Star Trek vs Babylon 5

[Mudcrab]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWtuKm6C1Sw

Heh. I've never seen that. I actually quite like the idea as using VR as a space ship battle interface (I actually had an idea for that in a comic story, so slightly irate to find out they did it first.* ) but boy, did she look silly.

*In my one it was a small one man fighter with the person plugged in directly via a cybernetic implant. To their perception they're flying through space kinda like superman, with a 360 degree view all around, actually relayed to their brain via the ship's sensors. The pilot might point to shoot, etc, but none of that flipping around. Unless he/she wanted the entire ship to do that.

I'll just wade in here with a Stargate reference 

http://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Eurondan_piloting_unit

I've not watched much Babylon 5, seems like the kind of thing you'd have to watch all of to say. The bits I have watched seemed too deep into whatever storyline runs through the whole thing to get into. Of course, being a Stargate fan will probably negate any opinion I may have anyway 

Liked BSG mostly, was disappointed by the end and copying it ruined SG: Universe.

[Professor Bear]

According to (Stargate Universe producer) Brad Wright, what ruined Stargate Universe was that fans of SG1 and Atlantis didn't like it and so warped reality itself to make it seem like the show was being criticised by established reviewers, and to make it appear that people were turning off in large numbers.
Basically, SGU failing was not his fault, it was ours.

[TordelBack]

It's an odd one.  The wife is a huge Stargate fan, has the whole endless shebang on DVD, including Atlantis and the movies, and for myself I find it inoffensive and entertaining, and sometimes actually surprisingly smart fun, so have always been happy to watch it with her. We also both enjoyed BSG, old and new.

Despite surely being the target audience the wife never even made it through the first episode of SGU, and while I tried quite a few episodes I somehow never got all the way through a single one.  Something went badly wrong there, I think.

[Professor Bear]

You  misunderstand, TB: there is nothing actually wrong with SGU.  You're just a hater.  A hater on the internet, no less.

[Roger Godpleton]

All of these shows are terrible.

[JOE SOAP]

That's why you should be a Mod.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Trek has a special place in my heart that no other show could ever replace

[Roger Godpleton]

Trek is a special kind of wet fart that no other show could ever replace.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Trek is a special kind of wet fart that no other show could ever replace.

I knew you'd understand

[Beaky Smoochies]

Sorry if I sounded glib Beaky Smoochies perhaps we can't really understand the cataclysmic culture shock for the USA 9/11 was and still is.
The TV series 'Homeland' is a very good example of this. To much exposure to the enemy might turn you into one it seems to be saying. If even your Defenders can be turned against you who can you trust?

No worries dude, I got your meaning alright, and you are absolutely correct that most non-Americans fail to grasp the cataclysmic impact that 9/11 had on the American psyche, if it was Canary Wharf that had been levelled and not the WTC, a lot more people would understand the grief and pain that America felt, not to mention their completely proportional response to it... in regards to Homeland, I have mixed feelings about that show, it's clearly an excellent and quality show, but unlike 24 which had both liberal and conservative writers on the staff (and thus came across as balanced), Homeland's writers are ALL left-leaning liberal Democrats, so it doesn't explore both sides the way it should, it's almost sympathetic to the erroneous view that the U.S. brought terrorism on itself through it's own actions worldwide, a view I find not only wrong but utterly reprehensible!

Anyhoo, back to the thread's subject, Star Trek's original and TNG series' are both great shows, forget the other spin-offs, with the second, third, fourth, and sixth movies superb, the TNG movies not so.  Babylon 5 is just different to Trek in that it's eseentially a singular, concurrent storyline with a clear beginning, middle, and end - Seasons 1-5, forget the movies (except In The Beginning ) and spin-offs - the only reason for B5 to return would have been to do a proper theatrically-released feature film that took place in the twenty years between the penultimate and final episodes of the fifth and final season, but as the actors who played G'Kar and the coloured doctor (I forget his name) are both deceased, that opportunity has since gone...

[klute]

I only saw a teensy piece of Babylon5, I was put off by the CGI ships- models are still even now better in my opinion, and at the time what I saw didn't grab me.
   @Klute- I didn't think the end of BSG was perfect [spoiler]so the baby didn't in the end matter at all, and that theatre stuff was meaningless)[/spoiler], but in terms of every other drip-feed multiple season mystery I've seen it was up there with the best.
   And the soundtrack throughout was immense.

