You all make some excellent points, I'm so glad I came back
Ah. I knew it was DiTillio's episode, but I did not know Biggs was that involved. And Biggs' angle aside, JMS could / should have told DiTillio to make General Franklin a woman.
That WOULD have been very interesting. I wouldn't say that "dad is a hardass military officer" is a completely overdone story, but it's definitely not rare. Having it be a hardass military mom would have put a bit of a different spin on it. And, as you say, would have given us a "mommy issue" story rather than another dad one. But, I don't mind the story being the way it is.
Never been in the military but methinks that when the opportunity for R&R arrises, you don't deny that to your troops. Especially just before they're going into combat. So the choice was to either move them onto B5 or to keep shuttles going back and forth to all the troop-ships constantly after allowing a very few hours of R&R to each GROPO. I think General Franklin made the right choice.
Something to consider is that the troops sitting on the transports would be sitting in zero gravity. So seeing as they are GROUND POUNDERS prolonged zero gravity exposure might be a problem when they are expected to go into a gravity situation fighting. I've often wished they'd done a little more exposition on how people got along on zero gravity ship assignments for long periods of time.
These are both good points, which I totally failed to consider
I just didn't think about the fact that big ships like that can't just dock on the station and allow the crew to come and go as they please. There would indeed have to be a lot of shuttling back and forth, which I suppose would be more difficult than just trying to bunk them all on a station where there isn't really room for them.
I definitely never considered the fact that these are zero gravity ships!
The show was pretty progressive when it came to feminism in general. The relationship between Talia and Ivanova is about as far as they could go in those days. They even mention a female pope at one point. What's nice is that they show Dodger as liking casual sex and it doesn't have any repercussions. It doesn't get her in trouble in any way. That's actually very progressive.
I agree! Babylon 5 definitely showed human (and Minbari) women in equal numbers to men in all jobs/functions. That's not a small thing! Agree about Dodger also. That was quite well done.
Re: Talia and Ivanova's relationship. Just recently, while scrolling through one of my social media feeds, I came upon this list of female characters on current TV shows who are gay or bisexual, and there were SO MANY. They were mostly characters I'd never heard of on shows I don't watch (I don't have live TV, and I don't watch that many current/recent shows [though I LOVE The Expanse, but I'll take that to the off-topic forums
]) but I was so struck by the difference between this TV landscape and the TV landscapes of my teen years. Back then, you had that one episode of Xena Warrior Princess where Xena and Gabrielle kissed, because ... somebody's spirit was inhabiting somebody else's body (Se. 2, ep. 13 "The Quest"). I've never actually seen this episode, but I knew SO many people who couldn't stop talking about it for years after, because it was all they had (I am vaguely aware they later kissed again in other episodes). There was also that (rather heartbreaking) episode of DS9 where Jadzia Dax and Lenara Kahn make out because their Trill symbionts are ex spouses (Se. 4, ep. 6 "Rejoined"). But before ALL of that, there was Susan Ivanova and Talia Winters. As we all know, they never kiss on-screen. But, unlike the other examples I just listed, they had an actual relationship that had been building since the first episode. There was no trickery with possessed bodies or symbionts so as to allow characters to kiss on screen without having to come out and officially declare them non-straight. These were honest-to-god canonically bisexual characters. It was definitely progressive!
