A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

[David cgc]

And the music rocked.

I won't even give it that, since most of the music was second-hand from the canceled computer game.

 

[Admiral Shran]

The Legend of the Rangers (*)

Dear God! I'm thinking it was best that I read this review before watching this movie. I'll probably pass on this one.

DS9 is next, it has been almost 5 years since I last watched it. For a Niner like me, that's an intolerable length of time. After DS9 I'm open to suggestions, including Farscape.

I say Stargate.

 

[sidious618]

Stargate is bleh, big step down from B5 and DS9. X-Files would be my choice as that has things which can actually be discussion worthy beyond "that line was funny."

 

[TheGodBen]

See, Legend of the Rangers is all about people seeming to do the same thing twice... but they're actually not. So I think JMS had a cunning plan.

But LotR's reveal at the end was that they pretended to be doing something else but they were actually doing the same thing as before.


The Lost Tales (*½)

There's two unrelated stories here and if there's a connection between them it's that the main characters in both took much too long to figure things out. I think that's what JMS was going for.

Story 1: Lochley, the priest, and the devil

It has been noted in the past that whenever Babylon 5 deals with religious material I tend to ridicule it, probably because I'm an atheist. That's half true. The concept of a god is one thing, but literal depictions of angels and demons are a bridge too far for me. Demons are as real to me as fairies are. B5 never had an episode about a fairy causing havoc on the station, but if it did then I imagine that many people would find it as ridiculous as I find having a demon causing havoc on the station.

Maybe I could just explain all the demon stuff away as being an alien masquerading as a demon? Perhaps the being that has inhabited Simon is no more a demon than Kosh was an angel. That's the way I'm going to rationalise it, naturally, but the episode seems to play all this stuff for reals. These beings have apparently been on Earth a long time, longer than the Vorlons or the other races if they're worried about an event that will happen in 5 billion years time. They also appear to be responsive to a Catholic exorcism ritual. Also, if they're really just misunderstood aliens then Lochley has condemned them to die on Earth (in 5 billion years) rather than trying to help them escape.

There's not really much of a plot here, but what little there is makes Lochley seem a quite silly, at least to me. Most people that were in charge of this situation would pull up the victim's background to see if there's anything suspicious before calling in a priest to perform an exorcism, that just seems like the logical way to go about things. But Lochley calls up the priest first before checking the records of the transport ship Simon was on. The episode plays this like a shocking revelation, but it leaves me questioning Lochley's competence.

Story 2: Sheridan, the Prince, and the wizard

It's a question that we're all asked at some point in our lives; if you had the opportunity to kill Hitler before he rose to power, would you take it? For me the answer is no. Not because I worry about disrupting the timeline, or because I love Hitler, but because I don't think killing Hitler would have addressed the problems that allowed him to come to power. If you want to prevent the rise of an extremist group in Germany in the 1930s then the best way to go about it is to avoid the perception of trying to humiliate Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and prevent the causes of the Great Depression. Those are harder acts to pull off, but they are not only likely to get better results, they're also nicer things to do.

So when Galen shows up and tells Sheridan to kill Prince Vintari in order to save the future Earth, I was already thinking of better ways to pull that off that didn't involve murder. The fact that this is a revelation that Sheridan only comes up with at the last second makes me question his judgement as a political leader. Didn't he learn from that time when he impulsively declared war on the Centauri because people were yelling at him? Anyway, this revelation makes Sheridan realise this was Galen's plan all along, because that makes sense to him for some reason. Then Galen acts all smug and hints that that's the case.

Bullplop! I'm convinced that Galen's plan really was to have Sheridan murder the Prince, because Galen is wicked and vengeful. (Just look at what he tried to do to that friendly alien in the bubble.) Once Sheridan presented a better plan, Galen claimed it as his own like the smug git that he is. I'm basing this theory on an irrefutable fact; the fact that I don't like Galen.

Overall, the first story didn't work for me and the second story, while trying to present an interesting morality play, wasn't as good as I was hoping. Plus, it had Galen, that always costs a point or two.