[spoiler]I didn't take the baby as being meaningless in the grand scheme of thing's for me anyway she proved that the Cylon's and Humans could co-exist with out the whole cylon resurrection (this would of course make them mortal as oppose to immortal) or at least as immortal as the ressurection hub would have  allowed

Again for me it meant that over many years the human and cylon genepool would mingle and give both race's the best of both.....the cylons had no idea till the baby and to a lesser extend caprica 6s baby came along that it was possible for them to create "new life" without having to engineer it themselves bringing the above back into play in the end the human race could not survive without co-existing with the cylons.

Being immortal such as they were/it was. Eventually the cylons would have wiped out the humans due to being able to come back from the dead the humans couldn't. for me again the message in the end seem's very simliar to our own situation in the past and even now the only way human life will continue to exist is if we continue to co exist and see past our own genepools and stop the wars against each other

So for me she was very important to the humans survival but yeah i wasn't so sure about the theatre[/spoiler]

[Devons Daddy]

TREK for me I own the entire lot on DVD,
I have heard rumor of star trek ENTERPRISE, i even have a box of dvds with that title on.

this said, as i am aware it was never actually anything other then a bad idea. which was never made in a show.
Babylon 5 I also own it all,
very good but TREK WINS.

babylon five was good, if you could not act! it got you a job on TV. later stuff better then the first couple of seasons.
movies from ok to outstanding.

[Professor Bear]

Babylon 5 gave Kenicke a job, so it wasn't a total waste of time.
One thing I do notice with B5 compared to Trek is that the direction is incredibly static.  The camera rarely moves around the set or the actors, almost like it was just turned on and then the director left the room.

I have heard rumor of star trek ENTERPRISE, i even have a box of dvds with that title on.

this said, as i am aware it was never actually anything other then a bad idea.

I fucking hated Enterprise so much the first time around, but I rewatched season three a year or two back on a whim and found it really enjoyable hokum the more it abandoned any pretence that it wasn't just a rip-off of Galaxy Quest, right down to the hammy actor captain, hot babe who does nothing on the bridge but answer the space-phone, the young black pilot, the trippy engineer (who was even named Trip), the alien doctor, the ineffectual security guy, and even the giant reptile supervillain baddy whose goal is to possess a giant spherical superweapon.
Season 4 was also much better than I remembered, but then I rewatched the first two seasons after that and realised they really were just as terrible as I recalled - if not worse.  The season four finale is also so laughably terrible that most of the cast refuse to watch it to this very day, citing it as the result of sour grapes on the part of the guys who wrote it that they weren't in charge of the show anymore.

[SmallBlueThing]

I own the entirety of the original series of Star Trek, along with the animated series, the first seven movies, the reboot movie, all of james hawley's star trek: new voyages/ phase II episodes and about fifty or so original series trek novels. I own only the episodes of later trek that feature actors from the proper show and which were released at the arse-end of the dvd partwork collection.
I neither own, nor have watched, any babylon 5. Actually, tell a lie, i may have seen the first episode and a series climax one where barry bostwick (?) piloted a cgi spaceship into another spaceship, seeming to die. Neither seemed very good.

So, trek wins. Unless you also factor in later trek (from tng onward), in which case the statistics may be weighed against it.

SBT

[Professor Bear]

There's a whiff of snobbery off that collection, SBT: you don't have the Starfleet Academy comics.  They had an issue written in Klingon, damn you!

I think you need to have watched DS9 and B5 specifically in order to really contribute to this discussion, particularly as B5 writer/producer JMS claims as absolute fact* that DS9 ripped off all of B5's good ideas, but tried to hide this by doing all of B5's good ideas on DS9 before JMS could do them on B5.  His exit interviews for Amazing Spider-Man are equally fair and balanced, as I recall...

Actually, I suppose you can get around not having watched B5 or DS9 if you watch original Trek and then compare it to Crusade.  Of course, that would mean having to watch Crusade, which I wouldn't wish upon anyone.




* though he graciously admits that he can't actually prove it in any way whatsoever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine#Deep_Space_Nine_and_Babylon_5