TV: Babylon 5, S2 Disc 1

Most SF series have weak first seasons as the writers struggle to define the setting and the characters. With much of the introductory lifting done, the second season of B5 is naturally an improvement on its predecessor, even with the show now forced to introduce and develop a new lead character.

This is entirely due to the first season doing its job to establish setting and cast; the series is now free to move the pieces around the board.  It's no accident that G'Kar and Londo completely turn against the audience expectations of their season 1 roles:  Starting right away Londo is the aggressor and G'Kar the victim.

Of course, the big change is the departure of former lead Michael O'Hare...



Episode 1: Points of Departure

Since we're replacing the lead character here, there's a lot of Sinclair-related decking to be cleared. This doesn't leave a lot of time a standalone plot, so it's a fairly perfunctory one.

 Eight days have passed since Chrysalis.

Captain John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner, far less wooden than O'Hare ever was) of the EA ship Agamemnon has been tapped to command B5.   Sinclair has been reassigned as the permanent Earth Ambassador to Minbar.  Garibaldi's still in a coma.  Delenn's in her cocoon, G'Kar's gone missing.

And everything else has been piled on little Susie Ivanova.

Sheridan's an odd choice for a diplomatic posting, as he is the only EA captain to have won a victory in the Earth-Minbari war.  Still, he's goofy excited about the job, which promises to be rife with fresh fruit and cushy showers featuring hot water.  While coming off a bit obtuse about what he's walking into, Boxleitner is fine at giving Sheridan a too-comfortable air of large fish in a small pond.

His first job on the station is to watch out for a renegade Minbari cruiser, the Trigati, a vessel that ignored the surrender order twelve years ago. Its Captain was referenced back in Legacies as one who preferred suicide to surrender.    Since then, his ship has roamed the universe as exiles,  but with Sheridan ("Starkiller," the Minbari call him; the ship he destroyed was the Black Star*) providing an excuse they try to goad the Earthers into a shooting war which would grant them an honorable death.

Cooler heads prevail, and the Minbari's own anti-Trigati hunters arrive to deal with their mess.

In the midst of all this, Lennier baldly spills the beans on the Hole in Sinclair's Mind:  the Gray Council found that Sinclair was a Minbari soul; the fact was such a shock they immediately ceased the war, as this episode establishes that Minbari do not kill their own kind.

* Several characters laud Sheridan's destruction of the Black Star as briliant command decisions; what he actually did was fight dirty (particularly to the honor-tied Minbari) by faking a distress signal and mining the nearby area with nukes.  The tactical abilities of nukes in B5 seem disproportionately large given the setting.


Pros: Has to do a lot of expository lifting, and handles it reasonably well.
Cons: The standalone portion of the plot is about as lightweight as last season's opener.

Then: B
Now: B

--


Episode 2: Revelations

Fallout continues from Chrysalis.

The B5 advisory council is in poor shape.  With G'Kar and Delenn indisposed, there's only a bellicose Londo, flush with Quadrant 37 victory to press on: Sheridan won't act alone, and Kosh attends, but continues his trademark stoicism.

The human crew have their own problems. Garibaldi remains in a coma, and Franklin's so far out of tricks he broaches the topic of using  Quality of Mercy's Alien Healing Machine. He's clearly been chastened by his many failures in season one and now asks permission to try the unorthodox.  The new CO is repulsed by the idea, but it's the only thing left...  The two each take a shift to pull Garibaldi back to consciousness.  When he wakes, he has Talia scan him to jar the memory loose: a conveniently placed mirror reflecting the face of his second-in-command shooting him in the back.

No sooner has the would-be assassin been arrested and given his best "things are changing back home, you can't touch me" response does President Clark himself place a call to Sheridan and personally request he and all evidence be sent to Earth for trial.  Only if Clark had laughed diabolically as a sign-off could he come across as more transparently evil; it's sledgehammer subtle and undercuts all the slow creep of fascism subplots for the next year.  And yet Sheridan plays along, only to be surprised (!) when the prisoner and all the evidence is transferred to a nonexistent Earthforce ship while on his trip home.   While the thread following up the death of President Santiago is eventually returned to, nothing from this part of the plot is ever seen again.

