Mallus said:
Rackhir, I beg to differ...
No argument that Londo/Peter Jurasik is the best character/actor on the show. But is he really accurately described as a villian? I think of him as a protagonist, not antagonist.
Well I know from past threads that you and I simply don't see eye to eye on these sort of things. Being a protagonist or antagonist is fairly meaninless in a show like B5 with the same characters serving primary, secondary and supporting roles and completely irrelevant to if Londo is a villian or not. Since terms those simply refer to a story's focus on a character. Generally the hero is the protagonist and the villian the antagonist, but there is nothing about the definitions of the words that mandates it be that way.
He is not a traditional villian in the Darth Vader sense certainly. He is not doing evil simply because it IS evil like so many villians seem to. None of the "Bad Guys" in B5 really were, except perhaps the Drahk, but they were more for Crusade. B5 made you understand Londo, you knew he wasn't innately a bad person. However that didn't stop him from doing things with quite evil outcomes.
As to why he was a villian, well lets see, he made a deal with the shadows, knowing full well and was warned that someone offering what they were, couldn't be up to anything good. He used that bargain to enable the Centari to destroy and invade the Narn homeworld, reducing them ONCE MORE to slaves of the Centari. He clearly didn't like many of the policies that were being carried out, but he not only went along with them, he supported them to the best of his ability in most situations.
He was essentially someone who had joined the Nazi Party, who perhaps wasn't fond of Hitler and his racisim, but none the less carried out his orders. Someone who believed in Germany and wanted it to be great again and saw Hitler and the Nazis as the best way to accomplish that. You can be a nice guy who loves his family, children and puppies yet who perpetrates the most monsterous acts concievable.
Mallus said:
I think the Borg had plenty of menace up through "Best of Both Worlds". You didn't find the soulless machine voice issuing out of a viewscreen full of infinite-seeming girders menacing? Or first time a Borg drone manifested a force shield; the mindless inevitability of their non-tactics was a sight to behold ... for awhile (at least the Borg didn't look like rabid Erector sets like SG1's Replicators...)
The problem is the Borg became as ubiquitous as a Paris Hilton sex tape. And nowhere near as scary.
No I never found the borg menacing, scary or intimidating. Their idiotic appearence, sluggish response and essential invulnerability, put me more in mind of Jason in Friday the 13th CCXXII(an exercise in killing teenagers/redshirts by an invincible character), than anything to be afraid of. Rather than think of some way to actually make them scary or intimidating, like a poor DM with a favored NPC, they simply made the borg essentially invulnerable, railroading them to the pre-plotted conclusion where the Plot-tium bombs would finally defeat them.
Basically if the Borg were ever used with a sensible approach to how much power they were shown to have, they would have vaporized the enterprise in a second and simply brushed aside anything else thrown at them. Like the aformentioned NPC shrugging off attacks from the PCs. So the Borg were made stupid. That's not scary.
