Alfred Bester. I think one of the old-school things that contributes to that is that telepathy is separate from the 'sciencey' add-ons to the world like FTL engines and PPGs. You don't have telepathy detectors, a simple protective device, or even a big 'tinfoil hat' construction to block mind-reading, the only defense against telepathy is to either have a telepath you can trust or kill/exile every telepath that comes near you. I think that's also part of why telepaths aren't that integrated into the world building, telepathy is on it's own magical layer instead of just being another piece of sci-fi - it's very unlike souls, which are somewhat mystical and mysterious but which we also see people interact with using technological devices. Psamtik I posted:So, I just finished a rewatch and the show was great; the movies not so much. I'm hesitating about getting the books. Are they any good? Like...closer to the TV show quality or closer to the movies quality? I don't want to waste my time if they're just trash. Running off of my memory of them from reading them 20 years ago, the Centauri Trilogy is a big deal because it finishes off the story of Londo and Viir. I feel like without it there are some significant pieces of the main story that don't get wrapped up. It also continues the theme of having to do bad stuff before becoming enlightened, since Viir does do some questionable stuff that he regrets. Psi-Corps trilogy is interesting backstory for showing how screwed up telepaths are in the B5 world, that's my main take away from it. You do find out what eventually happens to Bester, but I don't think that ties in to the main show the way the fate of the Centauri does - it's not a bad read, but it doesn't really add to the main event. The Technomage trilogy is my least favorite, it's pretty disconnected from the main series, and I didn't find the story in it very compelling. The three trilogies were the only ones I've read, and none of them are just trash - they're decently written and don't have 'throw the book against the wall' moments, but only one of them is one I'd really seek out at collector prices if I didn't already have them. Absurd Alhazred posted:I mean, surely someone is going to mention the real-life Al Bester's The Demolished Man, which to me seems like the closest inspiration for telepaths in Babylon 5, Finding out about that reference is what got me to read the real Bester's few science fiction works. Demolished man and The Stars my Destination are both good novels, but I think his short story collections are more interesting, and are definitely worth checking out if you decide to poke into those.
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Jun 30, 2023 00:58
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Small White Dragon posted:It was kind of... overly lengthy, but it did connect to the main story briefly in an interesting way at the end. Oh, I forgot that. Yeah there's a bit of tie-in, but it's really an explanation of one event that is neat but not really something I missed seeing in the main series. It's not like the Centauri trilogy where you see much more of what goes on with the Centauri, Alliance, Londo, and especially Vir during and after the show, it's more like the 'oh here's why the death star had an exhaust port flaw' bit in Rogue One. Carbon dioxide posted:""A Fire Upon The Deep" has an interesting take on a concept that is somewhat related to telepathy. Yeah, that's a great book. Another interesting thing about the packs is that they're immortal in a Ship of Theseus way. The core personality of a pack shifts but doesn't disappear when individual members are added or removed, so unless something drastic happens that disrupts the entire pack, the same person is still alive for centuries, but changes over time and older memories fade or get fuzzy. The packs consider humans very short-lived and fragile, to the packs they are singletons who completely die if they lose one member.
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Jun 30, 2023 15:34
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mllaneza posted:Do not read his 1975 novel, The Computer Connection. Is hilariously awful and hosed up in many strange ways. It's one chapter full of "he did NOT just go there" after another. You have been warned. This thread won't get me twice, I already read THAT Marcus story.
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Jul 1, 2023 00:29
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Just finished rewatching season 1 last night. I had forgotten how quickly Morden and friends moved in, I thought it was a ways into S2 before they made their move. A few comments: Morden is such a great character, that smarmy smile is just so perfectly infuriating. I don't buy that Londo only learned about how Minbari react to alcohol when he tried to get Lennier drunk, that has to be common knowledge in any bars that Minbari can turn up at and he'd have to have heard it. The Minbari government seems amazingly unsophisticated to me - they're presented as being wise and ancient, but 'we will pick a supreme leader, but if they don't want to be leader we will kick them out of the council entirely' seems like a really unstable way to keep things running. We never get a close look at how the caste system works or how the grey council is selected, but a ruling body that can easily kick out one of it's member with a simple majority vote without regard to the wishes of their selectors (or electors, or however it's done) is pretty much designed to collapse in a crisis. The fact that there hasn't been a major outside stress since the last Shadow War looks like the only reason they haven't had some other sort of civil war or major shift in the council. I think JMS gets a lot of things wrong about weapons, the bit with the secret agent's PPG in the last episode of S1 is IMO the biggest spot where that jumps out. Why would any intelligence agency want PPGs with no serial number if said agency is the only one who can get them? You may as well stamp "I AM A SECRET AGENT YOU HAVE BLOWN MY COVER" on the coil. I think they'd much rather have PPGs with ordinary-looking serial numbers that trace off to something inconclusive, like 'this was part of a shipment to an alien resistance group 30 light years away' or 'this was part of a shipment that was believed destroyed while being transported' or something along those lines. That one always really jumped out at me because they point out why 'they have the only guns with no serial numbers' is a bad idea in the next breath after they find that it has no serial number.
