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Welcome to Show #227!
Tim relates some JMS update tidbits for us — he’s working on an adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s classic “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man” (whoa!), and has written a spec script on the story of Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle investigating some unsolved murders in 1920s New York.
And as always, JMS has an open invite to come back and chat with us any time he wants, and also for Slice of SciFi to talk about any of those other cool scifi projects he has up his sleeve.
Deep Geeking: Tim, Summer and Bret chat about “The Well of Forever”, and there’s several points of disagreement on the content of the episode, and it could quite possibly be from either some lack of perception on our parts, or from looking to hard for a complex answer when it’s really much more simple than we think.
Summer believes the B story with Matheson and Mr Jones might have been served better as the A story, just because of the character depth and development potential that simmered underneath.
Additionally, Bret observes that Earth Alliance military ships with Greek names are doomed. They are the red-shirt ensigns of the B5 universe, and should be avoided at all costs.
The Jason Davis pointed out that Warlock class cruisers have names from the realms of magic and wicca, and Summer wonders why there weren’t any ships named after the gods and heros of Norse mythology.
Summer also wants a deck of those playing cards that Gideon and Dureena were playing with in the cafeteria. Badly. And yes, her deck of Pyramid cards really is between 25-30 years old.
Listener Emails: Nick Tuck also laments the dearth of B5 comics/graphic novels or web comics out there… why can’t we get more?
Nan from Ontario is still about a year behind in listening to Babylon Podcast, and still catching up, and while she’s offered a Trek-based comet explanation to help Tim in his “Day of the Dead” hate-on, but she realized the futility of it… but will continue to listen to the show to catch up.
Lurker’s Guide 2.0: Summer is expanding the documentation to be covered at Lurker’s Guide 2.0, the major change being converting the episode guide into a full Wiki with cross-referenced topics, tidbits and everything you’d want in a Wiki. She’s also still searching for pictures of rare collectibles, photos of magazine covers and toys, and all sorts of other B5 goodies that didn’t get included in the original guide during the years after Crusade. Let her know if you want to lend a hand.
Babylon Podcast Social Communities:
Twitter: @babylonpodcast
Babylon 5 Information Gathering: If you know of a dead or abandoned B5 related website that may be in need of a new home, let Summer know! Maybe we can mirror it here or house it on a sister site.
If you can, Please Donate to the show!
Promo: Tuning Into Scifi Television
Promo: The FuMP: The Funny Music Project
The shame of all it is that the Technomage Trilogy is probably one book too many. They should have used the last book to help end Crusade. I also love kettle corn.
Here’s an interesting passage from a transcript of a recent Q&A with Rick Berman (http://trekmovie.com/2011/03/02/rick-berman-talks-marlon-brando-in-star-trek-the-future-of-trek-on-tv-more/), Star Trek showrunner:
“[Berman] says the notion that he and Michael Piller stole the idea for DS9 from JM Straczynski is “amusing” because they didn’t even know who Straczynski was”
It doesn’t matter whether he knew who JMS was or not if the people to whom JMS presented ideas at Paramount then passed them on to Berman or Piller.
I don’t discount the possibility that Berman was not privy to jms’ presentation, but the cross pollination, especially early on is undeniable.
I think this is more spin then anything else. Gene wanted to do a city in space for the next show, yet even back then it would be a counter to the “Boldy Going” theme which the franchise was built on. I am pretty sure JMS’ presentation was the shell on which to sell the idea to the networks. Honestly, I love DS9 and I think its the best Trek series to date, yet you can tell the Dominions are the Shadows, the Bajorans are the Minbari and the Cardisssans are the Centauri. Its probably no conidence when they killed Sisko and sent him to the Wormhole aliens, it was a direct match to Sheridan going Beyond the Rim. I just wish they hadn’t done that, because Avery deserved to get chance to captain a movie. Hell of a nice guy too as well as Circton Lofton when I meet them. Berman is notrious for being two-faced anyway and he is probably still pissed Voyager was considered the worst Trek show and Enterprise bombed while the Trek reboot was total win.