Babylon 5: Believers

[Durandal_1707]

Just finished the review, and... HOLY SHIT. I... wow. When I finally get around to watching B5 (I'm checking out Chuck's reviews first, and reading through the wiki to help me understand this universe better first), I can only imagine how I'm going to feel. Like... really. DAMN.

Do not get your hopes up. The level of hype surrounding B5 vastly exceeds its quality. The show is very good with small, albeit emotionally manipulative, setpieces but the quality of the internal logic often falls to the level of TNG season 1, and the internal consistency is awful for a serialized show written by one person. If you care about logic and consistency you'll be disappointed.

Compared to what, exactly?

[Darth Wedgius]

JMS seems to have a hatred of cute. I'm pretty much convinced he saw Care Bears murder his parents in an alley or something.

[Yukaphile]

How so?

[FaxModem1]

How so?

He admits as such: link

Re: kids/robots...the exact phrasing of that has gone through various
permutations and paraphrasings; the specific line is "No kids or cute robots."
The latter specifically entails entities such as Twiki (got the spelling right
this time, thanks to whoever corrected me), who should be run down by a truck
at the first opportunity. (In fact, I can say without hesitation that if you
ever DO see what passes for a cute robot on this show, keep a close eye on it.
because you'll probably see somebody drop an anvil on it REAL fast.)

So this allows us to explore the question of robotics, but to do so in a
fairly serious context. Because logically, 200+ years in the future there are
going to be some changes; robotics will be more common, though likely in some
different form. (If you've seen the promos or the pilot, you've seen the
maintenance 'bot that checks out the hull of B5; it has arms, it moves, it's
independent, it's a robot. It just doesn't begin its report with
"Bida-bida-bida.")

On the topic of kids...it's a deliberate decision to steer clear of that
part, not because I think it's invalid, but because a) it's been done on
another show, and its spinoff, rather intensively, and b) it's part of the SF
stereotype, "We have to have kids because SF is a kid's genre."

Might there be a story about a family of refugees who come seeking
sanctuary, or opportunity elsewhere? Of course. But any kids in that family
won't be at the *center* of the story. And they'll be gone by the end of the
episode. It's also a matter of context; absent the scenario just posed, this
is a place for businessmen, travelers, mappers, traders, diplomats and others.
it's not a place for kids. It's also potentially a very DANGEROUS place.
---
Hmm...maybe I should amend it to "No cute kids, no cute robots, and no
filkers, ever...."

Nothing personal, but given the choice between listening to two hours of
filking, and having my eyeballs scooped out, popped, spread on toast as jam
and fed to me for breakfast...I'll take the latter.

-----------

This is probably mostly a reaction on having to write kids cartoons, and on how most television scifi of the 1970s and 1980s had at least one cute kid character that the heroes would hang out with for some reason. The key example is Boxey from Battlestar Galactica, who the reboot show tried to do seriously, and then disappeared once he had puberty. When fans asked where he went, they told fans that he died of Cholera because they kept on editing him out of the show, as the kid sidekick was a concept that did not age well. And a work for hire writer like JMS would get tired of such things in the genre.

[Cassandra]

There are some aspects JMS is good at, and many he is not. Unfortunately, once he takes over writing the show full time, there's no opportunity to have other writers bring in their own strengths. That sort of thing really matters, I think.

I wonder if having more junior writers on staff would have helped much. Season 1 had other writers and it is widely regarded as sub par. Granted, more people could have helped with smaller issues like poorly written dialogue, but fixing the bigger issues like poor arc pacing and poorly thought out internal logic would require good creative leadership from the top.

Well, all his women characters seem... cold and uptight, at least to my amateur eye.

That's generally true, with the notable exception of the one who is prone to hysterical meltdowns.

Compared to what, exactly?

I wouldn't know. I stopped watching TV twenty years ago.

[Durandal_1707]

I wonder if having more junior writers on staff would have helped much. Season 1 had other writers and it is widely regarded as sub par. Granted, more people could have helped with smaller issues like poorly written dialogue, but fixing the bigger issues like poor arc pacing and poorly thought out internal logic would require good creative leadership from the top.

Again, compared to what? I'm not going to claim there weren't any problems or anything (almost most of the arc-related problems that do exist were caused by actors leaving before their characters' arcs were done), but I will say that among space-based sci-fi TV, I can't think of a single show that has stronger arc writing or more consistent internal logic than B5. DS9 doesn't. None of the other Treks do. BSG suffered from the lack of a plan a couple of seasons in. Farscape was fun, but also flew by the seat of its pants. And Doctor Who, of course, never cares much about continuity. Honestly, arc writing is one of the things that makes B5 stand out amongst its peers.

