Babylon 5

The prequel movie is good after you finish everything as it gives you a bit of insight on stuff. The movie that launched Crusade is also decent enough, the rest are okay but missable.

You could, and maybe should, watch "Sleeping in Light" the final episode of season 5 which was actually made as the final episode of season 4 prior to the last minute renewal. While there are elements of season 5 that are entertaining to view, most of the main crux of the storyline ends by the conclusion of season 4 and Sleeping in Light is the capstone to the whole deal.

watch everything including crusade, while it never really recaptures the awesomeness of s3 & 4 its still decent stuff and more babylon 5 is always good. then watch farscape afterwards if you haven't already.

And don't forget the FarScape Movie. When I saw the final TV episode I was pissed (didn't know about the movie).

Funnily enough, I was hanging at a mates house last night and borrowed his Farscape DVD collection, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Gone kinda scifi crazy lately, I think it's Mass Effect's fault (only got around to playing the trilogy last year).

I'll give S5 a go, and if it doesn't do much for me I'll just skip to the final episode you guys mentioned.

Cheers.

Make sure you google the viewing order before bingeing thru the whole series or you get massive spoilers.

B5 basically started the serially narrative season format that all the prestige shows are doing now. Unfortunately you can't just jump into it mid season and catching the wrong episode at at wrong order can spoil stuff.

Hoss_sl said:

Shut your stupid whore mouth if all you're going to do is talk shit about Ivanova. She got all the best lines. The running theory was that JMS had a crush on her. Maybe they seem more campy now, I haven't seen the series since it originally aired.

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There was also the fact that the show was right after the Cold War and JMS might have felt the need to emphasize her nationality more and somehow make it cool.

As it is, it couldn't be him using her as a surrogate, JMS is Polish and was Catholic.

The stuff involving the Narn and the Centauri is worth watching in S5.

S5 is plenty good, it's 'slow' compared to S4 because it's not trying to tie up a show in case it gets cancelled. It starts slow and the earlier episodes feel pointless, but it's ABSOLUTELY worth watching and anyone that says otherwise is just spouting nonsense. Shit, you sat through S1 and that's 10 times worse than S5.

TheYanger_sl said:

Shit, you sat through S1 and that's 10 times worse than S5.

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What I don't get about crap about S5. S1 was extremely rough around the edges and at times make early DS9 seem good. The only thing that really carried it was the glimmering moments of the series arch that would pop up here and there.

The only real thing I really didn't like about S5 was Byron and the telepaths, the rest of it was good and it was nice for a series to take its time winding down and laying out the greater scope of its universe.

S1 is to be avoided, except for a few places. S5 was decent to good, except for all the Byron crap.

Mudcrush Durtfeet_sl said:

S1 is to be avoided, except for a few places. S5 was decent to good, except for all the Byron crap.

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What bugged me was a lot of the Trekish one-off crap that would have huge repercussions, like the dude who was Johnny Mnemoniced to carry information and avoid being scanned by telepaths. You'd expect that to be incredibly common given the paranoia around mind reading, but we never see it again.

A lesser series I could forgive that crap firm but B5 set itself avoid that. In the end I felt it was a quick, cheap way of trying to show that this future is weird instead of being subtle like G'Kar mulling over with the Oriental chick about ants and the ancient races or even that fucked up alien porno they come across in Crusade.

Technomages feature prominently in Crusade.

Unfortunately that series never went anywhere. Or fortunately, we'll never know. :-(

I think that was the pilot for Legend of the Rangers or whatever that was.

Mudcrush Durtfeet_sl said:

I think that was the pilot for Legend of the Rangers or whatever that was.

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Yup.

Terrible shit.

Couldn't get into Farscape so I came back to S5, and it's actually pretty good (although I miss Ivanova, fucking hate it when actors bail on a show and their established and central character has to be replaced - especially since they killed Marcus just to keep her, probably 2 of, if not the 2, coolest characters in the show, both gone because some dumb actress probably wanted to try pursue a movie career or whatever), except, as someone said, for the Byron/telepath storyline. That was a painful storyline to watch because the whole thing was a clusterfuck triggered by one stupid decision after another. It's like everyone involved temporarily turned into a fucking moron, Byron especially, which just annoyed the hell out of me.

Anyway, on e13 now (the ''day in the life of Walter Koenig's character'' episode), so there's half a season left.

The more I watch this show, the more I realize how much of an inspiration it must have been for the Mass Effect series. Aesthetically especially (if I squint I could almost think I'm watching a Mass Effect TV series made with extremely outdated equipment), but also certain parts of the storyline (a major, central space station where alien races meet diplomatically, recently emerged humans with special powers who face social problems and persecution, a massive, galaxy spanning war which has repeated itself in cycles over thousands and thousands of years, etc etc). I mean no one of those is unique to the series, they're all found in other space opera's, but the combination, on top of the aesthetic similarities, is interesting.