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Jul 4, 2023 02:36
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It's fun spotting the very 90s stuff that you don't expect. I'm on the second episode of S2, and "90s men would rather arrest the representative of an ancient, warlike alien empire than go to therapy," sums up how Sheridan deals with his wife death two years after it happened. A modern show still might have him refuse to do anything about it, but his sister would definitely be telling him to get to a therapist ASAP. As a general comment I still really like the sets, makeup, and costuming on the show. Sometimes the sets are wobbly enough that you can tell they're sets, but in spite of that they are varied and do a good job at showing different environments. I think the CGI holds up really well too, aside from the issue with composite shots. Obviously there is a lot less detail on ships and stations than you'd see now, but they all have good, distinct designs, and really good movements and scene composition. I was expecting to have to make myself ignore a lot of this and focus on the story itself, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how well it holds up overall.
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Jul 5, 2023 02:34
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah. The artistry is great and makes it so the lack of technical quality really doesn't matter much, especially after the first season. I think of it like an animated series - generally you don't expect animation to have the level of texture and detail you get in modern CGI. I did hit the technomage episode, and head-cannoned that the 'oh look a 90s CGI creature' effect was deliberate on their part, that the Technomages are going for 'you can tell we didn't loose a real creature, but do you want to gamble that it can't hurt you?' with their guardian thing. Qwertycoatl posted:There are only one or two instances in the whole thing where I actively noticed the sets being bad. They did a great job with it really. I had seen some comments about sets so was actively looking for 'is there anything wrong with the sets'. The shuttle flight scene in Babylon Squared is one notable place, the walls and console panels of the shuttle cockpit don't seem permanently attached to each other. It's something that I only notice if I'm looking to notice it though, it's not enough to make the scene laughable or require me to treat it like old Doctor Who (where an alien might be some spray-painted bubble wrap) to enjoy it.
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Jul 5, 2023 14:37
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I think the modularity works especially well since the station is supposed to be manufactured as a space station. You'd expect all of the rooms to look like reconfigurations of the same components since all of the components were probably made and shipped at once when the station was being built. It's not like offices or retail spaces on earth where the interiors were each redone at various times over the few decades with differing styles, building codes, and suppliers and there aren't any historical areas where people are trying to preserve an old look.
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Jul 5, 2023 17:42
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Absurd Alhazred posted:It's somewhat futurized 80's Technoir. As in, you remember the club Technoir from The Terminator? That vibe taken a bit forward and with aliens. Yeah, that sounds spot on. The clothing choices are interesting too. If I'm remembering correctly, aliens have bunches of weird outfits, but human norms are pretty narrow and distinct. Mainstream humans generally wear more formal clothing than now (or the 90s) - notably all denim must have been destroyed during the Dilgar War - and ties and collared shirts have gone out of fashion. Men wear slacks and a buttoned, tucked shirt or shirt and jacket, women wear dresses/skirts and 'pantsuit' type outfits - aside from military and utility uniforms, women's clothes are distinctly different than men's clothes. You don't see women wearing men's style clothing or men wearing any kind of skirt, kilt, or robe. Hairstyles have a pretty narrow range of styles, you don't really see partially shaved heads, non-natural-colored dyed hair, streaks in hair, or other things that stand out. Garibaldi's later head shaving is unique to him, and IRL it was a trend that was just taking off in the 90s. (You do see things like robes on priests and technomages, and some people in down below have ragged cloaks, but they're clearly outside of normal human society. Rangers wear robes, but they're a half human/half Minbari organization). Originally I thought of it as just a distinct look that they adopted for the show, but I think the narrow, formal look is also a sign of the political climate on Earth. Paradoxish posted:They're constantly shown making rash, short-sighted, or just outright bad decisions while presenting a completely aloof appearance to outsiders, and it doesn't feel like that's poor writing or a mistake. A lot of the mysteries around the Minbari turn out to have really dumb or even just kind of racist answers, so I think the takeaway is supposed to be a really advanced civilization held together by a bunch of outdated concepts and duct tape, with the whole thing ready to just fall down under the slightest stress. I'm noticing that much more clearly on rewatch. I remember thinking they were 'not as good as advertised' back in the day, but this time around they don't even seem to be advertising that well. I think I was probably giving their 'ancient, wise race' schtick too much credit back then, and not doing enough 'who told you Minbari never lie?'. quote:I mean they went collectively bonkers and launched a war of genocide over a single diplomatic incident ... that they instigated!
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Jul 6, 2023 17:39
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Qwertycoatl posted:It was a gigantic overreaction, but from their POV earth did, completely unprovoked, blow up the spaceship containing their leader No, they approached a ship with gun ports opened (first provocation) and used active scanners on the human ship that were strong enough to disable the human ship's scanners (escalating the provocation) right as the human ship was trying to figure out how to respond to the hostile actions. "It's my culture to approach with a drawn weapon" doesn't turn approaching someone not in your culture with a drawn weapon into a non-provocation. Their own leader realized how bad of an idea that was and tried to countermand the order, but didn't make it in time. Similarly, actively hitting ships with something strong enough to shut down their sensors is a provocation, even if you don't think about the effect of a strong active scan on someone else's ship. Modern ships on earth are aware that blasting their radar full strength at another ship is a provocation, the super-advanced Minbari should be too. I agree that aside from the now-dead leader they're too arrogant and stupid to *acknowledge* their role in starting the fight, but that doesn't change the fact that they are responsible for provoking it.
