Almost two months after I began downloading Babylon 5, I’ve finally gotten around to actually watch it. Following Loki’s recommendation, I watched the pilot-movie first: “Babylon 5: The Gathering“. And although I have some complaints, I thought it showed a lot of promise.

First, the complaints. Of these, the acting might be the biggest one, as most of it was pretty ridiculous. There was overplay, awkward hand movements (I suppose these were supposed to be gesticulation), exaggerated facial expressions, loud sighs, and stuff like that. Also, the “movie” was heavily encumbered by all the exposition that was needed. This was especially obvious for the dialogue, which particularly in the early parts of the film, was filled with a lot of questions and answers which sounded redundant. Like when Lyta Alexander is given a tour of the station by Cmdr. Sinclair, and asks him such ridiculous questions as “But why is it called ‘Babylon 5′?”, whereupon he goes on to reply at relative length about what happened to the previous four. It seems to me that this should be common knowledge, and that they wouldn’t have needed to say anything about this at all in the pilot, but rather could have waited until a less awkward time later in the show. But hey, it helped create some suspense, which I’ll get back to later. Then there’s the score. It could be that “Battlestar Galactica” has spoiled me when it comes to musical scores, but I thought this was crap. Where BSG’s score is pompous in a hauntingly beautiful way, B5’s score was just annoyingly pompous, seemingly following the typical American hero movie score recipe much more closely. “B5: TG” also had some traces of the Star Wars Syndrome of aliens, where there’s an abundance of different kinds of aliens, but you’d be hard pressed to find more than two similar aliens. However, this is only the pilot, so they’ll have much time to improve this. Finally, I had some problems accepting that the B5 staff was supposed to be soldiers, and that the ambassadors were supposed to be ambassadors. The human B5 staff seemed to be lacking military discipline, and the ambassadors seemed as sophisticated and as cool as, well, me. And as we all know, I am neither sophisticated nor cool — both of which are quintessantial qualities for a diplomat, at least in my book. I mean, not even the Minbari ambassador — the one of them who seemed like the most professional one (and there’s that word I was looking for: no one really seems very professional) — was able to control her emotions, neither when dealing with the other aliens, or when dealing with humans. However, this might just be due to the bad acting. Perhaps (and hopefully) it will improve.

In spite of all these things, though, I was relatively impressed and intrigued. The plotting built a hell of a lot of suspense through leaving a lot of unanswered questions — what happened at The Line? what happened to Babylon 4? — as well as by hinting at possible political scemes and old grudges between the races.

Also, the characterisations, while far from perfect, whispered sweet promsises of some interesting character arcs to come, perhaps especially for he alien ambassadors, who have to live so close to humans as to be prone to sympathise with them, while at the same time being supposed to work aganist them if their leaders tells them to. However, none of them, with the possible exceptions of Garibaldi and Londo, were immediately catching, but I guess they’ll grow on me.

In conclusion, I thought it was an interesting first glance, which surely will take up a lot of my time this spring and summer. 6.0/10.

I’ll try to get back with some more on the show later, when I’ve watched a couple episodes more.

On a slightly related note, the intro and the general athmosphere of the show gave me something of a nostalgia trip. You see, back when the show was aired in Norway, I didn’t really watch it. I mean, I watched an episode here or there if I came across it and it didn’t seem to boring, but I never paid close attention to it. However, and friend of mine did, and when I visited him on Sundays (the day it was aired, back then) we’d start the day off with some “Heroes of Might and Magic II” (my favourite of the five, I might add), take a break to watch “Babylon 5″, and then go back to playing H2 or “Red Alert” until I had to go home. Ah, those were the days, and this B5 pilot gets a star in the margin for reminding me of those simpler times.