You mean when JMS ragged on us for daring to suggest that maybe B5 was unduly influenced by LoTR he was perhaps not being entirely truthful? Surely you jest!

Not all SF got doctor characters wrong. One single series got them closer to right. I refer, of course, to the immortal _Sector General_ series, which got pacifism right too, even if it did often manage to present its aliens much more sympathetically and make them seem much more *real* than it did, say, XX-chromosomed…

I would have preferred it if Bester had taken him prisoner. I could have watched a whole _The Face of the Enemy_-style interrogation, hell no, *torture* session with Byron involved, just to pay him back for wasting so many episodes and such a good potential plot arc on such crap.

Compare to Star Trek engineering, with easily-rupturable conduits containing plasma running absolutely everywhere for no obvious reason. I can't recall phasers ever puncturing one though: it took a very minor hit by external forces (shields still at 65%, cap'n) to blow a few bridge conduits and/or consoles.

E. E. Doc Smith's extremely, ah, *lesser* work _The Galaxy Primes_ had an amusing section involving the protagonists (ultrapowerful telepaths capable of Smithian over-the-top things like interstellar travel by the power of thought, in this section quite profoundly lost) on a world of roughly Cold War levels of tech…

Quite. It's not like he didn't get a good run, either: he lasted longer than Iain Banks did :(

… except, Morden's galactic map in early S3 notwithstanding, it clearly doesn't. All of inhabited space is perhaps 100ly wide, 500 at max. That's a pinprick against the size of the galaxy, no more than a few tens of millions of stars (though the way B5 plays it it feels more like there are, what, perhaps fifty stars…

Yeah, their big unexplained resupply problem was with Eagles.

And then there is the film that actually was an Icelandic saga. Honest really. It makes so much more *sense* that way: http://tattuinardoelasaga.f…

My understanding is that this was the original intention: the Dominion as anti-Federation. It just never really worked out that way.

Yeah, creating a servitor species that worships you is horrendous. Kill all dogs now. (And note that the Vorta have substantial power and influence: they're really doing rather well out of their uplifting.)

Quite possibly. But I note that (contradicting my own poiunt) shadow ships and Vorlon ships are basically built of nearly-magic clarketech. I'd not be surprised to find they could hold in heat for a million years, or had vanes that reradiated it into hyperspace, or could violate the second law of thermodynamics and…

Quite possibly. But I note that (contradicting my own poiunt) shadow ships and Vorlon ships are basically built of nearly-magic clarketech. I'd not be surprised to find they could hold in heat for a million years, or had vanes that reradiated it into hyperspace, or could violate the second law of thermodynamics and…

Yes — but that picture was mocked up by Ivanova at the end of the episode: the Centauri, uh, forgot to revoke "Lincolni"s clearance or ability to issue travel papers, so Ivanova decided to keep him around for a while. But by this point he'd existed for months and already been the cause of Vir's dismissal from his post…

My understanding is that the 1993 version of _The Gathering_ is the only version available: only a limited run of the re-edited version was ever made, and it all sold out. I've never been able to find the re-edited version, alas.

I was just assuming they had magic drives with ludicrous delta-v, so could beetle anywhere in the system like it was a transcontinental flight on a single world. It's a typical SF trope, after all (remember Known Space, with its insystem fusion drives which, uh, well, if you run the numbers it turns out they produce…

Of course, this show had other preoccupations with order (and disorder) which may help explain the heavy use of the word.

Though, of course, poshing your accent up to RP quality is so routine for university-educated Britons that it's essentially de rigeur, and has been for at least a couple of hundred years. I did it without even noticing, and can now shift between two or three accentual registers, with all the class and education…

Particularly given that there was a Croatian married to a Serb *on the show*. It would be amazing if the plot *hadn't* absorbed some of that.

SPOILER, obviously…