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Jul 6, 2023 20:48
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Eighties ZomCom posted:I do find it odd that if the Minbari traditionally greet everyone they meet with gun ports open, then why haven't, say the Centauri, encountered it in their rare and brief encounters with the Minbari? You would've thought that would be something that Londo would've mentioned when he was asked about the Minbari if he knew. It also comes as a surprise to Sheridan when a Minbari warship turns up in S2, even though it was the cause of the Earth-Minbari war. You'd think that by the time B5 was finished, 'Minbari sometimes approach with gun ports open, they're not planning to attack just because of it, FFS don't overreact when they do it' would be standard training for any Earthforce person who might ever be in command of a warship. In general though, I don't think Minbari actually greet everyone with gun ports open. Unless I'm misremembering, it's said to be a custom of the warrior caste specifically, which explains why it took Dukhat by surprise that they were going in with gun ports open in In the Beginning. I think the warrior caste is usually either fighting or intimidating any alien races that they meet with their ships, and they're so overwhelmingly superior to any potential opponent people are either intimidated into ignoring it or wiped out if they do (only the Centauri are really close to them in combat ability). The worker and religious castes don't have that custom, and are probably engaged in non-hostile contact with other civilizations vastly more often than the warrior caste. Since they have their own warships, they'd provide escorts for their own missions that needed an escorts. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jul 7, 2023 |
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Jul 7, 2023 16:26
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Nah, they don't just have one caste of assholes. One caste is the angry rear end in a top hat caste, one is the sanctimonious rear end in a top hat caste, one is the 'actually gets things done' caste.
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Jul 7, 2023 16:44
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I said come in! posted:So they are cool yeah! I always assumed the worker caste is full of chill Mimbari that just smoke weed all day and build stuff. And the way Delene talks about them makes me pretend this is real canon. I mean, Delenn said it's a terrible thing when the Religious and Warrior caste agree on something, she never said it was a problem if the Worker caste teams up with one of the others though. Edit: I bet the religious caste doesn't approve of the worker caste smoking weed, so they have an elaborate set of rituals made up so they can pretend like it's an important a religious function whenever religious caste are around. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jul 8, 2023 |
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Jul 8, 2023 01:15
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Small White Dragon posted:I feel like this is going to lead to trouble eventually. I don't think the Grey Council style of government is one that can really function well under stress. From what we see, it has no constitutional or institutional checks on what it can do, just tradition that's ignored as soon things go out of the ordinary. It's not really clear how its members are selected, but it doesn't appear to be via general popular support like voting or by leaders of each caste picking their representatives (the warrior caste picked Delenn's replacement from the warrior caste). It doesn't seem to have much of a deliberation process (holding one quick vote to decide on a genocidal war) or requirement to consider intermediate options (Delenn's vote was the difference between 'don't declare war' and 'wipe them all out'). Delenn swapping 2 workers in place of a religious and warrior representative fixes the immediate problem of the religious and warrior castes focusing on their own agendas, but I think as soon as the now-dominant worker caste has an internal split the same shenanigans will happen. This is confusing since the Vorlons heavily influenced the Minbari government and claim to value order; the Grey Council seems like something the Shadows would love. It sits there looking wise and calm, inspiring confidence until something upsets the situation, then will start quickly making wild decisions on momentary whims with no sense of checks and balance once someone pokes the ant hill just a little bit. A temporary faction that shifts the balance of power to 5/9 (or 4/8 with one abstaining when replacing a missing member) can commit everyone to some kind of major war that they can't easily stop. I think the fundamental instability of the Minbari government is a sign of how far the Vorlons have fallen from the ideology they profess.
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Jul 9, 2023 16:48
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Also, doing a re-watch alongside a friend who is watching it for the first time. Seems like there's a goof in Midnight on the Firing Line. When Ragesh 3 is attacked by the Narn, G'Kar states that Ragesh 3 was actually a Narn colony before the Centauri conquered it, and this appears to be enough that the Minbari recognize it. But... as we'll learn later on in the series, and what JMS has stated in a few posts, the Narn were a primitive, agrarian people who didn't have space travel prior to the Centauri arrival. Where did you get that they were *primitive*? I know that they describe themselves as a *peaceful*, agrarian people, but I don't recall hearing or reading the primitive part. I got the impression that the Narn were not militaristic or heavily industrialized and didn't put a lot of effort into doing much other than living their own lives, not that they lacked scientific advancement. This wiki entry that I found when double checking supports that: https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Narn_Regime
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Jul 11, 2023 19:52
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It sounds like another case where there's contradictory statements. I always had the impression that the Narns were space faring, and other-solar-system-capable is where I'd draw the line on primitive in this context, but there's definitely support for them being planet-bound, especially the direct JMS quote. It does seem possible in the B5 universe to be space faring without building huge amounts of heavy industry or tech much advanced beyond ours, but the Narn likely weren't that. An interesting thing about B5 is that the tech for non-old-one races doesn't give a lot of advantage in a ground fight. Obviously if you have control of space you can bombard enemy positions with impunity and use mass drivers and similar devices for mass destruction, but they don't seem to have any sort of personal armor, power armor, or personal shields for defense, and PPGs are about as powerful as modern rifles in combat, with no super-powered personal weapons or highly effective smart weapons. I think one of the reasons you don't see a lot of big empires and that the less powerful races remain independent is that taking and holding territory (other than small colonies and outposts) takes a lot of manpower and risks significant casualties, it's not like some setups where a few squads of super-soldiers with disintegrator rifles can take over a 20th century country on their own.
