7 ms·

I've been meaning to get around to watching B5 one of these days. I'm a huge fan of DS9, but totally missed out on Babylon back in the day.

by Arrath 4y ago

jfengel 4y ago
My advice: have someone curate it for you, or use a curated list of episodes. Many series start off rocky and this one more than most.
- kemayo 4y ago
  That works pretty poorly for B5 unless you've got someone willing to do some hardcore editing for you, because there's so many cases where you should really watch, say, just the C-plot for a given episode even though the A/B plots are trash.
michaelsbradley 4y ago
Season 1 is a bit clunky, maybe that goes for some of Season 2 as well, I don't recall exactly. After that, it gets pretty good. A friend of mine gave me that same heads up after encouraging me to watch it, circa 2010. I just can't remember if he said it's one or more seasons that you have to sort of slog through before getting to the good stuff. If I had to choose between watching again DS9 in its entirety or B5, I'd probably go with B5, but I found both enjoyable. If a third option was BSG (2004-2009), that would be my choice in a heartbeat.
- bsder 4y ago
  People often forget that the first seasons of Star Trek TNG and DS9 were ... not good. Actors and writers seem to need about a season to marinate. Straczynski knew what he wanted, and even he still took a season to dial stuff in.
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    On the other hand, there have been plenty of TV series in the past 20 years where the first season is excellent and then the quality steadily drops in the later seasons.
    - akiselev 4y ago
      I think that might be due to a change in the predominant TV format. In the Star Trek era most flagship shows were shot in the planet/crime/monster-of-the-week format which would get better as the actors developed chemistry, their characters were fleshed out, and writers figure out what works best in the show. Nowadays, the flagship shows are either based on extensive literary works like Game of Thrones and Expanse which depend on the consistency of the writing and how easy it is to adapt, or they're concept shows like Altered Carbon that barely have an idea about what they're going to do with a full eight hour season when they shoot the pilot, let alone what to do for season two. The latter tend to work out really badly if they can't hang on to their writing staff See for example the 2011-2016 show Person of Interest that went from a mediocre if interest crime-of-the-week to possibly one of the best serialized science fiction TV shows about two AIs fighting it out (I'm rewatching it now due to the relevance)
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        I caught PoI for the first time during a trip in 2015, when I watched "If-Then-Else", an utterly gripping masterpiece of an episode. That probably spoiled me on the series as I still haven't made it through the first season. But I do know that the Samaritan plot awaits, so I'll get to it eventually.
      - fbdab103 4y ago
        Point of order, Altered Carbon is a novel series. Unfortunately, it is one of those where the producer knows better than the writer, and they upended the plot, for unknowable reasons. Spoilers: ..........in the book, the Envoys are the governmental elite special forces unit. In the show, the Envoys are now terrorists? Switches the allegiances of so many characters. Also weird manipulation of the historical timeline, seemingly just to bring a character into the plot.
  - arp242 4y ago
    > People often forget that the first seasons of Star Trek TNG and DS9 were ... not good. The thing is you can safely skip those and pretend those episodes don't exist. There's actually episode guides for this [1][2] and I used this when I watched the show with my girlfriend a few years back. You could argue a bit about which episodes should or shouldn't be included, but reducing the entire show to about a quarter of "the good parts" is entirely feasible. With Babylon 5 that'll be a lot harder. Not saying you can't trim any of it, but substantially less. Note that for TNG it includes just 3 episodes for the first season; I'm pretty sure you can't reduce Babylon 5's first season to just 3 episodes without losing the plot. [1]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-generation-in-40-hours-c4a6762cbd3 https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-g... [2]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space-nine-in-82-5-hours-10acde591fd2 https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space...
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      I love DS9, rewatched it again during COVID. Lot of homerun episodes... but there were also a lot of episodes per season. And some of them were pretty painful. The good far outshines the bad, but it wasn't 100% homeruns for sure.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    When you think about the production schedules are serial television of the time, it was also kind of insane: i.e. TNG was producing 26 episodes a season. They were basically scheduled to have to kick out an episode every 2 weeks for the run of the show. A lot of the rougher scripts of the era definitely make more sense when you realize the kind of crunch the production actually was under.
    - KingMob 4y ago
      Wasn't it every week for half the year, then? Barring stuff like holidays, seasons mostly kept to a once/week schedule.
      - XorNot 4y ago
        That was the release schedule, but the average is one every two weeks to hit it. If you were trying to get it all in the can before anything aired you'd be committing to finishing an episode per week. My understanding is that they split the difference: you needed to do most of your principle photography in the first half of the year, and then post-prod earlier episodes to account for delays.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
