Dias De Los Muertos (B5)

[G-Man]

When Chuck asked whom Zooty, with his talking companion box, was reminiscent of, was anyone else's first reaction "does he mean Captain Gideon?"

[FaxModem1]

It should be noted that behind the scenes, Lochley's relationship with her friend is supposed to be that they were lovers as well as teenage drug users on the run. Which really makes Lennier the odd man out, unless he had a subconscious crush on Morden that we never knew about, especially as the two never shared a scene together prior to this episode.

[Nevix]

I love the character portions of this episode, and the Penn and Teller bits I just shrugged at, as they were an example of in universe comedy that more than one person didn't get. Although I loved the joke with Delenn getting a Minbari joke, while it flew over the head of Sheridan.

The Rebo and Zooty bits were a cute little aside to modern comedians playing future comedians, and the character work was really good.

I also thank Chuck for getting that Zooty might just be trying to warn Sheridan about the Drakh.

[SiskosMuthaFknPmphnd]

One thing I want to note about this video:

"When the long night comes, return to the end of the beginning" doesn't refer to Babylon 5. There was really no reason for Sheridan to go there except for his own nostalgia. What it referred to was Coriana 6. The end of the beginning refers to the final battle of the war with the First Ones. The First Ones were the beginning and when they left known space never to return and the galaxy finally belonged to the younger races, that was the end of the rule of the First Ones. The message was a clue to Sheridan to go back to the planet where it all ended for the First Ones where Lorien would be waiting to... do whatever he did to/with Sheridan.

Edit: I just saw someone made a similar comment already. Oh well.

[Archanubis]

I missed most of Babylon 5 Season 5 thanks to the UK broadcast on Channel 4 showing the show at some bizarre hours which changed from week to week.

For all the character work and positives of this episode I still don't feel I've missed anything of any real value. Season 5 from what I've seen so far just appears, inconsistent and occasionally weird.

"Day of the Dead" is an odd episode, to be sure. I'm not sure anyone knows where in the season's continuity it's supposed to belong, for example. (Its been a while, but I think in the last episode, Londo and G'Kar were supposed to be heading off to Centauri Prime, but they're on the station for this episode.) And the first half of S5 was a bit of a mess...

http://sfdebris.com/videos/babylon5/b5s5e12.php

I'm not sure which part I find more difficult to believe, the whole "dead come to life" thing or the fact that people will still be reading newspapers in the 23rd Century.

I was suprise about that too, and I'm woudn't be suprise if at sometme JMS said that newspaper would be more realistic than the PADD

Well, real books are apparently seeing an upswing in sales recently (at least in the UK https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... book-sales), so Star Trek might have been correct that, even if you can get everything electronically, there's still a demand for actual, for lack of a better word, hard copies (besides, a hard copy book won't run out of battery power ). Don't think it's translated to newspaper sales, though. And the B5 was made in the mid-to-late 90s, before e-readers and iPads were a thing.

[Eishtmo]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... book-sales), so Star Trek might have been correct that, even if you can get everything electronically, there's still a demand for actual, for lack of a better word, hard copies (besides, a hard copy book won't run out of battery power ). Don't think it's translated to newspaper sales, though. And the B5 was made in the mid-to-late 90s, before e-readers and iPads were a thing.

It was also established in, I think a Season 2 episode, that newspapers are a regular thing in the B5 universe. Multiple ones, in fact, several about other species (I remember there is a Mimbari one that Delenn got regularly). So in universe it is a thing.

[RobbyB1982]

The obvious real life reason is that tablets just didn't exist yet so you had to make the intuition leap to them existing. Trek had them at about the same time, but it had always been a massive viewscreen touchpad technology series. Also maybe the look of newspapers just felt nice and grounded things against all the sci-fi.

You can excuse it some by saying some of the alien species on board have different eyesight and can't process computer screens so they need printed versions. Or just that its retro and came around again. Or that at some point during the many wars humanity goes through the internet stops being a free-for all resource and you have to get things through sources at some point. You can come up with lots of potential reasons... but a lot of media from around then had an impossible task of guessing what the internet would be and do.

Ender's Game is one of the most prolific offenders of getting it super wrong as a major plot point

[StrangeDevice]

Maybe by the time of B5 and interstellar travel, there are far too many things to interfere with an electronic interface, so people have gone back to paper (or paper substitutes) because the information can be transferred without that greater risk of damage. Similar to how one of the greatest methods of securing the safety of a document in modern society is to print it out on paper and lock it up in a physical vault.

[J!!]

I have a vague recollection of the idea that the on B5 everyone gets a customized version of the paper printed out just for them every day, with stories selected based on their interests. I don't remember where I heard that though.

I do know that Delenn considers the whole idea of a news-media and a free press to be quite novel and alien. She says that on Minbar, if you need to know something, somebody will just tell it to you.

[Thaeri]

It's definitely an odd episode, but the series wasn't really adverse to those. We are also talking about the first half of season five, which was quite slow and not very compelling.

Here we have an episode that has some very compelling parts: The whole "Day of the Dead" thing that can't be explained - including part of the station suddenly being in another part of the universe - and where almost everyone is visited by someone who fulfils some sort of subconscious need rather than playing into simple wish-fulfilment. All of that, including the strong character pieces and subtle humour is very Gaiman and very good.

It was good on its own merits anyway, but in the end it might have been better as a short story or novella tie-in rather than an episode. But I found Gaiman's style to work pretty well with the way the B5 universe works, where much is unexplained.

The Penn and Teller shtick is boring though, and the episode suffers hugely because of it. I sort of understand what the people behind the show were trying to do, but all the humour in the series before this episode had included the audience, and now suddenly even the Earth folk laughed at seemingly random stuff? It's just too much of a break from what had previously been established. I'm not sure if this too is Gaiman, or just a way of forcing Penn and Teller into the plot, but I sure hope it's the latter.