Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
- Start date
That final episode of season 1 might be my favorite finale of the season. So many things were happening and we're left with a sense of "now what".
The S3 finale for me, but that was when I'd become a real fan of the show. Everything in the last few minutes is just spot-on for me.
I loved that the novels retold some of the events of that episode from a different perspective than the episode was able to present.
For me, it's very close between the two. The only reason I give the edge to Chrysalis was because so much more happened and it was coming off an entire season where the show was finding its footing. That episode changed the game In a big way, while Zahadum intensified the game.
If aliens and ESP were real, Star Trek is the future you would want. B5 is the future you would get.
If you watched it for the writing alone, you would likely appreciate its thoughtfulness, intrigue, and humanity. Watching its effects, try to appreciate that what they achieved pushed the CGI artistry envelope for an era when practical effects were still de rigeur and most CGI still looked like the "Money for Nothing" Dire Straits video. Their ship maneuvers were also far more varied and interesting than Trek's.
The characters are just so darned likeable. You will come to care for them and their transformative changes. If you cherry pick episodes, you will miss a lot of fun, especially in its small, passing moments and offhand comments, where B5's heart really beats, and connects with our actual present as we live and experience it - with lots of salt.
Do yourself a favor and bear in mind that in B5's series era, not everything worth doing had an instant gratification.
Did I find it worth a complete watch-through? Yes.
More than once?
Yes.
If you watched it for the writing alone, you would likely appreciate its thoughtfulness, intrigue, and humanity. Watching its effects, try to appreciate that what they achieved pushed the CGI artistry envelope for an era when practical effects were still de rigeur and most CGI still looked like the "Money for Nothing" Dire Straits video. Their ship maneuvers were also far more varied and interesting than Trek's.
The characters are just so darned likeable. You will come to care for them and their transformative changes. If you cherry pick episodes, you will miss a lot of fun, especially in its small, passing moments and offhand comments, where B5's heart really beats, and connects with our actual present as we live and experience it - with lots of salt.
Do yourself a favor and bear in mind that in B5's series era, not everything worth doing had an instant gratification.
Did I find it worth a complete watch-through? Yes.
More than once?
Yes.
I think in terms of well built scifi universes, Mass Effect is the most likely 'If aliens were real' scenario. But I guess that's a little similar to B5.
For me the first episode that really made me think the show could be great was Babylon Squared.
For me the first episode that really made me think the show could be great was Babylon Squared.
Mass Effect isn't a TV series, it started with video games before expanding into comics, novels, and an anime movie. It's a remarkably well developed universe that easily rivals Star Trek, Star Wars, B5 and Stargate. Throughout all three games you get tons of info on the universe, with history, cultural and biological data on dozens of aliens, and background on the tech. You should take a peek at some of the entries on the wiki I linked to, there's some cool stuff in there.
Kail, I haven't seen anyone here post the proper viewing order of the episodes and movies. Although there is some variability between fan preferences, and certain orders of interest for the experienced B5 viewer, this is the best documented sequence that I've found, which I used in all three or four of my tours through the series for myself and each of my children:
Link: http://www.b5tv.com/showthread.php?t=11675
Why not? The Mass Effect game trilogy has one massive and epic story and some events/ideas are quite similar to B5.
What makes Mass Effect so well liked is that the characters are so well fleshed out (some of them at least) and each has his/her own backstory which you can discover if you bother with it giving you a much deeper game and immersion (and besides that you have games chock full of epic fights both on the small and the large scale).
Little can compare to the character journey of G'Kar and Londo Mollari but then few things in TV can so it's not fair to draw direct comparisons but for a game the story was awesome (disregarding the ending of the game which didn't sit well with the fans and is believed due to a rushed production as time ran out to make the release date).
Not everyone likes third (or first) person shooters. I knew the Mass Effect trilogy is well regarded with regard to its SF themes but I can't stand the genre.
Also Mass Effect was brought up in the context of which scifi setting is more realistic if mankind were to enter a galactic alien community. Not in terms of comparing the story to TV series.
I attempted to play it despite the format (I'm not a fan of 1st-person shooters) because I had heard such awesome things about it, but I was so bored that I couldn't even get through one of the games, let alone a whole trilogy.
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