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Babylon 5
1994 · TV series · 44 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by J. Michael Straczynski
DramaScience FictionFantasyActionAdventure
Babylon 5 is a five-mile long space station located in neutral space. Built by the Earth Alliance in the 2250s, its goal is to maintain peace among the various alien races by providing a sanctuary where grievances and negotiations can be worked out among duly appointed ambassadors. A council made up of representatives from the five major space-faring civilizations - the Earth Alliance, Minbari Federation, Centauri Republic, Narn Regime, and Vorlon Empire - work with the League of Non-Aligned Worlds to keep interstellar relations under control. Aside from its diplomatic function, Babylon 5 also serves as a military post for Earth and a port of call for travelers, traders, businessmen, criminals, and Rangers.
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222 comments on Hacker News
> That didn't make the movies and television series any less fun to watch.
Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to everybody :( Babylon 5 was mind blowing when I was a kid, and today the space and other sci fi parts from there, when I see them on YouTube, are quite cringe. Show is still great, but that’s the part where I’d be totally fine if some modern consistent ai re-rendered cgi to something more pleasant.
Babylon 5 is at the beginning of the uncanny valley of computer graphics so it looks funny (I think they used Amigas) but if you pretend that those effects are of current cinema quality, everything else is good. They travel with hyperspace portals (maybe you saw Cowboy Bebop) so they don't have to perform many unphysical motions in normal space. It's still a great show. Less of a space opera compared to the Expanse, more like a Star Trek DS9 with ETs way more powerful than earthlings.
Okay so a little bit of out of universe trivia on Dollhouse: It was planned for 5 seasons. With the risk of cancellation, the second season and the two Epitaph episodes were a severely compressed telling of 4 seasons of plans. And, personally I think it worked well. Something similar happened to Babylon 5, Manifest, Jericho (IIRC), Firefly (Serenity was the original ending that would have played out over multiple seasons), and the Escaflowne anime: the main plots towards the end got compressed to create a faster pace at the climax while ensuring the story could be finished (though I wasn't a fan of how Manifest ended).
My concern about original writers being involved in reboots is if they want to fill out the story they couldn't tell the first time around and end up with a more standard pacing that's less exciting, and end up getting cancelled before finishing. Then we end up with things like Tru Calling and Dark Matter, which had planned plots they couldn't finish.
I just watched an episode of Babylon 5 in which an entire race gets wiped by a virus in that way In a matter of days.
Yes, all the episodes have now been set to private, and The Gathering was re-uploaded. Not quite "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube" as reported.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaIZc2icdTU
The full series appears to actually be free to watch on Roku Channel.
https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/382d11be2c7e519b8105d835d3ab6b68/babylon-5/season-1993
TMDB is the best metadata provider for my home media server, they just have everything.
Two great features are: season names and episode groups. The other day there was a thread about Babylon 5, where seasons have names and the watching order is different from the airing order. Perfect application of both
The earlier Red Dwarf episodes were filmed in the BBC cafeteria and other similar locations. The difference is that Red Dwarf was supposed to look grimy. They were on a mining ship with few luxuries. Red Dwarf was more in the territory of Dark Star, and played into that. (Early Red Dwarf tended to use physical models and costumes for a lot of effects. CGI has never been especially great on RD.)
I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.
Star Trek, Star Wars shaped me, Babylon 5 opened my heart. It took me a few episodes to get through the awful CGI of the first season but the writing and characters were superb. It’s DS9 but way more political. Went to places Star Trek wouldn’t touch. Sheridan was one hell of a guy. Then I was introduced to Big Balls Bill Adama…
The uncertainty is actually an interesting behind-the-scenes story that the mini-TV Channel hoping to grow up into a full TV Channel that B5 was distributed under was PTEN [0] and leading up to and during Season 4 of Babylon 5 PTEN split in a weird divorce to form the WB TV Network and the UPN Network. (It got its wish, it grew up into not one but two competing TV networks.) Season 5 was a last minute pick up/rescue by one of WB's cable networks, TNT. (TNT wanted more than just one season which led to the mess that was Crusade. As a Crusade fan, TNT was both the best and the worst of what could happen to B5.)
(History repeating itself, and Babylon 5 being cursed to ironic timing, the WB Network and UPN eventually remerged to become The CW. A Babylon 5 reboot project development was started at The CW this decade, just before WB Discovery decided to get out of the broadcast TV business and start a fresh divorce at The CW somewhat resembling the PTEN divorce.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Entertainment_Network
Ratings agree with that assessment. TKO is the only episode rated "bad" of all seasons. https://seriesgraph.com/show/3137-babylon-5
Yeah, so far I see mislabeled-pilot, and episodes 3 and 4.
That... does not (currently) look like "Babylon 5 is now free to watch". That looks like a minor probing to see if they can charge for it again somewhere. That kind of thing happens constantly, and it's rare that it ever finishes.
Blu-ray version is definitely not perfect but I wouldn't call it mangled. It is presented in 4:3 which might be an issue for some viewers but it is absolutely the best this show has ever looked: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Babylon-5-The-Complete-Series-Blu-ray/342014/
It is extremely difficult for me to believe that someone watching Babylon 5 as it aired on a typical sized CRT television thought the effects looked "cheap". Hokey? Okay, maybe, that's subjective enough to be non-debatable. But "cheap" in the context of a television show? The shots were so much more dense and dynamic than what Star Trek was doing at the time, which is the obvious comparison.
It's the season one acting that I find the biggest barrier to entry. It settles in by the end mostly, and the acting markedly improves from Season 2 onward though it always retains some of that campy scifi feel.
On average, TNG has better episodes, but it doesn't come close to the multi-season story arc of Babylon 5 and I think the character arcs of Londo and G'Kar are possibly the best of any drama that I've seen.
Also, Babylon 5 later seasons are directly relevant to modern political developments and fascism.
Babylon 5 is one of my favorite sci-fi series. I couldn’t wait for the week to pass to see another episode.
It was too ahead of its time and like many series from that period, the lack of computer power for special effects was showing.
yes, somewhat incorrectly as its the pilot / first movie, that came out before season 1 started
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Pilot_film_(1993)
The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Babylon_5_episodes#Season_1:_Signs_and_Portents_(1994)
The curse of Babylon 5 https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056207990/
Excellent news. Babylon 5 is underappreciated, but it has mainly good episodes and several amazing ones.[0]
However, if I can be cynical for a moment: The article title is misleading. Only a few episodes have been uploaded so far. At the current rate of one episode per week, it will take until March 2028 to conclude all five seasons. That's assuming they post every episode, and allow the episodes to remain up in the long term.
For some reason, the first episode of season 1, Midnight on the Firing Line, is missing from the YouTube upload, which is a pretty critical omission. YouTube is also a minefield of spoilers in the video recommendations. I can't recommend the YouTube uploads to newcomers right now. The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.
[0]: https://seriesgraph.com/show/3137-babylon-5
Babylon 5 was my childhood defining TV series, the one that left an impact for the rest of my life. TNG is “merely” a great show.
From what I've read, DS9 was heavily based on the Babylon 5 Bible which was pitched by JMS to Paramount years before. You might charitably say DS9 was the Guix to the Nix of Babylon 5: Same core ideas mapped onto different story universes. The earlier B5 Bible apparently even had a changeling security officer which evolved into the "changeling net" plot shown in the pilot episode.
So I came to Babylon 5 late in life, when my partner's mother revealed she had the entire box set on DVD. My partner had recently introduced me to The Expanse, which, like many, I consider the greatest sci fi TV show of all time - she described B5 to me thus: "Babylon 5 walked so the Expanse could run." Suffice to say, my expectations were sky high.
No other TV show has so greatly exceeded my expectations.
I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent into the near future (present) to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got where Babylon 4 instead got sent to the distant past and Sinclair became the religious leader Valen 1000 years ago.
I couldn't stand TNG at first, and in fact didn't really watch it until a decade ago. To me the first 2 seasons, and pretty much anything involving the Q character, are unwatchable, but once I learned to skip them the rest became really interesting. For the sake of comparison, I loved the old TOS movies, DS9, and liked Voyager as a purely episodic "watch whenever I catch it" show.
Babylon 5 still lords over all of them.
The primary thing to know is that the actor who played Sinclair in season one, Michael O'Hare, suffered from mental illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Hare
His treatments were only partially successful. He reappeared in a cameo appearance early in season two ("The Coming of Shadows") and returned in season three for a two-part episode ("War Without End") which closed his character's story arc. At that time, Straczynski promised O'Hare to keep his condition secret "to my grave". O'Hare told him to instead "keep the secret to my grave", arguing that fans deserved to eventually learn the real reason for his departure, and that his experience could raise awareness and understanding for people with mental illness. He made no further appearances on Babylon 5 but continued to support the show and appeared at conventions and signing events until his retirement from public appearances in 2000.
On September 28, 2012, Straczynski posted that O'Hare had had a heart attack in New York City five days earlier and had remained in a coma until his death that day.[48] Eight months later, Straczynski revealed the circumstances of O'Hare's departure from Babylon 5 at a presentation about the series at the Phoenix Comicon.
>I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show.
There has been discussion about a reboot over the years, with JMS throwing some cold water[0] (at least for now) on the possibility in January 2026.
There's sort of a "continuation" with Babylon 5: The Road Home[1] from 2023.
There's also Crusade[2] which only ended up with a dozen or so episodes, although JMS had a multi-year story arc planned.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/j-michael-straczynski-is-being-upfront-with-fans-over-potential-babylon-5-revival-following-netflixs-warner-bros-acquisition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5:_The_Road_Home
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_%28TV_series%29
>I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself,
The series creator and chief writer, J. Michael Straczynski was explicit about that: The Earth Government story arc is lifted straight from the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.
A significant amount of which we're seeing rebranded as MAGA in the US and other far-right movements elsewhere.
A good example would be the "anti-alien" frenzy in Babylon 5 as compared with the far-right's ridiculous tropes about the undocumented in the US.
There are a bunch more like Trump's obsession with personal loyalty and lack of any empathy is quite similar to Babylon 5's President Clarke.
As I mentioned, that story arc is based upon the fascist regimes of the '30s and '40s, they even have a "Neville Chamberlain"[0] analog[1] who loudly proclaims "Finally, we will at last know 'peace in our time'."
The biggest difference is that in the Babylon 5 universe, the fascist scum are much more competent than those IRL today.
There's lots more, and I'll echo the plaints of others here that Season 1 is uneven and appears meandering, but many of the plot points brought up in Season 1 end up paying off much later in the series.
I heartily recommend watching the series, not just for the parallels with some of our current circumstance, but because it's a good story with the entire five season story arc fleshed out from the beginning, with good character development and character driven story lines.
It was also the first live-action Sci-Fi series that made use of CGI for the space scenes, which was both very cool, but was also limited compared to today's SFX given that 30 second segments could take hours to render on the Unix workstations of the mid 1990s.
Is it perfect, no. But it's worth the effort to watch it IMNSHO.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
[1] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Frederick_Lantze
For me, the appeal of DS9 was that certain episodes In the Pale Moonlight etc. are a bit like a play, very self-contained even if they are in a certain setting. Babylon 5 is kind of the opposite, no plays, just parts of a long arc.
I think both have their appeal, but it's easier to timebox the enjoyment of a play. It's also easier to discuss, or think about.
I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show.
In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginning, instead of completely making it up on the fly like so many other shows. Subtle things which might seem inconsequential, appearing in the very first season, can foreshadow events happening seasons later. This makes it, at least for me, much more coherent and enjoyable to watch, and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today).
hello,
as always: imho. (!)
ah ... babylon 5 :))
this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties.
it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time:
* telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons
* 2 parallel story-lines within episodes
* causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the toilet - you may laugh, but 30+ years ago, for example in various startrek spinoffs - tng, ds9, voyager - nobody went to the toilet ... ever!!
don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of startrek too ;))
* despite their budget decent CGI for the time
if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom", which ran on the amiga hardware-platform at first, for later seasons they moved to PC hardware...
just if you wonder about the quality of the CGI ... this was some 680x0 computer running at something like 16 or 32 MHz (!) with a few MB (!) of memory.
not a scifi "blockbuster" utilizing multimillion us$ SGI clusters like ILM productions of the era did!
absolutely recommended:
"the lurker's guide to babylon 5"
* http://midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
just my 0.02€
If you decide to watch Babylon 5 for the first time, I suggest giving it a chance to get under your skin. There is quite a lot to get in the way of that such as mediocre acting, cringey humour, low budget fx (all particularly prominent in season 1). But the pay off in seasons 3 and 4 is huge if you take the time to let affection grow for the characters. Babylon 5 was my first 'favourite series' that 'changed my life' etc etc so I guess I am biased!
> I find it funny that casual observers on the outside are so morally opposed. ... It's really going to help mid market and below, for films that don't have Disney budgets.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it.
> Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer...
Heh I was going to reply "B5 is better than TNG", but thought "better check all the replies first". Wherever there's discussion of extended plots there's one of us nerds. (If anyone hasn't seen it... yes half the first season is rough, but you get a season's worth of "The Inner Light"-quality episodes by the end and for all the major characters; TNG, while lovely, has just a few because there's so little character development besides Picard)
How old are you? Because I promise you, that description was pretty much spot-on for most shows through most of the history of TV prior to the late 1990s. My memory is that the main exception was daytime soap operas, which did expect viewers to watch pretty much daily. (I recall a conversation explaining Babylon 5's ongoing plot arc to my parents, and one of them said, "You mean, sort of like a soap opera?") Those "Previously on ___" intro segments were quite rare (and usually a sign that you were in the middle of some Very Special 2-part story, as described in the previous comment).
Go back and watch any two episodes (maybe not the season finale) from the same season of Star Trek TOS or TNG, or Cheers, or MASH, or Friends, or any other prime time show at all prior to 1990. You won't be able to tell which came first, certainly not in any obvious way. (Networks didn't really even have the concept of specific episode orders in that era. Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer in the "ongoing plot arc" space, the network deliberately shuffled around the order of a number of first-season episodes because they wanted to put stronger stories earlier to hook viewers, even though doing so left some character development a bit nonsensical. You can find websites today where fans debate whether it's best to watch the show in release order or production order or something else.)
By and large, we all just understood that "nothing ever happens" with long-term impact on a show, except maybe from season to season. (I think I even remember the standard "end of episode reset" being referenced in a comedy show as a breaking-the-fourth-wall joke.) Yes, you'd get character development in a particular episode, but it was more about the audience understanding the character better than about immediate, noticeable changes to their life and behavior. At best, the character beats from one season would add up to a meaningful change in the next season. At least that's my memory of how it tended to go. Maybe there were exceptions! But this really was the norm.
Telling a detailed story is different than telling a compelling story.
Andor isn’t as compelling as the original movie or significantly longer than the Harry Potter series of movies. Babylon 5 is probably the poster child for a long running space opera series with a planned story arch, but they added plenty of filler because you don’t actually need that much time.
If anything movies tend to be better than TV shows because of the time constraints rather than the budget.
I don't know, currently watching Babylon 5 Season 3 and I think the CG is pretty impressive. It's not high resolution or sharp, but the ray tracing is excellent. A lot of moving parts flying around everywhere with lighting and planets in the background.
There's a character in Babylon-5, the sci-fi TV series of the 90s, also named Garibaldi. Professional hater of authority.
I haven't seen it yet, but better than Babylon 5? Then it has to better than DS9, I feel that that seems really difficult, considering that DS9 has episodes like In the Pale Moonlight.
Fantastic. Andor recently passed Expanse,Galactica and Babylon 5 as my favorite SF series. The way I describe it is what we should have gotten in the prequels. As a kid I always imagined that the prequels would be the fall of Rome. What we got instead was a reflection of George Lucas’s monetization of Star Wars - purple lightsabers, yippee and Jar Jar.
There was no way to “earn” the payoff with Vader so they masked it over with massacring children and one of the worst romance screen in (then nascent) digital film history.