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Jul 14, 2023 00:50
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We don't see a lot of ground combat, but we definitely get a picture - we see an Earthforce division deployed to help put down a rebellion on another world, we see some fighting between Minbari and Humans during In the Beginning, we see the station defense forces repelling boarders on a few occasions, and we see Centauri guard who expect to fight Shadows. They're all basically some dudes with simple body armor and PPGs or hand weapons, and all of them are at risk from 'guys with handguns' or 'guys with melee weapons in close quarters' - station security doesn't have an easy way to deal with 'angry mob starts breaking things'. Compare that with Mobile Infantry from the Starship Troopers book, where soldiers fly around in armor that makes them tougher than modern tanks while as mobile as a combination of a jet and helicopter and has weapons ranging all the way to nukes. Or the escaping scientist family in A Fire Upon the Deep who have only one smart gun in their arsenal and are only expecting a possible wild animal attack, but manage to almost defeat and cause huge casualties to a couple of companies of the equivalent of medieval troops who ambush them. Or compare the heavy PPGs the Centauri brought to deal with Shadows to Star Trek phasers which can just disintegrate an entire small vehicle. Jedit posted:There's definitely a reason why projectile weapons are not used in space - they could puncture the outer hull. PPGs are used because they gently caress up flesh but if they hit a big solid metal object the heat quickly diffuses. I can see soldiers in space only being trained to use plasma weapons regardless of context because it's easier than training them twice and maintaining two separate tables of ordnance. And given the close quarters of space vessels, there'd also be a lot of hand to hand combat. That's the given reason for PPGs, and I'm sure JMS believed it when he said it, but it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. First off, if you do puncture the hull of a spaceship with a bullet, you have a minor maintenance issue, you don't have a gaping wound that's going to suck people out into space. So yeah you have to come back later with something to help you find the hole (like a fog generator), then patch it, but that's not a big deal. A bullet size hole isn't going to clear the air out of a room big enough to have a firefight in, and if your air supply and recycling gets overloaded by that, the boarding party is going to overload it faster than the puncture. It's not a danger to a human, if you put your hand over it you'd seal the hole and probably get a bruise, like if you put your hand over the end of a vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile a weapon like a PPG may not punch a hole as well, but it will superheat a large area (which will probably weaken whatever weak material you are using as a hull). It will also start fires causing significantly more oxygen problems and damage than a small hole It will probably cause worse damage to internal components - a bullet will sever a wire or two requiring you to splice or replace them, but a PPG will melt all of the wires in the area into each other, requiring more work to fix and probably more spare wire than you carry, and a bullet will kill a device that it hits directly, but a PPG will mess up any temperature-sensitive device that it hits near. Bullet damage to internal walls and panels would be a single small hole that you can patch over or fill in and cover up pretty quickly and easily (especially if you only care about a functional fix), PPG damage is going to leave larger, irregular holes, melting, and scorch marks, so you're more likely to have to replace an entire piece instead of just patching. Civilian ships might be thin skinned enough for a bullet to penetrate, but that is pretty risky when they're going into high-traffic areas - random bits of debris in the area will have a regular velocity that gives them more energy hitting the ship than a pistol bullet, so I think you'd want a stronger hull. Military ships are definitely armored way past what small arms can do, we see ships shrug off much more damaging attacks from ship weapons. If military ships were vulnerable to pistol bullets, you could do things like put a bunch of little rocks into containers on a starfury, fly at a ship, then open the containers once you'd in the ship's direction and brake slightly, which would then have a bunch of potential hull penetrators that you can't really track or intercept. Babylon 5 itself is armored like a military ship, and most of the volume has several levels before even getting to the outer hull. Except for the front and back ends of the cylinder the outer hull is the floor, and I'm pretty sure the floors have a 'working floor' that people walk on with space below for wires, pipes, and ventilation to run, so you're not even directly touching the hull. My head cannon is that people say that kind of thing in-universe because it's a popular urban legend, like the military legend that you can't legally target a soldier with a .50 caliber machine gun, you have to say you're targeting their belt buckle since it's an anti-equipment gun. Same with things like Garibaldi saying that spacing is a slow, painful death where you spend five minutes helplessly suffocating - being exposed to vacuum actually knocks you unconscious within 30 seconds, and there isn't a suffocating feeling because there's no CO2 buildup to trigger that.
