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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.
Fun fact: The S4 finale that rates merely "good" is actually a rapidly put together alternate finale when they got renewed for S5, using some of that season's budget. This was so they could delay the real series finale to S5 (originally filmed for S4, when they were unsure they'd get an S5).
Definitely not my favorite episode, but I got a kick out of the similarities to A Canticle for Leibowitz during one of the segments in it.
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.
Based on other articles, the plan is to release an episode a week. They are giving us 90ties experience, I guess. They just somehow managed to screw it up.
They did not released episode 1, which gives an authentic 90ties experience In 90ties people missed episodes. And misnamed the pilot movie as episode 1 and mislabeled other episodes.
And they dont use playlist and will be simultanepusly releasing clips from episodes, so it will be wonderfull mess.
I am incredibly out of the loop in the world of blu-ray. Do you still need to buy a terrible video player to read them legally on windows ? I give so little attention to physical media that I do not even know if 4k blu-ray use the same blu-ray storage format or if it is some sort of upgraded blu-ray with more storage.
Officially? Yes, unfortunately. 4K is even more complicated. Technically 4K is the same discs, but sometimes they use the rare BD-XL 100GB discs that not all drives can read. There's also a bunch of extra DRM junk, so for 4K you need a new drive, new software and an Intel CPU from a specific time period as new ones don't include the bits for 4K Blu-ray DRM.
Unofficially you use MakeMKV and just rip the disc.
EDIT: Oh, apparently PowerDVD no longer supports UHD Blu-ray either so even the official way is dead now.
Some drives have modified firmware that helps when ripping.
Any specific drives you’d recommend for ripping?
Isn't the linked YouTube video title literally "Season 1, Episode 1"?
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#Sea...
> The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia.
That’s because there are two hard things when it comes to uploading content.
- Off by one errors.
>Isn't the linked YouTube video title literally "Season 1, Episode 1"?
Yes and no It's the pilot (and consequently the first[2]) episode "The Gathering", which actually doesn't have an episode number.[0]
The first aired episode was S1E1 "Midnight on the Firing Line".
The former was released as a "TV Movie" even though it was the pilot episode.
[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html for the episode listings.[1]
[1] Be careful, a wrong click can end up giving you spoilers. :(
[2] I'd note that the pilot episode has significant personnel, prop and make-up differences from the rest of the series.
Without understanding the motive behind it, you should assume it is not good news. You're right to be skeptical of the upload count. All they're doing is sheltering the show on YouTube until the view counters rise to the point of another streaming service making a charitable offer. Then, poof all episodes are moved to another service without notice.
Babylon 5 has never been easy to watch which is a large factor in the underappreciation. Hard to appreciate something you can’t watch legally
It's very easy to watch. When I wanted to watch it a few years ago it took only a few minutes to find a torrent of the full series and less than an hour to download.
It was easy to watch on Tubi (with ads), though apparently as of very recently it was pulled.
Tubi stopped carrying all of B5 this month.
B5 has now appeared on Youtube.
Roku has all of B5 - with less commercials than the others
I find it hard to believe anyone on this site has a problem with piracy, nor technical nor moral.
You'd be surprised. "Hacker" doesn't mean what it once did, and the spirit of the old hacker culture is all but dead here.
The "hacker" here is a soulless techbro willing to sell more parts to make a buck. Of course, since he has no more parts of his own, he sells yours. Naturally, theres no permission.
You're going to get flagged to death for saying that. Only lassie faire libertarianism is allowed here. Libertarianism is apolitical you see
Recommended link to the Blu-ray collection for archival purposes?
> The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.
It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money.
This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.
I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
It made everyone weep.
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...
Have we just forgotten the DRM issues with Blu-Ray? I can't even watch them on Linux without relying on leaked keys.
That's why legal unencrypted availability online is such a boon.
Why do you care about "legal"? Buy some version to have a legal and moral right to watch the show, and torrent a good version you can actually watch.
Reading the review, it looks like they gave it the best treatment they could with what they had, definitely better than the DVD. Still a shame that WB didn't go the extra mile and redo the CGI, but maybe that will happen in time.
The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
I watched a chunk of the version on Tubi which I believe was the same as the BluRay, and I thought it looked great. They just do the whole thing in 4:3 which is maybe not the ideal solution to the problem but is seamless. CGI shots are obviously upscaled but it looks good enough not to intrude.
You know, AI might actually be able to fix this!
I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price. You have to remember to cancel it when you’re done, which is easy to forget with so many things bring for our attention these days. That $10 could easily multiply several times over if it slips your mind, at which point congratulations, you’ve paid a significant portion of the box set’s price to rent the series.
All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.
> I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price.
I think it's about not necessarily getting what you pay for. Shows are constantly leaving streaming platforms which is a problem if you want to watch something specific as opposed to just being happy to pay to watch whatever they feel like letting you see this week. Then they'll also silently censor content or remove entire episodes so you can't be sure if you've even watched the entirety of whatever show you intended to see if they have it at all.
They also like to reorder shows and even renumber seasons which can result in confusion and spoilers. Netflix is horrible when it comes to this. One example is the The Great British Bake Off. For some reason they insist on reordering them so that it starts with whatever the newest series is and then plays them backwards which is a pretty big problem. At the start of one series they even recap all of the winners of previous series spoiling them all for everyone watching the show on netflix.
If you just want to watch "something" by all means pay a monthly fee for a streaming service. If you want to watch a specific show and you want it to be there for you the next you want to watch it you're better off getting physical media or doing a little research and getting everything off the high seas.
As if they want to help people sign up for short periods of time. You might as well suggest drug dealers sell non-addictive crack.
Yeah 100% this. I want to watch Endeavour without ads, and I couldn't get some of it on Bittorrent (which is a first). It's available on ITVX for a subscription but there's literally nothing else I want to watch on there and I don't want to deal with cancellation & time pressure to watch it all.
I did consider buying a Blu-ray player and buying it on Blu-ray but it seems like they never actually released all the series on Blu-ray.
In the end I ended up figuring out how to download it without ads from ITVX. There's a tool which will bypass Widevine, download all the segments and splice them together without ads. Quite a pain to get working but still less annoying than yet another subscription. We already have Netflix, Disney, Prime, and a TV license.
When I buy the box set, at least I'll be able to watch it in perpetuity. $10 to own a 5 hour miniseries would be more than reasonable, but I don't want to have to pay $10 each time I want to watch it. (If I even can watch it, and they haven't lost the license in the interim.)
It’s not just pure value analysis, it’s a lack of confidence that the money will go to the people that deserve it.
I’m not going to spend a hundred bucks to try a series I may not even like. It would be one thing if I loved it and wanted to watch it again, or if I had seen enough to know that I want to watch it all. But that’s a lot of money for an unknown quantity.
It's let down by its effects which even appeared ropey at the time. However, some good storylines.
Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the window.
The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.
I always felt that Ron Thornton and his team at Foundation Imaging were sadly underrated and overlooked in computer graphics history.
B5's SFX had a dynamism and color that was unmatched at the time. I recently rewatched the series, and the later seasons still hold up just fine, graphics-wise (created by a different company, but reusing Foundation Imaging's original assets and esthetic).
And I love how the Star Fury's design was so carefully thought out - even NASA took an interest.
Having also been alive at the time, I can tell you I thought the effects looked hokey and cheap.
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.
The costuming and sets and CGI are impressive, but the lighting is unnecessarily murky and the dark industrial tunnels aesthetic makes me think of Red Dwarf, which I can’t imagine was a very lavish production.
They were pretty good for the budget. (As someone else noted at least a lot were done on Amigas.) I really liked Babylon 5 at the time but there's a lot about it you need to overlook. I recommended it to someone and they told me it was the worst recommendation I ever gave them.
The acting was a mixed bag from very good to pretty wooden. And the whole will it get renewed or won't it situation led to non-optimal organization of the last couple of seasons.
"Pretty good for the budget" is not the same thing as "good".
In the space of fifteen years we went from Battlestar Galactica, which used those same shots of Cylon ships swerving and getting blown up over and over and over; to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which used models for the ships and was therefore extremely limited in the scale and maneuvers they could portray; to Babylon V which used digital effects, allowing them a freedom of scale, angle, motion, and number of ships that nothing had managed before -- at the cost of being on the cutting edge of computer graphics, leading to a shininess, over-sharpness, and other telltale computer artifacts.
You can say they were too early, but not that they didn't lean in on technology and use it to their best advantage. It had weaknesses, but also strengths.
Was there much with better effects on TV at the time?
Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.
As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.
