The Rose&#39;s Grove

I'd wondered about that, but I'd never been able to pin down who had what idea first, if you get what I mean. It makes sense it'd be Straczynski who started it, if it really was a case of something not quite on the up-and-up; so much about DS9 was a total jump from what Star Trek had done in the past.

There's probably nothing that either group could use for actual suit material anyway, but to a long-time fan of one, now watching the other... wow are there moments of deja vu. Like hearing a well-known song played in a completely different style.

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windrose.livejournal.com

According to what I heard out of JMS's own mouth at a con some years back, he sued Paramount over it. They settled out of court with a very large cash payment, and a gag order on JMS not to discuss the details. JMS summed the deal up as: "I settle out of court and [Paramount] gives me the money to produce the first season of B5? Works for me!"

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I'm not surprised that's the case, considering Paramount at the time had practically more money than God. :P

Good for him for just going with it, I guess - whatever has to be done!

...*Icon love* I totally need to see the new Dr Who.

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(this time it was Jeffrey Combs, well-known to DS9 fans as Weyoun)
This particular crossover warms the cockles of my heart every time the battle rages between the devout fans of DS9 who insist B5 sucks and the devout fans of B5 who insist DS9 sucks. Luckily, it happens very very little these days.

some kind of weird zeitgeist/psychic plagiarism thing going on between JMS and Berman/Piller.
There was some sort of court thing in which Paramount paid JMS to either keep him quiet or to make him go away, depending on which faction you speak to. (:

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...every time the battle rages between the devout fans of DS9 who insist B5 sucks and the devout fans of B5 who insist DS9 sucks.

Psh. They're both awesome, for their own special little reasons. Granted, I've got a lot more nostalgia tied up in DS9 (I was eleven when it started, and I watched all seven years...), but B5 has been a great show to watch now that I'm older and I care more about the politics and nasty little details of how the world works. ;)

I'm not at all surprised that the fandoms have butted heads, but honestly - sci-fi isn't big enough for that kind of back-biting. I'm glad I haven't been around for any of it.

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Yeah, it's best to try and pretend it doesn't exist. It's just something that happens within.... social subsets. Punk rockers spend hours debating who's *really* punk and who's a poser. Goths spend hours debating who's *really* goth and who's a poser. FBI profilers spend hours debating who's *really* a threat to democracy and who's a poser.

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Sounds about right. And in terms of true sci-fi I'll admit that B5 has more of a unique vision, more unusual to look at, and maybe some more serious commentaries, at times, on what's going on in the world in the here-and-now. DS9, on the other hand... I think it had better script-writing a lot of the time (not plotting, mind you - Straczynski clearly had them outmaneuvered on that front - I mean just in terms of dialogue and the tightness of a given script), and some better acting. Some, not all. But there are definitely moments. ;)

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I lean toward B5, but I still haven't seen it past season 3. He had some unfortunate events with 4 and 5 due to thinking he was going to be cancelled and then not being cancelled and then Claudia Christian, so I understand that the pacing suffers somewhat. But I know he dealt (in my opinion) very well with the loss of Sinclair, and perhaps made a better story because of it.

DS9, if nothing else, won a lot of respect from me for taking what I felt was a worn out and tepid franchise and making it something worth watching again.

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I'm still digging my way through Season 1, and not sure how long it'll take me to get hold of DVDs for 2 and the rest.

(Ack. I'd forgotten that there was something that went wrong with Claudia Christian. *Whimpers* I'm not sure I'll be able to keep my attention on the show if she left...)

It did at that. And then... well, I won't make any enemies by sharing my opinions of the last few incarnations of the franchise.

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miss-arel.livejournal.com

(As I understand it, Claudia decided she wasn't getting enough money, so she left the show at the end of Season 4. I won't tell you how the writers handle her departure, though.)

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Eep. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will make me either very upset, very sad, or very very shocked.

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Yeah, the whole biscuit twist with Ms. Christian was... unfortunate and probably avoidable.

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So many things in the industry are...

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That made me giggle. Just thought I'd share.

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windrose.livejournal.com

I must have been around a bunch of atypical geeks, because all my SF&F friends back in the day loved both DS9 and B5. They never tried to argue which was better, they were just happyhappyhappy to have two quality SF shows worth watching.

As such, I tend to get disgusted with the extremists in both camps.

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It is my firm and unyielding credo that all extremists should be shot.
And yay for atypical geeks.

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Or at least sent to Mars. If we put all the extremists in one place, they'll just kill each other off, anyway, and then the rest of us can exist in something approximating peace.

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No! Shot! They must all be exterminated to preserve the purity of...

ahem.

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...they were just happyhappyhappy to have two quality SF shows worth watching.

That's exactly how it should be! The genre isn't big enough for back-biting, darn it - everybody's gotta just relax and enjoy whatever good manages to come out!

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It's kind of strange; I'm a...vague fan of DS9 (Like, I know what happens, I've seen a good many episodes, and I know main plot arcs) and I know a lot of what happens in B5 despite not seeing more than 4 episodes. But honestly, I seriously think I prefer the *idea* of B5--it's just grittier and truer to the real world. But Star Trek seems to sterilize a lot anyway.

Nothing against the ST franchise. I grew up with it, hell. But... you know? Am I making sense?

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You're making perfect sense, and I agree with you entirely on that. DS9, despite being one of the least sterilized Star Trek series... is still Star Trek. It's militaristic and sterile, without dealing much with the flaws and faults in either of those qualities. B5 is at least aware of its militarism to a greater extent than it often felt like DS9 was, at least until the later seasons.

