>>347996I've been watching Babylon 5 on and off over the past year or so since making this post (the episode in season 1 where Garibaldi helps his friend enter the alien fight club was so bad it made me drop the show for several months), and I wanted to share my thoughts. I was going to wait until I had finished the series before commenting on it, but, I'm in the mood to write about it now.
Overall, I like it a lot. It can be hokey at times, but that doesn't detract from everything else the show has going for it (most of the time). If anything, the goofiness makes the serious moments hit harder. The show does political drama as well as any I've ever seen, in part because it does such a good job of fleshing out the various alien cultures and making them so distinct from one another. There are only 3 or 4 episodes that I would consider bad, which is amazing for a network tv show from the 90s.
I don't know if this is a common opinion, but I like the alien characters a lot more than the human ones. They have that classical dramatic quality that you usually only find in old books. Londo is by far my favorite character. The human characters, by comparison, feel dull. Sheridan is the only one that can compare to the aliens. I don't dislike the others (except the bong), but I don't care about them very much either. It feels like the writers couldn't really let loose with the human characters because they were concerned with making them seem relatable, so they put all of that energy into the aliens instead.
I'm watching the beginning of season 4 right now; just finished the episode where
the main characters kill the Vorlon ambassador who replaced Kosh, and Delenn finds out that Sheridan only has 20 more years to live. Supposedly, the writers didn't know if they were going to get a 5th season or not, so they decided to cram all of the ideas they had for seasons 4 and 5 into 4, and it seems like that's already starting to mess with the pacing. For example, the
Vorlons suddenly deciding to destroy a bunch of planets came out of nowhere, and it feels out of character compared to what's been shown of them so far. That's not to say the twist is totally unbelievable, but it needed more build up. We needed to learn a little more about them first. The way they did it makes it feel like a contrived way fo
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