Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube
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cordcuttersnews.com
However, if I can be cynical for a moment: The article title is misleading. Only a few episodes have been uploaded so far. At the current rate of one episode per week, it will take until March 2028 to conclude all five seasons. That's assuming they post every episode, and allow the episodes to remain up in the long term.
For some reason, the first episode of season 1, Midnight on the Firing Line, is missing from the YouTube upload, which is a pretty critical omission. YouTube is also a minefield of spoilers in the video recommendations. I can't recommend the YouTube uploads to newcomers right now. The Blu-ray collection appears to be available for about $100.
The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.
The acting was a mixed bag from very good to pretty wooden. And the whole will it get renewed or won't it situation led to non-optimal organization of the last couple of seasons.
It's the season one acting that I find the biggest barrier to entry. It settles in by the end mostly, and the acting markedly improves from Season 2 onward though it always retains some of that campy scifi feel.
I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.
As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.
The trick with effects is to make whatever you have look good. There are a few ways of doing that. 2001's effects are genius and still look pretty good nearly sixty years later. They look better than 2010's from the 1980s. In fact, I'm even impressed with Forbidden Planet — yes, there are a lot of painted backgrounds but it does very well with what it has.
You can say they were too early, but not that they didn't lean in on technology and use it to their best advantage. It had weaknesses, but also strengths.
B5's SFX had a dynamism and color that was unmatched at the time. I recently rewatched the series, and the later seasons still hold up just fine, graphics-wise (created by a different company, but reusing Foundation Imaging's original assets and esthetic).
And I love how the Star Fury's design was so carefully thought out - even NASA took an interest.
It saddens me that people aren't willing to pay a pittance in cash (about $1 an hour) for entertainment. They're willing to spend their time, but not their money.
This isn't just buying a 100 episode box set, it applies to people complaining "I'd have to spend $10 on $streaming_service to watch that 5 hour miniseries, that's terrible" too.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
It made everyone weep.
That's why legal unencrypted availability online is such a boon.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.
I did consider buying a Blu-ray player and buying it on Blu-ray but it seems like they never actually released all the series on Blu-ray.
In the end I ended up figuring out how to download it without ads from ITVX. There's a tool which will bypass Widevine, download all the segments and splice them together without ads. Quite a pain to get working but still less annoying than yet another subscription. We already have Netflix, Disney, Prime, and a TV license.
They gave you an option to pay for it without adverts, but you decided to invest your time and energy in bypassing the adverts rather than pay the cost of a pint of beer. You could have paid for it on Apple TV but perhaps you consider it too expensive.
How much do you value an episode? Presumably enough to watch it - so 90 minutes of your time, which at minimum wage is £18. But you don't value it £4 to watch a 90 minute program just once on apple tv, let alone how cheap itvx is.
Justify it to yourself all you want, just don't cry when TV series like that are no longer made.
I think it's about not necessarily getting what you pay for. Shows are constantly leaving streaming platforms which is a problem if you want to watch something specific as opposed to just being happy to pay to watch whatever they feel like letting you see this week. Then they'll also silently censor content or remove entire episodes so you can't be sure if you've even watched the entirety of whatever show you intended to see if they have it at all.
They also like to reorder shows and even renumber seasons which can result in confusion and spoilers. Netflix is horrible when it comes to this. One example is the The Great British Bake Off. For some reason they insist on reordering them so that it starts with whatever the newest series is and then plays them backwards which is a pretty big problem. At the start of one series they even recap all of the winners of previous series spoiling them all for everyone watching the show on netflix.
If you just want to watch "something" by all means pay a monthly fee for a streaming service. If you want to watch a specific show and you want it to be there for you the next you want to watch it you're better off getting physical media or doing a little research and getting everything off the high seas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Pilot_film_(1993)
The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Babylon_5_episodes#Sea...
That’s because there are two hard things when it comes to uploading content.
- Off by one errors.
Yes and no It's the pilot (and consequently the first[2]) episode "The Gathering", which actually doesn't have an episode number.[0]
The first aired episode was S1E1 "Midnight on the Firing Line".
The former was released as a "TV Movie" even though it was the pilot episode.
[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html for the episode listings.[1]
[1] Be careful, a wrong click can end up giving you spoilers. :(
[2] I'd note that the pilot episode has significant personnel, prop and make-up differences from the rest of the series.
B5 has now appeared on Youtube.
Roku has all of B5 - with less commercials than the others
That... does not (currently) look like "Babylon 5 is now free to watch". That looks like a minor probing to see if they can charge for it again somewhere. That kind of thing happens constantly, and it's rare that it ever finishes.
They did not released episode 1, which gives an authentic 90ties experience In 90ties people missed episodes. And misnamed the pilot movie as episode 1 and mislabeled other episodes.
And they dont use playlist and will be simultanepusly releasing clips from episodes, so it will be wonderfull mess.
"It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others." -- Lurker's GuideUnofficially you use MakeMKV and just rip the disc.
EDIT: Oh, apparently PowerDVD no longer supports UHD Blu-ray either so even the official way is dead now.
The custom firmware allows them to rip 4K blu-rays.
I’m really glad I discovered this because I really didn’t want to spend on a 4K player or a PS5, knowing that this format is really on the way out.
After you rip them you can re-encode them to save storage space using Handbrake.
Either that or buy a 4K player designed for a TV, like a PS5 or the two most popular Sony and Panasonic players on the market.
- PS5 is a good choice if you need a vertically mounted behind-TV type of setup.
- Sony UBP-X700U is value 4K, just get the updated version which fixes some annoyances of the previous model (I think U is the updated US model)
- Panasonic UB820-K, widely considered to be the best one without spending a thousand bucks.
Overall though, as much as I want blu-ray to be a thing, the market is just dire. I tried to get into it and it’s frustrating.
New release titles often skip blu-ray entirely, especially for demographics that don’t care for the format like kids content. Either that or new titles will skip 4K so you’ll be paying $25 for 1080p when $10 will get you 4K digital. Then when you redeem the movies anywhere code, you don’t get 4K because your blu-ray is only 1080p.
I thought it would be cool to get into some classic 4K upscale cinephile releases like Lawrence of Arabia but it turns out that I can buy the 4K version on Apple TV for like $5 where getting your hands on the disc is like a hundred bucks.
