Werthead

On the contrary, Thompson was very happy to return for further appearances to wrap up her story (I know as I asked her at BabCom 96, when she was signing after a stage appearance with Jerry Doyle). However, Straczynski seemed to take it personally whenever an actor (or anyone else, actually) disagreed with him and his responses could be a little petulant. This was definitely in that bracket.

How Babylon 5 got on the air. This was a saga all in its own right.

JMS had an odd habit of simply dropping abandoned storylines rather than trying to circle them back into the arc (Sinclair and B4 was an exception, as it was too big to be ignored), like Talia's fate, so I think it was just that. That's the plan. I've never seen River of Souls, Legend of the Rangers or The Lost Tales so that'll be quite interesting.

You get a sense of that in To Dream in the City of Sorrows. I think the benefit (?) of the change is that Catherine Sakai isn't zombified by the Shadows and later killed, whilst Anna Sheridan starts off that way. Doing it to Catherine, a character we actually get to know over a season or a season and a half, would have hurt more, but this way she gets a happy (ish) ending.

Babylon 5: Season 1, Episodes 7-8 The War Prayer is awful, but what stood out watching this on an actual big widescreen TV is the atrociousness of Malcolm Biggs's epic jumper. Which he tries to chat up Ivanova whilst wearing! Brave man. Weirdly, last year a UKIP councillor called Malcolm Biggs was kicked out of the organisation for being a former member of a racist political party. Life imitating art... Also, And the Sky Full of Stars, which is still a great episode.

Babylon 5: Season 1, Episodes 5-6 The Parliament of Dreams, the first "really good" episode of B5, and Mind War, which is possibly the most overrated episode of the series (like, the guy playing Jason Ironheart is weak and some of the dialogue is awful), although it can also be seen as a very early blueprint for Sense8, which makes it retrospectively more interesting. Fun fact: assassin Tu'Pari ("You will know fear, you will know pain and then you will die,") is also the Catheter Cowboy from John Oliver's recent Last Week Tonight videos.

The same thing was happening on Firefox.

Babylon 5: Season 1, Episodes 3-4 Born to the Purple, which has aged pretty well (I like it now much more than when it was first on) and Infection, which is crap.

Because it doesn't work. When I try doing it like that it justifies the text to the right, then it does it again for the next quote and then again for the next, so it goes off the screen. I know it doesn't do that for everyone but it does it for me (on Windows 10, on Chrome) so it's utterly unusable. I can do it once (as here) but then it fucks up. Manually quoting is the only way to go. It was the Earthforce destroyer Hyperion that was named for the Usenet group. The B5 sector (Euphrates) was named after the Babylonian/Iraqi river. The Centauri Sentri-class fighters could pull much tighter overall turns (a change of direction), with the computer taking over for a few seconds if the pilot blacked out, but they couldn't spin as fast as a Starfury and they were more fragile (as like the Raiders they were also meant for use in an atmosphere). They never really put them up against each other, but if the Narn Frazis could take out Sentris, the Starfuries certainly could (the Starfuries could also beat Minbari Nials, with a bit of luck).

Rereading JMS's online posts from when the season was on the air is pretty astonishing. Remember that this was in 1994 when the Internet barely even existed, and there was a bit where JMS said they'd have a gay or bi character on the show (which kind of got undersold in the end), and he promptly gets attacked by the kind of invective you'd see from modern trolls and idiots (including one guy declaring that he will personally set to it that the show is attacked in "the hetero press"). Nothing changes, indeed.