DS9 is my favorite ST, and I very much enjoyed Babylon 5. Its that same kinda show. That being said, the cast isn't quite as charasmatic as the best of DS9, but surpassing Garak is a tall order.
- db48x 4y ago
  Are you kidding? G’Kar is much more charismatic than Garak, for example.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    Honestly g'kar and Londo are the only two exceptional characters in the franchise, everyone else is meh. By contrast I'd say most of the ds9 main characters are solidly good, well written, great arcs, well acted. Odo, kira, and quark and nog are exceptional to actors telling exceptional stories. (I love sisko but sometimes Avery Brooks overacts) Why is it always the aliens? On rewatch b5 was definitely better than I remember it being, but it doesn't have episodes that straight up make me cry. DS9 has me crying from episode 1.
    - marktangotango 4y ago
      Some episodes of DS9 were truly joyous to watch because the actors you mention were clearly having so much fun with the roles. Adding to them; Gul Dukat, Damar, Worf, Weyoun, it was just so great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo Babylon 5 is similar in that a lot of the scenes featuring Lando or G'kar were just mesmerizing. Garibaldi's hard boiled detective persona was a treat too.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        > "Well you want to live as much as I, hmm?" > laughing "Ohh yes, but I would much rather see you dead."
        4y ago
kilroy123 4y ago
Same here. I tried at one point to watch it after "acquiring" the first episode and just couldn't do it. I'm badly wanting an AI upscaled version made by someone. I've read articles about someone even recreating the CGI and remastering it themselves, something crazy like that. That's how I want to finally one day watch this show. Not the granny 280p or whatever.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  They just released a remaster in 2021 and it's available on streaming.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    It's available on the high seas.. 1080p 188GB for all 5 seasons
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      It’s like $30/season for what is probably 1000s of hours of work, is that really not worth it? Edit: or pay for one month of streaming for like 10% of that cost if it’s about the money. This is why there isn’t (and won’t be) an upscaled DS9.
      - vmilner 4y ago
        I remember in the uk that Babylon 5 was available on VHS around 1994 for about 12 pounds (about 20 dollars) for two episodes...
  - Kye 4y ago
    I tried watching it on HBO Max, but they would only send the old SD version to me since I didn't have the right combination of software and hardware.
    - acchow 4y ago
      What software/hardware combo are you not able to get? I think HD is only available on Safari on Mac (no Chrome) or Edge on Windows (also no Chrome)
stuxnet79 4y ago
I personally found B5 to be superior to DS9. S01 was definitely an anomaly. If you set it aside then B5 had tighter narrative arcs than DS9 and generally the average quality of each episode is higher. In fact if I was to really boils down thee difference between the two I'd say B5 had better writing and DS9 had better actors.
- sandyarmstrong 4y ago
  IMHO, Season 1 is very strong, but Michael O'Hare's acting can be a bit cringey. I hate to speak ill of him, knowing now a little of what he was going through at the time, but still... That being said, I've tried to get into DS9, and I find that show's lead surprisingly similar. Anyway, with Season 2, the cast really came together and the experience felt more smooth. But I still find a lot to love in that first season.
  - twoodfin 4y ago
    Agree. Babylon Squared and Chrysalis are two of my top five favorite episodes overall. It’s hard to put yourself back in an era before pervasive web culture hooking into every fandom. At the time it was very much, “Hey, a darker, grittier Trek on a space station, cool!” And then an episode like B^2 airs: “Holy shit, this show is not what I thought at all.”
  - elsonrodriguez 4y ago
    The similarities between DS9 and B5 are not accidental. The creator of B5 pitched it to Paramount first as a trek series. They rejected the pitch, but did use some elements for DS9.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  You're kidding right? DS9 had episodes like the visitor, duet, the emissary, paradise, and hell even take me out to the holosuite, which make me cry. B5 has no such episodes for me. B5 does not, for example, have an equivalent of the moment where sisko walks back into the punishment box in an act of pure defiance.
cpeterso 4y ago
When I watched B5, a decade late, a friend recommended I start with season 2 and watch season 1 after session 5. The big story arcs don’t really start until season 2 and some actors and characters change, so you can watch season 1 later as a prequel of sorts.
KerrAvon 4y ago
B5 does not hold up well in comparison to DS9. I watched both completely for the first time recently, back to back. It seems very clear that the B5 directors didn’t direct the actors, so they were left to their own devices. Clearly, the actors who played Londo and G’kar did not need direction — I’d put Girabaldi in this category, too. Most of the others needed a lot more than they got. Or maybe the directors told all the rest of them to move and talk as stiffly and unnaturally as possible, but that would be odd. The DS9 special effects were state of the art. The B5 special effects were done on some Amigas on the cheap. It probably didn’t show as much on the low-res TV’s of the day, but wow the difference is stark now. B5 also badly needed a dialogue coach. I’m sorry, but JMS’s dialogue was terrible. His story, his plotting wass brilliant. His screenwriting book is excellent, but his dialogue is stilted and boring in the examples there, too. I have to admit to some bafflement on this, because Harlan Ellison could surely have helped with this aspect of things. There’s more, but I think most of it comes from a very ambitious vision and complete lack of money to realize it.

