Season 1 Retrospective
So: I’ve finished Season 1. Time to take a look back at what we’ve seen, and what I think so far.
The first thing I notice, analyzing my own reactions, is that my “bad” reviews are way more entertaining than my “good” ones. When I like an episode I mostly just recap it, but when I don’t like an episode I get to make jokes. The rare third category of reaction is “let’s talk about the fascinating ideas this episode explores,” but this is not Star Trek, and idea episodes are rare; the only one that really stands out to me is BELIEVERS. What I worry about going forward is that, as the overall quality of the series improves (which by all accounts it does), every post will just be “and then this happened, and it was awesome,” which isn’t really all that fun to write or read. I need to find a way to keep this entertaining without pointlessly slamming a good episode for being less than perfect.
The other thing I notice, especially looking at the comments, is that I need to address the Commander Sinclair/Michael O’Hare issue. I make fun of Sinclair for two main things:
1) He was really boring and unfocused during the first few episodes; I don’t think he was really great until AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS.
2) He solves every problem, often by himself, even when someone on his staff is allegedly better at it. He does Garibaldi’s job as often as Garibaldi does, and frankly if he’d gone over Doctor Franklin’s head and tried to do surgery sometime it would not have surprised me—plus I bet he’d have been great at it, because he’s great at everything. I can’t be the first person to point out that Sinclair is a bit of a Mary Sue: super competent at everything, chased by attractive women, and has the writer’s same initials.
And the thing that everyone keeps saying to me is “you’re going to have a totally different persepctive on this when you find out what was going on behind the scenes.” And maybe I’m just being sensitive, but I suspect what they really mean is “you’re going to feel like a jerk when you realize he was doing all of this while suffering from crippling mental illness.” So let’s address this directly. For starters, I already knew about the mental illness; I never watched the show before, but I was culturally aware of it, so when the news broke in 2012 I read all about it. In short: Michael O’Hare had a severe mental issues, including delusions and hallucinations, which made filming the show incredibly difficult for him; JMS offered to hold the show for a few months while he dealt with it, but O’Hare didn’t want to hurt the show or the other actors so he backed out completely at the end of Season 1; he made JMS promise to keep it a secret until he died, and then to tell everyone because he wanted the fans to know the truth. I think the circumstances here are awful, and I think both men handled it not only well but nobly and admirably. They are class acts all around. But no, I don’t feel bad for joking about Sinclair because:
1) His early performance issues cleared up, and for episodes 8-22 his acting was top notch. He had some trouble finding the character, but then he found him and he was great. And I don’t think it’s any accident that the episode where he improved was the episode where Sinclair suffered from what was essentially delusions and hallucinations. O’Hare saw his character confront a false reality and fight back against it; he saw his character come to terms with a literal “hole in his mind.” This is pure speculation on my part, but I think it gave O’Hare the hook into his character that he hadn’t had before: this is a strong, capable man who can’t always trust his own mind, but chooses to forge ahead anyway and rely on his friends when he had to. I think he saw some of himself in Sinclair, and some of Sinclair in himself. You can see the level of confidence and assertiveness leap up in AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS, and it stays high for the rest of the season.
2) The “Sinclair is the best at everything” problem is not a commentary on O’Hare or his abilities, it’s a commentary on the writers. Why does Garibaldi get to perform a brilliant investigation, but then spend the climax running through the halls shouting into his comlink while Sinclair punches the bad guy into submission? And why does this happen over and over? Because the writers were making Sinclair the hero even when the story should have belonged to someone else. And this, too, cleared up as the season went on. In the second half of Season 1 Sinclair is a Commander functioning as a Commander, delegating and coordinating and spending his time talking to ambassadors and sparring with rivals and letting other people do the punching. Part of this is because the later episodes were finally beginning to focus more on politics and less on scary monsters running through the lower levels of the station, but I think most of it is just that after O’Hare figured his character out, the writers followed suit, and starting treating him differently.
The truth is that I came to really love Sinclair over the course of the season, and I’ll miss him a lot. They put the whole show on his shoulders during the early episodes, and he carried it out of necessity, and then he figured out what he was doing and started carrying the show out of pure talent and leadership, and I think he improved it overall. I picked a new favorite character almost every episode, and they were never him, but he was the foundation that everyone else worked off of. He helped make the show great.
Now, let's get into the fun stuff.
