Episode 3.8: Messages From Earth

It’s another Krang and Shredder episode, revealing to the main cast that Earth Force is in league with the Shadows. They go a step further in revealing that PsiCorps is also involved, which we suspected but which I’m sad to have confirmed, because now all of our villains are in one basket. They balance this a bit, though, with hints that Earth is not 100% married to the Shadow game plan, and is trying to pull some shenanigans behind their backs. Variety in our evil factions is always a good thing.

The story here is that Matlock’s assistant Michelle Thomas is still alive in the future, where she has become an archeologist on Mars. Remember in the last episode when a dying British guy told Marcus his “package” was on its way from Mars? Well, she’s the package. In the episode’s standout sequence, she has a secret meeting with Sheridan et al in which she describes digging up an ancient alien structure that turned out to be a derelict Shadow ship. Even non-functional, it had the power to kill, and Earth Force unsuprisingly took it over as soon as they heard about the find. Another Shadow ship showed up to help dig it out, and then our intrepid archeologist heard that they were planning to move the ship to Earth to study it in more detail. I don’t know why this is better than studying it in the middle Martian Nowhere, where it was already hidden and could have stayed so indefinitely, but one likely scenario is that they were trying to get it away from the Shadows—there are very strong hints that Earth intended to learn the ship’s secrets and use its technology for themselves. Michelle Thomas (here called Dr. Mary Kirkish) knows that this is Bad News Bears, and escapes to B5 to warn the Rangers.

You might be wondering how Kirkish knew about the Rangers, in order to contact them? The show wondered the same thing, and decided that the easiest way to close that circle was to invent a new backstory for Garibaldi in which he saw some of the same stuff back when he was working on Mars, and for some reason only just now decided to tell us. He’s even the one with the physical evidence linking PsiCorps to the “use alien tech to create superweapons” plot, which you think he might have mentioned during one of his previous rants about PsiCorps, but Garibaldi apparently plays things very close to the chest. He’s seen footage of the Shadow ships; he’s been in conversations with Sheridan and co. where they all try to figure out what these things are; and yet in none of them did he deign to mention that he’d totally seen one of those same exact ships on Mars several years ago. OKAY, GARIBALDI, BE THAT WAY. The only way the show could have been any clunkier about this was to have him hold up the PsiCorps symbol and say “plus I found this: it’s called a retcon.” And Garibaldi’s involvement isn’t even vital to this particular story, so I assume it’s vital for something in the future. There’s no reason to do it otherwise.

Sheridan's response to this is to jump on the White Star and zoom on over to Mars and blow the ship up, which feels like maybe not the best plan in the world, but he's the Captain so off they go. They get there just as the humans attempt to board the ship to fly it to Earth, which goes horrible wrong because this seems to wake the ship up enough that it can now fly itself to wherever it wants to go. Dr. Kirkish described the ship insta-killing someone who touched it, saying "it was like it sucked out his life force," and though the episode makes no specific hypothesis in this direction it seems awfully connected to the moment where a human enters the ship, something unseen but horrible happens, and then the ship wakes up and goes rogue. Do the shadow ships literally suck life force? Is that how they power themselves? I'll guess we'll find out. For now, Sheridan decides to bust a cap, and we watch a bunch of CG ships and laser blasts until finally Delenn comes up with the technobabble solution that saves the day. The White Star manages to trick the Shadow into flying too deep into Jupiter and getting crushed, but by then the Agamemnon has showed up, and the only way for the White Star to escape is to open a jump gate inside Jupiter's atmosphere. Nobody thought this was possible, but Delenn recites some dialogue and Sheridan does it and it works flawlessly, with zero complications or side effects. Maybe just nobody ever TRIED to open a jump gate inside of an atmosphere before? Maybe the White Star is equipped with a special Deus Ex Machina Compensator? Whatever, B5. They all make it home and everyone's fine.

Pause for a rant: I'm sure that if I'd seen this episode during it's original run I would have LOVED this whole fight sequence. Finally the good guys are doing something! Stuff blows up! But the older I get the more I find that I'm bored silly by most fight scenes. A good fight scene will either be technically amazing or it will reveal something vital about the characters; most fight scenes are just a loooooong way of saying "and then this guy stopped this other guy." If your entire space battle can be summed up with "Sheridan blows up the Shadow ship and then escapes," I don't want to have to sit through five minutes of pointless noise just to get to the part where he blows up the Shadow ship and escapes. "The only part that matters is who wins, so just let me know when that happens and I'll start watching again." And yes, I know that if Sheridan was able to do it in five seconds it would undermine the threat of the Shadows--I understand that it has to be hard to work in the narrative--but there's got to be a way to be interesting and weight-bearing at the same time. Some shows manage to pull it off. The fight scenes in the movie "Game Night" are great, because they double as fantastic physical humor. The fight scenes in most Hong Kong action movies are great, because they showcase incredible technical prowess and skill. The lightsaber battles in episodes 4, 5, and 6 of Star Wars movies are practically character studies, and we can watch Luke and Darth grow and change as people literally while they fight. But those are the exceptions, and most fight scenes we get in the world are narrative drudgery. They're the story treading water while somebody gets punched, or something blows up, or a car goes really fast. So I can't really blame B5 anymore than I can blame the rest of the entire storytelling world, but I just wanted to let you know that this episode pauses its story for a good five minutes while the director spends a ton of money on CGI and the audience plays with their phones. Stop doing that, TV and movies.