I certainly appreciate the disc releases from outlets like Criterion but $40+ for a movie seems so hard to justify.
The 4K experience on providers like Apple is so excellent, the benefits of blu-ray are so minimal if any at all.
Another random example, my Studio Ghibli transfers on blu-ray are clearly worse quality than HBO Max, and there are no 4K blu-rays except for The Boy and the Heron. There is no motivation to re-do any disc releases of those movies on 4K UHD because nobody is going to buy them.
My feeling is that despite the licensing pitfalls of digital ownership, I’ve concluded that it just makes more sense compared to physical media. Don’t bother with blu-rays. If a license gets revoked from me in the future I’ll just shrug my shoulders and pirate the title.
On the other hand, digital DRMed releases will only get you 720p on Linux while MakeMKV with 4K Blu-Rays works just fine. And besides, who would want to watch new releases these days. Also keep in mind that 4K is not the same as 4K - bandwidth matters a lot and streaming providers tend to cheap out there.
It's definitely pricey though but with some patience you can grab even 4K releases at $20-30 and then you'll have that movie (and that specific version of that movie) for as long as you want and not just for however long the streaming service/contracts stay up.
But you can also solve it by just going the piracy route instead of ripping blu-rays.
> And besides, who would want to watch new releases these days.
Most people. I’m not going to just watch the same content over and over.
> Also keep in mind that 4K is not the same as 4K - bandwidth matters a lot and streaming providers tend to cheap out there.
Honestly, not anymore, not in any way my eyes can detect. Apple TV’s 4K content is given plenty of bandwidth. Vincent from HDTVtest did a comparison and the results are basically identical to 4K Blu-ray. And that’s with a fraction of the hardware cost, basically $0-99 on a streaming box versus a $400 player and a $25-40 disc.
Like I said in my Ghibli example, streaming bandwidth sounds bad in theory but in practice when a movie isn’t even available in 4K on disc and the streaming transfer looks better, streaming is obviously the best way to watch.
The ultimate issue is that there’s no money being invested in a nearly dead format.
As an analogy, I’d really like a minivan or a station wagon instead of an SUV. But if I buy a Volvo V60 or a Honda Odyssey I’m buying a car that hasn’t been redesigned in close to a decade because they’re not popular/profitable enough. In contrast, if I go buy a three row SUV like a Kia Telluride, I’m getting the best 3 row vehicle on the market. This is exactly the predicament the blu-ray market is in. I don’t really want a three row SUV but my hands are tied, I’m not going to buy an inferior vehicle.
For example, Disney isn’t even going to produce their own discs anymore, they’re outsourcing it to Sony. I can’t imagine the quality will be optimal going forward. They are giving the blu-ray market the cable television treatment: they’re making money on the last holdouts and investing nothing into it.
Oh and, enjoy the ride. It's a good one.
I wish they'd do a corrected bluray release with even a bit more effort... when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.
Maybe AI upscale to 4k, with training data for newer ship models, actor photos, etc then reducing back to 1080p for a final BluRay set. Probably enough people that would do this as a passion project if the studio would let them.
Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)
If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.
Almost. Come S4 they got concerned the show would be canceled before finishing the story, so they dropped all the secondary plots from S4 and S5 and compressed the main plots from S4 and S5 into just S4. Then they got renewed and quickly wrote a new S4 finale using S5 budget, postponed the series finale a year to S5, and reworked all the dropped secondary plots into S5.
Personally I think this worked really well, made S4 much more fast-paced and S5 feels more like a "the world keeps turning" extended epilogue.
It's really unfortunate that so many bad things happened to this show since it being still great overall despite them suggests it could have been one of a kind if things had gone better.
Those were not upscales.
The HBO Max release was 1080p with some wife screen usage... The extra pixels came from somewhere.
I'm not gonna say "it's not worse it's just different", coz TBH... It's worse lol. If modern acting was a rare minority style of practice I would seek it out voraciously. But, for the variety I do think it's fun to watch old stuff too!
Can you elaborate on this point? I think I agree with you, I just don't know why.
From what I understand, although people still talk about it as if it's a specialised or niche thing, it's actually basically just how acting is done nowadays (at least for films and in the west).
When I first started watching, season 1 with its gratuitous 90s CGI, the dramatic musical cues, and Michael O'Hares rather stiff, wooden demeanor reminded me a lot of those live action cut scenes that some early CD-ROM games had. I remember thinking at first, that this is probably the kind of thing the local basement theater troupe would pull off if they were suddenly told to make a TV show.
> It's still one of my all time favorite shows.
Fully agree. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd highly recommend as well.
I don't think image quality really is an important thing to enjoy old movies / series as long as the story is good.
- Hey, have you watched that Game of Thrones S1723E1122?
- Nope, I'm not paying until they upscale it to 64K!
IME this becomes quite jarring if you're watching on a modern high-res screen - even something like a quarter-sized browser window or PIP on a 4K monitor - with other much sharper content visible nearby. If you're watching either full-screen or in a smaller window but without other more detailed visuals around it then personally I find it less jarring and I can still become immersed if the material itself is good. It's still noticeable if you're used to watching HD or 4K content on other devices but I'd rather watch something good in SD than not watch it. The same goes for old shows that were only made in SD originally.
In other words, immersion seems to be more important than precision/resolution.
I enjoy the story, but the FX are IMO literally worse than pre-60s serial Sci-fi content. The blurry, low res CGI just detracts from the show today. I'm not asking for a reboot or change of the material marathon... Just the special effects and CGI to what it should have been at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Hare
His treatments were only partially successful. He reappeared in a cameo appearance early in season two ("The Coming of Shadows") and returned in season three for a two-part episode ("War Without End") which closed his character's story arc. At that time, Straczynski promised O'Hare to keep his condition secret "to my grave". O'Hare told him to instead "keep the secret to my grave", arguing that fans deserved to eventually learn the real reason for his departure, and that his experience could raise awareness and understanding for people with mental illness. He made no further appearances on Babylon 5 but continued to support the show and appeared at conventions and signing events until his retirement from public appearances in 2000.
