Ken's original post re the pilot movie;

Okay, I can't remember what I originally wrote when I watched it a few months back, but my thoughts on having seen it again yesterday:

The story still interested me, even though I'd seen it before. It wasn't absolutely amazing, but I think from that I would have given the series a go, even if we weren't going through this whole board (re)watch thing.

Lots of conflicts going on between the various races. I'm guessing that that will be the basis for a lot of the stories. And also interested in the reason for the centauri (was it them?) backing out at the last minute when they had pretty much defeated "The Line". Still possibly a bit confused on who's Norn, Mumbari and centauri (no idea on the spelling ;) ), and the relationships between them, but I'm getting there, especially after watching 1x01 yesterday.

The Lt Tagoshima woman was quite annoying and wooden, same as Ben the doctor, so I'm quite pleased that they appear to have been dropped for the series proper. :)

Um, the computer generated spaceships etc still make me laugh a bit, but I suppose I'll get used to them. :D And I guess it's the best they could do for the budget.

That's all for now. :)

It was the Minbari who surrendered at the Battle of the Line ;)

The major races are the Minbari, the Narn, the Centauri and the Vorlons :thumbsup:

I did tinker with the idea of doing an FAQ, but decided it would probably mean giving too many spoilers away :rolleyes:

I think when I first saw it, that was pretty much my reaction as well. Not blown away, but enough questions asked to make me interested to see more.

Takashima's awful, but remind me to go back to her at the end of the season :)

It was the Minbari that surrended on the verge of victory at the Battle of the Line :)

About the effects - CGI was very much in it's infancy at that time so yes some of the effects are a bit cringeworthy and B5 was really very much the guinee pig for their use on a (pretty tight) tv budget - some of the effects work later in the series is simply stunning.

Ah, Minbari. :rolleyes: So, lets see if I'd got this right:

Minbari: the bald woman
Vorlon: guy in the weird atmosphere suit who was nearly killed
Narn: the scaly type guy who tried to get Sinclair shipped off to Vorlon and who caused the whole thing
Centauri: the gambler with the sticky up hair

So is Takashima still in it? She wasn't in 1x01, so hoped she'd been done away with. :angry:

Yep that's about it.

and yes Laurell Takashima has gone for good replaced by the goddess Susan Ivanova :)

Hurrah! :thumbsup:

It was B5's use of CGI that eventually prompted Trek to ditch the use of models and switch to CGI as well for DS9 and all subsequent series.

The CGI on B5 gets better as the series goes along.

One plank of wood down, one to go :lol: :lol: :lol:

Didn't Trek actually use Foundation Imaging for a time?

Some way down the line, they actually did :thumbsup:

I didn't see The Gathering first time around - much like Buffy I think I caught a couple of early episodes without taking the plunge which I don't think I did until sometime in S2.

Its interesting to see the little things being set up for later use which I only noticed on my last rewatch which was when the Sci-Fi channel showed the entire series about 5 years ago, If the newbies will forgive me theres even a follow up to G'Kars indecent proposal to Lyta in the 2nd or 3rd last episode of the entire thing :thumbsup:

I thought the music and some of the directing was a bit off - the dramatic moments were badly flagged in general though it does change dramatically once it starts properly.


Taken on its own I think it was okay - if you know the premise and you have wiser friends promising you that answers will come along with more questions then its easy to look forward to the things to come.

At the time I'm sure it was alleged the effects were done on an Amiga :)

At least it wasn't a speccy. Don't know if we could've handled monochrome CGI :lol:

It wasn't alleged, it's a fact.

The effects were done using Lightwave on an array of Amigas

Again you have to realise that at the time the higher end Amigas were some of the fastest computers around.

I rewatched the TNT version earlier;

On observation you have to say that the pilot movie recovers pretty well. If the whole movie had gone the way the first 15 or so minutes started off then it's doubtful the show would ever have been picked up for series. It's no coincidence that there's a fair amount of Takashima in those 15 minutes. My opinion of Sinclair isn't great, but Tamlyn Tomita is even more wooden !! :o

JMS is still getting to grips with the dialogue, and there's more than a few actors here who I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say they're performing well below their best. In fact, through the whole movie, there's only really the alien Ambassadors and Garibaldi who come out of it with anykind of credit. O'Hare (Sinclair) appears wooden, and whilst, like Avery Brooks on DS9 it's his style, he can't make it work the way Brooks does. Tomita (Takashima), as stated is awful, and whilst Johnny Sekka (Dr Kyle) is better he's still not right. Of the Ambassadors Katsulas (G'kar) is superb; completely and believably devious here. Jurasik (Mollari) is just as good, if a little less understated in this movie, and Furlan (Delenn) is suitably mysterious. There certainly seems to be a gap in class on the acting front with the Ambassadors practically oozing class, whereas the Human officers come across as one-dimensional for the most part. The one exception being Jerry Doyle's Garibaldi. Pat Tallman isn't exactly convincing here either, maybe later.

It's odd to note that here, in this pilot they seem to have attempted a Star Trek style multi-racial cast; with the American Commanding Officer, an Asian second in command and a Doctor of African descent. It doesn't exactly work here unfortunately.

Nice to see John Fleck (Enterprise, Millennium, Carnivale) getting in on the action as a guest star, albeit an unlucky one :)

Equally odd to see someone else on the B5 command deck who shouldn't really be there, albeit in a completely different role, even so though, still odd to see him there :lol:

The story itself, serves it's purpose. It's asks questions, questions that drew people back to the show once the series started proper. The principal aim of any decent pilot is to get it's claws into you, and to retain your interest; despite it's flaws, The Gathering does manage to achieve this goal. I remember seeing this for the first time, and then patiently waiting for over a year before hearing that a decision had been made to sanction a series. Rarely does a show pique the interest quite as early as B5 does, lots of questions asked, us the viewer, desperately waiting for the answers to be revealed.

