Babylon 5

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Well?

I got to wonder what the death tally was for those following the Vorlons?

With the Shadows they made you fight other people until you were the strongest or dead, but the Vorlons killed you themselves if you did not rise to the occasion or live up to their expectations, after they set undefined weird goals.

In either case, their success criteria was to create immortals.

Their failure contingency was to wipe the board and make room for younger races when a species (the Narn and Centauri according to JMS) do not transcend into Gods, or it starts to look unlikely.

Immortal species take up less room.

Neither of their philosophies are acceptable given the body count they require to accomplish their end goals.

60 trillion mortal Narn, 10 million years after they first go into space, sprawling across 3/4s the galaxy are vermin, but 60 x 2 million year old immortal Narn living on one moon celebrating 10 million years of Narn History sounds dreadful and you wonder why they don't kill themselves?

Who gets to determine if their Vermin? The Shadows, the Vorlons?
I call BS, the Narn are a Sentient & Sapient Bi-PaB {Bi-(Pedal & Brachial)oids} species.
They have every right to live as mortals or immortals.

So what if they spread across the Galaxy, Space is INCREDIBLY LARGE!

Let them spread, they are people just like you & I are people.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Neither of their philosophies are acceptable given the body count they require to accomplish their end goals.


Who gets to determine if their Vermin? The Shadows, the Vorlons?
I call BS, the Narn are a Sentient & Sapient Bi-PaB {Bi-(Pedal & Brachial)oids} species.
They have every right to live as mortals or immortals.

So what if they spread across the Galaxy, Space is INCREDIBLY LARGE!

Let them spread, they are people just like you & I are people.

Every race that does not become immortal and stop having millions, then billions of babies per second cannot fit in one galaxy.

There will be a war for resources, and then there will be no resources, and then there will be no more younger races.

It's a simple machine that requires some regulation through genocide.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Every race that does not become immortal and stop having millions, then billions of babies per second cannot fit in one galaxy.

There will be a war for resources, and then there will be no resources, and then there will be no more younger races.

It's a simple machine that requires some regulation through genocide.

Wow, you talk about 'Genocide' in such a "Cold Calculated Clinical" method as if it's a "Matter of Fact".

We manage to have billions of people on 1x Planet, the Cosmos's are VAST, I'm sure we'll be fine with Quintillions of people spread about.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Wow, you talk about 'Genocide' in such a "Cold Calculated Clinical" method as if it's a "Matter of Fact".

We manage to have billions of people on 1x Planet, the Cosmos's are VAST, I'm sure we'll be fine with Quintillions of people spread about.

A group of friends and I used to play the Babylon 5 Collectable card Game almost weekly. I very rarely played with a Vorlon Deck.

Remember Deathwalker?

Artificial immortality can only be diffused via murder.

The larger a population is, when they crack immortality, the more of them have to unseasonably die to evolve the rest.

So imagine that you're an old god, and there are thirty trillion Narn in the Galaxy but they are still a thousand years from figuring out immortality. So you got to judge whether you should wait till there are 15 quintilllion Narn, whereupon half of them stick the other half into camps to be juiced, or you cut their losses now in the present, eliminating only thirty trillion now, a pittance really, averting a true shit storm of horror in a thousand years, that you will be still around to behold.

 

[Anwar]

I think it's more meaningful if Morden is acting (mostly) of his own volition than if he's just another robot. Contrived or not, the novel gives us more insight into his background than the show ever did. And considering that allying with the Shadows is a terrible, terrible thing to do, it makes sense to me that Morden would have had a damn good, damn personal reason to be doing it.

Thinking about it, I'm more curious as to where the Shadows dug up Justin and why he was working with them.

This is reminding me of the cop-out of how Sheridan's wife HAD to be a living robot now, instead of something more conflicting like having her be genuinely on the Shadow's side and force Sheridan to make a real hard choice.

 

[JD]

The Vorlons and the Shadows were both horrible. They kept messing about in other races' development.

Yeah, I always assumed that was JMS intention when he revealed everything that was going on with them. That the Vorlons were just as bad as the Shadows, but they just went about things in a less blatantly evil way.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

A group of friends and I used to play the Babylon 5 Collectable card Game almost weekly. I very rarely played with a Vorlon Deck.

Remember Deathwalker?

Artificial immortality can only be diffused via murder.

That's a price I think only a select very few are willing to go down to attain the power of immortality.

The larger a population is, when they crack immortality, the more of them have to unseasonably die to evolve the rest.

So imagine that you're an old god, and there are thirty trillion Narn in the Galaxy but they are still a thousand years from figuring out immortality. So you got to judge whether you should wait till there are 15 quintilllion Narn, whereupon half of them stick the other half into camps to be juiced, or you cut their losses now in the present, eliminating only thirty trillion now, a pittance really, averting a true shit storm of horror in a thousand years, that you will be still around to behold.

Or we can just leave them alone and maybe they'll never figure out immortality.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yeah, I always assumed that was JMS intention when he revealed everything that was going on with them. That the Vorlons were just as bad as the Shadows, but they just went about things in a less blatantly evil way.

The Vorlon Planet Killers were blatantly evil, and their use against Centauri Prime absolutely would have been.

 

[JD]

Oh, I forgot about that.

 

[DonIago]

Yeah, I always assumed that was JMS intention when he revealed everything that was going on with them. That the Vorlons were just as bad as the Shadows, but they just went about things in a less blatantly evil way.

Agreed. The Vorlons and Shadows are two sides of the same coin (or if you prefer, two edges of the same sword); it's just that the Vorlons managed to tap into more angelic, 'good' symbology while the Shadows come off looking rather demonic by comparison.