On September 28, 2012, Straczynski posted that O'Hare had had a heart attack in New York City five days earlier and had remained in a coma until his death that day.[48] Eight months later, Straczynski revealed the circumstances of O'Hare's departure from Babylon 5 at a presentation about the series at the Phoenix Comicon.
It is of profound significance.
https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Alcoholism-Willpower-Abstinence-...
I know that some of them, indeed, died due to substance abuse issues; I don't know the circumstances of all of them. They will all be greatly missed.
Too many others of the main cast had died relatively young, of "natural causes" though. Richard Biggs, Mira Furlan and Stephen Furst stand out.
My impression is that there's not much causation from being an actor to mental fragility. It's the other way around; the pool of people who make good actors is already prone to mental fragility before they become actors.
I will upvote you now.
Edit: Vir waves.
If you believe the actors on the DVD alternate commentary tracks, a Wurlitzer!
Unless they're a young person hearing about this show for the first time, here.
It's wildly unkind to suggest that just because you know the big plot twists, everyone else should as well.
But let's suppose I *did* care about spoilers. I shouldn't be expecting everyone to walk on eggshells when they're discussing Gunsmoke or Happy Days.
B5 is known for the fact JMS had a full five year arch planned from the start (due to O'Hare's unfortunate state of mind he was forced to pivot with Boxleitner as well as season 4-5 got gutted for other reasons) but I can't recall if DS9 had similar aspirations from the get go or if they eased into it as the story progressed. For comparison: was the Dominion War in the cards all the way from episode 1 or did it come into play later?
What I find fascinating is that JMS wrote in all kinds of escape hatches for if major characters left and of course, there's the time travelling shenanigans that are shown in season 1, but not resolved to much later which show just how planned out it was. Of course his 5 season arc was tied up in 4 seasons when the studios threatened to cancel the 5th season, and then when they changed their mind, it led to a somewhat tacked on season 5 as the main story had been resolved.
It seems like a common factor of having a static space stations that lends itself well to story arcs. The other Treks were based on exploration, so they make sense to reset each episode as they travel to a new region.
I think it's more a industry trends thing - Voyager also had longer story arcs as did many other sci-fi series released after B5.
It's getting old but nostalgia kicks in as soon as I see a Vorlon ship
If anything I found the later seasons more disappointing than 1 and 2 as smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward, which still feels rushed somehow.
With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of production JMS was told there would be no S5 after all, so he put all of S4 and S5 into S4 ... but then there was an S5 after all!
This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.
In the end, season 5 was given the go-ahead, and so now season 4 seems rushed needlessly.
(History repeating itself, and Babylon 5 being cursed to ironic timing, the WB Network and UPN eventually remerged to become The CW. A Babylon 5 reboot project development was started at The CW this decade, just before WB Discovery decided to get out of the broadcast TV business and start a fresh divorce at The CW somewhat resembling the PTEN divorce.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Entertainment_Netwo...
An example not quite off the top of my head is as early as Episode 2 "Soul Hunter". It's a goofy plot full of weird pseudo-scientific mysticism with a "special guest of the week" who basically never returns (excluding books and movies), so in most shows meets several definitions of skippable, but this episode also introduces Dr. Franklin, has several key Sinclair and Garibaldi moments, provides background lore for the Minbari and foreshadows certain Minbari things to come.
That's just the second episode of the season. (Truly a rough start for some.)
Another common example is "TKO". It's a silly boxing match episode, much of it doesn't do much for the series except set up some of Garibaldi's goofier side and maybe foreshadowing Garibaldi's flaws. But it's also the Ivanova confronts grief and her heritage episode, a key part of Ivanova's arc.
It's probably now number 2 for me behind DS9. I watched it again a few month later to catch all the foreshadowing I missed the first time. You are spot on that season 1 is a slow burn that ramps up to the amazing seasons 3 and 4. Best part, it has a clean conclusion without any sequel bait nonsense.
Londo and Gkar are two of the best characters in Sci-Fi and their relationship is brilliant.
It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.
The series creator and chief writer, J. Michael Straczynski was explicit about that: The Earth Government story arc is lifted straight from the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.
A significant amount of which we're seeing rebranded as MAGA in the US and other far-right movements elsewhere.
A good example would be the "anti-alien" frenzy in Babylon 5 as compared with the far-right's ridiculous tropes about the undocumented in the US.
There are a bunch more like Trump's obsession with personal loyalty and lack of any empathy is quite similar to Babylon 5's President Clarke.
As I mentioned, that story arc is based upon the fascist regimes of the '30s and '40s, they even have a "Neville Chamberlain"[0] analog[1] who loudly proclaims "Finally, we will at last know 'peace in our time'."
The biggest difference is that in the Babylon 5 universe, the fascist scum are much more competent than those IRL today.
There's lots more, and I'll echo the plaints of others here that Season 1 is uneven and appears meandering, but many of the plot points brought up in Season 1 end up paying off much later in the series.
I heartily recommend watching the series, not just for the parallels with some of our current circumstance, but because it's a good story with the entire five season story arc fleshed out from the beginning, with good character development and character driven story lines.
It was also the first live-action Sci-Fi series that made use of CGI for the space scenes, which was both very cool, but was also limited compared to today's SFX given that 30 second segments could take hours to render on the Unix workstations of the mid 1990s.
Is it perfect, no. But it's worth the effort to watch it IMNSHO.
DS9 has some wonderful episodes and fantastic characters, but the overall plot was weak. The world building was plot driven while in B5 it is vice versa and it made all the difference for me.
I think both have their appeal, but it's easier to timebox the enjoyment of a play. It's also easier to discuss, or think about.
DS9 very quickly brought in the Defiant so that its characters could escape the station and go on more traditional Star Trek adventures. The station was home base, but the crew got out a lot. It typically felt like the station was well under control, with only minor differences between it and a star-fleet vessel. (Toss Quark and Garak out an airlock and you'd pretty much have a standard starship.)
B5 did send its characters on excursions, but they were fewer and far between. The station was not a safe home base. It was a bigger and wilder place than DS9 ever was. It always felt like some crisis or another was ready to spiral out of control and the staff generally needed all hands on deck to deal with whatever was happening. DS9 had the occasional crowd scene, but B5 had bigger crowds (in record shattering amounts of alien makeup) every episode. DS9 felt like a sleepy frontier fort. B5 felt like a city.
