Episode 3.17: War Without End (Part 2)
Let's get this out of the way up front: we don't have to like the same things. You can love this episode with all your heart, and I can think it's boring and disappointing, and neither of us is "wrong"--we just have different reactions to the same piece of art. In many ways that's the purpose of art. If we all felt exactly the same way about a piece of art that would be a sign that it's is Bad Art, because it is not taking the risks it needs to take to be powerful.
Now, with that out of the way: I thought this episode was boring and disappointing.
WAR WITHOUT END includes several references to other things going on in the series, but it's not really a part of a long, ongoing story, it's just the third part of a three-part episode, the first part of which was two seasons earlier than the rest. Up until the final shot, in fact, with Valen and the Vorlons, the trilogy is pretty solidly self-contained. And what bothered me more than anything--more than the obvious retcons, and more than the shocking number of inconsistencies with BABYLON SQUARED, is how small it ended up feeling. BABYLON SQUARED hinted at vast mysteries, and incredible powers at play, and then all WAR WITHOUT END gave us was a behind-the-scenes caper that took itself very seriously but was plotted like a hallway farce. I expected the mystical culmination of years-long plans and prophecies, and all I got was Ivanova running around in the back halls of the station, dodging guards and powering up fusion reactors. I was promised a Babylon 4 "unmoored in time," jumping back and forth and showing its crew glimpses of innumerable futures, going on and on until they nearly went mad and were desperate to get out, but then all I got was a single time jump and on quick Delenn vision. The only one unmoored in time was Sheridan, and that was almost certainly done as an excuse to get him out of the way while the rest of the cast was doing their hallway farce.
There were exactly three parts of this story that I liked:
1) Londo gave an even better performance in Part 2 than he did in Part 1. Angry Vengeance Londo was cool, but Drunkenly Outwits A Mind Control Parasite Londo was incredible. The story behind it was great--the idea that he's just a puppet to a nasty eyeball monster is so much more interesting than the "you ruined my planet" story they hinted at, and huge kudos for that very clever fakeout. But beyond that, as I said, it was the performance that made it really sing. I have never been a Londo fan, and even when I enjoy one of his stories I feel like I'm doing it in spite of his performance, instead of because of it. Every now and then, though, he hits it out of the park, and his very best mode is "tragicly bemoaning faded glory." The stuff at the end, with one-eyed G'Kar recontextualizing the whole strangle scene, and Vir kind of haplessly picking up the Imperial seal, felt very weak and--again--smaller than I had hoped that story would eventually play out, but the lead up to it, and Londo telling them to get out quickly before the Keeper woke up and forced him to kill them, was fantastic.
2) When The One takes off the spacesuit helmet and reveals Delenn instead of Sinclair. This isn't maybe exactly a retcon to BABYLON SQUARED, because we never actually saw Sinclair take his helmet off right there in that scene, but we saw him take it off like two seconds later in a different scene, so we assumed, and when The One took off the helmet and it was Delenn I was shocked, and momentarily elated because I took it as a sign that Delenn had somehow changed the timeline, and it was going in a different way now. That's not what it actually meant--it was just that there were three people in space suits and they were all The One, and it was lame--but for a moment there I got really excited.
3) The final bit where Sinclair turns into not just a Minbari but Valen himself. I don't know where the Vorlons came from, and honestly that felt a little unearned--Sinclair did all the work, and then they show up to claim the glory--but even so, the idea that Valen is actually Sinclair is hugely cool and exciting to me. Everyone saw the "he wrote a letter to himself in the past" thing coming a mile away, pretty much the instant the letter was revealed in Part 1, but I didn't predict the Minbari thing or the Valen thing, and they both fit so perfectly with the whole shared-soul business. The flashbacks were clunky, as always, but probably still helpful to people who watched this in its original run instead of binge-ing.
