A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

I haven't rewatched Babylon 5 since seeing Celebrity Rehab. I'm afraid it will ruin any episodes Zach is in for me.

 

I just realized there was another counter you could have included: Franklin Soliloquy. Mind, that might have been spoilerish way back, but this is definitely the episode where it became cliche. Come to think of it, the whole episode is nothing but a string of B5 Character Cliches.

 

Harlan Ellison sits around Babylon 5 for years, and this is the excellent story he sees fit to grace us with.

It's a pretty dismal episode and I'd agree the 'you're the woman, so go escape' angle was particularly poor. The entirely random alien threat bugged me because they seemed so arbitrary and half-baked as protagonists; emerging randomly from the ether just to give Babylon 5's crew something to tilt against in the background, but oh well.

 

Franklin has some of the worst monologues in B5. The one about spacing takes the cake.

 

Yeah. Sadly, this is how I see it too. You want to give the episode a chance, but it just doesn't work, largely because Mack and Bo are simply unappealing characters.

. Much as I love the character...pretty much true.

I also agree with Kegg that the antagonist race is unappealing too. "Arbitary and half-baked" as he put it, and I think that pretty much sums it up.

That said, at least the episode has a few good points. The Londo/G'Kar scene was great (but then those always are), Delenn got a few good lines, the continuity nod about the White Stars still on the way back from Enphili was welcome...and Byron's scene was actually one of his best, in my opinion.

Oh, and there was spoo. Spoo improves any episode. But only marginally.

Overall, I have to agree with everyone else- a poor episode.

 

The plan worked!

More coming.

Why would it do that? Jeff was sober when he was on Babylon 5.

Harlan gets story credit here because he was asking Joe "What about the little guys? Why so much focus on the command staff?" Harlan didn't necessarily come up with the rest of it, since Joe also shares story credit.

 

Yeah, probably my least-liked episode. I'd even give it a "pathetic". The two leads never once made me believe they weren't reading lines (badly) from a script. And that idiotic line about not knowing what their tool was and why they were sweeping it back and forth made me want to set them on fire and toss them to the Pak'Mara.

 

I had no idea this one was so disliked. While it's certainly not a favourite of mine I did rather enjoy the tongue-in-cheek/wink-at-the-audience nature of it. The floor wavey thing, the debate about why Ivanova left, if Lochley is any good, why is there fire in space, how long Londo and G'Kar have been married - this is all stuff that the fans were asking at the time and I think I got the joke.

I don't know if I found Bo and Mack appealing but I defiantly found them entertaining. For guest actors at least, they had pretty good chemistry.

As for the alien fleet...well the fact that it was an arbitrary theat was entierly the point. Not every alien race has a government that gives a crap about trade and co-operation. Some are just out to conquer and grab what they can and they're treated very much like a force of nature, a storm you occasionally have to ride out, a significantly more powerful alternative to those old generic raiders. They weren't central to the plot, they just served as a catalyst for the backdrop. Plus they didn't entierly come out of nowhere; they were expected and the Gaim had already fought off one fleet themselves.

 

Okay, that's a pretty good point. Maybe the combination of Red Helms and Mack/Bo is the problem, then, at least for me. Maybe if it was just the one I would view it more like you do here. I think the two of them, though, just made the entire episode feel...off.

That said, it wasn't a bad idea for an episode- either the Red Helm raids or the "Lower Decks" aspect- but to me it just didn't work because I found Mack and Bo uninteresting, and the Red Helms were a little too much "aliens of the week" on top of that. Again, between them, it simply left me a bit cold.

 

The episode would have worked a lot better if Clark's forces would have done the attacking and not some random, half-assed alien race.

 

Mack and Bo weren't just uninteresting to me, they were actively annoying.

 

I love this episode. But I usually like the off-format episodes. That was one thing I disliked about last season, that the compression pushed out the experimental eps. And I liked Mac nab Bo.

 

Well not to split hairs but the "alien of the week" label don't really apply as B5 generally didn't do that. It's just a one off race, of which there have been about *thinks* umm...three? four? In five years?

I suppose it's a bit of a catch 22 because if it had been about the aliens then it'd be just a mindless stand alone action episode with not a lot going on. If on the other hand if it had been a known enemy in the background then people would complain about being cheated of a proper confrontation with whomever they might be...which raises the question of who it could conceivably be if not some new race? There's only one known antagonist out there by this point and they've been lying very low since being kicked out of Minbari space. A direct assault on B5 wouldn't make any sense, for a number of reasons.

I'm only mildly curious, but how so?

 

View from the Gallery was an excellent introductory episode for new viewers who'd gotten access to Babylon 5 on its new TNT channel and timeslot. The stuff about Ivanova was confusing and obnoxious until I saw fourth season.

 

I quite enjoy this ep, and agree with your reasonings above. And I LIKE Bo and Mack. Just working joes. I see guys like them on post all the time. Civilian employees of the military just doing a job.

 

Don't wory. Split as many hairs as you want, you're making good points - as you usually do.

I'm afraid I'm unlikely to change my mind that this was a weak episode, though.

 

Simply because being tongue-in-cheek is no guarantor of quality. Sure, you can poke at the fourth wall and create a pretty good episode of something... but you can also create one which weakly tries to be funny, and this is the latter. It's not the worst episode of Babylon 5 or the fifth season by any means, but it's one of the weaker ones from this year. Bo and Mack aren't funny or endearing.

It's a major threat that solely exists to be a major threat in the background, and that's it. Babylon 5 getting attacked by a mysterious alien force should have some more payoff, no? It appears from nowhere, attacks for no reason, and is then defeated. For a show that often prided itself on having consequences to events, this is painfully far too tidy - complete with Voyager levels of magic recovery.

 

Well, I thought their acting was atrocious, their dialog was inane, the writing (both dialog and plot) was bad... every time they spoke I cringed. Moments like the afformentioned sweeper-thingie gag (totally unfunny) and "you're okay Capt Lochley!" scene (a true WTF? moment)... I know, opinions are subjective, but I just couldn't stand those two guys!

 

Learning Curve (**½)

I watched this episode two days ago and put off writing anything about it because I couldn't think of anything to say. It's not terrible, it's not great, it's an okay episode. On the plus side we get to learn more about the Rangers and their structure, and on the minus side we have one of the worst villains in the history of the show. It's okay, I can't think up much else to say about it.

Oh, there is the stuff about Lochley, I guess I should talk about that since I've been waiting for more info about her since the start of the season. And this episode brought me... more mysteries about Lochley! I thought this episode was finally going to give me some answers, but instead my joke about Lochley being a mystery has been taken up by the show itself and I'm left to wait to find out more about her relationship with Sheridan. Garibaldi didn't even get to look at her file, so I'm still in the dark about her beyond the fact that she was probably on the other side during the civil war, but I'm still not absolutely certain of that. Who is she anyway?

Scott Bakula: 68

 

In contrast to the stimulating adventures and formidable intellects of Mack and Bo, I enjoy "Learning Curve" quite a lot. I enjoyed the insights into Ranger philosophy and Minbari culture, the continued workings of the Alliance (Drazi, Yolu, Abbai and pak'ma'ra joining the Rangers), and the little contiuity nods to the Minbari Civil War (like when the Warrior Caste ranger calls his Religious Caste counterpart out on the "inappropriate" comment). Oh, and I think n'grath got a mention (he's the praying mantis crime lord from season one, "oooh....expensive...." ). I also quite like the villain because he's so bad. He's so bad he's good.