Then there's the continuity. There just wasn't a lot of continuity in anything other than soap operas in the mid 90's. TNG occasionally had multi-part episodes and sometimes referenced earlier episodes, but it was always careful to explain things so you could jump in anywhere and not be lost. DS9 was initially episodic, but had some larger arcs in later seasons, perhaps as a response to what B5 was doing. B5 broke the mold. The first season seemed episodic at first glance, but each episode advanced the central story-line. You could jump into Season 1 at any point and be a little confused, but figure things out. That swiftly changed. Later seasons became completely continuous, and frequently relied on bits of story that happened in earlier seasons without any kind of hand-holding. This caused big problems that probably prevented B5 from being as well received as it should have been.
This is for the young whippersnappers out there who grew up with the internet, streaming, and home video: Today, if you decide to jump into a show, you can call up every episode on demand. If it's not on a streaming service, it's on DVD or VHS. Failing that, there's always piracy. When B5 came out, it was not a given that a TV series would be released on VHS or DVD. The internet was there, but it wasn't yet up to distributing video. There was no such thing as streaming. The era of Netflix mailing you physical discs was years in the future. If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to tune in when it was broadcast. It was, essentially, live TV.
The kicker is that most broadcasters were utterly irresponsible in how they aired shows. Episodes would frequently be pre-empted or aired out of order. Broadcasters were used to purely episodic content. Who cared if people saw episode 5 before episode 2, or missed episode 3 until it got reran the following year? This royally fubar'd people's ability to follow B5. My personal memory of B5 when it first aired was fragmentary and frustrating. I'd watch an episode and really enjoy it, try to tune in next week only for it to be pre-empted by golf, and then be lost when an episode from much later in the season was aired the week after that. It wasn't until B5 came out on DVD (years later) that I was finally able to watch the show in order and finally appreciate how special it was.
Continuity between episodes is normal now. Everyone is used to shows that play out as one long narrative instead of hitting the reset button every week. B5 blazed the trail for them before TV distribution was really ready for continuity. There are a lot of warts to overlook. CG was in its infancy back then. DS9 was still using physical models in its first few seasons. B5 looks like it came out of somebody's Amiga because it literally came out of somebody's Amiga. There probably won't ever be a quality up-scaling of the special effects because a lot of the files from that Amiga were lost. The set design is clever, but stagy. The budget of B5 doesn't even add up to half a shoestring by modern standards for a show with 10 episodes a season, and B5 had 22 episodes a season! The story is so grand and detailed that it still feels rushed at times. (They thought the show would be cancelled at the end of S4, so they crammed most of S5's plot into S4. The result is fantastically dense and frenetic!)
In the end, DS9 was a fantastic show but felt a lot like the station featured in it. It was always well under control and its creators got everything they needed to deliver a compelling show. They knew how far to reach and chose their battles wisely. B5 feels like a wild and overreaching fever dream by comparison. It nearly span out of control, much like its titular station was always threatening to. If they decided to re-make B5 today, they'd probably simplify it immensely. It's story still seems too ambitious for a single TV series to tell. If you can get past the warts, B5 is still a unique and rewarding series to experience. Nothing quite like it has come along since.
It actually feels more like most shows make things up along the way for each episode or at least each season, always trying to one up previous universe-shattering changes in order to give the audience their dopamine hit. While the continuity was well done in B5 it's been mostly a disaster for the industry afterwards.
I doubt that the changelings and the dominion where planned from the beginning.
I felt like it was a bit too much of the social stuff, maybe because it plays mostly on a station instead of an exploration vessel, but I guess that is exactly what people like about it. The characters and their development and so on. I liked the Garak character for example, but disliked Zisko being some chosen one for the wormhole gods or something. I much prefer Data, or Picard or most of their crew, even if they don't develop as much.
Well, to each their own, they are all good series to watch.
TNG is a classic, with the classic crew and after the first hiccups is some of the best scifi of all time. Absolutely great actors and amazing writing.
DS9 is the weird one. I do really enjoy the trajectory of many of its characters: Sisko, Odo, Bashir, Dax (one of my favorite characters in all ST), O'Brien, Quark, Kira, Worf, Dukat, Garak, Damar... The list of great characters in DS9 is the best part of this series. The last season was a definite letdown for me though, and I didn't like the ending at all.
Voyager was the surprising one. I expected a lesser series after reading the old discussion about the three Treks of the 90's. But wow. It's banger episodes right from the start, one of the most badass captains in all of Trek and in the fourth season arrives my favorite scifi character: Seven of Nine. There's a lot of great episodes here, and some filler. I didn't like how some characters never went anywhere. But there is more good here than mediocre. As a series I like it more than DS9, I just wished the other characters were up to the writing of Janeway, Seven and Doctor.
I won't claim my taste is universal: it's just something to be aware of.
Stargate Atlantis: Maybe better than average. On rewatch it's tended to feel bland somehow. Began with SG-1 S8 and ran concurrently with some crossovers (Atlantis premiere happens immediately after SG-1 S8 premiere and contains minor spoilers for it).
Stargate Universe: Nope. Had potential it very much did not live up to. Set years after the first two ended.
Stargate Infinity (cartoon): No way. Additionally was made before SG-1 got very far and has many incorrect guesses about how it would have developed, set decades into the future.
I think that's probably why a lot of people don't like it, the bad outweighs the good for them.
* Before some recent entries at least. Yikes.
Luckily Lower Decks was good, Picard had some good moments and there were a few good episodes in Strange New Worlds too, even though that series didn't really excite me anymore in its latest season.
Voyager's bad episodes are still better than most of the scifi I've watched in the recent years. They are cringe, but in a funny way.
And no, I'm not sorry for reminding anyone that this episode exists.
Because clearly none of the other series focused on social stuff, except...
TOS, which featured an interracial cast (and kiss) in the 1960s, where nearly every episode was thinly-veiled commentary on communism, where they visited a literal Nazi planet, where they had a black woman as a bridge officer (in the 1960s)...
TNG, which went into deep moral arcs, looked into military tribunals, witch hunts, had entire movies about mindless bloodlust and environmentalism/colonianism, and so much more...
VOY which.....honestly, if you don't get the point by now I'm not going to spend more time listing examples.