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Jul 16, 2023 19:51
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Narsham posted:Surely the projectile weapon issue isn’t about what a single bullet does to the hull? Think about the kinds of fire we see from PPGs in “The Long Dark” or “Falling towards Apotheosis.” We’re talking hundreds or thousands of shots hitting the hull in a relatively confined area. As I pointed out, bullets aren't even going to penetrate B5's hull - if it was going to penetrate the hull, the debris from destroyed fighters too small to even see on camera would leave giant gaping holes in the station, and we don't see that effect from battle damage during the series. So that kind of fire with firearms instead of PPGs wouldn't actually be a problem for the B5. Even if we assume civilian vessels are thin-skinned enough that a bullet will penetrate the hull, why would a military base their armament decisions for space and land combat on what might happen in extremely unusual boarding actions? Your two example fights involve a well-armed space station fighting a First One level opponent, not something the Earthforce Alliance has ever had happen before (or expected to happen). quote:As for whether PPG would do more damage: we don’t know how PPGs work exactly, nor what B5’s hull is made of. The fact that they usually only leave a small fire (which we see plenty of times) is a special effects issue, not a 'real' property of PPGs. We see that a single shot causes cause deep enough burns on a human body to do organ damage (not just surface trauma), and that amount of is clearly enough to set common materials on fire, melt things like insulation and non-hardened packaging, and otherwise cause a host of problems in a confined environment.
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Jul 17, 2023 05:24
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Narsham posted:To repeat, even if B5's outer hull is heavily armored, there's a large number of INTERIOR walls with are not going to be thick-skinned. The comment I responded to was "There's definitely a reason why projectile weapons are not used in space - they could puncture the outer hull," and the relevant JMS statements that I've seen (but can't find in a quick search) are also about breaching the hull. A concern about INTERIOR walls is not a concern about the HULL. Further, I just watched that episode today, and the INTERIOR walls in that particular scene look quite thick-skinned to me. They look like bulkheads and solid structural walls rather than light 'drywall-like' walls that we see in other places, something that would stop a bullet quite handily. Also I explicitly mentioned weapons effects on INTERIOR walls, though with the context of real material properties. quote:The dark servant in "The Long Dark" is no more a First One than a Drahk or a telepath. I never claimed that it was a First One, I deliberately chose the phrase "First One level opponent". JMS describes it as "Shadow servant. Soldier of darkness. Not a shadow, but a good, close friend of same." I think calling something that the Shadows use as infantry forces a "First One level threat" is completely reasonable in the context of the show. quote:The evidence we have is what is on screen and what JMS says. That's all we have. PPGs do not exist, and have no "real" properties whatsoever. The thrusters on a White Star move it at the speed of plot. And so on. If you want to discuss what you imagine to be "real" in the B5 universe while ignoring both the creator and the available evidence on-screen, then I guess have fun with that, but there's no point in having a discussion with you about it at that stage. We also have all of real world physics available to us. But you're correct, if you don't want to involve any real physical properties related to human bodies, ship hulls, internal walls, heat, or the like in the discussion of PPGs, then the discussion is pointless. I don't choose to treat the series as completely divorced from all real world physics, especially since it goes out of its way to include things like Newtonian motion for non-grav-drive ships, but that's certainly a reasonable way to approach watching a show, just not one consistent with talking about whether a particular weapon system is reasonable (or better/worse than what could be done in the real world, or anything along those lines). McSpanky posted:Citation needed. The only part we know for sure is armored are the blast shutters they closed over C&C during combat which protected from a disabled fighter collision in "Severed Dreams". Notably, a similar potential collision against the broad side of the station was considered a "shoot it down, screw first contact" emergency previously in "Soul Hunter". Look if you really think that the only part of Babylon 5 is armored strongly enough to withstand a pistol bullet are the blast shutters at C&C and that the inches-thick hull shown when looking at viewports in episodes like the Long Dark would be penetrated by a handgun, I think your baseline of what's reasonable is too far out for a discussion. McSpanky posted:That's not the kind of fidelity that's being discussed here. Pantaloon Pontiff is asserting that the VFX of PPG blasts are not an accurate reflection of their intended function. Anyone who's read even a few pages of the Lurker's Guide would know that's patently absurd. No, I asserted that the special effects of the aftereffects of PPG blasts on background objects are not consistent with other stated and shown properties of PPGs. The shots I'm thinking of use only practical effects (an actual fire burning so that a wall appears to be on fire, or blackened marks around a hole left in clothing by a PPG, for example) and not VFX (which would involve computer aided video to add fire to a scene without fire) as far as I am aware. Special effects of background damage often receive less attention than foreground, and practical effects of fires burning often use a small, controlled fire because it's much easier to set up and film near than it would be to film with a larger fire or one that's actually burning up the materials that make up a set. I don't believe that effects, especially minor background effects, generally reflect the exact properties of events that happen in a movie or TV show, effects are often limited by artistic, economic, and practical decisions. For a similar case, in The War Prayer we see the Minbari poet get stabbed, but there isn't much blood compared to what a human would bleed in that situation. It would be possible to argue that this indicates that Minbari have more advanced clotting than humans based on that... but in Shadow Dancing, Dr. Franklin also gets stabbed and also doesn't bleed as much as a real human would. So my conclusion would be that the special effects (not VFX in either case) are just following the usual TV and Movie practice of using a small amount of fake blood to indicate bleeding, rather than a more realistic amount that would also draw focus away from the actors and be harder to work with on-set. You could of course argue that knives in Babylon 5 simply don't cause as much bleeding when someone is stabbed as the knives we use in real life, and like Narsham stick to only on-screen evidence without involving real world factors, but I don't do that and don't think it's a really useful position to take. There's also the problem that the special effects do support the idea that PPGs start fires and we don't see the fires left unattended for very long, so I'm not even sure why anyone would argue against my belief that PPGs can start fires and melt insulation, but this is the internet.
