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Best season to start watching B5

cappy

Member
By the subject, you correctly guessed I'm new to B5 - so hi

The obvious answer to my question is 'the first episode of the first season' but I know from experience that the characters and the writers don't really get going until the second or third (or even fourth) season of most sci-fi series and I have read that B5 is no different. There are many websites on B5 so I know that if I started watching from series 3 (for example) I could read some spoilers to catch up without having to endure any wooden acting and mish mash storylines that may exist in earlier seasons.

So, which season is where the whole story really gets going - where the actors are briliant and the storylines realy start to flow as one?

Cheers

cappy
 
Unfortunately, there is crucial information from the pilot that isn't quite followed up on for seasons. :eek:

Sorry, but I think the die-hard B5 fans will say "it's best if watched from the start, in its entirety". :D
 
OK, fair point.

Some of my concern stems from a couple of friends who, when they were students, started to watch B5 from the start and stopped watching half way through season one due to it's 'lack of real entertainment'. They never bothered to watch again until one evening years later when one of them caught a season three episode on the sci-fi channel (UK) and was hooked and watched every episode from then on.

So my concern is I'll rent a few of the DVDs of season one and then be turned away before I get chance to see what I have heard is one of the best sci-fi series ever. I don't want to be put off the good stuff by a bulk of bad stuff at the start.

cappy
 
I agree with Hypatia that everyone else is probably going to say that it's best to watch from the start in its entirety. However, I'd like to dissent from that a little and say that, while there are some episodes in Season 1 that you absolutely need to see in order to get the full experience, there are others that you can skip and not have it impact your enjoyment of the show much at all.

This is the way I hooked a couple of my friends as well. Show them an abridged version of Season 1 with the most significant episodes, then move on to Season 2. Knowing them, I figured that they wouldn't have the patience to go through every episode, and would probably give up if they were asked to sit through all of them. Honestly, can you really say that someone's enjoyment of the series will be severely hindered if they miss "Infection" or "By Any Means Necessary"?
 
yeh - but infection sets up the organic technology which the shadows and vorlons use. It brings into the mix Interplanetary Expeditions. It raises the point that Earth was trying to get its hands on advanced technology. Also it asks the question as to WHO it was that was invading the Ikarrans.

I dont think this is one you can miss ( even if David McCallums acting is really rubbish ).

and what is it about the disappearing suit of Ikarran armour?

and why does the creature walk as if he has just emptied the contents of his bowel while he was still wearing his suit?

Oh Nuts....

:D
 
Well, first, please be careful about posting spoilers, as we obviously have someone reading this thread who hasn't seen the show yet.

Second, yes, clearly B5 is a show in which all but a handful of episodes contribute *something* to the arc. In many cases however, it's just a matter of some foreshadowing or giving the audience some details about a character that adds some texture. Yes, that stuff is nice to have, but it's not absolutely necessary to understand or appreciate the rest of the series. I have friends who have seen 80-90% of B5, and enjoyed it, but I really don't consider their B5 experience to have a gaping hole in it just because they missed "Infection".

If you're sure that you'll stick with the show, then watch everything. But if there's a chance that you might bail out if you get bored, then I don't think there's anything wrong with cherry picking episodes in Season 1.
 
I have read that B5 is no different

Well, you've read wrong. So, there! :)

Start with the pilot, skip nothing. You'll just miss too much of the slow build-up, the mysteries, and the foreshadowing. You'll also miss the invaluable experience of going back and watching the first couple of seasons a second time in light of what is revealed in the later seasons. The show is a completely different experience when viewed this way and you simply don't get the effect if you watch S3-S5 first and then see S1 and S2 for the first time already knowing what comes after. Why cheat yourself to save what really comes down to a a few paltry hours in the grand scheme of things?

And don't depend on the judgment of others on what constitutes "wooden acting" or "lack of entertainment value". (And don't forget that there is a difference between an actor being "wooden" and an actor brilliantly portraying a very tightly-wound and tortured character who keeps his emotions on a very tight rein. One is a lack of talent, the other is a creative choice about how to exercise a talent to bring what is on the page to life.)


Welcome aboard. :)

Regards,

Joe
 
Hey Cappy, it's great that new people are still coming to see B5. :)

The greatest/worst aspect of B5 is that every episode builds upon the previous ones. If you skip the first season then you are denying yourself the full enjoyment when you get near the end. There were events in later seasons that were set up wayyyyyy back during the first season.

I'll admit that the first season doesn't appear to be all that special, but that's because you are seeing things that you don't yet realise will become important. All we can say is - trust us, it is worth working through.

