I haven't thought recently about how I became interested in B5, maybe because the story's a little embarrassing.
To begin with, I'm a compulsive video-taper, particularly where sf and movies are concerned. I can remember seeing some kind of quickie review in the paper about a two hour movie (didn't realize it was a pilot), written by someone who used to write for Murder She Wrote. It was SF. It sounded like the author had good credentials. That was good enough for me. So I marked it in the TV guide as something I needed to tape (like twenty plus
other hours' worth of movies for the week). I also noticed that an hour
into the show, something else was coming up on another station that I REALLY
wanted to see. I have no idea what that was, anymore.
Anyway, Babylon 5 starts and I'm watching and the whole thing's really very good. Hmm. Glad I'm taping. May want to watch this again sometime..Glances to the clock. Time's approaching for the 'big attraction of the
evening'. This Vorlon ambassador person is arriving. I set up the other TV
in the house to watch my 'big attraction'. I'm jumping back and forth
between the two tv's. At some point I start to lose track of the B5 plotline, but I think I've got it figured out. This jms person writes for Murder She Wrote. So now he's doing MSW is space. Ok, the captain or whoever will figure out who the murderer is, but I don't want to lose my own chance to work it out for myself, by giving myself too many spoilers for the second half of the movie. I turn off the sound of B5 and concentrate on the other show. I'll get back to it. 'Course I'll have to rewind and watch the whole movie over again, or I'll never figure out the murderer....
Cut to a year later. There are two new SF series coming on the air within
a week of each other. Both sound pretty good, and fortunately I can tape
them both because they're on successive nights. The premises of the two are
completely blurred in my mind. The existence of a two-hour pilot of ANYTHING
has long since sunk into oblivion. Babylon 5 starts. I have this niggling feeling that something looks familiar but I'm not sure why. One raised eyebrow. Hey, this space station looks like a real, live working space station, not some kind of carpeted conference room. (I love Trek and liked TNG a lot, but I'd recently gotten tired of all the TNG board meetings, so anything else seemed impressive at the time).
A few more minutes pass and the second eyebrow goes up. Wow, intrigue. Real, live political intrigue. I could learn to like this show. Hm... And this G'Kar fellow. So Machiavellian... Gotta watch him. He's going to eat the funny guy with the hair alive, pretending like he knows nothing about the attack and then calmly saying he just found out from his government...
Sinclair goes to speak to Ambassador Kosh. A weird light behind a screen, a strangely familiar suit, some completely bizarro dialogue. Who IS this guy? Yikes! I've seen him before. I've seen him! I can still remember jumping up out of the chair and almost racing into the next room to look for the tape. But the story is too good. Plunk, back down in the chair. I wait for the story to get TNG simple at some point, so I can go looking for the tape. The story stubbornly refuses to cooperate. In fact, it proceeds to preversely get even more complex.
A commercial comes on. I'm sitting in the chair, staring blankly at the TV, wondering how they're going to resolve all this in the last few minutes. And of course, half the complications that have arisen politely refuse to be smoothed over in the last few minutes. I continue to sit in the chair, gaping at the TV as the ending
credits go up. The Prisoner, Mark Two has landed. (At some point, I finally
DID race into the other room and frantically began looking for the tape
of the pilot, muttering to myself and scaring the wits out of my cat. But
that's another story.)