I've been meaning to get around to watching B5 one of these days. I'm a huge fan of DS9, but totally missed out on Babylon back in the day.

by Arrath 4y ago

I've been meaning to get around to watching B5 one of these days. I'm a huge fan of DS9, but totally missed out on Babylon back in the day.

jfengel 4y ago

My advice: have someone curate it for you, or use a curated list of episodes. Many series start off rocky and this one more than most.

kemayo 4y ago
That works pretty poorly for B5 unless you've got someone willing to do some hardcore editing for you, because there's so many cases where you should really watch, say, just the C-plot for a given episode even though the A/B plots are trash.

michaelsbradley 4y ago

Season 1 is a bit clunky, maybe that goes for some of Season 2 as well, I don't recall exactly. After that, it gets pretty good. A friend of mine gave me that same heads up after encouraging me to watch it, circa 2010. I just can't remember if he said it's one or more seasons that you have to sort of slog through before getting to the good stuff. If I had to choose between watching again DS9 in its entirety or B5, I'd probably go with B5, but I found both enjoyable. If a third option was BSG (2004-2009), that would be my choice in a heartbeat.

bsder 4y ago
People often forget that the first seasons of Star Trek TNG and DS9 were ... not good. Actors and writers seem to need about a season to marinate. Straczynski knew what he wanted, and even he still took a season to dial stuff in.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  On the other hand, there have been plenty of TV series in the past 20 years where the first season is excellent and then the quality steadily drops in the later seasons.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    I think that might be due to a change in the predominant TV format. In the Star Trek era most flagship shows were shot in the planet/crime/monster-of-the-week format which would get better as the actors developed chemistry, their characters were fleshed out, and writers figure out what works best in the show. Nowadays, the flagship shows are either based on extensive literary works like Game of Thrones and Expanse which depend on the consistency of the writing and how easy it is to adapt, or they're concept shows like Altered Carbon that barely have an idea about what they're going to do with a full eight hour season when they shoot the pilot, let alone what to do for season two. The latter tend to work out really badly if they can't hang on to their writing staff See for example the 2011-2016 show Person of Interest that went from a mediocre if interest crime-of-the-week to possibly one of the best serialized science fiction TV shows about two AIs fighting it out (I'm rewatching it now due to the relevance)
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      I caught PoI for the first time during a trip in 2015, when I watched "If-Then-Else", an utterly gripping masterpiece of an episode. That probably spoiled me on the series as I still haven't made it through the first season. But I do know that the Samaritan plot awaits, so I'll get to it eventually.
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      Point of order, Altered Carbon is a novel series. Unfortunately, it is one of those where the producer knows better than the writer, and they upended the plot, for unknowable reasons. Spoilers: ..........in the book, the Envoys are the governmental elite special forces unit. In the show, the Envoys are now terrorists? Switches the allegiances of so many characters. Also weird manipulation of the historical timeline, seemingly just to bring a character into the plot.
- arp242 4y ago
