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Old 12-03-2022, 11:42 PM
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Nate the Great Nate the Great is offline
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February 22nd, 1993, "The Gathering"

First Impressions:
* They got too ambitious with the CG at times. I promise not to harp on this in the future, we have to remember that this is the '90s, but I had to bring it up once. The station itself looks good, they did a good job maintaining enough distance that the fakeness isn't noticable. But then they zoom in on a turret or floating drone. Ugh. Stuff that could've been skipped or done better with modelwork. There is such a thing as being TOO ambitious, and I think B5 will be guilty of this many times in the future.
* We started WAY too far in medias res. Way way WAY too far. Catchup exposition is the worst kind of exposition. You run into the problem of "if we don't know who these people are, why should we care about them?"
* Now is not the time to mention Babylon 4. Save it for the actual show. In general I don't like backstory that comes across as "stick a pin in this for later". It should be relevant NOW.
* The editing was atrocious. Events seem too disjointed and it didn't feel like there was a through line for characterization. I hope this improves in the future.
* Characters doing things in secret to protect the captain-you can't do that in the pilot. Way too soon for that nonsense.
* A shapeshifter assassin in the pilot? That's "Naked Now"-levels of a bad idea. You have to establish characters before subverting them like this. It took me awhile to realize it WAS a shapeshifter because I had no basis to say "this character would never do this."
* That being said, the performances were good, they just tried to focus on everyone at once and you can't do that at the same time that you're introducing them.

The Episode

Yeah, about that. Any "script" that I see online is just a rip of the subtitle track. I'm not going through that. A little help here?
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