- the acting is terrible,
- dialog is pretty corny in places
- the alien prosthetics look silly
- the CGI, while technically impressive, look cartoonish (even in true in its era)
Yes despite all this, it’s still amazing and, for me at least, it becomes very easy to look past those faults.
In my opinion it’s one of the best sci-fi shows ever written for its world building. You genuinely buy into the politics.
I just wish they weren’t messed around with the cancellation, then renewal of season 5 because that completely destroyed the pacing of the last two seasons.
I also don’t think it was too bad for its time, but I think it was too early to rely on CGI to that extent. Great show though.
The station still looks pretty great...
This isn't Trek where the Enterprise is a character in and of itself. This is more Deep Space Nine.
Babylon 5 is about politics and personalities, the spaceships and stuff are just the background.
Tom Bakers Doctor Who I think is the best example of using a shoestring budget to tell huge sci-fi stories well. B5 takes a lot from that book.
I watched it then, and i can tell you that NO, it wasn't pretty good for the time nor the media, it was terrible even for that time. Not because their CGI was particulary worse, but because all CGI was terrible at the time. The technology wasn't ready yet to do much, so everyone else at the time relied on practical effects, miniatures, and built full set; but for practicality and cost reasons they decided to use the crude CGI of the time for many things that were not good enouth at the time, and it shown terribly.
In subsequent seasons they walked back that decision slightly, mostly abandoning CGI for indoor scenes in favour of building sets for their actors like everyone else. And the last few seasons had fairly good CGI for external shots of the station and ships, because by that time the tech evolved to be good enouth (that is when you start seeing such CGI being used in all other shows as well).
It's a remarkable achievement but yes, it does look rather dated sadly.
My main annoyance with B5 is how the alien designs echo human historic stereotypes. A lot of sci fi falls in this trap.
The Minbari are meditative asians. The Centari are a decaying franco-romanesque empire. The Narn are primitive and violent with dark skin and exaggerated facial features. The humans are plucky American go getters. The Vorlons are the only real original alien design, but were deliberately made a blank canvas of mystery.
Mind you in no way do I think it was malicious, just a lazy writing crutch others have used. Star Trek TNG had some pretty glaring examples of the same thing in early seasons. Star Wars patterns the Jedi after Samurai.
Even if there's a universe/plot justification for why all the alien species are humanoid variations too, I think it's a lot more interesting if the writers can come up with unique histories and cultures for the aliens.
To be more specific, it was done on Video Toaster. Since the Video Toaster effectively guts the Amiga's video system and substitutes it with its own its hard to even call it an Amiga anymore.
And yeah, it has numerous examples of very lazy writing: Minbari (Space Asians), Centauri (Space French), Narn (Space Palestinians) ... but the Vorlons as original? Really? They're the Space Zen Masters, spitting out zen fortune cookies to drive the plot forward.
> I think it's a lot more interesting if the writers can come up with unique histories and cultures for the aliens.
Not everyone can be Tolkien and write 5,000 years of history and a linguistic family tree, so I tend to cut writers some slack even if their fictive cultures are boring stereotypes, as long as they can create characters that aren't. For the most part I think JMS succeeded at that.
1) The problem with TV is that you have to cough up an episode every single week on the fly. And JMS wrote a huge number of the episodes for Seasons 3 and 4 (I think all of them, but I can't find a citation).
2) Babylon 5 was specifically engineered to be TV budget friendly and was about $650K per episode. That puts significant limits on what you can do. Contrast to say Farscape at $1M or TNG at $1.5M per episode.
IIRC, JMS says so in one of the DVD extras for Season 3 or 4 (one of the JMS commentary tracks).
We all know shows that started out strong then got ruined by this stuff, like Lost or Heros. Or the internet's favorite punching bag, Game of Thrones.
I think The Wire is an interesting exception. They never got more than a single season commitment, but still managed to make something that feels cohesive over 5 seasons. They did it by using an ensemble cast where character's arcs can be extended in later seasons, but with new characters entering the mix as well. They also picked a different theme for each season, looking at the failures of american institutions from different directions, and resolving that theme within each single season. The result is each season feels distinct and can stand alone, but they also form a cohesive whole.
Heroes, I agree with you, no question.
That said, it's also aided by primarily being a story about characters rather than plot.
I always thought Lost got a bad rap for that. It was actually a story about characters, but its fandom thought it was very much about plot. Hence the hate for the finale (which I thought was wonderful)
However, genuine thanks for the Lost finale spoiler, I never wanted to watch beyond season 2 anyway as it already became rather tedious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdOpQE5miP4
Referring to the 'Who Shot JR' part was a mixup on my part- was pretty young at the time and not actively watching weekly so I forgot which was which...
You refer, of course, to Season 5.
Midwinter's episode ratings are a pretty good guide to which ones are skippable, though there's only a handful of episodes that are truly disposable filler. It's a remarkable achievement for 90s TV.