A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

^ Ah, thank you. I've never been able to track the Centauri Prime trilogy down, sadly.

 

Well 500 years in the future there is a major split in the Alliance leading to the Great Burn. Those cracks had to start forming somewhere.

 

As I recall the plague was the result of a TNT mandated "hook" for the show; something easy to explain without diagrams that tells people what it's all about. I don't know how detailed or specific that mandate was or how much wiggle room JMS had, but suffice to say that the plague would have been cured midway through season 2-ish and the real plot would have kicked in. I won't spoil anything at this point but I will say, as short as Crusade's run was it still managed to get in hints of what that plot would have been.

Think back to B5 midway through season 1 and how much of what was really going on we knew and how much had been hinted at right under our noses without being spotted until the second run through.

Possibly, but as I said, it was never meant to be the core of the show and would have been dispensed with pretty quickly. Then of course the whole point of this "hook" is the draw in new viewers who may not have seen B5 or even much science fiction before (at least that's what TNT hoped for.) Though trite, "the fate of Earth" is much easier for people to grasp than any of the other options you propose...plus from a purely logistical standpoint, I don't think the plague would have done much on Mars.

The colony still has everyone living in pressurised domes and there's no planetary ecology to speak of aside from engineered microbes in the permafrost for terraforming purposes, no not many ways for the plague to infect people. It may have meant everyone had to stay in the domes more than normal and could no longer go outside with just a parka and breather but I think if they restricted travel, most of the population would be reasonably safe from being infected in the first instance. Either way it'd be much less credible to have a clock-o-doom ticking down the five years till mass genocide day.

I'm about halfway through reading the first of the Centauri books right now and details on the Drakh are still pretty sketchy. They do have a central authority or government of sorts called the Drakh Entire, which seems to plan and act through consensus with agents like Shiv'kala (the one that gave Londo his Keeper) given fairly wide latitude. The name would appear to suggest that all Drakh have a say in what goes on but (so far) it's not been elaborated on.

 

I think the Technomage trilogy went into a little more detail on the Drakh's organizational structure. At the very least, they explained the difference between the Shiv'kala Drakh and the red-glowy-eye raver Drakh.

 

Well, it's official - I hate Galen.

Did he even have hair? Because if he did, I hate it!

Then again, given what JMS is currently doing to Wonder Woman, I'm not too fond of him either.

Oh, and one more thing, about Galen....

Subtle transition there pal.

 

Eh, I like Galen. He's over the top, but he's fun.

 

Remember he's Edward Woodward's son. of COURSE he's gonna act over the top!

 

As to why Centauri Prime and Earth were the first targets of the Drakh, I had assumed that it was because Earth and Centauri Prime were allies of the Shadows who betrayed them. The Vorlons obviously intended the PsiCorps on Earth to get together in some sort of humongous psychic communion that would mentally fry Z'hadum and the Shadows. The neutrality treaty took away this weapon from the Vorlons. Violating the neutrality treaty to give the Shadows telepathic Shadow vessel operators would have given the Shadows a well nigh invincible core to its forces.

As Shadow loyalists, punishing the traitors from the ranks would be a high priority for the Drakh. Thus, the open attack on Earth and the covert attack on Centauri Prime came first.

Incidentally, n one sense, one can attribute the victory of Good to Alfred Bester! But then, you can say the same I think for all the characters.

 

Very interesting theory - it makes no sense at all.[/groucho]

Centauri Prime was targeted because of Londo; both what he did and the potential the Shadows saw in him. The Drakh wanted to continue to harness that potential and among all the Alliance races, the Centauri would be the easiest to isolate. They have a history of stomping about and throwing their weight around so it was easy to turn the others against them.

Earth would have been more of a symbolic strike as humans (not just Sheridan) had lead the charge against the Shadows and later the Vorlons. The Minbari would have been next - indeed that was what they brought the plague for, it was to be used against Minbar.

As for the Vorlon's plans for human telepaths, that's touched on in the short story 'Nautilus Coil'. In a nutshell the "standard" human teeps (P1 - P12) were about step three out of a five step plan, with Lyta's enhancements being around step four. Because of Dr. Kirkish and IPX found that ship on Syria Planum, leading to the Icasus mission and the premature awakening of the Shadows the Vorlons never had time to finish the job and just used what they had. The Shadows got their first however, using Morden's connections with Earthforce New Technologies, IPX and their links to the faction of "laters" (teeps raised as mundanes before manifesting their psi - as opposed to the Cadre Primers who were born teeps.) The laters had essentially pushed most of the Primers out of key positions within the Corps and took control of Department Sigma (the ones behind Ironheart's enhancements, the Syria Planum dig, and probably the "Bureau 13" cell) which meant they could funnel the high powered blips to the Shadows.

