This might be the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia talking, but I'm doing a full rewatch, and the season one episodes are....good! I don't remember them being this good. Lots of world building and characterization. It definitely makes me wonder "what if" with Sinclair.
I've always felt like season one has a lot of good episodes, it just also has the highest proportion of really bad episodes outside of season 5 - and even some of the bad s1 episodes have good B-plots (like, "TKO" is really fuckin dumb, but the stuff with Ivanova and the rabbi is nice).
I think a lot of people think you should skip season 1 just because not all the episodes are main plot episodes, but I don't agree with them at all. The non-main plot episodes help build the world and flesh out the characters and I think the story loses a lot of its oomph without some of that. Also, some of my favorite s1 episodes, like "Believers" (the one with the sick child) and "By Any Means Necessary" (the union one) aren't "important", but they're great.
Season 1's main problem isn't that it's bad, it's that the cast and production team spend a good chunk of it trying to find their legs. I can't think of many SF series I've watched with multiyear runs that weren't stumbling out the gate (hi, TNG and DS9 first seasons), so I try not to hold that against them that much, especially since even the really schlocky episodes across the series tend to at least have a good B-plot, like you said.
(That said, I liked TKO unironically, but that's because I'm precisely the age to have had a lot of really dumb martial arts movies back in my childhood.)
Posted on JMS's patreon just now:
That's all I can say at this time, other than that this could be just an awful lot of fun. "
"So, we've decided to speed things up and just hire hitmen to take the rest of the cast and crew from the original series. We figure it's best to just get this done with..."
I remember recording the whole first series on a series of VHS tapes, pausing it when the adverts came on. I missed the episode about the union buster and didn’t see it for years afterwards until I got them on proper VHS releases.
I remember seeing the original pilot and not being too interested in B5 at the time, especially with DS9 in the picture, and then yeah, years later, I think I happened to be channel surfing and I came across B5 and it was the union buster episode and that got me to start watching B5. the idea of space station dock workers and the crappy conditions they undoubtedly had to deal with fascinated me since of course, you never see the seedier side of the Trek universe...especially then.
Kinda tangential to that, but I'd like just one SF show with some kind of Standard Warrior Culture to have characters understand that deeply gashing the palm of your weapon hand just might not be the kind of tradition you want to encourage..
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
When friends are watching the show for the first time his method of departure is basically the one thing I'm willing to spoil them on, and they all really appreciate it.
I am on the first episode with the great machine. Londo does start as one of the best characters and does just get better.
Also noticed on the entry of the atmosphere you can see the shuttle's nose heat up and then cool off. A nice touch they added.
Edit: Also Londo's obsession with Hokey Pokey. I do like they added a bunch of little things where the aliens are constantly trying to study each other. It was a good touch. You don't really see it in DS9.
I like Byron .... as a character. I think he's interestingly nuanced. He's not exactly wrong but he's also a hypocrite and his telepath superiority complex is kinda shitty. In terms of the series' larger ideas I also enjoy that he's the leader of an ostensibly non-violent cult that begets a violent terrorist movement. I've always felt like this is one of the big reasons so many dislike him though. He's not really a good guy but he's not cool either in the way of a badass villain.
What really harms that entire part of the series though imo is the same thing that hurts all of S5. The threat of cancellation in S4 fucks up the whole end of the series in a lot of small but noticeable ways. It causes the Byron section to be stretched out over a few too many episodes and also makes it feel like kind of a weird follow-up to S4's more definitive ending.
What really harms that entire part of the series though imo is the same thing that hurts all of S5. The threat of cancellation in S4 fucks up the whole end of the series in a lot of small but noticeable ways. It causes the Byron section to be stretched out over a few too many episodes and also makes it feel like kind of a weird follow-up to S4's more definitive ending.
This is largely it for me, his whole gang are the focus of a bunch of episodes to the extent that they start to just kind of take over the show...or at least it feels like that when watching it.
I am on the first episode with the great machine. Londo does start as one of the best characters and does just get better.
Also noticed on the entry of the atmosphere you can see the shuttle's nose heat up and then cool off. A nice touch they added.
