Kevin's Watch

I can't believe no one has mentioned this show in this part of the forum...

Come on, it's the greatest show to have ever been on television.

Except for Monty Pythons Flying Circus, I could not agree more!

Acctually there are a thread on B5 in the sf/fantasy-forum (started by guess who). I am not sure if it should stay there or be here... Perhaps the solution is to have a thread in both forums?

Have anyone had the annoying experience of the third season DVD-boxes? All the DVDs got loose and scratched . I wonder if something is being done about this (had to return my box and now there is a hole in my mind, or at least my DVD collection).

Ivanova is God, Ivanova is always right...

My season 3 was ok... But I'm region 4 down here in oz so mine is probably a little different.

Season 4 isn't out here yet, we have to wait 6 months after you guys get it (assuming your from America)

That could be a common problem actually. Everywhere I've looked I've seen multiple copies of Seasons 1,2 and 4 but never 3.

Well, I hope they have gotten better boxes for the 4th season (which by the way, I will be in possesion of by the 20th of April if all goes as planned... ).

They've re-released Season 1 here in NZ, in a plastic box. It looks fairly smart, but of course it clashes with the other 2 Seasons that are out.

I am so far behind in my DVD watching. I've got 2 episodes left of Season 6 of ST-TNG, then I've got to watch DS9, which is currently up to Season 6 as well. Then I've barely started Space 1999, and there's ER too, and of course B5, where I'm about halfway through Season 1.

B5 was, imho, the best program ever, mostly because of its all-encompassing story arc. Crusade disappointed, but I think it could have been very good if it had been allowed to get to the stage where Joe would write the stories himself. If that had been the plan, of course.

Tom

I could have sworn I was logged in when I posted that...

Tom

tomo wrote:

They've re-released Season 1 here in NZ, in a plastic box

There is hope still then!

When summer holidays come, I will sit down and have a B5-marathon (seasons 3-4). It is truely annoying to have the DVDs but too little time to watch them...

I have a question to you out there who also possess the DVD-boxes: have you found more than one collection of bloopers (the one I found was on disc 3-6, "hidden" under Data-files)? I suddenly got afraid that I might have missed something...

Oh no! I just heard that Richard Biggs (Stephen Franklin) is dead!

I never got into it. Somebody sell it to me...why should I try to catch in in reruns?

IMO, this was the best space opera to ever come across anyone's TV screen. At its best it blows away all the best star Treks (including yesterday's enterprise), and even at its less than best it's still pretty good.

After taking my SF lit course and my beginning fiction course at a local comm. college, I started to wonder what made Bab 5 so great. And my conclusion was the writing and how all the characters were so much better than any Trek character (excepting Q). The characters were real, dynamic and not carboard, and to be honest many Trek characters are so cardboard and static. Of the characters who changed in the course of the series, Mr. Garibaldi and G'kar, by the end of the series those characters have went through a amazing amount of dynamic change.

My opinion and $0.02. I might be full of crap.

Not all the Star Trek characters were quite so static as you say. (although most of them were)

Neelix changed a lot throughout voyager, he was a very interesting character, and stopped being quite so anoying once Kes left (when I realised she was gone for good I punched the air with excitement, has there ever been a worse character in anything?)
Captain Picard was great, as was data, Riker was alright too. Worf always kept me entertained too. Wesley Crusher always annoyed the hell out of me and I tried to avoid seeing any episodes with him in.
Ben Sisko, Quark, O'brien and dr. Bashir I also thought were good characters who changed a lot throughout DS9 (but who could manage not to change with all that happened to them?).
The enterprise characters are looking promising too, especially Archer, Trip and Malcolm, I'm not too impressed with Hoshi or Mayweather though, they seem to just be filler characters like most of the Voyager characters, predictable and boring, only there to play a role, not a character.

Other than that though I think you're right, most Star Trek characters are only a vehicle for the plots (which have merit of their own, they're very entertaining). Voyager was particularly guilty of this, I can't remember one thing Chakotay ever did that made him a real character.

I watched the first 5 or 6 episodes of Babylon 5, but they bored me to tears so I stopped. I hear it improved with age - is there any truth to this?

The first series primarily introduced the characters and environment, and foreshadowed the main story arc. You could tell which were going to be the important episodes, as they were written by J Michael himself. Some of the episodes in season 1 were a little dubious, TKO springs to mind, but even so it was a firm foundation for what followed.

Spoiler

The episode where B4 returned was sheer genius, especially considering the two-parter later on which dovetailed so neatly into it.

Once we got into Season 2, and

Spoiler

Sheridan replaced Sinclair

, and J Michael started to write every episode, the depth of the story and the character development really started to come through.

Seasons 3 and 4 were my favourites, even if

Spoiler

the end of the Shadow War was a little anticlimactic

.

Overall it gets 10 thumbs up from me, and it's well worth a Babfest whenever time permits.

Tom

I was a huge B5 fan back in my youth. I'm not sure exactly what it was I liked about it so much. I suspect it was a lot to do with the dynamic writing and the effects. I always found the space battles in Star Trek to be impersonal in comparison.

I'm not blind to the series faults, however. The sets varied in quality from incredibly convincing (the Edgars Industries complex on Mars) to painted chipboard (I remember in the 3rd series episode Convictions, whilst trapped in a burning lift Londo touches a wall and abruptly recoils, causing the entire structure to wobble). The dialogue ranged from awe inspiring (usually from G'Kar) to Cheese-Factor 5 (usually from Sheridan: "Get the hell out of our galaxy!").

Overall, when B5 was good, it was one of the best things on TV, but there were some really sucky episodes along the way . Most of these are confined to the first season, when things were starting out and the writing team wasn't really working, and season five, because the first half of the season had been compressed into the end of season four in order to provide closure in case there wasn't a final season. This made season four pretty awesome though, even if it did leave the first half of the fifth feeling like a lot of filler.

I think it is fair to say that B5 had far more character development than any of the Star Trek Series. Take TNG, sure Picard, Worf and Data had grown by the time the series ended, but Troi, Crusher, La Forge and Riker were essentially the same people they were at the beginning of the show, albeit more confident in themselves. They've all been on this great adventure for years, and haven't really been changed by it. In B5, even characters who appeared in a relatively small number of shows, such as Vir, Lennier and Bester, all had great character arcs. No anonymous red shirts for JMS.

On a different note, what's so bad about the DVD boxes? I think they're okay, nothing special but nothing bad about them either.

The problem with the third DVD-box was that all the discs had gotten lose in there and most of them were scratched . A mechanical problem, nothing else.

I will organize a B5 marathon next week, starting with 7 selected episodes from season 1. It will be harder (near impossible) to make a selection in season 3 and beginning of 4 though...

On an earlier subject: I think the biggest difference between B5 and ST (and I like most ST, except for Enterprise - but I have only seen the first two seasons yet) is that B5 is more epic and it feels like there is a very strong plot keeping all (well, most of) the episodes together and pushing the story forward. And on the subject of rather poor sets in some episodes I heard from some of the comment-tracks that they had a rather limited budget and sometimes spent all their money on effects or settings/artifacts that were important for the story. I assume this is why so many scenes are against an almost compleately dark background . When I see a movie were you can hardly make out the background due to darkness in rooms, I cant help thinking of B5...

BUMP - am I the only current member that liked this show?

While I liked the Shadows vs. the Vorlon drama best, it had many elements to admire.

What do others think?

You'll have to go a long way to find bigger fans than Sin and I.

What did you think of the last season? I felt it was a bit of a let down after the climactic Shadow / Vorlon resolution. And then the poisioned earth ...