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Stray B5 thoughts ahead of the S3 finale
We haven't watched any more yet, so collecting a few random thoughts from comment threads and just things I was thinking about.
- One thing that only occurred to me when I was chatting in comments is that the "And the Rock Cried Out" scene with Refa's death juxtaposed with the gospel song is not just using the song's lyrics and upbeat melody for ironic contrast with the violent events happening on Narn. It's also juxtaposing the scene of people from different species and religions coming together in the church, vs the bloody and violent fallout of Londo and G'Kar's temporary alliance: Narns and Centauri working together to the same end at last, and that end is a murder of vengeance for both races. It's an interesting underscore to G'Kar's earlier drug-fueled vision about Narns and Centauri being essentially two sides of the same bloody coin. They can cooperate, as it turns out, but can they cooperate for anything other than vengeance and death? And yet it's interesting to have that common ground between them, that they'll put their differences aside if it's a matter of retaliatory murder.
- I also had and still have a lot of thoughts about how directly the Inquisitor's words to Delenn foreshadow, not just Londo's fate, which I had guessed even at the time was being set up there, but G'Kar's even more directly.
"How do you know the chosen ones? No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions. Not for glory. Not for fame. For one person. In the dark. Where no one will ever know ... or see. I have been in the service of the Vorlons for centuries, looking for you. Diogenes with his lamp, looking for an honest man willing to die for all the wrong reasons."
I already figured this was foreshadowing Londo - and possibly in ways I haven't learned yet; you all have done great at keeping his season 4-5 plot under wraps, please continue to do so! - but I did not see G'Kar coming at all. Londo at least dies for grander principles, his people's survival as well as Delenn and Sheridan's lives, even if it is indeed a noble death in the dark that no one will know about. But G'Kar dies for Londo, full stop. (And to save the Centauri, a twist his younger self could never have guessed. But mostly for Londo.)
- One thing I haven't really addressed is that I feel like the back half of season 3 is struggling somewhat to find things to do with the members of the crew who aren't directly involved in either the Shadow war or the Narn/Centauri plot - namely Garibaldi, Franklin, and Ivanova. Ivanova is mostly stuck watching the station while the others are out, and Garibaldi and Franklin have primarily been shunted off into side plots. (It's Dragonball Z syndrome, basically, where the cast is growing too large, and the original core characters' skill sets are too peripheral to what has become the primary plot, to center them anymore.) They get some nice scenes, but feel peripheral to the core plot. Fingers crossed the trend doesn't accelerate as badly as it did in DBZ, I guess? (Once again, I'm idly speculating based on very little advance knowledge, so I'd rather not know about their future plots, please!)
- Apparently Talia really did just vanish into a future black-hole prison. (I assume Bester was just trying to get a reaction out of them with the "dissected" line, so she might not be dead, but I genuinely thought she was being set up for a lot more than seems to be the case so far. She might come back in future eps, though! Once again, I'm enjoying not knowing.)
- I was never a big fan of Kosh or especially invested in whatever Kosh and Sheridan had going on, but Kosh channeling Sheridan's dad to say goodbye was a really neat moment; it was just such a nicely understated use of psychic powers, where you can tell without being told that Kosh is using the machinery of Sheridan's own mind to talk to him.
- I love all the little technological details like the Earth-based ships and stations, even warships, using spin gravity; Earth clearly does not have native artificial gravity tech, even if some of the aliens do. I was noticing - because I wanted to point it out to Orion - that we rarely see the curved inner hallways on B5 that we regularly did in season one, but I do like that the show is pretty consistent about keeping track of where the gravity is light or nonexistent, e.g. Sheridan's stroll on the vanes of the station requires magnetic boots, and of course the scene where the tube transport blows up and Sheridan has a slow-motion fall in the S2 finale. Or people needing to be strapped into small Earth-based transports because presumably they don't have gravity. Orion liked the use of mass drivers in the Narn bombardment. (I mean, "liked" for values of "that makes sense both that it would be banned as a WMD by future treaties, and also nations in a habit of ignoring those treaties would use them anyway.")
- I also really love how the show has a lot of really beautifully staged scenes and set-pieces, even working within the limitations of 90s budgets and CGI; it's just really a pretty show sometimes. The scene where Delenn and Sheridan finally kiss against a backdrop of Minbari warships on the bridge of the White Star is one of those, and I absolutely love their war room. Or G'Kar turning and walking away in the Narn catacombs, that's such a beautifully staged moment, and there are so many scenes where they take advantage of camera angles and lighting to make the show sing even when they're limited by what they're working with.
