Loved Angel, perhaps looking back on it more than Buffy.

I figure I'll stick through the whole season, and if I'm not at least intrigued by the end of it I'll just ebay it back. Das monkey's claim of season 3 being the best ever really has me intrigued.

Im done with S4, starting on S5, and season 3 is VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY VERY good.

DOnt judge the show on S1...the rest of the series has a feel very different from the pre-Babylon Squared episodes

I haven't watched the whole show start to finish in several years, and although I'm very tempted to start it, I'm going to wait another couple years. I figure in 2 to 2 1/2 years my daughter will be old enough to appreciate it and we can go through it one at a time.

Get season 2 cause season 1 is not anywhere close to what this show can be.

Oops. ;)

Don't worry, you'll probably fall in love with it before too long.

das

I'm very much inclined to agree with das monkey here.

Season 1 is 90% complete crap. There are some good episodes toward the end of the season, but I was not hooked until the last episode of Season 1. The first season finale is one of the most intriguing cliffhangers I have ever seen. Not much happens, yet you are left feeling completely intrigued about what will happen next. It was all so very nicely and subtley done.

You just have to suffer through the first season. There is enough important information in there that you can't skip it completely, so you just have to labor through it unfortunately.

I think S1 plays better the second time through...at least it did for me...while there are definitely 4 or 5 episodes I would classify as pretty bad and forgettable, there are also several episodes that seem like standalone pieces that do have effects on the characters or plot later on. The S3 finale is, perhaps, my favorite single piece of tv ever. While I'm often engaged heavily in tv shows I like, few of them give me shivers of pleasure like this episode does.

Also, I've never quite understood the claims of 'bad acting' that I often see from people starting to watch B5 for the first time...certainly Londo and G'Kar are the best actors bar none in the show. Sinclair is a bit wooden but I never thought of him as bad...perhaps Talia and some of the secondary background actors can be just aweful at times but I always felt the primary cast was pretty solid (or at least serviceable) for acting on the show. And Walter Koenig is pretty fun in his guest starring role on the show. If it IS the secondary characters bothering you, then I'm afraid they rarely get any better in acting quality.

Once you make it to the season one finale I think you'll find you either want to stick with it (it's a point of significant change in the B5 perspective) or you'll want to stop. I never really thought much of the S1 'mystery' but I still enjoy watching the season.

i don't think you'll want to stop;)

Michael

I was in the same boat a couple of years ago. My partner watched it with his Brother when it was originally on. I watched the first couple of episodes and gave up. So, he introduced it to me. I felt the same as many here that the first season was fairly boring but let me tell you once it gets towards the end of Season 1 and they start with the story arc going into two I was hooked.
Amazing stuff.
I suppose you could just start out in Season 2 but there are things that happen in later seasons that are connected with season 1.
Keep going.

Well, I've decided to start watching Babylon 5. I've been thinking about it for a while, but finding Season 1 & 2 for $20 a piece (used) at Hastings convinced me. Watching BSG has got me in the mood for watching another sci-fi series. I watched "The Gathering" tonight, and I'm going to start Season 1 maybe later tonight.

Season one is big load of crap but the rest is great.

Personally I only think a few of S1 episodes are bad. Most of them are OK to good in my book.

I think you guys just say stuff like that to scare away us johnny-come-latelys. ;)

Well, it's kind of tricky... Once you've seen the whole show, you'll have a whole new appreciation for the first season, but since a LOT of it is just setting stuff up, a new viewer can find it a little "meh".

I really don't think season one is that terrible. It can be boring, the effects take some getting used to, but there is still great stuff to be found. If nothing else Londo, G'kar, and Delenn are interesting as hell characters to watch in nearly any situation (even bad tv).

I still enjoyed the character interaction in season 1. But I really need to get back to watching the show because blockbuster started sending them all out of order and I gave up for a while.

Yup, season 1 blows

Sorry to ressurrect this old thread again, but I just finished watching B5 and the movies for the first time. Thank you everyone for always talking about this show and convincing me to try it out!

Overall, I loved the show and would probably rank it in my Top 5 of all time.

That being said, I pretty much completely agree with chess regarding Season 5. I don't know what JMS was thinking, but the whole Telepath story-arc seemed like a general waste of time to me. Not only that, but like some posters have already mentioned, the telepath colony seemed really freaky to me and I absolutely hated hated (!) Byron.

Maybe the telepath arc would have been better if they had casted a different actor, but whatever merit the arc had was sucked right out whenever Byron was on the screen. I can't possibly imagine a Byron/Ivanova romance, that another poster mentioned, if Ivanonva had stayed on the show. I actually jumped up out of my chair and did a little dance when he died. All the telepaths, but especially the males, seemed like bad Anne Rice Vampire rejects.

Also like chess wrote, as much as I loved the final episode, I would have liked some more closure regarding the whole Centauri, Drahk, and Sheridan's son storyline. Even though you can pretty much piece together what happens using flash-backs and A Call to Arms, I would have preferred to see it.

I also thought that what happened to Lennier was waaay out of character, even if he did love Delenn. Plus, you never find out what happens to him. I would have liked in the series finale if they had had Lennier assume command of the Rangers after Sheridan, showing that he's atoned for his mistake, and have Ivanova become President, kind of tying it back to her comment about voting for the president with the best chin, or whatever in season 1 (I forget the exact line and am too lazy to go back in the thread to look for it).

Watching the show in January of 2007, I can clearly see the influence of Babylon 5 on TV today. Not just on scifi shows like Farscape and Battlestar Galactica, but shows like 24, Lost, Heroes, and Prison Break, with continuing storylines and character arcs. It really was a revolutionary show and it's no wonder that after B5, and competing with BSG, Enterprise didn't satisfy the fans anymore (among other reasons, but that's another topic all together.)

