Oh and, enjoy the ride. It's a good one.
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.
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.
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.