In our other medical subplot, Delenn's out of her... chrysalis. After spending some time under heavy cloaks and scaly makeup, she hatches as a human Minbari, now with full-length hair.  She lies that her change was officially sanctioned and quid pro quo for Sinclair being stationed on Minbar -- it was underway prior.  All the council is impressed, particularly the one with the dead wife.

That point factors in the first "visitor for Sheridan" subplot!  It's his sister, Liz, who isn't here for herself, but rather to allow us to see that "Johnny" Sheridan is still tormented by the death of his wife, two years past.  Liz uses the innocuous phrase "passed away" but Sheridan's closure-free fervor  suggests the more accurate description is "mysteriously vanished while on an xenoarcheology expedition to the rim."   Hmm, there's some other mention of the rim in this episode.  It's a bit of spoon-feeding that was probably seen as necessary at the time, but in hindsight and with no months-long gap between episodes, it feels stupid-obvious.  If this had come up last episode, it'd almost feel elegant as viewers put the pieces together.

Nurturing the arc of the series, Londo meets with Morden, who is still happy to provide overwhelming and untraceable strikes against any small target.  The Narn homeworld is too big just now, but not off the table for later.   Finally, there's a price named for this help: if Londo should hear of any news about the (galactic) rim, pass it along?   Londo, for all his multiple dimensions, is a completely incurious dupe for Morden, rarely asking questions and is never shown investigating the origins of his powerful friends until it's far too late.

G'Kar returns quietly, and is now the only person to have seen a Shadow ship and lived.  More motivated than his Centauri counterpart, he starts researching them, and finds references in the scriptures of the Narn prophet G'Quon.  A thousand years ago the Shadows had occupied the Narn; they came from a bleak world out on the..  yes, yes, out on the rim.  A popular destination, and now we know why.  He pulls some strings to get a Narn cruiser (G'Quon class, Wiki tells me) sent out to the planet.

This begins our kick-the-Narn portion of the series.  Previously. G'Kar has been seen as an at least plausibly good schemer and adept at keeping his reputation intact despite frequent setbacks.  Here, he commits two major blunders: first, while correctly deducing that none of the other major powers could wipe out Quadrant 37, he never asks the follow-up: who would?   If I play the writer-apologist role, this is because his second blunder, informing the council of the fact-finding mission prior to its arrival was a ploy designed to see if there was a tie to a major power after all.  It's difficult to square that, given G'Kar's secrecy in his investigations so far (he left B5 in Chrysalis without telling even Na'Toth where he was going)  and he's never seemed callous enough toward his own people to sacrifice the lives on the ship just to run a game on the Advisory Council.

Which brings us to another troubling point of all this.  When the Shadows destroy the cruiser just after it emerges from hyperspace, everyone shrugs.  This potential origin point of a massive slaughter was going to be investigated but our ship just happened to have had engine trouble and exploded.   The other ambassadors shrug it off (of course, Kosh and Delenn know better, but he aren't talking).   G'Kar raises the obvious point that the only outsiders who knew about the mission were on the B5 council, and connects the obvious dots to Londo.   This enrages Sheridan, who makes it a unanimous vote against the Narn.*

Chastened, G'Kar reflects on his present situation by reading from The Second Coming, which has become a cliche to use in times of bad changes.   If there is one poem I wish to see banished forever from genre fiction, it's this.

* At this stage in the season, Sheridan is still reading lines with the "Sinclair" scratched out,  and his strong reaction here seems to indicate that he has inherited a year-plus history of clashes with G'Kar from his predecessor.   Bad writing.

--

Pros: Breakneck pace of closure from last season.
Cons: Lazy set-up for this season, and, god, no more Yeats.  Please.

Then: A
Now: B-

--


Episode 3: The Geometry of Shadows*

Garibaldi's on the mend, but isn't so sure he wants to get back to work, not for Sheridan.  He's also still stewing about his horrible betrayal, a point that might have been more dramatic if the assassin had appeared in more than one episode prior to the shooting, and, um, had ever been given a name.  Oh, that bastard, my-second-in-command!

