Much like Farscape, it takes a while to really find it's feet, but that first season has a few really great episodes, and once season two hits, things really start to kick off, and seasons three and four are about as good as sci-fi tv gets. Season 5 suffers from the fact that the story had basically been completed in season 4, and so new plot threads were started, some of which, frustratingly, were never fully resolved.
It still has some great episodes, but season 5 didn't really achieve the promise that JMS had said it would, with the five seasons representing a beginning, middle and definitive end, like a novel for television. Well in a novel you don't leave threads dangling and then tell fans to follow it is some other medium afterwards. And I'm still a touch annoyed by the threads that were opened and then left incomplete in season 5, in the hopes that they could be followed up in other mediums, or in spinoff projects, all of which tanked pretty hard. It kind of broke that oft said promise a little bit, despite how great the show still was.
Speaking of spinoffs, most of the tv movies are pretty entertaining, but they are also mostly, but not all, self contained. The spinoff series Crusade, which was preceeded by the tv movie A Call to Arms, was actually quite good, but it was cancelled early so not a lot of satisfaction at the end of that either unfortunately. While later attempts at a B5 resurrection, with Legends of the Rangers and Lost Tales, were both pretty damn weak to be honest, and not anywhere near the same quality as the original show, or the first attempt at a spinoff, had been, but still worth a look for fans all the same.
Funny, all this B5 talk reminds me how back in the 90's I was a mod on Warner's official Babylon 5 web board, and I used to help with the local B5 conventions down here in the 90's as well. Met a lot of the actors involved in that time, as B5 was pretty huge here. Michael O'Hare (who really is that dull in person as well
though still a nice guy all the same), the late Tim Choate (great guy), Claudia Christian (who was great fun, and who I helped set up a website for at one point when she was going to star in a British sci-fi show called First Frontier, which never got off the ground), Bruce Boxleitner (one of the nicest celebs I've ever met), Jerry Doyle (very funny), Jeff Conaway (who seemed clean at the time, and quite good natured), Mira Furlan (very sweet natured), the late Andreas Katsulas (great storyteller), Dwight Schultz (very genuine and down to earth guy), Walter Koenig (a little...odd), Jason Carter (funny, but quite the man slut at the time
), Joshua Cox (pretty much just glad to be there), Marjean Holden (personable and good humoured enough, but seemed a little self absorbed), and Tracy Scoggins (much nicer and nowhere near the drama queen I, for some reason, expected), maybe a couple of others too that aren't immediately popping to mind. Strange now to think I haven't been to a convention now in around a decade...