Star Trek was BORN "woke" and has always been there, and anyone who claims otherwise was never really paying attention. Star Trek EXISTS because Gene Roddenberry put social commentary into his show "The Lieutenant" which was too controversial for the actual US Military so he had to make a new show set in the future to make all the same points but with less oversight from crusty generals.
PS: Did you forget TOS in your lists or leave it out intentionally? IMO it focuses on doing one mostly self contained short story per episode even better than TNG.
Also I read JMS' autobiography [1] which added enlightening context
[1] J. Michael Straczynski, Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood
(Voyager is entirely optional but a much welcome addition that happens concurrently at later seasons; I would recommend it on its own anyway.)
For all these shows, let them grow on you, the first season of each can be a bit awkward but then things start to fall into place, both in terms of characters/lore/setting/story/world building as well as actors themselves getting the hang of characters.
And yes there are absolute duds of episodes, but don't let that make you miss the absolutely fantastic ones.
When the background has been told elsewhere, it's a legitimate challenge to the unprepared viewer's mind. But when it's made up on the spot, it's an arbitrary riddle. I know some viewers love that kind of stuff (e.g. everybody who made it through Lost I guess?), but to me that just feels annoying. If you want me to apply myself to the riddle, make it part of the story (like in a whodunnit), or don't keep me guessing.
But when it's organically grown background complexity from another story, I'm perfectly fine with it. Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck: he just pops up later with atomics, the "how" is not part of the movie adaptation. And neither is speculating about it. It's just an obvious indication that yes, there's more happening in this universe than the part squeezed into anamorphic cinemascope.
That being said, yes, watching TNG after DS9 wouldn't work well at all. It's hard enough watching early episodes after late episodes, because even the "adventure of the week" episodes have been told very differently later, but the universe is too much the same to really disconnect.
Then you have Obrian's history with the Cardassians - quite significant for his new assignment and without this context the character feels like a fake tough guy. The acting and directing was brilliant, because we could feel the restrain, but without understanding this it comes off cocky. It's like watching Travolta's character dance poorly in Pulp Fiction - if you didn't know who Travolta was, the scene comes off poorly acted. Or Robin Williams playing a gay man playing straight. Some background of the character is important to actually enjoy the acting mastery that we are witnessing.
There are occasional TNG references but they are not important to the plot.
TNG was far more thought provoking and one could ponder each episode - I'm still pondering some. Other than Sisko's decisions in the latter seasons, what years-to-ponder dilemmas were explored in DS9?
I actually felt that Sisko became a villian at some point, I wish that DS9 would have explored that.
It’s hard for me to be entirely unbiased myself, as I watched the the original series (TOS) films without watching much of the OG series itself, and then watched TNG when it was airing, so I already had the context to watch DS9.
All of that is to say, I don’t think you necessarily need to watch TNG to appreciate DS9. The shows are mostly standalone and self contained. Also, I don’t think this is much of a spoiler, as the double episode premiere of DS9 pretty much includes all of what I’ve said above, in some form or fashion, with the exception of the introduction of some character crossovers of the TNG cast. I think it’s nice to know where those characters came from and what they went through prior to DS9, as the two shows were running concurrently, but neither show is written in such a way that you’ll feel lost if you don’t watch TNG first, though others may disagree.
TOS and TNG explain the Federation utopian universe, the ongoing conflicts and races, the moral dilemmas of the captains... I feel that starting with DS9 might get you miss the point a bit.
I would say to at least try to watch a curated selection of TNG episodes.
Babylon 5 explores some aspects deeply which were just glanced over in DS9 and that makes it an amazing show as well.
Watch a handful of classic trek to get the idea. Balance of Terror, city on the Edge of Forever, maybe Mirror Mirror or Trouble with Tribbles. They will seem very cliched.
Start TNG in the third season and just focus on the best episodes, the ones that are 8s or 9s on IMDB. Be sure to see The Best of Both Worlds I and I, the original season finale climax.
Skip a lot of the first season of DS9. Low IMDb will tell you which ones. But watch almost all of the later seasons.
Then play Star Trek Attack Wing!
Season 1: Ferengi
Season 4: Trill, Cardassians
Season 5: Bajorans
Also, Chief O'Brien and his wife Keiko who were recurring minor characters in TNG have more important roles in DS9.
But all the star trek series are self contained enough that you don't really need to have seen the previous ones.
And how is DS9 a soap opera? I associate soap operas with sh!t acting and not really exploring deeper philosophical topics.
DS9 had amazing actors, character development and story lines. Take Garak for example, amazing character.
That said, DS9 is its own thing, just with B5 "roots".
That said, two people have the same idea all the time. B5 really pioneered the idea of a show with a multi season arc that was planned up front. In a time where shows more or less reset continuity after every episode. Shows like Lost pretended they knew where they were going but really made it up as they went along.
Deep Space Nine had a similar multi season arc, which is why I think the poster said soap opera.
There were a few news articles about that in various entertainment publications.
I sure loved it, at least on my crappy 21" tv
Still, there are things like the starfield visible from C&C’s observation window never rotating because it was apparently too expensive to greenscreen it (presumably an actual physical rotating backdrop was also not feasible for whatever reason). On the other hand, I think B5 was the first TV series to use greenscreening to create large interior spaces like ship hangars.
Babylon 5 early and very enthusiastic use of CGI meant that the scope of what it could see was ridiculously bigger without reusing clips as much as some other places did.
Eventually, somebody curated a couple of season 1 episodes and told me to skip ahead to season 2. By the time it got to season 4, I felt it had risen to the level of "ok".
I never found any of the characters compelling, despite some game performances. And I never found the plot all that interesting, either, though I can see why others might find it so.
My suggestion is that had you endured S1 fully, you might have felt S4 had risen to a higher level than "ok". That's not to say I begrudge you skipping through S1 ... I'd probably have done the same if I'd come across it in recent years as opposed to however many years ago it was.
I'm not trying to change your mind really, but yeah - I think the value that you hear about in the characters and plot arise from the many small nuances which build up slowly over time.
Having to suffer through two mediocre seasons is a dealbreaker in 2026 to be honest.
Plus, many reactors now have liked season 1 a lot better than when it initially aired.
