I'm not sure if I ever saw 'The Gathering' the first time around, so it's probably wasn't very fair of me to draw a comparison. All I know is when I did finally see it on video, it bored the crap out of me. Plus I could have done without the bartender in the gorilla suit. Seriously, what the hell was that about?
I agree, there was some good chemistry between the two LotR male leads and it it weren't for the weapons pod silliness and a few ham-fisted lines, the female lead would have been so much better. As for the others, well they hardly had enough screen time to make much of an impression, though I agree with Jan, Na'Feel looked promising.
We saw little of Narn women in the original B5 show and I'd have liked to see more of this one.
That raises a point, how often did we ever see female aliens, no counting the likes of Delenn, Na'toth & Durenna? Off the top of my head...there was a Narn woman and girl in the message smuggled out of Narn (I forget which episode), one Brakiri woman (played by the same actress as Dureena as I recall), two or three Abbai, the Markab mother and child, the Onteen mother ('Believers') and of course there was no shortage of Minbari and Centauri women.
I wonder if the nature of the make-up had something to do with this. With races like the Centauri & Minbari where it's especially just a bald-cap/headbone we see plenty of examples but with races that require full face and/or head pieces we get a few one-offs at most (I don't think we ever saw any Drazi women - possibly for the best!) and the actresses in recurring parts (Ko'Dath/Na'Toth) never seamed to last long for one reason or another.
That may be why we rarely saw any Abbai at all, after it initially looked like they were going to be set up as one of the "major" league races.
