The show was clearly meant to be binge-watched, so I set it aside until the season completes and I can watch it as it was meant to be watched. Even by my definition, a “relaxed binge” of one or two episodes a day will let me keep up with the story.

I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new art form, long segmented movie-analogues that can carry a bigger story than previous forms. There’s long been a yearning for it–that’s why we have sequels, but the years between them limited their story-telling capacity. Now they have a dozen hours to play with, packaged in a way the viewer can commit more or less time to, as suits.

I credit J. Michael Straczinski for starting this trend. His ambition to tell a five-year story with Babylon 5 had to fit within television’s episodic constraints, but he demonstrated that audiences are willing to immerse themselves in complicated and long-term stories, as long as the writing is up to JMS’s standards. Now the streamers seem to have found the format the JMS was looking for. Imagine what B5 would have been like if it had been structured for binge-watching. The mind boggles, etc.

BTW, this wouldn’t have warranted a post on its own, but I’m watching B5 again through Amazon Prime, and somebody has finally taken the time to produce a clean wide-screen rendition that looks as good as something produced in the late ’90s. This is a big deal, because the digital SFX model files were lost, and there were supposedly only low-quality film prints (interiors, anything with actors) still around. The first DVD and stream versions of Babylon 5 were truly terrible.

But in this version, the interior shots seems to be SD digital quality, while the exterior SFX shots are, unfortunately, still crap…and always will be, until an AI can look at the blocky over-compressed current version and infer new digital models of the station and spacecraft from them. There is one more version of B5 yet to come. But for now, at least this current version is no longer painful to watch. And that’s a big deal.