Unfortunately, there's some very important episodes that set up major plot arcs that you don't get to appreciate until later on, so maybe it's worth just watching the best episodes of season 1 if you're impatient. Season 2 is better than mediocre.
"The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22. Currently available are episodes 1, 3, and 4, (Thursdays), and assorted five-minute clips. I could not find them bundled in a playlist here.
The episodes are in broadcast order. "Midnight on the Firing Line", a missing episode, is listed as Episode 1 in Wikipedia, because "The Gathering" was a pilot.
Steve Grimm's "Lurker's Guide" is still online since 33 years, and updated with 2023's releases: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html
The 16:9 cropped and upscaled version (of the TNT cut) unfortunately, with the same excessive noise reduction and sharpening that previous releases of that version had. Baffling why they keep using this version when even the old DVD release has better quality.
The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.
Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)
Then, is there a version somewhere with original uncropped 16:9 live action and 4:3 CGI? I can tolerate side bars. To me, seeing the complete video frame is more important than a consistent frame format.
So yeah the 16:9 crop we did get in the 90s (on TNT on cable and then on DVD) was cropped further from the 4:3 crop, but it mostly worked because the previous framing for the "full" Super 35 16:9 crop allowed for it.
Reviewing the helpful Wikipedia diagrams, the 4:3 crop actually uses more overall "volume" of the Super 35 frame than the best 16:9 crop, so I think I appreciate the 4:3 version we have a bit better.
I also found this useful visual comparison of the two crops that we have today: https://www.engadget.com/babylon-5-original-4-3-ratio-video-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35
[1] https://www.b5tv.com/threads/explain-the-widescreen-issue-to...
Only for the pilot (The Gathering), the rest seem to be from the 4:3 remaster which is probably the best version - so both same as the Blu Ray and streaming versions.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. What's wrong with the quality difference?
The quality jump from 480p to 4K is a big one.
https://www.insidehook.com/television/seinfeld-netflix-aspec...
There is a choice of Standard Defintion and High Definition. Usually that only means a change in resolution, not different conversions.
When I first returned to it rewatching B5 a couple of years ago, I actaully found it difficult to navigate. It took me a while to realise that my brain was parsing the block of navigation buttons at the centre top of the screen as a banner ad and filtering it out!
I will always have a special place for Babylon 5. One time I was watching it with my father who lived under a dictatorship, watched a scene with Mr Morden and Lando, immediately said "this kind of talk is meant to put people against other people". He didn't care much for the extraterrestrial part of the show but was very interested in portrayal of authoritarianism.
No other TV show has so greatly exceeded my expectations.
In the Expanse, you do not.
In B5 the only thing close to ineffable alien were the ones that went beyond the rim. Most of the day-to-day aliens were stand-ins for human nations and cultures.
The OPA and Mars were effectively the day-to-day aliens for the Expanse. The gate-builders were the ineffable aliens.
In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginning, instead of completely making it up on the fly like so many other shows. Subtle things which might seem inconsequential, appearing in the very first season, can foreshadow events happening seasons later. This makes it, at least for me, much more coherent and enjoyable to watch, and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today).
I don't know. I loved Babylon 5 but I also found it kind of corny. And then Crusade was just a D&D campaign in space. The ship was even called the Excalibur FFS. I feel like "full creative freedom" would ruin it the way it did with George Lucas and Star Wars.
>and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today.
What else can you do when you don't know if you're getting renewed? You can't push the conclusions to your storylines forward into seasons you might never even have to resolve them.
I think at this point JMS is trying to keep a diverse income and still do comics as well as TV projects. Even during Sense8, with its Netflix-sized budget, he had comics irons in the fire.
but i just see that he was approached to direct star trek: enterprise. star trek by straczynski is something i'd really love to see.
There has been discussion about a reboot over the years, with JMS throwing some cold water[0] (at least for now) on the possibility in January 2026.
There's sort of a "continuation" with Babylon 5: The Road Home[1] from 2023.
There's also Crusade[2] which only ended up with a dozen or so episodes, although JMS had a multi-year story arc planned.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/j-michael-straczynski-is-being-...
He had this idea around 2004 of rebooting Star Trek: https://web.archive.org/web/20060628131520/http://bztv.typep...
And on a few occasions he also said he'd try steering Doctor Who
Needless to say we’re all side-eyeing each other as said friends all share the same feedback: “This is pretty good, but it feels kind of cheesy too, like Star Trek TNG, but also weirdly…prescient?”
And we just kind of nod, because we know what vibes they’re picking up on, and boy oh boy are they in for a surprise at just how prescient it is.
Incidentally, we have the DVD and the BD box sets, and the BD is such a step up that it’s worth the purchase to own it forever. Go give JMS your money.
Obviously there was no social media at the time, and I would bet that was the first time a U.S. TV show’s creator was communicating directly with fans via the Internet.
(Update: more that I reflect on it, I think he was engaging with the community even while shopping the show around, but that was before my participation.)
Growing up Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 were syndicated one after another in the middle of the night. It was a wonderful tradition staying up all night to watch both.
as always: imho. (!)
ah ... babylon 5 :))
this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties.
it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time:
* telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons
* 2 parallel story-lines within episodes
* causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the toilet - you may laugh, but 30+ years ago, for example in various startrek spinoffs - tng, ds9, voyager - nobody went to the toilet ... ever!!
don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of startrek too ;))
* despite their budget decent CGI for the time
if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom", which ran on the amiga hardware-platform at first, for later seasons they moved to PC hardware...
just if you wonder about the quality of the CGI ... this was some 680x0 computer running at something like 16 or 32 MHz (!) with a few MB (!) of memory.
not a scifi "blockbuster" utilizing multimillion us$ SGI clusters like ILM productions of the era did!
absolutely recommended:
"the lurker's guide to babylon 5"
* http://midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
just my 0.02€
[1]https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue166/68_The_makin...
" Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.
P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.
Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.
Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI)."[0]
Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...
Never did get into Babylon 5, but SeaQuest, for all its campiness, was my jam briefly in my childhood.
I know if I stick with it, it will probably get good (doctor who was like this for me) but it's a huge slog.
I feel Star Trek TNG lucked out with all the choices they made. The designs and effects generally hold up.
The LCAR interface still looks modern and it's way better than the babylon 5 CRT screens.
