Happy Sunday everyone!

Some TV reviews below, so if you want to just skip over the personal stuff…

How does our involvement or expertise change our personal perception of things? Well, over the last couple of days, there were a few things were I realized that my thoughts about the subject would have been quite different just 1 or 2 years ago. I'm talking about minor stuff and details, not about world changing events (and yes, this has some minor relevance to the reviews later in the blog ).

So earlier today, I drove through an area were a lot of new houses were being built. Instead of just driving through, I was looking around, checking out gardens, thinking about colour schemes (What happened to me? When did I become this square/bourgeois?? ARG!) But the most worrying thing was thinking about bricks. I looked at the half-built houses and all I could think about was "How could they use those bricks? They have bad thermal coefficients and they don't even use additional thermal insulation."

VS.

Another example is, a couple of days ago I watched a Danish(?) horror short movie about a 5-year old girl with seemingly demonic powers. Ok, the short wasn't very thrilling, but the thing I remembered the most was "This father is so irresponsible, he is driving at high speed and he didn't even fasten the seatbelt of his daughter correctly"…

So obviously something weird is happening to me… Perhaps I should see someone about that

But enough about my obvious transformation towards a dull, middle-cla$$ white collar kind of guy and on to some TV related stuff:

Everyone who read some of my previous blogs knows that I highly anticipated the release of Babylon 5: The Lost Tales. My DVD finally arrived here on Thursday, so I made sure that I could watch it without any disturbances, opened up a beer, lay on the couch and started the DVD. So before I go on, I have to say that I really enjoyed The Lost Tales very much, which might not become so apparent in the next few paragraphs

(There be spoilers):

So the first of the two stories started with a great new credit sequence. The new Babylon 5 cgi-model was of course much more high-def than the one from over 10 years ago. The station looked shiny, but somehow it looked too smooth, but still great. So the first story began with Col. Lochely encountering a case of what seems to be demonic possession and asks for help from a catholic priest… I don't want to go in the details of this story, I think it would make a good or even great Twilight Zone story, asking some interesting questions about faith and self-sacrifice but it didn't fit in Babylon 5 at all for several reasons:

- They have encountered the strangest aliens, highly powerful telepaths, etc. and Lochley's first thought is actually "possession"?

- You have demons (the biblical kind) that are bound to Earth, banned by a single creator god. In the B5 universe, Earth and humans are not the center of creation, but just one race of many. So this story implies that Earth either IS the center of creation (which doesn't make much sense with the First Ones around) or that Earth literally is Hell aka The Home of Demons.

- The priest says, that when humanity reached for the stars, they travelled through heaven and they found no God, no Angels and no Seraphim. Aehm, hello? This is Babylon 5, where humans actually encountered 'Angels' (in form of the Vorlons) just a decade earlier!? And it doesn't even get mentioned? Not a question if this possessing entity is perhaps a servant-race of the Shadows?

As I said before, interesting story, wrong universe! I should also mention that "The Lost Tales" is very low budget, so the whole story takes basically place in one set with 3 actors.

First episode: 6/10

So I was quite disenchanted after the first story and the second one started… for some reason I began grinning and didn't stop until it was over. Bruce Boxleitner just is John Sheridan, the story itself is very good, Galen (Peter Woodward) great as ever and the Centauri Prince Regent is acted fantastically by Keegan MacIntosh. You can just feel that he is his father (Emperor Cartagia)'s son, he is so likable (unlike Cartagia), slightly mad and scary at the same time and this is what is needed to make the story work.

Everything in this episode feels real and Babylon 5ish. When the Prince Regent talks about what Londo told him, you can just imagine Peter Jurasik delivering the lines, and when Lochley tells Sheridan that Dr. Franklin took a trip beyond the Rim, you see how not only the characters but also the actors are affected.

It seems also that most of the budget went into this second episode, as you have quite some expensive looking Special FX, a big (if very brief) space battle, etc.

But I have to point out a few nitpicks, even if it was a great story:

- Vir Coto as the number 2 successor to the throne seems to contradict the existing stories, as he AFAIR should be part of the Resistance by the time of this story. And it was an off-hand remark, so it was not as it was necessary to p toint that out.

- Isn't it a nice coincidence that the Centauri Prince Regent just happens to like Human Starfuries?

- The ending was a bit too saccharine for my taste.

- Hundreds of Ambassadors and Officials from all over the Galaxy are on B5 and we see only a handful of ships and a nearly empty station?

So, overall second episode: 9/10

I've also to mention the specials on the DVD: there are two touching memorials to Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs, some interviews, a bit of behind the scenes stuff that mostly explains how this show would have worked had they used sock puppets instead of actors, and a nice shout-out to some of the people you typically just see in the credits, like the script supervisor or the 1st AD.

Overall, I'd recommend it to every B5 fan, even though the first story could be better. I just expect that the following DVDs (if they happen) will try to top the second story.

Ok, this was quite long, so I'll handle the other stuff I watched this week, like the first episode of 'Californication' and 'Masters of Science Fiction' in the next blog

The 'What if' obviously has to do with 'The Lost Tales', even though it's probably more a question to think about than to answer:

"Would you sacrifice everything you believe in, so that this that you have to sacrifice for yourself might come true for other people?"