(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

B5: 1.1 Midnight on the Firing Line
* Dubbing voices can be a funny thing, especially with tv shows, when as a rule (before the DVD age, at least) you don't get to see the OV. After getting used over years to associate a certain character with a certain voice it can be extremely disconcerting to have it suddenly changed. Londo's accent I had a very hard time getting used to, even to the point of switching back to German, except that Sinclair was better in English and well, I wasn't going to watch the whole thing in German, so I'd better start getting used to it. 'German' Londo has this extravagant way of talking that just works perfectly with the character... the accent was a complete surprise.
* G'Kar... Obviously I had the G'Kar from the later seasons foremost in mind and it was good to see the earlier, still more ruthless version. He's certainly come a long (and painful) way since then.
* (Garibaldi with hair!)
* I remembered the mythical semi-messianic Sinclair, 'The One', but not the man he started out as...
* Delenn talking about killing over hundreds of years old claims, revenge and bloodshed... I've always wondered, especially during the Minbari civil war episodes, how Mira Furlan, who'd fled from the civil war in Yugoslavia felt playing those scenes. Given her biography it blurs the lines between fiction and reality a bit...
* Garibaldi keeping Londo from killing G'Kar: intense. One gets so lulled into resigned apathy by the mediocrity of most TV shows, I almost forgot just how good this one was, how gripping, what an edge it always had.
* Garibaldi and Delenn sitting on the sofa, watching Daffy Duck cartoons, Delenn not quite knowing what to do with the popcorn. Funny. Sweet. Lovely.


B5: 1.2 Soul Hunter
* Again, a reminder that B5 is really a league of its own. There's dialogue! Good dialogue, not only one-line fillers. And acting. God, I love Delenn. The sheer range of character. It's not the bone ridge or nose or the alien make-up that marks her as a Minbari, it's the way MF plays her. And major credits to the B5 producers for creating such a complex figure and not doing the Star-Trekish thing to make a female character attractive to the widest audience possible: all the women there, even the interesting ones are conventionally beautiful and wear those form fitting uniforms/suits. I guess they compromise this a bit by making Delenn half-human by season 2, but at least she still gets to wear those robes....
* Mm, now I remember why I had those vague Delenn/Sinclair-ish memories... even if in the grand scheme of things it turned out to be about something quite different.
* Maybe I should pre-face this by mentioning that I don't read B5 fan-fiction, slash or otherwise. So there are no slashy thoughts when I say the Sinclair-Garibaldi friendship always fascinated me. Loved how he matter-of-factly stepped in front of Sinclair when they met the second soul-hunter.
* The last scene, Delenn freeing the souls from the globes they were captured in... :: sigh ::


B5: 1.3 Born to the Purple
* Londo: and again it's good to remember just how complex, how subtly shaded the B5 characters are, even this early in. Other shows need whole seasons to establish such characters. (Have almost got used to the accent, too.)
* G'Kar with Vir's game-boy thing... *g*
(I'd half-believed Vir and Ko'Dath would have arranged a settlement by the end of the episode, left to their own devices and less hindered by personal animosities.)


B5: 1.4 Infection
Started out so-so, and frankly I tend to be skeptical at best about the 'archaeology' episodes on any given show, because most of the times it's the Tombraider/Indiana Jones variety of achaeology rather than the real-life kind.
But towards the end... Sinclair's portrayal was very, very good.
And this is why I love B5: Because they turn the average fight-the-alien-intruder episode into something deeper and meaningful. Because they don't just shoot, but talk. And because they deal with real-life issues in real-life ways, like the conversation between Garibaldi and Sinclair in the end. The characters, for all that happens to them, remain human, with believable human reactions; they're not some kind of card-board action heroes. [Come to think of it, that was the conversation I've been waiting to happen on 'Andromeda' for three seasons now...]


... to sum up, there's more and better acting to be seen in a couple of good B5 episodes than in the whole of the LotR trilogy. Sad.


Hmm. I'm feeling the need for a Delenn icon now ...