Babylon 5, oh Babylon 5!

I took a gigantic bag full of tapes to campus on Tuesday: due South, every episode except Mojo Rising -- I forget why. I've seen it, but I don't have it on tape -- and traded with sineala for the first season of Babylon 5, The Best Television Show. Ever. Really. I like X-files early seasons, Buffy kicks ass, especially seasons 2, 3, and 4, due South had excellent plots for the first two seasons and CKR and high(er) doses of slashiness in the second two seasons, although I feel that the characterization of Fraser and the tightly woven, although weird, plots start to fall down.

But. Babylon 5 is just The Best Television Show Ever. The plots kick ass. The characters learn and grow and have personalities and, incidentally, a woman who is probably my favorite female character on television. Ivanova. Ass-kicking, swearing, cynical, Russian Jew, bisexual, in command and on fucking top of it and she never took any shit from anybody. The arc is -- my god, this is the show where the same guy wrote an entire season single-handedly because the arc was so important and so cool that he didn't want some other writer doing a MotW and accidentally ruining some minor point. This is the show where I watched my first episode ever on the phone with Ra, so that she could tell me who everyone was and what she thought was going on, because they talk like real people and don't do that thing we've made fun of at parties:

Bob, what do you think of this?
I don't know, Bob, I think it might be interesting. What do you think, Bob?
Hmmm. Well, Bob, I could go run it though the technical name.

You know. Every other word someone's name.

And the dialogue! And the Neil Gaiman writing an episode! And the scientific accuracy! (Well, for a fictional work, pretty damn good. Rotating ships for gravity, and when Sheridan falls from the center he falls slowly at first; the real danger is that he'll hit ground that is moving so fast. I've heard that this was NASA's preferred sci-fi...)

I don't have anything against Sinclair, or against Delenn pre-half human, or anything, but our vcr broke during first season reruns, when I was planning on recording them all pretty and nicely labeled. This means I haven't seen the Narn in power and the Centauri on the run in ages. Or Sinclair interrogated about the Battle of the Line. Or Morden and the Shadows behaving so nicely but the undertones written so well everyone thinks they're evil even before anything's really happened. Or Chrysalis. Or Babylon Squared.

I've heard that Delenn was originally intended to be a male Minbari and transform into a female half-Minbari, half-human, thus adding to Sheridan's Issues when they start being attracted to each other. Damn, that woulda been cool. I love this show for even thinking about trying it, even if the technology wasn't good enough to alter Mira Furlan's voice.

As you can see, this whole tape-trade thing may have been a bad idea... Damn it, I should so be working!

Postscript, re: Babylon 5 and Fanfiction

I just found out the Sineala is trying to summarize our recent discussions about how and why some shows have more and better fanfiction.

Babylon 5 is a show where there's really very little good fanfiction. I choose to believe that this is because the show kicks so much ass, and the characters as so well-drawn, that it's difficult, if not impossible, to write fanfiction that fulfills all of the fanfiction characteristics we love, both filling in plot holes or tangenting off incomplete plot ideas and building or investigating characterisation.

I think the most common pairing in B5 is Marcus/Ivanova, because their story had a Sad Ending. But I think it's kind of like trying to write fanfiction for Romeo and Juliet -- it's so well done, fixing it would either make the emotions trite and lose the power of the moments on the show or have to do incredibly ridiculous plot thingies or both. I mean, when the famous Marcus Moment happened, I wrote a list of 100 ways to save him (both before and after the end of Endgame) as a joke -- and man, silly and farfetched and not in keeping with the spirit of the show.

Not that the emotions in R+J might not be trite already...

(no subject)

Heh! My last post made me remember that list I wrote at the original airdate of Endgame in 1997. This is one of the ways I wrote to save Marcus:

21. They shoot his body out onto a planet that is in the process of growing and he is reformed by it, growing as fast as it does in the beginning in order to return to Babylon 5 in a year.

The ridiculous things one writes to get a favorite character back; or, why some fanfiction doesn't work. I mean, Mulder shoves off and it's all "oh, *again?*" Basically takes no effort. Anybody can fix it any which way. In the case of the Babylon 5s of the world, it's pretty much over once the guy's dead.

Also:

41. He needs to be in the spinoff.

It's a good show, and so that doesn't cut it. Just because he would have been excellent as a Ranger on an all-Ranger show is no excuse to start weirdo plot lines.