Didn't rewatch it for decades. But isn't this romance a very background narrative arc until the very latest season?

yes, somewhat incorrectly as its the pilot / first movie, that came out before season 1 started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Pilot_film_(1993)

The numbering of the uploaded episodes seems to be off by one versus wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Babylon_5_episodes#Sea...

>Isn't the linked YouTube video title literally "Season 1, Episode 1"?

Yes and no It's the pilot (and consequently the first[2]) episode "The Gathering", which actually doesn't have an episode number.[0]

The first aired episode was S1E1 "Midnight on the Firing Line".

The former was released as a "TV Movie" even though it was the pilot episode.

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/eplist.html for the episode listings.[1]

[1] Be careful, a wrong click can end up giving you spoilers. :(

[2] I'd note that the pilot episode has significant personnel, prop and make-up differences from the rest of the series.

It's very easy to watch. When I wanted to watch it a few years ago it took only a few minutes to find a torrent of the full series and less than an hour to download.

I find it hard to believe anyone on this site has a problem with piracy, nor technical nor moral.

I think the aversion to subscribing to a streaming service for a single series has more to do with the recurring nature of the subscription than it does the price. You have to remember to cancel it when you’re done, which is easy to forget with so many things bring for our attention these days. That $10 could easily multiply several times over if it slips your mind, at which point congratulations, you’ve paid a significant portion of the box set’s price to rent the series.

All streaming services should offer prepaid options, so you can add time in 30/60/90 day increments. Less mental overhead and it better matches how a lot of people pay for streaming anyway.

I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.

For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.

It made everyone weep.

When I buy the box set, at least I'll be able to watch it in perpetuity. $10 to own a 5 hour miniseries would be more than reasonable, but I don't want to have to pay $10 each time I want to watch it. (If I even can watch it, and they haven't lost the license in the interim.)

It’s not just pure value analysis, it’s a lack of confidence that the money will go to the people that deserve it.

Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the window.

The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.

If I remember right, the graphics in early episodes were rendered on commodore amigas

fwiw the whole thing is free to watch on Tubi and the quality there is very nice.