A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

I'm sorry, I'm about half a year late to the party, but...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

 

The The Psi Corps Manual bit looks very interesting (as do the patches .) Though I think a bit of the manual might have been printed in one of the old magazines. I vaguely recall a little snippet on on of the early issues.

 

Just an FYI for people interested in revisiting B5... I noticed that Netflix now have all five seasons of B5 available on streaming "watch instantly".

My apologies if this is old news... I just noticed it when searching through Netflix.

 

Pity they don't have Crusade available as view instantly. I would actually like to revisit that series again (I've seen it after my first run through of B5).

 

Good morning everyone, Scott Bakula here. I'm currently hanging out with some friends at my ranch in Australia, but my best friend TheGodBen asked me to use his account to relay a message to you. I know you've all been waiting for his return to this thread, I certainly have, but I'm afraid that his meth addiction got really bad last year and he was in no condition to review any science fiction shows. The last time he tried he ended up running away because he had a vision of bikers with swords knocking on his door, or so he claims.

Anyway, things came to a head back in May when he tried to punch Dmitry Medvedev while wearing a Joe Bidden mask, you probably saw it in the news. He was sent to a Russian prison, which only made his meth habit worse, but I managed to use my high-level contacts in the Russian government to get him released. Since then he has been detoxing at my Australian ranch where we've enjoyed many wholesome activities together, such as horse-riding, kangaroo-riding and Tasmanian tiger-riding.

As an aside, here's a picture of my favourite pet, Scott Bakangaroo.



Anyway, TheGodBen is mostly better, he only does meth on weekends now, so he should be returning to this thread soon. So stay tuned and tell all your friends.

Sexily,
Scott Bakula

 

I think I threw up a little in my throat...

 

Good to hear, Mr. Bakula. I've been patiently waiting.

 

Mr. Bakula, don't take this the wrong way but I have to ask:

Why is your head so flat?

 

I suspect he lost some brain volume while doing Enterprise.

 

Gotta have some palce to put your Margarita where it won't get all sandy

 

That's what the kangaroo pouches were for.


Each Night I Dream of Home (***)

Okay, I'll be honest, I've forgotten most of the characters and plot elements, and I probably should have rewatched all the old episodes before jumping back in, but that's not something I'm going to do. So bear with me if I get the names wrong or if I suddenly like a character that I used to hate.

A Federation Councilmember shows up with a secret mission and starts telling Kirk what to do with his ship, or something. Apparently there's a plumber called Dave with him whose soles purpose for being onboard is to infect himself with an unknown virus, so he's naturally given access codes normally afforded to members of the government. On their way to Earth, Captain Lochley pulls a Worf and comes aboard the ship under the flimsiest of circumstances. This leads to some flirting with Captain Bingo Bob. Then MU Franklin shows up because, hey, why not? Now that everyone is aboard the ship, it's time for a party! I'll bring some snacks, the Senator will bring the beer, and MU Franklin will bring the deadly nanovirus.

So, Earth's government decides it would be a good idea to bring an infected person aboard Excalibur and perform a risky contamination procedure on the ship that's Earth's last, best hope for survival becau-... Argh! A spider on my keyboard!

What was I saying? I've forgotten. Anyway, Dave decides to infect himself with the Drakh plague because he wants to see his fiancée again. You know what? Screw cynicism, that's sweet. And it's nice that Gideon and the others don't try to convince him that he's throwing his life away, they immediately accept and understand his decision. And if it weren't for the fact that Dave nearly got everyone killed because he couldn't hold off on having Skype-sex with his fiancée he'd come across as an honourable man. The episode ends with a big battle and people racing against time to open and close doors, and Lochley is none the wiser about anything that happened. Yay?

This episode was okay. I liked the general story, although certain elements of it felt a bit off. The action bits towards the end felt rather fillerish, and I'm not quite sure why Lochley was even there. But it was enjoyable enough, I suppose.

Scott Bakula: 89

 

I remember sort of liking that episode because it had Franklin, but I also forget what it's about. Something something Drakh virus, I believe. I think it's the one Crusade episode I semi-caught on real TV, making it the only time I saw part of Babylon 5 when the franchise was actually relevant.

 

I always found it weird that they did an episode that features Franklin and Lochley, where both characters neither meet nor are aware of the fact that they're on the same ship at the same time.

 

Glad this thread is back! So close to the finish.

I always thought that was a very fun touch--especially when they hang a lantern on it and she looks at the closed capsule with Franklin inside. It felt very real in some way.

 

Glad to see that Lochley continues to be used as she always has been - i.e. for no apparent reason.

And now that this thread has started back up, I'd like to point out that it's now been 459 days since I watched Bryon blow himself up and I'm still glad to be rid of him.

 

IIRC the reason Lochley is there is because this was supposed to be her first appearance on the show. Because of the whole mid-season hiatus/uniform switch thing this episode ended up being scheduled for airing *after* one of her (intended) later appearances. It's just one of a number of continuity glitches that resulted from that whole fiasco.

 

The Long Road (*½)

Did you know that there's an ongoing experiment where virtual monkeys are randomly creating text and they're trying to compile that randomness into the complete works of Shakespeare? It's true. I imagine that over the course of that experiment a story about simple townsfolk fighting off an intransigent government/military has materialised roughly 11,000 times. Because it's such a common story. And perhaps that's a good thing, perhaps the reason why that story keeps being retold is because it's a good story. Perhaps Avatar was so popular because it took that story and put a fresh coat of 3D paint on it.

But I wasn't a big fan of Avatar, the main reason it kept me interested in its tired story was that it had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of flashy things dancing in front of my eyes. The Long Road had a CG dragon that's laughable by today's standards. Avatar had an alien culture to explore with some interesting biological abilities. The Long Road had boring anti-technology humans with creepy moustaches. Avatar had a villain that was so cheesy you couldn't help but love him. The Long Road had some guy. I guess what I'm saying is that this episode isn't as good as the highest grossing film ever, which probably isn't fair to hold against it, but I will anyway.

What this episode had going for it is that I didn't predict how the story would go, but that's only because I lost interest after seeing the dragon in the teaser and spent most of the episode counting my own fingernails (10, for those of you that are interested). Also, Galen and Alwyn have some good chemistry, which is something to be expected considering Edward Woodward's sperm was instrumental in the creation of Peter Woodward.

 

The CG dragon was laughable by the standards of the day, too.

It was so laughable, in fact, that I wondered at the time if it was done that way on purpose, since it was supposed to be a parlor trick of sorts.

But given the general cheese of the SFX in Crusade, I think it was just tight purse strings.

 

I have to confess that I never even considered watching it, I was so put off by the bad CGI. When B5 first aired I had computer games with better graphics. I chatched a few episodes on syfi and found them okay but not great. I guess I need to give it a chance sometime. But I need to fully watch ds9 first.

 

Strangely enough, a lot of Babylon 5's CG was better than Crusade's, even stuff from years before. I'd rate the season 2 Mars shot way ahead of, well, pretty much every planet-of-the-week in Crusade. Even the Drazi Homeworld in season 5, meant to be a prototype for making planets-of-the-week, looked better, so it wasn't just a problem with Netter Digital being bad at landscapes.