Babylon 5: No Compromises

[McAvoy]

Well of course he made up his mind. He has such a distain for mundanes and that he does seem to hate the rules placed preventing him from letting loose with his abilities.

He was never called out either. Like there is legitimate reasons why telepaths shouldn't have full reign to go in someone's head without their permission. Like there was no realization even on his own part about that.

Nope, couldn't get his way so he did exactly what everyone feared and tries to blackmail everyone in getting what he wanted too.

He is just Bester but with long hair.

I never experienced him as being that grating, but in hindsight, that might be down to voice actors. Either way, his pose came across as a religious cult with him being their Lord and Saviour and I always had a high level of distrust of this kind of power and relationship and it got made worse, because the character was always displayed as being in the right, no matter what he did, even when his actions and the implications of his words and actions didn't paint a flattering light if you really thought it through (quite the contrary even). He demanded freedom for telepaths and trampled over everyone else's rights and privacies, acting all indignant when people distrusted him naturally. Buddy, you're smug, you act superior, you're exclusive and you clearly carry a god-complex around. People not liking you isn't about you being a telepath. It's about you being a collosal arsehole. For someone who can read minds, you're having an astounding lack of empathy and understanding.

But the really wierd thing is: These traits could be compelling. But we lack an origin story of that villain in the making, to properly contextualize everything.

Yep exactly. I think he could have been tweaked a bit in that he started out that way. A left over from the Mother is Corps mantra stuff. And then he mellows out but not everyone does. Like that one guy taking up after Byron when they barricaded themselves and took over Medlab.

[RobbyB1982]

My main gripe with this season is Cultyboi, what a lame ass character and a creep.

The actor was a bad fit for the role, although the role itself was outdated by that point too. I know it was similar to Marcus, but Marcus' actor was so full of personality and just sheer charm.

He was *supposed* to be not-Marcus. Very similar at a glance but then not. The original plan was for him to be the culmination of Ivonova's telepath arc, and to fully realize that she'd missed her one chance with Marcus. Meanwhile Leetah gets infatuated on the side and ends up sort of where she ended up anyway.

But losing the almost-Marcus aspect, losing the love triangle, just losing Ivonova's involvement in general, completely gutted what the character and arc was supposed to be and you can just FEEL that gap there, and it why it seems like such a drag. Instead of being integral to two main characters it was just one of them and so it lost a lot of its purpose and what would have made it actually interesting.

Had Claudia made it clear sooner she wasn't returning for season 5, JMS would have had Marcus survive, and might have had more time to think out an alternate story path... but she (or her agent) was being irresponsible until the last possible moment.

(Also if he hadn't lost his notes in a hotel room or something)

[RobbyB1982]

I always feel season 5 gets a bit of an unfair wrap. Season 4 squeezed two seasons and most of the concluding plot arcs or the preceeding series into itself, so expecting season 5 to be able to match that is a bit unreasonable; it was never going to be that good. With the best will in the world, season 5 more or less had to build up from near-scratch.

Season 5 was always meant to be a LotR style extended epilogue. Going from JMS interviews at the time, had they known for 100% sure they were getting a season 5, season 4 would have ended in the interrogation episode, and then the cleanup at the start of next season would still have only been about three episodes to resolve the Clark stuff.

So the pacing might have worked out a little better in that case because it would start big and then have slightly less slog in the middle, but the overall plan wasn't compressed by *that* much, it wouldn't have been a huge difference.

Losing two of the main cast members is what really wrecked the pacing and momentum. Lochely would have been fine as a new addition to mix things up, but not as a replacement for Ivanova AND Marcus. (And Marcus would have stayed around if they'd known Claudia was leaving.)

Once the show got past the Byron arc though it picked up, all the stuff with Londo and Gkar was fantastic.