bab 5 lost a lot of cast in its short-ish run, and didnt have a huge budget. Despite that, the story arcs were pretty good, and it was highly enjoyable to see the characters grow.
It was nice this show had a planned ending rather than being cancelled like every other show on tv   See 4 other replies

Nope, I agree. I watched through the whole series a number of years ago and kept expecting the production values to improve... and what I saw was negligible.The acting did, at least, improve marginally more, finally attracting the likes of what's-his-name who played Galen, and Daniel Dae Kim for the short-lived spin-off series.   See 4 other replies

I notice this response is to the pilot. Go back and watch Encounter at Farpoint, or really the first season or two, of ST:TNG and compare those to the last half of the series -- you'll find they "LOOK" like a joke, too. As do most TV series before they attract the viewership to justify larger budgets. You also said "there are around forty episodes and two seasons so far"; that's only what's available on HULU -- there were actually five 22episode seasons of this program made, along with a number movie spin-offs, as well as a spin-off TV series.
Yeah, it may have gotten off to a somewhat shaky start, but trust me, it gets MUCH, MUCH better -- particulalry about 3/4 through the 2nd season, when all but one of the remaining episodes benefit directly from JMS's superb writing. Not only was B5, as Eric said, "one of the very first shows ever to use CG scenes and ships," it was also among the first Sci-Fi shows to use very long (multi-year) story arcs -- it's really become something of an industry benchmark program for modern Sci-Fi series.   See 4 other replies

"The Gathering" was the pilot movie for the series. If you never saw it at all, you'd miss nothing. Everything brought out in the pilot is brought out later in the series, though differently--some different characters as well as different make-up & special effects; it's just back-story. It is, in fact, *not* the first episode of the series. I'd even venture to say that you'd be just as well off, series-wise, to never see it at all; it's more like a first draft--it adds nothing new to the "B5-verse". The show ceased production a decade ago.   See 3 other replies

I lived by "The Lurkers Guide". I always read them hoping to get spoilers. But I am a spoiler junkie.And AOL still exists? I'll take archaic bulletin boards for 500 jack.   See 4 other replies

One of the things that made Babylon 5 unique was its bold decision to use only computer graphics and no models. This gave the designers tremendous freedom on how the special effects could be designed at a very low cost.. The effects do get much better, and as others have mentioned, the battle scenes are awesome. There was no way that even large budget movies, let alone a small budget show like B5, could match the dynamics of the CGI. Models, while pretty, limit you to what can be done. And once you blow up a model, you have to build another one. With CGI, you can blow things up without worrying if the shot was good, if the camera angles were right, etc.That's why the StarTrek franchise, and others, went to cgi (after The Next Generation). Even with a much smaller budget, B5's special effects eventually were far superior because cost for special effects were much more cost effect, able to put the camera anywhere in a scene, and do much more realistic physics than you could never do with models alone.   See 2 other replies