A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

Season 2 has an unfortunately slow start. As everyone has been saying, once it gets going, it really gets going, but you still have to get there.

 

It had it's moments...OK it had one moment. Specifically the one where he's chasing G'Kar and Londo around the Zocalo.

As for Schultz, he's definatly given Lloyd, Nicholson and Dourif a run for their money in the "who can play the most nutters" race.

 

Well, JMS always explained away the very formal speech patterns as being a cultural thing. The idea was that humanity was still coming off the Minbari War, so the 2250s were kind of analogous to the 1950s in terms of how people behaved. At least, that's how he tried to get away with everyone talking like a character on Dragnet.

 

Of course, coming off the Minbari War they should be banging a lot more, too. Big wars always produce a population spike; there weren't nearly enough kids running around on the station for Earth to have reasonably just barely won a war for survival.

I really see the Long Dark as an excuse to get out some backstory. There is no real reason for the episode but too have Franklin exposit about how Earth gained jumpgate technology from the Centauri, none at all. This is an important detail, but not really important enough to dedicate a whole episode to.

 

A common talking point is that B5 improves almost immediately with the arrival of season 2, but I've always thought it's among the weaker stretches of the show. As TGB has been pointing out, the foreshadowing hammer is stupidly obvious a lot of the time, and the plots tend to be on the banal side. It also takes a while for Sheridan to gel with the others, but that makes sense. One of the commentaries is really funny, where they're all making fun of Boxleitner for constantly smiling in season 2 . JMS certainly kicks it up a notch or several really soon, though.

 

I think some of the heavy foreshadowing is an artefact of JMS making sure anyone who missed season one wouldn't feel lost and so you have several episodes on the trot that rather hammers the point home. In fact most seasons start with this slow ramp up, both as a breather after the previous series finale and to be able to save some momentum for later one. If a show comes out of the gate swinging for the fences then it will often run out of steam before it gets even half way. B5 tends to ratchet things up a notch at a time.

 

It's not a great excuse because:
1. Everyone talks like this - human and alien alike -
2. It doesn't explain how stilted the speech can be. Formal speech still sounds more natural than stage play speech, which is what we have here.

But I'll roll with it.

 

With the "Captain Grayshirt" counter being tied to the new character, shouldn't it be resetted to 0?
After all, there was a psychological reason for Sinclair to act, as he did, so such behaviour is more unrealistic with Sheridan as with him.

 

Um, yeah, "The Long Dark" is the worst episode of Season 2. NEXT.

I'd say the coming four episodes see a constant improvement in quality. From Average to Good, then Great, and finally Awesome (I'll refrain from hyping 2x09 too much now, see for yourself).

To pull you back to the ground, 2x09 (the episode title is somewhat spoilerish) is then directly followed by another of those bummer episodes. From there on, the season (and perhaps the show as a whole) stays almost constantly good. Well, except for "Acts of Sacrifice" (2x12) which contains one of the most retarded b-plots ever.

 

Not that big a fan of "A Spider in the Web", personally. I think that could fairly be seen as pretty crappy.

Overall season two is where Babylon 5 really starts getting its stuff together, that's true.

But yes, "Acts of Sacrifice"... um... what? We'll discuss that when we get to it.

 

"Spider in the Web" is actually my least favorite ep of Season 2. I just found it to be terribly boring.

 

Not to spoil you or anything, TGB, but here are the ratings you should come up with for the beginning of the third season:

**
***
*
**
****
***

If you don't come to the same conclusions, then you obviously haven't paid enough attention to all of the pre-viewing discussion of them.

 

Ok, let's stop trying to affect the man's opinion of episodes he hasn't watched yet.

 

^^ those were completely random groupings of stars, btw, in case the sarcasm of the post didn't imply that.

 

That wasn't solely directed at you, just a general statement so don't get your knickers in a twist.

 

Not twisted, I just realized that the post might elicit some, "How can you give episode X three stars? It's clearly a two-star episode!" replies, when I didn't even look at the episode list when making that post. Anyway, the two carats (^^) indicated that I was replying to my own post (two up the thread), not yours, so don't you get your knickers twisted either.

In fact, I think my post and yours were meant to convey the same message.

Mine was just much more creative.

 

The Captain Greyshirt counter is new to this thread, but it built up 8 points while it served in a thread in the QSF forum. I'd feel bad about taking them away from it now.

If you give me the scores for the rest of the show then I can skip the whole reviewing thing and just pop in at random occasions to make Scott Bakula jokes. It will save us all some valuable time.


A Spider in the Web (**)

Wow. I guess immigration really did destroy San Diego.

To be honest, the story here is very dull for the most part, and it was obvious from the beginning that Earth was behind killing Isogi, I had just assumed it was the Psi Corps or some part of Earth Force. The episode is propped up a bit by the suggestion of black-ops group working on Earth's behalf, a section of numbers 1 and 3, but it doesn't really rescue the episode. Bureau 13 seems like they could be interesting, but I'm not really sure what they're about. Earth already has a secretive organisation that's up to no good, does it really need two? Possibly. I guess I'll find out in good time.

As for the rest of the episode, something happened with a robot man who was very angry that he didn't have enough money to buy his favourite chocolatey snack, so he roamed that station electrocuting people while shouting "Free Mars!" Frankly, I can't summon up the effort to delve into this episode, it just wasn't interesting enough for me to want to do that, and I can't justify the time doing that while I have ominously titled emails that I'm hiding from. So let's just do the Scott Bakula counter and call it an evening, shall we?

Scott Bakula: 22
Captain Greyshirt: 10

 

JMS found out after the episode aired that an RPG existed called Bureau 13, so it doesn't come up, at least in that name, again.

It is also the first episode to feature Zack Allen.

 

I didn't love this ep, but really liked it. Not only for what it had, but yet more peeks into the history and the goings on in the B5U.