Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-28 (Tuesday)

On 1/30/2025 7:36 AM, Arthur Lipscomb wrote:

On 1/29/2025 8:31 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

On 1/29/2025 10:21 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

>

Babylon 5: The Gathering (blu-ray) 1998 pilot movie for the TV series.
About half the cast from the series is in this and the other half will
get replaced.  The plot follows everyone awaiting the arrival of the
mysterious Ambassador Kosh.  Kosh is poisoned upon his arrival and the
episode focuses on figuring out who poisoned him and why, while also
keeping the Ambassador's people from blowing the station up in
retaliation.  It was an OK pilot, but it was weird seeing G'Kar played
as a mustache twirling villain.

>

Hey! Lyta came back!

>

I forgot she left until the pilot episode and there was someone else there.

>
Andrea Thompson got Tamlyn Tomita's hidden personality story line.
Straczynski claims he'd expected her to go on to better-paying roles and
wouldn't have stayed with the series, hence the story arc.
>
I've never read why Patricia Tallman wasn't hired for the series.
>

 I forgot about the sleeper agent story.  Spoilers!  LOL.  I just remembered that line from Bester where he catches himself mid-sentence when he says they dissected her.  I'm sure I must have known at the time and just forgot, but I was shocked to read in Wikipedia that Andrea Thompson was married to Jerry Doyle while they were on the show.  And why does Doyle still have hair?  I keep waiting for it to fall out.  He just doesn't look right with hair.
 

Vir hit the ground running.  I keep seeing Bill Mummy in the opening
credits, but so far I haven't seen him on screen.

>
He's introduced in episode 5 "The Parliament of Dreams". Sinclair's
second girlfriend, also with initials C.S., is also introduced.

 I skipped that one.  It's funny because I googled best of lists and so far Mumy doesn't appear in any of the best of episodes.  There are some episodes not on the best of list that I remember and I'm starting to regret skipping.  One is the episode with the guy who gets turned into an alien monster with a gun for a arm.  I wrote that one off as probably a bad episode that I only remember because it was in all the promos for show way back when.  But I meant to watch the episode with Sarah Douglas as the evil alien and it just slipped past me.  I'm not going to go back and watch them out of order now, but once I finish the series, I may go back and do a clean up for any I missed and still want to see.

B5 is not a show to skip episodes in.  There is always some clue or "throw away" line that becomes relevant, if not revelatory, later.
--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky dirty old man.