At the end of Andor, nothing felt unearned. For film folks there were jaw dropping moments, and for history geeks, gasp out loud moments (my favorite being half-track and Wannasee callbacks in not so subtle Star Wars allegory).
Andor is good enough that it makes its sequels better:
https://youtu.be/qzny45Zk05c?si=0fMi8YKgHOPfKV62
I think in isolation it does have that vibe, and had it been left effectively as a bottle episode, it would have, but given we see Rom increasingly stand up for himself and make a mark as a reformer, it gets redeemed by the rest of the arc.
I also kinda like the Babylon 5 episode, but it has an entirely different feel to it, and the way it is resolved does make it weaker overall - it's the captain rather than the strikers that seal the win. The main strength of the Babylon 5 episode is that caricature of the negotiator and the visual presentation of the conflict, that feels like it is referencing an old-fashioned way of presenting conflict in US media that is made toothless by focusing on the anger while giving little play to the issues. Only in the Babylon 5 case, the extreme caricature of the negotitator gives him the more negative portrayal often given to strikers.
I agree its important to rom's arc, and in general is a good episode. However it definitely gave me the vibe of "oh look how cute, he wants rights". There was something a bit condescending about it.
You're right though, its definitely better than the babylon 5 episode.
Really amazing how much of current reality consists of direct 1-1 plot points in Babylon 5. Not like some Simpsons reference, but entire season story arcs.
I think we are up to Season 3, Ep 9.
The president will declare martial law, and will issue executive order to dissolve the senate.
Also, credit where credit is due that Babylon 5 is almost exclusive in that era in terms of almost every episode having at least something that contributes to the main plot.
So much so that Star Trek had to pivot TNG and DS9 from problem of the week formulaic writing to something similar.
How about Babylon 5?
J. Michael Straczynski had a a storyline designed to last 5 seasons (and apparently with several "trap-doors" for when actors left the show etc.), but the studio then let him know that they were going to cancel it at the end of season 4, so he had to tie up the main plots quickly. However, the studio then decided to produce a fifth season, so Straczynski had to string together a whole season that he hadn't planned for.
Babylon 5, but go in unspoiled.
It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...)
That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.
I don't think "all CGI looks the same" has been any more true for games/movies/tv than "all [things] look the same" style-wise was before (consider sci-fi aesthetics by decade, say - how many Star Trek copycats, how many Alien copycats, etc). And obviously the limitations of practical effects are HUGE - Star Wars broke a lot of ground here, and yet looking at a movie from 5 years later, Wrath of Khan, we see very limited model movement and "action". Or compare TNG space action with even the primitive CGI of Babylon 5.
Wind Waker was one of the first obvious examples in the 3d-rendered-game world; the Spiderverse movies are probably the most widely-seen cultural example of breaking with existing styles. The "feathering" effect of some of the surfaces/fur and such in the commercials for The Wild Robot is another that I remember seen recently.
There's a lot of copy-catting, but not really in a "limits of the process of making CGI" way anymore.
>I just reread the summary of “In The Beginning” and you’re absolutely correct. Do not watch this pilot first!
You are absolutely correct that "In the Beginning" has all kinds of spoilers, and shouldn't be watched.
Because "In the Beginning"[0] is not a pilot. It was a TV movie made to introduce the series to TNT viewers and broadcast just before they started airing Season 5.
"The Gathering"[1] is the only Babylon 5 pilot (with "A Call to Arms"[2] as the introduction for Crusade[3], and "To Live and Die in Starlight"[4] was the pilot for the never-made "Legend of the Rangers"[5])
[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/111.html
[1] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/000.html
[2] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/115.html
[3] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/113.html
[4] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/117.html
[5] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/117.html
I just reread the summary of “In The Beginning” and you’re absolutely correct. Do not watch this pilot first!
I don’t know why the Lurker’s Guide (or JMS) recommend watching it first. I rewatched Babylon 5 recently and I’m glad I watched “In The Beginning” last.
> My main annoyance with B5 is how the alien designs echo human historic stereotypes. A lot of sci fi falls in this trap.
1) The problem with TV is that you have to cough up an episode every single week on the fly. And JMS wrote a huge number of the episodes for Seasons 3 and 4 (I think all of them, but I can't find a citation).
2) Babylon 5 was specifically engineered to be TV budget friendly and was about $650K per episode. That puts significant limits on what you can do. Contrast to say Farscape at $1M or TNG at $1.5M per episode.
Babylon 5 remains almost unique in its particular tone of melodrama, its very theatrical acting with larger-than-life characters. I love it for that, despite one or two actors who aren't very good.
Midwinter's episode ratings are a pretty good guide to which ones are skippable, though there's only a handful of episodes that are truly disposable filler. It's a remarkable achievement for 90s TV.
I haven't started it yet, but saw this viewing guide which helps reduce filler episodes for those wanting to get into the series with limited time: https://www.bjornmunson.com/2023/05/18/a-viewing-guide-for-babylon-5/
What I'm saying is that I suspect writers need to be attached to a specific show for a while for that seasoning/maturity/"sea legs" process to happen for the show. I don't think it works if there's just a procession of people who only write one or two episodes and then move on to other shows.
To be fair, there is the odd exception where one writer just single-handedly cranks out the scripts (e.g. Joe Straczynski writing all of season 3 of Babylon 5), but that's the exception for a reason.
I have to mention Babylon 5 here, I don't think anything is as complete in terms of a 5 year, 110 episode plot. Note; don't read up on the plot, it's actually self-destructive.
I'm old enough to remember people saying that about go.
I pitched the idea of an AI directly generating art sometime around 2008, only to have the idea curtly dismissed.
Deep Fakes (by a different name) were a plot point in an episode of Sliders, and the audio version a throwaway line in an episode of Babylon 5, at the time I thought each were completely impossible.
My bet would be androids doing plumbing around ten years after cars lose their steering wheels; but even then, that's just anchoring on Moore and the available power envelope for a car vs. a bipedal robot.
Another piece was a science-fiction story about exploring an undiscovered tropical region of Antarctica. It imagines the Nimrod’s party making their way into the strange land of Bathybia, 22,000 feet below sea level. They used rafts made of giant, man-sized mushrooms to travel down rivers into a red jungle, encountering giant ticks, alcoholic algae, and huge carnivorous versions of microscopic Antarctic rotifers. A few years earlier, the German science-fiction author Kurd Lasswitz published the novel "Two Planets", about a Martian colony at the North Pole. It would influence a young Werner von Braun, who would later guide the US space program, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571588
More recently, J. Michael Straczynski, creator of "Babylon 5", participated in the writers room for the 2021 movie "Godzilla vs Kong",
> Apex CEO Walter Simmons recruits former Monarch scientist and Hollow Earth theorist Nathan Lind to guide a search for a power source into the Hollow Earth, the Titans' homeworld. Lind is hesitant as his brother died in an expedition to the Hollow Earth due to a strong reverse-gravitational effect. He agrees when Walter reveals that Apex has developed HEAVs, specialized craft able to withstand the gravity field. Lind convinces Andrews to let Kong guide them via an outpost in Antarctica. Lind, Andrews, and an Apex team led by Walter's daughter Maia board a barge escorted by the US Navy, carrying a sedated and restrained Kong.
There’s a great scene at the end of Babylon 5 season 4 when a bunch of pundits are talking about John Sheridan much like you are talking about Churchill. It all happened years after the fact and sounded so plausible and so truthful, like they absolutely knew what they were saying was gospel. Perhaps you are a foremost expert on Churchill and not just a rando on the internet.
(continuing)
were more or less sitting around idle because of course business is happening during the day. So General Electric Network Internet Exchange, or Genie, was launched.
Priced at $6 per hour at night and $36 per hour during the day, Genie had all the best online games at the time and lots of sci-fi writers ended up using the service, including J. Michael Straczynski, who announced some TV show called Babylon 5 on there. And Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV shows, just celebrated its 30th anniversary of the series debuting.
Anyway, back to Apple Link and the shuttle email. On STS-43 the communications experiment was designated DTO-799, PGSD-slash-PADM Air Ground Communications Demonstration. So PGSC is the Payload General Support Computer, the aforementioned Grid Compass, and PADM was the Portable Audio Data Modem. And the modem was of course key in communication back then, right? This would be talking back to Earth. The space shuttle already had amazing communications capabilities compared to all previous space programs. It had been launching the Tracking Data and Relay Satellites, or TDRS. In fact, the primary payload on STS-43 was TDRS-5. These satellites sat out in geostationary orbit and they enabled communications with the shuttle when the shuttle didn't have a line of sight to the ground stations.
The shuttle actually supported digital communications protocols at bit rates that absolutely eclipsed the lowly dial-up connections that us earthbound plebs generally had to deal with. Like the telemetry and the voice communication, all that stuff would take up about 216 kilobits per second. But the shuttle could also send data like a real-time video as much as 50 megabits per second, so it was able to scream out data.
So yeah, there wasn't also an existing teletype communications system on board, so from the shuttle they could send up text to the teleprinter to provide written instructions and messages to the astronauts on their trip. And sometimes these printouts could be huge. They would spill out of the printer in zero-g, making for some comical sights as astronauts tried to make sense of the massive instructions flowing out of this device. So a big part of the air-to-ground communications experiment was to provide a two-way equivalent of this, and maybe one day eliminate the paper copy if it wasn't needed.
So now the question is, how do you connect a Mac to this space-age digital communication system so it can take advantage of all that bandwidth? Well, it turns out that modifying the digital communication system to support a data link to a device on the flight deck was not possible with resources they had on hand, right? So they just hooked up an old school modem, the portable audio data modem, to an audio channel. And let's be clear, the space channel communications were all digital, including the analog audio, which was converted to a digital format for transmission and then decoded and converted back to audio.
So the modem on the flight deck, it would convert the digital data on the computer to analog audio and vice versa. So the binary data on the computer was converted to an analog audio signal by the modem, fed into the shuttle's audio processor, which could convert it to a digital signal, and then beam that to the TDRS satellites, which would then send it back to the Earth at White Sands, and then that would be sent across the country on data links to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. And there, the data would be decoded, including the shuttle audio. And some lucky person at JSC could have picked up the wrong phone and, you know, sure, no doubt have listened into the modems screeching at them, right?
But anyway, according to the documents that I found, the protocol they used was V27TER, half-duplex. That's a fax protocol that uses 1200 symbols per second at 2 bits per symbol, making a total data rate of 2400 bits per second. And the half-duplex part is significant. It means that this is a one-directional transmission. And when a pair of modems share the line, only one can be transmitting while the other is receiving. And I think this may be down to the fact that shuttle audio was like a push-to-talk system, where you would push, talk, and then you would release and you would listen. And so running a modem over this had to run with the same constraints.
So, you know, you might think the obvious next step is just to plug that audio from
> I could go on for more pages than anyone would care to count about Farscape. It is, without any doubt, one of the greatest science fiction television series’ ever created. Please quote me on that.
A’men! It holds up incredibly well to modern scifi because there’s very little CGI and it doesn’t look as badly dated as say, Babylon 5. It’s sad that there’s no one who really does animatronics like Henson anymore and if the show were to be remade today (god forbid), all the characters would probably be Andy Serkis in a mocap suit.
My favorite puppet to this day is the Seer Creesus [1] which would have given me nightmares if I had watched the show as a kid.
[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/farscape/images/5/55/Cresus.jpg
I didn't watch every single episode of it, but from what I saw I think Babylon 5 had a really good Finale.
It’s already being used to upscale Star Trek and Babylon 5.
In 10-15 years, hopefully we can just input this script as a prompt, and get a full film in the style of David Lynch.
Babylon 5 is the best science fiction series ever IMO (if you can make it all the way through). The first season was especially campy, but the world building, geopolitics (not politics, but how the alien species interact), storytelling, and philosophy are all very thought-provoking. Yeah it had amazing space battles, but where it shines the most is in the dialogue. I still get chills to this day from some of the discussions. The show is even better on a second or tenth watch as all the foreshadowing is so apparent.
I thoroughly enjoyed DS9 as well, but outside of some things like Quark and Garrak, I feel it to sometimes be a pale imitation of B5.
Farscape is just freaking weird, but just so much fun. The characters have no restraints on emotion. There is no chain of command.
Stargate SG-1 and all the spin offs are also extremely good and the only science fiction show my wife could really get into. If you haven't watched it yet...well then you have like 18 seasons and a few movies to get through if you count all the TV shows.
“These things happen in a monarchy”
— Londo Mollari, Babylon 5, season 5, episode 10, A Tragedy of Telepaths (1998)
Babylon 5 was a pioneer in the use of CGI for television, and its success in blending CGI with live-action footage set a standard for future sci-fi TV shows. The show's use of CGI was particularly impressive given the technology and budget constraints of the time. What an awesome memories!
Together, DS9 and Babylon 5 are rightfully credited with innovating the long form series. What the kids today might call "binge worthy."
Their story arcs were known from the outset. Each (main) character has their own hero's journey and side quests. Both had satisfying endings.
Also, officially, Capt Sisko is the GOAT. With Capt Janeway placing a strong 2nd. Though Capt Pike (Strange New Worlds) is quite promising, but only time will tell.
Whereas Voyager has most of my most favorite episodes, esp wrt Ensign Kim, DS9's characters are legend, esp Quark. I couldn't pick a favorite DS9 character (or story), even on pain of death, because I cherish them all equally.
In glancingly tangential news,
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester won the first ever Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1953 ... 70 years ago.
How did a character from the 1990s TV series Babylon 5 write a novel 40 years earlier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demolished_Man
Is this the year I learn Norwegian? https://radio.nrk.no/serie/demolisjon/MKTT81005181
There are already applications like https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai and https://tensorpix.ai/ -- So it doesn't seem unreasonable that some of these deep learning models could upscale all these old TV episodes to at least 4k.
I'd love to see a combo of this Google tech and AI upscaling do the same for Babylon 5. They had shot the actors in widescreen format, but the CGI spaceships were only rendered in 4:3 and the files have been lost.
> just
Unfortunately there's a lot of post-production steps that take place between the original film and the finished show. Since the 90s/noughties many of those steps take place in digital systems after the film has been scanned at the chosen resolution. Here's some detail specific to Babylon 5 and HD conversion, for example:
https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-22-babylon-5-digital-video-quality.html
That conditional has one hell of an `else` clause. What if we assume they should not be properly compensated?
Semantic jokes aside, we have some decent coverage of the idea from science fiction already. The one that comes to my mind is the Babylon 5 Season 1, Episode 9: "Deathwalker" where an alien develops a universal anti-agapic and decides to give it to Earth because it requires the destruction of someone living to create a dose.
What we actually need is to find a way to synthesize the protein, should it have any equivalent and effect in humans, under production circumstances, and not require donors at all.
On the topic of "I hope the future will be like Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be like Babylon 5," the very first episodes of TNG loosely tell the story of what Earth was like from, say, 2000-2200. It was very bad. So, even if things are terrible now, we could be tracking towards that militaristic utopia that TNG made us all yearn for!
My memory of Babylon 5 is that it was fifty percent great episodes with really good writing and fifty percent "Oh no, Senator Fuckface tripped and fell down a hole and lost their communicator and got amnesia and they're somewhere in the massive ghetto part of the station that exists for some reason."
From Article >"“I hope the future will be like Star Trek, but I’m afraid it’s going to be like Babylon 5.”"
This is exactly what I'm seeing. Having watched sci-fi for decades, I was pretty idealistic about Star Trek, the future is going to be great.
But it is turning out to be more like Blade Runner. Or the mega corp in Alien.
Recently Re-watch the Babylon 5 episodes on the Right Wing take over of the Earth Government, it was incredibly realistic for its time. It was legit scary how similar it was to our elections, and we are living through it. (not even sure the mind control part is even too un-realistic with the fake AI stories coming out).