- And I think that the S3 flash-forwards to the apocalyptic future, as well as Londo's classical-tragedy life choices, really made me aware this season of how operatic this show feels; it's grand, it's big, it's rolling towards something grand and tragic and memorable. I feel like this show is pulling it off better than just about anything else I've seen; I was especially thinking about Foundation, which also deals with galactic scope and operatic events, but is simply too compressed to really have the feeling of grandeur and epic scope that B5 pulls off even without the thousands-of-years time scale. The interweaving tapestry of different storylines in B5 is part of what gives it that sense, and also a certain amount of messiness as characters weave in and out, actors get other jobs and the show has to work around them, etc. I feel like you actually need some sprawl to really get that epic feel, and modern short-season, tightly scripted shows have lost some of the messy edges and the unraveled threads that are part of what makes B5 feel so real.
- I also, at times, genuinely can't believe that this show was written during the Clinton years. It's a show that could easily feel like a fictional reaction to a lot of what came after (the Bush years, 9/11, the current era) more than it feels like a reaction to what came before. But I think if it had been written directly in response to something like that, it would feel dated and uncomfortably allegorical (like a lot of post-9/11 or first-Trump-presidency media now does) and instead there's a timelessness to it, where it's aware enough of the trends and political realities that it's depicting that it can fit into a wide array of historical eras and feel of that time. It doesn't feel anything like as dated as I thought it might.
ETA: Oh yeah, one more thing. I've been trying to figure out how the heck much of this show did I watch back in the 90s, and I'm still not sure!
I know that I stopped watching when I went to college in fall 1995. I thought I'd seen the first two or three seasons in their entirety, then missed seasons four and five (and maybe three). But based on airdates, and also my very glitchy recollections of the show (where I retained a lot of details from season one and early season two, but not much else) I think it's more complicated than that. I'm pretty sure I saw all of season one, a lot of season two, and then it got intermittent from there.
I am absolutely positive I've seen some of the recent eps - I definitely remember the apocalyptic flash-forwards now that I've seen them - and I think what probably happened was that I stopped watching near the end of season two, then picked up in mid-season three and saw most or all of that. I also think I might have seen some random episodes from other seasons, because I have a very clear recollection of some scenes from an episode that has definitely not happened in the part I've seen, and it's too specific to think I made it up entirely.
- One thing that only occurred to me when I was chatting in comments is that the "And the Rock Cried Out" scene with Refa's death juxtaposed with the gospel song is not just using the song's lyrics and upbeat melody for ironic contrast with the violent events happening on Narn. It's also juxtaposing the scene of people from different species and religions coming together in the church, vs the bloody and violent fallout of Londo and G'Kar's temporary alliance: Narns and Centauri working together to the same end at last, and that end is a murder of vengeance for both races. It's an interesting underscore to G'Kar's earlier drug-fueled vision about Narns and Centauri being essentially two sides of the same bloody coin. They can cooperate, as it turns out, but can they cooperate for anything other than vengeance and death? And yet it's interesting to have that common ground between them, that they'll put their differences aside if it's a matter of retaliatory murder.
- I also had and still have a lot of thoughts about how directly the Inquisitor's words to Delenn foreshadow, not just Londo's fate, which I had guessed even at the time was being set up there, but G'Kar's even more directly.
"How do you know the chosen ones? No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions. Not for glory. Not for fame. For one person. In the dark. Where no one will ever know ... or see. I have been in the service of the Vorlons for centuries, looking for you. Diogenes with his lamp, looking for an honest man willing to die for all the wrong reasons."
I already figured this was foreshadowing Londo - and possibly in ways I haven't learned yet; you all have done great at keeping his season 4-5 plot under wraps, please continue to do so! - but I did not see G'Kar coming at all. Londo at least dies for grander principles, his people's survival as well as Delenn and Sheridan's lives, even if it is indeed a noble death in the dark that no one will know about. But G'Kar dies for Londo, full stop. (And to save the Centauri, a twist his younger self could never have guessed. But mostly for Londo.)
- One thing I haven't really addressed is that I feel like the back half of season 3 is struggling somewhat to find things to do with the members of the crew who aren't directly involved in either the Shadow war or the Narn/Centauri plot - namely Garibaldi, Franklin, and Ivanova. Ivanova is mostly stuck watching the station while the others are out, and Garibaldi and Franklin have primarily been shunted off into side plots. (It's Dragonball Z syndrome, basically, where the cast is growing too large, and the original core characters' skill sets are too peripheral to what has become the primary plot, to center them anymore.) They get some nice scenes, but feel peripheral to the core plot. Fingers crossed the trend doesn't accelerate as badly as it did in DBZ, I guess? (Once again, I'm idly speculating based on very little advance knowledge, so I'd rather not know about their future plots, please!)
