My Journey Through Babylon 5

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Good luck with the series. I just finished a rewatch myself. It's quite a ride.

If you can make it up to Signs and Portents and still be enjoying the show at that point, there's a very good chance that you'll get a lot out of it.

[Durandal_1707]

^ Heck, if you even liked "Soul Hunter," it's pretty safe to say that you're going to be in love with the show once it actually starts taking off.

[MissKittyFantastico]

I'm with you on Soul Hunter - goofy, but it has a fond place in my heart.

Helps that it was the first regular episode to air here, after the loooooong wait following the pilot - for some reason (probably got bumped for some bit of sports or something) Midnight on the Firing Line got bumped out of order, and they didn't get around to showing it until the second to last spot of the season. Thanks for that, guys.

(That's nothing unusual for how our networks treat sci-fi. 9, who co-produced Farscape, could barely bring themselves to air it - season one got like two episodes in evening timeslots, then straight to the post-11pm graveyard shift. And season two, if you can believe it, they put on at like 3:30pm, in the middle of the afterschool cartoons and stuff, and hacked out everything unsuitable for the kiddies, which you can imagine made several episodes nigh-incomprehensible there was so much missing.)

[MyUserName]

I'm very fond of Soul Hunter. It taps into a lot of different plots that are going to be front and center in Season 1. But more than that, It says that the show is going to go all in on its more mystical aspects. I got REAL tired of Star Trek hand waving ideas like mysticism and religion away as superstition as those kinds of unexplained plot aspects do a lot to add intrigue to a series. And B5 does indeed have genuine mysticism in its universe and its great.

[Madner Kami]

I got REAL tired of Star Trek hand waving ideas like mysticism and religion away as superstition as those kinds of unexplained plot aspects do a lot to add intrigue to a series.

And then there were Q and Trelane. I always found that aspect of Star Trek rather... inconsistent. I'm an atheist and there's exactly one thing that could feasibly convince me of a God or gods existing and that would be a being like them. That this never really gets adressed in Star Trek is baffling.

[Cassandra]

Final thoughts are the stuff with the telepaths. I dunno, the idea of the state enforcing three options on telepaths, prison over literally something they did not do, no crime committed, drugs that sap the life out of you, or bring drafted into military service like the Jedi do to newborn babies? Well, I find that morally repugnant. It's being done to protect the comfort of others at the expense of people who were born "different." Aside from that one telepath girl later in the season, does B5 ever comment on this again? It seems unfair to me. Seems VERY wrong. Like an abuse of state power.

Telepaths come up a lot but their isn't a firm resolution to their treatment by Earth Alliance.

Something to keep in mind about human telepaths in B5 is that they are, in general, dangerously aggressive. Think of them along the lines of people who aspire to be Plato's Stepchildren rather than generally cooperative (if obnoxious) Betazoids. Some degree of control or separation is necessary to prevent them from taking over society. Of course, Psicorp ultimately backfired as a control mechanism and gave teeps a powerbase from which to take over society, but something needed to be done to keep them from enslaving the rest of the human race.

Though turning Delenn into a slasher type victim? Yeah, that... kinda rubbed me the wrong way. A bit.

B5 doesn't have a Deanna Troi character--someone who is useless to the point of being annoying--but if I had to pick which B5 character was most like the Troi archetype, it would be Delenn. She's often annoying, is seldom useful (with a few very large exceptions), and is often saddled with plots that are capital F female. In other words, she gets damseled regularly.

[Yukaphile]

Just finished "Born to the Purple," and I liked it. I thought the echoing between Londo and G'Kar to their aides of "Don't give away the homeworld" was an interesting parallel to play to what we'll see later (I've finished SF Debris's Season 2 reviews of B5).

Also, some people think JMS has a severe disdain for cute things? I dunno. Susan's moment with her dying father, and Garibaldi choosing not to tell her, and in his own way, letting her off the hook, was pretty cute, and got me right in the ticker. I'm always drawn to stuff like that. It was very heartwarming, and is making me value Susan as a character all the more. I... still think she's not particularly attractive, I'm sorry, I find Takashima more attractive, but as a character with a past, and with value to this story, I'm really growing to like her, and a lot. She definitely has a lot to contribute, and I wanna see her go places, the same as the others.

Once again, the musical score is pure win. It once again makes me furious to think we could have had this on DS9, and yet we didn't, because Rick Berman is an asshole.

Onto the next episode!

[Yukaphile]

Just finished "Infection." Started off weak, but what Sinclair was telling Tu'lar really resonated with me, again. The first rule of fanatics, when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy. WOW. Even a monster-of-the-week episode like this really grabs at me. And as always, the musical score is top-notch. Onto next episode!

[MyUserName]

Also, some people think JMS has a severe disdain for cute things?

There's an episode in Season 2 that has a bear with the initials J.S. being thrown out into space. In the episode, its sold by a gift shop selling B5 memorabilia and the bear was supposed to be a likeness of John Sheridan, the commander in season 2 and he took it personally, shut the shop down and threw the bear into space.

In the original draft, the gift shop was supposed to be a front for nightwatch and Sheridan found out and shut it down. The reason that it was changed was longtime collaborator of John Stracynski, Peter David, wrote the episode and his wife made the bear for Stracynski with his initials. Stracynski saw the gift, rewrote the episode, and had the bear thrown out into space because of his anti-cute policy.

In retaliation, Peter David had the bear show up on his Sci-Fi Comedy show, Space Cases, in which the main cast find the bear, ponder who would be horrible enough to throw an adorable bear into space, and find out it was done by the horrible Stracyn empire who's aim is to rule the galaxy, but they don't have the budget.

This story is in the season 2 guide to the series.

They remain good friends and collaborators to this day. Peter David would go on to write the novel adaptions for the first two Babylon 5 movies, In the beginning and Thirdspace, as well as the in canon trilogy, legions of fire which takes place after the fifth season. He also wrote a three issue comic series for D.C. called "In Valen's Name" which you can guess the subject matter after the Season 3 two parter, "War Without End."

He'd also create a character called "Slaughterhouse Stracynski," who General Ross referred to as one of his comrades in arms, in his Incredible Hulk novel, "What Savage Beast"

[Yukaphile]

Just watched "Mind War," and OMG, is it epic. Walter Koenig makes a deliciously evil bad guy. I feel sorry that Kelsey was vaped, even though she did it to herself.

Onto the next episode!