Edit: Also Londo's obsession with Hokey Pokey. I do like they added a bunch of little things where the aliens are constantly trying to study each other. It was a good touch. You don't really see it in DS9.
"Zooty! Zoot zoot!"
Londo's right, we humans make this stuff up just to drive the other races mad.
What really harms that entire part of the series though imo is the same thing that hurts all of S5. The threat of cancellation in S4 fucks up the whole end of the series in a lot of small but noticeable ways. It causes the Byron section to be stretched out over a few too many episodes and also makes it feel like kind of a weird follow-up to S4's more definitive ending.
This is true but I also feel like it's not really the whole story.
Like, yeah. It's absolutely the case that the big plan got screwed up and S5 was stretched out because S4 had had to be hurried up.
But it didn't have to be that way. Nobody was holding a gun to JMS' head and telling him that he had to stick to only doing what was in his years-old outline. That was just a choice he made.
Instead of just marking time interminably with the Byron subplot, he could have just..added extra material! It's not like there was any shortage of possibilities for that new material, either. As S5 begins, the show's premise and status quo has been completely upended - why not explore that new status quo more thoroughly, flesh it out more? Sheridan is president of a galactic government with the station as its capital! That's a galaxy's worth of stories that could have come to the station. How is he adjusting to the new role? What about Lochley, the brand new character? Maybe she could get a few spotlight episodes to at least try to flesh her out comparably to the main cast? What about the aftermath of the war for all the various smaller species who haven't gotten as much screentime as the Centauri or Narn? What about the new Earth government, and what it's like trying to live together again with people who were 100% down with being genocidal fascists a few months ago? Surely that might have some kind of relevance for the audience at some distant point in the future. :razz:
But instead, we just get...more Byron. Some of the things I mentioned get namechecked, or they get a bit of lip service, but it's thin gruel, or outright stupid (the "big secret" about Lochley was such an epic yawn). The season is bifurcated in a weird way, where it just goes BYRON STUFF in the front half and then CENTAURI/AFTERMATH STUFF in the back half, instead of interweaving those two plots together, and a lot of the more interesting stuff gets relegated to that back half, which makes the Byron stuff more tedious and frustrating because you keep wanting to know more about how the whole terrain has shifted under these characters and about what's going on and instead it's just like, no, it's creepy cult singing time.
So to me, there's an underlying problem with Season 5 above and beyond just "the plan got screwed up." And I think that underlying problem is just...JMS. Or rather, that he was burnt the fuck out after writing 50something consecutive hours of TV, uninterrupted (the last non-JMS episode having been, iirc, "Knives" in season 2, by Larry DiTillo). I think he was exhausted and needed some time off, or at least to slow down, but he was too much of a self-admitted control freak to do that, even though S5, with its new status quo and new possibilities distinct from the main plot, would have been a great time to set things up more like s1, with guest writers exploring different facets of the world.
Beyond physical exhaustion, I think dude also just ran his tank out of material. Writers don't create out of nowhere, they repurpose stuff that's already in their heads from the outside world, other media etc and at some point if you deprive a writer of outside stimuli for long enough, they run out of things to say. And JMS admitted online several times that he never had time to watch or read during the production of B5; it was his life, 24/7. So in the show, people start repeating their tics and speeches or borrowing other characters', plots start looking like previous plots, everything gets a little less inspired-feeling and more rote, and that continues into Crusade. As much as the fan story is "TNT fucked up Crusade," the episodes that were closer to "JMS' vision" weren't...great? They kind of sucked! I think he really needed to step back for like two or three years, enjoy going to cons for a while, and just spend some time reading and watching stuff again.
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PolarisI am powerless against the sky.Registered Userregular
What really harms that entire part of the series though imo is the same thing that hurts all of S5. The threat of cancellation in S4 fucks up the whole end of the series in a lot of small but noticeable ways. It causes the Byron section to be stretched out over a few too many episodes and also makes it feel like kind of a weird follow-up to S4's more definitive ending.
This is true but I also feel like it's not really the whole story.
Like, yeah. It's absolutely the case that the big plan got screwed up and S5 was stretched out because S4 had had to be hurried up.