In a Babylon 5 episode (set a few centuries in the future) they call it the Helsinki Syndrome, which I thought was a clever little nod by the writer to remind us how a legend continues to mutate.
Yes. I think TNG is overall a better, comfortable show, but DS9 is more of a "space-opera" (akin to Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica), with a few one-offs episodes. Ronald Moore wrote both BS:G and DS9, so you see very similar styles between the two.
Remember the first season episode of Babylon 5, Signs and Portents, that kicked off the series-long plotlines? In addition to the meddling from the sibling comment, Crusade didn't even get that far before cancelation, its version of that episode was still coming.
Also because of that meddling, episodes aired completely out of order, so a lot of things made no sense. For example, using the nanotech shield before it was invented.
Babylon 5 accounted for this in the first three seasons by making them start out episodic and switch to serialized over the course of the season, since by that time most would have settled into routines and watch the same shows each week.
Seasons 4 and 5 probably would have been the same except due to fears of cancelation they took the primary plots of both seasons and stuffed them into just season 4.
One of my favorite things about Babylon 5 was how it was planned out for exactly five seasons, with a beginning, middle, and end.
Granted, the last season was a bit muffed since they'd had to bring the story to a closure at the end of season 4 when they thought it would be renewed. But still...
I have a lot of respect for creatives who can plan out a work, and then actually carry through and walk away from it when it is complete.
And honestly now that I am thinking about it, 2010 is such a rich book/movie with this theme of consciousness and Becoming in general... a really apropos movie for these times. That quote inspired me to re-watch it and as I'm doing so, practically every scene is wrestling with that concept.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2E7sxGAmuo
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086837/
So was 2001 A Space Odyssey of course. Like I said this is a topic that has been grappled with in scifi, particularly Clarke and Asimov (Foundation, The Last Question, etc), or that episode of Babylon 5 about the psychic dude ;)
But I think we are on the precipice of crossing from the Information Age into the Mind Age. Less than 50 years probably. Less than 25 years probably. And it will change everything. ChatGPT is just an idiot child compared to what will exist in 10 years, and in 25 years the world will be fundamentally different in unknowable ways, any more than we could have predicted the smartphone and tiktok.
(did we have an idea that a star trek communicator or tricorder would be neat? Sure, but, it turns out it's actually a World-Brain In My Pocket.)
Sort of a tangent, but related: I read a lot of serialized fiction and it suffers from the same problem that there's an implied contract the creator will take the consumer through a complete story arc. But authors struggle with both writing new episodes and attracting readers, and unless they build enough viewership it's possible they'll lose motivation and just stop writing.
To protect yourself from this, it usually pays to either read stories from authors who've finished work in the past, or wait until they're done. Too long between episodes, or frankly lots of "slice of life" (cynically read: the author hasn't plotted anything out and doesn't have a plan to create and resolve conflict, so they just putter along) and most readers will lose interest.
Anecdotally this is why I stopped watching Rick and Morty even prior to the various revelations about the authors. They shed enough momentum that any interest in the characters or universe was lost. And R & M is a good example of what happens when there's no planned plot line: you end up with filler episodes like "Intergalactic Cable" where the author just riff randomly.
For people who remember Babylon 5, there was a great deal of excitement in part because the arcs were all pre-planned which some viewed as a positive because there was no danger of the show just turning into episodic and formulaic exploitation of a known set of characters and places. We used to have TV shows just stagger on until cancelled, with showrunners hoping to be the next Simpsons, Star Trek or Stargate writer and now we're at the other extreme that if audiences don't show immediate and sustained engagement, the show (at least on Netflix, HBO MAX, etc) is doomed.
By now, I figured we'd have a lot more visual media being 100% CGI. That would have allowed small creators to ride the collapsing cost of hardware.
You're probably pushing more triangles in ten seconds of a modern video game at 4K than in the entire run of Babylon 5's groundbreaking CGI usage. So we've definitely got the resources available to deliver broadcast-quality CGI video to the masses, and the right tooling could make it accessible.
I could imagine franchises that started with modest visuals, and if they can find bigger backers (more subscribers, advertisers, merchandising, whatever), they can level up with more resources behind them.
I also imagined that studios and directors would love the idea of CGI actors-- you could do things that are still infeasible with practical effects, you can pull them back out 10 years later and they haven't aged, and you don't need to worry that they'll suddenly go on a binge that effects their ability to film.
> It's also coherent in between seasons, since it was pre-planned as a 5-season show spanning exactly 5 years on the Babylon 5 station.
Though the 5th season is weak, because the show was threatened with cancellation. IIRC, each season had an "major plot" and a "minor plot." To adapt to the cancellation threat, they crammed the season 4 and 5 "major plots" into season 4 (IIRC defeat the Shadows, liberate Earth), leaving season 5 with two "minor plots." The season 5 finale was originally shot as part of season 4, but delayed when the show was renewed.
My understanding is Babylon 5 was shot on 35mm film -- the same used for movies.
I started watching this series back in the day because it involved Commodore Amiga and Lightwave 3D (both of which I owned and used at the time). Totally agree with you about "distinguishing features". That's what kept me watching it right to the end (including the movies)… As to "It hasn't aged that well" re; the animation, it's honestly aged better'n some other shows from around the same timeframe, although some A.I. upscaling of resolution for modern displays might be nice to see. I'm highly in favor of more new Babylon 5 stuff coming forth…
Agreed but unfortunately the CW has a very common denominator amongst the content it produces and Babylon 5 does not fit that mold in my mind. Think 23 episodes a season, the entire main cast young adults 18-23 with maybe a few adults as supporting cast, and lots of screen time dedicated to “shipping” different romance scenarios.
I enjoyed Arrow and early seasons of Flash despite being well well past their target demographic but I’m not sure how well this show will in if it sticks to the CW formula.
Yes, Season 1 is really uneven. For new viewers, if you have someone to pick out the important episodes, then you can skip the rest and come back later. (And you can always skip "TKO".)
Seasons 2 to through 4 are still some of my all-time favorite science fiction TV. The three-episode mini-arc of "Messages from Earth", "Point of No Return" and "Severed Dreams" (IIRC) is still incredibly intense.
The closest thing I can think of today is probably The Expanse. It has the same mix of human politics in the face of aliens we cannot comprehend. Of course, The Expanse has a higher budget and more consistent acting.
In a lot of ways, Babylon 5 is the first "streaming-style" show. There's a clear series arc, viewers are expected to know what happened in previous episodes, and there's plenty of foreshadowing for the attentive viewer. (The original online Babylon 5 fandom kept track of every tiny hint.) Buffy was also moving in that direction, and Star Trek quickly followed.
Babylon 5 was excellent. Crusade was killed off way too soon. The B5 movies however... Legend of the Rangers was really bad.
Also: "All of the main cast still around participated" makes me feel sad. Andreas Katsulas is a hard act to follow.
Babylon 5 is a well made SciFi show and I'd recommend it!
I'm currently on season 3, started watching it because of Casey Muratori's (video game programmer, author of "Handmade Hero" educational streams) series of interviews with Jonas Kyratzes (video game designer, writer of "Talos Principle"), where they discuss the show: [0]
The distinguishing point about the show is that it features a coherent world, where some small detail happening in one episode can come back 6 episodes later. It's also coherent in between seasons, since it was pre-planned as a 5-season show spanning exactly 5 years on the Babylon 5 station.
Also, it features early computer animated 3D art made on Amiga computers. It hasn't aged that well but gets the job done.
[0]: https://youtu.be/iASsvQ8sX9w
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
Yes, I assume that Lost--for whatever its problems--was essentially a child of Internet discussions plus TiVo/DVRs. Babylon 5 was even earlier but it was pretty niche and many fans (like myself) were content to timeshift on VCRs by then.
And, yes, syndication was a significant revenue stream that basically didn't work unless you could randomly drop into a Law and Order episode or pretty much any sitcom.
Hmm, a few years late per SeaQuest’s timeline… I just hope we have a SeaQuest 4600 class sub handy to sacrifice in order to plug the lava flow when the turbines cause the ocean floor to break apart!
Ironically, in the SeaQuest timeline, SeaQuest DSV itself would have been abducted by an alien ship just a few weeks ago. Maybe there’s still hope that Mark Hamill is actually our first contact with an alien species?
Makes me want to go rewatch 90’s sci-fi: Babylon 5, Space Above & Beyond, SeaQuest (season 1 at least), TekWar, TimeTrax, etc.
It seems like strong shows can go up to about 7 seasons and remain good. Three does seem short for a very strong show.
Maybe personal bias, but it seems to hold up pretty well in my viewing history. Seinfeld definitely felt stretched at 9. Star Trek TNG's seventh season definitely felt like about time to wrap it up. Simpsons went kind of wonky around season 8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed good for a 7 season run.
Not some immutable law, but really good shows ending after 5 seasons seems a bit disappointing as well, like Babylon 5. Writers run out of ideas and the original concept seems explored pretty thoroughly after going through 7 seasons.
Three is way too short. Seven seems like the sweet spot. Maybe everyone just gets bored and they don't do stuff as well after seven seasons, but shows really start to change after season 7.
With the Amiga it is possible to use an external clock source as the system clock and to switch the video chip horizontal and vertical sync pins to inputs so they can come from external source instead of internal system clock based sync generator.
The addition of the Amiga toaster, meant that Amiga saw use in the TV and Movie Industry in the late 80's and 90's. A number of high profile projects used the Amiga.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
Here's a listing of some of the famous uses of the Amiga https://www.amigareport.com/ar134/p1-12.html
Some notable ones, were Babylon 5, Titanic,
That'd be Video Toasters. But Newtek ditched Amiga support in '95, and by late 90's PCs or DEC Alphas would cream the Amigas for the render farms.
Even Babylon 5 switched the render farms for seasons 4 and 5.
Not impossible someone would still want to replace individual systems in a render farm rather than upgrading, but given the potential speed gains it'd seem like a poor choice.
> and the special effects didn't seem that much less obvious to me than they would today
While I understand where you come from, there is still a difference of the medium.
Eg: I have seen Blade (1998) on a VHS first, except it was a pirated copy of a pirated copy. It was a very dark, almost noir toned story, somewhat visually akin to Sin City. Years later, when I saw in a decent quality on a (still analog at that time) TV I didn't recognized it first. And again, years later on a digital TV it became just a bunch of ads for Snipes on a highly lit backdrops and ugly CGI. Somewhat similar, though not that jarring, is my story with Babylon 5. Even when it aired I could see the effects and CGI (they were pretty obvious most of the time) but now the difference of quality (and 38" vs 14") sometimes distracts from immersing to the story.
BTW only with Avatar I finally couldn't reliably distinguish where the CGI starts or ends, but it was a top notch one. I still see the "lame" CGI (especially when a fake motion blur is cranked up to 11) even on a high budget films, like all that comic book adaptations.
> In fact there is much more humor and general levity on DS9 than TNG which felt more stuffy and righteous.
While I agree TNG was more “stuffy” the examples you’d described were no different to the lighter elements in TNG. Eg most of the sub-plots that involved either Data were like that. Most of the Q episodes too. There was plenty of banter on TNG, what DS9 did differently was showed people being snarky with each other. Every episode of DS9 had someone delivering a cutting putdown to a colleague. This was something TNG lacked (because Gene Roddenberry didn’t think it worked with his vision but he was dead by the time DS9 was being written).
> A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.
B5 was originally pitched to the same network as Star Trek (Paramount?) but was rejected. Then a few months later DS9 was being produced. Straczynski (the creator of B5) had accused DS9 of ripping off his ideas. And to be fair there are parallels to his show: darker plot with a story arc about impending war based on a space station that hosts an array of aliens who don’t all get along. Even the worm hole idea could be related to the jump gates in B5 - both are subspace portals created by ancient aliens.
But you can also see a lot of parallels between SG1 and B5/DS9 too so it’s fair to say all art inspires other art.
I do miss 90s SciFi too and agree with your points about how dark things have gotten these days.
> DS9 was the darkest
While this is true in many of the plots and themes explored on the show, especially the Dominion War, it by no means meant the show always took itself super seriously. In fact there is much more humor and general levity on DS9 than TNG which felt more stuffy and righteous.
It wasn't outright comedy besides a few episodes (Little Green Men, Our Man Bashir, Take Me Out to the Holosuite, Ferengi episodes), it was natural banter between character pairs (Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, Worf/Martok/Sisko, Jake and Nog, the entire extended Ferengi family, etc.). Often episodes would be structured with a "serious" A-plot and a more soapy B-plot where most of the shenanigans would take place.
It's part of the reason DS9 felt, to me at least, more real and lived-in than TNG. TNG was promoting an ideology, a religion of sorts. Very aristocratic, many sacred cows. You would not expect humor to show up much for such people. DS9 on the other hand showed people living in a less than ideal situation, dealing with a galactic shitstorm that washed up on their shores. One of the ways real people deal with such situations is humor.
Granted this was the 90s, since 9/11 TV shows, including Star Trek, became more dark for the sake of being dark. Seemed like Archer was torturing people every other episode at times, and I'm not sure he knew how to smile. And for the epitome of "dark and super srs", look no further than nuBSG, where characters could not even take a dump without Irish bagpipe music being played over it.
Yes I miss the 90s. A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.
> Except that Star Trek is a TV show.
A category in which it loses handily to Babylon 5, the best sci-fi show, nay, the best show in general, ever to have been made.
To be fair Babylon 5 WAS planned for the 5 Season Arc and only extended after the original plans for season 3-5 were essentially compressed into what became season 3 and 4. But from what I know it's true that the Babylon 5 we got was substantially different from the one originally planned. Here's a very detailed Discussion of the original story line https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/synopsis-of-jmss-synopsis-of-the-original-arc-for-b5-spoilers.53739/
I haven't thought about .plan files in years. This takes me back to setting those on the HP-UX account I had at college, and fingering my friends' .plan files daily. That was my first real encounter with actual multi-user, family-tree Unix, though I had been horsing around with some of the various Linuxen available in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s.
Mine usually had snarky movie or TV quotes. Usually from MST3K, Babylon 5 or Army of Darkness.
An excellent Babylon 5 episode!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deconstruction_of_Falling_Stars
(For very fuzzy definitions of “these days”)
Emmy award nominated Babylon 5 episode! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comes_the_Inquisitor
One of the best, among many, of the series.
It's really odd to see someone rebooting their own story. Either he'll make changes for change sake to make it fresh or the show may be boring since we'll know what happens.
(JMS will hopefully still be good at writing Babylon 5 but he wrote some really crummy comic books over the years, and one of his last Babylon 5 project was an awful "A ripoff of the Movie The Exorcist but in SPACE!" episode which hopefully isn't a sample of what we can expect from here on.)
You’ll be pleased to know, then, that JMS is showrunner and actively writing the pilot:
> “You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.” In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?
https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1442621159221043202?s=21
If you haven’t seen his recent work Sense8, I highly recommend it (though practically all content warnings apply in spades). It’s a show about many things, but most relevant to potential success on the CW, it’s a show about young adults from different walks of life coming together to do heroic things and understand themselves through empathy with others. If anyone can find the balance that Babylon 5 deserves, and find a way to make it maximally relevant in a time we need to hear stories of heroic empathy, it’s JMS with everything he’s learned. I’m incredibly stoked.
I always liked it’s lunch time somewhere from Babylon 5, same vibe as that TNG episode.
[1] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Intersections_in_Real_Time
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
> Would be interesting to have an entire website like this where you can tune to any day and hear the news. And eventually more than just media.
When you mix archive.org Wayback Machine and the back footage of many of the news networks have with their giant software platforms, I'm sure that most news editing rooms are already like this. Probably just a matter of time/infrastructure until we all get a chance to access such things, assuming we don't fall to entropic decay.
I think you'd have to solve the "unified theory" physics equation before you could predict where all particles were in the past, though. So like rewinding and seeing where I am right now and what is happening in my life (or yours). That one I personally am not entirely sure can be accomplished.
There is a Babylon 5 episode about this, though, in season 5. Takes place millions of years in the future.
