Babylon 5: The Final Verdict

If you somehow missed the Babylon 5 rumpus that's been taking place around here for the past week, fear not: all the links can be found right exactly here. Last Friday, I did an overview of the show. Monday was the show's best characters, Tuesday was its worst, Wednesday was its best aspects and Thursday and Friday covered its worst aspects. Today, we wrap up the whole thing.

It occurred to me while I was writing the 'worst things' posts that I might be grading Babylon 5 on an unfair metric. Comparing B5 to the three best sci-fi shows of the 2000s--Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and Firefly) inevitably puts it at a disadvantage, and there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances relating to why it stinks at times. Its first four seasons aired on a network (PTEN) that was relatively unknown and probably doomed from its inception, its budget was poor, it was in an era of TV sci-fi that didn't have all that many standout shows, and so on. The best sci-fi shows of the 2000s benefited from ample budgets, well-known networks and better actors than B5 could muster.

I'm not so sure that's an excuse, though. Less than two decades after its release, Babylon 5 looks extremely dated. The bad CGI, the heavily made-up cast contribute to it and the pre-HD cameras contribute to it, but there's a certain look to the footage, sets and in the directing that just stamps the show as old-fashioned. (The camera basically remains at shoulder height for the entire series.) It gained a large cult following and is remembered fondly by many sci-fi fans, but against sleeker, more modern shows it just doesn't measure up.

Ultimately, it's hard to pin the show's faults on J. Michael Straczynski or on extenuating circumstances. The actors are wooden, the directing is ordinary and the dialogue is poor: is that Straczynski's fault, or was it the fault of the era? It's hard to prove one way or the other. Ultimately, though, the only real criteria upon which I can evaluate Babylon 5 is how it looks to me, a fan of sci-fi that came of age in the 2000s.

Viewed purely on its own merits, then, Babylon 5 falls short in most ways. As I've been saying throughout this weeklong review, the show is consistently mediocre. Straczynski often likened his creation to a novel, but it's not an exciting one if that's the case. Bad writing, a lot of bad acting, bad casting, bad set design and stories that took forever to tell drag this show down, and good acting, some good universe-building and a pair of good seasons resuscitate it. I think some of the show's appeal originally lay in its serialization and consistent mediocrity: you could turn on the TV every week and know what you were getting. It wasn't going to be more than occasionally good, but it wasn't going to be horribly bad either, perhaps because there was so little at stake.

If you're a fan of the shows I mentioned at the start of this post, Babylon 5 is probably not for you. It's not remotely in their league. If your standards are lower or you're a fan of '90s sci-fi, then give it a try.

More Or Less Arbitrary Grading Scale
Acting: B-
Set Design: D
Character Development: A-
CGI: D-
Average Episode Quality Relative to Itself: C
Imagination: B
Writing: D+
Universe-Building: A-
Good Villains: C- (good in seasons 2 and 3, terrible in 4 and 5)
Good Heroes: D-
Good Characters Who Are Both: A
Series Ending: F
Arc Continuity: A
Character Continuity: D+

OVERALL SERIES GRADE: C-

The Worst Aspects of Babylon 5 (Part 2)

We're nearing the end of the Babylon 5 blitz. In case you missed the deluge of B5-related posts over the past week, here are some links: last Friday's overview of the show, Monday's rundown of the best characters, Tuesday's rundown of the worst characters, Wednesday's 'Best Aspects of B5' and Thursday's 'Worst of B5, Part 1'. Today I'll have Part 2 of the Worst Things, and then we'll wrap everything up on Saturday.

The Writing Stinks

I’ve been dancing around this for awhile, but I’ll just say it: The writing, done almost entirely by J. Michael Straczynski, is consistently bad. It is full of clichés, the dialogue isn’t clever (there’s a fascination with light bulb jokes that goes on for way too long), it’s fairly humorless and it doesn’t make you feel for the characters. The best thing you can say about the writing is that it gets the job done and tells you what you need to know in a given episode. The worst thing you can say is that’s all it does. The writing isn’t My Immortal-bad, but it’s serviceable at best. Compare it to Battlestar or Doctor Who or Firefly or even Star Trek and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a handicap to the actors rather than a help.

Consequence: Moral Superiority and Lousy Villains

I wrote the following halfway through Season 4:

“The thing that makes the current B5 conflict so uninteresting to watch is the absolute moral battle lines that have been drawn. Sheridan is what they call a paragon of virtue, a perfect ideal. He stands for Truth, Justice and the American Way, all in capital letters. ______'s side stands for nothing but fucking up other peoples’ shit. There’s no moral conflict because it’s been spelled out in the most explicit terms. Plus, there’s no documentation of what ______ does, how he does it or why. We don’t know how he got to be a police state-type of fellow, we’ve barely met him. We don’t know how he keeps everyone in line, other than through misinformation.

“There’s just such absolute ideological superiority from Sheridan, who sounds like a horse’s ass every time he draws upon it. There are very few moral choices or ambiguities to be found in B5.”

This is part of what I was saying about Sheridan, Zack Allan and Dr. Franklin in the Bad Characters post. They are so morally upright and the villain (in this case especially) is so poorly defined, it makes them unbelievable. There are very few moral conflicts on this show, and most of them feel manufactured (like the one near the end of Season 4 with the telepaths). The only convincing one comes at the end of Season 3, where Sheridan holds Morden against his will. For the rest, nothing. Sheridan and Co. are always right and the other guy is always wrong, period, end of line. This is especially true of the Season 4 villain, an evil cardboard cutout that we almost never see on-screen.