Anyway, to get back on track here, I'd say that if you're a sci-fi nerd who liked the shows I mentioned above, you're probably going to like B5 as well. You do have to hold your nose through the first season, though, as it is very early-TNG-ish, but once you hit that one Hugo-award-winning episode in the second season, it's a great ride from then on. Try to avoid any spoilers related to Londo and G'Kar's arc, because it's definitely one of the best long-term arcs in sci-fi TV.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I have to disagree as well. To me, the long-term arc, plot, and planning is the strength of B5 and the one area where it consistently outdid other sci-fi shows.

Some of the best episodes of other great sci-fi shows (e.g. BSG's 33 or TNG's The Inner Light) could be taken in isolation and feel like works of art. With B5, even many of the best episodes might fall flat of expectation if you take them in isolation. The production value isn't great, the effects can be distractingly poor, the acting can be hit and miss, and on a script by script basis the writing can be hit and miss as well. But the big arcs as a whole are extremely powerful and effective, and JMS did some simply outstanding improvisation to deal with some of the real life and network difficulties that could have hampered the show.

When I first tried to watch B5 with my family, they would have probably been just as happy to drop the show after the first episode. Once you start to understand the arc and its intricate, novel-like structure, you find a new appreciation even for the comparatively weak early episodes (or at least that's how it was for me and my family). With the weight of two or three seasons behind it, some of the moments in the third and fourth season episodes payoff as beautifully as any (tv) arc in sci-fi.

[Deledrius]

There are some aspects JMS is good at, and many he is not. Unfortunately, once he takes over writing the show full time, there's no opportunity to have other writers bring in their own strengths. That sort of thing really matters, I think.

I wonder if having more junior writers on staff would have helped much. Season 1 had other writers and it is widely regarded as sub par. Granted, more people could have helped with smaller issues like poorly written dialogue, but fixing the bigger issues like poor arc pacing and poorly thought out internal logic would require good creative leadership from the top.

Having established writers like DC Fontana and David Gerrold take up more of the slack and collaborate would have helped. Here we are discussing Gerrold's only B5 episode, and it was a season one episode, so I think that says something positive.

The sub par reputation for season one seems to be the result of too much filler... all the world-building was poorly integrated in uninteresting stories, or decent stories with too many lousy guest actors. As the show goes on, it relies more on revelatory events and the primary cast, by which point the plots have had time to grow interest and the actors to learn their characters. It's not really a new problem, and I don't think the improvement was solely caused by JMS taking over full-time writing, or else shows like TNG and DS9 wouldn't have demonstrated the same kind of improvement as they went.

[Durandal_1707]

Kinda related to what you said, but a little different: To me, the problem with Season 1 is that it's a victim of the show's own cleverness.

I'm gonna try to explain this as delicately as I can to avoid spoilers, but there's a line given by one of the characters in Season 1—"No one here is exactly what he appears." And it's true. The show holds back a lot of information about the characters, their motivations, and the galaxy's political situation in general, and basically makes the season into a "fake-out show" which appears to be just another weird-space-shit-of-the-week series in the Star Trek mold, with most of the characters appearing as broad archetypes—Londo as the Quirky Comic Relief, G'Kar as the Moustache-Twirling Villain, Delenn as the Mysterious Schemer, Sinclair as the Slightly Deconstructed Captain Kirk, etc. None of these characterizations are really true, as all of these characters are far more complex than this, but the first season doesn't really let you see that. It's really effective once the big twists happen in Season 2, because after having lulled you in a false sense of security, the events of that season deliver a massive gut-punch, and suddenly there's no more reset button. Up until you get to that point, though, it makes the show seem far less interesting and nuanced than it actually is, and for that reason, the show is hard to get into.

In a way, Babylon 5 is a demonstration of both the strengths and weaknesses of long-term planning in a TV series (the other big weakness, of course, being the spanner that gets thrown into the works when actors leave the series before their part in the story is done).

This same characteristic also, however, improves Season 1 quite a bit on a rewatch, as many of the episodes produce a far different impression once you know where things are going.

[Deledrius]

I agree. I think it may have been possible to massage the start to at least be interesting on its own before everything kicks in, but I struggle to think of a positive example. Dollhouse pulls a similar switch five episodes in, and if I hadn't been told that it improves I would have given up long before that (and I was sorely tempted despite the recommendation). There's got to be a better way to show the mundanity of Life Before The Plot without it being dull. I suspect that it doesn't help the mind of the writer is probably focusing on the later aspects (or in Dollhouse's case, placating the network).