Episode 1.2: Soul Hunter
I'm not gonna lie: this was a bad episode. The first ep convinced me that Babylon 5 was doing something different from Star Trek, and then this was just a bog-standard "monster of the week" Star Trek episode, and not even a good one. It wasn't enough to make me stop watching or anything--that honor belongs to 1.3, which I'll get to soon--but it was enough to dishearten me a little. If I wasn't at a con, bored in my hotel room at 1am, I honestly don't know if I would have kept going.
The basic premise is this: an alien shows up, and Delenn freaks out because he's a Soul Hunter, and then it turns out Soul Hunters are just misunderstood good guys, and then it turns out that this one's totally still bad though so someone's got to kill him. They "preserve" souls from people when they die, but this one kills people before their time so he can preserve them early, and of course he goes straight for Delenn because she's a Minbari princess or whatever, and I'm sure that will be important down the line but this was a boring way of revealing it. The officers figure out what's going on, and try to stop it, and Captain Boring But Still Always The Hero swoops in to save the day.
There's a scene in the pilot movie where somebody gets attacked, and the Captain looks RIGHT PAST his security officer to a junior lieutenant and says "alert security." Dude, Garibaldi is RIGHT THERE. This is literally his job. And I mention this here because the show very clearly does not know who Garibaldi is or what he's supposed to be doing. He job consists of investigating things, running through halls with an armed response team, and then being in the wrong place while Sinclair punches or shoots the bad guys. It's getting kind of silly. LET YOUR SECURITY OFFICER DO HIS JOB.
In other news, we have a doctor now, and while we don't really get to know him, we don't really know anybody at this point so it's okay. I like him, and he helps vary the lily-white cast a bit. And as much as I complain about everything, the actor playing the Soul Hunter really did a fantastic job: he was spooky and ominous and a powerful presence on screen, which was expecially useful in this episode because we didn't get any G'Kar (at least not that I remember).
Overall, this whol episode felt like a studio executive was leaning over the showrunner's shoulder saying "write a Star Trek episode, that's why we bought you." So he wrote them one, and that's fine: they got it out of their system, and now we can move on to the good stuff.
The basic premise is this: an alien shows up, and Delenn freaks out because he's a Soul Hunter, and then it turns out Soul Hunters are just misunderstood good guys, and then it turns out that this one's totally still bad though so someone's got to kill him. They "preserve" souls from people when they die, but this one kills people before their time so he can preserve them early, and of course he goes straight for Delenn because she's a Minbari princess or whatever, and I'm sure that will be important down the line but this was a boring way of revealing it. The officers figure out what's going on, and try to stop it, and Captain Boring But Still Always The Hero swoops in to save the day.
There's a scene in the pilot movie where somebody gets attacked, and the Captain looks RIGHT PAST his security officer to a junior lieutenant and says "alert security." Dude, Garibaldi is RIGHT THERE. This is literally his job. And I mention this here because the show very clearly does not know who Garibaldi is or what he's supposed to be doing. He job consists of investigating things, running through halls with an armed response team, and then being in the wrong place while Sinclair punches or shoots the bad guys. It's getting kind of silly. LET YOUR SECURITY OFFICER DO HIS JOB.
In other news, we have a doctor now, and while we don't really get to know him, we don't really know anybody at this point so it's okay. I like him, and he helps vary the lily-white cast a bit. And as much as I complain about everything, the actor playing the Soul Hunter really did a fantastic job: he was spooky and ominous and a powerful presence on screen, which was expecially useful in this episode because we didn't get any G'Kar (at least not that I remember).
Overall, this whol episode felt like a studio executive was leaning over the showrunner's shoulder saying "write a Star Trek episode, that's why we bought you." So he wrote them one, and that's fine: they got it out of their system, and now we can move on to the good stuff.
I also didn’t like this episode on first viewing. But when I watched it again after seeing the entire series I found it much better.
ReplyDeleteThat’s the greatest achievement of Straczynski I think, how he knew exactly where he was going. I was astonished when I rewatched those first few episodes which I thought were rather weak. And on second viewing they had such an emotional resonance. And they kind of overtly hint at very important things to come, but on first viewing you just don’t see them. Quite genius.