Star Wars: The Mandalorian - Season 1 Review

The week on Sci-Fi Adventures... is going to be the last week for a while I'm afraid. I'll be writing about video games on Super Adventures instead for the next two months so that hopefully I don't go insane. But before that I'm going to be sharing my thoughts about season one of The Mandalorian, the very first live action Star Wars TV series!

Man, it took them bloody long enough. Star Trek made the jump from live action series to movies 13 years after it first premiered, but it took Star Wars 42 years to do the opposite! On the other end of the scale, Doctor Who and Firefly hit cinemas just 3 years after their first episodes aired, which is the same amount of time that Stargate took to evolve into a TV franchise. Even Lost in Space beats Star Wars, as it got a movie after 33 years (then jumped back to TV 20 years later). Plus if you count TV movies, Babylon 5 progressed from pilot movie to series after just a year, Battlestar Galactica got a film after 29 years, and Red Dwarf actually got its promised movie after 32 years. Okay I'm done now.

Wait, Indiana Jones (11 years). Sorry, now I'm done.

The reason a Star Wars series took so long to get made is that they were waiting for the technology to make it possible to produce on a TV schedule and budget. George Lucas actually had something like 40-50 scripts for a show called Star Wars: Underworld (from writers like DS9/BSG's Ronald D. Moore), which was planned to be produced in the late 2000s, but it just wasn't time yet. Lucasfilm apparently took some of the story concepts and ideas and put them into things like Rebels, Rogue One and Solo instead. It turns out the technology they needed was a set made of giant LED walls featuring a resolution high enough for them to be used for both lighting and as the backdrop, with the scenery rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4 so that the parallax is always correct from the camera's point of view. But they've got that now, so it's cool.

Anyway, I wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes so if I sound like I don't know what's coming next, that's because I actually didn't at the time. There'll be SPOILERS here for the whole first season and maybe a few of the movies, so I recommend you stop reading here if that's going to be a problem.

Babylon 5: Season 3 - Point of No Return Review

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'll be writing a bit about the third season of Babylon 5! Three down, two to go.

I've finally hit the end of the middle season and it's nice to be 60% done with the series. Not because I'm not enjoying it, it's just a relief to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Only 44 episodes, a handful of movies and a couple of spin-offs left and then I can finally relax. Move on. Maybe even start a Babylon 5 podcast. (I won't be starting a B5 podcast).

Anyway, this is going to feature SPOILERS for the whole of season three, from Matters of Honor to Z'ha'dum, and I'll inevitably end up spoiling earlier seasons as well. I won't say a word about future seasons though, so if you're watching through the series for the first time and you've made it up to this point then this is all safe for you to read.

Babylon 5 3-22: Z'ha'dum

Episode:

66

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Air Date:

28-Oct-1996

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally reached the Babylon 5 season 3 finale Z'ha'dum!

Saying anything about the name would be spoiling earlier episodes, but if you're not familiar with it, it's a made up sci-fi place that has a lot of significance and a lot of apostrophes, and using it as the title gives the impression that this story will be somewhat important. If the fact that it's a season finale didn't already give that away. This unfortunately means that it's given me more to write about than usual, so you're getting a double-length article this time.

You want to know an absolutely pointless fact that I guarantee you've never read anywhere else? Season 3 contains both Babylon 5's alphabetically highest and lowest episode titles, with A Day in the Strife up at the top and Z'ha'dum right at the end. Here's more obvious piece of trivia: this is the second episode of the series to be directed by Leonard Nimoy's son, Adam Nimoy (the first being the universally beloved Passing Through Gethsemane). It's also the last episode he directed, for whatever reason.

This recap/review is first time viewer safe, but there are going to be SPOILERS for this episode and the series so far, so I'd suggest watching it first. I mean you can do what you like, but the series has gotten pretty good by this point and the episode will tell you the story much better than I can.