Episode 3.7: Exogenesis
I’d probably like this episode a lot more if I liked Marcus. It has everything I dig in a B% episode: it focuses on Franklin, who’s my favorite of the main cast; it introduces a minor sidekick who I genuinely like, and it tells a cool mystery story about gross monsters who turn out to be benevolent and awesome. Unfortunately, as mentioned, it also has Marcus, in quantities that I’m simply not prepared to ingest. I now have a mental stomach ache.
Babylon 5 has a tendency to just throw us into the deep end of a character, assuming that we’ll like them because they’re a lead in the story, without every bothering to introduce them properly or show us tangible reasons WHY we should like them. In practice, this hangs a character entirely on their performance: if the actor can win you over, you’ll like the character no matter what they’ve done to deserve it, and if the actor doesn’t win you over then no amount of awesomeness can possibly make up for it. Marcus is a commando warrior from a shadow army, trained by aliens and dedicated to fight an ancient evil; in this episode we see him in his element, punching faces and taking names, and all of it SHOULD be super cool, but I just don’t like the guy. He’s obnoxious, he’s grating, and he keeps trying to be funny despite having no appreciable comic timing and working solely with dialogue written by JMS, who has the humor equivalent of face blindness. He even manages to drop some amazing “look how badass I am” one-liners—which, credit where it’s due, JMS is amazing at—and still can’t make me care. I suppose he could still grow on me, but seven episodes in I’m confident in stating my bad opinion, and I look forward to the day when Marcus gets Keffered in an arc finale.
The A-plot focuses on Marcus and Franklin and an epidemic of nasty neural parasites infesting Down Below. People are being taken over, and the process is so gross and the concept so inherently nasty that it takes us most of the episode before we realize that they’ve never actually shown them being evil. I don’t know at what point other viewers figured out that the parasites were actually good guys, but when I started to suspect it I got elated: nasty, yucky, invasive parasites that are also benevolent and wise and helping people rather than hurting them is an idea I don’t think I’ve ever seen in SF before, and I loved it. Imagine if the horrible brain bug thing from WRATH OF KHAN were also the symbiotes used by the Trill, and you can see the what they were going for. And I adore the way they used the parasite’s own yuckiness against us, allowing us to stereotype them as evil just because of their appearance—and then never putting a fine point on their metaphor. The parasites are ancient beings of advanced intelligence, who can only survive long-term when joined to another host, and who choose their hosts in a thoroughly moral and voluntary way. And sure, when it comes time for them to explain themselves they do it with not one but two (2) bad rewrites of the “Tears in the Rain” speech from BLADE RUNNER, but I will forgive them because the story as a whole was a great one. The only real downside is that I don’t hold out any actual hope for the parasites—despite effectively being on par with the Old Ones in terms of age and wisdom—will ever come back again. Wikipedia more or less confirms this, by the fact that the aliens do have a name, but it’s not clickable.
The B-plot has Sheridan asking Ivanova to scope out the newly-promoted Lt. Corwin to see if he'd be a help or a hindrance in their little shadow war. She drops the world's least subtle hint about getting to know him, which he OBVIOUSLY interprets as a come-on, because this show freaking loves putting Ivanova into quote-unquote "hilarious" sexual misunderstandings. Corwin buys her flowers, she laughs at them, he immediately backs down and says he found them outside her door, and blah blah blah this entire thing ends up being a setup for yet another "hilarious" sexual misunderstanding when she thinks Marcus sent them and gives them back, and he thinks she likes him enough to give him flowers. OH YAY, THIS WILL BE SO FUNNY. HA HA HA. A subplot where one of my favorite characters has to deal with one of my least favorite characters, and JMS will be writing ostensibly humorous dialogue? You're lucky I swore I'd watch this entire series, because that's enough to make me want to quit.
The actual Corwin stuff, by the way, is great. Corwin is wonderful, and manages to be legitimately hilarious by underplaying every scene he's in. His conversation with Ivanova about the flowers is fantastic because of everything he doesn't say--every time Marcus would have winked at the camera and waggled his eyebrows, Corwin just keeps his mouth shut and look slightly worried, and it works. Corwin is great. He is also, alas, totally faithful to Earth Force, and thus can't be brought in to their confidence, and thus I assume there will soon come a time when he, too, is Keffered, probably because he accidentally discovers some vital secret about the Rangers or the shadow war and then Ivanova has to kill him for the greater good. And it will be tragic and he has cute puppy dog eyes and she'll have to do it anyway. And maybe while he's dying he'll admit that the flowers were from him! It's going to be perfect. And then Marcus is going to ruin it all with a bad Groucho Marx impression, and I will break my laptop screen in rage.
