Michelle Dockery is amazing in this and V'z fnq gung fur arire unq bppnfvba gb ercevfr gur ebyr.
And as much as I love Christopher Lee, the combo of Ian Richardson and Marnix Van Den Broeke will always remain the definitive Death for me, with the voice and body language complementing each other so well that you forget that the character has an inflexible mask for a face.

Ah, you mean during the rebellion. I think it's pretty generous to assume that Pink remembered/cared about Spinel at that time.
And if she did, she likely didn't believe that Spinel needed saving. She wasn't off color, or a forbidden fusion, or a rebellious gem, or a squishy human. She was just a regular gem she's grown bored of.

I don't think they knew the remaining warp pads could go all the way to space though? Everyone was pretty surprised when Peridot came through.

(Or, in perfect Diamond fashion, she never thought of long term consequences on the scale of a normal person. Yellow's laughter at the end because "6000 years really is nothing" is telling.)

In light of "Love like you", I think that Pink really believed by the end that she 1. was a horrible person, and 2. incapable of enough change, given her baggage and identity as a gem. Becoming/giving birth to Steven was certainly an attempt to turn into something that could be half as good as those she loved.

As for the film itself... I really loved it as a long episode, and as a musical, and for the production values, and as an exploration of how the abused can become toxic and abusers in themselves.

But as a sequel/coda to the series, and the diamond arc in particular, it's... eh? The whole thing about recovering the memories of the Crystal Gems is very neat, but it's retreading old ground for the old viewers, and the newcomers don't really know any of the events that are being referenced. Steven himself, before recovering his powers, says that this is basically just more of the same: another mess his mom left that threatens to destroy Earth and that he has to fix.

So, did I like it? Yeah. Am I gonna listen to selected portions of the soundtrack on repeat? You bet. Am I gonna rewatch it ten times in a row like the four final episodes? Eh, no, not really.

Spinel's animation had multiple purposes: it showed that she was from an earlier era of gemkind, that she wasn't changed from all the history that came after she was abandoned, that she was a sort of double/caricature of Pink Diamond in herself (like Mickey/Oswald in Disney), and also that it came with a lot of unexplored baggage. One reason why we don't see that animation style all too often is not just that we moved forward in technique, because many other old styles are still in vogue, but also because cartoons from the 1920 are strictly tied to racist, sexist, and all-around offensive imagery that big, old animation studios really don't want to face in any sort of way and so they just sweep the whole thing under the rug.

Ba gur bgure unaq, xrrcvat gur pbzcnavbaf juvyr punatvat gur Qbpgbe unf bsgra orra n jnl gb rnfr crbcyr vagb n arj npgbe va gur yrnqvat ebyr, nf jryy nf n arj crefbanyvgl naq aneengvir dhvexf. Znal byq Qbpgbef orarsvgrq sebz univat erpheevat punenpgre ng gurve fvqr - rira gur 'pyrna fyngr' Guveq Qbpgbe fnj gur erghea bs gur Oevtnqvre.

Naq Fnenu Wnar Fzvgu vf bar bs znal rknzcyrf bs ubj n punenpgre jub jbhyq nyjnlf xrrc ehaavat jvgu gur Qbpgbe pna or yrsg oruvaq jvgubhg fbzrguvat greevoyr unccravat gb gurz (hayrff, bs pbhefr, lbh srry gung yvsr va Peblqba *vf* n greevoyr sngr...). Jr yvxr gb oryvrir gung zbqrea Qbpgbef jvgu gurve svar(e) pbagebyf bs gur GNEQVF jbhyq pbzr onpx sbe gurz, riraghnyyl, ohg... lrnu, zbfg bs gurz jbhyqa'g. Gbb zhpu fghss gb qb nyy gur gvzr.

Add me to the list of those who didn't really like Bill's fate, even though the rest of the story was very good. Frankly I'm very much over torturing/killing/fake-killing the companions. It didn't happen *that* often in Classic Who to justify saying that it's a thing that *must* happen because it's part of the brand - unlike, say, regeneration or things being bigger on the inside.
Vg srryf yvxr gur npgerff tbg gur fubeg raq bs gur fgvpx, gbb, fvapr gurl qvgpurq ure punenpgre nybat jvgu gur GNEQVF naq rirelguvat ryfr sebz gur byq cebqhpgvba.

I loved Capaldi's arc, though. I know a lot of people were angry that he was so acerbic on his first appearance, but I frankly believe it's more satisfying to see an uncaring Doctor become the man who will die to buy people a little more time, rather than watching a happy-go-lucky explorer turn into a reclusive ass who saves people against their will because he thinks he's god.

As for these Cybermen, I think we were meant to imply that it was a case of parallel evolution. Since the people on the spaceship were Mondasian, with Mondasian technology and way of thinking, they eventually engineered the same 'solution' as the people on their planet. And of course, just like his arc parallels Hartnell's, so does his final story and regeneration. We've come full circle. Time to try something new, perhaps?

Yeah, and unfortunately for me, impossibly contrived situations like these break my suspension of disbelief and make me hard to care for the emotional core of the story. Yes, Doctor Who breaks the rules of logic all the time, but that hazmat lab was specifically made to release hazardous material rather than contain it. It's a farce more than a drama.

I think I mentioned this before, but this is my crying episode.

I watched when and cried when I realized that a particular relationship would never happen. I watched it and cried when my grandfather died. I watched it and cried when my dad was diagnosed with a tumor. I watched it and cried the day the doctors told him he was cured.

Even now, just thinking about the episode can bring tears to my eyes. Heck, I'm fighting tears while writing this, and I haven't seen this episode in years.

So yes, like everybody else has been saying: lots of crying.

This is the perfect finale for me, for the perfect story. There have been shows with better writing, better acting, better dialogue, better episodes, but none of them have had the coherence, the vision, the unity that Babylon 5 had. None of them knew from the beginning what story they wanted to tell, and where they wanted it to end. Babylon 5 is my paragon of what a TV series has to be and, so far, very few have come to task (incidentally, Steven Universe is one of those).

To this day, I find it a mortal screenwriting fault to have a writing room with no idea of where the show is headed, stretching the story year after year, renewal after renewal, only to drop the ball in the end. It may be the journey and not the destination, but dammit, the destination is still part of that journey.

Babylon 5 knew its destination. And damn if it wasn't worth getting there.