But it didn't have to be that way. Nobody was holding a gun to JMS' head and telling him that he had to stick to only doing what was in his years-old outline. That was just a choice he made.
Instead of just marking time interminably with the Byron subplot, he could have just..added extra material! It's not like there was any shortage of possibilities for that new material, either. As S5 begins, the show's premise and status quo has been completely upended - why not explore that new status quo more thoroughly, flesh it out more? Sheridan is president of a galactic government with the station as its capital! That's a galaxy's worth of stories that could have come to the station. How is he adjusting to the new role? What about Lochley, the brand new character? Maybe she could get a few spotlight episodes to at least try to flesh her out comparably to the main cast? What about the aftermath of the war for all the various smaller species who haven't gotten as much screentime as the Centauri or Narn? What about the new Earth government, and what it's like trying to live together again with people who were 100% down with being genocidal fascists a few months ago? Surely that might have some kind of relevance for the audience at some distant point in the future. :razz:
But instead, we just get...more Byron. Some of the things I mentioned get namechecked, or they get a bit of lip service, but it's thin gruel, or outright stupid (the "big secret" about Lochley was such an epic yawn). The season is bifurcated in a weird way, where it just goes BYRON STUFF in the front half and then CENTAURI/AFTERMATH STUFF in the back half, instead of interweaving those two plots together, and a lot of the more interesting stuff gets relegated to that back half, which makes the Byron stuff more tedious and frustrating because you keep wanting to know more about how the whole terrain has shifted under these characters and about what's going on and instead it's just like, no, it's creepy cult singing time.
So to me, there's an underlying problem with Season 5 above and beyond just "the plan got screwed up." And I think that underlying problem is just...JMS. Or rather, that he was burnt the fuck out after writing 50something consecutive hours of TV, uninterrupted (the last non-JMS episode having been, iirc, "Knives" in season 2, by Larry DiTillo). I think he was exhausted and needed some time off, or at least to slow down, but he was too much of a self-admitted control freak to do that, even though S5, with its new status quo and new possibilities distinct from the main plot, would have been a great time to set things up more like s1, with guest writers exploring different facets of the world.
Beyond physical exhaustion, I think dude also just ran his tank out of material. Writers don't create out of nowhere, they repurpose stuff that's already in their heads from the outside world, other media etc and at some point if you deprive a writer of outside stimuli for long enough, they run out of things to say. And JMS admitted online several times that he never had time to watch or read during the production of B5; it was his life, 24/7. So in the show, people start repeating their tics and speeches or borrowing other characters', plots start looking like previous plots, everything gets a little less inspired-feeling and more rote, and that continues into Crusade. As much as the fan story is "TNT fucked up Crusade," the episodes that were closer to "JMS' vision" weren't...great? They kind of sucked! I think he really needed to step back for like two or three years, enjoy going to cons for a while, and just spend some time reading and watching stuff again.
A big problem also was that all his notes for the 5th season were thrown out by the cleaner in a hotel in Blackpool during a convention (same convention Claudia dropped the "not signing" bombshell) and spent hours trawling through garbage trying to find them. So, not only was he dealing with everything you say, but also having to recreate from memory all of the above. It is hardly surprising that S5 was compromised.
As Intersections in Real Time was the planned season 4 finale, the Earth civil war would have concluded in S5, followed by the creation of the Interstellar Alliance. Giving these stories more room the breath and weaving those threads with the rising telepath threat would probably have worked better as Byron would have been a better B plot than A. So there is that too.
I really do agree with you about burn out though, he was running on empty and it showed. However, there are still amazing moments in S5 and I personally think that it is still essential viewing, ymmv obv
Did it have a bit of season 4 Blakes 7 to it? Blakes 7 got cancelled in season 3 then they renewed it super late. So no one had been writing anything for it, then they suddenly had to shit out enough scripts to start filming. First half of it is basically the worst of series, then it picks up a bit at the end when they hit ones that had time for edits.