There are a million nitpicks in the city, this is just one of them.
Netflix and Amazon both have a strong interior belief this smart referral thing is good and who knows: A/B testing may even validate it. I just know that recommendations in books film and music creep me out, maybe it's an analogue of "uncanny valley" but being told "you may also like" kills the mood for me. Dammit, I want to like what I like, not what statistics thinks I may like.
"The office" thing, yes, that's the whole point: ask me Tuesday and I might say yes. Ask me Monday and Sunday, I might cancel my subscription. I talk about this with a lot of people and book and film recommendations are toxic to friendship. You love STNG? Oh you would love Babylon 5 no, just no.
And I don't think "I'm zany" or anything cute. I think this is a normal reaction and a common reaction. I bet Netflix has never asked "do we creep you out a bit snooping on what you watch and recommending things" that literally.
Science fiction isn't about the future, it's commentary about the present.
My interpretation of Believers is that it's meant to be commentary about Jehovah’s Witness and blood transfusion for children.
As such, leaving that connection as a bare footnote, with no additional commentary about that human connection, and existing legal structures, leaves the piece using the sorts of simplistic portrayals that must be made in a 1 hour TV show.
It also feels cherry picked for leaving out discussion of "Confessions and Lamentations", where the Markab on Babylon 5 die because they didn't socially distance while they wait for a treatment to be developed.
I've forgotten why they insisted in being in the same room. But suppose Bab5 security staff forced them to separate - how many might have survived? Given perfect hindsight, should they have been forced to separate?
>>>I doubt there is anyone in any minority group who feels mocked by greater representation.
I'll have my (future) sons watching old James Bond and Indiana Jones movies before I ever show them most of the crap that Hollywood shovels to us as black males. A strong white character is a better role model than a weak black one.
My coworker is mixed Jamaican/ Italian and a staunch Catholic. He and his black/Hawaiian wife homeschool their sons (both early teens I think). He shared his difficulty with finding media content for them to consume that isn't heavily laden with homosexuality, especially in the black male characters. I suggested he introduce them to ST: TNG, Babylon 5, and ST:DS9. Worf, Geordi, Sisko, and Dr. Baxter are all useful role models. Those were positive and inspirational black characters.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/emasculation-black-male-image-building-better-man-timothy-tart/
https://negromanosphere.com/hollywood-emasculation-black-male-image/
https://youtu.be/0aYo8nxedOM "Boskoe100 Thinks There's An Agenda to Make the Black Male Image Effeminate"
https://youtu.be/gyjblZqw2dE Brandon Tatum's take on a recent rap video heavily depicting prison homosexuality
Dave Chappelle shined a light on this 15 years ago: https://youtu.be/oCahQtiEYb4
This sort of content is nowhere near as popular or desired as the bubble-dwellers in LA/Atlanta/SF/NYC seem to think it is. One might retort "why does someone else's representation negatively impact you?" IMO, the answer should be obvious. Amplifying the "edge cases" of representation colors the expectations and perceptions of community outsiders who don't necessarily understand that they are not indicative of the majority. Wealthy drug-dealer rappers are a tiny fraction of the black male community, but walk into any nightclub in Asia and SOMEBODY will look at you askance and question why you don't dress like 50 Cent. I don't sell cocaine but that media representation of someone who does impacts how others interact with me. How long before I'm dealing with women asking me "Why don't you wear lip gloss, sparkles, and a dress like those other black men I see on TV/Instagram?"
https://www.vogue.com/article/billy-porter-oscars-red-carpet-gown-christian-siriano
So yeah this stuff feels like they are mocking us, and no representation would be better than representation of this sort. Malcom X was right (and his quote below is my favorite one to drop into HN discussions). https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8869214-the-white-liberal-is-the-worst-enemy-to-america-and
The speck is in your own eye, I think.
The Narn are certainly sounding the war drums at the beginning of the show, but that isn’t enough to make them “war–like”. The Centauri and the Minbari are both better at war than the Narn. Two of the Narn characters are the most eloquent and intelligent of any characters on the show. The humans and Minbari fought a war just ten years before the show starts, and you didn’t put either of them down as “war–like”. The Minbari nearly committed true genocide and wiped out the human race completely, but you called them mystics instead.
The Minbari certainly seem like mystics, at least until you meet a few members of the Warrior caste; the diplomats we see at first are only from the Religious caste. And when considered in detail their philosophy is not really very similar to any “Eastern” philosophies you might be thinking of.
But the decadence of the Centauri Republic is intended to remind you of the Roman Empire. There are differences, but that aspect of the Centauri was intended to feel especially familiar. Humans can grow to understand the other races, but they could easily _be_ the Centauri.
The question of religions and philosophy is an interesting one.
Depending on how much of the show you watched, you may have found out that they believe in reincarnation (in fact that think that was a big plot–point of the second or third episode). This is certainly a point of similarity with one “Eastern” religion that I can think of. However, the Minbari have _scientific proof_. The Warrior caste Minbari believe in reincarnation even though they are not religious, because it’s been proven. There are people in the universe who call it a “pretty fantasy” so the question is left open for the viewer, at least until later. However, in other respects their philosophy is not much like that of any human religion which incorporates a belief in reincarnation. Hinduism has reincarnation and castes, but it also has a pantheon of gods. The Minbari have reincarnation and castes too, but no gods at all. Their most revered religious figure is “a Minbari not born of Minbari”; in other words an ordinary Minbari of unusual heritage but not a supernatural being in any way.
Meanwhile, the Centauri believe that they can often see the circumstances of their own death. “Comes in a dream, yes?”. Again, this is something even non–religious Centauri believe. Londo tells Sinclair about his dream, that he has always known that he would be strangled to death by a Centauri (“We are squeezing the life out of each other.”). And he says that as soon as he saw G’Kar for the first time, he recognized him as the Narn in the vision. We the viewers are actually shown the vision, and in season 4 the show follows through and we see how Londo’s death plays out. The Centauri also have Seers who can see the future of other people, and those visions always happen exactly as we are shown them. Meanwhile, the Centauri religion is in many ways the direct antithesis of Christianity, a major human religion that has a strong element of prophecy, and one that became common in the Roman Empire no less. Their religion is much more similar that of the earlier Roman Republic with a whole pantheon of deities, including at least one ascended emperor.
It’s not as important to the plot of the show as the others we see, but in the fifth season we learn that every 200 years on the Brachiri homeworld the dead come back to life for a night to talk to the living and give them advice. And this works not just for the Brachiri; a human on the Brachiri homeworld or on any property owned by the Brachiri during that night will be visited by someone from their own past. One of the visitors, a human who died years before the show begins, relays a message from a character that died in season 3 to one that is still alive, but who wasn’t within the Brachiri zone!
I’m not really sure how to classify the Narn religious beliefs, but at least one of their religious texts contains accurate historical information that turns out to be useful to the main characters.
So in the Babylon 5 universe, many species have religious beliefs that are actually literally true. Those religions share some broad strokes with religions that exist here on Earth today, but not much more than that; the details are always quite different. There’s more depth there than you thought.
An interesting take on the lighting issues, and one that would be easy to show instead of tell in TV, would be to use mixed reality.
Have the displays show up when focus character puts on glasses, disappear when without them, and possibly even enhance the "otherness" aspect of the displays.
BTW, your example about showing screen in TV reminded me of, iirc, pilot episode of Babylon 5 - where camera suddenly cuts to Amiga-rendered ID card filling the whole screen (rotoscoping it otherwise would be too costly at the time).
It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot.
Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.
Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.
Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.
Yes, a lot of modern television shows have been serial works rather than episodic ones. Babylon 5 comes to mind as one of the earliest serialized television shows, if not the earliest.
Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative endings; they were designed to last as many years as possible.
> It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it.
Interstellar was heavily hyped as being "realistic".
There was one Babylon 5 episode where an alien probe approaches the station and broadcasts a bunch of scientific questions that if we answer correctly, they will grant us knowledge beyond our dreams.
The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships.
In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
It's got the bonus nerd connection in that a character on Babylon 5 spent an episode raving about it:
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Bagna_Cauda
Babylon 5, season 2, episode Geometry of Shadows. The Drazi civil war between green and purple factions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxIfMRZemc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxds-Co7G1Q
For a while I thought this was an unpopular opinion, but now I'm seeing more people agree. Relative to season 1-4, season 5 is extremely anti-climactic and at times even annoying (e.g. the looping Naomi transmission really got on my nerves). It's hard to believe season 6 will be the last after the complete disappointment season 5 has become.
Conversely I see hate for season 4, but I really liked it. I really love plot-lines around mysterious aliens or ancient technology. It's one of the reasons why Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 are some of my favorite Sci-Fi series.
Season 3 was the absolute pinnacle of the show and some of the best scifi ever on tv. It completely blew my mind, and I’ve watched my share of Star Trek, Stargate, Babylon 5, Farscape, BSG, etc over the years. It completely pays off for the buildup of seasons 1 and 2.
> On a social network, however, nothing is that self-contained. Any time you see something that looks like a name or a picture, you expect to be able to click on it and go see that user, their profile, and their posts. A TV show application doesn’t work that way. If you’re on season 1 episode 1 of Babylon 5, you don’t expect to be able to click through to season 1 episode 1 of General Hospital.
That is exactly what I'd expect, and that is how small websites like IMDB work. I am on the page for a General Hospital episode, and via the actors in the episode or whatever other part I can click through to Babylon 5, or the other way around, or anywhere else.
One of my favorite parts of the "curse narrative" is the part where they had the foresight that "HD" TV resolutions were coming, decided to shoot in proper widescreen film and tried to keep the digital files for the special effects reworkable for when it was time to quickly remaster. But somewhere along the way Warner Brothers lost the digital files and the cost to remaster ballooned significantly and in this timeline we'll likely never see a Blu-Ray release of the show despite it being filmed for something like it.
One of the twisty roads in that story is that one of the arguments that WB has for how they lost the digital files involves Sierra On-Line's especially cursed attempt at a Babylon 5 videogame and that one argument is that one place that could turn up the lost files is somewhere in the cursed bowels of Activision Blizzard. (Just as WB and Activision Blizzard lost the contracts for NOLF and its sequels somewhere and no one knows who has the rights today.)
Oh no! Babylon 5 was pretty good in the beginning, then it became GREAT when seeds planted in past episodes paid off big time in later episodes.
RIP.
The curse of Babylon 5 strikes again...
Not that there really is a curse, but there is an interessting statistical anomaly that an unusual high amount of people involved with bablyon 5 die early. More than half of the maincast has now died (all in the age 40-65). Even IMDB has a page for this: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls023048945/
Interessting part is that the production of bablyon 5 already met some unlucky envents at it's production. And the series itself had the curse of the babylon-project as part of it's lore. Probably from this the meme about a curse leaped over to real world.
Great shows though TNG doesn’t hit its stride until the third season. Don’t give up early. The main problem is too many episodes per season; several are “phoned in” per season.
I loved watching the remastered version on Netflix, it looked better than new.
Second on the Babylon 5 recommendations, it is one of the best sci fi shows ever. Was hooked
Sorry, it was a reference to the science fiction tv show Babylon 5. The Vorlons and Shadows were two "elder" races who took it upon themselves to shepherd the evolution of less advanced species (whether they wanted it or not,) with one having the philosophy of authoritarianism, and the other a sort of brutal, chaos-driven Darwinism.
DS9 is peak Star Trek for me. It took what I loved about TNG and gave it the "Babylon 5" Arc treatment with a bit more darkness to it. I would highly recommend watching the whole series. It's available now on just about every streaming service.
It's a weird comparison. Babylon 5's special effects were very early CGI, but TNG has almost no computer graphics at all. (Nearly) everything was done practically, and with models. Personally I think TNG stands up better, and the fact that it was done practically and shot on film now allows a high-definition version to exist, which can never happen for B5.
Babylon 5 is also a useful oddball because so much of its plan versus reality was documented on USENET or in interviews as they happened. As they say "no plan survives contact with the enemy" and in this case the enemies of any 5 year TV plan are numerous, and included among other things network notes, network switches, cast contract negotiation problems, cast health problems, and more. JMS made it very clear he had to have a ton of contingencies in his five year plan and the show had to carry out a number of them.
It's also an oddball because even JMS hasn't been able to replicate it with nearly the same degree of success. B5 follow-up Crusade was pitched with a 3-5 year plan and barely survived a half season. (Supposedly B5: Legend of the Rangers was pitched as a 5 year plan including cleaning up Crusade plot-lines at least "sideways" and that barely got a pilot movie.) Sense8 was pitched to Netflix (appropriate to consider for this overall thread) as a 5 year plan and got 2 seasons and wrap-up movie (though seemingly had a lot fewer contingency problems than B5's early seasons in the 2 seasons and a movie that it did get).
TNG had the right number of multi-episode arcs and recurring characters (especially Q). Also every season finale was a cliffhanger two-parter with the first episode of the next season. Unlike TOS, it felt like things that happened in the episodic TNG episodes (heh) actually mattered in the larger world, even when it wasn't directly a part of a story arc.
DS9 is my favorite though, partially because of the story arc. It was also done quite brilliantly, with the story arc always being present, but not really solidifying into something substantial right away. This along with Babylon 5 were amazing. Prior to these shows, the only television sci-fi I had ever seen with a story arc was Robotech. Battlestar Galatica (original) had something of an arc, but was more like TNG.
Babylon 5 is a bit of an oddball. They were originally told they'd have a fifth season. Then they were told they wouldn't, so they wrapped it up in season 4 (and season 4 is quite compressed as a result, which might be what you like). Then they ended up getting that fifth season. They used it to do all kinds of fun 'post show' things.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went 7 seasons. They could have done it in 3-4; especially if they could have had modern 50-60 HBO-style shows, rather than 35-40 minute network television shows.
I'd like to see creators target 3-4 seasons and contracts be written for them to create all those seasons. The really good, fan-centric ones could then do the Babylon 5 style post-seasons or a contract could be written for additional seasons to cover the next story arc. (I'm sure this is impossible for some reason, but I can dream.)
As things stand, I generally don't watch any new show that doesn't already have a few seasons under its belt. I really dislike watching a season of a show, falling in love with it, and then finding out its already gotten the axe.
It's only canceled too soon if the main plot arc isn't resolved, which does happen with some regularity.
I am very annoyed with shows dragging on endlessly though. I very much like Babylon 5 for precisely this reason: it told the story it intended to, and when the audience asked for more content they spun it off into other shows/movies.
In general, I would say that 5 seasons is a good maximum, and that you better have a good reason for going longer (e.g. adapting a book series to TV, where each book is a season).
This reminds me of a similar idea I came to a few years back. I noticed that 10-13 episode/year shows tended to be better than average, while 22-26 episode/year tended to be worse on average and have large numbers of garbage episodes. The second group is how traditional US shows were done in the days of classic TV, to be shown twice in a 52 week year.
It came to me a few years back after watching the remastered Star Trek TNG, later an early season of Game of Thrones. Even though TNG was given plenty of time to hit its stride and had some incredible episodes, another half were just crap. Meanwhile early GOT season would have ten decent episodes in a row. The difference in average quality was striking.
Of course, GOT had the benefit of being mostly written beforehand, similar to Babylon 5, one of the first series to break episodic containment.
TL;DR: TV show law - A dozen or so episodes per season is the limit of a writing team. Produce any more than that and they are guaranteed to be phoned-in filler.
Babylon 5 is actually a great example of what happens when you mess with cancellations.
During the production of season 4, JMS (the creator) was given to understand that season 5 was unlikely to happen. So he had to cram most of the rest of his plot into that season.
Having such a powerful, story-packed season 4 meant it did really well. So they put season 5 back on.
But he'd already used up (most of) the story he wanted to tell, because they told him he wasn't getting a season 5. So the season 5 we got ended up being a bit weak and wandering, with only the last few episodes (which were part of what would have been the ending of season 4, if he hadn't found out in time that there would be a season 5) having the same strength and memorability as the season 4 episodes.