- Apparently Talia really did just vanish into a future black-hole prison. (I assume Bester was just trying to get a reaction out of them with the "dissected" line, so she might not be dead, but I genuinely thought she was being set up for a lot more than seems to be the case so far. She might come back in future eps, though! Once again, I'm enjoying not knowing.)
- I was never a big fan of Kosh or especially invested in whatever Kosh and Sheridan had going on, but Kosh channeling Sheridan's dad to say goodbye was a really neat moment; it was just such a nicely understated use of psychic powers, where you can tell without being told that Kosh is using the machinery of Sheridan's own mind to talk to him.
- I love all the little technological details like the Earth-based ships and stations, even warships, using spin gravity; Earth clearly does not have native artificial gravity tech, even if some of the aliens do. I was noticing - because I wanted to point it out to Orion - that we rarely see the curved inner hallways on B5 that we regularly did in season one, but I do like that the show is pretty consistent about keeping track of where the gravity is light or nonexistent, e.g. Sheridan's stroll on the vanes of the station requires magnetic boots, and of course the scene where the tube transport blows up and Sheridan has a slow-motion fall in the S2 finale. Or people needing to be strapped into small Earth-based transports because presumably they don't have gravity. Orion liked the use of mass drivers in the Narn bombardment. (I mean, "liked" for values of "that makes sense both that it would be banned as a WMD by future treaties, and also nations in a habit of ignoring those treaties would use them anyway.")
- I also really love how the show has a lot of really beautifully staged scenes and set-pieces, even working within the limitations of 90s budgets and CGI; it's just really a pretty show sometimes. The scene where Delenn and Sheridan finally kiss against a backdrop of Minbari warships on the bridge of the White Star is one of those, and I absolutely love their war room. Or G'Kar turning and walking away in the Narn catacombs, that's such a beautifully staged moment, and there are so many scenes where they take advantage of camera angles and lighting to make the show sing even when they're limited by what they're working with.
- And I think that the S3 flash-forwards to the apocalyptic future, as well as Londo's classical-tragedy life choices, really made me aware this season of how operatic this show feels; it's grand, it's big, it's rolling towards something grand and tragic and memorable. I feel like this show is pulling it off better than just about anything else I've seen; I was especially thinking about Foundation, which also deals with galactic scope and operatic events, but is simply too compressed to really have the feeling of grandeur and epic scope that B5 pulls off even without the thousands-of-years time scale. The interweaving tapestry of different storylines in B5 is part of what gives it that sense, and also a certain amount of messiness as characters weave in and out, actors get other jobs and the show has to work around them, etc. I feel like you actually need some sprawl to really get that epic feel, and modern short-season, tightly scripted shows have lost some of the messy edges and the unraveled threads that are part of what makes B5 feel so real.
- I also, at times, genuinely can't believe that this show was written during the Clinton years. It's a show that could easily feel like a fictional reaction to a lot of what came after (the Bush years, 9/11, the current era) more than it feels like a reaction to what came before. But I think if it had been written directly in response to something like that, it would feel dated and uncomfortably allegorical (like a lot of post-9/11 or first-Trump-presidency media now does) and instead there's a timelessness to it, where it's aware enough of the trends and political realities that it's depicting that it can fit into a wide array of historical eras and feel of that time. It doesn't feel anything like as dated as I thought it might.
ETA: Oh yeah, one more thing. I've been trying to figure out how the heck much of this show did I watch back in the 90s, and I'm still not sure!
I know that I stopped watching when I went to college in fall 1995. I thought I'd seen the first two or three seasons in their entirety, then missed seasons four and five (and maybe three). But based on airdates, and also my very glitchy recollections of the show (where I retained a lot of details from season one and early season two, but not much else) I think it's more complicated than that. I'm pretty sure I saw all of season one, a lot of season two, and then it got intermittent from there.
I am absolutely positive I've seen some of the recent eps - I definitely remember the apocalyptic flash-forwards now that I've seen them - and I think what probably happened was that I stopped watching near the end of season two, then picked up in mid-season three and saw most or all of that. I also think I might have seen some random episodes from other seasons, because I have a very clear recollection of some scenes from an episode that has definitely not happened in the part I've seen, and it's too specific to think I made it up entirely.
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