ISN'T IT WEIRD, THAT NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO IN THE UNIVERSE PEOPLE ARE JUST ABOUT THE SAME HEIGHT AND WEIGHT, AND COME IN TWO SEXES? THAT ASIDE, THE GUYS ON B-5 DID A DARN GOOD JOB.
Hey, Charlie. There's such a thing as a Caps Lock key. Use it and stop shouting!
Actually I thought a couple of the races on B5 came in more than two sexes and that there was one that came with both in one package.
The Hyach had a third sex, the Hyach-do, which were a related species, to the Hyach. Unfortunately, the Hyach started to discriminate against the Hyach-do, eventually resulting in the extermination of the Haych-do. Unfortunately, the Hyach-do, provided a enzyme necessary for reproduction, & as a result of this, the Hyach population is declining.
Franklin finds about this, in his attempt to compile a pan-species medical database, & the Hyach medical data, only goes up to 700 years (The Hyach are trying to supress any mention of the Hyach-do), and some Hyach try to kill him after he finds out !(I think this was a Season 5 Episode)
BTW, anyone notice that Enterprise has done a episode that is a homage to/rip off of the episode in question, but they call their related species "Co-genitors" in their episode. (It even has Andreas Katsulas in a role (The Vissian Captain)!
Well, in the Enterprise episode, the cogenitor was a third sex, while the Hyach-do were a separate species, with their own sexes, that were able to interbreed with the Hyach. And the cogenitors weren't being killed off... I really don't see the similarities between the episodes...
JMS once addressed the point in a BB post, sort of anyway. He said that the bipedal form is very versatile, which is why we humans climbed to the top of the evolutionary ladder, and hence similar things happened on other worlds.
Of course the real reason is that it's easier to dress a person up in a costume than to create a fully CGI character or an animatronic puppet to use as a regular character.
I'll give B5 credit for going further than most sci-fi shows even tried. The Narn were marsupials, hence discussion of "pouch brothers" "puchlings" & even "kiss my pouch." The aliens from "Believers" hatched from eggs and even worshiped the concept of the egg. The Pak'ma'ra were supposed to be all female. That hump on some of their backs was their mate. Male Pak'ma'ras are smaller than females, non-sentient and basically work like the anglerfish on Earth. Well I'll let wikipedia explain it.
The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are signifantly smaller than a female angler fish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing its digestive organs, then its brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which releases sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.