|
Thern posted:3. Followed by him coming out in his nightrobe. Somebody got mad pouch that night.
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2017 09:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:58 |
|
|
Baka-nin posted:The Rangers always confused me, and I still don't see how Marcus is supposed to work, he's supposed to be helping run a secret underground network of soldiers and scouts, but he's so loud and flamboyant in mannerism that he sticks out like a sore thumb. I'm pretty sure he's JMS's AD&D character.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2017 23:24
|
|
|
Jedit posted:Well, Vir. Vir gets his in the end.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2017 06:55
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:Everything about Kosh 2 is more intimidating. He's all hard angular lines with two big horns looming over everything. Kosh 1 had this warm, pleasant green and brown tones with a pleasant voice. Kosh 2 is purple and red and his voice sounds like a sneering buzzsaw. Yeah everything about him just blatantly says "don't give a gently caress about your meatbag sensibilities, do as I say or screw". The question is, are most of the Vorlons like Kosh 1 or Kosh 2? I'm guessing 2.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2017 18:21
|
|
|
Crusade is freaking high art compared to Legend of the Rangers, and you don't even have to get to the loltastic weapon system for that.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2017 09:14
|
|
|
Dirty posted:Yeah, I remember seeing that in flashback and thinking "I don't remember that". Months later, Channel 4 aired The Gathering and I finally understood it. Although to be honest, it wasn't that confusing anyway, since the flashback was reinforcing what Sinclair was remembering at that point anyway, and I never thought about it again until I saw The Gathering. It's great reading all of JMS's Usement posts about the poisoning thing. They all make enough fridge-logic sense but also betray a pretty strong reluctance to just straight admit when an idea might not have been that great.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2017 18:58
|
|
|
shadok posted:This one is still in, though (I think): Maybe I'm dumb but I don't know what the gag is here.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2017 23:43
|
|
|
Oh, I thought that orange circle on the diagram was someone's Paint drawing highlighting a visual gag 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2017 23:54
|
|
|
ConfusedUs posted:SeaQuest was my jam even if it was hokey as gently caress SeaQuest was the best when it was hokey as gently caress but totally earnest near-future sea exploration fun. When they kicked the scifi into turbo overload with space aliens and psychics and poo poo it just started getting absurd. Then the third season tried remaking it into the 90s version of a serious business hard-men-making-hard-choices show but, it was the 90s version of that so it was just boring (despite perennial badass Michael Ironside anchoring the effort) and the boat sank for good. hope and vaseline posted:The first season was passable near-future sci-fi, with basically Roddenberry's treatment of the Vulcan's first contact with earth. Then it went... so far off the rails after that. But I still kept watching to the very strange end. Same thing with Andromeda, it was a decent enough low-budget stab at that "Starfleet ship gets thrown into the far future where the Federation is gone and chaos reigns" idea with all the franchise serial numbers filed off, then Sorbo got increasing creative control and it morphed into Space Hercules. And both of those shows had especially terrible final seasons where they ditched nearly all remaining traces of the original premises to take complete left turns into  land.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2017 17:32
|
|
|
Narsham posted:Short version: B5W is to Star Fleet Battles as B5 is to Star Trek. In that case it's really, really too bad there was no B5C.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2017 05:08
|
|
|
Jedit posted:Because it was. Robin Atkin Downes was in nine episodes, although not all of them as Byron. He later went on to become the voice of the Medic in Team Fortress 2, that rights a lot of wrongs to me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2018 01:52
|
|
|
Rebo, zoot zoot!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2018 19:38
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I think the Pakmara got only one episode where anything about their species and culture got described, but I swear, that little tentacle-face was everywhere. One of the most impressive alien designs too. Was that the one where the Pak'ma'ra was in the medbay describing what they eat to Dr. Franklin and Garibaldi is like "hey, wanna know what they say humans taste like?"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2018 22:13
|
|
|
That's not enough to make up for Grounded.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2018 11:36
|
|
|
If you can't handle Babylon 5 at its worst you don't deserve it at its best 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2018 03:16
|
|
|
hope and vaseline posted:You gonna watch Legend of the Rangers now? LOTR (I just realized that abbreviation can't be a coincidence, ugh) is the only B5 thing I saw on TV when it was originally broadcast instead of in reruns. I've paid a heavy price for this wisdom.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2018 13:10
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:It also makes the universe seem a lot smaller, by having half the main cast know eachother a decade earlier Prequels and revivals just can't resist this stuff. Fictional setting spanning the galaxy? Ten people controlled the destiny of the universe from high school to retirement (and probably beyond).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2018 20:26
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:I've been rewatching it too, and I've actually come to love any scene involving Kai Winn. Every word she speaks has some underhanded inference behind it, and just about everyone else can still talk circles around her because they're not taking any of her poo poo. Looking back on it, Winn is the personification of *~decorum~*
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2018 04:52
|
|
|