My favorite episodes of Season 1 (from best to slightly-not-as-best):
1: BABYLON SQUARED
2: CHRYSALIS
3: AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS
4: MIND WAR
5: EYES
BABYLON SQUARED is the kind of episode that hits me, personally, right in my happy place: it's a perfect example of what Babylon 5 can do, and what it's about, but it does so in a very Star Trekkie way, complete with temporal anomaly and Big Idea SF. Babylon 5 seems like it's mostly not about Big Idea SF, with a tighter focus on politics and schemes and character arcs, and I'm not complaining--I think that's awesome--but I suspect that this kind of "anomaly of the week" episode will become increasingly rare over the rest of the seasons. Season 1 of B5 was a show struggling to break out of Star Trek's shadow and become its own thing, and I'm glad that it finally did (in the aptly named CHRYSALIS), because I've already got five full Star Trek series on Netflix I can watch whenever I want, and I appreciate having something different. But BABYLON SQUARED landed squarely in the center of the Trek/B5 Venn diagram, doing everything both shows do best, and I loved it.
Eyes might seem like an odd choice, because it doesn't really stand out in any particular category--it wasn't an amazing story arc episode, or an amazing SF Idea episode, or even really an amazing "focus on one character" episode. On the other hand, it had rock-solid stories and performances from all three of the main Human characters, it had two great guest stars, it had a simple but beautiful character arc from the visiting Psi-Corps guy, and it had a scene where Ivanova frigging wrecks an entire bar. I loved it.
Runner up episodes include SIGNS AND PORTENTS, BELIEVERS, GRAIL, and THE GATHERING, any one of which could have been on this list if I'd made it on a different day or in a different mood. If we're allowing individual storylines removed from context, The Dr. Rosen stuff from QUALITY OF MERCY was easily top-5 material, but it gets dragged down by that stupid Londo/Lennier plot.
On that note, I was this close to writing in "The Ivanova half of TKO" as my number five pick, but no. I can't do it. That episode is just so bad, and no amount of awesome Ivanova can fully redeem it. Speaking of which:
My least favorite episodes of Season 1 (from least-worse to most-worse):
5: THE PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS
4: SURVIVORS
3:SOUL HUNTER
2: TKO
1: BORN TO THE PURPLE
PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS was an episode fully focused on G'Kar, in which he is--I suspect unintentionally--an inept buffoon. SURVIVORS was a good story about a guest star disguised as a bad story about Garibaldi. SOUL HUNTER was a Star Trek "monster of the week" reject. TKO was half-wonderful, half abysmal racist disaster. And BORN TO THE PURPLE, as I said in my review, literally made me turn off the show and decide that Babylon 5 was not for me, and this whole exercise was a bad idea. Many thanks to Alexi and Quincy, my comrades in arms, for talking me down from the ledge and convincing me to try again.
THE WAR PRAYER probably deserved to be on that list as well--I suspect that it is, in fact, objectively worse than PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS, but I had to rank that latter lower because of how poorly it treated my favorite character.
Speaking of which:
Dan's Favorite Characters (So Far):
1: G'Kar
2: Ivanova
3: Na'Toth
4: Zathras
5: Sinclair
6: Franklin
7: Kosh
8: Dr. Rosen
9: That Psi-Corps Guy in EYES
10: Neroon
Talia is not on the list because I want to like her more than I do. She's always incredibly passive and reactive; they need to give her something to do, and they need to do it soon. Garibaldi would probably be relatively high on the list, honestly, but I'm still not sure where they're going with his harassment of Talia. Don't underestimate how much those two scenes in A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS bothered me. I described Garibaldi in SURVIVORS as "the most likable, problem-free character on the station," and he's like that in almost every episode, and then he creeps on Talia in what seems like a pretty malicious way, and now he's not even in my top ten list. He lost out to a guy who I literally don't know a name for. That's bad, Garibaldi. Get your house in order.
And what about the other main characters? Delenn is at the center of a lot of exciting storylines, but she herself is not exciting in them. And Londo, well, you know my thoughts on Londo. He's a huge fan favorite, but I mostly still find him annoying--both the way he's written and the way he's played. He has flashes of true pathos and character, but this is where we stand as of now. I expect this list will change wildly from season to season, and I'm excited for that. Watching these characters change is one of the best parts of the show.
So there you have it. Season 1. I've been interested in the show for years, and my interest has actually grown over the years rather than lessened. I'm delighted to finally be watching it, and even more delighted that, for the most part, it's actually pretty great. And everyone says that Season 2 is miles ahead of 1 in quality, so here we go.
The first thing I notice, analyzing my own reactions, is that my “bad” reviews are way more entertaining than my “good” ones. When I like an episode I mostly just recap it, but when I don’t like an episode I get to make jokes. The rare third category of reaction is “let’s talk about the fascinating ideas this episode explores,” but this is not Star Trek, and idea episodes are rare; the only one that really stands out to me is BELIEVERS. What I worry about going forward is that, as the overall quality of the series improves (which by all accounts it does), every post will just be “and then this happened, and it was awesome,” which isn’t really all that fun to write or read. I need to find a way to keep this entertaining without pointlessly slamming a good episode for being less than perfect.