Weren't they also writing, filming and editing whilst the show was on air? Rather than going into a season with a season's worth of scripts already written.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Like, as an example, do you guys remember the episode at the end of S4 where Sheridan gets betrayed by Garibaldi and captured? That episode has a lot of directorial flourishes, like when Garibaldi is recovering from Bester's mind control, or the scene in the bar where Sheridan is overpowered. Lots of jump cuts, strobing lights, Dutch angles, some actually pretty nifty choices, some daring filmmaking compared to B5's usual very staid, 1970s approach of just planting a camera and having it sit there.
Apparently that episode's director (I think it was Mike Vejar, he directed most of the better episodes) had come to JMS and been like "hey at these big moments, I want to try some new stuff, maybe get a little Homicide in there." Referring to Homicide: Life on the Street, which had just come out a year or two earlier and was blowing people away with its comparatively much more hard-hitting, experimental filmmaking.
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
With shows like Homicide and The West Wing, TV in the late 90s was really starting to stretch its wings and become more daring. But in the last couple seasons, in 98 and 99, Babylon 5 still looked and felt like something from the early 90s. That was fine in, like, 1995, but the gap between what it was doing and what everyone else was doing was getting bigger and bigger, and not to its credit. Its serial storytelling was still innovative, of course (and still hasn't completely been equaled, as shows mostly just do season-to-season plots instead of full beginnings, middles and ends) but the direction, dialogue, etc were mostly stuck in syndicated 1992 tv land. I really wish more of the show's directors had tried to push the envelope like Vejar did.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
Garibaldi maintains a revolver, of all things. Not an interesting revolver like a Colt Army, but a plain, crappy, boring cop revolver.
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
Garibaldi maintains a revolver, of all things. Not an interesting revolver like a Colt Army, but a plain, crappy, boring cop revolver.
To say nothing of his motorcycle hobby or his love of Looney Toons. B5 was set in 2250 something, so those cartoons would have been something like 3 centuries old.
Sure, Bugs and Daffy have some staying power, but 300 years is a lot of time and an unbelievable amount of media to shovel through to find something like that.
One person having a hobby collecting antiques (especially those related to his professional expertise) or enjoying old media is not abnormal. I mean, some of us still play Shakespeare and Molière and read Hugo and freaking Homer, and I have an entire shelf of antique engineering books in my office at work.
It being a wide-spread thing and modern media being absent would be weird (looking at you Star Trek), but B5 actually had a few episodes about more modern forms of media and alien influences in media.
Gulliver's Travels are just shy of 300 years old. I doubt there are many people with Lilliputian minifigs on their desk, but it's also not exactly an obscure reference today that would be indecipherable to most people.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
I've found that my DVDs are extremely precarious, with some straight refusing to read at all. They aren't even that old and have been stored properly. This is the worst! Hopefully it's only first series or I am going to be extremely peeved
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
Garibaldi maintains a revolver, of all things. Not an interesting revolver like a Colt Army, but a plain, crappy, boring cop revolver.
To say nothing of his motorcycle hobby or his love of Looney Toons. B5 was set in 2250 something, so those cartoons would have been something like 3 centuries old.
Sure, Bugs and Daffy have some staying power, but 300 years is a lot of time and an unbelievable amount of media to shovel through to find something like that.
I don't think it's that difficult to manage in Garibaldi's case. He's not shoveling through three hundred years of media - he's pretty clearly a twentieth-century buff specifically.
When that's your starting point, there's less stuff to sift through, and the stuff he's interested in - film noir, motorcycles, Looney Toons - were all Really Big Things in that time period anyway. If you grew up in the 2200s and were digging into that period, you wouldn't need to look very hard to come across any of those.
Also Bugs'll totally have the staying power. G'Kar was on the right track; he's clearly a Terran trickster deity.
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
Garibaldi maintains a revolver, of all things. Not an interesting revolver like a Colt Army, but a plain, crappy, boring cop revolver.
To say nothing of his motorcycle hobby or his love of Looney Toons. B5 was set in 2250 something, so those cartoons would have been something like 3 centuries old.
Sure, Bugs and Daffy have some staying power, but 300 years is a lot of time and an unbelievable amount of media to shovel through to find something like that.
ok... so? Daffy Duck is a huge part of cartoons in our culture, and one that will persist for as long as the Warner Brothers exists, even then what ever the entity that acquires it will be re-booting the series of cartoon characters and with that the remastered laser crystal version of the original cartoons.
