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MrL_JaKiri posted:Sort of. Originally, according to JMS on usenet at the time, the plan was to finish with what became episode 18, Intersections in Real Time - 3 to go, not including Sleeping in Light (shot with S4, with Deconstruction shot with S5 which is why it doesn't have Claudia Christian but SiL does). Now quite a lot happens in those three episodes, but if anyone thinks that the content in those episodes was sufficient to stretch out into the plot of an entire (or half a season)... man, they don't know what filler means. In another one of those long after the fact things, in the script book series JMS put out he basically chalked up the season 5 problems to him being overloaded and burned out, and some of the things contributing was having to fight behind the scenes battles over things like budget cuts to even get the season go-ahead despite it already being as minimalist as possible (iirc he said episode budgets were 900k per episode, versus Deep Space Nine at the time being about 2mil), Claudia Christian pulling the rug out at the last moment by walking with almost no warning after saying she was staying, and through a mishap of his own losing almost all of his season 5 episode outlines and planning notes. So he had to hammer out a lot of scripts in a much shorter time than usual, with less planning and direction than any previous season had, improvising around Ivanova being gone, and having to start writing the Lochley character before having any idea what kind of actress they could get for her just a few weeks out from filming beginning. It was probably dramatized a bit for story telling purposes but it really did sound like what lead into that final season was a world of poo poo and the season 4 acceleration didn't really plan that large a factor in comparison.
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Sep 21, 2016 16:06
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If Warners would just let go of it, I'd take a 4:3 upgraded release in a heartbeat. The 16:9 version was a nice idea but at this point it's just a novelty, one that actually harms to experience with what they had to do to the FX to fit with it.
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Nov 19, 2018 11:08
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At the time of the season 4 incident where Earth ships are started to engage White Stars and can detect and lock onto them with ease, Earth had been working with the Shadows for a considerable amount of time - if they hadn't already figured out Minbari stealth technology on their own before then, I always assumed the Shadows would have quietly handed over the ability to do it. Earth wouldn't have been the most effective agent of chaos for the Shadows if they still couldn't fight what would be one of their primary enemies in an everyone for themselves meat grinder war.
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Dec 11, 2018 23:26
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He probably has because there's 17 seasons of Stargate tv series plus a handful of movies and they stubbornly managed to make it so that the world is utterly unchanged by anything that has taken place or anything humans have obtained in their travels offworld, a situation bordering on ludicrous considering humanity as of the last Stargate stuff made is that of the sole galactic superpower, possessors of the accumulated knowledge and technology of two extinct ancient races, and a gigantic city-starship is parked in the San Francisco Bay. All within 10-15 years of humans stepping foot off the planet for the first time.
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Jan 19, 2019 14:19
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Even if JMS's explanations of the CG stuff aren't accurate I'm not sure why this guy is so offended by it and I can't say it improves my view of him that he seems to have yanked all those nice HD rerenders off Youtube in response.
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Aug 6, 2019 01:41
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TraderStav posted:I see that one is coming up for me soon. Good one to play on my Switch through? Grey 17 is possibly the biggest example in the whole series of A and B plots feeling like they're from two entirely different episodes The A plot is extremely lame and a mistake that just somehow didn't get spiked before making it to production, it's poor reputation is absolutely earned. The B plot on the other hand is both good, and important for things going forward.
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Oct 18, 2019 03:37
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Why did they do that, anyway? That seems like such a weird promise to make in the first place. They wanted to be sincere about them being a very limited edition thing, plus to get the special 15th volume you did have to put down a not small amount of money up front I don't have crazy collector brain so it really wouldn't have upset me that much if they'd gone back on it, there's a lot of great behind the scenes stuff in them that I don't really think should be mostly inaccessible but I understand people who care.
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Nov 12, 2019 02:00
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Angry Salami posted:Of course, it would be entirely in-character if the Minbari still haven't cleared up that miscommunication, and ten years after the war, humans still don't know why first contact went so horribly wrong... Not to mention that any survivors from the war and the Battle of the Line likely learned an extremely different meaning for "Minbari warship with open gunports", and it wouldn't be that they were sending a polite greeting.
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Mar 23, 2020 13:35
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It's not entirely fair to say the original treatment was binned - despite the very large deviations, parts of it exist right to the very end of the series and many things are still based on it. It's just that JMS definitely operated on the Obi-wan Kenobi theory of "what I said was true, from a certain point of view" as to what that actually meant over the years. As the most obvious example, Sheridan is a combination of elements from the original treatment's Sinclair (eg, the shortening of his lifespan from the events at Z'hadum came from Sinclair's lifespan being greatly reduced by bringing Babylon 4 into the present, Anna Sheridan was a replacement for Catherine Sakai and so on) and his son David (rapid aged into adulthood by the trip on B4) who would have become a major character that would have been the equivalent of Entil'Zha before becoming the founding president of the Interstellar Alliance at the end of the Shadow war - so it's all stuff that was meant to happen in his plan, just not explicitly as some pre-planned Alternate-Sinclair. It's less he had perfect plans for everything and more than he had a pretty solid outline and did a good job of creatively hammering a bunch of square pegs into round holes when things went sideways on him to get it to the destination he always had in mind from the beginning.