The other thing I notice, especially looking at the comments, is that I need to address the Commander Sinclair/Michael O’Hare issue. I make fun of Sinclair for two main things:
1) He was really boring and unfocused during the first few episodes; I don’t think he was really great until AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS.
2) He solves every problem, often by himself, even when someone on his staff is allegedly better at it. He does Garibaldi’s job as often as Garibaldi does, and frankly if he’d gone over Doctor Franklin’s head and tried to do surgery sometime it would not have surprised me—plus I bet he’d have been great at it, because he’s great at everything. I can’t be the first person to point out that Sinclair is a bit of a Mary Sue: super competent at everything, chased by attractive women, and has the writer’s same initials.
And the thing that everyone keeps saying to me is “you’re going to have a totally different persepctive on this when you find out what was going on behind the scenes.” And maybe I’m just being sensitive, but I suspect what they really mean is “you’re going to feel like a jerk when you realize he was doing all of this while suffering from crippling mental illness.” So let’s address this directly. For starters, I already knew about the mental illness; I never watched the show before, but I was culturally aware of it, so when the news broke in 2012 I read all about it. In short: Michael O’Hare had a severe mental issues, including delusions and hallucinations, which made filming the show incredibly difficult for him; JMS offered to hold the show for a few months while he dealt with it, but O’Hare didn’t want to hurt the show or the other actors so he backed out completely at the end of Season 1; he made JMS promise to keep it a secret until he died, and then to tell everyone because he wanted the fans to know the truth. I think the circumstances here are awful, and I think both men handled it not only well but nobly and admirably. They are class acts all around. But no, I don’t feel bad for joking about Sinclair because:
1) His early performance issues cleared up, and for episodes 8-22 his acting was top notch. He had some trouble finding the character, but then he found him and he was great. And I don’t think it’s any accident that the episode where he improved was the episode where Sinclair suffered from what was essentially delusions and hallucinations. O’Hare saw his character confront a false reality and fight back against it; he saw his character come to terms with a literal “hole in his mind.” This is pure speculation on my part, but I think it gave O’Hare the hook into his character that he hadn’t had before: this is a strong, capable man who can’t always trust his own mind, but chooses to forge ahead anyway and rely on his friends when he had to. I think he saw some of himself in Sinclair, and some of Sinclair in himself. You can see the level of confidence and assertiveness leap up in AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS, and it stays high for the rest of the season.
2) The “Sinclair is the best at everything” problem is not a commentary on O’Hare or his abilities, it’s a commentary on the writers. Why does Garibaldi get to perform a brilliant investigation, but then spend the climax running through the halls shouting into his comlink while Sinclair punches the bad guy into submission? And why does this happen over and over? Because the writers were making Sinclair the hero even when the story should have belonged to someone else. And this, too, cleared up as the season went on. In the second half of Season 1 Sinclair is a Commander functioning as a Commander, delegating and coordinating and spending his time talking to ambassadors and sparring with rivals and letting other people do the punching. Part of this is because the later episodes were finally beginning to focus more on politics and less on scary monsters running through the lower levels of the station, but I think most of it is just that after O’Hare figured his character out, the writers followed suit, and starting treating him differently.
The truth is that I came to really love Sinclair over the course of the season, and I’ll miss him a lot. They put the whole show on his shoulders during the early episodes, and he carried it out of necessity, and then he figured out what he was doing and started carrying the show out of pure talent and leadership, and I think he improved it overall. I picked a new favorite character almost every episode, and they were never him, but he was the foundation that everyone else worked off of. He helped make the show great.
Now, let's get into the fun stuff.
My favorite episodes of Season 1 (from best to slightly-not-as-best):
1: BABYLON SQUARED
2: CHRYSALIS
3: AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS
4: MIND WAR
5: EYES
BABYLON SQUARED is the kind of episode that hits me, personally, right in my happy place: it's a perfect example of what Babylon 5 can do, and what it's about, but it does so in a very Star Trekkie way, complete with temporal anomaly and Big Idea SF. Babylon 5 seems like it's mostly not about Big Idea SF, with a tighter focus on politics and schemes and character arcs, and I'm not complaining--I think that's awesome--but I suspect that this kind of "anomaly of the week" episode will become increasingly rare over the rest of the seasons. Season 1 of B5 was a show struggling to break out of Star Trek's shadow and become its own thing, and I'm glad that it finally did (in the aptly named CHRYSALIS), because I've already got five full Star Trek series on Netflix I can watch whenever I want, and I appreciate having something different. But BABYLON SQUARED landed squarely in the center of the Trek/B5 Venn diagram, doing everything both shows do best, and I loved it.