I grew up with ST, too, most specifically with DS9. But I hate the feeling one gets from ST that all the problems Earth ever had have been fixed, that religion is apparently no longer an issue for anyone except aliens (did you notice that? No human on ST ever has religious beliefs, except people of Native American descent. I won't even go itno the number of ways I could interpret that...) I was so flat-out relieved early on in B5, when Sinclair gets a bunch of people from all the different human religious traditions together for a religious festival being held by the ambassadors aboard the station. I'm still irritated that it seems aliens have only one religion (what the hell kind of species has only one religion? One that killed off all the dissenting voices, that's what... Appropriate for a species like the Narn, maybe, and certainly for ST-verse Cardassians, but I do wonder about everybody else...), but it's progress. And Ivanova. Yay for Ivanova. At least somebody on the main staff has religious affiliation.

...Mmm, anthropology. Making me think way too hard about fictional cultures since... well... forever. :D

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I grew up with TNG, which is, imho, the second-most sterilized series out of the group. And let me tell you, between Wesley Crusher and some of the other crap they pulled on that show... I'm surprised I didn't give up on Trek entirely. I digress, though.

It's almost like, in ST, they don't want to touch religion or disease or anything that could cause anyone anywhere any degree of pain or discomfort--despite, you know, in TOS there being the first interracial kiss on TV. Let's forget all of that and stop being innovative--let's just become the same boring tripe and rehash all of the same old things, the same old plots, just with different characters in different ships. That's why I loved DS9--there was so much that was different. (then again, Voyager just pissed me off and Enterprise--despite severe Scott Bakkula love--just made me cry.)

Anyway, I'm just kind of rambling. B5 definitely took leaps when it came to touching on human emotion and human fraility and human... you know, human-ness, as it were.

..And what person of any fandom, within certain limits of course, doesn't think about the culture of the story's universe? That's part of the fun, at least I think.

(this was probably completely incoherent--I'm on my way out the door for work, heh)

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Enterprise made me want to spork my eyes out. Wait - check that. It made me want to spork the writers' eyes out, then feed them to the directors while dangling the producers over a nice hot bonfire of scripts. I am not so much with the Bakula love, so as far as I was concerned the damned thing had no redeeming qualities and, on top of that, was downright offensive in more ways than I really wanted to deal with.

And the thing with innovation and doing things that aren't usually touched on... all the series tried. They genuinely did, I think. But they usually failed, and I'm counting DS9 in that indictment, even though I will cherish the memory of it probably til the day I die. DS9 tried to deal with physical handicaps in "Melora"... and failed, I think, by ending up basically saying "she's a very nice person, but she doesn't belong here." It tried to deal with homosexuality... but just couldn't quite get up the gall to push the envelope to the point of an actual relationship - in the end, their love was just as forbidden (though for a different reason) and it went away like a bad dream. Particularly so since the networks all seem to have played that episode once (if ever) and then refused to show it again. And so on.

It did do some very good things with war (how far can we go to win? How willing are we to give up our morals, lie and cheat and connive with the devil in order to help our cause?), terrorism (looking back, I'm soooo glad DS9 happened when it did, because the Bajorans and the Maquis would definitely not fly in the current political climate) and what it does to the people who fight wars by terrorist tactics, and fuck of a lot of moral ambiguity... which, sadly, they backed away from at the end. Dukat, who had been a wonderfully ambiguous figure through the series, was suddenly EVIL. Garak and Damar became HEROES. Kai Winn, deliciously unpleasant but somehow understandable, became out-and-out DELUDED but eventually GOOD. And died for her sins, of course. And Sisko, poor, good, flawed Sisko, got Ascended to a Higher Plane in the process of killing The Embodiment of Evil. It was like at the end of 6 years of really good, fascinating, realistic story, they just couldn't hold it together anymore without resorting to caricature and cliche. Very sad way to end a series.

...Sorry, I apparently felt a need to write you an essay on DS9. o_O My apologies for the rant.

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No! I enjoyed reading it. Damn, you actually sat through all seven seasons and I didn't! Although now, I want to sit through all of the seasons and critique...

Meh. And watch B5. But it sucks to watch stuff alone. But eh.

I need to sleep now. :P

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See, I sat through all seven seasons of DS9 as they happened, so it was a totally different kind of experience. Especially with the age gap - I was eleven when the series started, eighteen when it finished up. So... talk about shifting viewpoints. And looking back on it now is completely different from either of those times. The shift from me at 18 to almost 24 is unbelievable, especially with five years of academia in that time.

I'm enjoying it - I can run upstairs and flail at my housemate who's seen it if I want, and the internet provides another good flailing outlet. ;)

G'night!

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Good morning. ^^; (this conversation's so good I can't give it up. :P)

I can imagine how that shift would be. I grew up with TNG--it was on constantly when I was a kid, even though I remember little. I think it ended... wasn't there overlap between TNG and DS9? Anyway, I was young when it ended. I'm 21 now, if that helps. So yeah. I just remember thinking Wes Crusher was cute.

And now I look back and realize what a Stu he was. Heh! It's amazing what time and life will do to ya, you know? Education's a gorgeous thing.

And yay for flailing. You've got to have the flailing.

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Yeah, I have similar memories of TNG before I started actually watching it - I was petrified of the Cardassians when I was small, from seeing bits of the episode where they tortured Picard. There was a couple of years where I watched both, but I think it was only... 2 years? Maybe three? I don't remember exactly when it ended, but Worf switched over to DS9 about halfway through the series...

Oh, Wesley. I remember liking him for a little while, too, but boy was he a Stu.

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