 

[Kegg]

Story 1: Lochley, the priest, and the devil

It has been noted in the past that whenever Babylon 5 deals with religious material I tend to ridicule it, probably because I'm an atheist. That's half true. The concept of a god is one thing, but literal depictions of angels and demons are a bridge too far for me.

It's the curious thing about JMS, I guess, who is also an atheist, but who takes religion very seriously. This works better when he's writing about religion and ethics (Brad Dourif the monk, a bit of telegraphing in casting) and not so well whenever he starts dealing with religion and the supernatural... and is just downright dire the moment he starts parading anything related to Arthurian legendry around.

All that said I'd probably point to "And the Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place" as the show's best use of religion, a choice that I'm sure says more about me than anything else.

 

[stonester1]

RCO, fantastic ep. But then, I enjoyed both Arthurian eps, too.

 

[Admiral Shran]

The fact that this is a revelation that Sheridan only comes up with at the last second makes me question his judgement as a political leader.

I've been questioning his competence as a political leader for quite some time as well.

 

[hyzmarca]

The Lost Tales, I think, is just a case of insufficient budget to do anything interesting. A telepath war movie would have been more interesting, but I don't think they would have been able to pay for it.
Legend of the Rangers suffers from being tacked on. It really doesn't have any place in the established 20-year plot arc.

 

[TheGodBen]

Babylon 5 Review

It took far longer than I was expecting, but I have finally completed this journey. It's weird trying to recap a show that I watched over a year ago, so this final summary isn't going to be my finest hour.

Here's the graph for the ratings I gave to each episode of the show:

This may be the controversial bit; determining what to include in the final average from the show. I decided right away that Crusade shouldn't be included as that was a different show, but what about the movies? Well, I included all of them except for A Call to Arms and The Legend of the Rangers as they were pretty much pilots for different shows. All the other movies were centred on Babylon 5 or the characters from the show so I included them in the total. That makes 115 episodes or movies and an average score of 6.122. (Including Crusade and the other two movies, that average drops to 5.984.)

By my standards, that's a very good score. (I'd point out that it's way ahead of my scores for Voyager and Enterprise, but that was probably a given from the start. ) The trend line shows what everyone already knows, it starts out as an average show and improves greatly from there.

This graph says a lot, I rated the vast majority of episodes as average or better, and there's a high proportion of 7s. Strangely, it has the same number of 10s as Voyager, but only one 0 score. This is a very solid show. Overall, I rated 21 episodes below average, 18 episodes average, and 76 above average.

I usually rank what I consider to be the top and bottom 10 episodes, but because the show isn't fresh in my mind I can't do that this time. So here's my top and bottom 1.

115. Infection
...
1. Intersections in Real Time


The Characters

Once again, I'm not going to go into much detail here because of the year-long gap between viewing the show and writing this, so here's my brief opinion: I like most of the characters. I even liked Byron a little bit, which probably has some of you cursing my name.

My clear favourites are Londo and G'Kar, which is probably the most uncontroversial opinion anyone has every expressed about this show. They're fascinating characters that can easily straddle the gap between comedy and high drama, sometimes in the same sentence. Then there's characters like Vir and Lennier that I initially thought I was going to hate, but I ended up liking them as well. The human characters were often overshadowed by the aliens, but they were okay, and I liked some of the stuff that Franklin and Garibaldi got up to.


Statistics

Captain Greyshirt: 22
Scott Bakula: 94
Scott Bakula?!: 4

Season 1 Average: 5.045
Season 2 Average: 5.682
Season 3 Average: 6.5
Season 4 Average: 7.136
Season 5 Average: 6.545
Overall Average: 6.121

Crusade Average: 4.538
Voyager Average: 4.875
Enterprise Average: 5.206


Final Judgement

I'm not going to say that it was a mistake for me to give up on Babylon 5 after four episodes the first time I tried to watch it, it was a rough time in my life and Rome relaxed me in a way that B5 didn't. (That's probably the first time anyone has called Rome relaxing.) But I am glad that I finally gave the show a second chance, it ended up providing quite a ride. One day I will probably give the show another viewing from beginning to end, and perhaps then I may be more forgiving to some of the show's weaker early episodes.

