Babylon 5 vs Star Trek

[Interference]

Originally Posted by alfaholic

....I caught my self waiting to finish all five seasons to see all the things you are talking about, while on the same time I am not enjoying any of the episodes I watch....

Much the same thing happened with me and Battlestar Galactica. I ended up skipping over episodes and not feeling like I'd missed anything at all.

[JunkMonkey]

Originally Posted by alfaholic

Just finished third episode, it looks like episode from Tropical Heat and Nick Slaughter in space.
Sorry dear friends, but this is not for me. It is boring, to much Americanized, with no science in this fiction.
I caught my self waiting to finish all five seasons to see all the things you are talking about, while on the same time I am not enjoying any of the episodes I watch, to be honest it is the opposite feeling.

I do not want to offend anyone, but for my taste Star Trek is another galaxy.
Thank you all, and sorry for OFF.

Season one was more than a little shaky with more than one 'Monster of the Week' episode. Watching them again now I find them a little thin but am spotting things I had missed previously - a few 'how did I miss THAT? first time round' moments. But it does get better, once the foundations have been layered and once SPOILER: There is a change of commander at the start of season two.

If it's any help I hated the first few episodes of Firefly (boy, was I wrong!) and it took me about half a season to 'get' the new Battlestar Galactica.

Conversely, I loved the New Who from the start and have become more and more annoyed, and frustrated, and bored with it and now wouldn't bother if the kids weren't hooked.

[Clansman]

I think the producers of Star Trek have finally cottoned on to what this thread is saying. I never liked B5, but I never really gave it a chance after those first few clunky episodes. But, the idea of an over-arching plot from episode to episode has been part of the evolution of TV.

The last Star Trek movie has set up such a plot line between movies (I thought the alternate history mechanism to retell the origin of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest was brilliantly done), but now they have to fix the alternate history, because they know its wrong. If you haven't seen it, what follows is a spoiler. Hopefully, there will be a strong plot link between the movies, much stronger than that between Star Trek II, III and IV.

Star Trek still has infinite possibilities, but the writing has to grow up, and there needs to be both overarching plot lines between movies/episodes (if they do another TV series), and some decent in-depth character development (like, why did Riker never grow up and captain his own ship?).

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by Clansman

but now they have to fix the alternate history, because they know its wrong.

That's typical Trek - rewrite the history, events, move on and forget. They won't fix it. They'll just keep changing it.

At least Babylon 5 could keep a clear and accurate continuity and development throughout.

[kd5]

My wife & I are currently watching both Babylon 5 and the Star Trek movies right now (+ a few select episodes, on opposite evenings). While Star Trek is entertaining to watch, IMO it can't hold a candle to B5. -kd5-

[Whitestar]

Originally Posted by alfaholic

Just finished the first episode... Oh... Soooo Americanized!
There are a few moments when I needed a bucket because I thought I was gonna throw up, but I did not, good for me.
The commander is acting like cowboy with that John Wayne macho face, and everything he said was so pathetic, oh...

But, I will watch further, I hope this will get better.
This suppose to look like future, with more global approach, if I wanted to watch American propaganda, I will watch the news, or some Disney cartoon where all the animals lives American way of life. Sooo bad...

Yes, I did warn you in advanced that the first season is painful to watch, particularly the performance of Michael O'Hare as Commander Jeffrey Sinclair. However, don't give up after watching three episodes. I suggest that you skip most of the first season episodes and see the following in chronological order: "And The Sky Full of Stars", "Deathwalker", "Believers", "By Any Means Necessary", "Signs and Portents" (this particular episode is very important to see), "Legacies", "A Voice in the Wilderness" parts 1 and 2, "Babylon Squared", "The Quality of Mercy", and the season finale, "Chrysalis", and then see if you want to continue. Give it a fair chance!

[Rodders]

My friend has the same issue. He's off sick at the moment so i've been trying to encourage him into getting into the series by cherry picking a few from the second series so taht he can begin to understand the complexity of the ongoing story and the achievement that B5 represents in story telling. He's getting there. (Started him with the Coming of Shadows and from there he watch Gropos and enjoyed it. I've now recommended The Long Twilight Struggle and Severed Dreams. Hopefully, he'll want to watch it end to end.)