It also meant (IIRC) that they lost some important actors, like Claudia Christian, for season 5. If Ivanova had been able to stay on to be B5's captain after Sheridan became President, the final season would have been much stronger.
This way of writing, at least the overall arc, really shows. Ideally, writers know when to stop. The Revenge had such an ending, it was Season 3 if I remember well, before it turned into yet another soap opera. Babylon 5 on the other hand was a great example of having the whole 5 seasons basically written before they started production.
I like to remind people the brilliant CGI work in Jurassic Park and Toy Story was contemporary to the cheeseball CGI in made for TV movies. People can guess what's made on a computer in Toy Story, but they never knew the well-done stuff trying to be realistic was done in part or in whole on computers.
The late '90s were especially big here because computers and tools were getting so cheap. The same tech that let big space battles happen in Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 also made stuff that...did not age so well.
> Take away Roddenberry's vision of a better future and you've got Babylon 5, eh?
I'd wish! I find B5 to be great in a different way than Star Trek. It has one of the deepest and most interesting stories I've ever seen explored in sci-fi on the screen. I wish there was another show like this. Alas, it seems that if you take away a vision for a better future, the shows you get today are cookie-cutter action flicks. They're sometimes fun to watch, but I don't feel enriched in a way I felt after Star Trek or B5.
> (You like the Klingons? To me they seemed derivative of (LotR) Orcs but I haven't spent time to really know.)
Not initially, and not from the looks - though the series did manage to (spoiler alert) turn them into what you'd expect to see in TNG in the latter seasons.
What I liked about the Klingons in DIS is that they didn't feel like space brutes who value violence and hate the Federation for no reasons. In DIS, they had a good reason, that resonates with people today - cultural imperialism. They went to war with the Federation because they felt it's the only way to protect their cultural identity, as they perceived UFP to be a civilization that conquers in times of peace, through slowly infusing everyone with their views and values. The DIS Klingons have seen that as a threat to the survival of their species' identity. And put that way, it's a very believable as a justification for conflict.
> And don't get me started on the blurring of the "sci-fi" genre. (...)
In complete agreement (though I liked Iron Man 1; it was more serious than other MCU movies, and also scratched my tech porn itch). My additional complaint is the pressure put on inter-character drama and general "character development". As I often repeat, if I wanted to watch the deep emotional struggles of people and their relationships, I'd pick literally any other literal/movie genre. Sci-fi (and to some extent fantasy) is unique, because it can get away with extensive world building and exploring ideas that are hard to explore otherwise. It serves as a real-life holodeck simulation. And I'd prefer my sci-fi to focus on that.
Bingo! Take away Roddenberry's vision of a better future and you've got Babylon 5, eh? Like I mentioned in a sib comment, it turns out that this was a tension going right back to the original series. It's hard to write!
(You like the Klingons? To me they seemed derivative of (LotR) Orcs but I haven't spent time to really know.)
> I miss that, because (with the possible exception of the Orville) there's nothing like that anymore.
I've been thirsty as hell for some good (video) sci-fi for a while now and have been looking and (IMO) you're correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science_fiction_films_of_the_2010s
(And don't get me started on the blurring of the "sci-fi" genre. Superhero movies are not sci-fi. Sharks attacking are not sci-fi even if they have lasers on their heads, or six heads, or swim through ice. Fast & Furious isn't sci-fi. Harry Potter isn't sci-fi. (WTF Sy-fy channel!?) Zombies aren't sci-fi. Nor vampires, nor bigfoot, nor giant animals. Godzilla isn't sci-fi. I'm just ranting... ignore me. Swords and magic: not sci-fi. ...okay I think I'm done...)
> The Babylon 5 episode "Intersections in Real Time" (S4E18) is almost entirely Sheridan being interrogated with the Reid technique.
It doesn't seem to agree with the Wikipedia description of the Reid technique.
I've watched this episode quite recently, and from what I remember, it was all about trying to break Sheridan's grip on reality, through techniques such as food and sleep deprivation, making it impossible to track the passage of time, and calling into question his reasoning skills. On top of that, the interrogator was seeking guilt admission, not the truth.
Even if we ignore the strong ethical, humanitarian, and strategic objections, using torture as a tool to extract information always seemed like the wrong tool for the job. Causing someone distress/pain obviously decreases the chance that they will tell you the information willingly and incentivizes simply making something up to make the torture stop. Instead, modern successful[1] methods of interrogation like the Reid technique[2][3] are designed around incentivizing the desired outcome. Very low (sub-psychadelic) doses of MDMA in a comfortable "social" or "party" setting might be very effective.
I don't know how true the story is, but I once heard an anecdote about this method working during WW2. The Allied soldiers took a German POW out for beers and just chatted with without trying to push any particular subject. Then they made a boasting claim about how German aircraft couldn't keep up with the latest American engineering, causing the POW to respond with an excited objection explaining their new airplane's capabilities (the information they wanted).
[1] Often dangerously successful - the Reid technique in particular is know for a very high rate of false positives. "Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions"[2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique
[3] The Babylon 5 episode "Intersections in Real Time" (S4E18) is almost entirely Sheridan being interrogated with the Reid technique.
Yes, B5 was an aggressive adopter of digital technology. The driver was costs. Models were expensive, and if they could be replaced by CGI, the cost of making the show could be dramatically reduced. B5 was being produced for the syndication market, which was a different animal than the usual networks, and doing it cheaper while retaining quality was a major goal. Short lived competitor "Space: Above and Beyond (which lasted one season) used models, with production costs over $1,000,000 per episode, and that was a major reason they only lasted a season. B5 did use Amiga and Video Toaster in the beginning, though I believe they transitioned to other equipment later. J. Michael Straczynski's partner Doug Netter had a company called Netter Digital that did the work. JMS commented that when he did pitch meetings with possible networks that would air the show, it was him and a 5 minute clip of their CGI renderings. When I saw the first episode opening, with the Vorlon craft emerging from hyperspace to dock at Babylon 5, I sat back open mouthed going "Whoa". I'm a computer guy, and had some notion of what it took to do that
You also started to have the national networks assert more control over the local stations which led to some successful attempts at shows with both series- and episode-long plot structures, like Babylon 5 & the West Wing.
That’s not what happened.
There are two reasons why serialized shows were not popular on network TV until recently.
Syndication - the networks always had control over what got sued during prime time. But they also made most of their money via syndication outside of prime time and with the cable channels. It’s really hard to syndicate serialized shows for the second reason...
If you miss either the first few episodes of a serialized show or miss an episode in between, you probably wouldn’t even bother about watching it. Now with video on demand via streaming the TV networks can tell the audience to catch up by going to the website/going to their cable providers VOD offerings, etc.
Netflix - serialized shows are very popular on Netflix where binge watching is a thing. Even the cable channels that buy syndication rights can also offer catchup/and video on demand.
Interesting. It starts to make sense of why so much US tv was entirely stand alone episodes, which did exist in the UK, but fairly uncommon except in sit-coms. The UK had the broadcasters, even the commercial ones, making the programmes, so they were wedded to scheduling in the programme making. External production companies and studios came much later, 80s or 90s I think. Presumably they stuck to fairly rigid contracts about order, or broadcast after all x episodes of the series were made, after those changes came in, they certainly had a long history of managing in order.
The UK experience was more how you describe Babylon 5 etc - a show plot that concluded with the episode, but theme and character development across the series. Even the classics from the 70s and 80s. Some were so smooth a transition it actually did seem like getting a glimpse a week later, rather than an artificially exciting episode. To modern eyes that looks pretty dull, though that's partly camera and production techniques too, yet did seem to allow smoother development.
Cliff-hangers long predate modern television, and seem to be endemic to any serialized content. The term itself dates back to the late 1800s, and it’s use has been derided in every medium from books to radio to film to television.
It also wasn’t a purely American thing. Go watch some of the old black-and-white Dr. Who episodes, for example; you’ll see some prime examples of cliffhanger- and recap-dominated television.
The exception seems to be late-20th-century television shows, where the syndication system meant that episodes might be dropped or reordered arbitrarily by the local station. This made it difficult to impossible to have any kind of changing circumstances like an overarching plot except at big events like season breaks. Star Trek: TNG is a good example here; the interpersonal relationships between characters don’t really evolve very much, and when they do it’s part of a season-break spanning two-part story. Those reliably had every character in danger at the break to provide the studio leverage during contract negotiations.
As the premium television channels started getting into producing their own shows, they didn’t have the problem of local affiliates reshuffling their schedule— their distribution model let shows have an overall plot, but they still add to be acceptable for viewers that expected to get a whole story each week. This gave us shows like Stargate SG-1 which still had very formulaic episodes, but also a continuity between them.
You also started to have the national networks assert more control over the local stations which led to some successful attempts at shows with both series- and episode-long plot structures, like Babylon 5 & the West Wing. Vestiges of the old system remained for quite a while, though, and is a large part of why Firefly was never commercially successful— it was produced with continuity from episode to episode in mind, but the network aired them in a seemingly random order instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffhanger
> Building HSR is expensive and takes a long time to do
Bids and bonds have already been levied against those estimates. Even if you make up new ones to match reality, it was fraudulent in concept. With less than half the length (515km versus the proposed >1200km CA project), the japanese built a HSR for about 2.3 billion USD (adjusted from 1959 ~400 billion yen). From the start, this has been a doomed project to get some people paid. Admittedly, the idea of starting something (anything) to connect the top and bottom half of CA is perhaps visionary, selling it as a doable project was dishonest.
However it turns out, the CA HSR (or slow speed rail) will not be completed in the lifetime of anyone alive today, but Californians still get to pay for it. I'm reminded of Lyta's admission about the Vorlon mistakes in Babylon 5's Thirdspace movie. It's just compounded for the poor Californians, each time.
There's so many layers to that question. The major influencer though was most likely syndication.
Shows were designed to onboard viewers at any point in the series. This would enable shows to appear in random order across multiple networks and viewers would just accept them as they were.
Shows which juggled long term serial arcs while staying accessible to the random viewer seemed to be viewed retrospectively as the best of that era. Shows like X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, etc.
Shows which were purely episodic such as Star Trek: TNG or old Doctor Who don't hold up quite as well. They're still enjoyable episode to episode, but there's something missing that we've become accustomed to in modern television. Perhaps if you feel the rose colored glasses starting to slip into place in the future, you could look back on some of those shows that didn't age as well.
We've thrown out syndication as a concept, so what we're left with is almost lazy writing since they don't have to put a bow on every episode after exactly 46 minutes.
But ultimately I think there are those that feel that the 90's were the pinnacle of Hollywood. I recently read an article claiming '99 to be the best year in cinema. We're just living in a perpetual era of disruption and it's going to take a few more decades until people consistently figure out the new successful formulas that are unbeatable until the technology fundamentally shifts again.
That is about the opposite of what works for me. A total absence of other signals isn't good. What I need is an "attention sponge". When attention lifts for a moment from the actual work, the "attention sponge" will hold it for a while, but that sponge is specifically chosen to not hold on to it.
An example is a background where a TV series runs that I watched 9 times already, let's say Babylon 5. The work computer has an attention accident (maybe just slow or whatever). My attention lifts from work, and B5 catches it before it goes off who knows where. Since B5 is not interactive and since I've seen it 9 times already it easily releases the attention so that it can go back to work.
I wrote more here: https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/on-attention-focus-and-autism-in-the-tech-workplace-8246526fbbc0
I recently tried to rewatch Babylon 5 but the resolution was terrible and it looked bad on my TV so I gave up pretty quickly. I hope someone does the same treatment to Babylon 5 episodes!
If Firefly counts, Babylon 5's attempted successor Crusade counts more so. It supposedly had 5 years planned, and was also cruelly cancelled after a lot of network notes and drama including airing some episodes out-of-order/at weird times.
JMS at least didn't try to cram the remaining plot into a single film. Some of the plot is out there as unfilmed scripts and some made its way into book series, and most of it we may just never know at this point because WB doesn't care about Babylon 5.
It is more common now. The parent post is probably referring to the 90's where this was ground breaking. I was in kindergarten while this was on the air and a friend of my parents would tape it for us. My parents would allow me to stay up to watch these episodes. My first true science fiction love along with Star trek TNG. Babylon 5 has a lot of concepts that have stuck with me over the years.
Season 1 is slow and terrible in some places. Particularly the CRT monitors look very dated along with the clothing which is supposed to be futuristic but screams 80's. The rest is good from the plot to many of the actors (Garabaldi, G'kar, Londo, and Delenn) come to mind, but many others were also great.
I think Delenn sells a female powerhouse role so much better than any other actress I've seen in science fiction. She is intelligent, thoughtful, funny, a master politician, and even a little scary at times even though on the whole the character reflects serenity. Her arc is great too. There are so many good Delenn scenes that depict her character's wit and badassery that it is hard to choose a favorite (dealing with G'kar early in season 1, defending the station on a Minbari battle cruiser, challenging a military dictator on her homeworld).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UYloWBP79ro
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qC1nW9D1_OM
I just did some very fast research about that, and apparently both Lost and Battlestar Galactica attributed their coherent story arcs to Babylon 5.
I never watched Lost though.
If I may ask, assuming you watched the show: did they ever film scenes from years in the future, seamlessly connecting them in the present and then later on?
Thanks for your reference.
Huge B5 fan here as well, watched them all (multiple times) as they came out.
Honest question: does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began?
Babylon 5 got funded when JMS described, in detail, the last scene of the last episode in the last season.
There were flash forward scenes in season 2 that took place in season 4. Two years later, they meshed together perfectly.
Has any other show been like that? I'd love to know. (:
The original Babylon 5 script books are amazing as well.
https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/
They contain all of the original scripts for every episode (in some cases multiple versions) as well as commentary written by JMS about both what is going on on-screen and off-screen. They have some really detailed information on the challenges he faced running this show in an exceedingly raw and real fashion. Sadly, they are only available in print and are very expensive.
http://jmsnews.com has complete archives of all of JMS's usenet postings, which span the entire period the show was on the air (as well as many years before/after). Again, some of this is very raw, like where he discusses the feature film due to be announced "in a few days" about the telepath war (which we never got :().
Anyway, revealed myself to be a huge B5 nerd here, but, I do believe it was in a number of ways one of the most visionary TV shows on air at the time, highly serialized plots 5 years before the sopranos and computer VFX that movies couldn't touch at the time.
> Does a 10 year old show attract customers?
Let me put it like this: I'd happily double my subscription payments (and I'm on the max tier already) if they offered the entire Babylon 5 series, just to show my support. Hell, the only reason I started using Netflix in the first place is because they had all Star Trek TV shows, including the remastered version of TNG. I also know I'm not the only one in my circle of friends who started using Netflix because of Star Trek, and who would fork extra money for some 80s/90s sci-fi shows, just to show their support.
For anyone too young to understand the fascination, the Amiga was far ahead of its time but suffered a premature death due to the gross mismanagement of the Comodore corporation.
In the early 90s, non-linear digital editing for film and TV (as well as graphics, and titles) was limited to specialized machines that cost, literally, millions of dollars in 90s money. With an add-on product called the Video Toaster, these functions could be done on an Amiga — for a price affordable to many public access broadcasters.
Lightwave3D which began as part of the video toaster brought 3d graphics to a ton of people — again, at a time when an SGI and something like wavefront would run around $40k. Lightwave was used to great effect for shows like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, etc. Even ILM used it for some shots theatrical releases, if I recall correctly.
Then there was the huge demo scene and gaming cohort which pushed the Amiga to do things that seemed like they shouldn’t have been possible.
An awesome time for personal computing.
As fsloth says below, JMS knew every plot point from day 1 and had trap doors for every character. If an actor's contract fell through after 2 seasons, they didn't have some emergency, they enacted the back up plan (Talia being replaced with Lyta). The shows lead had mental health issues and was also replaced after season 1 with some later cameos. It seemed like it was obviously meant that way. Even the super fans didn't know until recently when the actor died.