Anyway. I don't grade episodes, but I give this one a...triangle? Triangle is defined, for our purposes today, as "way more good stuff than bad, including a great central story, brought down by my irrational dislike of a side character."
Babylon 5 has a tendency to just throw us into the deep end of a character, assuming that we’ll like them because they’re a lead in the story, without every bothering to introduce them properly or show us tangible reasons WHY we should like them. In practice, this hangs a character entirely on their performance: if the actor can win you over, you’ll like the character no matter what they’ve done to deserve it, and if the actor doesn’t win you over then no amount of awesomeness can possibly make up for it. Marcus is a commando warrior from a shadow army, trained by aliens and dedicated to fight an ancient evil; in this episode we see him in his element, punching faces and taking names, and all of it SHOULD be super cool, but I just don’t like the guy. He’s obnoxious, he’s grating, and he keeps trying to be funny despite having no appreciable comic timing and working solely with dialogue written by JMS, who has the humor equivalent of face blindness. He even manages to drop some amazing “look how badass I am” one-liners—which, credit where it’s due, JMS is amazing at—and still can’t make me care. I suppose he could still grow on me, but seven episodes in I’m confident in stating my bad opinion, and I look forward to the day when Marcus gets Keffered in an arc finale.
The A-plot focuses on Marcus and Franklin and an epidemic of nasty neural parasites infesting Down Below. People are being taken over, and the process is so gross and the concept so inherently nasty that it takes us most of the episode before we realize that they’ve never actually shown them being evil. I don’t know at what point other viewers figured out that the parasites were actually good guys, but when I started to suspect it I got elated: nasty, yucky, invasive parasites that are also benevolent and wise and helping people rather than hurting them is an idea I don’t think I’ve ever seen in SF before, and I loved it. Imagine if the horrible brain bug thing from WRATH OF KHAN were also the symbiotes used by the Trill, and you can see the what they were going for. And I adore the way they used the parasite’s own yuckiness against us, allowing us to stereotype them as evil just because of their appearance—and then never putting a fine point on their metaphor. The parasites are ancient beings of advanced intelligence, who can only survive long-term when joined to another host, and who choose their hosts in a thoroughly moral and voluntary way. And sure, when it comes time for them to explain themselves they do it with not one but two (2) bad rewrites of the “Tears in the Rain” speech from BLADE RUNNER, but I will forgive them because the story as a whole was a great one. The only real downside is that I don’t hold out any actual hope for the parasites—despite effectively being on par with the Old Ones in terms of age and wisdom—will ever come back again. Wikipedia more or less confirms this, by the fact that the aliens do have a name, but it’s not clickable.
The B-plot has Sheridan asking Ivanova to scope out the newly-promoted Lt. Corwin to see if he'd be a help or a hindrance in their little shadow war. She drops the world's least subtle hint about getting to know him, which he OBVIOUSLY interprets as a come-on, because this show freaking loves putting Ivanova into quote-unquote "hilarious" sexual misunderstandings. Corwin buys her flowers, she laughs at them, he immediately backs down and says he found them outside her door, and blah blah blah this entire thing ends up being a setup for yet another "hilarious" sexual misunderstanding when she thinks Marcus sent them and gives them back, and he thinks she likes him enough to give him flowers. OH YAY, THIS WILL BE SO FUNNY. HA HA HA. A subplot where one of my favorite characters has to deal with one of my least favorite characters, and JMS will be writing ostensibly humorous dialogue? You're lucky I swore I'd watch this entire series, because that's enough to make me want to quit.
The actual Corwin stuff, by the way, is great. Corwin is wonderful, and manages to be legitimately hilarious by underplaying every scene he's in. His conversation with Ivanova about the flowers is fantastic because of everything he doesn't say--every time Marcus would have winked at the camera and waggled his eyebrows, Corwin just keeps his mouth shut and look slightly worried, and it works. Corwin is great. He is also, alas, totally faithful to Earth Force, and thus can't be brought in to their confidence, and thus I assume there will soon come a time when he, too, is Keffered, probably because he accidentally discovers some vital secret about the Rangers or the shadow war and then Ivanova has to kill him for the greater good. And it will be tragic and he has cute puppy dog eyes and she'll have to do it anyway. And maybe while he's dying he'll admit that the flowers were from him! It's going to be perfect. And then Marcus is going to ruin it all with a bad Groucho Marx impression, and I will break my laptop screen in rage.
Anyway. I don't grade episodes, but I give this one a...triangle? Triangle is defined, for our purposes today, as "way more good stuff than bad, including a great central story, brought down by my irrational dislike of a side character."
Hey, glad to have you (and even your Marcus hatred which I don't share, but to each their own on characters of course) back with at the B5 grind.
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