If I remember right, the graphics in early episodes were rendered on commodore amigas
Also, it seems like piracy is still yhe superior form to watch it over YT because, quite frankly, YT's quality is crap.
fwiw the whole thing is free to watch on Tubi and the quality there is very nice.
It was just pulled from Tubi a few days ago. Still on the Roku channel, though (for now).
ah, bummer. The recent-ish HD remaster is gorgeous if a bit incongruous to watch a mid-90s show in perfect detail.
I really enjoyed it until they shoehorned in an attractive human + wierd alien romance to compete with Odo & Kira (barf) on DS9
Didn't rewatch it for decades. But isn't this romance a very background narrative arc until the very latest season?
Didn’t B5 do it first, by years? Kira/Odo didn’t become an item until B5 was off the air.
Those who come to this magnificent piece of Sci-Fi for the first time, a word of advice: Pay attention. There are things set in motion in season 1 that are resolved multiple seasons later and there's a lot of foreshadowing (pun very much intended) both subtle and overt.
Oh and, enjoy the ride. It's a good one.
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.
Claudia Christian, who played Susan Ivanova, is also well known for her documentary on alcohol addiction.
It would be easier to list b5 actors without drug or alcohol issues.
Look at what she has to say.
It is of profound significance.
You've linked to a 50+ minute video. Is it recommending naltrexone for alcoholism?
It is, after the well-known book by Roy Eskapa.
https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Willpower-Abstinence-...
There is also Katie Herzog's recent memoir/guidebook on it: https://www.amazon.com/Drink-Your-Way-Sober-Science-Based/dp...
And sadly, so many of the main cast are no longer with us—far more than one would expect from their ages.
I know that some of them, indeed, died due to substance abuse issues; I don't know the circumstances of all of them. They will all be greatly missed.
Being a B5 fan, I found it heart-breaking to see Jeff Conaway on the reality show Celebrity Rehab a decade later. (the fact that there even existed a TV show called "Celebrity Rehab" ...)
Too many others of the main cast had died relatively young, of "natural causes" though. Richard Biggs, Mira Furlan and Stephen Furst stand out.
The curse of Babylon 5 https://www.imdb.com/list/ls056207990/
Indeed—and Mira Furlan died just a few years ago, at 65.
In the lingo of the show, they have "gone beyond the rim" (of our galaxy).
And we will see them again in the place where no shadows fall.
They are actors, young people paid to display exaggerated emotion while living in a world that values youth and appearance over everything. Then we ask them to constantly adopt new characters and shower them with on-again off-again false praise based on whether or not they are working on a given day. Frankly, i am impressed that any of them manage to walk away without profound mental health issues.
> Frankly, i am impressed that any of them manage to walk away without profound mental health issues.
My impression is that there's not much causation from being an actor to mental fragility. It's the other way around; the pool of people who make good actors is already prone to mental fragility before they become actors.
You should delete the spoilers. O'Hare's personal history is important, but the part of the comment about his chronological appearances in the show is not.
Talking about a show that aired 30 years ago isn't "spoilers". Anyone who wanted to not be spoiled has had plenty of time to go rectify that situation by now.
Could you list more spoilers!?
If you want to know something about the series, then ask.
I will upvote you now.
Edit: Vir waves.
The Vorlons are really a_____!
[flagged]
This is the first loony conspiracy theory I’ve seen posted on HN
You never forget your first.
I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better. It's still one of my all time favorite shows.
I wish they'd do a corrected bluray release with even a bit more effort... when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.
Maybe AI upscale to 4k, with training data for newer ship models, actor photos, etc then reducing back to 1080p for a final BluRay set. Probably enough people that would do this as a passion project if the studio would let them.
> I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better.
When I first started watching, season 1 with its gratuitous 90s CGI, the dramatic musical cues, and Michael O'Hares rather stiff, wooden demeanor reminded me a lot of those live action cut scenes that some early CD-ROM games had. I remember thinking at first, that this is probably the kind of thing the local basement theater troupe would pull off if they were suddenly told to make a TV show.
> It's still one of my all time favorite shows.
Fully agree. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd highly recommend as well.
It’s partly that JMS favoured stage actors. Partly that he grabbed a number of his favourite actors from “Murder She Wrote”. Honestly brilliant, taking a couple of murderers of the week and giving them lead roles in a show.
There's more to this line of thought. The pilot movie isn't space opera so much as it is a murder mystery in space, and it's not the only episode like that. The security chief, Garibaldi, is a hard-bitten alcoholic detective from film noir (and there are plenty of film-noir-like visual elements: fans, shadows, run-down industrial sectors unimaginable in Star Trek), and he plays a much larger role solving crimes than do his counterparts in other science fiction shows. The writing style, a long arc that drops clues up front to pay off in revelations down the line, also leans heavily on mystery writing.
Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.
> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.
Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)
The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.
If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.
Tangent, but a cartoon I immensely enjoyed as a young kid popped up recently on my YouTube feed - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. That day I learned JMS wrote the story and it too featured an overarching story that backed the otherwise “episode of the week” format.
The "TKO" 'A' plot is silly but it has one of the most moving and memorable 'B' plots of the series!
Season 2 had a similar writer split to season 1. It's season 3 where he took the reins entirely.
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 forward from the past 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.
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.
Do we really need to upscale everything?
I don't think image quality really is an important thing to enjoy old movies / series as long as the story is good.
While I agree, there's plenty of people who refuse to watch anything that's not sharp. I think there's room for both to exist, just clearly labeled as "original" and "AI Upscaled to 4K"
If you watch the popular streaming services on a Linux PC then you'll be lucky to get more than 720p and some only seem to provide SD anyway - even for content from the HD era. This despite obviously having access to more detailed versions that they'll serve you for the same money if you watch on one of their preferred platforms.
IME this becomes quite jarring if you're watching on a modern high-res screen - even something like a quarter-sized browser window or PIP on a 4K monitor - with other much sharper content visible nearby. If you're watching either full-screen or in a smaller window but without other more detailed visuals around it then personally I find it less jarring and I can still become immersed if the material itself is good. It's still noticeable if you're used to watching HD or 4K content on other devices but I'd rather watch something good in SD than not watch it. The same goes for old shows that were only made in SD originally.
Just wait, they'll soon demand that their favorite soap operas be AI-restarted to generate slop streams indefinitely, and will throw their hard-sat-on-a-sofa UBI credits at that.
- Hey, have you watched that Game of Thrones S1723E1122?
- Nope, I'm not paying until they upscale it to 64K!
Give me new Nothing, Forever in 480p and I'll be a happy man.
I think weird acting styles can be part of the joy of watching older media. Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s (?) and TV had a lot more variety in style (and quality lol) way up into the "modern era".
I'm not gonna say "it's not worse it's just different", coz TBH... It's worse lol. If modern acting was a rare minority style of practice I would seek it out voraciously. But, for the variety I do think it's fun to watch old stuff too!
> Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s
Can you elaborate on this point? I think I agree with you, I just don't know why.
I was hesitant to make any concrete claims in my comment since I don't know much about it but I _think_ this is basically about The Method i.e. Method Acting.
From what I understand, although people still talk about it as if it's a specialised or niche thing, it's actually basically just how acting is done nowadays (at least for films and in the west).
There are some AI upscaled versions of Babylon 5, Star Trek Voyager etc. on torrent. Pretty decent.
Honestly if it were some with live models even at SD it wouldn't be so bad... I just find it's from a time that's kind of painful to watch... Much like Transformers: Beast Wars.
I enjoy the story, but the FX are IMO literally worse than pre-60s serial Sci-fi content. The blurry, low res CGI just detracts from the show today. I'm not asking for a reboot or change of the material marathon... Just the special effects and CGI to what it should have been at the time.
> when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.
Those were not upscales.
They definitely aren't 1/4 SD (DVD) though... The original series was SD, shot in SD for the early seasons with 1/4 res CGI.
The HBO Max release was 1080p with some wife screen usage... The extra pixels came from somewhere.
Series were shot on film. The HD versions are a mix of rescanned film and upscaled vfx shots
It's great how many of those little important things there are and foreshadowing ... and yet a great deal of surprises, sub plots, a characters go in some surprising directions.
I believe B5 was the first sci-fi show to do this kind of multi-season story arc. For all the poor acting and filler episodes, it is still hugely influential.
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 rewatched it last year during an old sci-fi binge, I had watched bits as a kid but never got it. I grew up on TNG and DS9 was my favorite, so I was probably biased.
