I've heard a lot about Babylon 5, even though I didn't watch it when it first aired...it ended in 1998, and I didn't have access to a TV until about 2 years later, so that's probably why I didn't watch it as a kid. But I'm trying to go back and watch it now.

I like the alien characters more than the human. Sinclair is way too smarmy for my tastes, and Garibaldi is written with too much casual perving--although I bet I wouldn't have noticed if I'd watched it when I was in middle school and it was airing. So it suffers a bit from social norms shifting.

I haven't gone back to watch older shows in a while--but it sticks out to me that this show which aired in the 90s has such an old-school way of acting so prevalent in it. Again, it would have seemed totally normal to me if I'd seen it in the 90s, but nowdays it sticks out as quaint.

Anyway, I don't know if I like the show...I know they lose Sinclair after Season 1 so I might hang on until then. I don't dislike it either--I think I'm just reserving judgement.

A funny thing though--I'm a fan of the Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold. And one of her characters, Simon Illyan, is partly based/influenced by the looks of a certain actor (David McCallum). I have never actually seen anything with this actor in it before B5, I only saw a wikipedia headshot of him when he was younger. But he guest-starred in a Babylon 5 episode, the one where he's pressuring the Dr. as an old artifact-hunting colleague. And somehow I was like--wait, is that Simon Illyan? Is that the actor he was based on? Which was wild, because all I know of him is whatever homages made it into the Vorkosigan books and a wikipedia headshot of the actor earlier in his career, and I somehow managed to correctly identify him.

Was a weird crossover between entertainment mediums.