My (mostly) unspoiled watch of Babylon 5

[GreyICE]

It's not that "of course they don't want the baby." It's that due to societal gender roles, rarely will you see a woman in a piece of fictional entertainment media who was raped presented in a sympathetic light if she does not want the baby, because we tend to think women are more nurturing. Some right of center people on this very forum complain about how women win in a high number of custody cases. Ignoring that the male could just be plain stupid, let's assume for a moment why that is, which would be that society instantly assumes mothers are more caretaking and thus make better parents. This is why I want to challenge traditional gender roles, something which certain idiots on this forum clearly do NOT understand.

I'm enjoying reading this thread, even if I'm reluctant to contribute because my knowledge of Babylon 5 has blurred over the years and I'm not sure what is a spoiler when. But this did jump out at me. Men win more custody battles than women: http://leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/dv.html

The Committee for Justice for Women studied custody awards in Orange County, North Carolina over a five year period between 1983 and 1987. They reported that:

"...in all contested custody cases, 84% of the fathers in the study were granted sole or mandated joint custody. In all cases where sole custody was awarded, fathers were awarded custody in 79% of the cases. In 26% of the cases fathers were either proven or alleged to have physically and sexually abused their children."

This even includes this incredibly disturbing statistic:

Research has found that many custody evaluators consider alienation of more significance than domestic violence in making custody recommendations. A survey of 201 psychologists from 39 states who conducted custody evaluations indicated that domestic violence was not considered by most to be a major factor in making custody determinations. Conversely, three-quarters of the custody evaluators recommended denying sole or joint custody to a parent who "alienates the child from the other parent by negatively interpreting the other parent's behavior."

So given what it takes to be denied custody - even physically and sexually abusing a child isn't a guarantee of full custody denial. Note that 91% of custody issues are resolved without court involvement at all - of which most are mother's custody as both parents agreed to. When it actually goes to court, the man tends to win.

I sometimes wonder if many of the men who said they were denied custody actually voluntarily gave up custody and want to present it different socially. "That bitch took my kids" plays a lot better than "yeah, I didn't want to raise the little shits anyway."

[Independent George]

S2, Episodes 12-15: Acts of Sacrifice, Hunter Prey, There All the Honor Lies, And Now For a Word

I actually watched these a while ago, but I've been so swamped at work I haven't had a chance to do the writeup or even write notes. I'm going to have to be brief as they are not fresh in my mind.

1. The Narn are getting their ass kicked, and the younger Narn hotheads on the station are ready to start a war in B5. G'Kar forcing himself to be a grownup instead of one of the hotheads in order to get what little aid he can obtain is great to watch, and I like that they don't gloss over the fact that the show started with the Narn launching their own atrocity on a Centauri agricultural colony. I'm too lazy to look up the exact year of production, but I remember the Balkan civil war happening right around the time the show aired, so a clusterfuck of a conflict where everybody murders everybody else because they did it first at a time when everyone thought we'd reached the end of history was very much a contemporary theme.
2. Back in S1, the implication was that the Centauri were an empire on the declined, gone to fat on their past accomplishments while the Narn were a rising power (perhaps akin to Russia & Japan at the start of the 20th century). I wonder how much of this reversal here is due to the Shadows wiping out two major military installations at the start of the conflict, versus the Narn just overreaching against a sleeping giant? Even with their decline, the Centauri still have centuries of latent materiel and infrastructure at their disposal, whereas the Narn lack the depth to recover from their initial, sudden losses. That said, there is also the question of whether the Centauri have the logistical tail to hold their gains - that is so often the very first thing to go when cashing in on the 'peace dividend'. Space trucks are not as sexy as the latest fighters, but militaries typically devote less than 20% of their resources to actual warfighters; support and logistics get the bulk of it, because that's what lets you actually hold territory and keep fighting. I'm not sure how hard B5 is going to be about this stuff, but if there's a weakness to the Centauri, it's probably getting overconfident and overextending themselves. It's the kind of thing that always bothered me about the Klingons - how the heck do they maintain their high tech war machine in between battles? TOS actually had more complexity to them, but by the time we got to TNG, they were neo-barbarians amongst tech-heavy space navies.
3. Likewise, the Minbari culture makes less and less sense to me the more we learn about it. In some ways, that's good - an alien culture should be alien and not a flanderized version of some existing earth subculture - but in other ways, it's just irritating in that it doesn't seem like it should work. Minbari never lie except when they do, and saving face is the single most important thing in their culture - those are elements that can work within the framework of something more complex, but it seems completely contradictary to the glimpses we've gotten so far. I'm a bit biased because I kind of hate Space Elves, but thus far the Minbari seem more hypocritical and barbaric than the Narn or Centauri. I hated Sheridan's line in S1 about the Minbari being too "honorable" to engage in a first strike. Besides the subjectivity on a word like "honor", it felt a little too on the nose for my tastes; what we've seen from them since then is that honor includes harboring a war criminal and multiple attempts to manipulate humanity into another war.
4. Hunter Prey was probably the most interesting episode to me of these four, but I really wanted more espionage drama and less action hero stuff. That's just my personal preference, though; I think noir and espionage lend themselves really well to SF, and am a bit disappointed when it's not actually handled as well as it could be. Objectively it was a really good episode with a lot of important events occurring, but I can't help but want more than what I got.
5. I touched on this in my last post, but I really want the show to explore who Londo thinks he's working with, because his handler looks obviously human, and there's a great plot to be explored in him thinking he's got backing on Earth (and possibly accidentally tipping his hand to Garibaldi). Centauri intelligence (and, really, all of the foreign intelligence services on B5) has to know that Psi-Corps is really calling the shots on Earth - it would be negligent if they didn't. This has the makings of an epic clandestine showdown once the excrement strikes the oscillator.