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Jul 21, 2023 03:59
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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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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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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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Chevy Slyme posted:Such a missed opportunity to make the bad half of Gray 17 is Missing have any significance whatsoever. Oh yeah, that would be a good place to throw it in. That was probably banging around in the back of my head but I didn't think of the connection when I posted. Jedit posted:He could kill a few Shadows, but the Shadows are a hive mind and it would be like killing two ants in the whole hill. They didn't ask Sheridan to hand over his gun because they were worried he'd use it; they did it because he would have been suspicious if they hadn't asked him. I don't recall anything in the series implying that the shadows have a hive mind at all, I've seen it in fan theories but AFAIK is unsupported in the main story beyond shadows looking somewhat ant-like. There's evidence that Vorlons have a degree of collective consciousness, but even they are still independent, they can just communicate and share memories. A hive mind doesn't fit with their philosophy at all like you said, and while we don't see shadows operate very often we do see that their ships operating alone can't tap into any kind of collective consciousness which seems a point against that. They do have the contradiction of wanting their servants to move in lockstep, so put humans into mind-bending spaceships and put keepers on important figures both of which force them to obey orders. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 03:52
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Narsham posted:Honestly, it’s easy in the streaming era to forget the challenges in B5’s time. Z’ha’dum already involves three scenes to establish the undetectable nukes Sheridan takes with him. You either add two additional scenes (cutting what?) to establish his undetectable gun—which would really spoil the plan—or you establish it in a prior episode which might have aired two weeks or three months ago, meaning you need a “previously on” opening to re-establish it, which ruins the pacing at the start of the episode. I noticed this during my original viewing during the VHS and airwaves era, it's got nothing to do with streaming. You don't need to add any additional scenes, just have him secure the alternate weapon instead of the PPG. A firearm doesn't really need to be established beforehand, but you could do so in Grey 17 is missing and turn that half of the episode into an arc-relevant story instead of pure filler. A high tech undetectable weapon would be established in a previous episode, but here you'd just show it instead of the PPG. You don't need a 'previously on' to show a character using something that's been around from an earlier episode, they didn't do one when Marcus killed himself with the alien healing device. I don't see how the pacing or tension would change if you swap one prop gun for a different one in the exact same scenes, but it covers the issue of 'why don't the Shadows have a simple security device that b5 does when they're much more advanced'. quote:Why doesn’t Ulkesh detect Kosh inside Sheridan? Why didn’t Clark have more infiltrators (or bombs) on B5? If you want to, you can poke holes in any work of fiction. Kosh didn't want Ulkesh to detect him, so he hid from Ulkesh. That's a really easy one. Clark didn't have more infiltrators or bombs on B5 because he was focused on Earth and expected Sheridan to remain loyal, so didn't waste effort pre-positioning lots of resources on B5. That Sheridan's record would lead Clark to expect him to be loyal is explicitly established early on when Sheridan takes command. EDIT: Also Clark had a reasonable contingency plan in place to seize Babylon 5 if Sheridan wasn't loyal, it was only the Minbari intervening to protect Starkiller Sheridan from Clark's ships that let it work, and that only happened because of Delenn's personal intervention. None of those is really similar to 'we see that Babylon 5 has the technology to easily spot energy weapons on anyone boarding, why don't the Shadows do the same on their home base'. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 07:51
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Jedit posted:@Narsham - the Shadows probably weren't worried about Sheridan shooting himself, considering they were going to kill him if he didn't accept their offer. I didn't get the impression that they were going to kill him, I always thought their backup plan was to make him a puppet - Justin talking about the Shadow ship 'pilots' said something like "They do as they're told. And so will you." though I can't find the exact quote right now. I think their plan was to either hit him with something similar to what they use on the Shadow ship pilots or put a keeper on him and use the now-controlled version of him to subvert the alliance. Killing him would probably make him a martyr for everyone to rally around, but having him come back and appear OK but start inciting tensions between different factions, then break the Alliance at a key moment would give them a victory. It makes sense that he'd be able to get away if they wanted to take him alive - killing him would be quick and easy (whether he has a PPG or not), but they if they want to use him they would rather take him into custody. They wouldn't really be worried about him escaping since they cut off access to his only ship and he's alone, so take their time trying to get ahold of him without majorly damaging him. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 15:24
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Jedit posted:Justin says it when Sheridan asks. He also says that if they do kill him someone else will take his place. But Justin says a lot of things, and he's evasive. When the Shadows come in after Sheridan refuses their offer, maybe they're going to drag him away, but it doesn't look like it. And "Anna" is still desperate to get him to change his mind, which wouldn't matter if the Shadows planned to change it for him. If they aren't trying to take him into custody, why not just come in guns blazing or immediately return fire with their advanced weapons when he shoots? Their weapons are superior to human PPGs by a good margin (compare how quickly Kosh went down to shadow weapons vs Ulkesh to human weapons) and he's not armored, so he should just die. Sheridan being able to escape doesn't really make sense if they just want him dead, but if they want to capture him and think they have him cornered they can just take their time and wear him out. This is a place where the 'no stun settings' philosophy JMS has comes in handy, if they did have a stun setting for weapons there wouldn't be any tension here, and no reason for him to be injured but mobile at the balcony scene. NewAnna's job is pretty clearly to get him to change his mind, and the Shadows probably don't reward failure. I think she's a reconstructed personality sort of like but not actually the same as Original Recipe Anna, Sheridan points out that she's not the same. Like Lemniscate Blue said, if she fails NewAnna is going to become Generic Ship Component Anna again, which is either effectively death (they couldn't revive Original Recipe Anna) or extremely unpleasant.