I hit the episode with the Cortez. I do love how the humans have a very specific design but also build crazy huge ships. The Cortez was an really cool ship design too.
Also how human stuff doesn't have artificial gravity. Neither do the Narn. But the Centari and the Minbari do. Its a good way of cutting specific levels of technology.
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"So, we've decided to speed things up and just hire hitmen to take the rest of the cast and crew from the original series. We figure it's best to just get this done with..."
I don't mind the rabbi. But maybe it is because I know people like that.
Also I know rabbis would who do the exact same thing he does.
I am not making this up.
Zathras confused.
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B5 wasn’t on the BBC, it was on Channel 4. No idea if it was censored.
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Byron is the worst.
Edit - I have to assume that the part where he lights himself on fire is meant to be cathartic for the audience.
When friends are watching the show for the first time his method of departure is basically the one thing I'm willing to spoil them on, and they all really appreciate it.
Also noticed on the entry of the atmosphere you can see the shuttle's nose heat up and then cool off. A nice touch they added.
Edit: Also Londo's obsession with Hokey Pokey. I do like they added a bunch of little things where the aliens are constantly trying to study each other. It was a good touch. You don't really see it in DS9.
I love the various bits where people don't quite Get It about one another.
"Ahh, so you see it as being symbolically cast- ... in a bad light?"
What really harms that entire part of the series though imo is the same thing that hurts all of S5. The threat of cancellation in S4 fucks up the whole end of the series in a lot of small but noticeable ways. It causes the Byron section to be stretched out over a few too many episodes and also makes it feel like kind of a weird follow-up to S4's more definitive ending.
This is largely it for me, his whole gang are the focus of a bunch of episodes to the extent that they start to just kind of take over the show...or at least it feels like that when watching it.
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"Zooty! Zoot zoot!"
Londo's right, we humans make this stuff up just to drive the other races mad.
But also the end of that season is just so strong.
This is true but I also feel like it's not really the whole story.
Like, yeah. It's absolutely the case that the big plan got screwed up and S5 was stretched out because S4 had had to be hurried up.
But it didn't have to be that way. Nobody was holding a gun to JMS' head and telling him that he had to stick to only doing what was in his years-old outline. That was just a choice he made.
Instead of just marking time interminably with the Byron subplot, he could have just..added extra material! It's not like there was any shortage of possibilities for that new material, either. As S5 begins, the show's premise and status quo has been completely upended - why not explore that new status quo more thoroughly, flesh it out more? Sheridan is president of a galactic government with the station as its capital! That's a galaxy's worth of stories that could have come to the station. How is he adjusting to the new role? What about Lochley, the brand new character? Maybe she could get a few spotlight episodes to at least try to flesh her out comparably to the main cast? What about the aftermath of the war for all the various smaller species who haven't gotten as much screentime as the Centauri or Narn? What about the new Earth government, and what it's like trying to live together again with people who were 100% down with being genocidal fascists a few months ago? Surely that might have some kind of relevance for the audience at some distant point in the future. :razz:
But instead, we just get...more Byron. Some of the things I mentioned get namechecked, or they get a bit of lip service, but it's thin gruel, or outright stupid (the "big secret" about Lochley was such an epic yawn). The season is bifurcated in a weird way, where it just goes BYRON STUFF in the front half and then CENTAURI/AFTERMATH STUFF in the back half, instead of interweaving those two plots together, and a lot of the more interesting stuff gets relegated to that back half, which makes the Byron stuff more tedious and frustrating because you keep wanting to know more about how the whole terrain has shifted under these characters and about what's going on and instead it's just like, no, it's creepy cult singing time.
So to me, there's an underlying problem with Season 5 above and beyond just "the plan got screwed up." And I think that underlying problem is just...JMS. Or rather, that he was burnt the fuck out after writing 50something consecutive hours of TV, uninterrupted (the last non-JMS episode having been, iirc, "Knives" in season 2, by Larry DiTillo). I think he was exhausted and needed some time off, or at least to slow down, but he was too much of a self-admitted control freak to do that, even though S5, with its new status quo and new possibilities distinct from the main plot, would have been a great time to set things up more like s1, with guest writers exploring different facets of the world.