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Jun 6, 2020 14:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:It still just feels so skeevy to me that Delenn secretly married Sinclair without his knowledge and then just flipped around and put all those new feelings into Sheridan. In the original plan, Catherine Sakai suffers an extremely traumatic mind wipe (JMS straight up calls it mind rape) that destroys her personality and memories. Given the choice between repeating the process in the hopes of reversing it, which would have been equally as traumatic, Sinclair declines to do so. it's not specified as being Shadow related and there's no Z'ha'dum in the treatment, but it's another one of those things where you can see JMS pulled from ideas he'd laid out and adapted them into something similar. MrL_JaKiri posted:Honestly, "having the entire thing planned out" is too limiting anyway. It's good to have a plan to fall back on, but you should always be open to future-you having better ideas. The ending is probably one of the best examples of that. In the original treatment among other things it ended with Sinclair retiring to self imposed exile alone on an uninhabited world to live out his remaining days. I kind of get what JMS was going for but at the same time Sinclair just choosing to leave Delenn and their son doesn't strike me as something that would have been especially satisfying.
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Jun 7, 2020 08:29
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From how I remember it Medbay was busted up and there were a bunch of unconscious bodies left in his wake, Marcus was pretty laser focused on there being one possible way to save her
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Jun 20, 2020 19:09
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The main things I didn't really buy in the original outline were Earth-Minbari War 2.0 which Earth wins, and Sinclair's end of series fate is a pretty hard whiff compared to either Sinclair or Sheridan's endings in the series proper.
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Jul 12, 2020 03:46
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A View From the Gallery comes out bad because honestly, other than a very small number of exceptions B5 is not a show equipped to be carried on the back of guest stars
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Jul 18, 2020 03:57
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Goast posted:grey 17 Grey 17 has a b-plot that is both pretty good and fairly important
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Jul 23, 2020 07:44
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Someone should probably fire up Severed Dreams and see how it looks since that was stuck with the widescreen version even on that Vudu release
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Nov 18, 2020 05:18
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Off the top of my head I think he wrote one or two reasonably respected things (a Thor run, I think?) but also handed in one of the most reviled Spiderman stories there is, and was in the middle of a dreadful run of Superman before he cut and run leaving it for others to clean up the mess
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Jan 4, 2021 07:04
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Narsham posted:Also, Garibaldi has nothing to do with the JMS/Claudia Christian awkwardness. That was clearly worked through on screen via Lt. Corwin in Exogenesis. 
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Feb 9, 2021 02:40
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VinylonUnderground posted:Is there a series Bible for the future projects? I heard Crusade was supposed to have a twist that would have made it good. The main twist I remember is that the plague would have been cured early in the second season allowing the show to shift towards other things, the biggest being the Excalibur would be declared rogue and forced on the run after discovering that Earth Force was continuing to exploit recovered Shadow technology
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Feb 15, 2021 05:39
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Maxwell Lord posted:I disagree with the idea that everything on a serialized drama has to be meticulously planned from start to finish. The Prisoner worked fine without that. You absolutely don't need to meticulously plan or pre-write the stories in advance, but it's good to have a medium-long term outline that can function as guard rails and keep your story consistent with itself. B5 as it stands bears little similarities with JMS's original Five Year Plan, but the bones of that plan are visible all the way from start to end, so it basically tells the story it set out to tell even if the way it got there changed along the way. There's no point where you brain starts sending warning signals about things being wrong the way a Ron Moore DS9/BSG storytelling style does once you hit things that are just obvious random thought bubbles he had that week or improvisation.
