Yet cannot get thru season 1 of B5 in well... over a month now.
When you “get over the hump” of season one, you start to see so many things changing and playing off of foundation pieces set up in season one. They get on a roll in Season-2. and there are some truly HOLY ****!! moments by the time of Season 3. Also there is a lot of "character growth", and "character descent" that you could not appreciate so well without knowing how they started out in season 1 and then evolved or de-volved.
Actually IIRC, the last three episodes of Season one is where things start to take off. The Babylon-4 (yes, 4) episode near the end of S-1 is especially notable....then...and LATER (I will say no more than that, nor should anyone else).
I went on to read some of the books that finished off parts of the story the show did not (if there had been a 6th season....).
OK, having said that, I enjoyed Galactica too. But Galactica mostly had a one-year-at-a-time sort of plan, like so many shows do. Even if they “knew” one day the idea was to reach “Earth” (except that got all Frakked up).
B-5 had the 5 year plan for the whole series, with lots of key parts interweaving and planned. Unfortunately some of those were affected by the fact that after Season-3, it looked like there ,might only be a season 4, so JMS ended up merging season 4 and seasons 5 outlines into season 4. Which made Season 4 incredibly strong. But when there was a 5th season after all, JMS had to write a new outline from scratch for that one last season, and IIRC he had spent something like seven YEARS creating the original 5 year outline (Imagine George Lucas writing the outlines of the first three Star Wars movies before going to a movie studio to try to interest them in making the first movie). So, Season 5 was not so snappy, the first part of the season sagged. But it too had an ending to it, actually a strong season ending and then a series ending (actually they had shot the series ending at the end of Season 4, just in case. Then when season 5 was a sure thing to happen, they did not show the series finale they shot at the end of Season-4, they saved it for the end of Season-5).
Another thing. The cast of the show had so many character actors that have often not done so much in other roles (not much before and not much since). So many of them were tremendous in their roles in B-5. One of the few some of you would know, Billy Mumy, who made up for his “Bad Sci-Fi-Karma” from Lost In Space, by his role as “Linnear” in B-5. And of all people, Walter Koenig, nice little Chekov from Star Trek, wow he really pulled off the character of a very twisted [self-deleted].
It was screwy how Babylon-5 was aired in the US. Some episodes were re-run three times, then they saved 3 or 4 episodes at the end of the season for the FALL, so the last 3 or 4 of Season 1 those pivotal ones, did not even run until October or so, 3-4 weeks before the new season started (Imagine the season finales of current TV shows in the last few weeks were not shown, but saved to be shown in September or October!) . And yet in England, they showed those end of season episodes several weeks earlier than here. Tom Beach and I were such big fans that one time, Tom arranged for a friend in England to video tape a few of those delayed end-of-season episodes and mail them to him, and then Tom quickly copied them and sent copies to me. And one time, when I was at the 1996 WSMC in Slovenia, Alex Seltsikas of England had taped an episode for me, and gave me the tape there. Our team bus had a VCR player on it, so as we drove from Slovenia to Italy nearly everyone on the bus watched that episode of B-5, and a few team members also were B-5 fans.
Of course, these days, people could Bit Torrent the shows. For the Dr. Who Fans, there are already two episodes of this season “out there” on Bit torrents, that ran on BBC months ago. There are only going to be 4 (or 5?) 90 minute episodes this year. And no telling when Sci-Fi or BBC America is going to show them here (probably not until the last one of the season has aired in the UK).
“No one ever listens to Zathras....”
- George Gassaway
