Sunday, April 18, 2010

Babylon 5 Stuffed Animals

deviantART user Babylon 5 Club made these Centauri and Earth Force stuffed animals. Cute!

I watched about a twenty episodes of Babylon 5 when it aired -- enough to know that I was missing something pretty awesome. So in the past couple months, I watched the entire run of the show, the movies, and a few episodes of the awful spin-off show Crusade.

It was as good as I remembered. Some of it is creepy-cultish (e.g. "We live for the one, we die for the one."), but it is a rousing adventure and an intricate story arc, well-executed.

Have you watched Babylon 5? What did you think of it?

4 comments:

Mike S said...

Haven't watched it. I figured it was a Star Trek variant, and since I've only ever seen the bad Star Trek movies, wasn't interested in the TV serieses.

Maybe I should have watched them in the opposite order.

Divers and Sundry said...

I was a big fan from the beginning, watching them on tv first-run, and I have the DVDs from the first 4 seasons. I think the last season, which doesn't have Ivanova, is not worth re-watching except for the last episode.

I live for the one, I die for the one. (not knowing anyone else who'll make the "we" appropriate.)

John said...

Mike S -- you might want to give it a try. It's quite different from Star Trek in many ways. Among others, it's a serial, rather than purely episodic show. The characters are richly detailed and complex.

D & S -- Yes, the fifth season is odd. It could have ended very nicely at the fourth season. But the fifth season gave JMS (Praise Be Upon His Name) an opportunity to explore the re-corruption of Londo Mollari in greater detail. I really liked that.

One of the facets of the series that I like is that it doesn't stick firmly to the innocence-corruption-redemption formula. People do very well, and then they fall and their lives are pretty much over (Lennier) or they end up falling back into old, destructive patterns (Mollari, Garibaldi). Life is messy and doesn't fit into a nice, neat narrative pattern. B5 reflects this.

Divers and Sundry said...

As I understand it, the 5th season renewal was late in coming, a reprieve of sorts, so the 4th season was an emergency wrap-up which then turned out to have been unnecessary. Claudia Christian (Ivanova) didn't renew her contract because of the uncertainty over the series cancellation after season 4. Season 5 has the Elizabeth Lochley character, which is another reason to avoid it.