Jumpgate Episode 0

Welcome to Jumpgate, the new Babylon 5 Re-watch Podcast!

It's been 20 years since breakthrough CGI and a few million tons of spinning metal captured our young fannish souls in a little glowing sphere and showed us that televised SF could be more than Trek. Babylon 5 set the stage for many of the fantastic things in this golden age of TV we are now priveleged to experience. Arc Stories? B5 did it first. Deep, flawed, complex characters? Over a dozen of them. They changed over time, fell in love, fell in battle, saved the galaxy, and changed the way we see episodic drama forever. Before it even began, USENET newsgroups carried it's standard, and shouted it's battle cry: No cute kids, no robots, EVER!

As old-school B5 fans (and one Noob, along for the ride!) we are proud to bring you our insights, jokes, and even some misty nostalgia every other week. We're also doing something unusual for such an old show, which is bringing it to you as spoiler free as possible. Of course, there are tons of websites, wikipedia and a host of other resources that were simply unavailable on the nascent World Wide Web in 1994. But we'd like to think that those who haven't watched the series in it's entirety will appreciate the journey, and maybe discover something awesome for the first time.

In this inaugural episode, we won't be discussing the show at all. Calm down, we'll get to it. But for now, this podcast is about reacquainting people with the "TV landscape" (for lack of a better term) in the late 80's and early 90's. Much like good food, we feel that context enhances the re-watch experience. It's easy to forget, especially if you lived through it, just how different it was 20 years ago, based on which series got green-lighted, much less got decent ratings. If you have a favorite SF show from the time, we probably mention it and comment upon it. From Captain Power to Quantum Leap, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to The X-Files, we gotcha covered!

We hope you have as much fun listening as we did making it! Join us, then, as we go back to the Beginning... the Dawn of the Third Age of Mankind!