Special edition or original version?
As I mentioned in the YouTube thread, I recently watched the special edition and it was so much better than I remembered, even Christopher Franke's music which felt a bit subdued and recycled, though I still feel he should have gone for a style closer to his season 1 music.
I always felt in the original version at least, that B5 was much more on the frontier than it was in the regular series (the special edition used the updated effects shots that showed the station to be much busier). And I love Michael O'Hare's performance in this, you can tell that both himself as an actor and Sinclair as a character were so proud to be commander of the station.
It also feels like a little insight into the B5 that never was, really fascinating. I wonder what the show would have been like if subsequent seasons had gone ahead with Dr Kyle, Takashima, Lyta in from the beginning, Carolyn (and what was the nature of her relationship with Delenn?).
I miss the strobe lights filtering into C&C from spacecraft flying into dock.
In the UK we didn't get the pilot screened on TV until the run-up to season 2 - we started with Midnight on the Firing Line - so it always felt a little weird watching The Gathering after the fact. There had been a VHS release before that, however, though I guess most viewers didn't have that.
Happy birthday B5!