television!

[jazzfish]

I have a vague desire to drown myself in television. Which of these, o lazyweb, would you recommend? (ETA: I've seen none of these except the BSG pilot)

• Babylon 5
  
• Farscape
  
• Battlestar Galactica
  
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  
• Something else entirely

(No poll because I'm more interested in the Whys.)

Not that this will be happening anytime soon: the next four months or so are kinda busy. But once we get settled I may do something like 'i made my wordcount for the week so i get another episode of X.'

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

The aging well thing is definitely a concern--I think it's still okay, but it's very definitely a mid-90s piece of science fiction. (It's also easy to laugh at all the haircuts.)

My current recommendation is that people watch Seasons 1-3 normally, then Season 4 except the last episode, then the last episode of Season 5. That was the order they were filmed. If you want, then, you can go on and watch the last episode of Season 4 and the rest of Season 5, but I'd treat them like, oh, like spinoff novels or comic book extensions, not like a "real" final season.

[jazzfish]

Mid-nineties SF is pretty much okay; that's a little past the golden age of SF for me ("Twelve") but I can probably handle it.

And, I did not know that about the last episode of season 5! Although, as I just wrote elsewhere (regarding BSG), I /might/ be able to restrain myself; I have a really bad track record of stopping when the stopping is good if there's more 'official' material. Then again the B5 situation sounds a lot less dire than BSG.

And, thank you! Will definitely bear these in mind.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the finale episode of the series ("Sleeping in Light") was filmed at the end of Season 4, when they thought they weren't going to get a Season 5 and wanted to give viewers some kind of good conclusion to the series. (I quite like Sleeping in Light.) Then they did get a Season 5, quickly filmed a new Season 4 finale, and ran Sleeping in Light as the last ep of Season 5. So while Sleeping in Light works as the last episode of Season 5, it also works as the last episode of Season 4.

It's not even that Season 5 is so terrible (it has bad parts, but overall it's not so terrible) as that it's just not as good as what came before. I find it quite a bit less frustrating, therefore, if I mentally put it in the same semicanonical category as spinoffs and so on, and treat Seasons 1-4 + Sleeping in Light as the main canon. Mileage probably varies, though.

In terms of effects, B5 did CGI for the space scenes/battles at a time when most of the other SF TV sf shows were still doing most of their stuff with models. On the one hand, this gave them a lot more flexibility (and the ability to do some more ambitious things in terms of those battles); on the other hand, CGI does date rather more quickly. That's one of the things that's good to know going in: it certainly ages better if you look at it and think, "Pioneer of CG effects!" than if you look at it and think, "Wow, that render is kind of clunky."

...blah blah blah. Babylon 5 was my first real Internet fandom and my second really huge fannish love, after Star Wars. I see its faults and yet I still totally adore it.

[marcmagus]

Good point here about the B5 SFX. Unfortunately, the mixed scenes (filmed people with a CGI backdrop), of which there are a number, look especially bad on the DVDs. Worse, in fact, than they did when it originally aired. This is for complicated production reasons that amount to "we saved money in not making a widescreen version while we were making the 4:3 version knowing we could go back and do it later if we ever went to DVD, and then when we went to DVD we weren't able to go back and do it, so we had to do something that sucked"

I'm totally with you on B5, being my first really huge fannish love. Although I disagree with all and sundry about S5, which has extremely low low points, but isn't at all tacked on. (My understanding is that it's pretty much what was always intended for S5, barring casting issues, but feels tacked on because a show with a season and a quarter of denouement is really weird.)

[jazzfish]

To be fair, in 1993 there wasn't really a home video market for TV series that weren't named Star Trek.

[jazzfish]

Oh, okay. Hm. That seems decent enough, then. Will see how I'm feeling about it when I get that far.

I see its faults and yet I still totally adore it.

This I can understand. :)