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I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better. It's still one of my all time favorite shows.

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.

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> I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better.

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.

It’s partly that JMS favoured stage actors. Partly that he grabbed a number of his favourite actors from “Murder She Wrote”. Honestly brilliant, taking a couple of murderers of the week and giving them lead roles in a show.

There's more to this line of thought. The pilot movie isn't space opera so much as it is a murder mystery in space, and it's not the only episode like that. The security chief, Garibaldi, is a hard-bitten alcoholic detective from film noir (and there are plenty of film-noir-like visual elements: fans, shadows, run-down industrial sectors unimaginable in Star Trek), and he plays a much larger role solving crimes than do his counterparts in other science fiction shows. The writing style, a long arc that drops clues up front to pay off in revelations down the line, also leans heavily on mystery writing.

I think weird acting styles can be part of the joy of watching older media. Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s (?) and TV had a lot more variety in style (and quality lol) way up into the "modern era".

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!

> Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s

Can you elaborate on this point? I think I agree with you, I just don't know why.

I was hesitant to make any concrete claims in my comment since I don't know much about it but I _think_ this is basically about The Method i.e. Method Acting.

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).

Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

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)

The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.

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.

The "TKO" 'A' plot is silly but it has one of the most moving and memorable 'B' plots of the series!

Agreed! In fact it is kindof annoying. Every set of orderable elements has a worst element, therefore every show has some bad episodes. You want to tell new viewers to just skip those episodes if they want, but it’s practically impossible with B5. If you skip TKO because part of it is cliche then you also miss the essential key to understanding Ivanova.

Both were pretty meh IMO.

Season 2 had a similar writer split to season 1. It's season 3 where he took the reins entirely.

Tangent, but a cartoon I immensely enjoyed as a young kid popped up recently on my YouTube feed - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. That day I learned JMS wrote the story and it too featured an overarching story that backed the otherwise “episode of the week” format.

I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent forward from the past to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got.

That’s entirely possible. The story was deliberately quite fluid so that it could be adapted on the fly to unforseen changes in the cast.

> It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start.

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.

Can't say I agree - to me S4 felt quite rushed and seemed to be missing a lot more than just secondary plot developments. They go from "unstoppable enemy with the Vorlons being the only real hope" to "telepaths go brrr, also Vorlons are dicks now" in basically no time and then also jam in the battle for earth in the same season which felt really jarring. Then S5 feels like it's setting up the next big plot (the remaining shadow allies and specifically their hold over the centauri) only for that to end on a cliff hanger where nothing gets resolved even in the finale set in the far future.

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.

From what I've read, DS9 was heavily based on the Babylon 5 Bible which was pitched by JMS to Paramount years before. You might charitably say DS9 was the Guix to the Nix of Babylon 5: Same core ideas mapped onto different story universes. The earlier B5 Bible apparently even had a changeling security officer which evolved into the "changeling net" plot shown in the pilot episode.

Which is unfortunate as the writers can't seem to resist constantly making even bigger threats/drama with these longer story arcs messing up whole character arcs to just so they can shock the audience with big things happening. Limitations breed creativity and the limitation of having everything mostly go back to normal at the end of the episode is really underappreciated here.

Do we really need to upscale everything?

I don't think image quality really is an important thing to enjoy old movies / series as long as the story is good.

While I agree, there's plenty of people who refuse to watch anything that's not sharp. I think there's room for both to exist, just clearly labeled as "original" and "AI Upscaled to 4K"

Just wait, they'll soon demand that their favorite soap operas be AI-restarted to generate slop streams indefinitely, and will throw their hard-sat-on-a-sofa UBI credits at that.

- Hey, have you watched that Game of Thrones S1723E1122?

- Nope, I'm not paying until they upscale it to 64K!

Give me new Nothing, Forever in 480p and I'll be a happy man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever

If you watch the popular streaming services on a Linux PC then you'll be lucky to get more than 720p and some only seem to provide SD anyway - even for content from the HD era. This despite obviously having access to more detailed versions that they'll serve you for the same money if you watch on one of their preferred platforms.

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.

I am using a projector. Definitely not as sharp as a 4K and higher TV but it makes for a huge screen since I am covering almost all the wall. I find the result smooth and enjoyable regardless of the input resolution.

In other words, immersion seems to be more important than precision/resolution.

If you are watching in in a window / PIP then clearly you don't actually care that much about the looks since you are not even devoting your full attention to them.

There are some AI upscaled versions of Babylon 5, Star Trek Voyager etc. on torrent. Pretty decent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera

> when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.

Those were not upscales.

They definitely aren't 1/4 SD (DVD) though... The original series was SD, shot in SD for the early seasons with 1/4 res CGI.

The HBO Max release was 1080p with some wife screen usage... The extra pixels came from somewhere.

Series were shot on film. The HD versions are a mix of rescanned film and upscaled vfx shots

I thought you said it wasn't upscaled at all.

Rescanning the film is quite different from upscaling. Film is a lot of tiny silver grains embedded in a transparent plastic medium. Each tiny grain is photosensitive. Once you get through the whole process of exposure, developing, fixing, etc, etc then each grain of silver becomes a tiny dot of light on a projection screen. Not a rectangle or a square, but an irregular blob of colored light amongst a sea of irregular blobs of colored light. When we scan the film to make a digital video we sample those blobs and turn them into rectangular pixels, losing some of the information that was present in the film. Upscaling the video doesn’t recreate the lost information, but rescanning the film at a higher resolution can absolutely capture more of the information from the film.

Everything with CGI or other visual effects is upscaled from SD.

Honestly if it were some with live models even at SD it wouldn't be so bad... I just find it's from a time that's kind of painful to watch... Much like Transformers: Beast Wars.

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.

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