It's probably now number 2 for me behind DS9. I watched it again a few month later to catch all the foreshadowing I missed the first time. You are spot on that season 1 is a slow burn that ramps up to the amazing seasons 3 and 4. Best part, it has a clean conclusion without any sequel bait nonsense.
Londo and Gkar are two of the best characters in Sci-Fi and their relationship is brilliant.
Yeah Londo and G'kar is a critical relationship to the overall effect. Also I find Garibaldi's arc compellingly tragic also...
Also I read JMS' autobiography [1] which added enlightening context
[1] J. Michael Straczynski, Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood
As a DS9 fan myself I felt like B5 was the better show. DS9 had greater variance throughout its run, the standout episodes were phenomenal but also lots of weak episodes & filler. If there was tighter editorial control over the episodes & at least 30% of them got cut then it could be a contender.
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 watched all of TNG, Voyager and DS9. To me DS9 will always be behind the other ST series.
I felt like it was a bit too much of the social stuff, maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel, but I guess that is exactly what people like about it. The characters and their development and so on. I liked the Garak character for example, but disliked Zisko being some chosen one for the wormhole gods or something. I much prefer Data, or Picard or most of their crew, even if they don't develop as much.
Well, to each their own, they are all good series to watch.
We recently watched all the 80's and 90's Star Trek for the first time. So it's really interesting to compare the series' from the modern perspective.
TNG is a classic, with the classic crew and after the first hiccups is some of the best scifi of all time. Absolutely great actors and amazing writing.
DS9 is the weird one. I do really enjoy the trajectory of many of its characters: Sisko, Odo, Bashir, Dax (one of my favorite characters in all ST), O'Brien, Quark, Kira, Worf, Dukat, Garak, Damar... The list of great characters in DS9 is the best part of this series. The last season was a definite letdown for me though, and I didn't like the ending at all.
Voyager was the surprising one. I expected a lesser series after reading the old discussion about the three Treks of the 90's. But wow. It's banger episodes right from the start, one of the most badass captains in all of Trek and in the fourth season arrives my favorite scifi character: Seven of Nine. There's a lot of great episodes here, and some filler. I didn't like how some characters never went anywhere. But there is more good here than mediocre. As a series I like it more than DS9, I just wished the other characters were up to the writing of Janeway, Seven and Doctor.
You should try the stargate series next if you haven’t. They supplanted Star Trek in my pantheon. There are also some time travel series more recently that are also quite enjoyable; Travelers and Continuum.
Travelers definitely has a very distinct "seat-of-your-pants" form of plotting, though, that can seem inconsistent if you're used to something more consistently planned in advance like Babylon 5. Two big changes during S1 also made me bounce off it.
I won't claim my taste is universal: it's just something to be aware of.
>it was a bit too much of the social stuff
Because clearly none of the other series focused on social stuff, except...
TOS, which featured an interracial cast (and kiss) in the 1960s, where nearly every episode was thinly-veiled commentary on communism, where they visited a literal Nazi planet, where they had a black woman as a bridge officer (in the 1960s)...
TNG, which went into deep moral arcs, looked into military tribunals, witch hunts, had entire movies about mindless bloodlust and environmentalism/colonianism, and so much more...
VOY which.....honestly, if you don't get the point by now I'm not going to spend more time listing examples.
Star Trek was BORN "woke" and has always been there, and anyone who claims otherwise was never really paying attention. Star Trek EXISTS because Gene Roddenberry put social commentary into his show "The Lieutenant" which was too controversial for the actual US Military so he had to make a new show set in the future to make all the same points but with less oversight from crusty generals.
I interpreted the GP as saying "social stuff" as in focusing on social interactions between the characters instead of having more action & adventure. "maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel" was what made me think this.
I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front.
It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.
I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.
I've been watching B5 over the past year or so, and I came to the episode(s) where certain characters were pushing "you don't have to follow unlawful orders" about a week after Mark Kelly et al were pushing it.
It's fascism.
Exactly! Gene Roddenberry vision of the future is hopeful. I grew up on it and the idea that in the future people would rely on reason and express kindness. The government in B5 seemed hokey and anachronistic to me. At that time.
From the beginning, B5 is like the UN with all the pettiness included. As a political storytelling, it was magnificent. The characters were also very high level.
DS9 has some wonderful episodes and fantastic characters, but the overall plot was weak. The world building was plot driven while in B5 it is vice versa and it made all the difference for me.
>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.
I think because B5 had already a story to tell from the beginning while DS9 was a setting at first.
I doubt that the changelings and the dominion where planned from the beginning.
DS9 and B5 came out at roughly the same time and shared a similar concept: The (mis)adventures of the crew of a bustling space station. The divergence from there is extreme.
DS9 very quickly brought in the Defiant so that its characters could escape the station and go on more traditional Star Trek adventures. The station was home base, but the crew got out a lot. It typically felt like the station was well under control, with only minor differences between it and a star-fleet vessel. (Toss Quark and Garak out an airlock and you'd pretty much have a standard starship.)
B5 did send its characters on excursions, but they were fewer and far between. The station was not a safe home base. It was a bigger and wilder place than DS9 ever was. It always felt like some crisis or another was ready to spiral out of control and the staff generally needed all hands on deck to deal with whatever was happening. DS9 had the occasional crowd scene, but B5 had bigger crowds (in record shattering amounts of alien makeup) every episode. DS9 felt like a sleepy frontier fort. B5 felt like a city.
Then there's the continuity. There just wasn't a lot of continuity in anything other than soap operas in the mid 90's. TNG occasionally had multi-part episodes and sometimes referenced earlier episodes, but it was always careful to explain things so you could jump in anywhere and not be lost. DS9 was initially episodic, but had some larger arcs in later seasons, perhaps as a response to what B5 was doing. B5 broke the mold. The first season seemed episodic at first glance, but each episode advanced the central story-line. You could jump into Season 1 at any point and be a little confused, but figure things out. That swiftly changed. Later seasons became completely continuous, and frequently relied on bits of story that happened in earlier seasons without any kind of hand-holding. This caused big problems that probably prevented B5 from being as well received as it should have been.
This is for the young whippersnappers out there who grew up with the internet, streaming, and home video: Today, if you decide to jump into a show, you can call up every episode on demand. If it's not on a streaming service, it's on DVD or VHS. Failing that, there's always piracy. When B5 came out, it was not a given that a TV series would be released on VHS or DVD. The internet was there, but it wasn't yet up to distributing video. There was no such thing as streaming. The era of Netflix mailing you physical discs was years in the future. If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to tune in when it was broadcast. It was, essentially, live TV.
The kicker is that most broadcasters were utterly irresponsible in how they aired shows. Episodes would frequently be pre-empted or aired out of order. Broadcasters were used to purely episodic content. Who cared if people saw episode 5 before episode 2, or missed episode 3 until it got reran the following year? This royally fubar'd people's ability to follow B5. My personal memory of B5 when it first aired was fragmentary and frustrating. I'd watch an episode and really enjoy it, try to tune in next week only for it to be pre-empted by golf, and then be lost when an episode from much later in the season was aired the week after that. It wasn't until B5 came out on DVD (years later) that I was finally able to watch the show in order and finally appreciate how special it was.
Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week. B5 blazed the trail for them before TV distribution was really ready for continuity. There are a lot of warts to overlook. CG was in its infancy back then. DS9 was still using physical models in its first few seasons. B5 looks like it came out of somebody's Amiga because it literally came out of somebody's Amiga. There probably won't ever be a quality up-scaling of the special effects because a lot of the files from that Amiga were lost. The set design is clever, but stagy. The budget of B5 doesn't even add up to half a shoestring by modern standards for a show with 10 episodes a season, and B5 had 22 episodes a season! The story is so grand and detailed that it still feels rushed at times. (They thought the show would be cancelled at the end of S4, so they crammed most of S5's plot into S4. The result is fantastically dense and frenetic!)
In the end, DS9 was a fantastic show but felt a lot like the station featured in it. It was always well under control and its creators got everything they needed to deliver a compelling show. They knew how far to reach and chose their battles wisely. B5 feels like a wild and overreaching fever dream by comparison. It nearly span out of control, much like its titular station was always threatening to. If they decided to re-make B5 today, they'd probably simplify it immensely. It's story still seems too ambitious for a single TV series to tell. If you can get past the warts, B5 is still a unique and rewarding series to experience. Nothing quite like it has come along since.
Can someone who is new to Star trek start with DS9 or need to watch earlier series for context?
It's probably worth watching TNG before DS9. The contrast between TNG and DS9 with DS9's darker tone is an important part of the show. Probably the best episode in the whole series, "In The Pale Moonlight", is made all the better when you've seen what they're contrasting against.
