alt.hn

2/13/2026 at 8:49:02 AM

Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch on YouTube

 https://cordcuttersnews.com/babylon-5-is-now-free-to-watch-on-youtube/

by walterbell

2/13/2026 at 5:09:32 PM

Those who come to this magnificent piece of Sci-Fi for the first time, a word of advice: Pay attention. There are things set in motion in season 1 that are resolved multiple seasons later and there's a lot of foreshadowing (pun very much intended) both subtle and overt.

Oh and, enjoy the ride. It's a good one.

by tomkarho

2/13/2026 at 7:20:18 PM

I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better. It's still one of my all time favorite shows.

I wish they'd do a corrected bluray release with even a bit more effort... when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.

Maybe AI upscale to 4k, with training data for newer ship models, actor photos, etc then reducing back to 1080p for a final BluRay set. Probably enough people that would do this as a passion project if the studio would let them.

by tracker1

2/13/2026 at 1:14:49 PM

If you decide to watch Babylon 5 for the first time, I suggest giving it a chance to get under your skin. There is quite a lot to get in the way of that such as mediocre acting, cringey humour, low budget fx (all particularly prominent in season 1). But the pay off in seasons 3 and 4 is huge if you take the time to let affection grow for the characters. Babylon 5 was my first 'favourite series' that 'changed my life' etc etc so I guess I am biased!

by jefc1111

2/13/2026 at 2:41:12 PM

I rewatched it last year during an old sci-fi binge, I had watched bits as a kid but never got it. I grew up on TNG and DS9 was my favorite, so I was probably biased.

It's probably now number 2 for me behind DS9. I watched it again a few month later to catch all the foreshadowing I missed the first time. You are spot on that season 1 is a slow burn that ramps up to the amazing seasons 3 and 4. Best part, it has a clean conclusion without any sequel bait nonsense.

Londo and Gkar are two of the best characters in Sci-Fi and their relationship is brilliant.

by jeffwask

2/13/2026 at 5:05:22 PM

Yeah Londo and G'kar is a critical relationship to the overall effect. Also I find Garibaldi's arc compellingly tragic also...

Also I read JMS' autobiography [1] which added enlightening context

[1] J. Michael Straczynski, Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood

by jefc1111

2/13/2026 at 4:34:03 PM

As a DS9 fan myself I felt like B5 was the better show. DS9 had greater variance throughout its run, the standout episodes were phenomenal but also lots of weak episodes & filler. If there was tighter editorial control over the episodes & at least 30% of them got cut then it could be a contender.

by stuxnet79

2/13/2026 at 7:58:29 PM

For me, the appeal of DS9 was that certain episodes In the Pale Moonlight etc. are a bit like a play, very self-contained even if they are in a certain setting. Babylon 5 is kind of the opposite, no plays, just parts of a long arc.

I think both have their appeal, but it's easier to timebox the enjoyment of a play. It's also easier to discuss, or think about.

by impossiblefork

2/13/2026 at 4:58:13 PM

I probably agree but my emotional attachment to DS9 keeps it in front.

It's also crazy how relevant to modern times the plot of B5 is and how many parallels you see.

by jeffwask

2/13/2026 at 5:20:58 PM

I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself, but I'd love to know what people specifically mean. I.e. "X plot line is like Y thing" in real life right now.

by jefc1111

2/13/2026 at 8:21:15 PM

>I hear this a lot about B5, and I get a _sense_ of it myself,

The series creator and chief writer, J. Michael Straczynski was explicit about that: The Earth Government story arc is lifted straight from the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s.

A significant amount of which we're seeing rebranded as MAGA in the US and other far-right movements elsewhere.

A good example would be the "anti-alien" frenzy in Babylon 5 as compared with the far-right's ridiculous tropes about the undocumented in the US.

There are a bunch more like Trump's obsession with personal loyalty and lack of any empathy is quite similar to Babylon 5's President Clarke.

As I mentioned, that story arc is based upon the fascist regimes of the '30s and '40s, they even have a "Neville Chamberlain"[0] analog[1] who loudly proclaims "Finally, we will at last know 'peace in our time'."

The biggest difference is that in the Babylon 5 universe, the fascist scum are much more competent than those IRL today.

There's lots more, and I'll echo the plaints of others here that Season 1 is uneven and appears meandering, but many of the plot points brought up in Season 1 end up paying off much later in the series.

