Review Babylon 5 (1994)

michaellevenson

Member: Rank 8
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Any fans out there?





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A truly great masterpiece of Sci Fi storytelling. Bold, colourful, imaginative, good FX, fast paced episodes. It also has a great collection of characters and treats the aliens as deeply complicated personalities not stereotypical alien tropes.
It's a sweeping saga that spans the galaxy with vast story arcs keeping the viewer on their toes trying to link it all up.
" War Without End" is the high point for me, when Sinclair returns and we learn about the fate of Babylon 4.
The alien races are terrifically realized, The Shadows and Vorlons especially.
Great performances from the cast as well, Jurasik and Katsulas particularly.( hope I've got the names right). A very poignant ending too. The only regret is that season 5 was a disappointment, but that's understandable as it was made after the final episode had been filmed and everyone thought it was over after four seasons. The fifth, originally planned for, then cancelled, so many threads originally destined for season 5 put into season 4, then a change of mind from high up and season 5 resurrected with hastily written new stuff.
My favourite characters; Delenn, Londo Molari, G'kar, and Garibaldi and Sheridan of course.




 
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johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
This is one show I resisted for years due to most people I knew warning me off it! But I started to watch it in the nineties on Sci-Fi and enjoyed it enough to collect the series first on VHS and then DVD! A few years back I discovered that one of my favourite episodes, The Fall of Centauri Prime was missing the teaser at the beginning and found out that the DVDs had been released like that in the day but replacements had been issued and I had to send off my 'faulty' disc to Warners to get the newer version which was all but out of print! I really liked The Drakh as the regular baddies too...
JB
 

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
There are time travel plots that begin in the first season which are concluded with in the fifth but also rear their head in the third! It's a great series apart from the odd clunker that has been fit in to pad out the series!

JB
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Like Gavin, I have never actually seen a single episode of this.

I gather that J Michael Thinamjig went to Paramount first with the idea of a space station where different alien races lived and worked and they said no thanks we are not interested. Then made DEEP SPACE NINE.

Then Michael sold his idea to another studio and the two shows came out at roughly the same time.
 

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
J Michael Thinamjig? Don't you mean J Michael Thingamajig, Doc? HaHaHaHa It's worth a look and some episodes are very good indeed but I too didn't really want to get involved with it but I'm glad I did!

JB
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
Was reading in that LIBERATION book that designer Ken Thornton worked on both the shows BLAKE'S 7 and BABYLON 5.

He says that the ship WHITE STAR - a living organic ship, as it happened - in B5 was a deliberate homage to the LIBERATOR.


B5AG-045a-whitestar.jpg tf_wstar_ObliqueGoodT.jpg
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
I have yet to watch BABYLON 5, but it will be interesting to see the White Star in action now, knowing the above.

The same book also says that JMS kept hoping to get Blake's 7 actors to appear in B5, but it never came to pass.

That would have been so cool.
 

michaellevenson

Member: Rank 8
I have yet to watch BABYLON 5, but it will be interesting to see the White Star in action now, knowing the above.

The same book also says that JMS kept hoping to get Blake's 7 actors to appear in B5, but it never came to pass.

That would have been so cool.
The Liberator homage may have been the organic feel of the interior of the ship, not the outer design.
 

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
That Spider like other ship was actually pretty creepy! And is that a telepathic female crew member I see? :emoji_alien:

I do sometimes wish that these other shows had been a little more explicit in their homages to Blake. The same book says that other shows owing a debt were LEXX and FARSCAPE. And, presumably, FIREFLY.

Whedon wise, the book also claims that the ANGEL episode, "SHE" is a "deliberate retread" of the Blake episode "POWER".




It would have been lovely to have seen more deliberate nods in the space-going shows, such as planet names, actual guest appearances by Blake actors etc.
 

johnnybear

Member: Rank 6
JMS wanted Blake actors to appear in B5? Never heard that one but I did hear about an Outer limits cross over that was intended for Babylon 5 but can't remember if it was a follow up to Demon With A Glass Hand or whether it was another episode! B5 is great, Doc, but it can be a bit of a hard slog with the early shows I must admit but you have to stay in there like the guy who rides the Bull in a rodeo!
JB
 

michaellevenson

Member: Rank 8
Some great scenes put together involving the Shadows. The Shadow ships are wonderfully original, and the build up to see what the Shadows themselves looked like was cleverly done and their appearance on Z'Ha dum didn't disappoint.
 
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