I’m Sorry… You Do What Now?

B5 relentlessly hammers home the theme that its characters are special people. There’s an entire Season 2 episode devoted to making sure that Sheridan and Delenn are the right people in the right place at the right time. But on the level of their jobs, they never seem to have much expertise. This is a minor quibble, but what does Garibaldi do exactly? He’s a good shot and he knows how to ask questions, but he doesn’t possess any skills specific to being a Security Chief. Dr. Franklin lets machines do all the work for him, is rarely seen in surgery and operates as a glorified diagnostician. Everything from mission-critical research to flying starfighters is handled by omnipresent computers.

picture unrelated.

The point here is that nobody really seems like an expert at their job, the way Chief Tyrol is an expert Viper repairman (Battlestar) or the way Wash is a special pilot (Firefly). They don’t have to say ‘I’m competent at my job’, we see them demonstrate their competence. In B5, nobody seems to be that skilled at any job. The emphasis is on having the right people and the right personalities, not their skills, which I find strange.

You Had A Problem? Since When?!

Here’s a fairly typical scenario:

Something traumatic happens to Garibaldi in Episode A. The episode ends, the threat is dealt with and Garibaldi goes back to work. Several episodes go by, during which Garibaldi seems unchanged. Then in episode H, Garibaldi has a nervous breakdown and goes “I’ve been haunted by the vision of my wife’s buttocks ever since Episode A!!”

Seconds before bursting into incoherent rage.

This happens ALL THE TIME. A character has a crisis, then seems totally fine, then tells us that they haven’t been fine all this time, even though they’ve been acting totally fine. I don’t know what to attribute it to, but it’s really lousy continuity between episodes. It feels like the show wants to have the emotional continuity of a Battlestar Galactica, but doesn’t really know how to go about it. This results in a lot of unintentional comedy, as characters have massive freakouts over something they were totally okay with just last episode.

In The Conversation:

-The music isn’t very good or very memorable, and it’s kind of used as a blunt instrument. You know exactly how you’re supposed to be feeling because the violins tell you it’s an emotional moment.

-Straczynski’s enormous plot arcs move maddeningly slowly, although this shouldn’t be unfamiliar for recovering Lost fans like myself.

-Because we rarely leave the station in the first two seasons, it’s hard to get a sense of the greater outside universe. This does change in seasons 3-5, as more of the characters venture outside, but it’s a little off-putting early on.

- B5 tells, it doesn’t show, particularly with regard to characters’ emotions. Straczynski doesn’t let the actors show you how the character is feeling, he writes in huge info-dumps where the character tells you exactly how he feels today.

Not Bad, Just Weird:

For some reason, whenever a character has a minor wardrobe change, it’s made into a big honking deal in the show itself. Sheridan’s beard, Delenn’s hair, the new B5 uniforms, Security uniforms, G’Kar’s eye color, etc. are all played up much more than you’d imagine them being. It’s not a bad thing, just a quirk.

Mayhem Week: The Worst Things About Babylon 5 (Part 1)

Welcome to the week-long review of the TV show called Babylon 5! In case you missed 'em, here are links to last Friday's introduction to the show, Monday's 'Best Characters', Tuesday's 'Worst Characters' and Wednesday's 'Best Aspects of B5' posts. Tomorrow we'll have Part II of 'Worst Aspects', and then I'll wrap everything up in Saturday's post.

That Confounded Bad Acting

Kindly check Tuesday's post for a discussion of said bad acting.

Humans in Suits

Early in the show’s run, creator J. Michael Straczynski made the decision to eschew CGI aliens in favor of human-looking aliens. The choice was a sensible one, because the CGI of the mid-1990s looks awful, especially on a Prime-Time Entertainment Network budget. There’s some sort of Centauri-world bloodsucking thing in Season 1 that proves this particular point. Putting guys in makeup, therefore, was a logical decision.

The problem with this is twofold. One, nobody ever gives any reasons why the Minbari have bony heads, or why the Narn are orange, or why the pak’ma’ra have facial tentacles. They don’t serve any obvious function, so right from the start they feel like semi-random ornamentation. Two, even if the actors look like humans wearing makeup, there’s always the possibility that their bodies are more alien than they look, but this idea is systematically stamped out over the course of the series. 

It’s established that the majority of the ‘aliens’ speak English without trouble, have five fingers, four limbs, bipedal movement, two eyes that see in the human visual spectrum, breathe a nitrogen-oxygen mix, have approximately the same physical strength and vulnerabilities that humans do, think the same way that humans do, and are comfortable with Earth ‘standard’ gravity. This strains one’s credulity a bit far, don’t you think? (The First Ones that we meet are all nonhuman, but they are seen far less often than the human-esque races, probably due to budget constraints.)

I Mentioned the CGI…

I feel kinda bad putting this on here, because it’s really not the fault of the creators. They had in mind a very CGI-heavy show, with lots of space battles and expeditions, and mid-1990s CGI was both expensive and godawful. YouTube videos are better nowadays. But they went ahead with it anyway, and so while the CGI is worse than anything else you will ever see on TV, it’s also a testament to the show’s creative spirit. Hey, I guess that sort of turned into a good thing, huh?

Even the Real Sets Stink

Chalk another one up to a presumable PTEN budget crunch. It seems like a weird thing to criticize, but you know how in Firefly, the characters had a real connection and identification with the ship? How in Battlestar Galactica, the ship is a prison, a symbol and a source of hope all in one? How both ships really have personality and feel like home for their characters? 

B5 doesn’t have that. It sounds picky, but the sets are clunky and featureless and boring. There’s really not much effort to sell the station as someone’s home, as opposed to ‘where alien races meet to hang out’. This holds for all the sets, whether they’re on Mars or on Minbar or on the bridge of some ship somewhere. They don’t look remotely real, and more importantly, they don’t feel real. The actors don’t treat them like they’re real places. It’s like they took one of the worst lessons from Star Trek. (Small exception: the Drazi homeworld, which we visit in Season 5, is incredibly compelling.) 

I Saw That Coming

If someone on B5 mentions that Garibaldi must be having a great time on vacation on Zogblog VII, you can take it to the bank that the next shot will be of a bloody, bruised Garibaldi gasping for air. It’s a fairly predictable show. I’m not going to give away anything, but there’s a particular event in early Season 4 that is meant to be a huge surprise, but it’s just completely unsurprising. Even Season 5 is guilty of this. The viewer can predict B5 without too much effort, and the show doesn’t really make you think. That, to me, is pretty damning.

Speaking of S5…

Huh?

I like Season 5 the best of all of the Babylon 5 seasons. Like I said before, they get decent acting out of Jeff Conaway and Patricia Tallman, introduce some good guest-stars and have some really great universe-building episodes. But the season itself was spectacularly mismanaged.
 

Due to a flash-forward in Season 3 and a brief scene at the end of Season 4, the viewer basically knows all the important points about one of the major threats of season 5. I was waiting around for eighteen episodes while the characters stumbled around with this threat, going “I know this! I know this one, dammit! Figure it out!” And when they finally do catch on to what the viewer could see eighteen episodes ago, is there a showdown? Is the evil defeated? No! That storyline and a half-dozen others are intentionally punted, left to be resolved in made-for-TV movies and the spin-off series, replaced by four episodes’ worth of characters saying their goodbyes!

I think that’s a total waste of a season. Wikipedia revealed that there was a lot of confusion with the demise of PTEN and the creators not knowing whether their show would be picked up (it was, by TNT, for Season 5), which might be a root cause of the fractured season. I get that, I do, but surely they could have done better than that. It would be like Battlestar Galactica declining to reveal the fifth member of the Final Five Cylons, wagging its finger at the fans and saying “Uh-uh-uh! You have to watch Caprica to get your answers! C’mon, I’m gonna string you guys out for ALL of your attention span!”

Tune in tomorrow for more embarrassing flaws in the show!

The Best Aspects of Babylon 5

Good afternoon! If you're just tuning in, we're midway through a weeklong super-review of the TV show Babylon 5. Last Friday's preview of the show can be found here, Monday's post on B5's best characters here, and Tuesday's description of the worst characters here. Today, we tackle the best things about the show. Thursday and Friday will be posts about the worst things, and then we'll wrap it all up on Saturday.

Good Acting

B5’s cast, while accomplished, can’t compare to the David Tennants and the Nathan Fillions and the Edward James Olmoses of the world. It’s full of duds, including some of their biggest ‘stars’, and a lot of those duds’ on-screen time is a total waste of your patronage. But, surprise surprise, they have a lot of good actors/actresses putting in time as well. Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas are golden whenever they’re on screen, and both get a ton of time and storylines in all five seasons.

Aside from Lennier, Ivanova and the frequent guest stars I just mentioned, B5 brings in dozens of outside names every season. I can’t think of an episode that didn’t feature at least one one-off or recurring guest star, and a lot of the time it’s pretty effective. Wayne Alexander, who plays several of these roles, was a recurring favorite of mine.

Racial Psychologies

This is primarily a Season 1 and 2 thing, but one of Straczynski’s better moves was giving each major species its own background and personality, and having them manifest through that species’ ambassador on B5. Londo dreams of the vanished days of his once-great Republic, and sets horrible plans in motion based on those dreams. G’Kar’s race was repressed by Londo’s, and his species is still looking for its place in the universe. That’s evident in Katsulas’s acting. A lot of the humans are veterans of the Minbari War, a war they only won when the Minbari surrendered (they were about to win), and they’re still visibly freaked out about it. It's good casting, acting and writing all together.

The Big Ones

Like I said in the beginning, the series is primarily composed of mediocre episodes,  but every now and again comes a spectacular one. Babylon 5 doesn’t futz around with time travel much, but those episodes are some of the best. The culmination of the Shadow War in Season 4 is a kick-ass episode, as are a number of episodes in Seasons 1 and 5 (the Jewish one in S1, the fighting one in S1, the one in S5 where Garibaldi and Lochley bonk heads, etc). If you have the patience to sift through the crap, there’s some gold underneath.

Season 1, Season 5

In fact, those might be the show’s two best seasons. Season 1 featured Michael O’Hare instead of the wooden Bruce Boxleitner, and Season 5 got a lot of things right that hadn’t worked previously. It expanded some characters’ roles and scaled back others, gave Lyta Alexander a personality and introduced Robin Atkin Downes (“Lord” Byron) and Tracy Scoggins (Elizabeth Lochley). It’s perhaps an indictment of Straczynski’s inflexible arcs that his show’s best seasons were largely free of the series’ two longest-running storylines, but what can you do? Babylon 5 was best when it was universe-building, and that made up the meat of S1 and S5.