When you do start watching it, can I request that you make posts here after each viewing? Watching other people see the show for the first time makes even the old timers here happy. :D
 
i know it is only an opinion.

You don't have to watch them all to 'get it', but there are the smallest little references made in season one episodes which bloom into god awful universe changing prophecys years down the line.

( oh and sorry about the spoilers )

:D
 
OK great. I have added the season one DVDs and The Gathering(in order) to my online DVD rental. Hope they come soon.

Cheers for the opinions. I was hoping to miss out on some of the rubbish but it appears you don't believe there to really be any rubbish - though I doubt your opinions are completely unbiased ;)

cheers guys.

Will let you know what i think.

cappy
 
I wouldn't go that far. TKO is not considered to be a good episode by most fans. It is considered necessary to watch it though. :)

We'll be here with a cup of warm cocoa / beer / tequila shot to help you recover afterwards, I promise. :D
 
I'm one of the few people that think TKO was one of the stronger (although more suttle) episodes of Season 1. There are few who agree with me though...
 
OK great. I have added the season one DVDs and The Gathering(in order) to my online DVD rental. Hope they come soon.

Cheers for the opinions. I was hoping to miss out on some of the rubbish but it appears you don't believe there to really be any rubbish - though I doubt your opinions are completely unbiased ;)

cheers guys.

Will let you know what i think.

cappy

Grovy! I (and most other B5 fans) always like to here the stories of Babylon 5 1st timers, and their reactions to the character dynamics of Babylon 5, most notably, Londo & G'Kar.

Feel free to keep us posted! :)
 
If you start to flag in you enthusiasm I would recommend the movie "In the Beginning". Yes it does spoil a few things but this was my introduction to the series and the quality of the movie allowed me to ignore a few stinker episodes.
 
I was hoping to miss out on some of the rubbish but it appears you don't believe there to really be any rubbish - though I doubt your opinions are completely unbiased ;)

cheers guys.

Will let you know what i think.

Please do. We enjoy hearing from people who experience B5 for the first time because it's special. No, we're not unbiased but there must be a reason why we all love the show so long after it's off the air, right?

Enjoy!
Jan
 
I was hoping to miss out on some of the rubbish but it appears you don't believe there to really be any rubbish

The problem is that (to paraphrase a certain character) "rubbish" is a subjective thing. One man's rubbish is another man's treasure, and all that. I suspect that most fans would come up with a list of many 12 to 15 "bad" episodes out of a total of 110. That's an extraordinarily small proportion for any show. ST:TOS at 79 episodes suffered an entire last season that was pretty much trash, and some "growing pains" scripts that ought never have been shot in its first and second. TNG was pretty much unwatchable until it finally found its footing around "Yesterday's Enterprise". And the less said about Voyager the better.

The problem is that no two fans have the same list of "bad" episodes. There are some episodes that really split the fan community with half of us citing them as among our favorites of the series, while others call them the worst and skip them when they come up on DVD. And even the handful of episodes (about 5 or 6 I think) that are almost universaly dislike for one reason or another often have seriously redeeming features, something that can't really be said for something like "The Specter of the Gun" or "Spock's Brain". One show whose "A" story falls apart under a trying-too-hard metaphysical villain, a bad "man-in-monster-suit" alien and a wildly improbable (and physically impossible) resolution still has a "B" story that is not only compelling in its own right, but also sets up a key event in the following season. Another that seems to be transporting a Hollywood staple (and cliche) into outer space for no good reason has a "B" story that gives us real insight into a couple of the character's inner lives, as well as resolving a plot thread that has run through several previous episodes.

So yeah, there are "bad" episodes - JMS has said that he wouldn't shed a tear if the last print of a couple of them accidently got dropped off a pier late one night - but "bad" is a relative thing. There are episodes that fall short, in whole or in part, of the extremely high standards that B5 set for itself and that the audience came to expect from the show. Most of the "bad" episodes are actually "routine" space SF adventures. They aren't horrible, they just don't challenge us to do anything that we haven't seen done before, as the best B5 episodes do. They don't grow organically out of the universe and the characters, they are, in the worst sense, "generic".

