a conspiracy of cartographers

Apologies ahead of time; I'm powering through season one because, frankly, a lot of it is character bits, a lot of it is human character bits, and I just don't care enough to do proper deep analysis when I know what's waiting for me. (In the same vein, I'm probably going to skip whole sections of season five because I want Byron to die in a ball of fire.) First season is a bit of a wasteland in the middle, to be honest; sort of space-show-of-the-week.

( A skimming of Believers & Survivors, a Londo-and-G'Kar-bits watch of By Any Means Necessary, and a proper watch of Signs and Portents: In which there is a whole boatload of religion, Garibaldi hangs out with the Bad Decision Dinosaur, and Londo hangs out with Morden, who is worse; talk yet again of Londo and G'Kar's arc, plus my unconditional love for Signs and Portents, a really dangerous plotbunny, thoughts about prophecy, and discussion of what the characters want. )

Some tasty space links to go with today's recap!

i. Hypothetical methane-based life on Titan. There are plenty of non-biological explanations for everything that goes down on that moon, but I love that life is one of the wacky options.

ii. Hubble spots a planet-eating star. OM NOM NOM. The universe is so cool.

iii. Stellar Geography in the Babylon 5 Galaxy, which is less scientific but probably still relevant to our interests. Someone with much more attention to detail than JMS drew this up, so there are the usual mildly peeved fannish notes about inconsistency, but it's still awesome. (My personal favourite part is that, from the arbitrary viewpoint from which the galaxy is mapped, one would basically be traveling West to get beyond the galactic rim. :D)

( Mind War & The War Prayer: In which Bester turns up for the first time and we are likened unto ants, aliens are attacked by terrorists, and Londo's shoes are too tight; talk of the telepath arc, the seasons-long breakdown of mystery, the politics of being Centauri, and the healing power of love. )

Still doing this! I remain completely nuts.

( Midnight on the Firing Line & Soul Hunter: In which Londo makes the first of many attempts to start a war with the Narn, and Delenn gets kidnapped by a guy with funny leather flaps on his head; lots of Centauri-Narn relations, love for the women, and ongoing amusement at the foreshadowing. )

Having started this write-up literally a minute after finishing the show (with the tears still drying on my cheeks, I kid you not) I am ... perhaps not best equipped to give a sane and nuanced Show Is Awesome post. Nevertheless.

So there's this show. It ran on and off from 1993 to 1998, which makes me roughly as behind the curve in reporting my love for it as I was with due South. It almost got canceled quite a lot, and definitely almost got canceled between seasons four and five, which makes season four incredibly packed and season five incredibly not. It had fairly revolutionary effects for its time, being one of the first shows to rely a lot on CGI; the technology holds up abysmally, but I am given to believe that, aside from obligatory sound in space and your usual handwavey hyperspace travel, the physics holds up fairly well. The cast, including some of the main credit cast, has a tendency to get shuffled around a bit, with characters getting written out more or less gracefully. There is apparently a prank script where one of my OTPs got textually written; there are approximately a billion actual scripts where my other OTP was text for real.

Sometimes the things this show says make me uncomfortable; more often, the things it says and the way it articulates those things overjoys me. Sometimes the show kills its lesbians; more often, it passes the Bechdel test every time I've paid enough attention to test it out. Sometimes the show has characters or plotlines that bore me; much more often, I'm glued to the screen and will mainline six episodes a day because I desperately need to know what's going to happen.

The name of the show is Babylon 5, and I'm here to tell you why it's so awesome. Hopefully I can accomplish that without too many major spoilers, because I deeply enjoyed navigating the show blind. ( Squee, with visuals. Also: long and talky, unsurprisingly. )

And, like I said, the show is great. It is not 100% great all the time, and depending on how the fandom is, I might [a] stay joyful forever about it, a la due South, or [b] start deconstructing its fails, of which it has quite a few, a la Doctor Who. In either case, while it isn't perfect, it's fucking fantastic, and especially if you think/know you share narrative kinks with me, you should run, not walk, to see it. It is a show of my heart.


dfljkdsjhsd time to pack for WisCon.