1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A strong season of a strong series, August 13, 2011
This review is from: Babylon 5 Season 3 (Amazon Instant Video)
Fascinating, sometimes maddening mix of wonderful and silly,
intelligent and dumb, insightful and obvious.
At it's best it's the 'Wire' of science fiction, challenging
'Battlestar Galactica' for intelligence and emotional depth.
The most interesting thing; this was an early case of a series having a
pre-planned multi-year arc, so throughout there are sometimes intentionally
confusing or mysterious details that return to be finally explained as
having great importance a season or two or three later.
On the other hand, because this preceded the acceptance of truly serial cable shows,
each episode is more self contained than more recent shows in a sometimes annoyingly
neat way.
The show is also full of allusions; Shakespeare, the Bible, Buddhism,
King Arthur, the Koran. Certainly the writing is grounded in pretty
heady stuff. Of course, sometimes it's dealt with in a pretty heavy
handed way.
Season 3 was a roller coaster of good and bad episodes, with the best
--suddenly making sense of obscure things from season 1 -- simply
brilliant, and other episodes just acting as filler. And that may be
the series' biggest problem. If this show could have been 12 episodes
a year instead of 22, as is the case with most current serialized series,
there would be a lot fewer episodes that felt lacking
in substance, as if the show were just marking time.
I wish it was even more consistently great, but - in the end - it was
more than good enough.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Babylon 5 rocks, February 10, 2010
This review is from: Babylon 5 Season 3 (Amazon Instant Video)
This whole show totally rocks. To those who are interested, I highly suggest taking the time (obviously, over the course of several months/a few years, maybe) to watch the whole series from start to finish. Some of it is a bit campy (it is a product of the 90s), but then, so is Star Trek. My only real complaint about the series is that, even though it is based in the future, what we see portrayed are still largely 20th century humans, complete with all their short-comings.
Character development and plot, though, are still enjoyable and quite good -- especially since the focal point is not just a few main characters, but rather spreads out to focus on and illuminate the pasts of many of the supporting characters as well -- my favourite being G'kar and Lando. Now and then there is also some good philosophy thrown in.
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