Babylon 5
 

The future of science fiction lies with Babylon 5.

Discuss.

I'm not sure what sense of "future of science fiction" you mean.

Respond.

Babylon 5 is our last, best hope for science fiction?

Oi!

Now that my professional obligations are discharged...

It had its moments. The cast was superb, the concept of the five-year pre-planned story arc was novel in terms of weekly SF shows, the graphics were ahead of their time and the writing sparkled in places. Sure, it had its low moments, but everything does. What it could really have used was a bigger budget and some actual support and promotion from the network.

That said...

If my first exposure to B5 had been The Gathering, I probably never would have gotten into it. The series really got off to a bad start, but it recovered magnificently, peaking in Season 3 and maintaining that momentum into Season 4. Season 5, however, had nowhere to go but down. Large stretches of it are unwatchable, especially that interminable telepath arc. IT managed to go out with a bang, though.

I recently watched Legend of the Rangers, and I remember thinking "I liked this a lot better when it was called Journey to Babel/Thirdspace/the Shadow War." At lot of plot elements are recycled from earlier episodes, something I was critical of on Voyager and Enterprise. Could it be that JMS is finally starting to repeat himself?

Addressing the actual topic of the thread...B5 raised the bar, just like the original Star Trek did. Where before TV SF had to move beyond bad writing, bad special effects and alien-monster-of-the-week, it now has to move beyond hot alien babes, spectacular explosions and a rubber-forehead-of-the-week.

And that's the best you're gonna get at 11:30 PM.

I used to enjoy Babylon 5 a lot, but only when I could actually watch a bunch in a row. People used to compare B5 to DS9 all the time, but even in the latter seasons you could theoretically watch individual episodes with no more than the obligatory "last time on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." On B5, no way! You gotta watch all of them in a row if you're going to hope to see more than the barest scratched surface of what there was.

On a lighter note, one of my favorite moments of B5 was the scene over one of the closeing credits' (the anti-teaser?) It was just a guy, sitting, extending and compressing his force lance (or whatever it was). I loved the nonchalantness.

That wasn't "just a guy", that was Marcus, badass Ranger and Galahad-complex sufferer. It was his Minbari fighting pike (which actually resembled a quarterstaff more than a pike...while we're on the subject, why were the battleships always referred to as destroyers?). As I recall, there was some byplay with Franklin that ended in a light-hearted death threat.

The best credit gag was Jason Carter (who played Marcus) singing I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General (badly).

Yeah, I remember the Modern Major General now. I didn't mention it earlier because I wasn't sure I was remembering right.

While we're in a B5 thread, I'd like to mention how cool of a starship name White Star is.

I used "force lance" because it's the closest thing my faulty memory could come up with as a comparison.

It's a great show, it really is, but for me season 3 was the peak. Going into season four the nature of the best changed somewhat, and for the worse given what had come before. Up to that point it was clearly Vorlons good, Shadows bad, and then suddenly JMS shoves all this moral ambivalence crap down our throats. Clearly, he had this in mind all along, and I do laud the ambition on his part to make the dividing lines between "good" and "bad" a whole lot less clear, but there was no lead up to it whatsoever. Sometimes abrupt transitions are a good thing, but not in this case - it just didn't work for me at all.

I have to say series 4 was my fav. The final stuff of the Shadow War and then, (In my opinion) the best bit; The fight against Earth. No evil alien races, or beings from another time. This time the baddies are us. I know that kinda of thing has been done before (Blake's 7, and the computer game 'Colony Wars') But I really liked this one. How Earth started off, kinda good, but slowly turned bad. By far though my fav moment though, was Londo confronting Mr Morden about the Shadow ships based on an Island on Centari Prime. The whole scene just crackleed with energy and was fantastic from start to finish! I wasn't a fan of the effects though. Much too computer looking. Some Star Trek ship look so real, you feel you can reach out and touch them. And Battlestar as I said before, looks like real space fighting should. B5...not so much. But some great ship designs none the less.
However, I'm not really sure the show can go now...It had a 5 year arc, anything now feels taped on the end to me..

Crusade, To Live And Die In Starlight, they've got a Telepath War to depict (although the novels already did that), a second pulverising of Centauri Prime to explain (novels again), whatever happened to Lennier? Lyta? Is Marcus still on ice?

Of course, this is all academic since two of the principal actors and the most beloved recurring character are dead.

There's room in the B5 universe for more stories, though.

Season 5 felt tacked on, yes, but you can blame that on the uncertainties surrounding renewal. Watching the episodes in syndication, I felt that the show came to an aprupt halt and then lurched onwards as far as storyline goes.

The real question I suppose I was asking is: Should science fiction in future follow a similar model to Babylon 5: in-depth storyline planned out from beginning to end, characters who evolve and change etc...?

Pre-planning a whole series is a nice dream, but it'd be hard to realize. And even if you could, it might not be all that great. Being pre-planned might not keep your series flexible to meet with various unforseen complications (actors, the network, audience).

Of course, a pre-planned series is excellent when it can do good foreshadowing. I think a pre-planned time travel series could be awesome.

But I don't think all shows should be pre-planned. In my mind, the best way to do a series is to know where you want the characters and story to go (either over the course of the whole series, or just over the course of the next season), but not require yourself to have every detail and thread nailed down until you get there.

I'm inclined to agree. If it is planned in too much detail it may become dated in its own life-time...

Personally I always felt that the next logical step for Doctor Who was into a long story arc, a la BSG, rather than the ST: TOS/TNG model which, IMO, is a little redundant now, and is also difficult to sustain...

I thought the reason season five felt tacked on is because it WAS. At the end of season four it was cancelled from network TV, right? They filmed the series finale just in case. The renewal was a reprieve, a way to do the whole five-year saga. But in the end it was tacked on.

PS. Who's the idiot who tried to cancel B5 after season four?