Babylon 5 first time watching - specific viewing order?

[Mark_Nguyen]

Sticking my head back in to ask if anyone's counted, or noticed, how often someone says "scares the hell out of me" in the show? I've been re-watching recently starting with S2, and it seems that in practically every episode someone says it in regards to something (a person, an unknown part of B5, weird alien stuff, etc.). Should be good fodder for a drinking game at the very least.

Mark

 

[DonIago]

Heh. There was an episode review guide that once noted that in this show everything seems to always have come from or be going to Hell.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

No one's expecting jms to be an Aaron Sorkin or anything, but the man isn't known for much variation in his dialogue. Furthering the drinking game thing, should anyone count whenever a character references "back home" regardless of their actual planet, it's an inebriated evening.

Mark

 

[David cgc]

JMS's explanation (or excuse, if you want to be uncharitable) was that '90s syndication dialogue limited his flexibility with regard to swears, limiting him to "hell" or "damn," and the occasional ill-fated flirtation with "frag" or Lawrence DiTillio's lonely attempts to make "stroke" a thing.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

JMS seems to always have really cool things to say, but often says them in a really uninteresting way.

I'm trying to think of writers who are the opposite, who say boring things in a brilliant way. Maybe Mike Judge?

Just got to Babylon Squared. I remember this as the episode in my first viewing that convinced me that Babylon 5 was more than just 'A pretty decent but cliche space station show'. And until Lost nobody else had done the kind of time travel episode in an episodic show where the same events happen twice in the same place separated by two seasons, and the second time explains weird things in the first time.

I guess even Lost didn't really do that. The only real self-encounters in season 5 were Sawyer seeing Kate delivering Aaron and being shot at by Whitmore's people on the boat, all they did was have the cast cause historical events that were referred to earlier in the series.

Are tachyons a real thing? I thought they were a made up Star Trek thing but apparently they exist in Babylon 5 too, and also seem to be 'Time travelly sort of particles'.

 

[Marc]

No one's expecting jms to be an Aaron Sorkin or anything, but the man isn't known for much variation in his dialogue. Furthering the drinking game thing, should anyone count whenever a character references "back home" regardless of their actual planet, it's an inebriated evening.

Mark

It's quite a common expression for those who've moved a long way from home in the 20th century, why shouldn't apply in the 23rd?

Don't recall any of the aliens using though. the Narn tended to use "homeworld" to refer to their planet. for the Centauri it was Centauri Prime.

 

[David cgc]

Are tachyons a real thing? I thought they were a made up Star Trek thing but apparently they exist in Babylon 5 too, and also seem to be 'Time travelly sort of particles'.

Yes and no. The term was coined in the '60s for a hypothetical particle that could travel faster than light (thus violating causality, which is why it's used both for long-range communications and the time rift in Babylon 5). No such thing has ever been discovered, though, and stuff that might've pointed to them existing has turned out to be something else.

 

[DonIago]

I guess even Lost didn't really do that. The only real self-encounters in season 5 were Sawyer seeing Kate delivering Aaron and being shot at by Whitmore's people on the boat, all they did was have the cast cause historical events that were referred to earlier in the series.

I think there's the scene where Richard gives Locke the compass or watch or whatever while Locke is unstuck in time, and then we subsequently see that it was Flocke traveling with Richard who told Richard to give the item to "himself"? Except that at that point we don't know it's Flocke, not Locke?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yes and no. The term was coined in the '60s for a hypothetical particle that could travel faster than light (thus violating causality, which is why it's used both for long-range communications and the time rift in Babylon 5). No such thing has ever been discovered, though, and stuff that might've pointed to them existing has turned out to be something else.

In the Standard Model, a particle such as a tachyon that moves faster then light triggers a phase transition of the vacuum to a state of lower energy. Such a tachyon collapse is thought to have occurred when the Higgs field acquired its current vacuum expectation value during the Big Bang. If a tachyon field were generated today, it would trigger another phase change of the vacuum and destroy the universe as we know it.

 

[Forbin]

But surely that could be countered by generating an isostatic field of warp particles directing a concentrated polyluminal beam of chroniton particles. Somebody get Chief O'Brien on it stat!

 

[JD]

Is it bad that that last post almost made sense to me? Almost.