re: #232 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I always thought it was another Star Trek spinoff series.

Did not pay any attention to those series when they came out, only started catching up on Next Generation in 2016 or so when my GF got me into them.

Now I have watched all the episodes of all the series and suppose I should check out B5

It was, sort of. The creator of B5 showed his materials to the high up muckety mucks at Paramount to get them to produce the show. They declined and though never shared the material with Star Trek producers, apparently steered the development of DS9 in much the same way. There are claims that there was finally an out of court settlement between him and Paramount.

Frankly, having watched both, I’ll argue that Star Trek did a better job - writing, acting, etc - of telling stories on the same themes of war and peace/freedom vs authoritarianism/religion vs secularism than B5 did. B5 had lots of quips and sequences but few of the episodes hung together as well as many of the ones on DS9 did to me. Take “In The Pale Moonlight” as one example.

B5 wasn’t a bad by any means, I just never found it as be all end all that some of it’s fans think. I can easily watch it to this day unlike Firefly (Josey Wales in SPAAAAACE!) which I never could stand.