Getting others hooked

Iam thinking of starting with "Midnight...", "Soul Hunter" and "Born to the Purple".

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It really *so* depends on the people you're planning to hook. For example, if you showed me, as a new viewer, just two eps and one of those was Soul Hunter - or Believers - I can say with a pretty good certainty that I'd never be interested in the show. Honestly. I realise those two are "better" episodes than, say, TKO or Grail, but I remember them both as a struggle to sit through.

Same with ItB - I'm quite sure it would never have worked to get me hooked in the series, and not because of the spoilers or mystery angle - it's just so dead boring to me. Yeah, with a lot of people it might work, but certainly not with everyone - not even with people who don't have any particular dislike to scifi as a genre and who have the potential of becoming a B5 fan.

So it would be good to try and figure out what kind of stuff the people to be hooked usually like. Although this might not help either. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif But Midnight at the Firing Line should be a good start - it is a decent episode, and establishes a pretty good basis or at least a starting point for the series.

I just wish I could remember at which point exactly I started to watch B5 the first time around. It was mid-season 1, or second half of season 1 perhaps, no idea really. Damn, I don't even remember whether I saw Signs and Portents the first time around or not. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Then again, maybe it's good I didn't get to see the early part of S1 on my first time through - I have a very good friend who is generally into "genre" stuff but I later found out she had watched the few first eps of season 1 and decided it's a really lousy, boring and silly-looking show. All my raving about it in the following years hasn't done a thing to change her mind - no matter how much I tell her the show improved later on, she just doesn't care. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

But with watching 5 episodes a week, Sheridan grew on me, and I imagine everyone else.

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No, not everyone else.

I didn't see enough of S1 to grow really attached to Sinclair's character the first time around, so while I liked Sinclair, replacing him was certainly not the biggest problem I had with Sheridan. I was sort of neutral to him to start with, and ended up disliking him completely. Ugh.

Personally the character of Sheridan I never liked right from the start.I missed Sinclair. Micheal O'Hare has a certain style of acting BB doesn't have.Also I think if JMS had continued with the story of B5 as did .Especially with the story of Garbaildi it would have had a bigger impact on both the charcters and with the audience.

I am of the school that believed that JMS had always intended to bring a Sheridan type character into B5.

Some people who liked Sinclair had trouble adjusting to Sheridan, and others who liked Sheridan, would watch S1 and dislike Sinclair. That is mainly because people expected one to be a replacement character for the other, or for them to be similar. I dont think that was EVERY the intent. Think about how vastly B5 sets up these charaters to be:

Sinclair:
He is set up for his final destiny right from the start, which is that of almost a religious icon. Look at how he solves many problems in S1. "By any means necessary" was a good example of this, and I believe there is even a line in there from GKar saying he is a "much more spritual person" than he first thought. Naroon comments to him that he "thinks like a Minbari." He is much more of a thinker it seems.

Sheridan:
He is a soldier. The one to fight the big war. There is no way that a persona like Sinclair would fit as well into the role Sheridan had for the Shadow war. It really is a completely different role than Sinclair, but this makes sense because both characters go down such different paths. (although I guess if you look at it, both end up fighting a Shadow war, its just that Sinclairs is a vastly different situation considering when he enters it, and who he is).

This is rapidly becoming a "Sinclair vs. Sheridan" thread which is not only off-topic but a bit silly. JMS had excellent reasons for making the move that he did. Sinclair was connected to the Minbari through the 24-hour mystery, and that story was basically told. JMS said he needed someone with a connection to the Shadows, which is after all the bigger story, and Sheridan was the result. Both characters are excellent and enjoyable. Give the bickering a bit of a rest, please.

Returning to the topic... personally I disliked "the Gathering" when I first saw it, but I think that with the extra stuff ("Entil'zha Valen," for instance) it would be a bit cooler. Maybe not sufficiently cooler, however. "Midnight" it is.

While it's true that starting with ITB is valid from a story telling POV (that is, not treating it like a myster), it does deny that viewer the mystery angle. If you watch it in broadcast order, you get the mystery aspect. Then when you watch it again (in any order), you get the "cards on the table" thing. So I personally would give someone the mystery thing first, allowing them to view it again later.

I remember back in the day when I had my folks record ITB for me. They actually watched some and told me how boring it was and "How can you watch this stuff?" I had to explain to them that it works when you follow the series.

My mom also told me after only seeing a couple of episodes that she thought Sinclair was a better captain than Sheridan.

I, however, prefer Sheridan much, much more, but that's off-topic.

I bet you 100 to 1 everyone that watches the show the first time through thinks Sinclair is superior, then once you see all the movies and watch it again, Sheridan grows on you. Thats how it was with me at least.

Sinclair was my favorite, I loved the way he interacted with Garibaldi. (Fasten then zip...or zip then fasten?...and when they swithced Ivanova's breakfast...)

While I loved Sinclair, But I believe that Sheridan suits the role better as head of ISA... I really wish Sinclair was the one that Garibaldi saw on Day of the Dead, not some random GROPOS troop. Also I wish Sinclair would have been mentoined by somebody, probably Garibaldi when they went around the table remembering those who had passed, in SiL.