To me the worst thing about one universally despised episode (it is mentioned several times above and was one of the two JMS mentioned) is that it has precisely this "generic" quality. You could have gone through the script and crossed out the name "Commander Sinclair" and replaced it with "Capt. Kirk", "Capt. Picard", "Capt. Sisko", "Capt. Janeway" and so on throughout the script and shot it for any of the Trek shows with scarcely another change. If it had been shot for Voyager that script would have been one of the best episodes of whichever season it appeared in. It would have been in the top 5 of most seasons of TOS or TNG. On B5 it sucked precisely because we had seen the same thing over an over on Trek and it was just more of the same. On B5 it sucked because B5 was better, and we knew it. (I'm deliberately leaving the episode unnamed because I'm curious if you be able to identify when you see it, if you remember this post by then. :))

Regards,

Joe

* (I omit DS9 becasue I'm not in a position to comment on it. The show just never interested me. The characters were not people with whom I wanted to spend an hour every week. It isn't criticism of the acting or even the writing, just as a matter of personal taste I found the lot of them pretty unappealing so I never really watched the show except by accident and at friend's houses if it happened to be on. So I'm in no position to critique it.)
 
I worked out at one point that every single episode of Season 1 introduces something - be it a place, character, theme or prophecy - that gets mentioned again or revisited later on. There isn't a single episode that's completely superfluous or self-contained in terms of the overall arc story, no matter how they may seem so on a first viewing.

To put another point of view, though - I actually think season 2 is also a good point to come in. The fact that Sheridan is new on the station and needs to have everything explained to him leads to a fair bit of recapping. He also helped make the show accessible to new fans at that point (that was when I started watching seriously, anyway, although I was vaguely aware of what had happened in S1). B5 gained viewers in season 2 - midway through season 3 we were all junkies..

*Don't*, whatever you do, start with Season 4!!! :LOL:
 
At the time B5 started here in the UK pretty much the only TVSF my wife and I found worth watching was ST:TNG, but right from the start it was clear that B5 was just different, somehow.

It took a while, probably towards the end of season 1 before it even started to become clear what that "difference" was.

Yeah, season 1 has some episodes that don't match up to the standards set by the best eps of the season, but those best eps set quite a standard - and there are very few that I wouldn't sit and watch if they came on TV, even having seen the show right through on a number of occasions.

By one beef with B5 overall is that I now judge new SF shows by the standards it set - and most have come up too far short to hold my attention for long ... but I wouldn't have it any other way.

So, dive into S1 with an open mind - and ignore what others say to you about it. It might surprise you.

:D
 
The other problem for new B5 viewers, perhaps reduced now that there have been other long-running shows besides Trek to compare it to, is the "frame of reference" problem. People forget that until B5 no space-based SF show ever made it past season three that didn't have Star Trek in the title. It got to the point where if a show did something that Trek didn't, or did something in a different way, it was labelled "unrealistic" - as though Trek were some kind of 24th century doucmentary. (JMS actually got gigged for the communicators on the hand bit because "everybody knows" that we'll wear them built into chest insignia.) People viewed B5 through their "Trek-goggles", saw everything different as being "wrong" and sometimes hated the show. Or at least had to watch enough of it for the goggles to dissolve and start judging the show on its own terms. The amount of time this change in perspective can vary considerably, and I suspect that some who have only been through the show once and find S2 a vast improvement over S1 really just happened to take that long to lose their built-in Trek bias and see B5 "unfiltered".

I should add that I myself was very resistant to B5 initially. Like many others, I thought it was a "poor man's Trek" and as an original fan of TOS who had finally warmed up to TNG, I just wasn't interested. I didn't see the B5 pilot when it first aired, and caught only one or two episodes of S1 during the initial run, which did not impress me at all. My best friend, however, was totally hooked on the series. He kept writing me from New York about how good it was and I kept asking "are you sure we're talking about the same show?" Finally there was a block of reruns coming up and he said the magic words: "Watch four or five episodes straight. Don't judge the show. Don't try to figure it out. Don't decide after one that you don't like it or the sets are cheesey or the FX look funny. Just keep watching it until you've seen four or five in a row." I did just as he said, (reluctantly for the first couple of weeks as I still seeing everything through my Trek goggles) but aroud the fourth or fifth episode I suddenly "got it" and was hooked. (Oddly enough I don't even remember which episode those were. My B5 viewing remained spotty until mid-S2 because the local PTEN station kept playing musical time-slots with the show and even after that I missed the odd episode because of work - these were the dark days before TiVO and season passes ;) - but I never again intentionally missed an episode.)

Also, as I discovered many years ago, the series is a very different experience depending on the time the elapses between episodes. During the first run there was always at least a week and sometimes a couple of months between new episodes. Time to forget small details. When the reruns started airing Monday through Friday on TNT and I was able to catch up with the entire first season in order I started noticing foreshadowing and links even between episodes I had seen that I'd never spotted before. At around the same time I had a job that sometimes had me travelling for a week or more at a time, and I set the VCR to record the show every day at the lowest quality to get the maximum number of episodes per tape. When I got back I'd sometimes plop down and watch six straight hours of the show (less commericials) to catch up - and watching this way was another eye opener.