The Offbeat Episodes

Most of the B5 episodes followed a pretty specific formula. Station is hanging out, outside force/person/technology enters the station, someone wants to capture/speak to/negotiate with said force/person/tech, mayhem ensues. According to Wikipedia, Straczynski’s ideal show differed from the Star Treks of the time by having the universe come to the station, not having the station go and explore the universe.

I’m fine with that formula. But once or twice a season, the creators would try something completely different. It could be a news report on the state of the station, or following around random maintenance workers we’d never seen before, or taking a snapshot a million years in the future. All of these episodes served as a welcome change of pace, and most of them were pretty darn good.

A Bigger, Older Universe

 This is my favorite of the good things, and just about the only thing B5 has that sets it apart from the rest of TV sci-fi. You know how in Doctor Who, there’s a sense of the future being wide-open and full of wonders and practically infinite? Babylon 5 does a similar thing with the past. It has a wonderfully pervasive sense of age, of ancient wonders and fallen species and a history that far predates human experience. Any show can say that there’s been civilization millions of years in the past, but Babylon 5 makes you feel that sense of age and the unknown, of ancient mysteries and hidden treasures. That, I feel, is B5’s most distinctive and best feature.

The Worst Characters of Babylon 5

Brief introduction: this week I will be doing an extended review of the TV show, Babylon 5. For last Friday's preview/series basics, click here. For yesterday's overview of B5's best characters, click here.

John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner), Captain of Babylon 5

Yep. Their flagship actor, Bruce Boxleitner (fresh off a lead role in Tron), is just awful in B5. There’s nothing distinctive about him. He’s a leader, he’s able to build consensus and he’s irreplaceable in B5 politics, but the guy himself would fit comfortably into any good guy/leader role. In fact, you could probably swap out not just Boxleitner, but the entire character of John Sheridan with any other generic good guy/leader and not notice the difference.

Sheridan has no flaws. None. Seriously, go back and watch the series like I did, and tell me if you find one single character flaw. The worst thing he does is display loyalty to his dead wife. How exactly are viewers supposed to relate to a flawless character? Boxleitner’s acting is poor (he reminds me of George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore) and the character is a total write-off. We are given countless opportunities to know, meet and understand Sheridan, and it’s not like they didn’t try to write in depth for him. We’re given insight into his minutest thoughts, quirks and habits, and given every opportunity to like both actor and character. It just doesn’t work at all.

Zack Allan (Jeff Conaway), Asst. Security Chief of Babylon 5

 A bit-part character in Season 2 who ascends to a starting role in seasons 3-5, Zack Allan probably should have stuck to occasional guest appearances. He's even less watchable than Sheridan, and Conaway's acting is worse even than Boxleitner's. Zack starts to show some emotion midway through Season 5, but that’s about all you can say for him. The guy is a featureless rock with a stupid accent who does nothing worthwhile on the show. Londo pegged him perfectly with the caustic line, “You have that vacant look that says, ‘Hold my head to your ear. You will hear the ocean.’”

Stephen Franklin (Richard Biggs), Chief Medical Officer of Babylon 5

 For the third entry in a row, the character is uninteresting and the actor is poor. Biggs, Conaway and Boxleitner are given different qualities of material to work with, but all of them stink up the joint. Biggs just doesn't bring anything to the party in terms of acting ability, and his character suffers as a result, despite being given all sorts of material to work with. I didn’t always think this of Franklin; he handles a difficult science-versus-religion episode well, and is featured in the series’ most Star Trek-esque episode early in Season 1. But his emotionless patter, terrible delivery and lack of depth do him in. There is honestly a whole sub-arc in Season 3 whose sole purpose is to give Franklin some personality. After it’s over, Franklin picks himself up, dusts himself off and goes right back to being the same dull, featureless person he was pre-arc.

(Note: These three are highly visible, often-seen members of the B5 command staff. A lot of the good characters, many though they be, are stuck in more seldom-seen roles. Lennier is a minor character, Bester and Morden are occasional guest stars, etc. So although there are fewer of these guys, their crappiness has a disproportionate effect on the show at large.)

Virini (Damian London), Chamberlain to the Centauri Court

You have never met a more annoying character than Chamberlain Virini. He is fluttery, he is flighty and he is unconscionably stupid. You know those characters in anime franchises who are constantly behind on the plot, rarely to never understand what’s happening around them and run around screeching like demented geese whenever anything changes? Damian London is the live-action version of that, and it’s somehow even more annoying in this medium. London does a little better when he’s asked to be creepy in Season 5 (a lot of things improve in Season 5), but the rest of the time he’s just awful. I guess that’s just the role he was asked to play, in which case, this is the only time you’ll hear me criticize an actor for doing his job too well.


In the conversation: 

 Lyta Alexander (Patricia Tallman), Emperor Cartagia (Wortham Krimmer), David Corwin (Joshua Cox), President Clark (Gary McGurk). Tallman was ordinary in three seasons before blossoming in Season 5, when she was given an expanded role and more screen time. Krimmer wasn’t bad; his presence here is because he served as a walking reminder that you were watching a TV show. “How did someone so brain-twistingly insane become Emperor anyway? Oh, because it's on TV and someone has to be the villain.” McGurk I’ll deal with in the “Bad Things” note. As for Corwin, he’s here more as an indictment of creator J. Michael Straczynski than anything else. The guy appeared in 34 episodes as a member of the bridge crew, and in only one does he have significant lines or a subplot of his own. They could’ve done a lot more with him.