TJ

Once again... you'd lose that bet. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif I don't mean to get into a Sinclair vs Sheridan argument here, but the second time I watched the series, after having seen it and all the movies once before, I only grew to dislike Sheridan even more than the first time around.

Sure, I may be in a minority, but it's definitely not *everyone* that feels the same way about this. Sorry.

And I liked Sheridan right from the start. Of course, "Comes the Inquisitor" was one of the first ones I saw.

The pre-Z'ha'dum Sheridan is a little more approachable, I'll admit. He cracked jokes more often before he died. But Sheridan at any phase in his life is one of the classic heroes, and I always like those. I'm also a hopeless romantic, so the John-Delenn thing gets to me too.

Although, to be perfectly honest, the character I like best is probably G'Kar by a whisker. Mostly because of the incredibly dramatic change from "The Gathering" to "Objects at Rest" (or "War Without End 2" if you want to look at it that way).

Well of course everyone has different opinions.

I don't know what I said but I was probably generalizing, hmmm.

I still wish that Sinclair never left.

And I think that a Ivanova vs Lochley argument would be a no brainer....do you agree there? lol

TJ

Dodger was hardly some "random GROPOS troop", she was a woman with whom Garibaldi had an important, if brief, connection.

And there is no way that Garibaldi could have seen Sinclair, because Jeffery Sinclair never actually died. By the end of his life he'd been Valen for nearly 100 years. And since Garibaldi never met Valen... /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

There is also the question of whether or not Valen himself ever died in the conventional sense, or if he, too, somehow "passed beyond the Rim" like Sheridan. (Minbari accounts are contradictory.) So he may not have been "available".

Finally if you want to blame someone for this, you'll have to yell at Neil Gaiman. He, not JMS, chose the characters he would use in "Day of the Dead".

Re: The Last Supper. Yeah, a lot of people complained that Sinclair wasn't mentioned, or Lyta wasn't mentioned, etc. As JMS said at the time, you can't bring the whole episode to a screeching halt to do a roll-call of character names. By the time of "SiL" Sinclair's been gone for the better part of 20 years.

Most of what the Babylon project and this group of friends accomplished happened after he departed. By 2281 Garibaldi has been closer to Londo, G'Kar and Sheridan for far longer than he was to Jeff Sinclair. Each of the characters named one person he or she had a particular attachment to. Nobody present had that kind of relationship with Lyta, so nobody named her. (Maybe Zack would have had he made it to the party. "Or maybe not, considering what happened later", as JMS once said. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif)

You can't have someone name a character just because the audience wants to hear the name. Drama doesn't allow for that sort of thing.

Regards,

Joe

I don't think Dodger had that much of an important connection with Garibladi...it was pretty brief. Surely not as important as Jeff's.

I wouldn't want Sinclair's name mentionied just for a roll call, but in the series it was led to believe that Sinclair and Garibaldi were very close friends.

I don't think that changed even when Sinclair went back in time to become Valen.
TJ

And I think that a Ivanova vs Lochley argument would be a no brainer....do you agree there? lol

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Hm... I liked Ivanova, she was a great character, so I naturally missed her in season 5. But I really didn't dislike Lochley at any point - I guess she didn't really get enough screentime for me to dislike her. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

But then of course, being a straight female, I mourned the loss of Sinclair a bit more than the loss of Ivanova. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Getting back to the topic, I've always found that showing people:
The coming of shadows
In the shadow of Z'ha'dum
and The long, twilight struggle,
gets them hooked real good. I can always go back and fill in the blanks later, I've hooked like half a dozen people so far. When I tried showing the arc eps from season one to someone who's a trekkie, they just couldn't get into it. So from now on I'll stick to the big 3 frrom S2.

Back to the Sheridan/ Sinclair debate. I think both were just right for their part of the story. When I saw Points, I remember telling a friend that I liked Sinclair better (and the S1 main title music better). However, Sheridan is just so damn heroic, you just gotta like him! I can't understand how Kribu hates him so much. Like everyone in real life and the B5 universe, he's got flaws. He's so hypocritical to the telepaths and cares nothing for Lyta despite all she's done for him. Absolutely no mention of her when he was praising G'kar and Garibaldi on Objects in motion. He doesn't realise how much others have to sacrifice for his battles.

I think the series would have got cancelled if O'hare had stayed, he's a good actor but most people Ive hooked think he was quite crap compared to sheridan.

Actually, Kribu, I adore Ivanova as a character, and it has nothing to do with my preferences. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif

So VERY MANY men just cannot write an interesting, intelligent "real" female character. Especially in science fiction.

In many ways, JMS hooked me into his B5 series by just writing interesting characters. Both male and female. And Ivanova was one of the best. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I miss her of course in season 5. But Lyta was a great character, too, so I got past it. Besides, I knew that Claudia was pursuing projects that made more money for her, probably, so what they heck. It's the nature of the beast, eh? /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif