It wasn't until The Coming of Shadows that I realized that Babylon 5 was
perhaps the best SF TV show ever, but I knew that it was something special with
the very first episode.
Daryl
emma...@panix.com wrote:
> I've thought about this off and on over the years - at some point for me
> I realized that Babylon 5 was going to be something exceptional. I know
> that one of the elements I found intriguing in the pilot was the way
> Kosh was presented - it added mystery in a way I found appealing. But
> the real turning point for me had to be in "Mind War" at the very end
> when G'Kar parallels human understanding of the Sigma 957 creatures with
> an ant's understanding of humans. That was the point where Babylon 5 really
> became a story that *appreciated* the mysteries of space, not just a
> story that happened to *be* in space.
>
> I was wondering if others have such turning points - when for you did
> the story become something worth following and telling people about?
>
> emmanuel
That also was one of the (many) things that struck me the first time I
watched B5. The denouement would come, I'd be waiting for the end credits,
then I would look at my watch and realise there was over ten minutes still
to go. After years of watching Star Trek, I was conditioned to expect an
episode to end within a minute or two of the denouement (which never failed
to annoy me). The different pacing was refreshing. Some of the best moments
in B5 episodes are in those quiet moments after the denouement (reflection,
consequences, change)
Kerry
--
Kerry Casey
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
E-mail kca...@bom.gov.au
The way I described B5 to those who hadn't seen it was "Star Trek is
the idealized future we would like. Babylon 5 is the future we are
more likely to get."
Jon
(That does not mean every episode was an individual gem. It means the
series as a whole was better than any other ever.)
Jon
I once got an email from somebody at the Fermi Lab, who saw on a bulletin board
there, "Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
jms
(jms...@aol.com)
B5 Official Fan Club at:
http://www.thestation.com
(all message content (c) 2000 by
synthetic worlds, ltd., permission
to reprint specifically denied to
SFX Magazine)
I really didn't respond all that well to the pilot,
nor to the first couple of episodes, and so I (Dave,
you idiot) stopped watching.
Then I happened to catch "By Any Means Necessary,"
in which a commander of a major military installation
is essentially ordered to be a bastard, and instead
turns the order against his masters to do what is
right, at no small cost to himself.
"Whoa," says I, "A dock worker's strike? Star Fleet
would never allow things to get that far out of hand
and if they did, they would /never/ be that nasty,
and if they were, they would realize they were wrong,
and reconcile with The Captain, and we'd never, EVER,
hear about it again.
"This, though...This is going to cost Sinclair. This
CANNOT be fixed with the Reset Button. This show has
TEETH. Maybe I should start watching again...."
So I caught maybe every third or fourth show for
the rest of the season, and although I was intrigued,
I didn't like the acting or the dialog, and the CGI
was kinda cheezy, and so I (Dave, you idiot) didn't
invest enough time to get a sense of the arc.
Then, early in the second season, I think, there
was a scene in a garden, and I said, "Hmm, this
space station must be kind of big." And at the end
of the scene, the camera pulled up, and up, and up,
so you could see that the garden was in the middle
of a huge grassy field, with, by the Lord Harry,
dirt trails cutting through it. "Dirt trails on
a space station? I don't think there's any dirt
anywhere in the entire trekiverse!"
That was when I /knew/. I knew the station was big,
the B5 universe was big, the story was big; I knew
the people making this show understood they were
creating a universe, they cared about that universe
and the people in it, and they were doing their
damnedest to make it as real as they could with what
they had, and they were getting better at it as they
went along.
I never looked back.
Babylon 5 became the one TV show I have ever watched
passionately, abandoning friends, family and work to
catch the current episode.
I'll never forget how gods-be-feathered priviliged
I felt to watch "The Coming of Shadows," certainly
the best hour of SF ever televised, and up in the
top 10 of best TV, period.
I'll never forget suddenly realizing, "Hey! I bet
there's a newsgroup for this show!" and being
totally blown away on discovering the actual
producer of the show actually talking on a daily
basis about what he was trying to do and how
he was doing it.
I'll never forget watching Delenn watching that final
sunrise, and giving Joe my tears, not because he
manipulated them out of me, as many shows had done
before, but because he earned them.
Gods, I love this show.
Thanks, Joe.
--
Dave Moore == DJM...@UH.EDU == I speak for me.
"Out of the darkness of the prehistory of the human race,
a superb and splendid hero emerged, to do battle with the
monstrous forces of evil." -- Lin Carter on Beowulf
>"Dirt trails on
>a space station? I don't think there's any dirt
>anywhere in the entire trekiverse!"
yes, there's dirt in trekiverse, just watch closely when one of the Conn panels
blow up, dirt and rocks fly out of it. <g>
--Chris
no, really, i'm serious!
I had given up on B5; then one day by chance I caught the second half of
the ep. (sorry, I don't know the ep. names) which ends with G'Kar looking
in his ancient book at pictures of the Shadows from 1000 yrs. ago. That
was the moment for me. I need a bit of a mystery to keep me watching long
enough to get interested in the characters, and once I start to care about
the characters, I'm hooked. That scene with G'Kar and the book sparked
the mystery, and not too long after that I was addicted.
TNW
That would be 3.1 "Matters of Honor".
--
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Pål Are Nordal
a_b...@bigfoot.com