Tomorrow, we move back to halcyon times and contemplate the best qualities of Babylon 5.

The Best Characters in Babylon 5

Brief introduction: this week I will be reviewing the sci-fi TV show known as Babylon 5. For last Friday's brief round-up of the show and the schedule, please click here. Today's post (duh) will cover the best characters in B5; tomorrow will cover the worst. If you enjoy this post, keep comin' back! 

G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas), Narn Ambassador to Babylon 5* 

An ordinary actor made to wear red contact lenses, orange-and-black face paint and a ridiculous tunic, and wave his hands like a cat when he gets in a fight might turn in a shit performance. Katsulas turns in an excellent one. From the series’ opening TV movie to its final season, he is consistently one of its two best actors. In addition, G’Kar becomes one of the most deeply nuanced characters. He is a villain, a chef, a writer, a warrior, a religious person and a knight (literally, in one case). G’Kar is a focal point for his race’s rage against the Centauri, and Katsulas does an excellent job of expressing that.

Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), Centauri Ambassador to Babylon 5
                                            

Peter Jurasik makes the absolute most of Londo Mollari. In succession, Londo is sympathetic, pitiable, villainous, unscrupulous and finally heroic. I think he’s my favorite, now that everything’s over, because in a world of moral purity (I’ll come back to this in the Worst Things post), Londo is flawed! He drinks, he screws, he cheats at cards, he’s petty and vain and selfish and power-hungry, but he’s a good guy underneath it all. That’s something the viewer finds out over a long period of time, and watching him evolve is really an amazing thing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the splendid connection between Londo and G’Kar. Their complex relationship is the single strongest aspect of the series. The two have an extremely complicated dynamic, which shifts from worst enemies to close friends and back again over the series’ run. I think some of the best episodes of the series came when Straczynski put the two characters in a situation and just let them bounce off each other (the Season 1 episode where Londo denies G’Kar access to a sacred plant is a classic).

Lennier (Bill Mumy), Minbari Diplomatic Attaché

A quiet, well-spoken servant type, Lennier does his job and doesn’t screw up. Bill Mumy plays him as very restrained, but as someone who’s capable of deep feelings. When he falls in love in Season 3, it brings a whole new dimension to his character (then again, I’m an easy target for male characters in unrequited love, so this one is subjective).

Susan Ivanova (Claudia Christian), Lt. Commander of Babylon 5

Ivanova probably wouldn’t work as a starring role, but she is a capable No. 2 for the commanders of Babylon 5. A deeply pessimistic Russian Jew, Christian’s character is sometimes fiery and sometimes depressed. She brings some much-needed punch to the B5 command staff, which can be bland at times. Ivanova’s Jewish-centered episode in Season 1 is in my top three of the whole series.

Zathras (Tim Choate)

He’s only in four episodes, but all of them are great ones. Zathras guides the characters through time and space with his own particular brand of broken English and backhanded wisdom. Definitely the funniest character in the series.

Alfred Bester (Walter Koenig), Psi Cop

Bester is a good villain because he does what he thinks is right, which often conflicts with the B5 crew's idea of right. Most of their conflicts come from this simple effect. Bester is calm, calculated and utterly devoted to the Psi Corps. If Koenig’s character has a weakness, it’s his general lack of emotion, but that usually serves to make him a bit more villain-esque. Every time he’s on screen is a good time.

Morden (Ed Wasser)

Ed Wasser is the best pure villain on the show, which isn’t saying much (Londo, G’Kar and even Bester all have their heroic moments). As emissary for the Shadow race, he gets plenty of chances to be dark and menacing and makes the most of them (he’s especially effective in season 2). Zero nuances to his character, but who really cares? His interrogation scene with Sheridan at the end of Season 3 is a classic.

Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle), Babylon 5 Security Chief

The best way to describe Garibaldi is sort of a poor man’s Bruce Willis, circa Die Hard crossed with Pulp Fiction. Doyle gives his character a hard-ass mentality and a penchant for sarcastic quips. He’s kind of an asshole, actually, but he’s extremely crafty and good at his job. Garibaldi generally isn't a very complex fellow; the one major change in his character turns out to have been caused by outside forces. At his best when he’s kickin’ ass. (Incidentally, a garibaldi is the state fish of California. #randomfacts)

In the conversation: 

Vir Kotto (Stephen Furst), Delenn (Mira Furlan, who played Danielle Rousseau on Lost), Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) and Elizabeth Lochley (Tracy Scoggins). Vir and Delenn have good acting and terrible acting in pretty much equal parts. Sinclair and Lochley are impressive, but neither gets as much time as they should have had. The eccentric Draal (Louis Turenne) was one of my favorites.)

Coming tomorrow: the worst of B5! Cover your ears and grab your popcorn, because this series has some awful performers on it.

*Many of the characters' job descriptions change as the show goes on, so for the sake of making sense, I'm listing the characters by the first jobs they hold on the show.

Babylon 5 Mayhem Week Preview!

