I agree. I like 5, in all the ways that it's different- but I always feel like 5 has a long expanse of seemingly meaningless turns until all of a sudden things get good. Then it will have another long lull between interesting events.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
The other unique thing about B5 is the richness of character arcs. The central plot moves everything forward, but each character has their own multi-season arc inside it.
I mean, Garibaldi? G'Kar? Londo?
These are not "Oh, that's cute, the character changed" few episode arcs. They're the sum of innumerable small events in most episodes, that result in complete (and believable!) overhauls of the characters.
> It's also coherent in between seasons, since it was pre-planned as a 5-season show spanning exactly 5 years on the Babylon 5 station.
Though the 5th season is weak, because the show was threatened with cancellation. IIRC, each season had an "major plot" and a "minor plot." To adapt to the cancellation threat, they crammed the season 4 and 5 "major plots" into season 4 (IIRC defeat the Shadows, liberate Earth), leaving season 5 with two "minor plots." The season 5 finale was originally shot as part of season 4, but delayed when the show was renewed.
This way of writing, at least the overall arc, really shows. Ideally, writers know when to stop. The Revenge had such an ending, it was Season 3 if I remember well, before it turned into yet another soap opera. Babylon 5 on the other hand was a great example of having the whole 5 seasons basically written before they started production.
There are similar stories about Babylon 5 (envisioned as a 5 year cohesive story arc; lots of changes to the plot happened over the years of production)
This really shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who has worked on a creative project over an extended period of time. Heck, NaNoWriMo has you write a novel in a single month and I doubt many people have the novel hit exactly all the plot points they had originally thought up. How much more should we expect plans to change over many years (and with external constraints).
interesting view on the history. Of course, over here in Europe, we go into great detail when looking at WWII in history at school (at least the European part) and to be honest, I have to agree with the poster - all this feels kind of surreal and inaccurate.
I guess this is already some consequence of history-rewriting going on in some parts, combined with strange coincidences. But in general, yes, the whole story, especially when told in such few words as the original article, doesn't make a lot of sense.
On a different note: I totally agree on his opinion about Bablyon 5. There are few other series that managed to capture me as much as B5 did. Especially seasons 2 and 3 are brilliant and I would highly recommend everyone with even just a slight liking of Sci-Fi to give at least these two seasons a go.
If you want, you can start at S1, but it's quite slowly building up story, so you might get bored out, but in the context of the whole series, quite many episodes in S1 do make a lot of sense too.
Although I thought about it a bit more, and I'm a sucker for the storytelling trope they use a little bit after that, which means Control probably takes 2 out of the Top 5 moments :)
I'm not sure there was a need for filler B-plot and C-plot. There's no particular reason it needed to be planned as 5 seasons if there wasn't enough A-plot to fill 5 seasons.
Hell, Severed Dreams felt like a season's worth of plot all on its own, and all the better for it.
I love the series but I think this is an astute observation...though I have trouble articulating why I agree with this. I wonder if the world constricts or if its possibiilties just narrow (as they necessarily must) as the story plays out?
it sets up the scene for a major series of events happening in the background of the main story, but you have to be attentive to catch those glimpses, as it doesn't appear in dialogues much, in passing at best. the background slowly becomes the foreground during the 5th season.
Babylon 5 accounted for this in the first three seasons by making them start out episodic and switch to serialized over the course of the season, since by that time most would have settled into routines and watch the same shows each week.
Seasons 4 and 5 probably would have been the same except due to fears of cancelation they took the primary plots of both seasons and stuffed them into just season 4.
I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
I've become a little tired of series with continuous plots at this point. It's really hard to create content for so many episodes that isn't repetitive, irrelevant to the main story, or hard to believe because of the piling up of coincidences. Then you often have implausible character changes and other typical series-but-not-movies problems piling up. It's an art form that seems very difficult to get right, and so it usually goes wrong.
the new story pitch is actually very good. i just rewatched the whole 9 seasons in the past weeks, and it feels right at home.
edit : now that i think about it, i wonder how they'll manage to get multiple variation of the story unfold depending on your choices. it's already hard enough to write one linear... i suppose they'll just block you until you click on things in the right order. Wonder how interesting or funny this could be in that context. Maybe a lot ? Like, making the absurd choice and bad decisions the character usually make and see the consequences unfold... this could be fun.
It was plotted and written in the era where a plot of the week had to carry an entire episode. Main characters can no longer be allowed to get entangled in a non-critical event for a full episode just to reveal something important about them for later. Writers have to be more clever than that. There's no room for "this time on B5, a rebellion/alien/telepath problem/encounter."
With 22-episode seasons like the original, I bet a good writing team could do something like this:
Season 1: building up the world, revealing the Shadows at the end
Season 2: Shadow war
Season 3: proxy wars
Season 4: Loose ends & Consequences, including Thirdspace and the telepath war. If there's enough material, maybe even move the telepath war to a 5th season. I always wanted to see what happened to the Vorlons' favorite telepath.
There should still be room, in seasons 1 and 2 especially, for some cute but essentially irrelevant subplots like Green vs Purple.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
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