But for space scenes, IMO the later episodes of B5 were amazing and beautiful. They just need a modern render and to turn down the saturation. TNG era ships and camera framing were much more boring, partly due to the smaller story.
I do know they used CRTs in TNG but not often. Most of the LCARS stuff was just literally backlit plastic panels. Because of that it's much less jarring whereas babylon 5 I think the CRT screens were used everywhere.
The common criticisms are largely true: it does start slow with some weak episodes in season 1, some of the acting is a bit wooden, the CGI hasn’t aged well, season 5 is slightly anti-climactic because they largely wrapped up the main plot arc in season 4 in case the final season didn’t happen.
On the other hand, it had an epic storyline that spanned not just episodes but multiple seasons in a way that no-one had really tried in sci-fi before. That storyline made sense and weaves in and out of the individual episodes because it was planned out in advance. The world-building and development of different cultures and how they relate is generally strong.
Against that over-arching backdrop, it also had a lot of good individual episodes. They had genuine character development. They explored social and moral issues as well as any show of that period. They varied from diplomatic and political settings to the adventure of deep space exploration to almost pure action episodes. They varied in scale too, from relatable stories about a single individual, to stories about a whole planet or culture, right up to the fate of the known universe.
Much of the acting criticism is directed at the main leader characters, but I’ve always thought this is slightly unfair, because the script often relies on those characters to carry the plot and provide much of the exposition and those tend to be the more formulaic parts. The same show also features some of the best acting and main character arcs in TV sci-fi, with the relationship between Londo Mollari (played by Peter Jurasik) and G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas) being one of the great double acts. There were many good moments from the rest of the ensemble cast too, from the doctor wrestling with his conscience to a certain wave. And then there were some great supporting/recurring roles, from the light relief of Zathras (and Zathras, Zathras, Zathras, Zathras and Zathras, of course) to the much more serious Bester (arguably Walter Koenig’s finest work).
If you haven’t watched B5 and you’re a fan of epic space sci-fi, I highly recommend it even with its flaws. The first season is a slow burner (although it also has a lot of subtle set-up that you won’t appreciate until much later) but it picks up. If you’re the type of viewer who can’t stand filler episodes, there used to be some relatively spoiler-free guides to which early episodes you really need to watch and which you can skip, so you could look for one of those. Don’t watch In The Beginning first, though; it’s a prequel TV movie that has lots of spoilers about the main story that you’re not supposed to know yet when you watch the early series.
I was very surprised how many subjects were covered that had bearing to todays world. The US in particular, if you take the US as the earth government in the show. A proxy president, manipulated by the shadows. Come one.
And all the psy ops? Very much a lot of the same issues come up in the surveillance state.
And manipulating the press. This show really covered a lot of things happening today.
If only we had a Sheridan today to fight for our rights.
TNG was the hopeful future - something an idealist would like to imagine society could achieve.
Babylon 5 was the realistic future - where fascism and racism are issues still prevalent in society, but largely left unaddressed.
If you ask me to pick between them I'd have to go with Babylon 5 but only because of the writing. There were so many times that JMS foreshadowed events literal years in the future on the show and it was such a huge payoff as a fan.
Star Trek just wasn't structured as a show in a way that can compete with that level of world building that was all interwoven in the same kind of way.
When people asked me what I preferred, "Star Wars or Star Trek?", I've always responded with "Babylon 5".
B5 spends most of the series saying that sort of thing.
B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.
TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.
Babylon 5 still lords over all of them.
Both TNG and B5 have significant cultural value, but for different reasons. More people should watch them.
That said, B5 absolutely does wear its fantasy pretensions on its sleeve, and I think you're correct about the "forward looking" versus "backwards looking" themes. The technomages are wizards with robes and mystical incantations and everything - it's explained away as "technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic" but they wouldn't be out of place in any D&D setting. Mystical prophecies, gods, demons, "light vs. dark" motifs, the Minbari being so elf-coded it's ridiculous, the Great Man heroic ideal, sacred tomes, eldritch ruins, crystals crystals crystals. All the trappings are there. Crusade went even further in this regard. The hero ship in Crusade is named the Excalibur ffs.
>TNG isn't actually about science
I agree with your point that Star Trek is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but Star Trek -- at least TOS and TNG -- was very good at creating positive feelings about scientific and technological progress.
Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they decide the goodness or badness of almost everything that happens. Jesus and dismantling capitalism and other forms of oppression are two other examples.
In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
(TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.)
That's fair. Tons of scientists and engineers got into their fields because they were inspired by Star Trek.
>TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.
Yes. It isn't that potent, though, because it depends on a post-scarcity economy of free energy, FTL and magic boxes that make anything out of nothing. It also assumes humans will just "evolve beyond" their basic nature, bigotry, vice and desire for hierarchies of power.
But for communism (or weakly, socialism) to work in the real world it has to deal with scarcity and human desire.
What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse? Both have been done, but I've never heard of one actually being the centerpiece and the namesake of a series. There's also the issue of "porting" B4 into such a setting.
Having a series of "prototype" worlds or prototype floating islands would likely make the series overly contrived.
Imagine a typical fantasy setting in which humans live amongst other races - elves, dwarves, goblins and the like (but substitute them for aliens, the archetypes are mostly the same) Humans are still venturing out into the greater world and were nearly being wiped out in a war with the elves (Minbari) when their intitial meeting went poorly. Humans create a city called Babylon where representatives of various races could come together to talk, trade and interact peacefully at the outer boundaries of what humans knew to be "the world," near the countries of wild magic where eldritch and ancient things were known to dwell, which even the older races fear to speak of.
The fourth Babylon vanished without a trace. Humans have barely begun to master even the simplest of magics but this is far beyond their understanding, and the elves, who always seem to know more than they say, say nothing. But, humans being perhaps too stupid or prideful to know when to quit, simply built it again, and tried again.
But there are prophecies of an ancient enemy called The Lords of Shadow which have slumbered deep underground for so long that they have become mere legend to all but the oldest races, if not forgotten altogether. A profane force of the deepest and darkest magics which was beaten back by an alliance of older races and the Lords of Light, the divine high elf mages who still watch over the younger races and regard humans with bemusement.
