Our last best hope to finally see the darn thing...

[autographedcat]

It's been a quiet weekend, so far.

Friday, we spent the evening after work with wheezinggirl and her husband M. After meeting up at their house, we went into downtown Roswell for dinner at Sugo, a remarkably good Greek/Italian restaurant. I had the Loose Lasagna ("I prefer my lasagna to be a bit of a hussy, quite honestly."), and kitanzi had one of the specials, a delightful halibut and scallops dish with a perfect sauce. After dinner, we retired to their house for a game of Munchkin. The final score was 10-9-8-7, won by me on a wonderfully munchkined play (Looking for trouble, played Kali, then played Typographical Error to make her level 1. There was an exchange of cards in an attempt to stop me, but I had enough cards in hand to counter them.) A good close game like that is much more fun than a blowout, so I was glad it was so close. :)

The rest of the weekend has been spent largely undertaking the project of finally watching Babylon 5. It may come as a shock to many folks who haven't heard the story of my long and troubled history with this show, but I've not actually seen the large majority of it. That's not to say I haven't tried.

See, when B5 first came out, I sat down to watch it, because it was SF on television, and there wasn't that much SF on television in those days, aside from Star Trek. Generally, anything that had a science fiction theme was going to get watched by us, regardless. And, I have to admit, I didn't care for it. I hated it. And after four or five episodes, I stopped watching it.

Two years later, all anyone can talk about is Babylon 5! "Oh, you're not watching it?" people would say in amazed horror. "Nah," I said. I tried to watch it when it first came on, but I really didn't care for it." "But, it got better! Really!" After enough of these conversations, often with people whose taste I trusted, I agreed to give it another try. And they were right, it *had* gotten much better. The new commander was much more interesting, the characters felt much more deep and interesting, and the plot was engaging. Unfortunately, it being the middle of season 3, I had no idea what was going on.

But, I figured that sooner or later, they'd show it again, and when they did, I'd watch it and see what all the fuss was about. in 1998, TNT announced they were going start showing the series from the beginning. And I settled in to watch it. Two weeks later, my apartment building burned to the ground.

Ever since then, I always managed to miss when it would restart. filker0 tried to alert me of one rotation starting up a few years ago, but it was right at the time that my relationship with deidrecorwin was disintegrating, and it wasn't on at a convenient time for me to see it unless I missed all the traffic on my evening commute, so I didn't get to see more than a handful of episodes at that time.

So, recently, I have borrowed Season 1 DVD from a friend of mine, and this weekend kitanzi and I have settled into watch it, in order. We've gotten through the first two disk (eight episodes), and I'm pleased to say that I'm genuinely enjoying it. I still think Sinclair is made of wood, and the scenes which are supposed to be emotional often seem to ring a little false, but I know that it gets better, and honestly, I'm having much more fun enjoying the good bits than snarking at the bad bits. I do honestly think that I've changed a bit as a consumer since I saw these before -- I'm much less picky about my entertainment, and am much more willing to overlook absurdities in order to enjoy the shows.

I don't intend to keep an episode-by-episode reaction to the thing, because I really don't want to put that much work into it. But I do intend to keep watching it until I'm done with it, and then I'll finally understand all the in-jokes and the songs, and stop feeling like I've missed out on something exceptional that everyone else knows about but me.

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Sinclair didn't grab me either particularly, and I'll take on almost anyone in the Slavering B5 Junkie stakes. I don't know if another actor might have done better with the character, who as envisaged was a bit of a courageous choice for first-season lead anyway (moody, haunted, enigmatic--okay in something like The Crow or The X-Files, but not in the series B5 was coming across as being). There's only one I can think of who could possibly have done that and the heroic-lead stuff at the same time, and he'd done that character for six years already (and I'm not saying whom I'm thinking of because you'll all look at me funny).

But don't give up on Sinclair yet...

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I've not. I was struck tonight at the interesting friendship between him and Garibaldi. Sinclair appears to be the ultimate idealist, and Garibaldi the ultimate pragmatist, and yet they're close friends. (Of course these impressions may later turn out to be wrong. We'll see.