#2's lack of a name is probably why Lou Welch, balding, loyal, salt-of-the-earth security officer pointedly received one on his first appearance last episode.  Here he even receives a guest-star credit.  Sadly, B5 is bit both ways on the issue of security career development: underdeveloped #2 becomes a major player, and overdeveloped new #2 Lou Welch grew an ego problem and was unceremoniously removed from the series.  Garibaldi's third second, Zack Allen, introduced later in this season, would finally be the one who stuck around.

Ivanova often draws the comedic subplots, here it's an arbitrary battle between the Drazi, who pull purple or green sashes out of a sack and then fight until one color wins in the ol' SF reductio ad absurdum take on racism. Hilarity.

With Londo's rising profile among his people, he has thrown in with another Centauri Social Climber, Lord Refa.   When a gathering of "technomages" arrives (thus putting the "a" in a-plot), Londo seeks to secure a blessing from one, a blessing that will carry a lot of weight with Centauri nobility.   The mages, whose only speaking member is genre vet Michael Ansara, is less than interested in such things; so uninterested that he dismisses Vir with a near-direct Tolkien quote about meddling in the affairs of wizards.  Londo goes over the top to Sheridan, conniving an audience between himself, Ansara, and Sheridan.

My name is Elric. Really.

Sheridan is all over the map in the meeting.  Initially curious, he's now angry at the rumors that the technomages are relocating somewhere unknown. Earth is interested in the whys and wheres, but to what end?  Nothing is explained; and when Londo's agenda is exposed Sheridan turns on him, which patches up EA-technomage relations to the point that it draws Ansara into another writer's mouthpiece moment, a Sorkin-y walk-and-talk about the nature of technology, magic, and wisdom.  He warns Sheridan of a "black and terrible storm" approaching and that his people are getting somewhere safe to preserve their knowledge.**

Ansara exacts some measure of revenge for Londo's affront, but the two reach an accord as the mages depart.  Londo receives his "endorsement," but it arrives with the disclaimer, "for the little it's worth."  He is told he has been touched by darkness, and this will grow to the point where he has billions of victims. ***

And so he leaves, never to be seen again.

--


* The second and third seasons are rife with dark, night, and shadow references in their titles; very few have much to do with the Shadows themselves.

** This A Canticle for Leibowitz stuff is a JMS favorite, and is revisited twice more during the series. By the third time I was getting tired of the trope, but speaking to the episode at hand, I never warmed to the idea of the technomages.  They're stage magicians with SF technology who lived by their "We demand to be taken seriously!" credo long enough that the universe at large bought into it.

*** Here, the two characters who have directly spoken of the Shadows' return are ignored by the people they tell.  A nice point about inconvenient truths.

Pros: Lightly amusing Ivanova subplot, and the last we see of the technomages.
Cons: Boxleitner's awful, attempts-at-philosophical responses to "magic."

Then: C
Now: C-

--

Episode 4: A Distant Star

Here's our second friend-of-Sheridan-arrives episode.   Captain "Stinky" of the EA explorer ship Cortez.  He's been gone five years exploring strange new worlds out on the rim, paying a call on his old friend during a supply stop.  Stinky is aghast at "Swamp Rat" Sheridan's transformation from rough-and-tumble starship captain to an.. an... administrator.  Like "Swamp Rat" Sheridan, he has an eye for a longhaired Minbari.

After departure, the Cortez experiences a reactor problem that causes it to get lost in hyperspace.  Typical SF damage scene: shaky camera, sparking consoles, frantic, yelled damage reports. Typical SF heroics follow, as the show's Captain proves unwilling to give up on his friend.  Stringing B5's fighters into hyperspace leads to a rescue, and gives what's-he-doing-here pilot Warren Keffer (Robert Russler, maybe best known as Robert Downey Jr's sidekick in Weird Science) a long-term plot when he catches a glimpse of a Shadow ship during the operation.

The B plot is a dreadful misfire of a Franklin story where he's pressing  Garibaldi, and then the rest of the command staff, onto a diet.  Already a trivial notion for airtime on its surface (Franklin forbids even once-a-year treats!) it's worse when couched in ca. 1990 health information.


Pros: The Cortez design, and the explorer ship's role in the EA.
Cons: Food. Plan.  Ugh.

Then: B
Now: C-