[kulture]

Its a shame that you have to cherry pick the episodes in season 1 to make the whole thing watchable. I agree with the list however. Wheras I felt that BSG hit the ground running and died towards the end. B5 was a slow birth and went from strength to strength.

[Jammill Khursheed]

Wow!!!

Unless your moderators got RSI weeding out the nut-jobs this is the least "I-picked-my-team-and-I's-Sticking-with-it" forum I have EVER seen when it comes to B5 Vs Star Trek.

The main difference between the shows is the way they perceive Sci-Fi as a genre, and I'll preface my point by saying that I do like both shows, but for very different reasons.

Star Trek has the most perfectly formed 'world' in almost any fiction I have seen, it's just the stories that mostly suck.

We know apartheid was wrong, we don't need to see an allegory of it where Jem'Ha'Dar make the Klingons on their colony sit at the back of the shuttle craft to get it. We don't need a re-telling of easops fables where the crafty Romulan makes the greedy Ferengi sing so he can steal the food. And we never, never, never EVER EVER need to see anyone stuck in a god-damn holodeck ever again. If it wasn't for the holodeck going wrong, and there was some sort of space RAC to tow the enterprise when the engines broke, about a third of the episodes wouldn't even exist.

But on that odd occasion when it was good, it was very good, even some of Voyager. Although that said, there must have only been about five good episodes that weren't two-parters or about the borg across the entire franchise, but damn those two-parters were usually very decent. Ironically, the only two-parter that was awful was about the borg, some kind of a double-negative going on there I think (Unimatrix 0 if you need to ask.)

To the producers, they had the setting, and the ship, and characters that everyone loved (the characters were great, Janeway is one of my favourite characters ever, even though Voyager is the worst trek ever), and they didn't care, thinking sci-fi fans will watch anything with the odd laser-pistol thrown in it, and the fact it made money for so long, even when it was at it's worst, kind of proved them right.

Babylon 5 was an idea that worked, one which revolutionised genre fiction on T.V. (if it wasn't for the story-arc in Babylon 5 proving that it worked to TV execs, never mind not having Galactica re-dux, we wouldn't have even had stuff like the Wire or the Sopranos either.)

B5 is my favourite TV show EVER, for the story and the scripts, and only for the story and the scripts, because lets face it, the aliens, and the spaceships, and the action sequences and stuff were all a bit $**T. I'm talking about their design, not their implementation which easily outstripped Trek.

i.e. Not every Minbari is virtually identical in every single way to every single other one that doesn't want to learn to be more like humans. You can't say that about Klingons, but they don't look like the only kid at school who didn't get their mum to make their Halloween costume and did it themselves, whereas Delen and G'Kar do.

Babylon 5 set out to tell an epic story within a star-trek style universe, and while it did the first bit amazingly well, it never got the universe up to star trek standards, although to be fair trek did have like forty years of working on that behind them before B5 even formed as an idea in JMS's head.

I'm an aspiring Sci-Fi writer myself, and if i only get one of those things right, I'd rather make the next Babylon 5 than the next Stark Trek, but I'd still watch the next star trek.

I'd never pitch a script to them mind, just in case they robbed the whole story arc like they did when they stole/made DS9

Jammill

[Rodders]

I have to disagree with you in regards to the design of the ships and the space battles. B5 had some of the most incredible ship designs in SF (The White Star? The Shadows? The Omega Destroyers). I also thought that the battle sequences outstripped much SF before it and still rate them pretty highly now. (that's my opinion anyway.)

As for Standards, i feel that's more down to budget than anything. I think that an episode of B5 cost half as much as DS9? That's a lot of effects.

[Interference]

Bearing that in mind, even with the state of the art in those days (which was pretty darned good), because they used CGI they were able to keep costs of model-building down to a very manageable level. Unfortunately that didn't leave them with much in the kitty, anyway, as they were already on a tight budget, hence the (compared with Trek) Army-And-Navy-Stores uniforms and bedsheet costumes.

I actually thought they did a mighty fine job with alien make-up, though. No more "funny foreheads and fangs", as were the staple of aliens throughout the Trek franchise, but chins as well! And sometimes the aliens even looked - alien! What's not to love about the Vorlon designs?