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Nov 16, 2023 16:38
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Jedit posted:Did they use weapons to kill Kosh? I thought the Shadows simply tore him apart without him fighting back. "Without him fighting back" isn't said anywhere, and the amount of time that it takes them and the fact that Kosh is struggling to speak during the fight implies some level of resistance. While the fight between Kosh and the Shadows isn't explicitly shown, there is an energy surge and burnt pieces of armor. Servants of the shadows are shown using advanced weapons. Ulkesh is shown shrugging off human PPG fire. Whatever the shadows did to Kosh is significantly stronger than the fire human PPGs can dish out. If your theory is that Shadows don't have the weapons their subject races use and only tear things apart with their bare legs, which are more powerful than the weapons B5 security can muster, but also can be stopped by a human PPG when moving in to use those legs but not by anything a Vorlon can do, I think you're getting into silly theory territory. quote:Any road up: I'll cede the point that the Shadows didn't want to kill Sheridan. But I won't call them stupid for not searching him for a backup gun which ultimately did no more than buy him a few seconds, if that. Their real mistake was letting him keep his link. They didn't need to *search* him, they just needed to *scan* him, like Babylon 5 is shown to casually do to everyone who boards the station. If they don't care that he has a gun, then there is no reason to take his PPG and hand it to Morden. If they do care, then they should do the thing that much-lower-tech Babylon 5 does to all visitors without difficulty. This isn't a case of 'they didn't do a thing no one is ever shown to do', this is a case of 'they didn't do something that's shown to be routine for lower-tech people and would make a lot of sense to do here'. Letting him keep his link is explained in the Technomage trilogy, the planets defenses should have cut off the link, but they were down during the critical time because of issues with the being who's brain is forced to control the defenses.
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Nov 16, 2023 21:21
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Narsham posted:You'd also have to add Sheridan getting scanned. Which he isn't. No weapon he could conceal on his person concerns the Shadows, or they're being arrogant (we saw plenty of that with Kosh). Your change complicates a story to plug a problem that bothers you personally. So your idea is that they're exactly concerned enough to take the PPG he openly carries away from him, but not worried if he actually has one in his possession. That seems like a weirdly calibrated level of concern vs unconcern to me. If they were just arrogant and unconcerned, they'd let him carry whatever gun. If they are concerned, they could take a simple security precaution that doesn't even need to be shown onscreen. It seems to me they'd either want him unarmed or not care if he's armed, not care just enough to take the obvious gun away but not enough to do a simple scan we've seen can be done quickly and unobtrusively with less tech than they have. I'm not sure how Sheridan using a different holdout gun than he did would complicate the story, since you can have all of the scenes play out the same way, just with a different prop. It's possible JMS could add dialogue if he wanted to, but visual storytelling works fine and 'why did Sheridan bring a firearm instead of a PPG' would be one of those things people would discuss endlessly on newsgroups. It also makes Sheridan look smart, since he'd be using his wits to defeat a superior opponent instead of just lucking into the Shadows having the precisely calibrated mixture of concern and arrogance needed for him to get the second PPG in. And if you use a firearm and put mention of Sheridan acquiring one into an earlier epsisode, you turn the Grey 17 is Missing's monster-of-the-week bit into an arc episode which is a huge plus I hadn't even thought of before posting here. Sounds like a lot of plusses with no actual downside to me. quote:Given that Sheridan straps a hold-out PPG to his leg, why don't you just assume it is shielded from detection as-is, if you don't need a line of dialogue to establish that? Because it's never been established that human PPGs can be made to be shielded from detection like that (much less shielded from whatever shadow tech can do) or that there are any on Babylon 5. The only ones we've seen bypass scanners IIRC are ones that are hidden in shielded containers, enter the station in a way that bypasses scanners, or are non-PPG-looking components with the power source seperate that can be assembled later (Londo's gun in his quarters). If it were easy to shield a human-level PPG ready for use and concealed on the person, it begs the question of why no one uses one in the many, many situations where such a thing would be useful.
