The Pony Non-Pony Related Hour:Babylon 5 or Star Trek Voyager?

TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
SO. In the grand tradition of Abridgenator’s Diarrhea of the Mouth, here we have two great scifi shows. Which one do YOU think is better? Tough choice, I know, so think long and hard and explain why!
 
And, if you like, discuss what ponies you’d like to see in your preferred show! Me, I wanna see Twilight on the Vorlon Homeworld. Onscreen. :D
TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
@sixtyfour215  
Babylon 5 is one of those shows where if you saw it you probably liked it, but you needed to actually see it first. Whereas Voyager is a show you probably saw, but barely remembered that it was a thing at all. Hell, for the longest time I didn’t know Voyager was in-canon. XD
Elric of Melnipony

B5 was a brilliant work with a complex story arc that spanned more than a thousand years. It used real physics in depicting spaceship movements. It was the first TV series pitched as being closed-ended: it had a beginning, middle, and end, and would only run for a set number of seasons. Character development flowed in ways that were natural and believeable, but we never would have guessed in the first season what we had to look forward to in later seasons. JMS is a storytelling god.
 
Voyager featured a ship that was rationing energy, so the replicators were no longer in use and actual cooking had to be done; yet for some reason, this didn’t stop use of the holodeck nearly 24/7. There were also silly-ass plots, and supposedly major characters being played by cardboard cut-outs. (You can’t tell me that any real actor was bland enough for the role of Harry Kim.)
nyxabuse
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Babylon 5 is OK if you can look past the godawful acting, direction, camera direction and hilariously outdated CGI. It’s more interesting for its importance in television history (IIRC it’s the first show to have an ongoing plot from the very first episode).
 
Voyager isn’t the best Star Trek series (that’d be TNG), but it’s much better than the haters would have you think. I would definitely rate it above B5 as entertainment.
TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
@nyxabuse
 
The only thing I agree with in your B5 assessment was the CGI, which, yeaaaah, is pretty terrible, but the visual direction of the dogfights was great! But direction and acting? Dude, Peter Jurasik and Claudia Christian are damn powerhouse actors, and as for direction? Nuff said.
 
Still, props for acknowledging the greatness of TNG. :D
TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
@Elric of Melnipony
 
Did you ever hear the explanation for the Holodecks? They ran on an entirely separate power source! Seriously, even the worst of Apple’s products used the same power source for each individual device!
 
Harry Kim is simply the byproduct of Rick Berman wanting to keep the supporting cast as bland as possible so as to keep the focus on Janeway. Which worked, considering she is by far my favorite villain in all of Trek. Although I do wonder if Harry Kim was specifically supposed to have some kind of brain damage considering even freaking WESLEY got promoted faster than he did!
 
And season 5 of Babylon 5 is seriously, SERIOUSLY underrated. The Londo/G’kar dynamic is so damn awesome in that season and it’s really cool to see an interplanetary alliance not just turn into a utopia overnight. Plus, Byron provided some of the best laughs in the whole series before he ruined it by becoming kind of interesting. XD
Elric of Melnipony

@TheAbridgenator  
Someone once told me that it was a different kind of energy. But in either case, it’s still crap. Energy can be converted. A separate power source can be tied into the main power network.
 
Regarding someone else’s comment about CGI, you have to compare it to what else was available at the time. Plus, it should be remembered that this was for a weekly TV series, not a one-shot movie with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars. Most other TV shows at the time were still relying primarily on models.
TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
@Elric of Melnipony  
Actually, I myself have ready access to devices that convert one type of energy to another. They’re called AC converters and microwaves! DX I mean, I’m normally not one to praise Battlestar Galactica, but at least they knew enough to have the shi get dinged up and lose power over the years; Voyager literally looks the same as shipyard-standard by the end of the series! Granted, that isn’t the only thing on the show that stays static, lol.
 
When I was first watching B5 with my uncle, I brought up that the CGI looked pretty lackluster, and he brought up the time period and budget too. Although, in a fun bit of irony, the visual direction by the time season 2 rolled around made me forget the age of the effects. My God, the Narn vs Shadows scenes. <3
 
It’s funny, actually. When I made this thread I had picked Voyager to compare to B5 because I dislike Voyager and have a weeee bit of a fanboy attitude to B5, lol. But it really IS a perfect comparison of opposites when you look at it. By the time B5 ends, nobody is in the same place (or even time!) that they started, mentally or physically; when they made decisions, those decisions stuck, and in the end everyone had to pay their price for the mistakes they made, and reap the rewards of their hard-earned successes. By the time Voyager ended, literally nothing had changed. The Borg were still alive - castrated like a Centauri action figure, but alive - the Maquis crew were still buddy buddy with the Federation crew, noone even made a token inquiry into the events of the Voyager’s exile, and nobody even changed ranks! And yet B5 had to fight for literally every season and got its sequel depthcharged, while Enterprise and Voyager were basically kept on life support until the ratings went into the red.
 
breathes XD
 
Also, not sure if Celestia is Kosh or Ulkesh. XD
Background Pony #F90D
Replicators needed matter. They just turn one thing into another, the source thing being limited and power intensive to create more of.
 
Holodeck was just some laser projectors and force fields. Yes, objects sometimes got replicated but not that often, and lower res typically (not going to get eaten).
 
That said… B5. Trek as a whole wins but B5 vs Voyager is no contest.
TheAbridgenator
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Entil'Zha
@Background Pony  
This is true, bit I suppose the point is that, in order to be anywhere near effective, the force fields and projections would still need to use a lot of power. We know this because Holodecks are exclusively used for short-term recreation and training instead of holographic communication. So it’d still be a relatively useless energy drain.
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