Teeps were never meant to kill of the Shadows, just beat them back into submission so the Vorlons could force them to admit they were right.

 

I couldn't get D&D type fantasy out of my head with Call to Arms. With Galen as the Game Master and Dureena as the thief and Tony Todd as the paladin and so on. Anyway I found it, well. There are worse Bab 5 movies and I guess Crusade could have had a worse prologue then that.

The thing is, Minbar played a larger role in the war. I think that would have made more sense then Earth. The obvious motive is the same reason that Earth always seems to be threatened by villains on Star Trek also - the only planet we really care about is the one planet we actually live on.

 

Nah, Galen is the mage, not the GM. JMS is the GM.

 

The Drahk plague was optimized for Minbari. The Drahk actually made a pretty big mistake in panicing and using it on Earth---the effect would have been much more immediate if they had waited and deployed it on Minbar as planned.

 

^If that was the case (and I'm not saying it wasn't) then you'd think there'd be some mention of all the Minbari that happened to be on Earth succumbing very quickly. From what I recall, the implication has always been that the Drakh either didn't know how to specifically adapt it or it simply can't be done.

Spoiler: Crusade

There was that one world that the Shadows themselves used the plague on during the last year. They had a good 5 years too so either indeed it can't be specifically adapted or they intentionally left it switched to "default" to make sure their slow death served as an example. Either is possible.

The presence of a thief, a wizard etc. was quite deliberately meant to evoke an association, but with Arthurian mythology and symbolism, not D&D. The name of the ship is a dead give-away, yes?

 

I don't remember a prominent thief is Arthurian mythology, but every D&D party needs one to help deal with traps. And really, Crusade is a show about a ship that travels from dungeon-planet to dungeon-planet killing people and stealing stuff.

It's basically Spelljammer with less antiquated pseudoscience. .

 

There are definite similarities to B5 in there, but also to Star Trek, Star Wars, BSG... every major space opera has elements in the ME universe, which is one of the reasons why that universe is so delicious. Overall, I'd say that Star Wars is the main influence followed by B5.

I've noticed in A Call to Arms and War Zone that during some action scenes the sound effects are silent and you're only left with the music. Personally, I don't feel that works, the music just isn't big enough to carry those scenes on its own.

No hair, it seems. I'm having an opposite of the Byron-effect; with Byron I hated the hair but came to terms with the character, but with Galen I like the shaved head but I'm having a negative reaction to the character. I'll have to wait and see how it works out, I did hate Vir during the first couple of seasons after all.


War Zone (*)

Depending on how you choose to view this episode it is either episode 1, 8 or 12, and I'm guessing this is the reason why the episode feels so awkward. It appears to be a pilot produced mid-way through the season to follow on from a movie that did a poor job at being a pilot. Everything is rushed, all the characters are introduced with little attempt made at explaining who these characters are. Who is this captain guy? Who is the first officer guy? Where is Lochley? I have no idea.

The episode starts out with a young Daniel Dae Bakula trying to point out to some stupid mutineers that they're stupid, which appears to be symbolic of JMS struggling against TNT. Then Captain Bingo Bob shows and beats some guy up, and for some reason this stops the mutiny. Then there's some exposition for about 15 minutes (including some laughably out-of-place footage of real-world riots) then that thief I don't remember from A Call to Arms shows up, then they go to the ship, then some stuff happens with the Drakh, they kind of won, that guy Galen shows up to annoy me... I don't really care. To be honest, if I had chosen to check this show out without having seen B5 I would have just abandoned it after this episode.

I've done some reading at the lurkers guide and it seems that a lot of what was wrong here was TNT's fault and that JMS had greater control over the rest of the series, so there's still a chance I'll like the show. Hopefully this episode isn't the shape of things to come.

Captain Greyshirt: 18
Scott Bakula: 84

 

"War Zone" is dire and nobody including JMS is in a habit of defending it. He hated the idea of using stock footage to show the riots, but he was told he had to show them, and with the budget Crusade had, what do you expect?

Oh I hate Galen and I don't think he gets better... granted, he's not given a lot of time.

The writing style is far more reminsicient of a D&D campaign then Morte D'Arthur, though. And I must have missed the generic fantasy thief stuff in Arthurian myth.

 

Robin Hood was in Once and Future King.

 

Galen will really grow on you in the second season.

Except for the fact that there isn't one.

 

Does anybody know where I can get a copy of Crusade?