So, um, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, MESSAGES FROM EARTH. The B-plot here is about Kenickie and the Nightwatch: some blonde security dude we've never seen before--and will presumably never see again even though he seems to run the local Nightwatch--calls a meeting and warns everybody that the enemies of Earth have infiltrated the highest ranks of command, including possibly here on the station. One of them mentions that they haven't seen Sheridan in a while, and Blondie looks into it, and yep, it turns out that Sheridan hasn't been on the station in four days. They don't know he was off blowing up Mars, but they're still suspicious, and Blondie asks Zack to look into it. And Zack doesn't really want to, and he feels bad that he doesn't have the friendly rapport with Garibaldi that he apparently used to have offscreen somewhere, and nothing really happens but it's the best and most interesting the Nightwatch story has ever been. Will Zack get closer to Garibaldi? Will he inform on them or join them? Does the freedom of the galaxy hinge on this lazy moron trying to figure out how to do the right thing? I've always tolerated the Nightwatch as a good but unsavory story, but now I am super invested in it. Now it's been built up to the point that they can start paying it off. Score one more for JMS and the slow-burn, ongoing story format.

What's weird about the Nightwatch, though, is that they're super concerned about Sheridan not really being around for a while, but they don't even think twice about a government fugitive coming to the station. Earth Force knows Dr. Kirkish is here, because they sent assassins to kill her, and Blondie is in touch with Earth Force command because he is constantly relaying orders and information back and forth with them. Why didn't anyone tell them about the fugitive? "Hey, we sent some guys to pick up a dangerous traitor, but some annoying British guy with a quarterstaff beat the living crap out them. Can you maybe look into that?"...is not something that anyone says at any point in this episode. It just feels so weird to spend all their focus on people who might be traitors, instead of looking for the person who literally does traitorous things that they already know about.

And speaking of Marcus, there's a C-plot in the story, too! They had to pay him to be in the quarterstaff scene anyway, so they may as well use him in a few others while he's there. The C-plot is all about Marcus and Ivanova: he's constantly wooing her, and she thinks he's an idiot, and despite the whole flower misunderstanding last week there is no mention here of flowers or anything related to them: Marcus finished the last episode thinking Ivanova liked him (like, liked-him liked him), but now there's no mention of that, and no interest in following up on that misunderstanding. Instead we get a scene where Ivanova says, in effect: "You're annoying and you don't do anything and I don't even know why you're here," to which the entire audience says "YES, thank you, finally somebody said it." Marcus, instead of answering any of these questions, builds the world's worst third grade book report and waltzes in to Ivanova's quarters with it and SOMEHOW IT WORKS. He cut photos out of a magazine, glued them to poster board, cackled to himself about how this was a surefire ticket to Ivanova's pants, and against all odds and logic and flying directly in the face of Ivanova's character she actually responds to it. She hates this guy and everything he says, and now for no reason other than plot convenience he wins over; the broad outline said "we need these two to like each other by the end of episode eight," and this was the best they could come up with.

Does it sound like I'm complaining about lazy writing? Because I'm complaining about lazy writing. How do we get a personal connection to this archeologist? Let's give Garibaldi a backstory that doesn't fit with anything else in the series. How do we get Ivanova to warm up to Marcus? Let's skip the part where he actually wins her over, and just write a scene where she laughs at his dumb jokes and all is forgotten. How do we resolve this cool plot with the Shadow ship on Mars? Um, let's do a five minute fight scene and then a big deus ex machina to bring it all home. This episode had stuff I really liked: guest star Nancy Stafford was great, and her story/flashback was tense and frightening. The developments with Zack and the Nightwatch were cool and compelling. The one little scene with G'Kar in prison was, as should be no surprise by now, fantastic. But the rest of it was just kind of sloppy. Big stuff happened, and we end the episode under Martial Law, but getting to that point was a lot less fun and interesting than it could have been. It's not a bad episode, but it's mostly filler, which is not really what I want from a mytharc ep.