Probably you should really watch TNG first, lots of characters and lore that would be needed to fully appreciate a lot of things that would otherwise fall flat at best or be outright not understandable. I don't think they matter to understanding the main arc but then the main arc is only a small part of the show.
(Voyager is entirely optional but a much welcome addition that happens concurrently at later seasons; I would recommend it on its own anyway.)
For all these shows, let them grow on you, the first season of each can be a bit awkward but then things start to fall into place, both in terms of characters/lore/setting/story/world building as well as actors themselves getting the hang of characters.
And yes there are absolute duds of episodes, but don't let that make you miss the absolutely fantastic ones.
Not knowing the established history of some characters can actually be nice I think. The difference between a blank slate with conveniently made up background and a background that has already been told, in quite some detail, that difference tends to be very noticeable. No matter how "complex" the background made up on the spot is.
When the background has been told elsewhere, it's a legitimate challenge to the unprepared viewer's mind. But when it's made up on the spot, it's an arbitrary riddle. I know some viewers love that kind of stuff (e.g. everybody who made it through Lost I guess?), but to me that just feels annoying. If you want me to apply myself to the riddle, make it part of the story (like in a whodunnit), or don't keep me guessing.
But when it's organically grown background complexity from another story, I'm perfectly fine with it. Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck: he just pops up later with atomics, the "how" is not part of the movie adaptation. And neither is speculating about it. It's just an obvious indication that yes, there's more happening in this universe than the part squeezed into anamorphic cinemascope.
That being said, yes, watching TNG after DS9 wouldn't work well at all. It's hard enough watching early episodes after late episodes, because even the "adventure of the week" episodes have been told very differently later, but the universe is too much the same to really disconnect.
Starfleet's relationship with the Cardassians was established in TNG, and I think that DS9 failed to reiterate that properly in the first season.
Then you have Obrian's history with the Cardassians - quite significant for his new assignment and without this context the character feels like a fake tough guy. The acting and directing was brilliant, because we could feel the restrain, but without understanding this it comes off cocky. It's like watching Travolta's character dance poorly in Pulp Fiction - if you didn't know who Travolta was, the scene comes off poorly acted. Or Robin Williams playing a gay man playing straight. Some background of the character is important to actually enjoy the acting mastery that we are witnessing.
Voyager spoils the TNG experience by rehashing so many stories - definitely watch TNG first.
Yes, you can watch DS9 without having seen the other series. I hope you enjoy DS9 and also the other series should you continue.
There are occasional TNG references but they are not important to the plot.
You can start with DS9 and understand what's going on with the characters. Like many series it takes a couple of seasons to figure out what's going on and who the characters are, but in the end the payoff is fantastic. It was the first series produced after the death (and overall creative control) of Gene Roddenberry, which allowed it to step away from a utopian vision and address real issues in a complicated ugly universe.
I went on this journey with my son during COVID.
Watch a handful of classic trek to get the idea. Balance of Terror, city on the Edge of Forever, maybe Mirror Mirror or Trouble with Tribbles. They will seem very cliched.
Start TNG in the third season and just focus on the best episodes, the ones that are 8s or 9s on IMDB. Be sure to see The Best of Both Worlds I and I, the original season finale climax.
Skip a lot of the first season of DS9. Low IMDb will tell you which ones. But watch almost all of the later seasons.
Then play Star Trek Attack Wing!
As someone that has seen all/most Trek in full (same with the B5 universe), I agree with this strategy, it's a great suggestion. They can always come back and watch the remaining ones later. I would reduce the IMDB rating threshold to about 7.7 though and they can apply that to season 2 and 3 of DS9 as well (don't skip s3x22 "Explorers" though, it's a good one despite lower rating).
For me DS9 is the best Star Trek series. It's hard to admit since I adore TNG but overall DS9 is better. A few characters in TNG become main characters in DS9. You don't necessarily need the history but it may seem odd watching DS9 and then TNG. As some of these DS9 characters play a much smaller part in TNG.
DS9 was the better television series. But TNG was the better Star Trek.
TNG was far more thought provoking and one could ponder each episode - I'm still pondering some. Other than Sisko's decisions in the latter seasons, what years-to-ponder dilemmas were explored in DS9?
I actually felt that Sisko became a villian at some point, I wish that DS9 would have explored that.
TNG introduced various civilisations that drive much of the plot in DS9.
Season 1: Ferengi
Season 4: Trill, Cardassians
Season 5: Bajorans
Also, Chief O'Brien and his wife Keiko who were recurring minor characters in TNG have more important roles in DS9.
You can but you'll miss important context.
TOS and TNG explain the Federation utopian universe, the ongoing conflicts and races, the moral dilemmas of the captains... I feel that starting with DS9 might get you miss the point a bit.
I would say to at least try to watch a curated selection of TNG episodes.
If you have the general idea about this universe you can just jump in and then watch other shows later. But mind that DS9 is a different kind of show when it comes to Star Trek. Personally, I find it much more appealing than the rest because of the core premise.
Babylon 5 explores some aspects deeply which were just glanced over in DS9 and that makes it an amazing show as well.
It's the best starting point in many ways!
There are some characters from TNG who cross over into DS9, and one of the main characters in DS9 has a grudge against one of the characters in TNG due to events in TNG, whose effects offscreen relative to TNG are explored onscreen in DS9, for example. However, there are small flashbacks that act as explainers in DS9 for those who haven’t seen TNG, and the story focuses on the impact to DS9 characters and their motivations, so you might only have half of the story for those small details, but you’ll have the half that is relevant to the story that DS9 is trying to tell. You could easily watch the one or two TNG episodes involving Wolf 359 if you wanted to get the other side, though you could make do without, and come back to TNG after DS9 if you wanted afterward.
It’s hard for me to be entirely unbiased myself, as I watched the the original series (TOS) films without watching much of the OG series itself, and then watched TNG when it was airing, so I already had the context to watch DS9.
All of that is to say, I don’t think you necessarily need to watch TNG to appreciate DS9. The shows are mostly standalone and self contained. Also, I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, as the double episode premiere of DS9 pretty much includes all of what I’ve said above, in some form or fashion, with the exception of the introduction of some character crossovers of the TNG cast. I think it’s nice to know where those characters came from and what they went through prior to DS9, as the two shows were running concurrently, but neither show is written in such a way that you’ll feel lost if you don’t watch TNG first, though others may disagree.
Vir's toast in one of the later episodes about Londo was a wonderful scene.
There is good evidence that DS9 was (ahem) inspired by Babylon 5. However, Babylon 5 succeeds in its philosophical ambitions a lot of the time while DS9 turned into soap opera.
What's the evidence? Star Trek came out before B5 and in the ST universe there were several deep space stations. Do you mean they copied characters or story lines?
And how is DS9 a soap opera? I associate soap operas with sh!t acting and not really exploring deeper philosophical topics.
DS9 had amazing actors, character development and story lines. Take Garak for example, amazing character.
Hollywood is a company town, even more then because there was way less international production. B5 was pitched to every studio long before the first episode of DS9. The executives deciding to greenlight DS9 would know about BS5 even if the showrunners didn’t. Lots of people worked on both shows.
That said, two people have the same idea all the time. B5 really pioneered the idea of a show with a multi season arc that was planned up front. In a time where shows more or less reset continuity after every episode. Shows like Lost pretended they knew where they were going but really made it up as they went along.
Deep Space Nine had a similar multi season arc, which is why I think the poster said soap opera.
DS9 literally used B5 bible information because Paramount had access to it after unsuccessful bid by JMS to make B5 there. Decision to make DS9 happened after JMS managed to get B5 signed up after Paramount's rejection.
That said, DS9 is its own thing, just with B5 "roots".
DS9 has its philosophical moments.
I heard the same back then, plus IIRC B5 did or tried to sue Paramount for copying their plot for DS9. I believe the series was offered to Paramount first but they said no.
There were a few news articles about that in various entertainment publications.
Is that disclaimer really needed? As someone who watched the series the first time last year, the acting and humor seem fine for TV honestly. The CGI dated of course but not offensive either.
If anything I found the later seasons more disappointing than 1 and 2 as smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward, which still feels rushed somehow.
The disclaimer is just based on my own opinion, so inevitably there will be people to whom it does not apply. Some of the acting in season 1 is great, I would just say there are some spots where it kinda briefly falls through the floor. It may be just because I have seen it several times so am spotting things that I wouldn't have first time round.
With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of production JMS was told there would be no S5 after all, so he put all of S4 and S5 into S4 ... but then there was an S5 after all!