Hokay! So I'm back after three days and rarin' to go. Here's the plan. I'm going to do a comprehensive series review of the TV show called Babylon 5. I'm also going to be out of town/away from Internet access from tomorrow until Monday, so I'm posting this preview now as a brief introduction to the show. The tentative schedule next week will be as follows: 

Monday: The best characters in B5. 

Tuesday: The worst characters in B5. 

Wednesday: The best aspects of the show (production, acting, philosophy, writing, etc.)

Thursday: The worst aspects of the show. 

Friday: The worst aspects of the show, continued. (Based on the list I made, I doubt they're all going to fit into one reasonably sized post.)

Saturday: Sum up, final evaluation and grade.

Your Babylon 5 Basics

The best thing you can say about Babylon 5 is that it won’t break your heart. It won’t give you a terrible episode, it usually won’t resolve a storyline in an unsatisfying way, and the worst it gets will be ‘mediocre’. The worst thing about Babylon 5 is that it’s consistently mediocre. Occasionally there will be amazing episodes that transcend the usual tedium and rise to awesome heights, but these are extremely rare and it’s hard to guess when they’ll occur.

I recently finished watching the entire five-season run (110 episodes) of B5, in large part so I could do this review. I’m going to provide a brief summary of the series, talk about the good things, talk about the bad things and try to get a handle on what all of it means. I’ll also introduce you to the best and worst characters on the show.

Spoiler alert: one of the best.

Briefly, Babylon 5 was a TV show created by J. Michael Straczynski that aired 1994-1998. It depicted human-alien diplomatic relations, and occasional wars, on board an enormous space station named Babylon 5. The show takes place within a version of our galaxy that harbors dozens of alien races, who get around by “jumping” in and out of hyperspace. Earth has colonies on Mars, Io and elsewhere, and owns the B5 station. Everyone is in diplomatic contact with one another and most of the races trade with each other, when they’re not at war.

 At the beginning of the series, the five most powerful races are humanity, the Centauri (who have huge frilly hair and colonized the Narns in the past), the Narns (orange with black spots, who detest the Centauri for it), the Minbari (bald with bone on the outside of their heads; fought the humans 10 years prior to season 1 in the Earth-Minbari War) and the Vorlons (who wear encounter suits at all times; nobody knows a thing about them). A sixth race, the Shadows, appears in Season 2. Other, minor races are introduced and fleshed out a little as the series goes on.

The series was frequently described by Straczynski as TV’s version of a novel. B5 generally sticks to long, planned story arcs that can stretch over several seasons. Everything in the show was planned well in advance of its being aired; there’s not a lot of ‘made up on the fly’ stuff. Each season of the series corresponds exactly to one year in real time, with the season finale often being mentioned in-episode as New Year’s Eve.

The B5 franchise included five TV movies, one of which introduced the series in February 1993. A second was set between Seasons 4 and 5, and the rest followed after the series' run. The spin-off series Crusade ran for 13 episodes in 1999 and is essentially a continuation of story arcs from the original series (it includes Daniel Dae Kim of Lost fame). Some of Babylon 5's obscurity comes from its network. It was aired on the Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), which began in 1993 and folded in 1997. TNT picked up the final season of Babylon 5, and also aired Crusade and three films. The Sci-Fi Channel aired the fifth movie, Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers.

I hope you enjoy the forthcoming week-long review. If you have questions, insults or comments, please feel free to share them!

Ta, 

Andy

Sometimes A Great Universal Condition (Telepathy)

Sometimes, sci-fi will introduce a Game Changer. The most common one is a faster-than-light drive of some sort, but the basic thing is that it’s a Universal Condition. It’s not a one-off thing for one episode, and it isn’t a threat to be defeated. It’s a part of the universe, something you set at the start of the game.

Frequently, the Universal Condition has world-shattering implications. To combat this, there are often tons of restrictions on the Game Changer’s powers. Those powers are theoretically infinite, but in practice, they have to be controlled for the good of the story.

The example that works best are the telepaths in Babylon 5. Theoretically, telepathy could be a game-changing skill. You could put a telepath in a given location and s/he would be able to find out everything that’s going down in that location. Theoretically, on one of Bestor’s many visits to Babylon 5, he could walk into the station, scan the whole place and determine exactly who he wants, where they are and what they’re thinking at the time. Then he could immobilize them, or better yet, control their brains and make them walk right up to him.

But if Bestor was able to do all that, every episode with him would be exceedingly boring. The chases are fun, and later on when the main characters start hiding things from Bestor, it becomes imperative
that he not have Godlike Powers. So there have to be limits on the telepath’s ability.

"Also, I can kill you with my brain." -River Tam

First is distance. The guy can’t seek out someone on a different planet; he has to be in the same city-sized area. On a smaller scale, Bestor apparently can’t just cast his mind out and search for someone or something. He can’t pull a Cerebro and look all over the world; he's limited to scanning individual people. Plus, to scan someone, Bestor has to be in the room with that person, preferably within eye contact or at least line-of-sight.

Next is levels; Bestor may be as strong as human telepaths get, but even that isn’t massively strong, and the resident B5 telepath is a P5 to his P12 (which explains why they don’t instantly go to her whenever something goes missing).

Third is the ability to block. Bestor can be blocked by another telepath, and although he can overpower a telepath of lesser level, he’d lose to a group of telepaths. Certain drugs can also block or enhance telepathic ability.