I heartily recommend watching the series, not just for the parallels with some of our current circumstance, but because it's a good story with the entire five season story arc fleshed out from the beginning, with good character development and character driven story lines.

It was also the first live-action Sci-Fi series that made use of CGI for the space scenes, which was both very cool, but was also limited compared to today's SFX given that 30 second segments could take hours to render on the Unix workstations of the mid 1990s.

Is it perfect, no. But it's worth the effort to watch it IMNSHO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain

[1] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Frederick_Lantze

by nobody9999

2/13/2026 at 6:38:18 PM

When I finally decided to watch B5 for the first time, season 1 was so bad that I literally turned it off and stared at the ceiling. (I was stuck in bed due to an injury.)

Eventually, somebody curated a couple of season 1 episodes and told me to skip ahead to season 2. By the time it got to season 4, I felt it had risen to the level of "ok".

I never found any of the characters compelling, despite some game performances. And I never found the plot all that interesting, either, though I can see why others might find it so.

by jfengel

2/13/2026 at 8:25:19 PM

This is what I was referring to in my original comment.

My suggestion is that had you endured S1 fully, you might have felt S4 had risen to a higher level than "ok". That's not to say I begrudge you skipping through S1 ... I'd probably have done the same if I'd come across it in recent years as opposed to however many years ago it was.

I'm not trying to change your mind really, but yeah - I think the value that you hear about in the characters and plot arise from the many small nuances which build up slowly over time.

by jefc1111

2/13/2026 at 1:48:17 PM

Is that disclaimer really needed? As someone who watched the series the first time last year, the acting and humor seem fine for TV honestly. The CGI dated of course but not offensive either.

If anything I found the later seasons more disappointing than 1 and 2 as smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward, which still feels rushed somehow.

by account42

2/13/2026 at 2:11:28 PM

The disclaimer is just based on my own opinion, so inevitably there will be people to whom it does not apply. Some of the acting in season 1 is great, I would just say there are some spots where it kinda briefly falls through the floor. It may be just because I have seen it several times so am spotting things that I wouldn't have first time round.

With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of production JMS was told there would be no S5 after all, so he put all of S4 and S5 into S4 ... but then there was an S5 after all!

by jefc1111

2/13/2026 at 5:12:03 PM

Yeah, Season 4 is acknowledged for compressing a lot of the story that would have been Season 5 in the original plan. The series finale ("Sleeping in Light") was even shot as a part of Season 4 and delayed once Season 5 was picked up to keep it the series finale. The epilogue it tells spins out enough past the show that it mostly isn't that noticeable, but the big tell is a brief appearance of Ivanova rather than Lochley, which doesn't really break the episode because of the out-of-order storytelling of the whole episode and the glimpses of the crew are "timeless" flashbacks, but it is interesting.

by WorldMaker

2/13/2026 at 2:27:10 PM

> smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward

This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.

by sidpatil

2/13/2026 at 5:06:51 PM

I have a bunch of friends that either never made it completely through Season 1 or complained all through Season 1. Season 1 is rougher than normal. The problem though is that while it is easy to tell people "Skip Season 1 of TNG or DS9" (which is relatively common advice for both shows), Season 1 has so many moments of character building and foreshadowing that pay off in later seasons that even the "worst" episodes are hard to tell people to skip.

An example not quite off the top of my head is as early as Episode 2 "Soul Hunter". It's a goofy plot full of weird pseudo-scientific mysticism with a "special guest of the week" who basically never returns (excluding books and movies), so in most shows meets several definitions of skippable, but this episode also introduces Dr. Franklin, has several key Sinclair and Garibaldi moments, provides background lore for the Minbari and foreshadows certain Minbari things to come.

That's just the second episode of the season. (Truly a rough start for some.)

Another common example is "TKO". It's a silly boxing match episode, much of it doesn't do much for the series except set up some of Garibaldi's goofier side and maybe foreshadowing Garibaldi's flaws. But it's also the Ivanova confronts grief and her heritage episode, a key part of Ivanova's arc.

by WorldMaker

2/13/2026 at 4:22:58 PM

[dead]

by isjdjwjdhw

2/13/2026 at 4:24:46 PM

That’s not what “get under your skin” means.

by alehlopeh

2/13/2026 at 1:28:05 PM

No, you're not biased, it's simply the best!

It's getting old but nostalgia kicks in as soon as I see a Vorlon ship

by whynotmaybe

2/13/2026 at 4:34:33 PM

Low budget? I seem to remember it was lauded (but made on Amigas, if I'm not mistaken)

I sure loved it, at least on my crappy 21" tv

by g-b-r

2/13/2026 at 3:27:29 PM

I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show.