Yeah, Season 4 is acknowledged for compressing a lot of the story that would have been Season 5 in the original plan. The series finale ("Sleeping in Light") was even shot as a part of Season 4 and delayed once Season 5 was picked up to keep it the series finale. The epilogue it tells spins out enough past the show that it mostly isn't that noticeable, but the big tell is a brief appearance of Ivanova rather than Lochley, which doesn't really break the episode because of the out-of-order storytelling of the whole episode and the glimpses of the crew are "timeless" flashbacks, but it is interesting.
IIRC, this was because there was significant uncertainty about whether the network exec's would cancel the show after season 4, so JMS reworked things so that 4 wouldn't end on an open-ended cliffhanger if that were to have happened.
In the end, season 5 was given the go-ahead, and so now season 4 seems rushed needlessly.
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_Netwo...
> smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward
This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.
I have a bunch of friends that either never made it completely through Season 1 or complained all through Season 1. Season 1 is rougher than normal. The problem though is that while it is easy to tell people "Skip Season 1 of TNG or DS9" (which is relatively common advice for both shows), Season 1 has so many moments of character building and foreshadowing that pay off in later seasons that even the "worst" episodes are hard to tell people to skip.
An example not quite off the top of my head is as early as Episode 2 "Soul Hunter". It's a goofy plot full of weird pseudo-scientific mysticism with a "special guest of the week" who basically never returns (excluding books and movies), so in most shows meets several definitions of skippable, but this episode also introduces Dr. Franklin, has several key Sinclair and Garibaldi moments, provides background lore for the Minbari and foreshadows certain Minbari things to come.
That's just the second episode of the season. (Truly a rough start for some.)
Another common example is "TKO". It's a silly boxing match episode, much of it doesn't do much for the series except set up some of Garibaldi's goofier side and maybe foreshadowing Garibaldi's flaws. But it's also the Ivanova confronts grief and her heritage episode, a key part of Ivanova's arc.
It pains me how important TKO is for Ivanova's character because it's otherwise got to be one of, if not the worst episodes in the whole show's run.
Ratings agree with that assessment. TKO is the only episode rated "bad" of all seasons. https://seriesgraph.com/show/3137-babylon-5
When I re-watched B5 a few years ago, I wad surprised by the amount of humor and small pieces of situational comedy. It’s really missing from most 2000s TV dramas, everything became really serious after 9/11. If there’s humor in a 00s or even 10s "self-respecting" drama series, it’s usually dry, dark, and/or ironic.
Completely unnecessary, yes. Babylon 5 is a product of its time, as is everything, but it is as fine a production as any other sci-fi-on-a-budget show from the early-to-late 90s. It’s a phenomenally intricate and interesting little universe with great characters and stories. No need for a disparaging disclaimer such as that.
When I watched Farscape for the first time, I got a similar feeling. Costumes seemed weird, compared to Star Trek or Star Gate and some others. But I still watched and became a fan. Recently, I rewatched it and nothing seemed particularly weird or strange or low quality. I guess for Babylon 5 it will be a similar experience. Might watch that soon.
> But the pay off in seasons 3 and 4
Having to suffer through two mediocre seasons is a dealbreaker in 2026 to be honest.
Season 2 is good to great, not mediocre. It’s just that S3 and S4 are even better. Season 1 you can skip most of the fillers if you’re in a hurry. There’s a plenty of curated S1 episode lists on the internet that tell you which episodes you don’t want to miss. It’s much better this way than the usual "first season excellent, second season okay, the rest are crud and only exist to make money".
There are several stand-out episodes in season 1 and 2, as well as several stand-out scenes; plus the second half of season 2 is not mediocre. You also miss out on character and world-building that happens in those episodes that help contextualize a lot of the later seasons.
Plus, many reactors now have liked season 1 a lot better than when it initially aired.
"Suffering" would be putting it a bit strongly.
Unfortunately, there's some very important episodes that set up major plot arcs that you don't get to appreciate until later on, so maybe it's worth just watching the best episodes of season 1 if you're impatient. Season 2 is better than mediocre.
That’s not what “get under your skin” means.
It has both positive and negative connotations depending on the context. For an example of the former, look at the lyrics to the Beatles’ Hey Jude. It’s been used that way since 1968!
yes, "get under your skin" can mean that, it can mean "can't stop thinking about" like the way somebody annoys you while it turns out you are falling in love
No, you're not biased, it's simply the best!
It's getting old but nostalgia kicks in as soon as I see a Vorlon ship
Low budget? I seem to remember it was lauded (but made on Amigas, if I'm not mistaken)
I sure loved it, at least on my crappy 21" tv
It was lauded for being made on Amigas. The Season 1 CGI really is rather rough compared to TNG, never mind DS9. But it improved considerably in S2.
Still, there are things like the starfield visible from C&C’s observation window never rotating because it was apparently too expensive to greenscreen it (presumably an actual physical rotating backdrop was also not feasible for whatever reason). On the other hand, I think B5 was the first TV series to use greenscreening to create large interior spaces like ship hangars.
TNG was using mainly practical effects early on, which had benefit of higher visual quality but meant not as much could be done within the budget.
Babylon 5 early and very enthusiastic use of CGI meant that the scope of what it could see was ridiculously bigger without reusing clips as much as some other places did.
One issue w/sci fi is that sci fi takes place in the future and/or has advanced technology then it is more likely to look dated than a typical sitcom where the sets are offices and living rooms.
When I finally decided to watch B5 for the first time, season 1 was so bad that I literally turned it off and stared at the ceiling. (I was stuck in bed due to an injury.)
Eventually, somebody curated a couple of season 1 episodes and told me to skip ahead to season 2. By the time it got to season 4, I felt it had risen to the level of "ok".
I never found any of the characters compelling, despite some game performances. And I never found the plot all that interesting, either, though I can see why others might find it so.
This is what I was referring to in my original comment.
My suggestion is that had you endured S1 fully, you might have felt S4 had risen to a higher level than "ok". That's not to say I begrudge you skipping through S1 ... I'd probably have done the same if I'd come across it in recent years as opposed to however many years ago it was.
I'm not trying to change your mind really, but yeah - I think the value that you hear about in the characters and plot arise from the many small nuances which build up slowly over time.
The hosting channel is called "Clipzone: Beyond Infinity" https://youtube.com/@czbeyondinfinity?si=Vhn1LH1TjJzxNyLZ
"The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22. Currently available are episodes 1, 3, and 4, (Thursdays), and assorted five-minute clips. I could not find them bundled in a playlist here.
The episodes are in broadcast order. "Midnight on the Firing Line", a missing episode, is listed as Episode 1 in Wikipedia, because "The Gathering" was a pilot.
Steve Grimm's "Lurker's Guide" is still online since 33 years, and updated with 2023's releases: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html
I wish they published it in a more organized manner.. At the moment all published episodes are mixed with other content of their channel.
Is the poster, "ClipZone: Beyond Infinity" associated with Warner Brothers? It's not obvious to me it is, but it does seem to only post Warner Brothers content. Seems like it is an official WB channel that's been incognito until now.
It’s awesome that Lurker’s Guide is still there.
A _real_ web site!
When I first returned to it rewatching B5 a couple of years ago, I actaully found it difficult to navigate. It took me a while to realise that my brain was parsing the block of navigation buttons at the centre top of the screen as a banner ad and filtering it out!
> "The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22
The 16:9 cropped and upscaled version (of the TNT cut) unfortunately, with the same excessive noise reduction and sharpening that previous releases of that version had. Baffling why they keep using this version when even the old DVD release has better quality.
The original episodes were all recorded in wide aspect ratio, even though they were destined for broadcast TV. They were touted as future compatibility. So the original broadcasts were "pan & scan". Then, when the wide-aspect disc formats arrived, it turned out that converting them was not a simple matter of going back to the originals and plopping them on disc.
Only the live action shots were recorded with a wide aspect ratio, and perhaps not even that for the pilot. The CGI was rendered in 4:3 and the final cuts including transitions and VFX where composited in 4:3.
The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.
So just what is the optimal way to watch this show
There sadly isn't one. The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable. It's a bit of a dealer's choice at this point if you want "best available quality" or "best available widescreen."
Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)
14⋮9 was used for a while to ease the transition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14%3A9_aspect_ratio
So the version here on youtube is a 16:9 widescreen crop of a 4:3 TV crop of the original 16:9 filming? And the remaining CGI are only the 4:3 crop from the lost 16:9 originals? Did I understand corectly?
