babylon5: the lost tales

Y'know what? I can't be arsed to do a proper blog entry today, so instead I'm going to post the last of the mini-reviews of stuff I watched over Christmas. This weekend I can finally resume watching new stuff as my latest rental DVD finally turned up on Tuesday. The post has really been knackered after the snow - more so than when they were on strike!

I'm not going to spend much time explaining the show - go check out Wikipedia - but I was a huge fan of Babylon 5 back in the day.

For some reason, Babylon 5 never really broke through into the popular imagination in quite the same way as Star Trek and Star Wars have.

Now you could put this down to the fact that B5 is definitely hard sci-fi, but then Star Trek is actually surprisingly hard sci-fi. Star Wars is not really - it's set in space, but it fantasy more than it is SF, truth be told. And I think the difference with Star Trek is that it had a sufficiently large nerdy fan-base it managed to whether the storms.

Also, Star Trek was kind of a benchmark and let's be frank - occasionally things just manage to breakthrough. Be it timing or sheer quality or just random good luck, occasionally some niche things just manage to make that leap into the general consciousness.

Anyway, the point is I really enjoyed the B5 TV series, so when I saw heard about The Lost Tales I thought I'd rent it and see if it lived up to the original series.

B5's strength was always its storytelling. The budget was always more in the cardboard set realm, and it was a pioneer of CG when, to be frank, CG was in its infancy, but the point is that stuff didn't matter, because the writing was so good.

Well, I say that stuff didn't matter.

The Lost Tales kinda proves that actually, it does matter a bit. Because although the writing is okay, the severely limited budget kinda shows. I mean, there must only have been a dozen actors across both of the stories.

To be fair, they're cleverly set up so that you wouldn't expect big crowd scenes, but it gives the whole thing a stage-play feel, rather than living up to the standards of even the TV show.

I mean, the idea is both tales are set before a big ceremony on B5 to mark an anniversary. But we never get to see that ceremony, because that would need a big crowd.

More obviously there are quite a few bits of "Oh, do you remember Garibaldi? Will he be there?" "Oh no, he sent a message saying he couldn't make it." Which just ends up smelling of "we couldn't afford to get all the actors."

And unfortunately it's really noticeable.

Plus, to be frank, the two stories are actually inconsequential.

Given the huge, Space Opera scope of the original series, if these had appeared as actual episodes, they'd have been in the "filler" bracket, rather than really adding to the grand storylines.

And that makes them a little disappointing, to be frank.

Plus the first one is kinda on a religious theme and to me wasn't very satisfying as it kinda came across as "oh, btw, actually, God exists in the B5 universe" when religion wasn't really a big issue in the series. Not to mention it conflicting wit my personal views... and common sense.