Eyes might seem like an odd choice, because it doesn't really stand out in any particular category--it wasn't an amazing story arc episode, or an amazing SF Idea episode, or even really an amazing "focus on one character" episode. On the other hand, it had rock-solid stories and performances from all three of the main Human characters, it had two great guest stars, it had a simple but beautiful character arc from the visiting Psi-Corps guy, and it had a scene where Ivanova frigging wrecks an entire bar. I loved it.
Runner up episodes include SIGNS AND PORTENTS, BELIEVERS, GRAIL, and THE GATHERING, any one of which could have been on this list if I'd made it on a different day or in a different mood. If we're allowing individual storylines removed from context, The Dr. Rosen stuff from QUALITY OF MERCY was easily top-5 material, but it gets dragged down by that stupid Londo/Lennier plot.
On that note, I was this close to writing in "The Ivanova half of TKO" as my number five pick, but no. I can't do it. That episode is just so bad, and no amount of awesome Ivanova can fully redeem it. Speaking of which:
My least favorite episodes of Season 1 (from least-worse to most-worse):
5: THE PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS
4: SURVIVORS
3:SOUL HUNTER
2: TKO
1: BORN TO THE PURPLE
PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS was an episode fully focused on G'Kar, in which he is--I suspect unintentionally--an inept buffoon. SURVIVORS was a good story about a guest star disguised as a bad story about Garibaldi. SOUL HUNTER was a Star Trek "monster of the week" reject. TKO was half-wonderful, half abysmal racist disaster. And BORN TO THE PURPLE, as I said in my review, literally made me turn off the show and decide that Babylon 5 was not for me, and this whole exercise was a bad idea. Many thanks to Alexi and Quincy, my comrades in arms, for talking me down from the ledge and convincing me to try again.
THE WAR PRAYER probably deserved to be on that list as well--I suspect that it is, in fact, objectively worse than PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS, but I had to rank that latter lower because of how poorly it treated my favorite character.
Speaking of which:
Dan's Favorite Characters (So Far):
1: G'Kar
2: Ivanova
3: Na'Toth
4: Zathras
5: Sinclair
6: Franklin
7: Kosh
8: Dr. Rosen
9: That Psi-Corps Guy in EYES
10: Neroon
Talia is not on the list because I want to like her more than I do. She's always incredibly passive and reactive; they need to give her something to do, and they need to do it soon. Garibaldi would probably be relatively high on the list, honestly, but I'm still not sure where they're going with his harassment of Talia. Don't underestimate how much those two scenes in A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS bothered me. I described Garibaldi in SURVIVORS as "the most likable, problem-free character on the station," and he's like that in almost every episode, and then he creeps on Talia in what seems like a pretty malicious way, and now he's not even in my top ten list. He lost out to a guy who I literally don't know a name for. That's bad, Garibaldi. Get your house in order.
And what about the other main characters? Delenn is at the center of a lot of exciting storylines, but she herself is not exciting in them. And Londo, well, you know my thoughts on Londo. He's a huge fan favorite, but I mostly still find him annoying--both the way he's written and the way he's played. He has flashes of true pathos and character, but this is where we stand as of now. I expect this list will change wildly from season to season, and I'm excited for that. Watching these characters change is one of the best parts of the show.
So there you have it. Season 1. I've been interested in the show for years, and my interest has actually grown over the years rather than lessened. I'm delighted to finally be watching it, and even more delighted that, for the most part, it's actually pretty great. And everyone says that Season 2 is miles ahead of 1 in quality, so here we go.
Pretty good list of favorites from season 1. I am surprised that Bester is not on the list.
ReplyDeleteBester's only been in one episode so far, and didn't do enough to stand out. I assume his glory days are ahead of him.
ReplyDeleteYou might feel you are just summarising the good episodes but it’s your thoughts on the scenes and characters and what you think they will mean for the future that makes it a great read. One because of your different viewpoints as a writer picking up things I have missed in over 20 watch throughs but secondly because reading your predictions and knowing what does happen i can both respect your deductions when your predictions are right and chuckle to myself in my head when they are wrong but often same as mine on first watch through. My point is you don’t need to be joking at the less than perfect buts to add high value worth reading. Which is good given that less than perfect bits are few and far between on the remainder of your watching journey. Enjoying your blog keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteI remember disliking Londo a lot, then disliking G’Kar, then disliking Londo again, until I just loved them both.
ReplyDeleteIt’s really sad how many B5 actors have died: Stephen Biggs, Michael O’Hare, Andreas Katsulas, Stephen Furst, Jeff Conaway, Jerry Doyle; I think I’ve missed some of the minor characters.
What season does Marcus show up? Two or Three? He’s a quick favorite.
Sinclair being raised by Jesuits is a throwaway thing that becomes important a little bit later
ReplyDelete