There are 14 regular and recurring castmembers on the show in Season 1 (Sinclair, Garibaldi, Ivanova, Londo, Delenn, G'Kar, Vir, Lennier, Na'Toth, Dr. Franklin, Talia Winters, Kosh, n'Grath, the Ombudsman, Mr. Morden, Jack the Security Guard, a few of the Dome Techs), so it's understandable they can't quite cover everyone in the first 6 episodes. In fact, it takes them until Episode 5 to get all the regular cast on the station. All the characters do get their time in the sun, and Garibaldi is much more prominent in the second half of the season. DS9 had far higher production values (the DS9 pilot cost $12 million, the B5 one $3.5 million; each regular episode of DS9 cost $2.5 million in the first season, each episode of B5 cost $850,000!), so it's aged far better, but I think both shows had uneven opening seasons. I think DS9's is the best first season of Trek, easily, but B5's is probably stronger. DS9 had one outstanding classic in its first season (Duet) and the rest was watchable-to-very good. B5 had a few episodes worse than anything in DS9's first season (Infection, TKO, a couple of others) but it also has Signs and Portents, Babylon Squared and especially Chrysalis (and, if you're feeling generous, And the Sky Full of Stars as well) which are all stone-cold classics. The back half of both seasons I think are much stronger than the opening halves. The worldbuilding in B5 is somewhat subtle and it's also not very "up-in-your-face". There isn't tons of exposition on it. But in quite a few scenes they mention fictional history and real stuff: Vance Hendricks names several famous real scientists and a couple of fictional ones in Infection, whilst Sinclair lists Pearl Harbour as an example of a sneak attack but also the nuking of San Diego and the bombing of the first Mars Colony in Midnight on the Firing Line. I think the show does quite a good job of mixing the real past and our fictional future together. The newspaper thing I think is part of a new desire in the Earth Alliance for tangible things; you see later on a vending computer create a copy of the paper from the latest-breaking electronic news stories on the fly. Born to the Purple mentions how real-time information can't get to B5 because the tachyon FTL channels are very expensive to use, so are reserved for military and diplomatic channels only. Everyone else has to wait for information and news to be slow-beamed to them via the jump network. The show missed the iPad revolution, sure, but that was predicted by Star Trek's PADDs, and B5 wanted to avoid replicating that. JMS is actually something of an optimist, but he believes humanity's better side sometimes only comes out in the face of its darker side, whilst Roddenberry believed it was possible to kill all our demons forever, In both B5 and Sense8, JMS shows the good side of humanity but doesn't shy away from the darker either. The station simulates gravity through centrifugal force: the station is spinning at 60mph, generating a gravity field of about 0.9G at the floor of the Garden. The Earth Alliance and the Narn Regime do not have artificial gravitational technology, but the Minbari (you see a Minbari gravitational weapon in the pilot), Centauri and Vorlons do. The League is a mixture of some without (like the Drazi) and some with (such as the Markabs). The Core Shuttle is close to the spin axis (but not right on it) and is classified a "low gravity area". There are danger signs telling people to hold on. You see that in greater detail in later episodes. It's something they do fudge a bit though. C&C is quite close to the spin axis as well, but everyone walks around there as if it's still the same gravity as closer to the hull. That was for time and practical reasons.

Babylon 5 Rewatch: Season 1, Episodes 1-2: Midnight on the Firing Line and Soul Hunters This is a metric ton more work than the Lost rewatch was last year, so I might have to limit it to two entries a week. That means we're going to be here for a bit over six months. Anyway, G'Kar is a git at this point, Londo is shambolic, Delenn is being cool and mysterious and the viewers are going "AREN'T STARFURIES AWESOME?"

Babylon 5 Rewatch: The Pilot Episode I was going to repost it here, but it's 6,000 words so you can have the link instead.

Babylon 5 Rewatch: Canon and Sources Onto watching the actual show now, at last.

Babylon 5: Setting the Scene Part 2 - The Babylon Project

The Centauri Republic was founded a thousand years before the events of the series, as per several episodes. One question mark is if the Republic was founded before the Centauri became a spacefaring civilisation. One idea is that the Centauri defeated the Xon as an industrial/pre-modern society, the Republic was founded under the first Emperor and then the Republic became spacefaring later on. We know they were in space and had an empire 500 years before the time of the series, but not when exactly that all happened. The problem is that the first Emperor consulted three technomages before founding the Republic (as per Geometry of Shadows) so either the Centauri were spacefaring or they were visited by aliens quite openly before becoming spacefaring themselves. One way around this was provided in the CD-ROM and other sources, which stated that the Centauri discovered an abandoned alien jumpgate in their system, so they actually became interstellar at a far less technologically-advanced level than other races, like humans. So if the Republic were interstellar 1,000 years before the series, their technology was not very advanced and certainly nothing like at the level of the Minbari. Modern Minbari society was founded by Valen along with the Grey Council; the Minbari were technologically advanced and interstellar long before that (maybe even another thousand years earlier), under the rule of the Council of Caste Elders, but the Great War was when the Minbari Federation as we know it came into existence. The distances in the show are refreshingly realistic in the first two seasons, but they got thrown out the window in Season 3 when JMS started using galaxy maps and switched from saying that Z'ha'dum is on the "Rim of Known Space" (a rather amorphous concept) to the "Galactic Rim", which is considerably further away. Here's an interesting article which explores the problem in greater detail.

