Hmm, I didn't know that. Perhaps the rules should mention that option. Personally, I'll put up with the ads rather than shell out $25 per year. Anyway, enough irrelevancy...
Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
- Start date
TNG & DS9 were using physical models at that time. I think TNG was dabbling in CG for some small shots. You really can't compare until DS9 went full CGI, at which time the CGI on B5 was easily as good.
IIRC, the pilot mentioned that the Earth Ambassador had been recalled due to illness, and Sinclair was in the role temporarily. But that line didn't make the screen (and maybe not even the set), and the issue was never addressed in the series.
Hang in there, it gets better. It's one of those shows that you kinda need to make it through the first season, but once you're hooked, you're hooked and a second viewing has it suddenly all make way more sense.
I know it's academic for anyone viewing it for the first time now, but while the CG VFX started out looking crude for their, they actually look *worse* on most modern copies of the show due to a number of clumsy/lazy methods of transferring the show from 4:3 to widescreen. You may note a very drastic shift in picture quality during comp shots (shots that have both life action and CG elements.) The full CG shots aren't quite so bad, but what they did to fit it into a letterbox format is still basically like zooming in to far on a low resolution image. Makes it look way more pixelated that it used to.
Getting my girlfriend started on B5. Haven't watched it for a few years myself. We started with The Gathering, which really didn't make it easy to convince her. Man it is horrible. The acting is simply unbearable, thank science they threw out half that cast before S1.
I would suggest never exposing a newbie to The Gathering (either version) first if you want to have a good chance of hooking them in. Midnight on the Firing Line isn't that great an introduction but at least it isn't full of inconsistencies with the main series - such as Delenn's androgenous makeup, her magic crystals and Morden appearing to be on the staff of B5.
I can't imagine not starting a show like Babylon 5 from the intended start. I guess if it's not somebody who is into serial scifi, an episode like Babylon Squared might give a better impression.
TImely advice.
Agreed. I started with 'Midnight on the Firing Line' because I didn't have, and didn't know about, 'The Gathering', but it was for the best. The Gathering is fucking abysmal and, outside of a couple lines, provides next to nothing to the overall story. If I had watched the pilot first, I never would have continued with the series. Fortunately, I didn't.
B5's graphics were closer in quality to SeaQuest's graphic's than TNG or DS9's. But with DS9, even when they went CGI full-time, they weren't doing them the same as B5, since DS9 was overlaying photos of the physical models on the CGI wire-frames.
That’s why I started with episode one and at the end of the season we watched the Gathering.
Another hilarious 'Technology prediction fail'.
Apparently in the future, search engines take four hours to come back with a result.
Even though in 2018, typing in a serial killer's catch phrase would return you everything you need to know about him in about 0.00005 seconds.
Apparently in the future, search engines take four hours to come back with a result.
Even though in 2018, typing in a serial killer's catch phrase would return you everything you need to know about him in about 0.00005 seconds.
Well the search went back to earth archives on the low bandwidth channel. So you’re looking at transmission delays caused by Earth Force putting low priority on things like this.
If that's the case, then the entire 4 hours should be the transmission delay, and all searches should take 4 hours regardless of the complexity of the query.
The more this show reveals about President Clark has his brand of Earth fascism the more it bears resemblance to "Real life with no checks and balances".
The solar system jump gate is near Jupiter, isn't it? That represents a two-way time delay of a minimum of between 70 and 110 minutes for communication with Earth, depending on the positions of the planets. However, we did see people in B5 communicating in real time with Earth so that's either a writing cockup or B5 has some FTL communication tech that wasn't explicitly described on screen.
There was the Gold Channel, which was high-priority and real-time. There were other real-time connections made, but they always took some doing, explicitly or implicitly (William Edgars could always call Garibaldi at any moment from Mars, but he was super-rich, while Sheridan and Ivanova had to both pull some strings and wait around to call their respective fathers, and Garibaldi had to go through the Psi Corps office on Mars to get information of Lise when he was checking on her during the riots, since regular channels were unavailable). My read is that there were a finite number of real-time long-range communications channels available to Babylon 5 (and in civilized space in general), and that there were a handful like the Gold Channel that were always kept available for important calls, but for the rest, you had to wait for your turn, not just for Babylon 5's communications to free up, but also whatever relays and whatnot your signal had to pass through to get to whoever you wanted to talk to.
FTL communications don't seem to require a jumpgate (the only time we saw one used that way was when the station was trying to contact a specific ship, but didn't know the location beyond "Somewhere in hyperspace"), so light-speed delay to Jupiter probably isn't a major factor. Bandwidth, however, almost certainly would be. When communications are fuzzy, they always have analog interference, not digital, so if you want to read into that, it could be that interstellar communications doesn't have the speed of our present-day internet, but is stuck in the '90s. As for waiting for search results, a substantial amount of information would be locally cached on Babylon 5, so you'd only need to connect to the central database for really esoteric stuff like, say, detailed crime reports on a series of long-solved murders.
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