Or they seem to. It's hard to tell with them. Their faces are always obscured by masks, and everything they say is a riddle.
The prophecies say the time is drawing near for the Lords of Shadow to awaken again, and the dark magic to return... and strangely enough, within this city where humans, elves, dwarves, angels and devils all walk amongst one another, the key to the fate of the world and the coming of the New Age may be this weak, naive, plucky race called humans, whose nature seems to stand between the darkness and the light, and in whom the Elves have taken a particular interest, for reason they refuse to reveal.
It really isn't that difficult. Not every element has to have a precise 1:1 match, so many of the themes and motifs are right out of fantasy. You have an ancient immortal named Lorien, a mysterious broker of dark wishes named Morden who serves the Shadows, a group of elite warriors called Rangers who trained under the Elves (Minbari) and fought in the last great war against Sauron-sorry The Shadows. The Technomages are literal space wizards.
You could do some Norse Mythology thing and say "hyperspace" is a magical form of travel between the "realms" of these various races, and have the story take place when humans have just discovered the magic that allows access to the world tree. Add a Tower of Babel analogy and say the city of Babylon already existed and was already a place where different races commingled because it's where the portal was, making it both an international and interdimensional hub, but one day the old Tower of Babylon (which is where the portal is) just disappeared (probably those damned elves) but they built a new one.
Also, Babylon 5 later seasons are directly relevant to modern political developments and fascism.
A good example is Walter Koenig, to me he was amazing in B5, at times you hated and loved his character, even at the same time.
Absolutely. I just rewatched S02E05 ("The Long Dark") that had Dwight Schultz[0] as a guest star.
While watching it (and not for the first time), it occurred to me that in that one single episode on Babylon 5, Schultz showed us more humanity than in all the dozen or so Star Trek: TNG/Voyager episodes he was in as Lieutenant Barclay.
In both roles, Shultz's character is emotionally damaged, which causes problems for them, but in the Star Trek roles it's mostly played for comedy and the issues around his dysfunction aren't addressed at all.
As the B5 character, his PTSD (based on serious trauma as a soldier) made him a homeless substance abuser. The plot pushed him to examine and face the source of his trauma. While I wouldn't call it a "powerful" performance, the B5 character was much more believable and human than the ST character.
Same actor, incredibly different on-screen results.
As much as I love both shows, I wouldn't really recommend B5 to someone based on a love of TNG. I think it is more natural to recommend B5 to someone based on a minimial affinity for sci fi and a liking for Lord of the Rings, which will really tell you how different the two shows are.
TNG is wonderfully idealistic. It paints a picture of rising above your vices and being professional, civilized, and decent. It teaches you to work the problem, to examine the data, to think and consult and reflect and do better. I think it unrealistic -- I thought it unrealistic when I first encountered it -- but that doesn't matter. It's such a worthy ideal that it is worth encountering and remembering over and over again. As you go through life, you should remember that that is an option and strive for it.
B5 is wonderfully heroic. It is about dealing with a world of moral complexity and uncertainty, about trying to do good even when it is futile, about being a hero in the face of danger and risk and doubt. About how politics makes that difficult and keeps it in check and at any rate isn't a game you can check out of because it is the game.
Both shows encounter awful authoritarianism. One examines the law and philosophy in detail and gives a stirring verbal rebuke that carries the day. One starts a rebellion without certainty that it will be right or effective, but because under the circumstances, a good man feels compelled to do so. I think these are both extremely valuable takes on the topic, and I wouldn't want to have not seen either one. But I do have to say that at the end of the day, it is the second one I think of more as I go through life. For me the greater life lesson is not in taking the time to seek deeper wisdom, worthy as that is, but in having the bravery and faith to face danger, uncertainty, and tragedy.
But TNG had some amazing episodes, the top of which were are some of the best on television before or since. The Inner Light, the Drumhead, Yesterday's Enterprise, etc.
Whenever I get the itch to watch the whole thing again but I don't want to spend the time, I watch this (which is so thick with spoilers that you shouldn't watch it unless you've seen the series so many times that the Vorlons make sense now). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHpMAubwfQg
Recently bought and watched the Hornblower series. Amazing. Star Trek like atmosphere, exploration of new worlds etc (the show has less violence and a lot more good intentions than reality which i prefer in my times of relaxation), on a ship during the Napoleonic wars. Amazing. All the episodes of the miniseries are ~8 on imdb, deservedly so.
Yet you wouldn't know this excellent series existed based on what the platforms show.
Sharpe's another good one. I'm guessing there's bias against non-US made content but as someone not from the UK or the US wow what a blindspot!
or re-read the release as "B5 now available for download via YT-DLP for free!"
But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible to Google (eg naive residential IP or supplying a logged-in session cookie).
You need to upgrade your yt-dlp then. The newest versions still work without any session cookies or other such nonsense.
No need for all that. Just use yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) to download them as video files, and then just play the video files as you would any other video file.
Just tested yt-dlp on s1e1 to verify it worked, and it worked perfectly to download the video.
> ERROR: [youtube] Y235YEQstLo: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cook... for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-y... for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies
That's the latest version of yt-dlp, just downloaded. I tried from two different IPs, both actually also having signed-in Google sessions (so not even really trying to hide).
As always with the surveillance industry, your experience may vary. I'm sure there are workarounds - less-hassled IPs you can get access through, etc. The point is that going for the straightforward libre software solution lets you avoid playing any of those constantly-churning games to begin with. It's much nicer to use software systems that straightforwardly work in your interests, rather than having to trick adversarial systems.
The "AI" bot scare has really kicked the surveillance lockdown into overdrive. These days I get hassled merely trying to browse online stores. Like their goal is to advertise and sell things - yet they somehow care if it's "to a bot" ? rolls eyes.
That said, I found the DS9 upscaled you talked about on a torrent site now, and I'll give it a shot.
It was too ahead of its time and like many series from that period, the lack of computer power for special effects was showing.
This article sounds very AI generated though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaIZc2icdTU
The full series appears to actually be free to watch on Roku Channel.
https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/382d11be2c7e519b8105...
"Derek... Babylon 5's a big pile of shit"
"Get out!"
"Yaaaaaaay!"
Glad I'm not the only one who immediately thought of this.
S01E01 is "Midnight on the Firing Line"[0]