It appears that the fifth station has exploded...

[viktor_haag]

... and I say, thank goodness. The world has more than enough Babylon 5 material to watch, and re-watch, for better and for worse. It's time to move on and put money into making new things. I feel the same about most genre shows that get glommed onto by fannish devotion: nearly all of them have spent their time under the sun, told their stories, and in many cases long over-stayed their welcome. Some shows get canned before their chance to really solidly settle in (FireFly, for example, and Timothy Hutton's Nero Wolfe series).

But B5 is certainly not one of those.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

You mean in the "endlessly drawn out thrashing of dead horse" way? 8)

Honestly, there are bits of B5 and Trek (various flavours) that I don't have a problem with at all (I own the complete DVD sets for B5, Trek:TOS and Enterprise), but neither of them are even in quality, have generally poorer writing and acting than the best stuff in the medium, and have been propped up for far too long by corporations presumably wanting to milk slavish fandom for all the cash that they can.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

B5, I think, suffers from a split between jms wanting to do a serious political realist thriller plus telepaths or something and jms wanting to do a magical space opera, and the two get mixed into some awkward casserole that isn't pasta, isn't tuna and isn't something you wanna eat twice. They have between two and half a dozen messiahs running around, solving ostensibly complex political issues with big speeches while angels dance on their heads and utter gnomic statements. It's like "Demon With A Glass Hand"–theoretically epic in scope, but in practice you're punching a man in pajamas with panda makeup.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

That's pretty accurate. My appreciation for B5 was mostly for (a) the non-mythos episodes, as interpreted by the actors playing (mostly) the aliens, and (b) the episodes largely written by folks other than JMS. I've never been a big fan of JMS' touch with dialogue. His plotting is OK, if a bit hand-wavy at times; but I've always found his dialogue a bit troublesome. The mythos I, like you, found a bit grandiose and confused and the whole "are we renewed or not" problem doubtlessly didn't help.

And the actors playing the humans on the were, I thought, rather uniformly weaker than those playing the aliens. I run my thoughts over the human characters and I have a hard time thinking of ones that I thought were well portrayed over the long haul... and none of them compared with Katsulas, Furlan, Furst and, to a lesser extent, Jurasik. To my mind, Katsulas and Furlan were far and away the best actors on the show.

Boxleitner was probably the best overall performance for the human characters, to my liking, because it felt pretty natural and unmannered. Biggs wasn't too bad: he certainly handled humour well. And Walter Koenig also wasn't too bad. The other human character performances I could have done, more or less, completely without... (especially some of the villains)

Compare the cast to B5, for example, where even the bit characters are pretty well portrayed (compare Tahmoh Penikett with, say, Jeff Conaway or Patricia Tallman, and, well I'm not sure it's just that tastes in acting have changed...)

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

jms's dialogue is only really funny to jms, because only jms can do without the complex leadup that sucks the energy out of it.

And the actors playing the humans on the were, I thought, rather uniformly weaker than those playing the aliens.

Rewatching it recently, I find Jurasik to be the most watchable, with Katsulas a close second. Katsulas with Jurasik, or with Furst, or Jurasik and Furst or the three of them together are the best scenes overall. In a show filled with over-the-top tragedy and weeping and such, the only scene that sticks out is G'Kar and Vir in the elevator after the bombing of Narn. G'Kar cuts his hand and just stares at Vir, repeating "Dead" over and over as the blood hits the floor. In a show smothered under unnecessary verbiage and phantom limbs of platonic ideals of itself, it's sticks out as a crazy Shakespearean moment, worthy of the original Star Trek.

The alien actors are the best, and I think it's because they're really having fun.