IntenseDebate - merrick

13 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Babylon ... · 0 replies · +8 points

The Lochley half of the episode could have been made more a specifically Babylon 5 story, as opposed to a story that happens to involve a Babylon 5 character but could take place in any generic science fiction setting as long as there's interstellar travel, if they had found a way to make it about the Shadows and the Vorlons. You even had the priest character saying that mankind reached the heavens and found no angels, without anyone pointing out that we very much did find angels and subsequently exiled them from the galaxy.

13 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 0 replies · +5 points

I read this script somewhere and after learning that technomage technology is Shadow-based Gideon exclaims something like "No! Galen would never use Shadow tech!" which, given that Gideon commands and lives in a starship built using repurposed Vorlon tech, should he be throwing stones here?

14 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 0 replies · +4 points

So what we learn about the plague here, that people are already dying and at some unknown point between now and five years from now everyone will be dead, tracks with how the plague was described in the closing minutes of "A Call to Arms." It does not particularly track with how people have been talking about it in other episodes of Crusade, where it implied everyone will die five years after the plague was introduced. It especially doesn't track with the not-first-episode "Racing the Night", where we have a planet of people who all went into stasis after three years of being infected, and are woken up one at a time to live two years before they die and someone else is woke up.

I guess the topologies of hyperspace cannot be comprehended by our 21st century grasp of physics, but it does seem pretty weird that they could spend several minutes arguing about whether or not to drop out of hyperspace after receiving Lochley's signal, and then still enter normal space right next to her. Mysteries of the jump drive I guess.

15 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 1 reply · +7 points

So this is the episode that TNT didn't think was a good enough first episode and had JMS make "War Zone" instead. I think of the two Racing The Night works a lot better. More happens in it, there's better spectacle to draw in viewers, and while there's some unfortunate exposition ("Sir, firing the main guns takes up all available power except gravity and life support. We'll be dead in space for at least a minute afterwards." "I read the driver's manual, Lieutenant.") at least nobody explains to Galen what a technomage is.

I liked Woodward's delivery of "I have no surviving enemies at all."

16 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 0 replies · +3 points

An angle that might have made them a little less generic would be making "the plague is a punishment" into "the plague is a punishment for rejecting our gods, the Shadows and Vorlons." But they probably wanted to minimize "things that could make new viewers feel like they needed to have watched Babylon 5"

17 weeks ago @ http://markspoils.blog... - The Black Market · 0 replies · +8 points

11x08 and 1x09 http://markdoesstuff.fetchapp.com/get/3e31da9a

17 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 0 replies · +3 points

I like it too! It's memorable and gives the show a sense of identity distinct from B5.

17 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Crusade'... · 2 replies · +8 points

[youtube ItKC89IVEJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItKC89IVEJc youtube]

JMS may have written some clunky exposition in his time, but that final scene where Gideon tells Galen what a technomage is takes some kind of cake.

Why is this called Crusade? Who are they Crusading against? I mean, the Drakh, I guess, but that's not their primary mission. Their mission is to find something. (if they don't, in just five years, Mother Earth. . . will disappear. . .) That's more of a Quest.

So Babylon 5 avoided universal translator devices like Star Trek, or universal translator microbes like Farscape, or [future MR series] havirefny genafyngbe svfu yvxrf Uvgpuuvxre'f Thvqr, instead establishing that everyone (except in specific cases like the Vorlons) has learned English, and everyone important is really fluent, but now that we're going off to meet aliens instead of aliens coming to Babylon 5, we have a universal translator. . . person?

We seem to have switched gears a bit from Tolkein to Gygax. I mean not that Tolkein didn't have Wizards and a Burglar and whatnot, but this feels more like a tabletop adventuring party.

18 weeks ago @ Mark Watches - Mark Watches 'Babylon ... · 1 reply · +10 points

"They make the Shadows look like insects!"

This I think was not a good move here. This was a DBZ move. And I love DBZ! But this is not DBZ, and this is not the kind of story where it's a good idea to undermine the main conflict of your magnum opus in attempt to raise the stakes.

18 weeks ago @ http://markspoils.blog... - Weekly Shenanigans · 1 reply · +6 points

Sold out. Someone has downloaded all the videos.

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