I've been meaning to get around to watching B5 one of these days. I'm a huge fan of DS9, but totally missed out on Babylon back in the day.
That being said, the cast isn't quite as charasmatic as the best of DS9, but surpassing Garak is a tall order.
On rewatch b5 was definitely better than I remember it being, but it doesn't have episodes that straight up make me cry. DS9 has me crying from episode 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo
Babylon 5 is similar in that a lot of the scenes featuring Lando or G'kar were just mesmerizing. Garibaldi's hard boiled detective persona was a treat too.
I recall that Morn's costume/mask was made so that he could talk.
It's also interesting considering his key role in the war. - "I've know the courier for five years."
> laughing "Ohh yes, but I would much rather see you dead."
And yes it is always the aliens...
Rule 52 of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: Never ask when you can take.
Londo did have some bombastic moments.
In fact if I was to really boils down thee difference between the two I'd say B5 had better writing and DS9 had better actors.
That being said, I've tried to get into DS9, and I find that show's lead surprisingly similar.
Anyway, with Season 2, the cast really came together and the experience felt more smooth. But I still find a lot to love in that first season.
It’s hard to put yourself back in an era before pervasive web culture hooking into every fandom. At the time it was very much, “Hey, a darker, grittier Trek on a space station, cool!” And then an episode like B^2 airs: “Holy shit, this show is not what I thought at all.”
Which, granted, B5 still has as well, but far fewer.
It's indicative that later seasons of DS9 (93-99) were structured a lot more like B5 (94-98) than TNG.
B5 does not, for example, have an equivalent of the moment where sisko walks back into the punishment box in an act of pure defiance.
Bring enough contempt to the table, and anything at all sounds stupid. But the problem there isn't with the thing.
My issue is how jarringly out-of-place it feels. In the midst of a futuristic space opera, they shoehorn in a notorious serial killer from the Victorian era. JMS meant it to be cool, but instead I found it laughable. B5 wasn't Doctor Who, where mashups like that happen once a month.
Why does Jack, of all people, attract the Vorlons' attention? Why do they choose him as their tool? Why didn't the Vorlons interrogate Delenn themselves, or make a more recent interrogator? We're told he's uniquely-suited to his task, but nothing about his character convinced me that's true.
Why even were the Vorlons in doubt about Delenn and Sheridan? (I don't remember if there was anything leading up to the episode, but I admit it's been long time, so maybe there was something. I just vaguely recall it felt a bit out of the blue, but I could be wrong there.)
Regardless, there's really nothing about Sebastian or the episode that was improved by making him Jack the Ripper. It's my personal worst B5 episode.
For me there's something akin to a "twist budget," maybe; a show that does it too often or by too much of a leap starts to look overly pleased with its own cleverness. This doesn't reach that threshold with me, and indeed I thought the twist here actually did a lot to add depth and pathos to the character of Sebastian. For him merely to have been a sneering villain would probably have worked, set against Furlan's and Boxleitner's performances, and given after all this was a story about Delenn and Sheridan. Making him a repentant monster, with a unique perspective on their values and choices drawn from the horrific miscarriage of his own, turned what could have been just a sneering villain into something almost as pitiable as frightening, and shed new light not only on Alexander's performance but, in a narrative sense, on the depth and extent of the Vorlons' involvement in human history - a topic on which the story would later have much more to say, and putting in some work to help set that up here would help those later occasions likewise avoid tipping over into the "too clever by half" sort of twist.
That said, the specific questions you ask here have been asked before, and JMS has answered them. Those answers are collected on the Lurker's Guide page for this episode [1], and I think are worth your review; even if you find they fail to persuade, they'll at least still yield insight into why the story was written as it was.
I'm badly wanting an AI upscaled version made by someone. I've read articles about someone even recreating the CGI and remastering it themselves, something crazy like that.
That's how I want to finally one day watch this show. Not the granny 280p or whatever.
Edit: or pay for one month of streaming for like 10% of that cost if it’s about the money. This is why there isn’t (and won’t be) an upscaled DS9.
A friend of mine gave me that same heads up after encouraging me to watch it, circa 2010. I just can't remember if he said it's one or more seasons that you have to sort of slog through before getting to the good stuff.
If I had to choose between watching again DS9 in its entirety or B5, I'd probably go with B5, but I found both enjoyable. If a third option was BSG (2004-2009), that would be my choice in a heartbeat.
Actors and writers seem to need about a season to marinate. Straczynski knew what he wanted, and even he still took a season to dial stuff in.
The thing is you can safely skip those and pretend those episodes don't exist. There's actually episode guides for this [1][2] and I used this when I watched the show with my girlfriend a few years back. You could argue a bit about which episodes should or shouldn't be included, but reducing the entire show to about a quarter of "the good parts" is entirely feasible.
With Babylon 5 that'll be a lot harder. Not saying you can't trim any of it, but substantially less. Note that for TNG it includes just 3 episodes for the first season; I'm pretty sure you can't reduce Babylon 5's first season to just 3 episodes without losing the plot.
[1]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-g...
[2]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space...
Lot of homerun episodes... but there were also a lot of episodes per season. And some of them were pretty painful. The good far outshines the bad, but it wasn't 100% homeruns for sure.
My understanding is that they split the difference: you needed to do most of your principle photography in the first half of the year, and then post-prod earlier episodes to account for delays.
Nowadays, the flagship shows are either based on extensive literary works like Game of Thrones and Expanse which depend on the consistency of the writing and how easy it is to adapt, or they're concept shows like Altered Carbon that barely have an idea about what they're going to do with a full eight hour season when they shoot the pilot, let alone what to do for season two. The latter tend to work out really badly if they can't hang on to their writing staff
See for example the 2011-2016 show Person of Interest that went from a mediocre if interest crime-of-the-week to possibly one of the best serialized science fiction TV shows about two AIs fighting it out (I'm rewatching it now due to the relevance)
Spoilers: ..........in the book, the Envoys are the governmental elite special forces unit. In the show, the Envoys are now terrorists? Switches the allegiances of so many characters. Also weird manipulation of the historical timeline, seemingly just to bring a character into the plot.
It seems very clear that the B5 directors didn’t direct the actors, so they were left to their own devices. Clearly, the actors who played Londo and G’kar did not need direction — I’d put Girabaldi in this category, too. Most of the others needed a lot more than they got. Or maybe the directors told all the rest of them to move and talk as stiffly and unnaturally as possible, but that would be odd.
The DS9 special effects were state of the art. The B5 special effects were done on some Amigas on the cheap. It probably didn’t show as much on the low-res TV’s of the day, but wow the difference is stark now.
B5 also badly needed a dialogue coach. I’m sorry, but JMS’s dialogue was terrible. His story, his plotting wass brilliant. His screenwriting book is excellent, but his dialogue is stilted and boring in the examples there, too. I have to admit to some bafflement on this, because Harlan Ellison could surely have helped with this aspect of things.
There’s more, but I think most of it comes from a very ambitious vision and complete lack of money to realize it.