Yes B5 had some painful filler episodes and the acting was both amazing (G'Kar, Londo, Delenn) and at times bad, but overall the show is the one show that has stayed with me since Kindergarten. Just like TNG episodes (the drumhead and measure of a man) served as mini courses in morals, ethics, and philosophy for kids, Babylon 5 was the same, but more memorable to me as the arc was 5 seasons, two spinoffs, and like 5 TV movies. I learned all about politics, facism, standing up for what's right, leadership, really cool spaceships, the impact of discrimination, and diplomacy (kind of :)). A great show to watch at an impressionable age.
Babylon 5 was a whole new ballpark when it came out in the early 90's. Good television is now everywhere, but when B5 came out, it was completely unconventional to have a continuous plot over five seasons. At the time "one plot per episode" was the accepted standard, and while the dramatic arcs of for example Star Trek, the Next Generation (ST:TNG) eventually became longer as the script writers got more confident, the arcs of B5 were supposed to last through the seasons from the beginning.
The writing is occassionally weak, and thus it pales in comparison to more younger fantasy productions like Battlestar Galactica reboot, or Game of Thrones. But at it's time it was groundbreaking.
The moments of epic were really good since they were preplanned and they could be foreshadowed much in advance. Hence moments like (spoiler alert...)
... Earth falling into totalitarian state, bombing of one of the alien homeworld, the Shadows overwhelming Centauri prime, etc, were nearly unheard of narrative high points due to the buildup to them over the series.
There were lot of not-so-high quality filler episodes and so on, which make the series more of a cult classic rather than ... an obvious classic.
And yes, I categorized space opera as fantasy :)
Yeah.
As I learned more about science and actual spacecraft, I got increasingly frustrated with science fiction and anything related to spacecraft. But there is a spectrum of realism.
For example, with Babylon 5, the fighters had inertia, and would often face in the direction of the enemy while travelling in another direction. In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes.
Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore.
And these days, I just look for shows that feature "good writing" in the sense of dialog and overall plot.
Netflix's streaming UI keeps getting (substantially, for me) worse.
And a good part of this appears to be in the effort to hide and mask the increasingly crap quality of their catalog.
Bye bye, stars. Bye bye, user comments. Hello rotating tile images -- now more rapidly rotating tile images. Guess what? It's the same tired, B or C (or D) list title they've been pushing at you for weeks and months.
Oh yeah, and the fan on my laptop kicking in everytime I pull the site up, because now every tile has to have some irritating animation upon hover. Ooh, shiny! But a lot less useful for finding something I might actually enjoy watching, than stars and user comments.
(Think movie trailers, versus talking to a friend. Yeah, that clip may be "compelling". But your friend will tell you it's the best 5 seconds of the whole waste of time.)
10 bucks or so a month isn't that much. But you know what? I've had enough of the increasingly gamed UI and lamed catalog.
I have Prime, as well, and while it isn't the greatest -- all of streaming is becoming so balkanized -- I'm spending the vast majority of my fixed price streaming time in it, these days.
Recently, they've adopted the "big tiles" like Netflix. But so far, they aren't gaming the UI to nearly the extent that Netflix is.
And, starting a couple of months ago, I've gotten to revisit "Babylon 5".
Meanwhile, on Netflix, "Iron Fist" 'season' 2? Season 1 was bad enough...
> But if the consumer can't tell the difference, does it matter?
The consumer gets used to it. The CG effects in Toy Story 1 look dated, and if you were to watch the Incredibles and the Incredibles 2 back to back, you would also notice immediately. Or compare the movie "Gravity" to "Babylon 5".
Plus I've not even mentioned hair, fur and volumetrics. A staple in pretty much any feature film FX, they were completely absent in the real time ray tracing demos. Hair and fur are commonly not ray traced as triangles but use custom intersection routines. Those are an extra layer of complexity on top. I don't know yet how Nvidia's own API for the RTX card looks like, but Microsoft DXR and Apple's Metal ray tracing both are restricted to triangle geometry only.
My partner has, for 20 years, hated Babylon 5. An ex-boyfriend apparently forced her to watch an episode, which generated a lot of hate for the show. I re-watched it a few years ago, and she incidentally watched this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GOHqe0vokU
She laughed herself silly, and told me that the show isn't what she thought it was. I gave it a few months, and showed her some funny bits from it every now and then. The last one I showed her was this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkwF5BBL26I
She smiled a little, but clearly didn't get it. I explained that it's much, much funnier if you know the backstory of the characters, the how and why of G'kar's hatred for Londo, and she said "OK, I'll watch some of it."
I showed her the pilot and a few episodes, and she kept saying that it didn't make as much sense as she expected, and wondered why I kept pointing things out; "remember this for future reference."
So, we got halfway through the season, and she started asking to watch more of it. We're stalled just now, part way through season five, but she's firmly a fan of it.
When I watched it back in 2015/2016, I did notice how some of the scenes appeared to have been cropped and zoomed for the DVD release, The composition was off, and as noted in the story, some shots looked very much like a low res MPEG in fullscreen. I wasn't certain if they were originally like that or not. Glad to know it wasn't, although I would much rather watch a standard def (or plain upscaled) rather than the crappy video we got.
Have you read the books? I personally don't mind most of the scenes you mention, but that's probably because I know where they're going. Like - minor spoiler - Nagata's mention of her child in last episode. Sounds mostly irrelevant and ham-fisted if you're only watching, but if you've read the books, you know this is introducing a really huge major subplot. So maybe one of the problems of this show is that it's not tuned enough for people who don't know the source material?
> Would love to see a lower budget breakout series of Avasarala just doing her ninja politics stuff -- she is the main reason I kept watching at all. But perhaps that is just the corner of me that misses Babylon 5 :)
Me too. Avasarala carries this show by herself. And I miss Babylon 5 too. I wish someone would remaster and re-release it.
There is Babylon 5 episode about the conflict between Drazi of "green" and "purple" characteristic (2x03, coincidently? one of the more important episodes for the overall story arc). Last week I was reminded of this while thinking about Ingress and it's green vs. blue "conflict" (which is wonderfully designed such that taking the in-game fights into meatspace will gain you nothing in comparison to settling them in-game).
HUGE Babylon 5 fan here, but any sort of B5 film adaptation would have been a complete crap.
Different stories need different mediums?
I'd personally recommend:
* The Next Generation (starting point, but be prepared to sit through the slower first seasons). * DS9 * Voyager (however optionally skip anything from the Kess seasons that you feel like)
I only liked about 1/3rd of Star Trek Enterprise episodes, the entire series is kind of filler. Has that same wasted potential feeling that I got from Stargate Universe; it COULD have been more interesting if the pacing had been better and if they had focused on fitting the stories in to an overall plotline (much more like Babylon 5; which, BTW, you should TOTALLY watch if you haven't).
Star Trek Discovery was good, but is more an edgier more action packed thriller kind of series than the earlier series. I do like where they're going with rebooting the overall universe though and I feel that this brings the modern FX capacity in to the series in a way that makes sense for today.
For something you can show to your parents or if you generally don't get Star Trek, the Orville is a GREAT comedy focused take on the ideas that Star Trek (everything) classically presented, but covering modern social issues.
It was Shadowrun lite, which is awesome. Now that they have a movie that rates well with normies, they can go deeper and expand (and probably even make a series out of it).
A lot of settings that are actually interesting only really work as long-form episodes--Babylon 5 or Angel for example would've been a garbage movie.
Bright was essentially a large pilot. I'd be really interested in seeing what the production side of the house is learning.
> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
Sorry, this sounds backwards.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
> AFAIK, J. Michael Straczynski was the first person to get a successful arc-based television series on TV, with _Babylon 5_ - the pilot aired in 1993.
Would you consider Twin Peaks (1990) to be arc-based?
AFAIK, J. Michael Straczynski was the first person to get a successful arc-based television series on TV, with _Babylon 5_ - the pilot aired in 1993.
He had tried earlier with _Captain Power_ in 1987, but that only lasted a single season, and it was kind of doomed to be thought of as a kid's show because of the toyline tie-in.
Great post. Fun learning some of the back story.
I love Deep Space Nine. All of it. As in: Best show ever made.
I agree that DS9, along with Babylon 5, pioneered the long form TV story arc. Every single character goes thru the heroes journey. Convincingly. I love it.
Benjamin Sisko is my favorite captain. I'd follow that guy into a black hole.
Quark makes the show. I don't know how Armin Shimerman pulled that off. Some of the best acting ever.
My favorite episodes remain the Ensign Kim stuff from Voyager. But overall, DS9 was just the best.
"In 1970s you would just create plastic models of spaceships and film them with normal camera"
Are you sure? For example, from the ILM history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_%26_Magic we see:
1975: Resurrected the use of VistaVision; first use of a motion control camera (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope)
Following the link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control_photography gives us:
> The first large-scale application of motion control was in Star Wars (1977), where a digitally controlled camera known as the Dykstraflex performed complex and repeatable motions around stationary spaceship models. This enabled a greater complexity in the spaceship-battle sequences, as separately filmed elements (spaceships, backgrounds, etc.) could be better coordinated with one another with greatly reduced error.
That doesn't sound like a normal camera.
The text immediately before that quote is:
> The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey pioneered motion control in two respects. The film's model photography was conducted with large mechanical rigs that enabled precise and repeatable camera and model motion. The film's finale was created with mechanically controlled slit-scan photography, which required precise camera motion control during the exposure of single frames.
And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the mothership was made of wood, plastic and metal, and wasn't cheap.
Now, to be sure these are high budget movies, but your broad description makes it sound like it was true for all movies in the 1970s.
I think a better comparison would be to look at the model-based special effects in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the CGI effects in Babylon 5; both produced at about the same time. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine :
> DS9 was the first TV show in the Star Trek franchise to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for exterior space shots. Although a few other television series, like Babylon 5, were using CGI exclusively to avoid the high expense of model photography, the Star Trek franchise had continued to use primarily physical models for exterior space shots because producers felt models provided more realism.
Wikipedia has more details about Babylon 5's transfer issues. They shot the show on Super 35mm film so they would have a widescreen source, which they telecined down to 4:3 for broadcasting. But when the show was remastered for widescreen in the 2000s, the production company did not return to the original widescreen film. They converted a 4:3 PAL copy to NTSC and then upscaled that to widescreen!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Mastering_problems
It seems like too many involved with Babylon 5 are dying far too young.
When Richard Biggs died, I was sad, but I thought a revival could still be possible and be enjoyable. When Andreas Katsulas died, I knew any revival would suffer without his presence.
Now at some point with Jerry Doyle, Jeff Conway and now Stephen Furst have passed beyond the veil and I've come to realize that I don't want any more Babylon 5 -- except for a TOS/TNG-like remastering with new CGI -- I'd pay a lot for that.
I feel almost cruel pointing it out because they were limited print runs and you can't really buy them (no digital copies exist as far as I know, and the print copies are costly) but there exists an amazing set of books (http://www.cafepress.com/b5books). Each volume has copies of a few scripts from the show, but the real magic is a series of stories written by JMS for every book and each episode of B5. They go into detail about the production of the show and production of television shows in general and just how ground-breaking Babylon 5 was in general. The show was just as revolutionary behind the scenes as it was on screen. The books go into great detail to explain what happened to season 5 and -- at the risk of a BuzzFeed-style headline -- it's not what you think.
As a consolation prize for those who cannot read those books, I suggest Claudia Christians Memoir (Babylon Confidential https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Confidential-Memoir-Love-Addiction/dp/1937856062). It's quite good -- even and especially the non-Babylon 5 parts.
Each of these deaths from Babylon 5 leaves me profoundly sad because I highly doubt I will ever see another show that I enjoy as much as I enjoyed Babylon 5. I'm not sure that anyone will make another show with such depth and intricacy, though I will be watching the final two seasons of Game of Thrones with deep anticipation.
Babylon 5 should get way more love. It was ambitious in a way it's contemporaries weren't [1]. The fact that J. Michael Straczynski wrote the majority of the episodes is both unheard of and shows in how consistent and well-crafted the universe is. Pretty much every character is complex, motivated, and portrayed expertly.
It was the first TV show to regularly use CGI. Unfortunately, it hasn't aged well compared to Star Trek. If you can tolerate that, I can't sing the series's praises high enough.
[1] With the exception of Deep Space 9, and there's always that rumor that they stole the idea for DS9 from B5...
Yes. Even with high-end studio equipment the difference is astounding. Let alone with random consumer stuff that was poorly stored or whatever.
My favorite example here is Star Trek TNG. It was shot on film but immediately transferred to VHS for editing and transmission. The BluRay releases were remastered from the film and the difference in quality is just astounding. Immensely greater color range and resolution. And since everything was done with motion-capture and practical special effects, all that looks amaze-balls too. There are like 2 actual CGI sequences in the entire series (the Crystalline Entity and something else).
It was a massive effort to re-master the whole thing because again, it was cut on VHS. They had a map to the general area where a reel of film was stored but nothing specific ("3rd row of shelves, 4th from the top, halfway across"), and no real list of which takes or shots from the reels were actually used. Only a list of what shots were taken on what day, in most instances, and the shot lists weren't always followed. They literally re-cut the entire thing from scratch. Pretty amazing.
On the flip side - it's going to be a lot tougher to re-master DS9 or Babylon 5, because they were actually shot on tape (VHS?) instead of film, and the effects were done digitally. The model files and stuff are long gone. You could re-create it from scratch, but nobody wants that (see: the Star Trek TOS remasters). Practically speaking, DVD quality is the best it's gonna get there.
I feel there were some decent bits to this biographical article, but there are some huge swaths of text that just read as intellectualized tripe by someone that thinks they know the person through the media choices of his career.
Tom Hanks has been a very private person regarding his personal life and one can only take limited queues from those that do know him. To do much more than that is to make speculation that may be interesting, but not at all real.
I'm reminded of one of the scenes from the last episode of Babylon 5 the series, where they're talking about Sheridan a hundred or so years later. And this is a guy that's still alive.
Also, what's wrong with having a boomer dad vibe. A generation of can-do men who learned to fix what needed to be fixed themselves far more than hiring it out. We're a generation of men who wouldn't even try to change our own oil, let alone a broken electric outlet or fixture ourselves. There are a lot of things that can be interesting, informative and even funny (when you don't have a stick wedged up your rear).
Yeah, I'm a middle aged white guy... no I'm not a Trump supporter, and I didn't exactly grow up middle or upper class. I'm not even sure where I'm going with this all, it's just the tone of the article itself pissed me off.
I actually think Babylon 5, Seasons 2-4, was outstanding. I'm not sure of what you mean by being very negative about some of the acting -- I see the range as being from competent to brilliant, with almost nothing that was outright bad, a few specific lines perhaps excepted.
There was quite a bit of good stuff in the fifth season as well, actually, mainly the Centauri and telepath arcs.
I also can't think of any effects that are distracting on a rewatch.
I stopped watching Lost early on, perhaps in Season 2. I stopped watching Heroes a few episodes into Season 2; when Kristen Bell of all people seemed to be giving a bad performance, I concluded that the show was probably doomed.
The Buffy vs. Angel vs. Firefly discussion is a good one. Babylon 5, Veronica Mars, and the recent Battlestar Galactica also fit in. Ditto Dollhouse, Heroes, Alias and Lost.
I'd say:
-- It's just a detail, but recall that the first season of Buffy was actually just a half-season in length.
-- The first three seasons of Buffy had a very clear meta-metaphor. :) It posited monsters as being a good representation for what happens in actual high school life.
-- That aspect of the show hit its stride in the Buffy/Angel romance: Girl sleeps with guy and he turns into a monster.
-- Firefly was good, but nothing in it was as brilliant as, say, the best of Buffy.
