Up to Sic Transit Vir.

[conuly]

Is it just me, or did we somehow jump straight from "Vir's fiancee has a Narn tied up in her room" to "Now the marriage has been postponed indefinitely and they're saying goodbye" without addressing what happened to her would-be victim?

I mean, I guess Vir called security? And maybe stashed her away in the interim so she wouldn't pick up even more enemies, since she probably has plenty enough? Not that she doesn't deserve every last one of them....

I have found that I am not the only one to refer to Vir as a marshmallow with a core of steel. Londo should respect him more.

On the Earth-front, things are as bad as they are at this point in the series. I've been thinking about the short story, A Sound of Thunder, pretty much continuously since 2016. What Ray Bradbury doesn't seem to have realized when he wrote it is that if the race is between the fascist and somebody else, even if the fascist loses, things have already gone very badly wrong. You can't blame the butterflies for that!

And so it is on B5 as it is in real life. The Shadows didn't make the Centauri invade people on twelve fronts, and they didn't make most of the Earth military and the population support Clark, albeit with varying degrees of genuine enthusiasm, no more than they've made any of the real-world coups and conquests happen. No, they just made it easier for those seeds to grow.

But it's easier to blame the Shadows.

*********************

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Comments

[shadowkat]

Huh, insightful commentary on both Sound of Thunder, and Bab5, and our current situation.

The Shadows didn't make the Centauri invade people on twelve fronts, and they didn't make most of the Earth military and the population support Clark, albeit with varying degrees of genuine enthusiasm, no more than they've made any of the real-world coups and conquests happen. No, they just made it easier for those seeds to grow.

But it's easier to blame the Shadows.

All the spidery shadows asked was "What do you Want?" While the Vor (I think that's their name) asked "Who are You?" I saw both as a type of angelic force, who did nothing more than plant seeds in the consciousness of the sentient beings...and then sit back to see what happened.

Anyhow, I like your statement - "it's easier to blame the Shadows" because otherwise the Centauri, the humans, etc - would have to look at themselves and what they've done. And take responsibility for it.

We're here for the choices we've made along the way, not some higher being or external force.

Bab5 was at its most fascinating when it played with those questions of accountability and choice.
I kind of want to re-watch it now..

[conuly]

The Vorlons.

As for rewatching you, I warn you - HBO Max has THE worst interface.

[shadowkat]

Hmm. I've liked HBO Max for other programs. So that's interesting, maybe the transfer for Bab5 didn't work well? I thought Bab5 was on Prime for some reason?

[conuly]

No, when I say "the interface" I mean "this is the only place I've ever seen where all the letters are arranged in a straight row rather than in some sort of grid or, better yet, a keyboard layout".

[shadowkat]

Do you mean the search engine? So, it's hard to find?

I've noticed that items are really hard to find on HBO Max, harder than Netflix and Prime, which is saying something.

[conuly]

Typing things into it is a huge pain and a half. (It's also slow, but that's just the icing on the cake.)

[shadowkat]

Right now, I think Hulu and Disney are easiest of the interfaces. Bad news on HBO Max - since it has a ton of content. Sounds like it borrowed from Amazon, which is horrible too.

The problem with these streaming services isn't enough content - it's finding it. I can never find anything on Netflix. And my mother can't find Friday Night Lights on Hulu (I can't help her over the phone - nor can I get down there to help her.)

[mindstalk]

Both sides did a lot more than ask questions. The Vorlons meddled with species-- including abducting people to work on -- to give us telepathy and link themselves with angels, and the Shadows directly kill a lot of people.

[shadowkat]

I admittedly don't remember it that well - the last time I was saw it was sometime in 1990s Or thereabouts. Over twenty years ago. I have troubles remembering what happened in shows I saw last week.