It's always worth remembering that Babylon 5 was the backup plan made from spare parts and last-ditch funding drives, Babylon 4 was the Cadillac of space stations with dual contra-rotating habitat cylinders that probably had room to spare for live cattle and private gardens and all those bells and whistles.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2018 09:57
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:I thought that was more "Daddy's gone and we're playing with his guns"? That was the former Shadow thralls in the present, like the Drakh using the last Shadow planetkiller and then the plague on Earth. (Presumably some unchained Vorlon allies would've gotten into the mix sooner or later also.) The worlds the Excalibur was researching were victims of previous First Ones war cycles.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2018 07:21
|
|
|
I said come in! posted:I forgot how hosed up the Narn homeworld invasion episode is. You really lose a lot of respect for Lando with that one. I love that speech G'Kar gives so much, part of it was in the commercials SciFi used to run for their B5 rerun block that first drew my attention to the series.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2018 08:10
|
|
|
Snow White and The Seven Narns
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2018 16:57
|
|
|
I said come in! posted:The 90s were hosed up. Marcus and Lennier: proto-incels or incel precursors?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2018 06:15
|
|
|
For the longest time I was convinced that "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" was intentionally written as a potential series finale in case the show wasn't picked up for season 5, it's such a perfect capstone to the whole saga while leaving the particulars of the immediate postwar plot open to speculation.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2018 00:21
|
|
|
Vavrek posted:Could someone adept with image editing give Billy Dee Williams a giant hair-crest? TIA. We never saw any black Centauri, did we? I'm imagining a peacock-sized jheri curl and it's stupendous
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2018 04:28
|
|
|
Stabbey_the_Clown posted:It's not meant to be a non-lethal weapon, the only reason they don't use bullets is because they don't want to accidentally puncture the hull. It's not an energy weapon. It fires little blobs of super-heated helium plasma. I guess it depends on whether you think something can only be an energy weapon if it directly transmits EM radiation/radioactive particles to the target, or if a contact transmission medium is acceptable. Is a stun gun an energy weapon? What about a taser? Would a super powerful hair dryer count, or only if it was a Martian heat ray and the hot air blast was incidental?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2018 22:33
|
|
|
Kurr de la Cruz posted:Wait.. so Holo-Giribaldi kicked off World War IV or whatever??? Fuckin lollll Yeah it's pretty great. He gets just a little too much processing power or whatever from the simulation, becomes self-aware and hacks the Big Brother commeinazis so their enemies know what's going on and the space nukes fly. 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2018 00:45
|
|
|
wizzardstaff posted:Best setting element: the giant bar table shaped like a 5 in the pilot. They really lean into the whole 55555 iconography all over the station. Which, you know, if the previous four stations all met horrible ends, maybe you shouldn't be constantly reminding everyone of that fact? It's got to be horrible for workplace morale. Babylon 5's construction was funded in large part by a licensing deal with Daft Punk.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2018 22:06
|
|
|
MrL_JaKiri posted:Well, that's not quite true. There are plenty of potential hooks that never really get followed up on. And even then it still got followed up on, after a fashion -- IIRC Bester had her dissected after her sleeper personality activated to try and figure out what Ironheart did to her. e: keyboard shortcuts 
McSpanky fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Oct 28, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2018 23:24
|
|
|
Milkfred E. Moore posted:I don't think so. I think it's more that the distinction in Minbari society so often lies between the Religious and Warrior castes and they tend to be opposed in most things. Because of this, it doesn't ever leave the Worker caste anywhere to fit. We don't ever meet a Minbari from the Workers, as far as I'm aware. There is that aspect of give the power to the people who actually run society and so on but I feel it's undermined by the fact that the Workers aren't so much invisible as just not in the text. It also doesn't help that Minbari society is unclear and, I think, sometimes contradictory. I think they meant intentional on JMS' part as a worldbuilding/plotting measure, not an in-universe thing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2018 16:32
|
|
|
Clearly the Worker cast trim their headbones tastefully on the upper ridge to show they can get along with the squares but let the bottom grow wild like a Styracosaurus spike frill cuz nobody cages the beast within. Piety up top, party down the back 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2018 21:36
|
|
|
Vavrek posted:We've had this conversation before! It's all there, in the earlier pages of this thread. Besides, The Gathering has all kinds of amazing, inane stuff that needs to be seen to be believed, like the 90s drugs PSA opener, hermaphrodite extra-pointy Delenn or the giant dustbuster PPG cannons. And you'd be amazed what a difference a year makes for the CGI quality, it will make you appreciate the graphics come season 1.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2018 06:01
|
|
|
Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Oh yeah...I remember that, but I haven't watched that since I was a teenager. I remember liking it, but is that youthful nostalgia or does it hold up? At this point it's just a hodge-podge of mish-mashed plots in my mind, because nearly every story beat of that show has been iterated/eaten up by other post-apocs since then... I've been rewatching the series on Amazon since the digital broadcast channel Comet started a rerun cycle and I couldn't catch every episode, he just passed where they are now. I believe they aired "GROPOS" yesterday. Grand Fromage posted:The station is in Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years from Earth. The area of the galaxy B5 takes place in is fairly small, hyperspace travel is FTL but not crazy fast like a lot of other scifi. I believe in the first season the Narn homeworld was stated to be 12 lightyears from Epsilon Eridani and B5 is implied to be approximately equidistant between the major powers so yeah, it's a small galaxy after all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 00:35