Beyond physical exhaustion, I think dude also just ran his tank out of material. Writers don't create out of nowhere, they repurpose stuff that's already in their heads from the outside world, other media etc and at some point if you deprive a writer of outside stimuli for long enough, they run out of things to say. And JMS admitted online several times that he never had time to watch or read during the production of B5; it was his life, 24/7. So in the show, people start repeating their tics and speeches or borrowing other characters', plots start looking like previous plots, everything gets a little less inspired-feeling and more rote, and that continues into Crusade. As much as the fan story is "TNT fucked up Crusade," the episodes that were closer to "JMS' vision" weren't...great? They kind of sucked! I think he really needed to step back for like two or three years, enjoy going to cons for a while, and just spend some time reading and watching stuff again.
As Intersections in Real Time was the planned season 4 finale, the Earth civil war would have concluded in S5, followed by the creation of the Interstellar Alliance. Giving these stories more room the breath and weaving those threads with the rising telepath threat would probably have worked better as Byron would have been a better B plot than A. So there is that too.
I really do agree with you about burn out though, he was running on empty and it showed. However, there are still amazing moments in S5 and I personally think that it is still essential viewing, ymmv obv
Apparently that episode's director (I think it was Mike Vejar, he directed most of the better episodes) had come to JMS and been like "hey at these big moments, I want to try some new stuff, maybe get a little Homicide in there." Referring to Homicide: Life on the Street, which had just come out a year or two earlier and was blowing people away with its comparatively much more hard-hitting, experimental filmmaking.
And JMS was like "bwuh? Homi-what? I haven't seen a cop show since Hill Street Blues." And...you can kind of tell. Garibaldi is a Hill Street Blues guy magically transported into the 23rd century. That's the gas that was in JMS' tank.
With shows like Homicide and The West Wing, TV in the late 90s was really starting to stretch its wings and become more daring. But in the last couple seasons, in 98 and 99, Babylon 5 still looked and felt like something from the early 90s. That was fine in, like, 1995, but the gap between what it was doing and what everyone else was doing was getting bigger and bigger, and not to its credit. Its serial storytelling was still innovative, of course (and still hasn't completely been equaled, as shows mostly just do season-to-season plots instead of full beginnings, middles and ends) but the direction, dialogue, etc were mostly stuck in syndicated 1992 tv land. I really wish more of the show's directors had tried to push the envelope like Vejar did.
Garibaldi maintains a revolver, of all things. Not an interesting revolver like a Colt Army, but a plain, crappy, boring cop revolver.
To say nothing of his motorcycle hobby or his love of Looney Toons. B5 was set in 2250 something, so those cartoons would have been something like 3 centuries old.
Sure, Bugs and Daffy have some staying power, but 300 years is a lot of time and an unbelievable amount of media to shovel through to find something like that.
It being a wide-spread thing and modern media being absent would be weird (looking at you Star Trek), but B5 actually had a few episodes about more modern forms of media and alien influences in media.
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I don't think it's that difficult to manage in Garibaldi's case. He's not shoveling through three hundred years of media - he's pretty clearly a twentieth-century buff specifically.
When that's your starting point, there's less stuff to sift through, and the stuff he's interested in - film noir, motorcycles, Looney Toons - were all Really Big Things in that time period anyway. If you grew up in the 2200s and were digging into that period, you wouldn't need to look very hard to come across any of those.
Also Bugs'll totally have the staying power. G'Kar was on the right track; he's clearly a Terran trickster deity.
ok... so? Daffy Duck is a huge part of cartoons in our culture, and one that will persist for as long as the Warner Brothers exists, even then what ever the entity that acquires it will be re-booting the series of cartoon characters and with that the remastered laser crystal version of the original cartoons.
Also how human stuff doesn't have artificial gravity. Neither do the Narn. But the Centari and the Minbari do. Its a good way of cutting specific levels of technology.