[Ursa major]

I think the most impressive thing about Babylon 5 overall is how many of the characters change (or, in some cases, how our views of them change) over the whole span of the show. It demonstrates, in terms of character development, why shows mostly set in one place can be superior to those whizzing about the galaxy (in a ship or via a wormhole): we get to live with the "bad" guys as well as the "good" guys, even when they're incidental to a particular episode's story.

DS9 was able to do this to some extent, but the writers were hampered by the space station's purpose and ownership: it was still a Star Fleet installation, with other species visiting; most of the main species had a permanent presence on Babylon 5.

[Interference]

That is very much the major appeal of the series for me. There are many moments of true pathos as characters are hauled through the burning coals. Here is one place you won't find anyone "going back to normal" by the following week's episode.

But authors and screen writers please note: Very rarely is the dramatic twist anything to do with anyone falling in love, getting pregnant, being unfaithful, discovering a long-lost relative, being (or falling under the spell of) a sexual predator, accidentally killing a close friend or relative or any of other domestic crises which, while of undoubted impact in RL, are really, really lame in drama and ought to be left to soaps and the worst of sit-coms. Or Voyager. Or, in a pinch, Shakespeare

[JunkMonkey]

I actually thought they did a mighty fine job with alien make-up, though. No more "funny foreheads and fangs", as were the staple of aliens throughout the Trek franchise, but chins as well! And sometimes the aliens even looked - alien! What's not to love about the Vorlon designs?

And they didn't all come speaking American English as standard on first contact, and breathing Oxygen. Some of the aliens in B5 looked, well, alien. And some of the humans looked, and acted, like human beings. Albeit American TV versions of human beings. Some of them even had credible sex lives - even - gasp! - a homosexual encounter!

The thing that strikes me about B5 is that the writer/s were writing SF and telling the story in a TV format. Star Trek looks for the most part like it was episodic TV written in an SF milieu. They have a superficial similarity but are very different beasties. Like Dr Suess said:

How To Tell A Klotz From A Glotz
Well, the Glotz, you will notice,
has lots of black spots.
The Klotz is quite different
with lots of black dots.
But the big problem is
that the spots on a Glotz
are about the same size
as the dots on a Klotz.
So you first have to spot
who the one with the dots is.
Then it’s easy to tell
who the Klotz or the Glotz is.

[Jammill Khursheed]

Rodders - Like I said, it was the design, not the implementation, of the ships that put me off. The sequences were well directed and realistic (momentum, no sounds to make it more interesting), but the designs of the ships were all wrong, far too curvy and sleek and naturalistic, so while they looked cool, they looked wrong and not very realistic (the White Star especially.) With the Vorlons it worked though (as did the 'make-up' effects for the suit) The Human and Narn ships however were just boring.

As for the budget, I think I read somewhere that the feature length pilot for DS9 was about half the budget for the entire first season of B5. Don't quote me on that, I'm not 100% sure it's true, but it sounds and looks like it coulda' been.


Ursa Major/Interference/JunkMonkey - That was my point exactly, those bits were done so great, and so much better than Trek manages on its best day, you can forgive the fact the Aliens looked like the circa 1970's Doctor Who effects team did them, especially because they did try to do some races that were hugely different (even the Narn look less human-like than most Trek races, never mind the Pack'Ma'Ran or whatever they were called, they were very original.) They did get a lot better in the second series, up to 1980's Doctor Who standard in some places

And Interference, yes the Vorlons were VERY cool, even from the first episode. When everybody had to wear a suit to go see Kosh, even though he was still in his own suit with breathing apparatus on it just like he was outside his apparently needlessly hermetically sealed room, and I realised it was all just part of the self-created mystique for effect, my interest was piqued, and it never went back down. Hell, the first time I watched the episode 'Interludes And Examinations' I didn't sleep for two days I was that worked up by it, it's what inspired me to try and become a writer.

I can forgive that a lot of it looks cheap, everything did back then apart from Trek, but I'll never forget how good it actually is behind those poor effects.

P.S. JunkMonkey, the lesbian thing was really childish, peripheral, badly worked out and seemed tacked on just to get the 'first gay in space award.' If hadn't have been the butchest woman in the universe who turned gay, or had been a male who wouldn't have titillated the sci-fi crowd as much, it might have worked. I'm sure if anyone could have done it well it would have been JMS, but personally it was the only point in the storyline that didn't work for me.


Jammill