In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginning, instead of completely making it up on the fly like so many other shows. Subtle things which might seem inconsequential, appearing in the very first season, can foreshadow events happening seasons later. This makes it, at least for me, much more coherent and enjoyable to watch, and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today).
It's probably now number 2 for me behind DS9. I watched it again a few month later to catch all the foreshadowing I missed the first time. You are spot on that season 1 is a slow burn that ramps up to the amazing seasons 3 and 4. Best part, it has a clean conclusion without any sequel bait nonsense.
Londo and Gkar are two of the best characters in Sci-Fi and their relationship is brilliant.
If anything I found the later seasons more disappointing than 1 and 2 as smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward, which still feels rushed somehow.
With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of production JMS was told there would be no S5 after all, so he put all of S4 and S5 into S4 ... but then there was an S5 after all!
This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.
It's getting old but nostalgia kicks in as soon as I see a Vorlon ship
as always: imho. (!)
ah ... babylon 5 :))
this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties.
it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time:
* telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons
* 2 parallel story-lines within episodes
* causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the toilet - you may laugh, but 30+ years ago, for example in various startrek spinoffs - tng, ds9, voyager - nobody went to the toilet ... ever!!
don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of startrek too ;))
* despite their budget decent CGI for the time
if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom", which ran on the amiga hardware-platform at first, for later seasons they moved to PC hardware...
just if you wonder about the quality of the CGI ... this was some 680x0 computer running at something like 16 or 32 MHz (!) with a few MB (!) of memory.
not a scifi "blockbuster" utilizing multimillion us$ SGI clusters like ILM productions of the era did!
absolutely recommended:
"the lurker's guide to babylon 5"
* http://midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html
just my 0.02€
"The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22. Currently available are episodes 1, 3, and 4, (Thursdays), and assorted five-minute clips. I could not find them bundled in a playlist here.
The episodes are in broadcast order. "Midnight on the Firing Line", a missing episode, is listed as Episode 1 in Wikipedia, because "The Gathering" was a pilot.
Steve Grimm's "Lurker's Guide" is still online since 33 years, and updated with 2023's releases: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html
The 16:9 cropped and upscaled version (of the TNT cut) unfortunately, with the same excessive noise reduction and sharpening that previous releases of that version had. Baffling why they keep using this version when even the old DVD release has better quality.
The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.
There is a choice of Standard Defintion and High Definition. Usually that only means a change in resolution, not different conversions.