Thank you for praising this show so much that I had to go out and buy it all. I can't wait to lend it to other people and have them watch it, and being able to say Heh, heh, heh to them

Another convert!

There's some more straight to DVD B5 shows coming out this year. Hopefully they cover some of the unresolved stories.

I've recently been watching ST:TNG and ST:Enterprise on the DVR. I find I start getting annoyed when they hit the magic reset button; it's back to the status quo almost every time.

I noticed TNG drove me crazy with this. I swear every single person on TNG was single and changes very little. I've never seen so many single people! And Worf got a kid but he kinda vanished a lot.

I've found a lot more interest in TV shows nowadays, since many do a better job of having a cohesive story and aren't just a bunch of standalone episodes with unchanging characters.

If you're interested in more backstory, several of the books (two of the standalone ones, and three trilogies) are considered canon and do fill in a lot of the unanswered questions from the series. I especially liked the Psi Corps trilogy, which is great if you liked Bester.

I second this suggestion. I actually thought the Psi Corps books were the weakest, but they were still enjoyable. The Technomage trilogy was the biggest surprise to me- it filled in a lot of backstory and really makes that episode seem a lot "bigger".

Well, to be fair, I haven't read the last book of the Centauri Prime or Technomage trilogies, yet. I haven't been able to find them anywhere.

It looks like Amazon has them.

Book 3 of the Centauri Prime trilogy, "Out of the Darkness," and book 2 of the Technomage trilogy, "Summoning Light," are out of print, so anyone looking to buy them is probably going to have pay out the nose for them.

They occasionally turn up in used bookstores for cheap, so that's an option if someone is patient and unwilling to pay $50 for "Out of the Darkness."

We just finished watching Season 4. It really started to run down during the last 3-4 episodes, and it took more than a month to get through them all. Is Season 5 an improvement?

I'm trying real hard to avoid the spoilers.

Season 5( which Im half way through) seems useless to me

Dunno, I like the end of S4, things ramp up and a lot of things are concluded. I can't see that as running down - except for maybe the last ep, the Deconstruction of Falling Stars - it certainly is different.

I, like most people, consider S5 the weakest season. But the end of it is killer.

Perhaps if S4/S5 events had been stretched out & combined like originally intended it would have been better. But internal drama made them rush stuff to tie up lose ends as they thought that there would be no S5. So S5 comes off erratic. A lot of time in S5 is spent on the telepaths, for example: this storyline should have originally occurred in between parts of the S4 storyline and a lot of S4 events should have taken longer to resolve.

Nick... I think the problem you're having with Babylon 5's fourth season is that the show climaxed at the beginning of the fourth season. The end of the Shadow War was the dramatic high point of the series, and everything after that is just coming down from there. Never mind that "War Without End" pretty much gave away most of what was going to happen in the second half of the series.

I can understand what JMS was trying to do... in that just because a war ends doesn't mean that it's completely over, but it unless it's done gracefully, it doesn't make for good drama.

As for season five being an imporvement, not really. Sort of. Neil Gaiman's "Day of the Dead" is a great standalone episode, and the last five or so episodes finish up the series where it needed to end. But everything else just feels sort of forced. There's also a casting shake-up that really sort of hamstrings the whole season. It was bad enough to lose a pivotal character; even worse when the replacement character stunk up the series.

I enjoyed the Scouring of the Shire episodes that happened after the big war. It all made sense. Here are some plot items I didn't like from the last couple of episodes. It looked like lazy writing, but I guess it was caused by caused by JMS wrapping up the storylines too fast.

Holy thread resurrection!

I had some good times watching this show. It had a lot of mediocre writiing and a lot of bad acting, but when the writing and acting were good, they were absolutely brilliant. The end of S2 through the end of S4 remain some of the best television I've ever seen. I still think S5 was a huge let down, and I disagree with the idea that it would have been better if it had been mixed in with S4. If anything, it all would have dragged S4 down.

BSG has certainly faded some of my love for B5, being a similar but generally superior show. If nothing else, it's certainly more consistent. BSG has also paid homage to (ripped off?) B5 at least a couple of times, particularly in "Exodus" during the first half of this season.

I also FINALLY finished Farscape last month with the last starburst set coming out. It's brilliant in it's own right as well...and is probably my favorite of the three...with BSG coming on strong. I think I prefer the acting in Farscape to all of the above, and though it lacked the feel of a strong overriding story arc, the story was certainly well done. I also thought the dialogue was much more interesting and wittier. I think I just like the lighter more adventurous tone of the show.

Edit to add...I forgot Firefly/Serenity! It's hard to include it since it was so short lived, but damn did I love that show...and in a way, it's good that it was so short lived in that it never had a chance to get stale. It's a great ride that you can knock out in a weekend.

All 4 are superior to any Star Trek.

Heh heh heh

:hscratch:

Aside from the last episode, he's pretty much completely correct in my opinion...and you could easily just watch that episode at the end of season 4.

:shrug:

Fixed that typo.

Agreed, hands down some of the best B5 IMO.

Fair enough...not sure it needed a spoiler though.

I also think season 5 gets unfairly maligned for things that weren't really in the control of JMS. If they were sure they were going to have gotten that fifth season, the resolution of the Shadow War wouldn't have come until the middle or the end of the fourth season.

I just took the plunge into B5, I am on the second to last ep of the first season and am starting to get into it. One question though, does the video start to look better? It's pretty much about as bad as it gets as far as video quality goes.

S1 reels are in bad shape at times. S2 and later are definitely better.

The jump in video quality from S1 to S2 is very starteling