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Then again there are other episodes that suggest the show takes place across the entire Milky Way. Like all TV scifi series, it's not entirely consistent about space geography, even with as much planning as there was behind B5. I think this is actually pretty consistent and a combination of two known quantities in the series. One is the jump gate beacons that allow hyperspace navigation; when someone finds a beacon from an ancient/undiscovered gate they essentially get a DS9-style wormhole to a previously inaccessible area of the galaxy, but unlike that show there isn't another FTL method to explore around after popping out of it. Those huge explorer ships then use those to expand the jumpgate network manually by surveying around distant gates and building more in the region. The second is political allegory; later in the series there's a lot of talk of "dividing up the galaxy" and such and to me it reads a lot like colonialism in the Age of Sail, or America making the Louisiana Purchase -- people broadly know where things are on a map and they can draw lines divvying up this or that territory in negotiations or war spoils, but whether anyone's actually been there and staked a defensible claim is another story. E: "DS9-style" is overstating it, probably a couple dozen lightyears beyond well-explored space at the most. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Nov 8, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 02:33
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Well if you're going to have a hyperspace dimension, you might as well make it weird and crazy instead of just normal space but fast. Yeah hyperspace is clearly more complex than just an x:1 compression of distance correlative to normal space, or else it'd be trivially easy to calculate routes through it and it wouldn't be so dangerous to travel without gates and beacons for reference. They talk about gravitational curves and other  stuff so there's some non-euclidian poo poo going on.And no matter how broadly the galaxy is settled, Londo chopping off an entire spiral arm for the Centauri on that holographic map was wildly optimistic, Shadow backing or not.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 03:07
|
|
|
Narsham posted:If it's the scene I'm thinking of, then it makes sense Morden would be using a map that shows more stuff than all the active races are aware of. And if memory serves, they're dividing the galaxy up, which isn't quite the same thing as claiming that all of territory is inhabited or occupied right then and there. This is what I was trying to get across before, sorry if I wasn't being more clear.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 03:42
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Just because DS9 had good writers who were able to add original work doesn't mean the premise and much of the background wasn't stolen from the series book brought in by JMS before the whole thing was conceived. The problem is, this is completely at odds with how everyone who worked in the production of DS9 interacted with the studio and what they had to do to make the show happen. JMS' theory about someone at Paramount reading his treatment and then passing people at DS9 certain notes and ideas from "somewhere" is the perspective of every person with a brilliant idea who finds out someone else beat them to the punch and can't let it go. Nobody wants to admit when they're simply second across the finish line, especially on something they've been pouring their heart and soul into, and it's easier to believe a conspiracy than to accept a coincidence. Hazborgufen posted:Oh, I was just going to call that one off because at the end of the episode when she's in casual clothes and Marcus comes in to show her an organizational chart she was wearing two dangling earrings. And just to prove I'm really in a spoilsport mood: Walter Koenig came up with Bester's crippled hand himself, he just thought it'd be interesting that someone with so much mental power would also have an obvious physical weakness. McSpanky fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Nov 9, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2018 16:20
|
|
|
Tsaedje posted:Babylons 1-4 span in both directions. Now what went into deciding which colours they were, that might be interesting. Assuming they did it in rainbow order (reasonable), then if the first station was completed as planned all that red theme lighting would've been hideous. Then again, the Narns would've felt right at home. Grand Fromage posted:There aren't counter-rotating sections on B5 or Omegas but I imagine the non-rotating part of B5 has stationkeeping thrusters or something. Right, B5 doesn't need a counter-rotating section since it's stationary (though the bigger 1-4 designs had it so they could indeed maneuver unassisted) and the Omega rotating portion doesn't seem to spin very fast so it doesn't generate an unmanageable amount of momentum. The main reason a modern spaceship design would need a counterweight in opposing rotation is because we can't build something both large enough and strong enough to handle the torque of a habitable flying gyroscope without tearing itself apart as soon as it had to vector off-axis. The B5 setting can write this problem off with scifi superscience, the Omegas are just gosh-darn  enough to deal with it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2018 04:40
|
|
|
I kinda want a comic book version of the preproduction plan for Babylon 5, like that one that was made out of the original pre-cleaned-up version of the Star Wars script.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2018 19:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:58 |
|
|
Platonicsolid posted:Which sort of begs the question why the Vorlons would care about Talia personally. Or would Kosh do it just for giggles? I thought that had something to do with Ironheart's "gift" and Kosh's interest in the development of the younger races, like he was making a backup of her to compare to later stages of human psionic evolution or something, but of course that all got flushed with her character.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2018 10:54
|
|