Then, is there a version somewhere with original uncropped 16:9 live action and 4:3 CGI? I can tolerate side bars. To me, seeing the complete video frame is more important than a consistent frame format.
The original filming was apparently Super 35 [0][1] which is neither 16:9 nor 4:3 but is often cropped to either or both. The show was framed while they were filming it so that they could use the full 16:9 crop (for "cinematic effect"), but the effects were often only composited for the 4:3 crop. (A special few apparently had a chance to be done at the full Super 35 frame, but budget stopped them from doing that with every effects shot.)
So yeah the 16:9 crop we did get in the 90s (on TNT on cable and then on DVD) was cropped further from the 4:3 crop, but it mostly worked because the previous framing for the "full" Super 35 16:9 crop allowed for it.
Reviewing the helpful Wikipedia diagrams, the 4:3 crop actually uses more overall "volume" of the Super 35 frame than the best 16:9 crop, so I think I appreciate the 4:3 version we have a bit better.
I also found this useful visual comparison of the two crops that we have today: https://www.engadget.com/babylon-5-original-4-3-ratio-video-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35
[1] https://www.b5tv.com/threads/explain-the-widescreen-issue-to...
> The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. What's wrong with the quality difference?
If I recall correctly, the DVDs are 480p. They were very early DVDs and tried to squeeze a bunch of episodes on each disk plus commentary on every episode.
The quality jump from 480p to 4K is a big one.
Take it from someone who saw it when it first aired on standard definition analogue TV: it doesn't really matter all that much. The performance of the actors and the story is what's important!
That’s fair but from what I understand, inaccurate ratios could hide a lot of crucial detail
https://www.insidehook.com/television/seinfeld-netflix-aspec...
With an AI filter overlay of the cgi sequences?
DS9 and Voy have the same issue. For DS9, Season 1 was shot wide screen compatible then they switched to 16:9 but none of the effects are widescreen ready.
YouTube is still offering all five seasons for sale (not including "The Gathering" pilot.)
There is a choice of Standard Defintion and High Definition. Usually that only means a change in resolution, not different conversions.
Mild Spoilers.
I will always have a special place for Babylon 5. One time I was watching it with my father who lived under a dictatorship, watched a scene with Mr Morden and Lando, immediately said "this kind of talk is meant to put people against other people". He didn't care much for the extraterrestrial part of the show but was very interested in portrayal of authoritarianism.
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.
In Babylon 5, you actually meet and converse with the aliens.
In the Expanse, you do not.
SPOILERS.
In B5 the only thing close to ineffable alien were the ones that went beyond the rim. Most of the day-to-day aliens were stand-ins for human nations and cultures.
The OPA and Mars were effectively the day-to-day aliens for the Expanse. The gate-builders were the ineffable aliens.
We quote Babylon 5 on an approximately daily basis in this house. Definitely my favorite sci fi series. Well, that and Firefly. B5 won not one, but two Hugos, which were highly deserved.
Whenever I get the itch to watch the whole thing again but I don't want to spend the time, I watch this (which is so thick with spoilers that you shouldn't watch it unless you've seen the series so many times that the Vorlons make sense now). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHpMAubwfQg
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…
Hmm, the Vorlons were mysterious for most of the series but I thought it was clear by the end they simply craved order. ;-)
Several friends are just starting B5 for the first time as it appears on streaming services. My own housemates introduced it to me during Regime 1.0 on their DVD box set of the series.
Needless to say we’re all side-eyeing each other as said friends all share the same feedback: “This is pretty good, but it feels kind of cheesy too, like Star Trek TNG, but also weirdly…prescient?”
And we just kind of nod, because we know what vibes they’re picking up on, and boy oh boy are they in for a surprise at just how prescient it is.
Incidentally, we have the DVD and the BD box sets, and the BD is such a step up that it’s worth the purchase to own it forever. Go give JMS your money.
And the best thing thing for HN nostalgia: CG was created using Lightwave on the Amiga as discussed here [0]
Babylon 5 can drift into being a little corny but the characters and overall story arc grow and grow into something great.
Growing up Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 were syndicated one after another in the middle of the night. It was a wonderful tradition staying up all night to watch both.
I was just thinking about that, I think where I live in the UK it was after dinner but also back to back, seem to recall DS9 was first? Either way I found that period of TV annoying as DS9 is objectively the worst old trek, and Babylon 5 is a little more than a little corny, personally can't stand Babylon 5.
Objectively? Many consider it the best of the three 90s Treks. And TOS is really too remote for a meaningful comparison with the three.
B5 is still one of my favourite TV shows of all time.
The common criticisms are largely true: it does start slow with some weak episodes in season 1, some of the acting is a bit wooden, the CGI hasn’t aged well, season 5 is slightly anti-climactic because they largely wrapped up the main plot arc in season 4 in case the final season didn’t happen.
On the other hand, it had an epic storyline that spanned not just episodes but multiple seasons in a way that no-one had really tried in sci-fi before. That storyline made sense and weaves in and out of the individual episodes because it was planned out in advance. The world-building and development of different cultures and how they relate is generally strong.
Against that over-arching backdrop, it also had a lot of good individual episodes. They had genuine character development. They explored social and moral issues as well as any show of that period. They varied from diplomatic and political settings to the adventure of deep space exploration to almost pure action episodes. They varied in scale too, from relatable stories about a single individual, to stories about a whole planet or culture, right up to the fate of the known universe.
Much of the acting criticism is directed at the main leader characters, but I’ve always thought this is slightly unfair, because the script often relies on those characters to carry the plot and provide much of the exposition and those tend to be the more formulaic parts. The same show also features some of the best acting and main character arcs in TV sci-fi, with the relationship between Londo Mollari (played by Peter Jurasik) and G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas) being one of the great double acts. There were many good moments from the rest of the ensemble cast too, from the doctor wrestling with his conscience to a certain wave. And then there were some great supporting/recurring roles, from the light relief of Zathras (and Zathras, Zathras, Zathras, Zathras and Zathras, of course) to the much more serious Bester (arguably Walter Koenig’s finest work).
If you haven’t watched B5 and you’re a fan of epic space sci-fi, I highly recommend it even with its flaws. The first season is a slow burner (although it also has a lot of subtle set-up that you won’t appreciate until much later) but it picks up. If you’re the type of viewer who can’t stand filler episodes, there used to be some relatively spoiler-free guides to which early episodes you really need to watch and which you can skip, so you could look for one of those. Don’t watch In The Beginning first, though; it’s a prequel TV movie that has lots of spoilers about the main story that you’re not supposed to know yet when you watch the early series.
Notable for this audience but perhaps not widely known: JMS engaged with Usenet to promote and discuss the show; if I remember correctly, the B5 newsgroup was active even before the pilot aired.
Obviously there was no social media at the time, and I would bet that was the first time a U.S. TV show’s creator was communicating directly with fans via the Internet.
(Update: more that I reflect on it, I think he was engaging with the community even while shopping the show around, but that was before my participation.)
B5 on Usenet was everything right with the internet.
I tried watching this (I grew up with it remembering it's on TV) and while it's watchable, it's not that enjoyable in modern times because it hasn't aged very well at all in terms of the FX so it's hard to get immersed.
I know if I stick with it, it will probably get good (doctor who was like this for me) but it's a huge slog.
I feel Star Trek TNG lucked out with all the choices they made. The designs and effects generally hold up.
TNG looked like crap compared to modern standards, and why they spent a lot of money to restore and fix it. Was expensive/unprofitable enough that no other shows got the treatment. There were comparisons on youtube.
I'm talking about more then just the remaster. On a fundamental level the effects of TNG can hold up today. Babylon 5 can't. This is for both the space effects and the technology effects in the space ships themselves.
The LCAR interface still looks modern and it's way better than the babylon 5 CRT screens.
You can still see the CRTs behind LCARS, but I have to admit it is pretty cool in general. They had a bigger budget.
But for space scenes, IMO the later episodes of B5 were amazing and beautiful. They just need a modern render and to turn down the saturation. TNG era ships and camera framing were much more boring, partly due to the smaller story.
It's so weird how many good shows are not on any of the platforms. So much of what the platforms create is utter crap. Yet there's amazing shows only available on DVD.
Recently bought and watched the Hornblower series. Amazing. Star Trek like atmosphere, exploration of new worlds etc (the show has less violence and a lot more good intentions than reality which i prefer in my times of relaxation), on a ship during the Napoleonic wars. Amazing. All the episodes of the miniseries are ~8 on imdb, deservedly so.
Yet you wouldn't know this excellent series existed based on what the platforms show.