In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show. And by that I mean: he actually pre-planned the story (spanning multiple seasons!) of B5 right from the beginning, instead of completely making it up on the fly like so many other shows. Subtle things which might seem inconsequential, appearing in the very first season, can foreshadow events happening seasons later. This makes it, at least for me, much more coherent and enjoyable to watch, and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today).

by kouteiheika

2/13/2026 at 10:48:20 PM

> In my opinion he's one of the few people in the industry who actually knows how to skillfully write a coherent TV show.

He had this idea around 2004 of rebooting Star Trek: https://web.archive.org/web/20060628131520/http://bztv.typep...

And on a few occasions he also said he'd try steering Doctor Who

by pndy

2/13/2026 at 5:14:27 PM

The CW picked up a Babylon 5 reboot "recently", but it seems like it got trapped in development hell and caught in the cross-fires of the ugly WB-CBS divorce of The CW and the ugly merger of WB and Discovery and what is shaping up to be an ugly divorce of WB and Discovery.

by WorldMaker

2/13/2026 at 5:16:16 PM

you are right about straczynski, but i'd prefer to see a new scifi series by him rather than a reboot or continuation. ok, a spin off maybe. jeremiah was pretty good. (i haven't seen sense8)

but i just see that he was approached to direct star trek: enterprise. star trek by straczynski is something i'd really love to see.

by em-bee

2/13/2026 at 8:35:57 PM

>I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom. Or hell, even an entirely different show.

There has been discussion about a reboot over the years, with JMS throwing some cold water[0] (at least for now) on the possibility in January 2026.

There's sort of a "continuation" with Babylon 5: The Road Home[1] from 2023.

There's also Crusade[2] which only ended up with a dozen or so episodes, although JMS had a multi-year story arc planned.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/j-michael-straczynski-is-being-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5:_The_Road_Home

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_%28TV_series%29

by nobody9999

2/13/2026 at 5:13:25 PM

>I would give my left kidney for either a continuation or a reboot of Babylon 5 under the helm of J. Michael Straczynski with full creative freedom.

I don't know. I loved Babylon 5 but I also found it kind of corny. And then Crusade was just a D&D campaign in space. The ship was even called the Excalibur FFS. I feel like "full creative freedom" would ruin it the way it did with George Lucas and Star Wars.

>and I wish more writers/showrunners would adopt this approach (instead of the usual writers' room + only plan until the end of the season approach which is so common today.

What else can you do when you don't know if you're getting renewed? You can't push the conclusions to your storylines forward into seasons you might never even have to resolve them.

by krapp

2/13/2026 at 12:05:51 PM

The hosting channel is called "Clipzone: Beyond Infinity" https://youtube.com/@czbeyondinfinity?si=Vhn1LH1TjJzxNyLZ

"The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22. Currently available are episodes 1, 3, and 4, (Thursdays), and assorted five-minute clips. I could not find them bundled in a playlist here.

The episodes are in broadcast order. "Midnight on the Firing Line", a missing episode, is listed as Episode 1 in Wikipedia, because "The Gathering" was a pilot.

Steve Grimm's "Lurker's Guide" is still online since 33 years, and updated with 2023's releases: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html

by RupertSalt

2/13/2026 at 12:21:10 PM

> "The Gathering" was uploaded on January 22

The 16:9 cropped and upscaled version (of the TNT cut) unfortunately, with the same excessive noise reduction and sharpening that previous releases of that version had. Baffling why they keep using this version when even the old DVD release has better quality.

by account42

2/13/2026 at 12:25:51 PM

The original episodes were all recorded in wide aspect ratio, even though they were destined for broadcast TV. They were touted as future compatibility. So the original broadcasts were "pan & scan". Then, when the wide-aspect disc formats arrived, it turned out that converting them was not a simple matter of going back to the originals and plopping them on disc.

https://b5remasterissues.wordpress.com/the-good/

by RupertSalt

2/13/2026 at 1:30:58 PM

Only the live action shots were recorded with a wide aspect ratio, and perhaps not even that for the pilot. The CGI was rendered in 4:3 and the final cuts including transitions and VFX where composited in 4:3.