There was an official CD-ROM with lots of dates and backstory written by J. Michael Straczynski himself. It came out between Seasons 4 and 5, IIRC. Helpfully, JMS later retconned some of that material in Crusade and the spin-off movies and some of it conflicted with info in the series and the show itself had a habit of contradicting itself. For example, the date that the Centauri withdrew from Narn the first time has never been pinned down and that causes some issues in trying to get things to fit together (the withdrawal was in G'Kar's lifetime, as he was old enough to be a "resistance leader" before the Centauri pulled out, but it was far enough back for the Narns to build up a significant interstellar empire in the meantime). Another part of the issue is that JMS and his assistant Fiona Avery created a lot of more detailed lore which they gave to Mongoose Publishing for their RPG supplements and signed off on stuff Mongoose invented themselves, then JMS got annoyed with Mongoose and declared all of their material non-canon, even though some of it later was re-confirmed in material produced for other venues (like the script books, I believe). That leaves a lot of worldbuilding for B5 in a rather uncertain state, and fans generally have to go with whatever gets repeated more often (the alien ship classes - Minbari Sharlin, Centauri Primus, Narn G'Quan and so on - were created for the Babylon 5 Wars miniatures game and have remained constant in all material since then) and what makes sense, although given that JMS is under the impression that you can build a 5-mile-long space station in about two years, even that is a rather elastic notion. There's also the problem that JMS would get someone else to come up with some figures and then contradict them. Babylon 5, for example, was never meant to be 5 miles long. It was actually 11 miles long and all the CGI was scaled with that in mind. Only the carousel (between Red and Grey sectors) was supposed to be 5 miles long and weigh 2.5 million tons. JMS later said that the entire station was 5 miles long, which you can tell is not really possible in The Fall of Night (as that would make the Garden less than half a mile wide rather than it's intended 1 mile, and Sheridan would have gone splat long before Kosh saved him), even if it's far more plausible.

Babylon 5: Setting the Scene Part 1 - The Major Powers of 2257

No. The TV show is the property of Warner Brothers and they control monetizing it. Apparently Netflix wouldn't keep paying them what they wanted, so it's instead moved to something called Go90. Straczynski retains the theatrical film rights to the franchise, however.

You can just start with the first episode: we had no choice, as The Gathering wasn't aired until the end of Season 1 in the UK (yup, that was weird) and Midnight is a lot punchier than The Gathering. It's also a lot more histrionic and not as well-paced. Although to be frank, watching B5 does mean taking it on faith that Seasons 2-4 are vastly superior to Season 1 on every single level, although Season 1 does have a few good episodes in the early going to keep the flame burning. But Season 1 can be a struggle to get through.

Windows 10 on my desktop, via Chrome.

It's every single video ad that runs at the top or bottom window of the site. https://cdn.clearstream.tv/production/79c21496421805860.mp4 This is one link I managed to pull up.

It's not necessary to re-order Season 1, and is a little silly. The Season 2 changes are much more important: A Race Through Dark Places sets up Soul Mates (at least Talia's storyline). Same for Knives, which directly sets up In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum. It's actually nonsensical to watch it in broadcast order. Both were only flipped on initial broadcast because they both needed an extra week for the CGI to be done, which clearly isn't a problem now. The changes in Seasons 3 and 5 really aren't too necessary either.

Warner Brothers and JMS did get into discussions at one point. WB wanted to remake it as a TV show, which JMS didn't want to do (he'd been there, done that). JMS wanted to do a series of movies instead, but WB weren't keen on that. JMS put the movie into development with his production company and, although it didn't go anywhere, it forced WB to back off. WB let JMS keep the theatrical film rights to the series, something I suspect now they rather regret.