Other than those three things, though...meh? Why did we have to wait two years for parts two and three of this arc, when it could have come right on the heels of BABYLON SQUARED and been just as strong, and probably stronger? They didn't spend the intervening time developing this story in any way--outside of the Londo stuff, which is 100% independent from the Babylon 4 stuff, the ongoing storyine didn't inform or alter this substory at all. Waiting didn't gain us anything except the need to retcon Sheridan into it and the need to add some flashbacks so the audience wouldn't be lost.
And speaking of Sheridan, I am DYING to know what this story was originally going to look like before they had to find a way to fit him into it. What were they originally planning? What did The One refer to before they came up with the Holy Trinity nonsense? There is no way that any of this went down the way it was originally intended, and those obvious discrepancies are probably the main reason I didn't enjoy the episode: because the seams were showing, and because I was constantly distracted by speculation in a way I haven't been since Sheridan's first appearance. I suspect that a lot of my complaints about the story feeling smaller than expected come from the changes they were forced to make from their original storyline. Maybe I'm wrong--I'm almost certainly wrong about some of it--but it just felt so...jury-rigged. A broken story cobbled together from the fragments of a previous outline.
And speaking of a broken story: holy CRAP were there a ton of continuity errors with BABYLON SQUARED. Why go to all the trouble of lining the new story up with the old one, to the point that they literally started using old footage from the first episode, if you're going to ignore so much of it? Zathras appeared out of nowhere in the conference room; here they found him in a storage room and brought him there. Delenn was wearing red in the original "talk to Sinclair in a spacesuit" scene, but here she's not. And I guarantee that if I go to wikipedia it's going to point out a ton of other continuity problems. And I further guarantee that if I go to a fan site they're going to propose a convoluted justification for all of them. But I don't understand how the episode can simultaneous respect and disrespect its own backstory so strongly, and so simultaneously.
Whatever. This episode didn't do it for me at all, and in the process it wasted (in my opinion) several of the cooler promises the show has made about its future. Alas. But it still made me excited to watch more, which is something very few of my "didn't like this" episodes have managed to pull off. So...yay?
Now, with that out of the way: I thought this episode was boring and disappointing.
WAR WITHOUT END includes several references to other things going on in the series, but it's not really a part of a long, ongoing story, it's just the third part of a three-part episode, the first part of which was two seasons earlier than the rest. Up until the final shot, in fact, with Valen and the Vorlons, the trilogy is pretty solidly self-contained. And what bothered me more than anything--more than the obvious retcons, and more than the shocking number of inconsistencies with BABYLON SQUARED, is how small it ended up feeling. BABYLON SQUARED hinted at vast mysteries, and incredible powers at play, and then all WAR WITHOUT END gave us was a behind-the-scenes caper that took itself very seriously but was plotted like a hallway farce. I expected the mystical culmination of years-long plans and prophecies, and all I got was Ivanova running around in the back halls of the station, dodging guards and powering up fusion reactors. I was promised a Babylon 4 "unmoored in time," jumping back and forth and showing its crew glimpses of innumerable futures, going on and on until they nearly went mad and were desperate to get out, but then all I got was a single time jump and on quick Delenn vision. The only one unmoored in time was Sheridan, and that was almost certainly done as an excuse to get him out of the way while the rest of the cast was doing their hallway farce.
There were exactly three parts of this story that I liked:
1) Londo gave an even better performance in Part 2 than he did in Part 1. Angry Vengeance Londo was cool, but Drunkenly Outwits A Mind Control Parasite Londo was incredible. The story behind it was great--the idea that he's just a puppet to a nasty eyeball monster is so much more interesting than the "you ruined my planet" story they hinted at, and huge kudos for that very clever fakeout. But beyond that, as I said, it was the performance that made it really sing. I have never been a Londo fan, and even when I enjoy one of his stories I feel like I'm doing it in spite of his performance, instead of because of it. Every now and then, though, he hits it out of the park, and his very best mode is "tragicly bemoaning faded glory." The stuff at the end, with one-eyed G'Kar recontextualizing the whole strangle scene, and Vir kind of haplessly picking up the Imperial seal, felt very weak and--again--smaller than I had hoped that story would eventually play out, but the lead up to it, and Londo telling them to get out quickly before the Keeper woke up and forced him to kill them, was fantastic.
