Babylon 5 5-15: Darkness Ascending

Episode:

103

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

Janet Greek

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Air Date:

03-Jun-1998

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Babylon 5 season 5 episode 15: Darkness Ascending. A bit of a miserable title for this one. Also most of the time the series puts its episode titles over an establishing shot of the station, but twice this season they've put it over one of the characters instead and both times it's been Garibaldi. So there's some immensely pointless trivia for you.

The episode was directed by Janet Greek, which is a name that showed up a lot in seasons one and two, especially at the start of the most important episodes, but then disappeared entirely for seasons three and four. This is her third episode this season though and she'll be back for two more stories before it's all over.

Warning: I'll be recapping, screencapping, reacting to and commenting on this entire episode, so there will be SPOILERS below. There may also be spoilers for earlier episodes too. There will not be spoilers for later ones.

Battlestar Galactica (2004): Miniseries, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've nearly finished writing about the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries. This article has three parts and you're looking at the last of them. If you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO just click the appropriate text. Speaking of appropriate text, I was a bit surprised that they kept the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica logo for their gritty serious reimagining. I suppose that would've been one of the few things it had in common with the other attempts to bring the series back.

Original star Richard Hatch had been trying to get a proper continuation of the classic series going and in 1998 he filmed a 30 minute pilot movie called The Second Coming to pitch his concept to Universal and show it off to sci-fi conventions. The conventions apparently loved it, but Universal wasn't interested. Then a few years later Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto began work on another reboot idea that made it as far as pre-production. The 9/11 attacks along with Singer's commitments to the movie X2: X-Men United jammed a stick through that project's spokes. It was going to be a co-production with Fox and when it failed they decided to go with another sci-fi series instead... called Firefly.

So fans could have gotten a continuation of the original Battlestar Galactica story, it was actually in development, but instead they got a brand new story that used the basic premise as a starting point. I can see why this series was a little bit divisive at the time.

There will be SPOILERS here for BSG '78: Saga of a Star World and this BSG Miniseries. I'll won't talk about the later episodes, though I might mention at some point that the series has a controversial ending. I won't say what happens, just that it's controversial.

Battlestar Galactica (2004): Miniseries, Part 2

Hi! This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still working my way through the epic reimagined Battlestar Galactica miniseries. It's only got two parts but they're really long parts so I haven't quite finished the first one yet. I mean it's three hours long, so that's basically four regular episodes when you think about it.

Just to make things confusing this article has three parts and you're on part two. (If you want to go back to PART ONE just click the text).

Here's some trivia about the Battlestar Galactica reimagining: it was maybe the most expensive show that Sci Fi (later renamed Syfy) had produced, and it was the third most watched program on the channel. The first half got 3.9 million viewers and the second got 4.5 million, which put it roughly where Star Trek: Enterprise was at the time. For comparison, the original Battlestar Galactica movie, Saga of Star World, got an estimated 65 million viewers back in 1978. But it aired on ABC so it had a bit of an advantage there.

Alright, there will be SPOILERS for BSG '78: Saga of a Star World and this BSG Miniseries that I am currently writing about. I'll not say a thing about what happens next however.

Battlestar Galactica (2004): Miniseries, Part 1

Writer:

Ronald D. Moore

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Director:

Michael Rymer

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Air Date:

08-Dec-2003

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the two-part Battlestar Galactica remake miniseries. The parts are sometimes called Night One and Night Two but on my DVD they were edited together to form one 3 hour movie. Wait, 3 hours? I struggle enough writing about 90 minute movies! This is going to absolutely destroy me.

Okay, okay, I can do this, I'll just split it into three parts covering an hour each, it'll be fine. Oh by the way, I've called it 'Battlestar Galactica (2004)' up there, because that's the year the actual TV series started airing, and that's what everyone calls it. Even though this actually came out at the end of 2003.

The miniseries was directed by Michael Rymer, who I don't actually know much about. He'd just done that Queen of the Damned movie apparently (which was a sequel to Interview with the Vampire). Writer Ronald D. Moore, on the other hand, is a much more familiar name to me. His writing career began when he joined Star Trek: The Next Generation in season 3, then he wrote a couple of Trek movies and moved on to Deep Space Nine. It was all going well until he joined Star Trek: Voyager, which was a series about a group of people trapped together on a spaceship with limited resources on a long journey to a shining planet called Earth. Basically, he didn't get on with the way his former friend Brannon Braga was running things and he quit after two episodes, taking with him a whole lot of ideas on how the series could've been improved.

Four years later he got another chance to tell a story about a starship crew on a journey, only this time he was in the captain's seat, and this is what we got. It's a more naturalistic and grounded series designed to appeal to viewers who'd gotten tired of cheesy Star Trek space adventures with reset buttons and Starfleet protocols, but didn't want Farscape's goofy characters or Firefly's playful dialogue.

This BSG is also a reimagining of a series from 1978 and seeing as I just watched the pilot movie, Saga of a Star World, I figured I might as well compare the two as I go. This means that there will be a few SPOILERS for Saga of a Star World mixed in with a ridiculous amount of spoilers for this miniseries. Seriously, I'll be going through it scene by scene. I'll not spoil a thing about what happens later though. In fact I won't even drop cheeky hints, because screw cheeky hints.

Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 2 Review - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the second half of Star Trek: Lower Decks' second season. If you'd rather go back to the first block of reviews and read about the first five episodes, then you should click THIS LINK.

Star Trek series often have a big shakeup behind the scenes during their first few seasons... but not this time. They didn't even replace the showrunner! In fact I can't think of much to talk about in this intro so I'll just mention that there'll be SPOILERS for this season and previous Star Trek series, and get on with it.

Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 2 Review - Part 1

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm writing about veteran Star Trek series Lower Decks, which returned for a second season recently to show newbies like Prodigy and Strange New Worlds how it's done.

Well I say "recently" but the second season started in August 2021, so it's actually been almost a year now. Funny thing is, I actually wrote about each episode immediately after watching them, so I've just been sitting on these reviews all this time. It never felt like the right time to finish the article and get it published, because I had all those other series to write about first. Netflix's live-action Cowboy Bebop remake took priority!

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling the events of every episode I review and probably something from earlier Trek episodes as well.

Babylon 5 5-14: Meditations on the Abyss

Episode:

102

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

Mike Vejar

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Air Date:

27-Mar-1998

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Babylon 5 season 5 episode 14: Meditations on the Abyss. I'm not sure about that title as meditation isn't typically all that thrilling. Though abysses can be dramatic sometimes I suppose, especially when there's a risk of all your hopes and dreams falling in. James Cameron even made a film about one once.

The episode was written by showrunner J. Michael Straczynski, though that goes without saying really. There are just eight episodes left after this and they're all by him. This was the final episode to be directed by Mike Vejar however, which is a shame because he's a contender to be the greatest director B5 ever had. He did come back for the movies and the Crusade spin-off though.

SPOILER WARNING: this is episode 102, which means there are 101 other episodes that I could spoil at any time, and I'm definitely going to spoil this one. The particulars of subsequent episodes will remain undisclosed however.