@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus One of the small, but continuously irratating manifestations of the humans-are-magic trope in B5 is the way that none of the alien races seemed to have developed any kind of idiomatic phrase at all and continuously had to use ours. Phrases along the lines of 'as you…

No props Simon Russel Beale's radical take on Falstaff as a nasty, manipulative old moocher rather than the jolly comic-relief drunkard he tends to be on stage?

I suppose what Google wouldn’t give you, though, is the semiotics: that the denizens of that part of the UK (particularly the older ones) are known for a slightly glum, no-nonsense demeanour that’s thoroughly unromantic and that Halifax itself is one of the more unremarkable towns in the region. So it’s sort of ‘the…

So totally agreed. No idea why it isn't as well known as it should be - he knocks it out the park and is prepared to overcome any residual vanity to curdle his hard-man persona into something that sits between ambiguous and totally repellent.

Original script by, I shit ye not, Martin Amis. He actually appears in the credits

Thinking about this, it’s now occurred to me that the idea that the whole thing’s some kind of hallucinatory metaphor or possibly a psychotic break actually works if you consider it to start at the point where Gary’s reconvened friends reject him after finding out he’s been lying about his mum’s death.

To be honest, I thought there was a bit too much of that sort of thing – the pub names all having something vaguely to do with what happens in them, the pub crawl going down exactly how it did in the 90s right down to which characters get lost where (and them ending up diverting to the bowling club and getting…

See Molesworth. ALWAYS see Molesworth. Humour derived from the most specific space/time situation possible (a provincial boy's boarding school in the mid 50s) and yet somehow universally hilarious (and, quietly, bitingly satirical and cynical about the entrentched authority and corruption of its time). A thoroughly…

Alas, yes! The terrible sex scenes, passed from hand to hand like hedge-shredded pr0n, seemed to be an integral part of my just-at-the-turn-of-puberty years. And if nothing else, he provided one of the primary inspirations for Garth Marenghi…

Prince of Darkness? You take that back! Top tier, all the way – underrated, I think, because he’s trying for a British style of contemporary gothic/ ‘cosy apocalypse’ that doesn’t fit with the mainstream tradition in the US – he was openly taking inspiration from Nigel Kneale, author of similar tech/supernatural…

I think that simply ‘crappy’ doesn’t adequately describe ‘The Keep’. Watching it is a genuinely bizarre and slightly upsetting experience – you’re so obviously wandering through the desolate, vandalised ruins of a much, much better film.

[Is filmed opining that the appearance of public tweets as a promotional strategy for a film is by now surely, much like those TV ads in which the reactions of slightly drunk idiots coming out of a film they’ve just chosen to invest their hard-earned cash in seeing are used to promote that film, an obvious and blaring…

The director's new one is on Film 4 in the UK tonight. Apparently it's a mushroom-trip nightmare in black and white set during the English Civil War.  So excited. So, so excited.

“By the power of Grayskull!”

@avclub-bbb04f2a70775131fa0397bbdb4c03de:disqus - Yeah, Scotty's claim that he always overestimates things so he can be known as a 'miracle worker' later was only ever going to work for about a month.

I don't think it's just Marcus. Babylon 5's approach to sex generally was clumsy and problematic - slightly better than, say, STTNG in that it was prepared to admit that sex was a thing that happened on a fairly regular basis, but it was all surrounded by a lot of carry-on style sniggering.

The actor. The sense you get is that they thought he was a bit of a 'theatre nerd' and took himself far too seriously.

Like, generally. In a cast mainly populated by dewy-eyed, slightly stuffy characters pursuing quasi-mystical vocations he was this crazy, romantic maverick who’d already decided he didn’t give all that much of a toss and was just going all in for the big fight because it was there. His most irritating moments were…

I don’t think this took place too long after the reign of the Krays, so it’s interesting culturally to see how the tendency of the people who lived round there to talk about them as ‘lovely lads…did lots for the community…only killed their own’ etc. etc.  was embedded enough to satirise at that point.  
Other gag in…

"…so Babylon 5 has to painstakingly reintroduce the concept…"