Fourth are PsyCorps regs. Scanning people without their consent is a rule that’s broken more than occasionally on this show, but it is a rule, and one that’s generally kept.

Fifth, Bestor can’t control people’s actions.

Sixth, scans don’t always work out as intended. You don’t always find what you’re looking for, or find it immediately.

And seventh, telepaths generally have to go to some lengths to keep from hearing everyone’s thoughts. It can form an indecipherable background gabble, not a perfect interpretation of what everyone in the area is thinking.

This is the Cosmic Microwave Background. Start thinking about that in terms of background clutter and Bestor and telepaths and lots of random folks thinking, and you get some really scary thoughts.

So you can see how this omnipotent power is cut down to a size that fits what the show’s creators want it to do, bit by bit. You can modify an FTL drive in the same way: it only comes out at a certain place, it takes a certain amount of time to get there or to spin up, it requires a certain fuel, etc. You can take the abstract concept and modify it in any way you want. In other words, the writer can shape the reality and create the rules of the world to get the result he or she desires. I’d never thought of it in those terms before, and it’s scarily empowering.

The Ancient Threat Returning: Trend Study

I'm a big fantasy reader, and one of the biggest plot devices used in sci-fi and fantasy works or series is the concept of a "returning evil". I've seen it in scads of different places, and probably, so have you. Here's a generic description:

Long ago, in the Before-time, a great evil walked the Earth/roamed among the stars. This evil was eventually defeated/sealed away/stopped in some other fashion, and it stayed that way for thousands/millions of years. But now, the great evil is returning. Our ancestors were awesome; now it's just us. We have to find some way to defeat/destroy/re-seal-up the evil with what we've got right now.

This scenario crops up everywhere. It's in Lord of the Rings (Sauron), The Wheel of Time (The Dark One), Game of Thrones (TBD), Harry Potter (Voldemort), Doctor Who (several uses; mostly Daleks), Babylon 5 (The Shadows), the Abhorsen trilogy (Orannis) and various H.P. Lovecraft works (notably referring to Cthulhu), among many others.

As it turns out, since the hive-mind at TVTropes is considerably smarter and more on top of things than I am, they have a whole page about this, called "Sealed Evil in a Can", and give a bunch of other examples. So the best I can do is give my small opinion about why it works so well in these particular genres.


-It instantly creates a sense of menace. Sauron may have an army of orcs, but he doesn't really do anything (in books or movies) other than send the orcs to attack things and gaze menacingly out of the Palantir at Pippin. He's not really all that scary. But if we learn that he once nearly destroyed the world, when he had the Ring... now he's a bit frightening. Likewise the Daleks. In the new series, when we meet them, they could be just the alien bad guy of the week (albeit an astonishingly deadly one). What makes "Dalek" the best episode of Season 1 is their history, and the Doctor's instinctive dread for them. Having what sticks in my mind as a "once and future evil" gives the evil in question instant badass credentials.

-It establishes the heroes' weakness and gives the viewer a sense of risk. Usually, the people who did the defeating/sealing away of the Great Evil were much more powerful than the present day; similarly, the Evil was usually much stronger too. If we know that our modern-day heroes aren't as good as the ones back then, we're less likely to expect them to win just because they're the good guys. We know they'll be overmatched.

Holy hell, I just got trapped in TVTropes for a solid hour. Where was I going with this?

I don't know. Will edit later if it comes back. 

Sci-Fi Drinking Game(s) [IN PROGRESS]

Widely Applicable Rules (Mostly for TV Shows):

Drink every time an alien, or a human, delivers a stirring polemic on the potential of the human race.
 

Drink every time somebody distressedly points out the flaws that could lead humanity to destruction.
 

Take a big drink every time an alien species is created with a distinctively un-human trait for purposes of providing a contrast with humans (ex: an emotionless species, a hive mind, etc.) Take a shot of vodka if one of the characters ham-handedly points out the difference within the show. Finish the bottle if this leads to a stirring polemic.

Every time someone utters the phrase “We’ve never seen anything like it” or says that something is “off the charts” or “off the scale”. (If it's a major character instead of a throwaway character, drink twice.)

Whenever someone says, during a firefight, “[Hull integrity/shields/deflector screens] down [XX] percent!  The [shields, ship, station, hull, etc.] can’t take another hit like that or we’re done for!”

[Mostly for '90s sci-fi:] Drink every time we meet an alien species that is humanoid, has a face and hands, and basically is human except for a little makeup or horns or something. (Warning: Blackouts possible when playing this rule with Babylon 5 or Star Trek.)

I am not fucking around with this warning, man. (Screenshot: Babylon 5.)

Drink whenever an alien species magically has the lips, teeth and tongue to speak virtually flawless English. (Start a Waterfall if the aliens in question have an accent that's meant to convey the difference between Them and Us.)

Drink every time someone provides an alien-y explanation for some person, event or structure from Earth's history. Examples: ancient Egypt/the Pyramids (I'm looking at you, Stargate), the Tunguska meteorite, Jack the Ripper, etc.

Take a drink whenever basic physics are violated. You can play this the "forgiving" way, i.e. drinking whenever there's gravity in space, whenever laser weapons travel slower than light, misuse of black holes, when spaceships ignore kinetic energy and so forth... or, you can play the "unforgiving" version. In "unforgiving", drink for wormholes, FTL travel, transporter beams, time travel, artificial gravity, food replicators, tractor beams, telepathy and "Eject the warp core and shoot it into the black hole so that we may escape certain death!" sort of deals. (DO NOT play this game with the new Star Trek movie. YOU MAY DIE.)

