A little digression, since it's Christmas.
We've been rewatching (and introducing James to) the wonders of
Babylon 5, as
Watch are currently reshowing all 5 series at the moment. (They're currently paused partway through Season 2 for Christmas and will restart on Jan 6th.)
It's always fun rewatching something - you notice things, especially forward references to things you now know are going to happen, that you didn't notice before, for example. It's also worth remembering that Babylon 5 did something that, really, no episodic SF series had done before (you could make an exception for Blake's Seven, but certainly no
US series), namely moved largely away from the Mystery/Alien Of The Week format that the likes of Star Trek had used into having an overarching plot that ran through its episodes - in fact, the term 'story arc' is pretty much Babylon 5's fault.
To be fair? Season 1 was a bit 'Alien Of The Week' to start with, but about half-way through it starts to warm up, and by the time you get to 'A Voice In The Wilderness' parts 1 and 2 it's really starting to roll. Season 2 manages to fairly seamlessly cover for the illness of Michael O'Haire (Commander Sinclair) who had to leave the series for really quite sad health reasons, and from then on it's a roller-coaster of tangled plot threads and character interactions. Season 5, IMO, is marred a little by both the loss of Claudia Christian (Commander Ivanova) due to what I think is most fairly described as some bungled contract negotiations, and the fact that it was touch and go whether it was ever going to be made (which makes the last episodes of both Seasons 4 and 5 a little awkward, and forces a bit of a race to wrap up threads in Season 4, and then fill space in Season 5).
It also makes some of the first really serious use of computer generated effects, using the Commodore Amiga, the Video Toaster card and Lightwave 3D, rather than model shots. Certainly if you watch them now you can see how far we've come since (the way exploding ships leave no debris behind is particularly obvious), but the show managed scenes which would have been impossible any other way.
In all honesty? I'd forgotten how good it was.
There are both wargaming and RPG tie-ins with the series:
Mongoose produced both two editions of an RPG and the 'Call To Arms" ship combat game. Both are now discontinued, I assume because they no longer hold the license. I'd love to get my hands on lots of both, but dear oh Lord, they're expensive. Copies of various RPG books are going on Amazon for well over 50 quid a shot!