I found the story interesting, once it got going, which did take a while. The last half an hour seemed to fly by, and bonus marks for the ending with G'kar; "If anything happens to Babylon 5, my Warrior class will find you, and......well, why spoil the surprise......" :lol:

All in all, not a bad beginning. Thankfully, despite a slow start it did build enough momentum by the conclusion to draw me back for more, but it's quite obvious at this stage that a few tweaks are necessary. A decent pilot. Not the best, but far from the worst.

Just finished it now (on the nice new TNT version - far better than the original edit- if only for Chris Franke's music making it sounds so much more Babylon 5-y :))

It is a very slow start, and for a while I was wondering if it was worse than I remembered! Takashima and Kyle were quite dire though, and as a result it's good to know at least one of them will be gone come the series proper.

There are several other things that just look wrong in this episode, but they really pertain more to the series proper rather than this movie; so I'll digress here :)

In all, it's not that bad a pilot, but it really doesn't fare that well when compared with what's to come! :D

Spot on ;)

Which one is that? :huh:

And this one too? :unsure:

Who? :huh:

Was he Varner? :unsure:

Er... :blink:

Mollari is the ambassodor with the dodgy hair that was gambling/drinking all the time.

Delenn is the funny looking woman who was acting all mysterious (our files are extensive etc)

Pat(ricia) Tallman was the ginger telepath Lyta Alexander.

Yep Del Varner

Dunno = that went over my head as well :)

Via the power of IMDb I've realised who Angel was referring to though I didn't spot him - one of the staff on the bridge plays a bit of a baddie in the real series though you won't see him for about 8 eps I think :)

In Order -

The Centauri Ambassador - sticky up hair

The Minbari Ambassador - Bald shellhead

The red headed telepath

John Fleck - didn't notice

Ed Wasser comes back in a somewhat different role ;)

Thanks guys! :) Note to self, must pay more attention to character's names. :lol:

LMAO@bald shellhead :lmao: :lmao:

Well, "The Gathering" is as good as it ever was. :D

It's hard to recall my first impressions of this episode - it was rather a long time ago now - but what I do recall is loathing the music (I was delighted when the re-edit included a Franke score), being very impressed with Kosh's ship, liking Delenn very much, and thinking very little of Mollari and G'Kar.

The irony of that is that G'Kar went on to become by some distance my favourite ever SF character. :D

As pilots go, "The Gathering" worked for me when I first saw it. I wanted more. I liked most of the characters and I wanted to see what happened next. I liked the feel and the look of the show. I wanted answers to the questions that the pilot raised. I wanted to know what the hell was in that encounter suit. :D In short, the episode did its job, and it still does.

Watching it again, for...well, I don't know how many times it's been, actually...reminded me of one of the series' greatest strengths: So many plot points are scattered here and there, in the unlikeliest places, and all of them add up in the end to an almost flawless whole. One of the things I'm most looking forward to during this rewatch is finding even more bits 'n' pieces that will have me thinking "He set up (plot point) this early???

I didn't mind the human characters - Tomita's performance is ordinary, but not (for me) unwatchable. O'Hare's Sinclair I always liked, and Sekka's Kyle is acceptable too. The CGI is, for the time, pretty good, but SFX have never been terribly important where my enjoyment of SF is concerned (growing up with Doctor Who and Blake's 7 is a real asset in more ways than one :D). The story, the characterisations and the acting are always more important to me, and "The Gathering" delivered nicely in all departments.

It gets the series off to a good start, introduces characters and themes pretty well, and delivers an interesting (if not mind-boggling) story as well. Having said that...it gets so much better from here. :lol:

One of the guys on the command deck wouldn't have been out of place had he simply asked 'What do you want ?' :lol:

One of the things that I didn't particularly like about Crusade; Franke's music replaced by that of Evan Chen, which frankly (pardon the pun) just didn't work at all :rolleyes:

Agreed - Crusade's music is utterly dire. Franke's music added so much to B5; Chen's "music" actually diminished Crusade for me. If change was necessary, why change so radically?

I found Chen's music to be really distracting. There's sometimes something to be said for difference, but that was just too different IMO. It just didn't work at all.

I hadn't watched this for years and I have to say, after revisiting it, I was pleasantly surprised by just how good it is, as a pilot or otherwise. The new score really helps as well. Stewart Copeland probably seemed like a good idea at the time but it was so out of sorts with the rest of the series it just came across as strange (a bit like Alex Lifeson's theme for Andromeda, although it was better than anything else in that series).

I don't have a problem with any of the acting, with the exception of the doctor, even Tamlyn Tomita, who I've always kind of liked :ph43r: . I did find myself wondering what it would have been like had they kept her on the show whilst bringing CC aboard as well, even if they had changed her position on the station.

The episode looks fantastic. I think, by and large, they carried the look over into the series proper, but here the lighting seems a lot darker and moodier, which works really well for me. There is an attention to detail that shows the love for the genre of the people behind the scenes. I remember hearing criticism from some quarters that B5 was nothing more than a space-based rehash of Lord of the Rings . In some ways I see it as a compliment: B5 is the only series I know of that has ever come close to the level of detail, intrigue, backstory and sense of history that Tolkein gave to his work. Whilst it obviously comes into play more and more as the series progresses it is still in evidence here in the little hints and mysteries that are laid down for the future, and in Sinclair's retelling of the battle of The Line (which, incidentally, I thought O'Hare did very well :) ). It's really fascinating to watch.

Anyway, it's very difficult to write too much about this without delving into spoiler territory.

Just one final thought, though: beep beep :lol:

They mention in the commentary that it was quite surprising just how much of the look and feel of the show survived from the pilot into the series proper.