Subject:
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Re: Not the right way to exit?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Wed, 21 Jul 2004 22:34:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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2192 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Dave Schuler wrote:
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Admittedly, not much. I caught bits of episodes here and there (which, I
grant, is not the best way to get one’s teeth into a longterm space opera).
I saw a good bit of the pilot, one episode with Checkov, and a chunk of the
finale.
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Heh. Even hard-core fans are amazed at the comparatively low technical quality
and such of the premiere movie after having watched the full series, but to be
fair, I believe it had an even lower budget than the individual episodes, and
that had to cover building everything from the ground up. Of particular
interest are the various changes that were made between the two. The Minbari
(bone-crested people) ambassador underwent a significant change to make her
appear quite a bit less androgynous. The bulky guns were replaced by little
Derringer-sized pistols. They never again strapped on riot gear before a simple
shoot-out (this can be likened to how the crew from The Cage is seen bundling
themselves up in Away Team clothing layers that were abandoned for the regular
run of ST:TOS).
Now, “Chekov” (Alfred Bester, to B5 fans, and yes the character is named after
the author) is actually a deliciously quasi-evil character, often working in
opposition to the B5 command crew, but occassionally helping them out. He can
best be likened to Q, but with a decidedly reduced level of omnipotence. And a
decidedly darker set of morals.
I don’t remember much about the finale (saw it only once, and I haven’t had a
chance to pick up the last season on DVD yet), but many fans consider Season 5
to be a huge disappointment, though most admit that it’s probably because of
WB’s decision to drop the show after the 4th season even though they knew it was
plotted for a 5-year run. Too many plotlines had to be wrapped up last-minute
in Season 4 just in case it didn’t get picked up by anyone else, so the plot of
Season 5 felt a bit watered down as a result.
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I don’t mean to begrudge them their budgetary shortfalls--I suffer from those
same constraints in real life! But I’ve gotten spoiled by other contemporary
SFX, and B5 suffered as a result.
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I’d really like to know what they could have pulled off with a less restrained
budget. At the time, noone believed any non-ST sci-fi show could survive, so
noone was willing to give them the funding necessary to prove themselves. After
B5 developed a strong following, a bunch of other sci-fi shows showed up and
burned out pretty quickly (which might explain why WB cancelled B5). Now we
have the Stargate franchise, but even that ended up having to retreat from full
syndication to the Sci-Fi channel 5 years in, with syndicated reruns following a
year behind.
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Regardless, I commend B5 for having a better menagerie of non-humanoid
aliens, which are much more interesting than Star Trek’s generic-alien-with-
head-prosthetic.
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Heh. One of my biggest gripes is that n’grath, one of the coolest recurring
alien bit characters ever created for B5, ended up being quietly dropped from
the series because thought-impaired trekkies kept telling him that it had the
wrong number of legs...for an insect.
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On the other hand, there was a scene in the finale in which Tron was floating
through some big space-fighter fracas in a spacesuit, while one of the
bone-headed people watched from some kind of monitoring station on B5. The
CGI of Tron in his suit was terribly weak, with bumpy transitions between
facial closeups and wide-angle shots of the whole scene. And the monitoring
room looked like nothing so much as a person sweeping her gaze back and forth
in front of a weatherman’s bluescreen. So this was the finale, presumably
the last blast of the SFX they were able to showcase, and it came across as a
jarringly executed CGI test run. Again, I understand the problems of budget,
but it you can’t do it right, then you don’t want to do it wrong, either.
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Well, TNT was funding the show at that point, so I don’t know how that affected
their per-show budget in relation to their WB years.
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Ah, the spectre of technobabble rears its head in B5-world as well as in Star
Trek! Still, I guess that’s better than spaceborne sound reaching the
listener at the same time the enemy’s ship is seen exploding in the distance.
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I don’t believe that really qualifies as technobabble. The way I’ve heard it is
that technobabble is when you toss out words with no meaning as a way of
disguising the fact that you don’t have a real explanation for it figured out.
When you’ve got telepaths strapped into organic ships to serve as a living CPU
against their will, a “telepathic scream” is a perfectly logical result. It’s
interesting to note that when the first Shadow vessel showed up in Ep 1.22 there
was no scream-like sound effect whatsoever, but when you see them again in Eps
2.4 and 2.22, there was. I can’t be sure whether that was a running change, or
whether they just hadn’t started stuffing telepaths into their ships yet.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Not the right way to exit?
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| (...) Admittedly, not much. I caught bits of episodes here and there (which, I grant, is not the best way to get one's teeth into a longterm space opera). I saw a good bit of the pilot, one episode with Checkov, and a chunk of the finale. (...) I (...) (20 years ago, 21-Jul-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek, FTX)
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