Anyway, that's as much as I can think to write at the moment. I'm probably going to binge this weekend, but I'm going to be busy with work for the next couple of weeks.

ETA: I kind of skimped on the Vorlons, but we really haven't learned much besides (1) they are far more advanced than anybody else, (2) they have their own agenda, and (3) they have an interest in Sheridan - all of which we already knew. I know it will pay off eventually, but there's not much to say at the moment.

[Independent George]

One last comment - bad biology, particularly bad evolutionary biology, is another personal pet peeve of mine, and I have to admit that it kind of ruined Acts of Sacrifice for me. Yes, I know real life social Darwinists don't actually understand Darwin any better than the alien of the week here, but it still irritated me to no end. At least they were portrayed as villains in this episode (unlike TNG or Enterprise), but in some ways that's actually worse because it's lazy writing as opposed to stupid writing.

[Durandal_1707]

One last comment - bad biology, particularly bad evolutionary biology, is another personal pet peeve of mine, and I have to admit that it kind of ruined Acts of Sacrifice for me. Yes, I know real life social Darwinists don't actually understand Darwin any better than the alien of the week here, but it still irritated me to no end. At least they were portrayed as villains in this episode (unlike TNG or Enterprise), but in some ways that's actually worse because it's lazy writing as opposed to stupid writing.

That was a deliberate parody of this kind of thing turning up in Star Trek though.

[Independent George]

That was a deliberate parody of this kind of thing turning up in Star Trek though.

Was it? That completely went over my head; maybe too much Trek lowered my expectations to the point where I thought it was sincere.

[Durandal_1707]

JMS liked to take little potshots at Trek every so often. This is one of the more entertaining ones (they tended to be a bit heavy handed. "This isn't some Deep Space Franchise! This place means something!"—yeah, ok).

Have you seen Chuck's review of this one? https://sfdebris.com/videos/babylon5/b5s2e12.php

[Independent George]

JMS liked to take little potshots at Trek every so often. This is one of the more entertaining ones (they tended to be a bit heavy handed. "This isn't some Deep Space Franchise! This place means something!"—yeah, ok).

Have you seen Chuck's review of this one? https://sfdebris.com/videos/babylon5/b5s2e12.php

I'm avoiding Chuck's reviews until I finish the series.

I did catch that 'Deep Space franchise' line, which I agree was heavy-handed and kind of petty. The space Darwinists as a Trek parody is way too subtle for me to catch it as a parody.

[Durandal_1707]

^ It probably depends on how annoyed you get by TNG's tendency to occasionally go way off the deep end with Prime Directive fundamentalism.

Some of the dialogue was almost word-for-word from the kind of stuff you'd get in those eps—"We would neither help nor harm them. It's not our place to interfere," etc.

[Madner Kami]

ETA: I kind of skimped on the Vorlons, but we really haven't learned much besides (1) they are far more advanced than anybody else, (2) they have their own agenda, and (3) they have an interest in Sheridan - all of which we already knew. I know it will pay off eventually, but there's not much to say at the moment.

Careful, this post might get somewhat spoilery.

(3) is something that always puzzled me in more ways than one. In terms of mere story-flow, it appears as if Sheridan is destined to greatness, which kinda comes out of nowhere, but that part of the story makes a lot more sense in hindsight, considering Sheridan wouldn't originally have been a thing, but Sinclair would be in his place.

*mark to read, due to heavy spoiling*

And another thing born out of this is: So time-travel is a thing in the B5-universe. It seems clear to me, that the Vorlons are aware of Sinclair and Babylon 4 traveling back in time to fight in the previous Shadow War, especially considering how they appear alongside his Valen-persona in the past. So with Vorlons being aware of time-travel and, as far as I can tell, knowing how it works, what the hell keeps them from traveling forth and back all the time in order to further their agenda? And at the same time, what keeps the Shadows from doing the same, resulting in a temporal war? Was that ever explained by the Word of God? I mean, the Shadows themselves, even though they might not have been able to time-travel, should be ware of the uncanny similarity between Valen and Sinclair and the Babylon stations.

*end of hidden text*

[Artabax]

It's still creepy as hell. What a smooth talker, eh? To treat poor Lyta as a prostitute...

Wait till you get to Season 2. I have serious issues with how the Psi Corps' breeding program is presented on screen.

Psi-Corps are the SPOILER ALERT bad guys, you ain't supposed to admire them.