Episode 1.1: Midnight on the Firing Line
Boy, this show just kind of throws you into the deep end, doesn't it? This was the first thing I ever watched of Babylon 5, sitting alone one night in my hotel room at PensaCon a couple of weeks ago; I knew the basic premise was "The UN but in space," and I knew it was a major landmark of long-form, serialized storytelling. I had not yet seen the pilot movie, because it wasn't available online so I had to track down a DVD, but I didn't want to wait and just jumped in and watched it. And I was super lost for most of it.
Who are all these people? What is their relationship to each other? There's a blonde woman who keeps following one of the officers around, looking like she's trying to talk to her but never actually trying to talk to her; turns out she was a telepath, apparently? I was halfway through the episode before I realized the boring fighter pilot was actually the captain of the station. I was even more than halfway through the episode before I realized the guy with the crazy haircut was an alien and not just a weird Russian stereotype--and that's saying something, since the entire plot of the episode is about a different alien attacking that alien's colony somewhere.
But it eventually all gets sorted out. Crazy haircut guy is a Centauri, and the snake-ish people who attacked them are Narn, and the bald lady with what's either a hat or a shell is a Minbari, and they're all ambassadors trying to maintain a fragile peace in a galaxy that's only recently recovered from a war. There's a fourth ambassador who's a Vorlon, and he lives in a special suit because he can't breath our atmosphere, and that's a nice touch that Star Trek rarely ever played with. There is not, to my knowledge, a human ambassador, which seems very weird, but I suppose Sinclair fills that role? In addition to being the station captain and for some reason a fighter pilot? That's a lot narrative weight on the shoulders of such a wet blanket. I have since watched the pilot movie, THE GATHERING, and Sinclair was outstanding in it, so I don't know why he seems so passive here. I hope he wakes up in future episodes.
Most of the episode hangs very heavily on haircut guy, Londo Mollari, which is too bad because I DO NOT LIKE HIM. Like Sinclair, he was stellar in the pilot but really weak here; I watched seven episodes of the series before finally tracking down the pilot on DVD, and I never warmed up to him in any of them. Like I said in my last post, a lot of people say he's their f avorite character, so I'm holding out hope--and he shows in the pilot that he can be riveting when he wants to be--so we'll see. His assistant looks like Bobby Moynihan from SNL, but this was 1993 so it's actually Stephen Furst, who (to be fair) was the early 90s version of Bobby Moynihan. So far the Centauri as a race seem like they're being played purely for laughs, as the Boris and Natasha of the galaxy, and yes I realize that this is a weird thing to say about an episode where a Centauri is driven to murderous revenge, but there it is. Maybe I was in a weird mood when I watched this? Because I didn't like or empathize with Londo in any way.
Some of the other characters are excellent, though. Don't get me wrong. G'Kar is great, Garibaldi is great, Ivanova is great, and the telepath that kept trying to track her down, named Talia, is also great. I still don't know why Talia was so intent on talking to Ivanova, but at least we learn why Ivanova was so intent on not talking to Talia: she hates telepaths because her mother was one, and the Psi-Corps drugged her into a stupor until she killed herself. That's the biggest, flashiest billboard yet proclaiming exactly what this show is and isn't: it isn't Star Trek, and this is not a utopia, and the "good guys" are going to do bad things in some pretty shocking ways. That one revelation, more than anything else, is what has me excited to keep watching this show. The writers obviously have a really rich world behind the scenes, and they're planning to dole it out in small chunks, hinting at a massive story, and despite my initial shock at the steep learning curve I am totally down for it. Let's do this.
(Side note: I know we get a black guy literally in the first scene of the next episode, but it was really bugging me all through this episode how white the whole cast is. The pilot had a black doctor and an asian XO; and the next episode gets another (different) black doctor; but this episode, as my introduction to the series, had me worried.)
Who are all these people? What is their relationship to each other? There's a blonde woman who keeps following one of the officers around, looking like she's trying to talk to her but never actually trying to talk to her; turns out she was a telepath, apparently? I was halfway through the episode before I realized the boring fighter pilot was actually the captain of the station. I was even more than halfway through the episode before I realized the guy with the crazy haircut was an alien and not just a weird Russian stereotype--and that's saying something, since the entire plot of the episode is about a different alien attacking that alien's colony somewhere.
But it eventually all gets sorted out. Crazy haircut guy is a Centauri, and the snake-ish people who attacked them are Narn, and the bald lady with what's either a hat or a shell is a Minbari, and they're all ambassadors trying to maintain a fragile peace in a galaxy that's only recently recovered from a war. There's a fourth ambassador who's a Vorlon, and he lives in a special suit because he can't breath our atmosphere, and that's a nice touch that Star Trek rarely ever played with. There is not, to my knowledge, a human ambassador, which seems very weird, but I suppose Sinclair fills that role? In addition to being the station captain and for some reason a fighter pilot? That's a lot narrative weight on the shoulders of such a wet blanket. I have since watched the pilot movie, THE GATHERING, and Sinclair was outstanding in it, so I don't know why he seems so passive here. I hope he wakes up in future episodes.
Most of the episode hangs very heavily on haircut guy, Londo Mollari, which is too bad because I DO NOT LIKE HIM. Like Sinclair, he was stellar in the pilot but really weak here; I watched seven episodes of the series before finally tracking down the pilot on DVD, and I never warmed up to him in any of them. Like I said in my last post, a lot of people say he's their f avorite character, so I'm holding out hope--and he shows in the pilot that he can be riveting when he wants to be--so we'll see. His assistant looks like Bobby Moynihan from SNL, but this was 1993 so it's actually Stephen Furst, who (to be fair) was the early 90s version of Bobby Moynihan. So far the Centauri as a race seem like they're being played purely for laughs, as the Boris and Natasha of the galaxy, and yes I realize that this is a weird thing to say about an episode where a Centauri is driven to murderous revenge, but there it is. Maybe I was in a weird mood when I watched this? Because I didn't like or empathize with Londo in any way.
Some of the other characters are excellent, though. Don't get me wrong. G'Kar is great, Garibaldi is great, Ivanova is great, and the telepath that kept trying to track her down, named Talia, is also great. I still don't know why Talia was so intent on talking to Ivanova, but at least we learn why Ivanova was so intent on not talking to Talia: she hates telepaths because her mother was one, and the Psi-Corps drugged her into a stupor until she killed herself. That's the biggest, flashiest billboard yet proclaiming exactly what this show is and isn't: it isn't Star Trek, and this is not a utopia, and the "good guys" are going to do bad things in some pretty shocking ways. That one revelation, more than anything else, is what has me excited to keep watching this show. The writers obviously have a really rich world behind the scenes, and they're planning to dole it out in small chunks, hinting at a massive story, and despite my initial shock at the steep learning curve I am totally down for it. Let's do this.
(Side note: I know we get a black guy literally in the first scene of the next episode, but it was really bugging me all through this episode how white the whole cast is. The pilot had a black doctor and an asian XO; and the next episode gets another (different) black doctor; but this episode, as my introduction to the series, had me worried.)
I heard that Peter Jurasik went up to Strazynkski with that hairstyle and said, “Hey, isn’t this awesome for my alien?” and Strazynski thought he was serious and said, “Oh yes,” and then Jurasik thought HE was serious, and what started as a joke became a thing.
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