  > People often forget that the first seasons of Star Trek TNG and DS9 were ... not good. The thing is you can safely skip those and pretend those episodes don't exist. There's actually episode guides for this [1][2] and I used this when I watched the show with my girlfriend a few years back. You could argue a bit about which episodes should or shouldn't be included, but reducing the entire show to about a quarter of "the good parts" is entirely feasible. With Babylon 5 that'll be a lot harder. Not saying you can't trim any of it, but substantially less. Note that for TNG it includes just 3 episodes for the first season; I'm pretty sure you can't reduce Babylon 5's first season to just 3 episodes without losing the plot. [1]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-generation-in-40-hours-c4a6762cbd3 https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-g... [2]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space-nine-in-82-5-hours-10acde591fd2 https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space...
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    I love DS9, rewatched it again during COVID. Lot of homerun episodes... but there were also a lot of episodes per season. And some of them were pretty painful. The good far outshines the bad, but it wasn't 100% homeruns for sure.
- XorNot 4y ago
  When you think about the production schedules are serial television of the time, it was also kind of insane: i.e. TNG was producing 26 episodes a season. They were basically scheduled to have to kick out an episode every 2 weeks for the run of the show. A lot of the rougher scripts of the era definitely make more sense when you realize the kind of crunch the production actually was under.
  - KingMob 4y ago
    Wasn't it every week for half the year, then? Barring stuff like holidays, seasons mostly kept to a once/week schedule.
    - XorNot 4y ago
      That was the release schedule, but the average is one every two weeks to hit it. If you were trying to get it all in the can before anything aired you'd be committing to finishing an episode per week. My understanding is that they split the difference: you needed to do most of your principle photography in the first half of the year, and then post-prod earlier episodes to account for delays.

brucethemoose2 4y ago

DS9 is my favorite ST, and I very much enjoyed Babylon 5. Its that same kinda show. That being said, the cast isn't quite as charasmatic as the best of DS9, but surpassing Garak is a tall order.

db48x 4y ago
Are you kidding? G’Kar is much more charismatic than Garak, for example.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  Honestly g'kar and Londo are the only two exceptional characters in the franchise, everyone else is meh. By contrast I'd say most of the ds9 main characters are solidly good, well written, great arcs, well acted. Odo, kira, and quark and nog are exceptional to actors telling exceptional stories. (I love sisko but sometimes Avery Brooks overacts) Why is it always the aliens? On rewatch b5 was definitely better than I remember it being, but it doesn't have episodes that straight up make me cry. DS9 has me crying from episode 1.
  - marktangotango 4y ago
    Some episodes of DS9 were truly joyous to watch because the actors you mention were clearly having so much fun with the roles. Adding to them; Gul Dukat, Damar, Worf, Weyoun, it was just so great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo Babylon 5 is similar in that a lot of the scenes featuring Lando or G'kar were just mesmerizing. Garibaldi's hard boiled detective persona was a treat too.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      > "Well you want to live as much as I, hmm?" > laughing "Ohh yes, but I would much rather see you dead."
      - 4y ago

kilroy123 4y ago

Same here. I tried at one point to watch it after "acquiring" the first episode and just couldn't do it. I'm badly wanting an AI upscaled version made by someone. I've read articles about someone even recreating the CGI and remastering it themselves, something crazy like that. That's how I want to finally one day watch this show. Not the granny 280p or whatever.