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Mar 4, 2021 04:50
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Honestly the spoilers introduced in the directors cut version of The Gathering are the kind that a new viewer won't understand are spoilers until they reach the things they revealed early happen, 2-3 seasons later
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Mar 19, 2021 18:39
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Midjack posted:I think those are the only two plot consequential things, the rest are stuff like "Privacy Mode' and "Set Your PPG To Force 5" stuff that doesn't really matter. Kosh greets Sinclair as "Entil'zha Valen" is the other one
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Mar 19, 2021 19:17
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The show never explored it further, but back in the day once the malevolence of Kosh's replacement was clear and the Vorlons shown to absolutely not be few in number or lacking power, I assumed that Kosh telling Sheridan there were too few of them to help meant there were too few sympathetic Vorlons like himself
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Apr 24, 2021 11:12
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I think JMS made pretty good of that situation - I never minded Keffer and the way he eventually went out worked
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Sep 27, 2021 07:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:Although I do feel like the way the thing was resolved was a bit haphazard, and I think there are some indications that a lot was changed from whatever the exact original plan for the Shadow War was. The Shadow War and it's resolution is actually the least detailed part of JMS' original outline, and wasn't even meant to be resolved in the Babylon 5 series at all (the original outline was for two series spanning ten years, B5 was to end in a cliffhanger). There was nothing about how it would be resolved other than the final paragraph of the outline basically being "After a final great war, the Shadowmen are defeated, Earth is victorious against the Minbari, Delenn returns to the Grey Council, Sinclair lives out what's left of his life in peaceful exile while their son leads the new Interstellar Alliance"
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Sep 30, 2021 15:04
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I can let stuff like the revised version of The Gathering having Kosh say "Hello, Ranger One Valen" to Sinclair the first time he meets him slide because nobody will know what those words mean for years, but In The Beginning shows way too many cards to be watched first
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Oct 9, 2021 07:18
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Chevy Slyme posted:Why does Kosh call Sheridan disobedient and impudent when he tries to defy the Vorlon plan? They literally send out their designated torturer to beat the poo poo out of Delenn to test her loyalty. and Kosh is apparently the kindest and most benevolent Vorlon around outside of that outburst towards Sheridan, his replacement certainly dispenses with any illusion of standing alongside the younger races and working for their benefit
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Nov 8, 2021 04:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:Do all the B5 novels require that you have seen the whole show beforehand, or are there some you can read earlier while still watching through the show? Of the novels that are considered canon, I think all of them except one take place post-series so you do need to be up to speed, and the one that takes place mid story covers pretty important plot and character beats and would require having seen season 3 to understand everything
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Nov 18, 2021 03:46
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Babylon 4 (and 1-3) weren't built in orbit of Epsilon III the way B5 was - it's why they had to travel to B4 by White Star when it reappeared in the present day
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Jan 11, 2022 11:45
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I think Sheridan does acknowledge that, he needs the White Star fleet but they're seen as his and they're partially crewed/commanded by humans, anything representing any of the races directly is kept out of action
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Mar 9, 2022 03:34
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Zaroff posted:As to the TV series, he’s still adamant it’s coming (apparently there’s someone high up at the CW who is really fighting for it)… The person JMS says has been fighting to make the remake happen is CW CEO Mark Pedowitz, and he's staying as CEO when the Nexstar takeover goes through
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Aug 31, 2022 03:54
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Hell, I think he's still proud of it. You'd think it'd perhaps be something he'd quietly move to the back of the shelf behind everything else he's written given whole the thing with Claudia Christian but welp
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Oct 19, 2022 03:47
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Dirty posted:There's lots of branch points in the series where things could have gone very different in the story, so I guess there's a lot of material there. And that really would be "a love letter to the fans" because that sounds like it would be totally incomprehensible to anyone else. That's the real curse of Babylon 5. There was so much story that continuing it for a new audience is impossible, and catering to the existing one is difficult because that's a very finite, and probably shrinking, number of people. It's one of those things JMS would likely never (and in fairness, probably could not) openly admit anyway, but a part of me wonders if something this left field and seemingly self contained in a way that it's neither a continuation or even really a side story is because it completely steers clear of anything the remake could end up doing
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May 12, 2023 04:53
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Rappaport posted:If there isn't a Corps, how do you keep teeps from becoming (even moreso) bad actors? It's immediately clear what kind of advantage reading minds would give, even if there's technobabble about deep scans or whatever. Is there a way to make a "humane" Corps? Admittedly I haven't read anything secondary like the novels about the Telepath War so I don't know what they had to say about it, but from what little Crusade got into it, things seemed like they were headed in a circular direction - from memory, the Psi Corp was abolished and telepath segregation ended so they could be private citizens or join Earthforce like anyone else, but there was a new telepath oversight body in place (civilian? can't remember) and when they show up in an episode it's as villain of the week abusing their powers and violating boundaries so they're pretty much Psi Cops with a new badge
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Jun 30, 2023 03:03
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I'd preorder but I think I'd want to know first whether they fixed those couple of episodes that had problems like missing footage when the remaster was released to streaming
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Jul 19, 2023 09:32
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Neddy Seagoon posted:I believe they fixed that fairly quick, didn't they? Just searching now it looks like it was a specific streamer problem, HBO and Apple fixed it, Amazon never did
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Jul 19, 2023 14:42
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Rappaport posted:I've been an idiot in this thread before, so I figure I'm not losing any more face by asking what was the copyright Sheridan would've been infringing in that joke scene? He couldn't say time and space together? He was going to say "Lost in Space", as in the old sci-fi show more recently rebooted by Netflix
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Aug 11, 2023 05:19
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An important thing with that whole situation is that the Shadows are treating Sheridan pretty sincerely, they're true believers when it comes to their philosophy and do want him with them rather than against them. There's numerous ways they could have acted more cautiously towards him but their best case scenario that day is him listening to their pitch and being convinced. They don't even have immediate reason for extra caution because for his part Sheridan outwardly appears to be dealing with them in good faith as well, they're caught completely by surprise when he eventually reveals he knows the truth about Anna
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Nov 18, 2023 08:55
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It's Kosh that mentions the Vorlon are few in number, it's his initial excuse for them not intervening personally in the conflict when Sheridan requests help - which turns out to mean few sympathetic Vorlon who actually care about the younger races, not as an entire race because when they take the gloves off and start attacking the Shadows directly, they certainly don't appear to be few in number
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Feb 28, 2024 23:34
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