(In fact, looking back at this list, almost all of these apply to the J.J. Abrams version of Star Trek. I wouldn't go there, but if you do, I'm not responsible for what happens.)

Optional rule: knock yourself out with a fifth of vodka whenever robots enslave, subjugate or wipe out humanity. 

Like I said in the title, the game is still in progress, so suggestions for new rules are welcome! (So are beta testers who are brave enough to try this with me. Show of hands!)

Ooh! One More Babylon 5 Observation

I was thinking about the mysterious gravity rings that the Imani ambassador uses to squeeze (literally) a committment out of G'Kar in the pilot, and it occurred to me that all five of the major races essentially play by the same rules. With the exception of the Vorlons, they're all humanoids, and they can all tolerate one Earth gravity (and Earth atmosphere, again with the exception of the Vorlons, maybe). This is of course a concession to reality; CGI wasn't in existence back then, as I noted before, and you can't very well squeeze a human actor into an octopus suit and expect him to have emotional range.

But it brings up an interesting point. There's plenty of war between these five species, right? And all of them have expansionist policies, large empires and terraforming (or whatever-forming) capability. I was wondering why there was so much conflict, and one of the possible explanations could be that they're all after the same real estate. We don't know much about their instantaneous warp technologies yet, or the borders of the various empires, but it's entirely possible that one or more of the empires is running out of living space/resources and needs these prime terraforming candidates. And since everyone's looking for the same type of planet, well...

Another explanation could be that terraformed planets can be used by anybody, since their requirements are about the same. As soon as your rival has invested a ton of money and time in Varn-forming a planet, you swoop in and seize it from them. Their investment is gone, you've hurt their expansion efforts and gained a new world for yourself at little cost--until and unless they strike back, that is.

This is all speculation at this point, but it's interesting speculation. This show is making me think, and that's a quality I treasure on television.

Picture is unrelated.

Babylon 5: First Impressions

For a long time, I've kinda thought that besides the giant Star Trek franchise, the three great sci-fi TV shows are Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. (I'll throw Stargate in there for kicks, but I just can't get past the ancient Egyptian aliens thing.) I'm in love with the second one and rather enamored of the first one, but up until now I'd never gotten around to Babylon. I recently got through the premiere movie and just now finished the first episode, and I'd like to give some early impressions. 

First Note in Four Days is about what now?

-First of all, the computer graphics are god-awful. They look like what you see nowadays in the behind-the-scenes of a Pixar film, before they've filled in the texture and details of faces and backgrounds, or possibly a N64 video game. The series started out in the early 1990s, so it's understandable, but the graphics are still really bad. You won't find anything like the beautiful wide-angle shots of Galactica and the rest of the fleet, or playing around with textures and lighting, here. 

However, I'm grading Babylon 5 on a massive curve because of what they're attempting to do. Even in just the pilot and the first episode, we see a space battle, fleets emerging out of hyperspace and immense shots of the Babylon 5 space station itself from quite a ways away. It may look awful by modern standards, but what they're trying to do is so far beyond the graphics they had at the time, it's hard not to admire it. 

-The writing has started out as pretty clunky, too. The first episode serves you three stories that are so different--a war between two rival species on Ragash III, space raiders around Babylon 5, friction between a telepath and a senior officer--that you know they're probably going to coalesce, and when they do it isn't much of a surprise. It's also fairly easy to predict what the characters are going to say. That said, it's still early on and it will undoubtedly get better as the writers get more comfortable.

-On the other hand, the high muckety-mucks are going out of their way to universe-build early. In the pilot, we were introduced to four alien empires that humanity maintains diplomatic relations with; in episode 1, we meet (briefly) a huge rogue's gallery of other species, and get personal tidbits about all of the show's main characters. Again, it's clunky; personal anecdotes are sort of dropped into the episode at random, but however forced it felt, by the end of the episode I felt like I knew the officers of Babylon 5 and a few of the alien diplomats a bit better. I also had a decent feel for the central government on Earth, which they drop in as well. It's a lot of information all at once, but it also signifies that the show won't have much dead time. Babylon 5's selling point is its complex plots, after all, and I'm rather excited to see what they come up with. 

-The political-legal-diplomatic climate looks like where the meat of the show will be, something that Battlestar and Star Trek dabble in and Doctor Who ignores entirely. There's apparently an interracial legal framework, within which Babylon 5 is neutral ground that is administered by representatives from all five major empires. The first episode reminds us, however, that just because every race has a diplomatic representative on board doesn't mean there's peace everywhere. We get an unprovoked attack on a Centauri farming colony by a Narn fleet in the first episode. It's definitely an unstable political climate, which I think will make it more fun to watch than simply trying to keep the peace. (The opening sequence's line "Babylon 5 is the galaxy's last, best hope for peace" keeps making me think of Gundam Wing, by the way. Even the announcers sound similar.)

So far, there has been a notable lack of giant space robots.

Overall, I think there's a lot of potential in Babylon 5. As it stands now, after watching the first two chunks of show, I don't like it terrrrrribly much on its own merits. They were decent episodes, but not on the level of a Battlestar or a Doctor Who or even a good Firefly episode. I like it for what I think the series has the capability to do. Let's see where this goes.