2) When The One takes off the spacesuit helmet and reveals Delenn instead of Sinclair. This isn't maybe exactly a retcon to BABYLON SQUARED, because we never actually saw Sinclair take his helmet off right there in that scene, but we saw him take it off like two seconds later in a different scene, so we assumed, and when The One took off the helmet and it was Delenn I was shocked, and momentarily elated because I took it as a sign that Delenn had somehow changed the timeline, and it was going in a different way now. That's not what it actually meant--it was just that there were three people in space suits and they were all The One, and it was lame--but for a moment there I got really excited.
3) The final bit where Sinclair turns into not just a Minbari but Valen himself. I don't know where the Vorlons came from, and honestly that felt a little unearned--Sinclair did all the work, and then they show up to claim the glory--but even so, the idea that Valen is actually Sinclair is hugely cool and exciting to me. Everyone saw the "he wrote a letter to himself in the past" thing coming a mile away, pretty much the instant the letter was revealed in Part 1, but I didn't predict the Minbari thing or the Valen thing, and they both fit so perfectly with the whole shared-soul business. The flashbacks were clunky, as always, but probably still helpful to people who watched this in its original run instead of binge-ing.
Other than those three things, though...meh? Why did we have to wait two years for parts two and three of this arc, when it could have come right on the heels of BABYLON SQUARED and been just as strong, and probably stronger? They didn't spend the intervening time developing this story in any way--outside of the Londo stuff, which is 100% independent from the Babylon 4 stuff, the ongoing storyine didn't inform or alter this substory at all. Waiting didn't gain us anything except the need to retcon Sheridan into it and the need to add some flashbacks so the audience wouldn't be lost.
And speaking of Sheridan, I am DYING to know what this story was originally going to look like before they had to find a way to fit him into it. What were they originally planning? What did The One refer to before they came up with the Holy Trinity nonsense? There is no way that any of this went down the way it was originally intended, and those obvious discrepancies are probably the main reason I didn't enjoy the episode: because the seams were showing, and because I was constantly distracted by speculation in a way I haven't been since Sheridan's first appearance. I suspect that a lot of my complaints about the story feeling smaller than expected come from the changes they were forced to make from their original storyline. Maybe I'm wrong--I'm almost certainly wrong about some of it--but it just felt so...jury-rigged. A broken story cobbled together from the fragments of a previous outline.
And speaking of a broken story: holy CRAP were there a ton of continuity errors with BABYLON SQUARED. Why go to all the trouble of lining the new story up with the old one, to the point that they literally started using old footage from the first episode, if you're going to ignore so much of it? Zathras appeared out of nowhere in the conference room; here they found him in a storage room and brought him there. Delenn was wearing red in the original "talk to Sinclair in a spacesuit" scene, but here she's not. And I guarantee that if I go to wikipedia it's going to point out a ton of other continuity problems. And I further guarantee that if I go to a fan site they're going to propose a convoluted justification for all of them. But I don't understand how the episode can simultaneous respect and disrespect its own backstory so strongly, and so simultaneously.
Whatever. This episode didn't do it for me at all, and in the process it wasted (in my opinion) several of the cooler promises the show has made about its future. Alas. But it still made me excited to watch more, which is something very few of my "didn't like this" episodes have managed to pull off. So...yay?
The original series "bible" is out there and available. In short though: The original plan was for Babylon 5 to be destroyed at the end of the original 5 year arc. THEN Babylon 4 would appear from the past. If you pay attention closely you can see the B4 actually has engines, it can move like a VERY large space ship (i.e. it moves SLOWLY).
ReplyDeleteThe series would have then moved into a sequel series "Babylon Prime" which would have featured them carrying on the war from a mobile Babylon 4.
The Delenn dress thing? I believe JMS has basically admitted they goofed up on that one. It's definitely just a straight continuity error.