Sharpe's another good one. I'm guessing there's bias against non-US made content but as someone not from the UK or the US wow what a blindspot!
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 i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom"
Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...
That explains why the effects looked so similar in the two...
Never did get into Babylon 5, but SeaQuest, for all its campiness, was my jam briefly in my childhood.
It's incredible that it still lives to this day. I remember running it on Pentium-133. The gallery they have there still has showcase renders from 2000s.
yes, you are right ... its been a few years :))
You are missing one important detail, an Amiga alongside NewTek's Video Toaster.
24 Amiga 2000's each with a 68040, 32mb of RAM and a Video Toaster, managed by a 486 server with a 12gb of storage.
[1]https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue166/68_The_makin...
I just had to add more, because I remember they used DEC Alpha systems at some point.
" Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.
P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.
Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.
Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI)."[0]
Thanks for the correction and link.
you are right, i left this detail out ... but it went somewhat together with the amiga & the lightwave-software :))
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).
> In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show.
He had this idea around 2004 of rebooting Star Trek: https://web.archive.org/web/20060628131520/http://bztv.typep...
And on a few occasions he also said he'd try steering Doctor Who
The CW picked up a Babylon 5 reboot "recently", but it seems like it got trapped in development hell and caught in the cross-fires of the ugly WB-CBS divorce of The CW and the ugly merger of WB and Discovery and what is shaping up to be an ugly divorce of WB and Discovery.
I thought that project got turned into the animated film that got released not too long back? I got the impression JMS was done with B5 after he went back to focusing on comics again with his run on Captain America.
you are right about straczynski, but i'd prefer to see a new scifi series by him rather than a reboot or continuation. ok, a spin off maybe. jeremiah was pretty good. (i haven't seen sense8)
but i just see that he was approached to direct star trek: enterprise. star trek by straczynski is something i'd really love to see.
>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-...
>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.
I don't know. I loved Babylon 5 but I also found it kind of corny. And then Crusade was just a D&D campaign in space. The ship was even called the Excalibur FFS. I feel like "full creative freedom" would ruin it the way it did with George Lucas and Star Wars.
>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.
What else can you do when you don't know if you're getting renewed? You can't push the conclusions to your storylines forward into seasons you might never even have to resolve them.
link to Season 1, Episode 1 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y235YEQstLo
Believe it or not I've never seen it. I'm a big sci-fi fan but it was never on any station in my region of Canada years ago. Plus over the years it seemed to be really hard to find in any form whether torrents, DVDs, or anywhere really.
Have to give it a chance. FX lighting is too bright until the second season, and story builds slowly.
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.
What wonderful news. Babylon 5 remains one of the finest crafted sci-fi tales ever told. Hopefully this encourages more people to discover it!
Weird anecdote: Patricia Tallman, who played telepath Lyta Alexander through most of the series was simultaneously Gates McFadden's stunt double on TNG and in the TNG-era movies.
It's great that they are releasing these episodes on YouTube. But what a lot of OG fans would love even more is a proper remaster of some of the classics. Unfortunately the lukewarm response to the TNG remaster proved to media companies that such undertakings are not worth the effort. But I wonder if the advent of AI tools has made remasters more economical. I do know there is an ongoing effort by fans to remaster VOY and DS9 with the help of AI but not sure of the quality or cost.
There's an AI upscale of ds9 in torrent land. Looks pretty good other than certain scenes.
It was never about the graphics though, at least for me. As long as the writing, the stories, the acting, and so on was stellar, I don't mind how it looks (to an extent).
That said, I found the DS9 upscaled you talked about on a torrent site now, and I'll give it a shot.
For those who have watched both Babylon 5 and Star Trek TNG- which did you like better?
B5 was more important in the long run, it pushed boundaries a lot further and to some extent was more realistic.
But TNG had some amazing episodes, the top were as good or better than anything on television before or since. The Inner Light, the Drumhead, Yesterday's Enterprise, etc.
It's a hard comparison. They are both very good, in wildly different ways.
B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.
TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.
Babylon 5.
When people asked me what I preferred, "Star Wars or Star Trek?", I've always responded with "Babylon 5".
I will always love Star Wars for the 15 minutes of Return of the Jedi that make the point that, with all of magic and technology at your disposal, love is still the strongest weapon in the universe. The rest of Star Wars (and all of Star Trek) is comparative fluff.
B5 spends most of the series saying that sort of thing.
TNG, because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives, whereas B5 is really about the past (and present), about politics, recurrence and mysticism. It’s a bit like which do you prefer, science-fiction or fantasy? Much of B5 could have been done in a pure fantasy setting.
To expand on that: B5 is about ethics, and it has a primordial good and evil that are decidedly kept in the mystical realm. It has a supernatural concept of souls, it has messiah-like characters, it seems to believe in a notion of fate. TNG on the other hand is steeped in renaissance enlightenment, it has the spirit that there is no supernatural, and that everything is rationally explainable. It often tackles ethics as well, but I dare say that beyond that it explores a broader territory in philosophical topics than B5. TNG is more down-to-earth, B5 is more vibe-heavy.
B5 in a fantasy setting wouldn't make much sense, the key issue is the namesake.
What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse? Both have been done, but I've never heard of one actually being the centerpiece and the namesake of a series. There's also the issue of "porting" B4 into such a setting.
Having a series of "prototype" worlds or prototype floating islands would likely make the series overly contrived.
>What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse?
Imagine a typical fantasy setting in which humans live amongst other races - elves, dwarves, goblins and the like (but substitute them for aliens, the archetypes are mostly the same) Humans are still venturing out into the greater world and were nearly being wiped out in a war with the elves (Minbari) when their intitial meeting went poorly. Humans create a city called Babylon where representatives of various races could come together to talk, trade and interact peacefully at the outer boundaries of what humans knew to be "the world," near the countries of wild magic where eldritch and ancient things were known to dwell, which even the older races fear to speak of.
The fourth Babylon vanished without a trace. Humans have barely begun to master even the simplest of magics but this is far beyond their understanding, and the elves, who always seem to know more than they say, say nothing. But, humans being perhaps too stupid or prideful to know when to quit, simply built it again, and tried again.
But there are prophecies of an ancient enemy called The Lords of Shadow which have slumbered deep underground for so long that they have become mere legend to all but the oldest races, if not forgotten altogether. A profane force of the deepest and darkest magics which was beaten back by an alliance of older races and the Lords of Light, the divine high elf mages who still watch over the younger races and regard humans with bemusement.
Or they seem to. It's hard to tell with them. Their faces are always obscured by masks, and everything they say is a riddle.
The prophecies say the time is drawing near for the Lords of Shadow to awaken again, and the dark magic to return... and strangely enough, within this city where humans, elves, dwarves, angels and devils all walk amongst one another, the key to the fate of the world and the coming of the New Age may be this weak, naive, plucky race called humans, whose nature seems to stand between the darkness and the light, and in whom the Elves have taken a particular interest, for reason they refuse to reveal.
It really isn't that difficult. Not every element has to have a precise 1:1 match, so many of the themes and motifs are right out of fantasy. You have an ancient immortal named Lorien, a mysterious broker of dark wishes named Morden who serves the Shadows, a group of elite warriors called Rangers who trained under the Elves (Minbari) and fought in the last great war against Sauron-sorry The Shadows. The Technomages are literal space wizards.
You could do some Norse Mythology thing and say "hyperspace" is a magical form of travel between the "realms" of these various races, and have the story take place when humans have just discovered the magic that allows access to the world tree. Add a Tower of Babel analogy and say the city of Babylon already existed and was already a place where different races commingled because it's where the portal was, making it both an international and interdimensional hub, but one day the old Tower of Babylon (which is where the portal is) just disappeared (probably those damned elves) but they built a new one.
TNG isn't actually about science, though. There is precious little actual science in the series, or even the franchise as a whole. Ironically the most scientifically grounded series is TOS because they didn't have a ton of franchise tropes to lean on and actually hired science fiction writers now and then. I remember one episode where they encountered a (Romulan?) cloaking device for the first time, a major plot point was the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the fact that such a cloak couldn't be perfect - it had to vent energy somewhere, somehow - which is a degree of scientific rigor no subsequent series would even attempt. And then in another episode they fought Space Lincoln so YMMV. By the time you get to TNG any pretense at science is abandoned for "teching the tech" and inverted space wedgies and whatever nonsense Q gets up to.