-- A lot of shows started with a lot of monster-of-the-week/crisis-of-the-week and emphasized the ongoing story more later into the run. But most of the shows cited did at least some standalone stories all the way to the end. (Babylon 5 is one exception).
-- Firefly never got past that part of the show's evolution. This may be one reason it never matched Buffy's brilliance.
-- Not knowing whether or not a show will be renewed is a huge problem. If you're a fan of Buffy or Angel or Babylon 5, you're familiar with the consequences.
-- The writers' strike messed up multiple shows, or at least their audiences. I never went back to watching Battlestar Galactica post-strike.
-- Joss Whedon tried to oversee three shows at once. That didn't go well. Each of Buffy, Angel and Firefly deserved more of his attention.
-- Dollhouse didn't have real characters, the people running the place excepted. It was never going to work.
-- Some shows have a brilliant idea for an overarching story, in which the big story and the individual characters' experiences and arcs mesh beautifully. Then that story comes to a natural end, and the show is never quite as good again. Veronica Mars Season 1 is a great example. Ditto the first 1 1/2 or 2 seasons of Alias. Ditto Babylon 5 after things were wrapped up in Season 4.
-- I'd put Battlestar Galactica into the same group. The best part was the first season, as everybody builds a society on the fly )as it were) that can survive against terrible odds. The plots with the election and the defeat and the aftermath weren't as good. And the pseudo-mystical stuff toward the end was just weird.
I wonder how much Firefly has benefited from being cancelled so early. I imagine if Heroes got cancelled after about 10-13 episodes, it'd be very well perceived right now. The subsequent writers' strike mess and not being able to handle an evolving story messed that show up quite a bit. So many shows, even really well done ones, taper off at a point due to various production issues (Babylon 5 comes to mind).
> how about the Zima sign in a Babylon 5 episode?
Seeing the Zima sign up in the Zócalo always makes me laugh.
There are some workarounds. There are old shows, where the product placements are no longer relevant. "Mom! The Shadow says we should buy Blue Coal." (Yes, that's a radio show; how about the Zima sign in a Babylon 5 episode?)
Or old shows which were funded by other sources, like Fraggle Rock.
There are also foreign shows, like ones from the BBC, which aren't allowed to use product placement, or where the products aren't available local.
That said, most kids want to watch what their friends watch. I doubt "The Vicar of Dibley" will be popular among US kids, making my proposal mostly theoretical.
After thinking about it for a bit, if such workarounds prove popular, the provider will likely start inserting product placement into the shows digitally, after the fact. So, umm, nevermind.
It depends... the better the input and larger the resolution, the better x265 works for a given display. On the other side, I recently started re-ripping my DVDs of Babylon 5 for seasons 4-5 (had already watched seasons 1-3 on dvd) via Handbrake. I had to play a lot with the settings, and found that for DVD, a constant quality level 18 at medium seemed to work about best without losing too much quality. This resulted in a file size anywhere from around 290mb to 390mb, so some variance in size, for local data store this works fine, for online streams this wouldn't work as well, and would probably want a 2-pass for a consistent bitrate. This is compared to an average 850mb or so file size for the prior rip to x264. The time to encode (i7 4770k) seems to be about 13-16 minutes per episode. Again, this is at DVD source/output quality.
At 1080p, you can lower the quality to around 22-24, and get near blue-ray output... the flatter the input (animation is a great example) the bigger the difference. I'm seeing encodes at 40-60% of comparable blue-ray.
The down side, is it is significantly slower, and the quality of the x265 version of the codec is much better than say the nvidia x265 encoder, which is a shame as it's much slower too, so it becomes kind of a non-option for archives imho.
If you are encoding new media for your library, definitely go x265, it's worth the file size saving (so long as your playback devices support it well enough), but I wouldn't go back and re-encode it all, it's just too slow for now... maybe if x264 gets some CUDA support, that would be really nice (recently upgraded to a 1080 GTX).
I learned this watching TV coverage of a particular protest/rally I had been to. There were no shots of the diverse crowd of thousands, only a single close-up of an old man who was dressed oddly. The much smaller counter-protest of ~10 people got more airtime, but instead of showing them yelling and cussing at the children in our group, a well-dressed female lawyer from their side was interviewed, with a few others packed around her and a tight camera angle to make it look like she was in the middle of a huge crowd.
Like, it wasn't just mildly inaccurate coverage as a result of the reporters not having good enough understanding. It was intentionally slanted coverage. And it made me think, if they can make something that straightforward look so different from reality, I have a hard time trusting their coverage in general.
(See also: Babylon 5 season 4 episode 8 "The Illusion of Truth")
Reporter: “Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?”
Commander Sinclair: “No. We have to stay here. And there’s a simple reason why: Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers. But there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us, it’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto¹, and Buddy Holly and Aristophanes, and all of this… and all of this was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.”
— Babylon 5, Season 1 Episode 4, Infection (1994)
① Fictional
> […] any ethical objections I may have are meaningless, as the only thing I can do to object is lose all my household income and be replaced by someone more pliant.
“How do you know the chosen ones? ‘No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother.’ Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person. In the dark, where no one will ever know, or see.”
— Babylon 5, Season 2, episode 21, Comes the Inquisitor, 1995
I didn't like DS9 when I was a kid. Same for Babylon 5. However gave it a try three years ago and watched all seven seasons. Enjoyed it much. Especially the last seasons are very good. There are also single episodes with very unique stories.
Also don't forget star trek: voyager, my personal favorite.
I'm not a hardcore fan either I watched TNG, DS9 and Voyager as just another Scifi show back when MGM, Paramount and 20cent Fox still wanted to make television we had Stargate, Babylon 5, Star Trek, then Scifi was pretty much left to in the hands of syndicated TV productions and basic cable which resulted in well meh.
Shows like BSG are pretty much unicorn's these days no one seems to want to make serious scifi the best we can hope for is for the random Canadian show to be picked up by SyFy and not being shredded (Continuum was good, Dark Matter seems interesting but very goofy).
SyFy is also trying to get of their asses together I'm still hoping that they'll pick up Ascension it's backdoor pilot / mini-series was one of the most interesting Scifi concepts of late and if they don't screw up 'Childhoods End' (which from the trailer looks like an HBO show which is great) I might actually believe that they still can produce something besides fake reality shows and wrestlemania.
I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - one that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
One convenient thing about TOS is that everything was done optically and the prints that were scanned for broadcast were still available. They were able to go back to the film without being forced to redo all the editing and effects, as was necessary for TNG, which was composited and edited on tape. As you say, they were wise to include the unaltered versions on the Bluray releases. The "upgraded" effects are certainly interesting, but far from subtle!
If you want to see the unaltered version of TNG you are forced to go back to the DVD's. Fortunately, the restorers were meticulous in recreating the original special effects as faithfully to the original as possible, even to the point of bringing in a lot of the people who originally did those effects in the 80's and 90's. Practically nothing sticks out as being as out of place as the upgraded effects that were done for TOS do. Even though a lot of what we see in the HD release of TNG is entirely new, it blends in seamlessly. Extremely impressive work!
TV of the late 80's and 90's seems destined to be a bit of low-resolution dip for for the foreseeable future. The TNG restoration was expensive and CBS Paramount hasn't yet gone forth with restoring Deep Space Nine. It may simply be too expensive to give most shows the same treatment. An added problem of the late 90's was the advent of extensive use of CG effects in television. DS9's restoration will be complicated by this, and another great example is Babylon 5. The models, animation files, etc. for this show's CG effects were lost, so they'd need to be recreated from scratch if the show was ever to be restored in hidef. Even the DVD releases suffer from poor quality due to this.
Well, that shows what little I know about the Hugo and of fandom.
I don't disagree that others have that opinion about Star Wars. That's besides the point. You claim is that Babylon 5 is not part of science fiction. You think that the allusion to what other people think about Star Wars is relevant to your claim. But as you must well know, that question of "is Star Wars really science fiction" is old and well-worn (eg. http://pop-verse.com/2014/12/10/is-star-wars-science-fiction-or-fantasy/ ).
It is therefore a poor tool to use to answer the question of 'is Babylon 5 science fiction?'. My objection was to this use, not that others believe it to be fantasy.
This concept of "speculative fiction" as an encompassing term is a perfectly reasonable one to have. However, it does not address the question 'is Babylon 5 science fiction?'.
You can place Hitchhiker's Guide into "Comic Science Fiction", but note that "Science Fiction" is in the name. Granted, astronomers say that a dwarf planet isn't a planet, but a dwarf star is a star, so it's not always possible to infer an is-a relationship in a name, but so far it looks like Hitchhiker's Guide is part of science fiction.
You give what you say is the "classical definition" of 'a work of fiction that uses science as a story telling device to explore ideas'.
As you must surely know, there is no such classical definition, and "its exact definition remains a contested question among both scholars and devotees." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction and reflective of my understanding.) Furthermore, there's an entire section in Wikipedia on just that topic, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction , many of which are not limited to your 'science as a story' definition.
I can assume your definition for argument's sake, but you still haven't answered the question of which TV series you think is actually science fiction under your definition, nor have you given any books.
This unwillingness to state examples is why I'm getting gatekeeper vibes from you. (A gatekeeper who is used to shutting people down for using the wrong terms is often one who does not want to stick a neck out for worry that it will in turn be cut down.)
Do note that the "science fantasy" link you give says the term "has never been clearly defined". The Heinlein example of 'Magic, Inc.' has many of the tropes of outright fantasy. I would consider "Glory Road" a better example for this category, with mixed fantasy and science elements. Indeed, if you look in the talk you'll see a raging discussion on just that point. In any case, 'Tunnel in the Sky' has no fantasy elements, so cannot fit into this category.
Babylon 5 (1st 4 seasons, season 5 well meh) while potentially one of the best "space" shows ever created is hardly science fiction, actual science plays very little role as plot devices it's more of a space opera than classic SciFi.
Amiga's was being used on Babylon 5 first seasons. Also, I have Amiga A1200 with animations for TV and a movie across the whole 90's. So not was too dead.
Case in point: Babylon 5.
The show's creator, J. Michael Straczynski, originally planned for a full 5 season run. But he was forced to cram the ending into season 4 because of uncertainty over the future of the show. Then season 5 was approved at the last moment - with most storylines already wrapped up.
He had to create something for the next season, but it wasn't what he'd envisioned from the start.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
There's definitely a danger of Philosophical Questions. But what you want isn't necessarily philosophical.
I shamelessly stole the "What do you want?" question from the tv show Babylon 5. Here's the original, meaningful answer from that show, by Ambassador Londo Mollari:
"All right. Fine! You really want to know what I want? You really want to know the truth? I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars! I-I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to– to look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to BE! I want…I want it all back, the way that it was! Does that answer your question?"
Of course, this leads to a gigantic galactic war and the deaths of billions, but that's another story.
Another one that comes to mind is Inigo Montoya, from Princess Bride. He knows exactly what he wants - he wants revenge for his father's murder. He may take odd jobs as a hired sword, but it's all in service of finding the six-fingered man and killing him.
So at a certain point, you don't have to keep asking philosophical questions. You just need to understand what motivates you, deep down. Inigo Montoya didn't have to ask why revenge mattered. He loved his father, and that was enough.
After watching "Babylon 5", the first American TV series I knew that had a fixed length and didn't try to go as long as possible, I decided that if you don't have an end, you don't have a story. So unless I know there's an end, I don't bother. It's worked out pretty well; Robert Jordan's series kept getting longer (= doesn't know how to finish) until it got so long he died. GRRM seems be having similar problems--taking 5 and 6 years to write the latest two suggests to me he is getting bogged down (= doesn't know how to finish).
I had similar problems with "Alias." You can't just upend who is good and who is bad every month. It isn't believable, and it feels like you're playing with your audience. It also indicates you have no idea what you are doing (= no end point). I watched season 3, and quit early on in season 4 after I realized...
Yeah. The Babylon 5 episode that talmand was referring to was an explicit reference to the Berserker stories.
Disorganized team/crew of what first have seemed to appear as "professionals", imho, is a curse of most sci-fi movies (I could hardly recall any movie with more than one actor, where characters won't behave like a bunch of strangers gathered together under some unfortunate circumstances).
Exoggerated drama (i.e. dramatic action out of nothing or due the course of highly regulated procedures (eg. EVA)) is harder to evaluate: sometimes that drama looks quite plausible. Nevertheless, action sci-fi without some sort of team member sacrificion/unexpected death is hard to imagine, at least for me. Hell, it is not even specific to sci-fi: just take a look into any action movie out there - pretty high chances to become a witness of the dramatic death.
Very frivolous treatment of the laws of physics in general. I am pointing out that instantaneous information transmission specifically. Well, pretty much of cliche either, isn't it?
Stupid reasons for "heroicity". Are you a script writer in a search for the rationale to balance around the case of dramatic death of one or more characters? Director struggling with producers demand for fancy attention-binding activity you might be. What to do? Easy! Just place some important peace of equipment in a morbid place and there you go - engineering have been favored out by thrill.
Life. Remember that in "Babylon 5" most of aliens were anthropomorphic? Well, 90th there were, no fancy CG, and, besides, convergention one may say, right? Second decade of XXI century, Wikipedia is here and accessible in a matter of keystrokes. Why not chemothrophs, why?! Although, phototrophs could be plausible even in a shady world, convergention one may say...
Kosh is a character on the TV show Babylon 5. It's where the quoted line is from.
Rather than respond to a lot of different comments, I'll just note (and these comments are US-centric):
1. Because of the internet, recording technologies, etc., we have a much more accurate view of the relatively recent past than one had in the 1980s.
2. From the 50s to the 80s there was a huge change in societal attitudes vs. authority, order, etc. Nothing as dramatic has happened since. Cynicism has changed in its specifics, been put aside occasionally, etc., but since the stock market crash of 1987 and Iran/Contra took some of the bloom off the Reagan rose, there hasn't been a huge societal consensus, so there in particular hasn't been a huge societal consensus that was later shattered.
3. Sexual mores had a much bigger shift from the 50s to the 80s than from the 80s to the present; the 80s are when the view was adopted that sex was permissible but dangerous, and that's been the general societal attitude ever since.
4. I agree that modern filmmaking techniques emerged in the 1970s. Hollywood then regressed to the more commercial action blockbusters, but eventually technology evolved to the point that the same or even greater quality of storytelling was possible on television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like a series of 1970s auteur movies of 22 * 47 minute duration. The same is true of Babylon 5, except that the dialogue (usually stolid at best, Londo & G'kar excepted) and special effects were more in the George Lucas vein. TV may have progressed even further since.
5. The internet brought tremendous changes to day-to-day life, especially if you include the rest of computing (PCs, video games, mobile phones) as well. I don't have a good answer for why that alone doesn't make the 1980s feel more distant than they do.
6. People never know many details of era before their own. This was brought home to me when my stepdaugher, who is a Middle East expert (e.g. relevant Master's degree from Harvard), couldn't get a Trivial Pursuit question whose correct answer was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
I suspect this is more a matter of what "sci fi" you like. The 1990s had lots of sci fi TV shows, including, among others:
X-Files
SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032
More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)
Babylon 5
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Farscape
I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)
No, he really wrote most of the episodes [1]:
Creator and showrunner J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, including all 44 episodes in the third and fourth seasons;[63] according to Straczynski, a feat never before accomplished in American television.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Writing
> Babylon 5, 1 guy wrote most of it
I thought that while JMS oversaw all of B5 and wrote the broad story arc, he did not write most of the episodes.
Babylon 5 is what I'd call an acquired taste. :) So many people swear by it, and for the life of me, I just couldn't make it past the first two episodes. It was a slog. I respect the creator of the show immensely; he is a fantastic writer, and also the author of one of the best how-to books on screenwriting I've ever read. And by all accounts, I should love the show. But I just...can't. I don't know why. Does the pace pick up a bit after the first few eps?
I wish somebody would do something like this for Babylon 5--shame they only made four seasons and no movies.
Endless war is exactly what military contractors want.