I think I'll end this with an anecdote. While watching the final episode of Crusade, seeing the characters walk around the old Babylon 5 sets, I found myself missing that place. The sets aren't fancy, they demonstrate the show's low budget in many ways, but I grew attached to them all the same. I may not be fanatical about the show, but I am a fan.

Don't groan! It's the best that I could come up with. I'd like to see you do better you miserable sons of...

Fin

 

[Admiral Shran]

I may not be fanatical about the show, but I am a fan.

Same here. This first viewing of B5 was quite a ride for me as well. I certainly didn't like it quite as much as you did (there are plenty of things, even in the later seasons, that make me just scratch my head, groan or go ), but I still consider myself a fan. There were plenty of episodes that I thought were rated rather highly (an oddity for you), but there were also some I thought you were too harsh to - so rest assured.

As for the characters - definitely Londo and G'Kar are the best (for obvious reasons) followed very closely by Lennier (for reasons I stated upthread). As for the worst - Galen, Byron and Ivanova. I still can't stand any of them.

So, it's on to Stargate now, right?

 

[Stevil2001]

Smallville, surely.

 

[TheGodBen]

For those of you that want me to review Stargate, here's the thread.

For those of you that want me to review Farscape, here's the thread.

For those of you that want me to review The X-Files, here's the thread.

Spoiler: those threads

Mwaahaha! You all fell for my trap.

 

[Forbin]

I still think the "no walls" weapons pod was a great idea poorly executed. If it had worked more subtly - for instance, if she'd fired the weapons by simply pointing, or looking sternly at the target, it might have been pretty cool. But the kung-fu just looked absurd.

And... "We live for the one, we die for the one" was never meant to indicate you HAVE to die if you can help it! Geez!

 

[Hound of UIster]

See, Legend of the Rangers is all about people seeming to do the same thing twice... but they're actually not. So I think JMS had a cunning plan.

I agree.

It's clear to me after all these years that the villains weren't an ancient race like the Shadows or the 3rd Space Aliens, but rather got their hand on some advanced First One tech and were just playing pretend like the Wizard of Oz.

 

[Hound of UIster]

I have also come to the opinion that the show's hook, finding a cure to the Drakh plague, was a poor one. Excalibur travels the galaxy looking for evidence that this artificial plague has been used before; it's hard to imagine an endgame for that. A mysterious alien that's building a super-weapon to blow up Earth real good is an arc that you can get your head around, the heroes need to find the weapon and blow it up. Finding a cure for a plague on some random world and curing everyone just doesn't quite work in my head. It's difficult to even see how such a search could even come up with any leads to find a cure. And it almost universally doesn't, most episodes use the premise to tell an episodic story that's not related to the search for a cure.

[Rumours, bargains, and lies]
The series would have switched into a different arc at the end of season 1 when the Excalibur crew would expose Earth Gov as secretly developing Shadow technology, and they would have to go rogue. A cure would be found for the plague that probably was ethically questionable - possibly using the healing device from Bablyon 5 to extract the life force from criminals and other people considered undesirable. Galen and Gideon would have fallen out when the technomages were revealed to depend on Shadow technology and to require the deaths of sentient beings to maintain the continuation of their order. Gideon would have died and had his mentality downloaded into the Apocalypse Box. The rumour is that Garry Cole might only have been on board the show as a main character for one season - sound familiar? After some sort of quest, Dureena would have received a magic sword that went "Ting". How it would all work out I don't know. I've never played D&D.
[/Rumours, bargains, and lies]

I think the cure developed by Earthforce probably would have had consequences. Possibly turning people into shadows weapons like the original technomages with heightened aggression or the experiments that Gideon and Galen encounters in the unfilmed finale.