The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.

by account42

2/13/2026 at 3:04:41 PM

So just what is the optimal way to watch this show

by Apocryphon

2/13/2026 at 5:21:57 PM

There sadly isn't one. The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable. It's a bit of a dealer's choice at this point if you want "best available quality" or "best available widescreen."

Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)

by WorldMaker

2/13/2026 at 10:25:00 PM

With an AI filter overlay of the cgi sequences?

by assaddayinh

2/13/2026 at 2:44:06 PM

DS9 and Voy have the same issue. For DS9, Season 1 was shot wide screen compatible then they switched to 16:9 but none of the effects are widescreen ready.

by jeffwask

2/13/2026 at 12:44:13 PM

YouTube is still offering all five seasons for sale (not including "The Gathering" pilot.)

There is a choice of Standard Defintion and High Definition. Usually that only means a change in resolution, not different conversions.

by RupertSalt

2/13/2026 at 2:53:20 PM

hello,

as always: imho. (!)

ah ... babylon 5 :))

this was one of the best scifi shows back in the mid 1990ties.

it introduced a lot things which we take for granted today ... together with startrek "deep space nine" which roughly aired during the same time:

* telling a "story arch" over multiple seasons

* 2 parallel story-lines within episodes

* causally show people doing "every-day" life things, like going to the toilet - you may laugh, but 30+ years ago, for example in various startrek spinoffs - tng, ds9, voyager - nobody went to the toilet ... ever!!

don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of startrek too ;))

* despite their budget decent CGI for the time

if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom", which ran on the amiga hardware-platform at first, for later seasons they moved to PC hardware...

just if you wonder about the quality of the CGI ... this was some 680x0 computer running at something like 16 or 32 MHz (!) with a few MB (!) of memory.

not a scifi "blockbuster" utilizing multimillion us$ SGI clusters like ILM productions of the era did!

absolutely recommended:

"the lurker's guide to babylon 5"

* http://midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html

just my 0.02€

by t312227

2/13/2026 at 5:45:40 PM

> if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom"

Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...

by lantastic

2/13/2026 at 5:48:49 PM

yes, you are right ... its been a few years :))

by t312227

2/13/2026 at 2:57:20 PM

You are missing one important detail, an Amiga alongside NewTek's Video Toaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

by pjmlp

2/13/2026 at 6:52:43 PM

24 Amiga 2000's each with a 68040, 32mb of RAM and a Video Toaster, managed by a 486 server with a 12gb of storage.

[1]https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue166/68_The_makin...

by bilegeek

2/13/2026 at 7:08:20 PM

I just had to add more, because I remember they used DEC Alpha systems at some point.

" Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.

P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.

Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.

Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI)."[0]

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

by sillywalk

2/13/2026 at 5:51:57 PM

you are right, i left this detail out ... but it went somewhat together with the amiga & the lightwave-software :))

by t312227

2/13/2026 at 4:42:54 PM

It's great that they are releasing these episodes on YouTube. But what a lot of OG fans would love even more is a proper remaster of some of the classics. Unfortunately the lukewarm response to the TNG remaster proved to media companies that such undertakings are not worth the effort. But I wonder if the advent of AI tools has made remasters more economical. I do know there is an ongoing effort by fans to remaster VOY and DS9 with the help of AI but not sure of the quality or cost.

by stuxnet79

2/13/2026 at 11:32:45 PM

There's an AI upscale of ds9 in torrent land. Looks pretty good other than certain scenes.

by ChoGGi

2/13/2026 at 4:47:29 PM

Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room, probably getting hassled over its (lack of) digital restrictions management lockdown, signing into a Google account with all of the surveillance pwnage that implies, ads (including ads for senile political ragebait) plastered all over my experience, while becoming dependent on a UI that can change at any time, likely to demand money? Youtube is a step back in experience, something to be suffered when the thing you want to watch is only available there (ie network effects). Meanwhile, Babylon 5 has been free ~forever on torrents.

by mindslight

2/13/2026 at 5:04:01 PM

okay, then be happy there will be some new injected life into the fandom

or re-read the release as "B5 now available for download via YT-DLP for free!"

by serf

2/13/2026 at 5:10:10 PM

Sure, there is value to corporate top-down synchronization telling everyone to focus on a specific piece of media at the same time. I wasn't really complaining about that. In fact it would be interesting if we could recreate the effect some way in a more distributed culture.

But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible to Google (eg naive residential IP or supplying a logged-in session cookie).

by mindslight

2/13/2026 at 3:37:07 PM

“Sooner or later everyone comes to Babylon 5."

by PepperdineG