b5_revisited

This is the spoiler-free discussion post for the pilot movie The Gathering. No spoilers beyond the episode currently being discussed are allowed here (this includes icons).

There exists two different versions of the pilot movie, the 1993 original, and JMS's 1998 re-cut. There are no major differences to the story, but scenes have been cut and added in the new version, but it's worth mentioning which version you're talking about. The easiest way to tell which version you have watched is to check if the music was by Stewart Copeland (original) or Chris Franke (new version).

Because the article for "The Gathering" at Lurker's Guide (THE B5 site on the web, if you haven't heard of it) contains spoilers, I'm copy-pasting here some interesting quotes from Straczynski about the episode:

RE: The zoo-like alien sector in the original version of the pilot

"First, we decided that wasn't a right look for the alien sector, and that's the corridor we blew up at the end. But the reason it was designed that way is important. Your reaction -- don't the aliens have any privacy? -- is a very human, and specifically a very *western* point of view. Our feeling at the time was, why should alien quarters look at all like human quarters? Shouldn't they have a different perspective than typical Western-style hotels? (In some degree, the quaters were patterned after Japanese mini-hotels, where you get basically a slightly larger coffin-like setup, which you crawl into like a torpedo tube, with a window at one end, which has a curtain, a TV over your head, and so on. What we discovered is that many people ask for more alien aliens, but when we delivered on that, were asked why these things weren't more like what we expect, why aren't they like human quarters? It's really a losing battle.)

The other point on this is that if you look closely, there are back areas accessible to residents, which can in particular be seen in the insectoid/antennae'd character's quarters. The idea was that it would be sort of a front porch, where for lack of much else to do, you'd sit out on the porch, watching the passing parade.

But the reaction was less than favorable, we had to keep explaining that this proceeds from an alien POV, and so our alien quarters are more like human quarters now, minus the alternate atmosphere stuff. I'm still not quite sure what to think of this."

RE: Delenn (who, in case you haven't yet watched ahead, will look radically different in the next episode)

"We'd originally planned to go for a more vague sexuality for Delenn; a male physically and primarily in the voice, on top of the natural female movements one gets from an actress. In post-production, however, we couldn't get the voice to sound as good and male as we'd wanted. In addition, a couple of convention showing of a rough cut saw people responding VERY strongly to her voice as it was, so we finally decided to let it stand and change the one reference to "he" to "she," and that was the end of it."

"Delenn was originally going to be a fairly sexually-ambiguous character...a male character, played by a female, with a computer altered voice...but we couldn't make the alteration sound good enough to satisfy us, so we left her a her."