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Nov 18, 2023 03:32
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I said come in! posted:How come Babylon 5 only has a handful of windows? Brown sector with the poors get windows to peak out of, but the ambassadors do not. The majority of the internal space just doesn't have any walls that border the outside. The station rotates for gravity, so the 'ground' level which is also down below, is the outermost level. You can have windows to space in the floor there, but not windows in the wall. Lower decks would take the longest to get from one area along the station's length to another, since you'd have to take an elevator all the way to the center, then take the tram to cover the length, then another elevator, so even without the 'down below' political stuff I think they'd be less wanted by an ambassador. The only area where you can have windows into space that aren't in the floor are in rooms at the ends of Babylon 5, and that's where the bridge and the observation deck room are. Those are only a small percentage of the station, so tend to be public or station-function spaces rather than private quarters. I'm also not sure that an ambassador would want to be in the end of the station nearest where ships dock and where the bridge comes under fire in the event of combat, it seems like the most dangerous end to be at. EDIT: Thinking about it, there really isn't a good reason for the down below windows other than JMS wanting to have a shot that shows them. Putting windows all around the hull would be more difficult, expensive, and time consuming than making a solid hull, so I'd expect the budget-limited Babylon 5 would put them there since they don't seem useful and aren't being used for 'make this a premium room'. It wouldn't feel as much like a space station without those shots so I like that they're there. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 3, 2023 22:00
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CainFortea posted:Man, I'm really glad we got what we got instead of this. I know people can really be into that pulp sci-fi 50s vibe but that aint me. Yeah, I don't think the 'future is 50s' look really works for B5, the '90s in the future' look that they have so much of is part of the charm to me. Also the smooth curves don't fit the 'it's the 5th one, we're not paying a lot for it' feeling - the actual look seems a lot more 'functionally put together' like you'd expect from someone with limited funds than 'smoothed into a cool-looking shape' that would be more extravagant.
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Dec 4, 2023 00:14
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Hmmm... I don't know that much about 90s CGI, but would the sleek, curvy 40s and 50s style ships work well in it? One advantage of the ships having lots of edges is that you have an excuse for some of the limits of CGI at the time. Not sure if it would be better or worse to try a lot of silvery, shiny curves instead of blockier ships with distinct squares of color.
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Dec 4, 2023 02:18
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Yeah, I was thinking of it as a simple cylinder but you definitely have space for windows on the front ends of each mini-cylinder part too. That makes more sense for the observation rooms, which we see a number of times, and means you're not always going to the tip of the station for the 'there's a window here' scene.
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Dec 4, 2023 07:35
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I don't remember that specific guy, but B5 was chock full of what I like to call '1994 JC Penney catalog' fashion; especially the first half of the series. I thought it was nostalgic in a weird sort of way. That's a good label for it. I really like that even if they were being fairly low-budget about it, the show had a definite and distinct look for its future that, even though the particular setup seems unlikely, was something people might wear. Even though at the time the extreme 90s-ness of it was not quite as obvious.
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Feb 1, 2024 21:47
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I'm not really sure what a reboot or reinterpretation would do, Babylon 5 completely told its story with a lot of really solid characters and distinct worldbuilding. It pioneered being an arc-focused show instead of episodic, and pushed against a bunch of tropes common in SF (especially Star Trek) at the time, and it has that 1994 JC Penny catalog in space look and feel. Arc-focused shows are commonplace now, and a reboot would completely lose the element of surprise (there's no chance for 'this Kosh guy... actually doesn't seem like a good guy' realization or 'why did Delenn's head glow around that "What do you want?" dork'). It would be hard to do the look without either just mocking the original or coming off cheesy. Without any of the distinct things that make B5 great, I don't see it's own path to being a great show. I'm also kind of skeptical of JMS doing another show - he did make B5, but he also made the Legends of The Rangers pilot, and I worry that a reboot/revisit/reinterpretation would fall way more into 'fight ships with 3d kung fu' than 'story so good people worry about spoilers three decades after it aired'. B5 feels much more like a singular achievement than part of a pattern of really amazing shows/comics/books/etc to me.
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Feb 3, 2024 17:45
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I think you have a fundamental contradiction. If you're going to retell the story, then you tell the same story without radically altering it, similar to the way people recast and reinterpret Shakespeare plays without changing the lines. But going down paths they didn't go down because actors left means telling a new story, which is a fundamentally different thing than retelling. It's going to be a radically new story if you explore something huge like Sinclair leaving. Also a lot of good things came out of actors leaving, which you'd have to get rid of - General Hague being killed offscreen on his way to meet with Sheridan ratcheted the tension in the Earth civil war arc, which I think actually improved the series over what they would have done if the actor hadn't snubbed B5 for ST. Ivanova's contract dispute leading to her not being in S5 led to Lochley's entire appearance, while there are certainly things to criticize about S5 I think removing Lochley entirely would be a radical change taht wouldn't make things much better. You also have the problem of trying to cast actors to fill roles that were largely great because of the original actor. Someone like Sheridan or Franklin is easy to recast - I like both actors and their performance, but someone else could easily play the commander struggling with how to respond to a corrupt government then leading an alliance, or a doctor struggling with stim addiction and bad medical ethics. But trying to recast Londo and J'kar would likely lead to failure IMO, what makes those two entertaining is a lot of specific things about their performance, and I think it would be really hard to catch that same magic again. Narsham posted:It’s the production paradox: it’d be far better to remake Crusade with better CGI and less network sabotage, or remake Legend of the Rangers without the punchy weapons pod, but nobody is going to spend money to remake a failed show (yes, BSG, but the original show was initially a ratings hit until being counterprogrammed). I think JMS had an easy scapegoat in being able to cry 'network sabotage' about Crusade. I thought crusade had some fundamental issues that can't be blamed on network sabotage(the 'look we have the 4 basic D&D classes represented' schtick made me roll my eyes, for example) and Legend of the Rangers had even more ('why did the organization dedicated to being invisible and gathering information suddenly decide on a no-retreat policy'). Things really came together well for B5, but I think that Crusade and LOTR demonstrate that there's no guarantee that a series will be good just because JMS has a free hand in doing it.
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Feb 5, 2024 00:16
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