That said, B5 absolutely does wear its fantasy pretensions on its sleeve, and I think you're correct about the "forward looking" versus "backwards looking" themes. The technomages are wizards with robes and mystical incantations and everything - it's explained away as "technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic" but they wouldn't be out of place in any D&D setting. Mystical prophecies, gods, demons, "light vs. dark" motifs, the Minbari being so elf-coded it's ridiculous, the Great Man heroic ideal, sacred tomes, eldritch ruins, crystals crystals crystals. All the trappings are there. Crusade went even further in this regard. The hero ship in Crusade is named the Excalibur ffs.
>>[I prefer] TNG because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives
>TNG isn't actually about science
I agree with your point that Star Trek is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but Star Trek -- at least TOS and TNG -- was very good at creating positive feelings about scientific and technological progress.
Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they decide the goodness or badness of almost everything that happens. Jesus and dismantling capitalism and other forms of oppression are two other examples.
In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
(TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.)
>In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
That's fair. Tons of scientists and engineers got into their fields because they were inspired by Star Trek.
>TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.
Yes. It isn't that potent, though, because it depends on a post-scarcity economy of free energy, FTL and magic boxes that make anything out of nothing. It also assumes humans will just "evolve beyond" their basic nature, bigotry, vice and desire for hierarchies of power.
But for communism (or weakly, socialism) to work in the real world it has to deal with scarcity and human desire.
Comment was deleted :(
They are sort of incomparable, being very different shows. That said, I am myself someone who grew up with TNG, who was molded by TNG and shaped by TNG, and for whom TNG is the only good Star Trek... and I like B5 better. For me, TNG is entertainment and B5 is literature. To illustrate the difference, I will point out that TNG occasionally (rarely!) deals with death, and it usually does so by minimizing and mourning it, essentially averting the topic. Entertainment does not linger over the uncomfortable. (I am painting with a broad brush here -- I'm aware TNG sometimes does. Just not a lot.) B5, by contrast, returns again and again for full episodes to the topic of the soul-rackingly difficult moral requirement to offer comfort and face the inevitable tragedy together, and the agony of the experience and the ways it changes you.
As much as I love both shows, I wouldn't really recommend B5 to someone based on a love of TNG. I think it is more natural to recommend B5 to someone based on a minimial affinity for sci fi and a liking for Lord of the Rings, which will really tell you how different the two shows are.
TNG is wonderfully idealistic. It paints a picture of rising above your vices and being professional, civilized, and decent. It teaches you to work the problem, to examine the data, to think and consult and reflect and do better. I think it unrealistic -- I thought it unrealistic when I first encountered it -- but that doesn't matter. It's such a worthy ideal that it is worth encountering and remembering over and over again. As you go through life, you should remember that that is an option and strive for it.
B5 is wonderfully heroic. It is about dealing with a world of moral complexity and uncertainty, about trying to do good even when it is futile, about being a hero in the face of danger and risk and doubt. About how politics makes that difficult and keeps it in check and at any rate isn't a game you can check out of because it is the game.
Both shows encounter awful authoritarianism. One examines the law and philosophy in detail and gives a stirring verbal rebuke that carries the day. One starts a rebellion without certainty that it will be right or effective, but because under the circumstances, a good man feels compelled to do so. I think these are both extremely valuable takes on the topic, and I wouldn't want to have not seen either one. But I do have to say that at the end of the day, it is the second one I think of more as I go through life. For me the greater life lesson is not in taking the time to seek deeper wisdom, worthy as that is, but in having the bravery and faith to face danger, uncertainty, and tragedy.
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.
They were, for me at least, too different to compare like that.
TNG was the hopeful future - something an idealist would like to imagine society could achieve.
Babylon 5 was the realistic future - where fascism and racism are issues still prevalent in society, but largely left unaddressed.
If you ask me to pick between them I'd have to go with Babylon 5 but only because of the writing. There were so many times that JMS foreshadowed events literal years in the future on the show and it was such a huge payoff as a fan.
Star Trek just wasn't structured as a show in a way that can compete with that level of world building that was all interwoven in the same kind of way.
TNG, by a country mile. B5 has "writer identifies too much with the main character" written all over it. It's the story of how Our Great Leader does the right thing and saves the world, over and over again.
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.
It would depend on what mood I'm in! Although if I forced to only pick one, it would be DS9
Babylon 5 was space fantasy in the vein of epic literature, like a Lord of the Rings in space, and influenced modern TV productions like Game of Thrones, whose author says that he was indebted to the former.
Both TNG and B5 have significant cultural value, but for different reasons. More people should watch them.
I liked B5 far more, it tended to show people as real people.
A good example is Walter Koenig, to me he was amazing in B5, at times you hated and loved his character, even at the same time.
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.
Just torrent it… it’s a Pedomerican show anyway..
What do they mean by a "special edition" of Babylon 5?
Put up sg1 instead, and I'll think about it.
B5 was the first sci-fi show that felt real to me, Star Trek never felt gritty.
If you're new to Babylon 5, pay attention to the Londo and G-Kar characters. They are presented as semi-comedic characters at the start, but have the most incredible character arcs.
Doesn’t seem to be free in the UK
The BBC has also been posting classic Doctor Who episodes for free.
Everyone should re-watch.
I was very surprised how many subjects were covered that had bearing to todays world. The US in particular, if you take the US as the earth government in the show. A proxy president, manipulated by the shadows. Come one.
And all the psy ops? Very much a lot of the same issues come up in the surveillance state.
And manipulating the press. This show really covered a lot of things happening today.
If only we had a Sheridan today to fight for our rights.
Let me know when they offer to pay me to watch it.
Vaguely remember it was one of the first shows filmed in 16x9 even before HDTV existed
I'm glad B5 is still getting a new audience.
This article sounds very AI generated though.
Amazing series, which somehow survived a forced change of lead actor, and got even better. The story was only marred by rushed ending to the story arc for Season 4, and then a nothingburger of a Season 5. Still, up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time.
Putting this here for everyone whose head it also immediately popped into upon reading the title:
"Derek... Babylon 5's a big pile of shit"
"Get out!"
"Yaaaaaaay!"
Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room, probably getting hassled over its (lack of) digital restrictions management lockdown, signing into a Google account with all of the surveillance pwnage that implies, ads (including ads for senile political ragebait) plastered all over my experience, while becoming dependent on a UI that can change at any time, likely to demand money? Youtube is a step back in experience, something to be suffered when the thing you want to watch is only available there (ie network effects). Meanwhile, Babylon 5 has been free ~forever on torrents.
> Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room
No need for all that. Just use yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) to download them as video files, and then just play the video files as you would any other video file.
Just tested yt-dlp on s1e1 to verify it worked, and it worked perfectly to download the video.
Nope.
> ERROR: [youtube] Y235YEQstLo: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cook... for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-y... for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies
That's the latest version of yt-dlp, just downloaded. I tried from two different IPs, both actually also having signed-in Google sessions (so not even really trying to hide).
As always with the surveillance industry, your experience may vary. I'm sure there are workarounds - less-hassled IPs you can get access through, etc. The point is that going for the straightforward libre software solution lets you avoid playing any of those constantly-churning games to begin with. It's much nicer to use software systems that straightforwardly work in your interests, rather than having to trick adversarial systems.
Interesting, that's not my experience at all. So they are doing something different for you and/or your IP address vs. mine.
For sure, this is why my original comment said "make your identity legible to Google". They're apparently happy enough with the identity signal of your specific IP, but they most certainly no longer allow general anonymous access. Reddit has not been generally publicly accessible for quite some time, and imgur even longer. Reddit at least still seems to work through TOR (no idea about imgur or Youtube).
The "AI" bot scare has really kicked the surveillance lockdown into overdrive. These days I get hassled merely trying to browse online stores. Like their goal is to advertise and sell things - yet they somehow care if it's "to a bot" ? rolls eyes.
okay, then be happy there will be some new injected life into the fandom
or re-read the release as "B5 now available for download via YT-DLP for free!"
Sure, there is value to corporate top-down synchronization telling everyone to focus on a specific piece of media at the same time. I wasn't really complaining about that. In fact it would be interesting if we could recreate the effect some way in a more distributed culture.
But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible to Google (eg naive residential IP or supplying a logged-in session cookie).
> But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible
You need to upgrade your yt-dlp then. The newest versions still work without any session cookies or other such nonsense.
P
“Sooner or later everyone comes to Babylon 5."
No one ever listens to Zathras. "Quite mad," they say. It is good that Zathras does not mind. Has even grown to like it. Oh, yes.
Cannot say. Saying, I would know. Do not know, so cannot say.
Which Zathras? Zathras.... or Zathras?
Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM!
Comment was deleted :(
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