One of the reason the "first generation" of fans often complained early on was the "where's this arc I keep hearing about" issue. When you waited a week or more between episodes, and had no way of knowing what in an episode was foreshadowing and what wasn't, the arc could be hard to spot. And the comments of those fans are still floating around on the 'web, and still influencing the perceptions of newer fans. But if you sit down on a rainy Saturday and watch 4 (or even 8) episodes of the series in a row you're going to have a very differnent experience of the series than a first time viewer.

Like much else about the show, this was no accident. JMS always knew that if the show was a success, if he made it to five years, that the show might eventually run forever in syndication, probably 5 nights a week. There was even a chance that the show would join the small number of (mostly cult SF) TV series that got released on home video in the U.S., along with The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and the various Treks. (He was thinking in terms of VHS and laserdisc, since DVD didn't exist. Prior to DVD the conventional wisdom in Hollywood - and the realities of the marketplace, to be fair to them - was that TV shows did not sell on home video in a country where every show was rerun on hundreds of independent TV stations and dozens of cable networks. Except for a few shows that those SF weirdos just had to collect. That's why Warner Bros. released the series on TV in the U.K. - where was a much smaller syndication market and few shows were rerun - but not in the U.S. DVD changed all that.)

So JMS designed the show to work in a week to week schedule, but to work even better when viewed every day in reurns on in great gulps on home video. And especially repeat viewing, which is why there are things planted throughout the first couple of seasons that can't be understood or even noticed except in light of what we learn in S4 and S5. The technique was dubbed "holographic story-telling" by somebody, and it really is very effective. It makes B5 the first and only TV series I'm aware of that really has to be watched at least twice before you get the full effect of it. :)

Regards,

Joe
 
Hi there and welcome cappy.

For me, although I started with season 2 during my current rewatch on DVD, and while I would say you could probably miss more than half of the season 1 episodes without missing anything over the long run, something that happens when you watch the entire season 1 is that a person, hopefully, develops an appreciation for the station commander as a whole, Sinclair. This familiarity and appreciation pays off VERY nicely in a 2 part episode during season 3.


If I were to take a consciencious stab at which episodes were more vital from seaason 1..........and these are fairly plot critical, so if quality of performance and story are the goal then anywhere around the mid point of season 1 would do as a staring point:


Season 1 intro "Movie", "The Gathering"

S1 Episode 1 "Midnight on the Firing Line"
S1 Episode 6 "Mind War"
S1 Episode 8 "And the Sky Full of Stars"

S1 Episode 9 "Deathwalker" (good performance, not essential though)

S1 Episode 13 "Signs and Portents"
S1 Episode 17 "Legacies"
S1 Episodes 18 & 19 "A Voice in the Wilderness"
S1 Episode 20 "Babylon Squared"
S1 Episode 21 "The Quality of Mercy"
S1 Episode 22 "Chrysalis" (A total "do not skip" episode)

---------------

Also (though not critical for future developments, but helpful in appreciating many of the permanent characters)

Episode 3 "Born to the purple" (for background on the Centari Embassador)

Episode 4 "Infection" (background on the Chief of security)

Episode 5 "Parliment of Dreams" (Background on the Narn embassador and his relationship with his aid)

Episode 7 "The War prayer" (background on Centari peoples culture)

Episode 11 "Survivors" (more vital background on Garibaldi and also some lead in to future schemes by unknown people)

Episode 14 "TKO" (Background on Commander Susan Ivanova)

Episode 15 "Grail" (Background on what happend to Babylon stations 1-4, Relationship development between Sinclair and the Minbari ambassador)

------------------------------------------------------------------

And I would not recommend doing seasons 2,3 or 4 piece meal, as only 1 in every 4 or 5 episodes is marginal and often still has critical development anyway.

Season 5 might be considered equivalantly weak with season 1 as the story slows a bit and the wrapping up of the series takes over in many episodes along with a certain person organizing certain people which can to some feel like filler and not as valuable as other story lines. Still many are of a fairly high quality even if not as meaty as previous seasons.........

Seasons 2, 3, and 90% of 4 are golden though.
Persoanlly, the only downer to season 4, for me, was a somewhat repetitive role for Mr. Garibaldi to play out, but his story line still manages to wraps into a taught finale near the end of season 4.

Please be aware that these views do not necessarily reflect those of this web site or of the other posters here...... ;)
:D

:rolleyes:

:)
 

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