On an interesting digression, "War Without End" is a two-part Babylon 5 episode that won a Hugo award.
On the other hand, DS9 at least, with its serial format, fleshed out a couple of alien cultures and explored some of the concepts behind the Federation in ways other series wouldn't have even been able to attempt - although there were a couple of episodes in TNG which managed to take some risks, when the writers managed to lock Gene Roddenberry in a cupboard.
Even though the Cardassians were essentially Nazis in space (in a series which, literally, had Space Nazis as a thing) and the Ferengi were comic relief, it was refreshing to me to see a bit of effort put into some of the other species. The Ferengi and Cardassians, unlike the Klingons (who despite being a warp-capable species were portrayed as barely coherent psychopathic warlords) were presented as reasonable, if not very alien alternatives to the Federation point of view.
TNG would never have had an episode where an alien species calls out the humans for their history of slavery and violence, it would have merely shown us an "alien" species as an allegory but DS9 did (and had the wonderful "Far Beyond the Stars" which, despite barely being in-universe, was able to state Star Trek's essential thesis more directly and profoundly than the main series itself.)
And yes, it was essentially Babylon 5 (But Trek) and wound up being all about a war, and the Dominion and the Changelings were utterly disappointing. And by Voyager, the Borg had gone from being one of the most sinister and alien concepts on television to just another bunch of goons for the Federation to punch, and the only thing in my mind that Enterprise had going for it was the cynical and manipulative Vulcans. But I think, for the most part, the further Star Trek got from Roddenberry's idealism, the more its idealism actually meant something, precisely because it was flawed. The story of how humans get to paradise is much more interesting the the one about how awesome it is after they're there.
Lately I have kept repeating to myself: You can either spend your time consuming or you can spend your time creating.
I have always felt guilty deep inside when watching something and not learning anything from it, I try to find that one thing, that small part of philosophy in a television series and use it as a motivation to watch (like the line: "We are the universe trying to figure itself out" and the stuff about humanity growing up in Babylon 5). But the feeling of uselessness kept creeping up.
Recently I have just told myself flat out: Just make something, I felt increasingly restless while watching TV. And it feels good, I make lego contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my RPi(s). It feels good. I don't know why but ever since I was I kid I have felt this, very deeply and only in the last year have I actually expressed it in words.
I have read 1984 and Brave new world in the last 3 years and they hit some sensitive spots for, must reads if you ask me.
On the subject of SF portrayals of futuristic torture, there's an episode late in Babylon 5 where torture is being used for a more realistic purpose than is usual on American TV -- to elicit utterly and completely false confession and to name names. It's an intense, highly focused, episode and incredibly well done. One of my favourite hours of SF TV ever.
The very best torture scene I've read or scene was the one in Day of The Jackal - where they torture the legionnaire to divulge the location of the OAS leadership. Putting myself in his shoes, there is no way - no matter the importance of the information - that I wouldn't break.
The main difference between that scene vs. say Babylon 5 or StarTrek is not only the violence (for instance Captain Picard doesn't have electrodes connected to the end of his penis) but the fact the the person being tortured knows for a fact he will be killed after it's all over. There is not psychological game going on: the reason he ultimately divulges information is so that the pain will stop. He wants and begs them to kill him.
I've never seen an equally powerful scene in any movie or book.
For me, that is one of the best episodes of the best TV show ever made.
I say that because its not just the episodes its self, which is brilliant, its the fact that by the time you get to that episode it really means something. There is a hell of a lot riding on the torture of Sheridan. The TNG episode, while in itself brilliant, sort comes out of no where.
(Yes, Babylon 5 is my Linux/Mac. Of course there is opinion to the contrary, but Im openly deaf to them.)
I also remember the Babylon 5 fourth season episode “Intersections in Real Time” as being particularly good.
I'm going to sacrifice a lot of nerd points by saying this, but the pilot of Babylon 5 was so dreadfully unwatchable for me that I never got past it. I never tried another episode. Everyone I know tells me how much I'd love the show, but for the life of me, I'd rather watch paint dry than sit through another episode.
Perhaps this is a great example of a bad pilot that grew into a decent series?
This reminds me a bit of the way telepathy was presented on the TV show "Babylon 5". Untrained telepaths found themselves awash in a sea of confusing, poorly organized thoughts that they couldn't control (the "broadcast" thoughts of others.) With training, they could block out others' thoughts, or focus and read specific thoughts from specific people. Star Trek:TNG showed a similar contrast in the episode "Tin Man", between normal Betazoids and Tam Elbrun, who couldn't shut off his mind-reading ability and therefore found being near people excessively stressful.
The same ability could be either a curse or a blessing, depending on how well it was organized and controlled.
Although I'm a self confessed fanboi, I recommend watching Babylon 5. In places it's one hell of a scary prophecy.
The Wikipedia article goes into this. They wanted to film widescreen but certain necessary equipment wasn't provided so they filmed in 4:3 but with the idea that you could crop it to 16:9 later. Also most of the SFX were done in 4:3 but could be cropped.
The widescreen conversion thing was executive short sightedness at it's finest!!! We offered to do ALL of Babylon 5 in widescreen mode if Warner Bros would buy us a reference monitor so we could check our output. (only $5000 at the time) Ken Parkes (the "Business affairs" guy) and Netter (penny wise, but pound foolish) said no! So we did everything so it could be CROPPED to be widescreen! Each blamed the other by the way. Doug Netter said, "Ken Parkes said no". Ken Parkes said, "Doug Netter said no". SHEESH!!! So for $75 an episode they could have had AWESOME near Hi-Def.
It was innovative. It was epic. It had a huge effect on Sci-Fi television (which was largely Star Trek:TNG and nothing else at the time).
But it was cheesy and uneven. Yes, seasons 3 and 4 were some of the best sci-fi ever made (at the time, at least). But season 1 was mediocre at best and has aged pretty badly. Increased production values for new TV also makes a lot of Babylon 5 difficult to watch, now.
Right, if you mean to watch in one sitting, that wasn't something you could do in the '60s. But it's something that seems like it's been common since the '90s, since the advent of the "DVD Box Set". People would get box sets and watch these long-narrative-arc series in marathon weekends, or socially in parties. There was a period in the 1990s when seemingly everyone I knew was organizing Twin Peaks parties, and it seems like it fits the description of long-running experimental novel. People did that with the X-Files too, though admittedly it was a more coherent experience if you cut the "monster-of-the-week" episodes from the sequence (but hey, leave them in, and make it a gigantic, sprawling novel with disconnected subplots, of the Alexandre Dumas variety). Or Dawson's Creek, for that matter, or Buffy as you mentioned. In my circle of friends it seemed everyone was gorging themselves on Babylon 5, Star Trek, Black Adder, and Monty Python box sets as well; I don't know if I'd describe those as narratively complex, but there are lighter novels, too.
But in any case, I could believe the numbers are different. Perhaps box sets were not as major a part of 1990s/2000s TV-watching as I had thought?
Visit any thread on reddit that mentions BBT. It'll be full of highly-upvoted hate comments. It's a a close third hate object after Justin Bieber and "Twilight".
I wonder if the psychology student message boards also raged same way about "Frasier" (also an award-winning comedy with a live studio audience).
To me, BBT is great and I've just finished a second run through its 5 first episodes on Blueray. That Jim Parson is in no way a true geek makes his performance even more hilarious.
Amusingly the reddit snobbery over BBT can be found within BBT itself: the way Sheldon absolutely despises "Babylon 5" while fawning over "Star Trek" etc.
I'm not a fan of political shows. That said, I decided to watch House of Cards last night.
It's not bad. Having Kevin Spacey as the lead is good. There's a good cast of supporting actors too. The writing is a bit mundane, but not terrible. I know the show is somewhat of a remake of a BBC show from a while back, but I never watched it so my take is purely on this experience.
I plan on watching the rest of it. It was interesting enough to have keep me up till 5am doing the "just one more" thing. The format of no commercials and having all the episodes available at launch is a really good thing. I was pleasantly surprised when the 2nd episode started playing as I finished the first one. I was fully expecting to have to wait a week to see the next one. No episode felt rushed, like things had to be crammed into a specific time slot.
The things that work for this format:
1) Release at once 2) Natural variable time lengths 3) Good production values 4) Good cast 5) Decent writing
If they use this as a framework for other types of genres, I think it will be good. I'd personally like to see the next show be sci-fi. Something with a unique premise that has never really been done by networks, because they screw it up. No time travel, or future detective, or alien invaders thing. Something gritty but uplifting, along the veins of Babylon 5, TNG, or BSG.
I'd like to see a near-future show about solar system colonization. Could have an entire system-wide, multi cultural backdrop like Firefly. Hell, try getting Josh Whedon to do it. Visits to Luna, Mars, asteroid mining colonies, deep space science labs, political intrigue from Earth, the companies that own colonies, immigration rights, etc. The solar system as a backdrop is big enough to have an infinite number of stories, but keeps everything so close together that it feels real. Star Trek provided a big galactic tapestry, but many times still felt distant and isolated.
Anyway, check out HoC if you have Netflix. Hopefully we'll see more shows from them.
The science-fiction series Babylon 5 used this as a plot device in one episode - a group of hostages were located partly by identifying the background hum of machinery in the terrorists' video of demands.
From the role you played in Babylon 5 I salute you for making it one of the rare TV series that had me feeling comfortable with the characters and direction before the end of season one, let alone season 3 which is the usualy pace for me.
I feel rest in peace is probably not as fitting perhaps as Live In Peace as for many his work in which he touched us will live on still.
This article points out that movies are now excessively marketing-driven, and suggests that the reason is that the generation born in the 1960s suffers from "arrested development" — i.e. psychological neoteny — to a unique degree, and that they now control Hollywood. Although it does not offer any evidence to support either of these propositions, it suggests that Top Gun or the Reagan administration might be the cause of the neoteny.
In reality, marketing-driven movie are nothing new. In the 1960s, they were called "exploitation" films; "exploitation" was the 1960s movie-biz term for "marketing". The crucial question is, why is so much of the movie business organized around exploitation films today? And an unsupported psychological hypothesis doesn't cut it as an answer.
Here's an idea that seems at least as good as the answer proffered by the article. The internet makes word-of-mouth travel a lot faster now. It used to be that the box-office receipts of a stinker movie would decline over the first few weeks after its release. Now, they decline even during the opening weekend. (I haven't verified that, but it seems like it ought to be easily verifiable.) People tweet about how bad the movie is even before they've finished watching it.
In turn, this word-of-mouth heightens the winner-take-all nature of the film industry; hit movies take home a bigger share of the total box-office receipts of the industry (unverified, but should be verifiable), with the result that more movies these days fail to even make back their production costs (unverified, but should be verifiable). In short, film production is a riskier investment than it used to be, and there's less that marketing money can do to rescue a stinker.
An economically rational response to this situation (assuming I'm correct!) would be to work harder to figure out which films are going to be hits and which are going to be flops, make the hits bigger hits, and spend less on the flops. For example, you could do any of the following:
• Value talent more highly. Talent can't stop a flop from being a flop, but it can make the difference between a hit and a mega-blockbuster.
• Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
• Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing. (In a way, that's what's happening with the sequel craze that the article is complaining about, but the difference is that you need to have the story arc planned out: Dune or Star Wars Episode IV or Babylon 5, not Fast Five.)
• Instead of a first episode, release an abridged version, maybe a half-hour. This has been done unintentionally and on a small scale for many years; think of Blade Runner and Blade Runner: the director's cut. The difference is that you can actually save money by not shooting the parts of the story that you leave out. Maybe instead of showing it in theaters, you can show it on Lifetime or HBO or something, or just on your web site.
• Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book. Comics have a lot in common with films: they're intensely visual and powerfully immersive, they even use cinematographic techniques, and a "graphic novel" is a lot closer in length to a movie than it is to War and Peace. These days, online, maybe you could even add a voiceover to your comic book. (Admittedly, filmstrips never really took off as a dramatic medium.) Again, in a sense, studios are doing this already; they're just not funding the production of the comics in the first place. They ought to. If there were ten times as many graphic novels coming out every year, they'd have a much better selection of audience-proven storyboards.
• Post trailers and teaser episodes on BitTorrent before you're done filming in order to see if they take off. It's no guarantee — lots of people will be willing to watch the movie for free even if they wouldn't shell out for a ticket — but if it flops there, it'll probably flop in the theater too.
• Cancel more films before they're even finished shooting. If your early indications are that it's not going to work out, don't try to rescue your investment by sending good money after bad, hiring a famous film editor to try to salvage something from the wreckage, nonsense like that. You need some kind of interim feedback on quality, of course, which is impossible to do reliably, although some of the approaches above might help. The big returns are going to go to the mega-hit films. Invest the money you would have invested in finishing the film in something that has a chance to be a mega-hit instead.
• Leave room in filming budgets for expansion. If early feedback (from the first episode, or just during screenings) is that the film is good, double the special-effects budget. Splurge on ADR and better music.
• Make more films, which means making a lot of low-budget films.
• Diversify your film investments; we should see more multi-studio films, just like we see lots of multi-VC-firm startups.
• Share the risk with the fans. Sell nonrefundable opening-night tickets before you're finished shooting, in order to raise money for the film. Give them cash back if the movie is a hit. Or sell the advance tickets in groups of four. (If the movie's worth watching, they can treat three of their friends for free.)
However, although as I said above, the studios are using some of these approaches, we're mostly seeing something else entirely. When you're used to a certain level of risk, and that level of risk goes up, your natural inclination is not to figure out how to take advantage of the new risk; it's to try desperately to push the risk back down. So, instead, we're seeing stupid moves like these:
• Release the film initially in more theaters, not less. That way, if it sucks, you might still make your money back before everyone sees their friends tweet about how it was so bad they walked out of the theater.
• Make films that people will want to see before they hear from anyone who's actually seen them: sequels, comic strips, toy brands. This is a necessary complement to releasing the film in a lot of theaters at once.
• Spend more on pre-release marketing instead of less. This slashes your maximum possible return on investment, but you have to do it if you're going to get people into all those theaters on opening weekend instead of a week later.
(The author's grudge against comic books is pretty embarrassing. Are you going to tell me Watchmen was infantilizing, not aimed at adults?)
Now, I admit I know little about business and nothing about the business of movies. So maybe these ideas are stupid.
Speaking of Babylon 5, for those of you who haven't seen it--or those who wish to rewatch it--all 5 seasons are available online for free at AOL's online TV/movie site, SlashControl.com.
Series page: http://www.slashcontrol.com/free-tv-shows/babylon-5
Start here: http://www.slashcontrol.com/free-tv-shows/babylon-5/season1/episode?page=3&pageSize=10
(There are one or two missing episodes--specifically, I know season 1 #13 isn't there--but you can get whatever's missing from iTunes, etc.).
The pilot is there, as Season 1 ep 1, but the other movies are not (I'd recommend seeing "In the Beginning" just before watching Season 5, if you can).
Just saw the movie, and it was great! I'm not sure the interconnectedness was intended as information transfer, though. They had to communicate with the other tribes by actually going there. It seemed like the network was more like the brain of a planetary organism (eywa). Each individual could access and add to the memories, but was not a communication network. An interesting approach--they truly are "one with the world" in a way other sci-fi (Babylon 5, for example) does inelegantly.
Nice write-up, it gives me some things to look for next time I watch the movies, like Amidala's costume color.
Trek is a series of standalone 42-minute episodes written by different authors with different agendas. Wars is one man's vision and after the first movie Lucas had all the time and money required for the rest. So it's natural to think of Wars as a better "whole" than Trek.
But in both cases I find myself wishing the vision and writing had been better. Does anybody over the age of 5 think Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea well-executed? No, he was just a plot device. Trek's Wesley Crusher is equally grating in most of his episodes. ("Wesley" is not to be confused with the talented Wil Wheaton, who deserved a better character.)
But when I watch Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, well, I don't think the writing is bad or the characters contrived. Better vision, better writing, better stories.