Apocryphon 4y ago
They just released a remaster in 2021 and it's available on streaming.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  It's available on the high seas.. 1080p 188GB for all 5 seasons
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    It’s like $30/season for what is probably 1000s of hours of work, is that really not worth it? Edit: or pay for one month of streaming for like 10% of that cost if it’s about the money. This is why there isn’t (and won’t be) an upscaled DS9.
    - vmilner 4y ago
      I remember in the uk that Babylon 5 was available on VHS around 1994 for about 12 pounds (about 20 dollars) for two episodes...
- Kye 4y ago
  I tried watching it on HBO Max, but they would only send the old SD version to me since I didn't have the right combination of software and hardware.
  - acchow 4y ago
    What software/hardware combo are you not able to get? I think HD is only available on Safari on Mac (no Chrome) or Edge on Windows (also no Chrome)

stuxnet79 4y ago

I personally found B5 to be superior to DS9. S01 was definitely an anomaly. If you set it aside then B5 had tighter narrative arcs than DS9 and generally the average quality of each episode is higher. In fact if I was to really boils down thee difference between the two I'd say B5 had better writing and DS9 had better actors.

sandyarmstrong 4y ago
IMHO, Season 1 is very strong, but Michael O'Hare's acting can be a bit cringey. I hate to speak ill of him, knowing now a little of what he was going through at the time, but still... That being said, I've tried to get into DS9, and I find that show's lead surprisingly similar. Anyway, with Season 2, the cast really came together and the experience felt more smooth. But I still find a lot to love in that first season.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  Agree. Babylon Squared and Chrysalis are two of my top five favorite episodes overall. It’s hard to put yourself back in an era before pervasive web culture hooking into every fandom. At the time it was very much, “Hey, a darker, grittier Trek on a space station, cool!” And then an episode like B^2 airs: “Holy shit, this show is not what I thought at all.”
- elsonrodriguez 4y ago
  The similarities between DS9 and B5 are not accidental. The creator of B5 pitched it to Paramount first as a trek series. They rejected the pitch, but did use some elements for DS9.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
You're kidding right? DS9 had episodes like the visitor, duet, the emissary, paradise, and hell even take me out to the holosuite, which make me cry. B5 has no such episodes for me. B5 does not, for example, have an equivalent of the moment where sisko walks back into the punishment box in an act of pure defiance.

cpeterso 4y ago

When I watched B5, a decade late, a friend recommended I start with season 2 and watch season 1 after session 5. The big story arcs don’t really start until season 2 and some actors and characters change, so you can watch season 1 later as a prequel of sorts.

KerrAvon 4y ago

B5 does not hold up well in comparison to DS9. I watched both completely for the first time recently, back to back. It seems very clear that the B5 directors didn’t direct the actors, so they were left to their own devices. Clearly, the actors who played Londo and G’kar did not need direction — I’d put Girabaldi in this category, too. Most of the others needed a lot more than they got. Or maybe the directors told all the rest of them to move and talk as stiffly and unnaturally as possible, but that would be odd. The DS9 special effects were state of the art. The B5 special effects were done on some Amigas on the cheap. It probably didn’t show as much on the low-res TV’s of the day, but wow the difference is stark now. B5 also badly needed a dialogue coach. I’m sorry, but JMS’s dialogue was terrible. His story, his plotting wass brilliant. His screenwriting book is excellent, but his dialogue is stilted and boring in the examples there, too. I have to admit to some bafflement on this, because Harlan Ellison could surely have helped with this aspect of things. There’s more, but I think most of it comes from a very ambitious vision and complete lack of money to realize it.