Fannish links from B5 to Homer

[sunnyskywalker]

First up, Google Ocean: Has Atlantis Been Found Off Africa? Slightly misleading, since it's not so much "Wow, we found a former city/island in roughly the right place!" as "Hm, we found some oddly regular lines on the ocean floor which might be of human origin, and therefore might have been a settlement of some sort at one time, and might be about

Comments

[4thofeleven]

Re: Atlantis - that’s an old story, I believe it was eventually concluded it was merely an artefact of Google’s mapping process

[sunnyskywalker]

That's about why I thought the story was amusing. Here's this tiny, ambiguous thing, and everyone's all OMG ATLANTIS!!1! I would have been rooting for unusual rock formations which revolutionize geology, myself.

Definitely - Season 5 was necessary, and ending the show on an "everything's great now!" note would not have felt right. I quite liked that kicking the Big Bads out of the galaxy happened midway through the show and the rest dealt with the mess left afterward, because that gets overlooked so often. (*coughHarryPottercough*) But I remember watching the end of the season and going, wait, you've just handed Sheriden and Delenn this highly significant vase with an evil parasite in it for their son, dangling this huge ominous thing in front of us - and then we don't see the fallout? Why bother setting it up then? I would have been perfectly happy to end with Londo being controlled, knowing that eventually that flashforward scene with G'Kar will happen. Tossing blatant cliffhangers in to get us wanting spin-offs is very poor

[4thofeleven]

Honestly, I actually suspect the whole bit with the keeper-in-a-jar wasn't meant as a cliffhanger so much as a way of providing an explanation for what Sheridan and Delenn were doing on Centauri Prime in the flashforward in the first place... and JMS just didn't notice it raised more questions than answers.

(I don't think the spin-off novels did anything particularly interesting with that plot point anyway - though it's been a while since I read the Centauri trilogy. They're... not very good.

My head!canon is the Drakh leaders had a whole elaborate evil scheme planned which they then abandoned once some lackey finally pointed out to them that, all appearances to the contrary, the Interstellar Alliance isn't actually a hereditary monarchy...)

Is BSG worth watching? I've never seen any of it; the general consensus seems to be it starts of strong but falls apart in the resolution - plus the whole premise sounds painfully depressing, so I haven't really been racing to track it down.

[sunnyskywalker]

Found some interview bits here, where it looks like that's about what he had in mind - and it will be covered in more detail in the books! And the Lyta and Garibaldi and Bester stuff will provide background to Crusade... thought he didn't want to create a franchise? There's also a snarky fake letter to Tolkien complaining that instead of the Shire and elves leaving stuff, we should have seen what happened to Tom Bombadil. So, does that mean he thinks the telepath stuff was no more relevant than Tom Bombadil?

I'm actually wondering whether he closed off too many things for it to work as an open, life-goes-on ending. The most satisfying parts seemed to be when we saw the characters in the middle of stuff - Garibaldi being a businessman with a family and hanging out with Franklin, Ivanova being a general, Vir being emperor. We don't know all the details, but we have a sketchy idea, so it feels resolved in a way