I'd kind of like to see the reboot shake things up in this regard and have the Shadows be the ones who initially seem to be 'the good guys', but I don't really know how that's possible without making so many changes that the Shadows would basically be the Vorlons and vice-versa.

I think the most we could hope for in terms of subverting expectations in this regard would be to have the Shadows align themselves with the Narn rather than the Centauri, but that upends the whole notion that we start out more sympathetic to Mollari than to G'kar only to have that turned around as Londo sinks deeper into his faustian bargain while G'kar has to watch his people be devastated.

 

[DonIago]

This is reminding me of the cop-out of how Sheridan's wife HAD to be a living robot now, instead of something more conflicting like having her be genuinely on the Shadow's side and force Sheridan to make a real hard choice.

I guess the tragedy with Anna is supposed to be that her body's still around but her mind/soul are gone.

If she'd been working with the Shadows voluntarily, I think that would have raised the question of how she could possibly be a sympathetic character for the audience. Morden is only mildly sympathetic once you know his backstory because we have so many reasons to dislike him and his 'mitigating circumstances' make his decision perhaps understandable but not excusable. In Anna's case, at least all evidence is that she refused to cooperate with them and so they ripped the core of who she was out of her.

 

[Guy Gardener]

That's a price I think only a select very few are willing to go down to attain the power of immortality.


Or we can just leave them alone and maybe they'll never figure out immortality.

15 quintillion Narn don't have to kill 15 quintillion Narn to become immortal. 15 Quintillion Narn may be able to kill 15 quintillion Centauri to live forever, which sounds fairly easy, given their prospective history.

Of course maybe Kosh is a Vegan, or hasn't eaten meat in 17 million years, so to him slaughtering any life form is bad, even unintelligent herd animals like lambs and cows, but if they had to kill some species as smart as a person but maybe it's a Dolphin, well that's just Equinox.

I guess the tragedy with Anna is supposed to be that her body's still around but her mind/soul are gone.

If she'd been working with the Shadows voluntarily, I think that would have raised the question of how she could possibly be a sympathetic character for the audience. Morden is only mildly sympathetic once you know his backstory because we have so many reasons to dislike him and his 'mitigating circumstances' make his decision perhaps understandable but not excusable. In Anna's case, at least all evidence is that she refused to cooperate with them and so they ripped the core of who she was out of her.

When the Shadows were invisible, Morden could see them.

That's either brain surgery or eye surgery, unless he was carrying around Shadows inside him, like Lyta Did even as Three Invisible Shadows followed him around all the time.

 

[Anwar]

I guess the tragedy with Anna is supposed to be that her body's still around but her mind/soul are gone.

If she'd been working with the Shadows voluntarily, I think that would have raised the question of how she could possibly be a sympathetic character for the audience. Morden is only mildly sympathetic once you know his backstory because we have so many reasons to dislike him and his 'mitigating circumstances' make his decision perhaps understandable but not excusable. In Anna's case, at least all evidence is that she refused to cooperate with them and so they ripped the core of who she was out of her.

But it eliminates any potential conflict within Sheridan so he can stay 100% a hero.

For all its talk of moral complexities and depth, Babylon 5 was frequently guilty of having its protagonists (outside of Londo and G'Kar) be as morally pure as possible.

 

[DonIago]

I don't think most of the main characters on B5 either acted or really thought they were morally pure. Sheridan absolutely made decisions I disagreed with, and I don't think the show painted them as being black-and-white either.

 

[Anwar]

I don't think most of the main characters on B5 either acted or really thought they were morally pure. Sheridan absolutely made decisions I disagreed with, and I don't think the show painted them as being black-and-white either.

The show didn't, but if you think about it they really didn't do anything morally ambiguous...unless they were Londo or G'Kar.

 

[DonIago]

...really?

Delenn played fast and loose with the truth on more than one occasion and was the tie-breaking vote that initiated a genocidal war against a race known to be technologically inferior, Sheridan held a prisoner without charging them with a crime, used the telepaths as weapons and ultimately treated Lyta somewhat terribly, Franklin performed surgery on an alien without the consent of that alien or his parents and endangered his patients by performing medical care while under the influence of drugs, Garibaldi...where to start...

You want me to go on?

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I don't want to come up with examples of how the characters were morally flawed, because I like that they generally weren't, but there was the Ranger who deserted during the final battle for Earth and took a White Star with him and the commander who ordered Babylon 5's defence grid to fire on a helpless telepath. One aide let a major galactic leader suffocate to death, another assassinated an emperor, and the third was happy just to beat a defenceless woman half to death with a wrench. Zack joined the Night Watch, Lochley fought on Clark's side, Keffer got obsessed and broke orders, every XO has their illegal coffee. Nuking the enemy's capital city is a little bit morally questionable, as is blowing up their whole planet with a telepathic message. In fact Lyta did a lot of morally questionable things, though if leading a rebellion against your own evil leaders is bad, then everyone's guilty.

 

[DonIago]

Good job of not coming up with ways they were morally flawed.

 

[Anwar]

...really?

Delenn played fast and loose with the truth on more than one occasion and was the tie-breaking vote that initiated a genocidal war against a race known to be technologically inferior, Sheridan held a prisoner without charging them with a crime, used the telepaths as weapons and ultimately treated Lyta somewhat terribly, Franklin performed surgery on an alien without the consent of that alien or his parents and endangered his patients by performing medical care while under the influence of drugs, Garibaldi...where to start...

You want me to go on?

Yes, and none of that was portrayed negatively. That's the problem

 

[DonIago]

Yes, and none of that was portrayed negatively. That's the problem

It sounds to me like you need to rewatch "In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum", among other episodes.