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Babylon 5

I've watch the last episode of B5 last week with my wife, she cried the whole episode :)
Sometimes I wished that I could do that
 
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I've watch the last episode of B5 last week with my wife, she cried the whole episode :)
Sometimes I wished that I could do that


Yeah if you meant "Sleeping In Light" that was sad.... The whole last 5 episodes were sad. For me for a month or two after the show I actually woke up in the morning just to watch the sun rise.....

The way they did the show though, the end of season 4 could have been a final episode as well the way it worked..
 
Actually now starting season 3...

One thing that did feel terribly cliched to me was the whole Nightwatch thing. I know what they were trying to say with this plot thread but it wasn't very subtle, nor very original. Obviously Earth had never learnt any lessons from past history. This was clearly the Nazi brownshirts and Hitler youth in space..
 
Nuttiness from the Patriot Act to Donald Trump says otherwise. Fear has never gone away and those who will stoke it for their advantage haven't gone away, are never very far off, and people fall for it everywhere.
 
Also keep in mind that to those living in the mid 2200's, World War II is over three centuries in the past and as such about as distant in memory as the Nine Years War and the Jacobite Rebellion is today. Not exactly obscure, but certainly faded and only really understood in detail by history buffs.

Remember that this is a society that just a decade ago, found itself staring into the abyss of total extinction courtesy of the Minbari, right after riding high on a wave of military superiority against the Dilgar. Pretty much the same combination of self-righteous arrogance and paranoia that produced McCarthyism, to say nothing of recent (and current!) events.
 
I just rewatched "V for Vendetta" last night, and there were certainly some moments that resonated with current American politics more than I would have cared for.
 
Yeah I could easily see Trump right at home with the Nightwatch and Ministry Of Peace..

Joseph McCarthy would have loved them.
 
One of the themes of B5 is that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Its cautionary stories about civil war, being caught between two extremist ideologies, and Byron's self-destruction are certainly resonating strongly now as well.
 
Here's an interesting post from JMS about Nightwatch.

JMS said:
Here's something to consider in this.

It's easy -- safe and reassuring -- to dismiss Nightwatch and the whole political climate on Earth at this time as referring to Nazi germany...SS, Stormtroopers, informers...but if we know our history, it shows that this is not so isolated as we might think. If we say it was just the Nazis, then it's a non-repeatable phenomenon, we needn't worry about it again.

But, of course, it does happen again...it did, and it will, to varying degrees. Go back to the Inquisition, and forward to Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which destroyed lives and reputations based on association, past history, social contacts and party affiliations (the items specified by Musante to the EA folks in Nightwatch). Stalin and to a lesser extent Lenin would have been right at home in Nightwatch. Several of the leaders speaking for parties in the ruins of what was once Yugoslavia would also fit.

It's easy, and safe, for us to say, "Oh, we would never do that, only THEY did that." But the "they" in this ARE the we on the other side...and "we" have done it, are doing it now, and will continue to do it. Only when we *know* the history of such things, when we recognize the rhetoric of control, when we oppose blacklisting and scapegoating and dead-catting do we help to assure that they *won't* arise again. Remember the quote: "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it."

There's a great deal of generalized historical and political metaphor in the show, never one-to-one because that's too easy, but disguised in one form or another, transumted. The Centauri Republic isn't a real republic by any stretch of the imagination...any more than the Roman Republic from which it draws some of its political structure, particularly the Centarum, the ruling body. There's a great deal of Japanese political and social structure to the Minbari, in their culture and art and some of their philosophy. You can find parallels to the story in World War II, and the bible, among a few dozen others.

Too little of TV these days is *about* anything...it's all context, no subtext. This show is about a lot of things...but never in the mode of telling you what to think. We'll ask *that* you think, that you consider the world around you, and your place in it...but defining that is your business, not ours.
 
For anyone that might know..

What is the purpose of the docking bay on the top of the station and why is that different to the one in the centre of the spinning part of the station? Do they both lead to the same areas?

Also some of the scaling seems off sometimes. The docking ports seem huge, and at other times they seem pretty smallish......

Also what's with the travel tubes? Aren't they just elevators that go up and down?
 
I guess that's a zero-G docking bay for non-passenger cargo.

Yes, the scale is often off -- in particular with the star furies. Artistic licence.

By travel tubes, I assume you mean the lifts/elevators in the internal radial struts used to transport people between the core longitudinal transport system and the floor or between different floors of other sectors? I presume the system used autonomously driven pods rather than a winch system but I don't recall seeing any evidence to decide this.

It's a pity that the inside open areas of the station weren't seen more often but CGI probably wasn't really up to it at the time and/or was too expensive.
 
I guess that's a zero-G docking bay for non-passenger cargo.

Yes, the scale is often off -- in particular with the star furies. Artistic licence.

By travel tubes, I assume you mean the lifts/elevators in the internal radial struts used to transport people between the core longitudinal transport system and the floor or between different floors of other sectors? I presume the system used autonomously driven pods rather than a winch system but I don't recall seeing any evidence to decide this.

It's a pity that the inside open areas of the station weren't seen more often but CGI probably wasn't really up to it at the time and/or was too expensive.

I suspect on that last point you are correct.

I hate to imagine what a remake of this great series would be like. They'd probably follow the BSG formula and make everything grungy and shitty.
 
IIRC there's actually three separate internal transit systems. The core shuttles which run along the axis, the transport tubes that move up and down though the levels and there's a rarely seen train that looks like the core shuttle but runs along the circumference of the cylinder.
 
^That sounds right to me.

Yeah, the tube elevators definitely don't seem to be akin to turbolifts in the sense of being able to move both horizontally and vertically.

I seem to recall one reason for the two cargo areas was that the one at the top was used for cargo that was to be handled in zero gee, but I have no idea whether that's accurate and/or the intent
 
Yeah I could easily see Trump right at home with the Nightwatch and Ministry Of Peace..

Joseph McCarthy would have loved them.

I could very easily see Clinton being allied with the Shadows. Mr. Morden's "What do you want?" would certainly be easy to answer. She lusts for power and doesn't care who gets hurt because "it doesn't matter anyway."

I don't think B5 will ever not be relevant. There are so many important themes woven through it, and people are still people. Even 500 years after Clark there was an even worse regime on Earth that caused the "Great Burn" so they still didn't learn their lesson.
 
Folks, with all respect, could we please keep the real-world political discussion to a minimum and false quotes absolutely out? The moderators have enough to do, I'm sure.

JMS has often said that Babylon 5 is about the process of how things come about. In it we see the fairly slow slide of Earth into totalitarianism by the use of unfocused fear of the 'other'. At the time, people tended to poo-poo it and thought JMS was being heavy-handed and that nothing like that could ever happen again.
 
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