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there is a hole in your mind
Some of you may recall that last summer I did an epic due South rewatch (tagged here, with a couple of extras); it took me a diligent month and a half, with breaks for things like WisCon in the middle.
What I would like to do now is a bit madder.
I'd like to rewatch a show that is a self-contained world five miles long, weighing two million, five hundred thousand tons, and spanning a hundred and ten fucking episodes plus a ridiculous pilot film. It is the dawn of the third age of mankind, I've only got a handful of episodes with me at any given point, and if I'm remotely sane (and don't give up partway through) it should take me at least all summer. Today, Aria presents: a Babylon 5 rewatch!
I'll do more than one episode in each post (usually two to four, depending on how long my commentary gets); the pilot film gets its own, though. I should probably give some general header warnings going in, the most important of which is that this is going to be spoilery like a spoilery thing, and that if you have not seen this show, plan to, and are remotely allergic to spoilers, you should stay very far away. Less important warnings: I have massive alien favouritism (ie I will spend much more time deconstructing G'Kar, Londo, and Delenn than I will anyone else, and Londo is maybe one of my favourite characters ever); I will not hesitate to bewail anything that is 'acting' instead of proper acting; I will probably sometimes be blinded by my love for this show, and not pick out the problematic things I should.
Also, I want to keep track of how well each episode passes the Bechdel Test, so if I start forgetting to do that, poke me and I'll resume.
We open with a monologue by Londo, declaring with some pride that he was there when it all began. I am not trawling deep into archives or other resources that will tell me about JMS's writing process, but I really do wonder if he had Londo's arc planned or at least sketched at the time of the pilot. Because if he did -- I may be a little choked up already. I am absurdly emotional about this show. I also think it is slightly evil of the writing to open with Londo's narration, because some of us (ie me) glom onto him as someone to pay attention to and like.
Sinclair's first lines, to some guy flirting with a hot alien: "I wouldn't. You know the rules about crossing species. Stick with the list." I am curious about this list! Who drew it up? Are the restrictions entirely biological considerations, or also cultural taboos? I ask this because I want to know if the Minbari allow any cross-species courting/sex/&c to happen -- Delenn is obviously a special case, and her clan seems more concerned with the reflection on them than honestly squicked, and I assume Valen had to have some influence re: interspecies sexuality (which of course means that making it Sinclair's opening line is strangely brilliant). I also want to know what the Narn think of it, considering their ambassador will try to seduce almost anything that is female and not Narn; I also also want to know if the Centauri would ratify a list like that. I am definitely overthinking this, but cross-species relations of all sorts are one of the most important considerations on this show, so the mention makes me want all sorts of deep political elaborations.
On the other hand, it might not be a political list in any way. It might be entirely biological, and mostly meant for things like "Warning: the female of this species eats its mate," which is the way Sinclair cites it here. I also love this little bit of scene because it tells us [a] the weird futuristicness of the world we're in, and [b] that Sinclair knows his stuff, and is at least in some ways absolutely the right person to run B5.
OH MY GOD GARIBALDI HAS ALL HIS HAIR.
G'Kar's makeup in the pilot is ... kind of cool, actually! More to the point, he comes in raging, deeply affronted that a Narn ship requesting docking must submit to a weapons search. I promptly got a huge stupid grin on my face. Lt. Commander Takashima meanwhile did not, and instead said something sarcastic about the peace-loving Narns we've all come to know and love except for those times when they invade border worlds. I don't remember if they kept that particular plot element, because while I assume the Narn homeworld was freed from Centauri rule long enough ago for the Narn to become major players, it worries me to discover that they're apparently acting like abused children who imitate their parents. I'm not surprised, though.
Delenn! How your makeup has drastically improved. I am liking the way that the humans get almost non-introductions (Sinclair is an Action Hero -- hah oh Straczynski I hope you caught on fairly quickly that he has a Hero Voice but that he's better at the introspective stuff -- Garibaldi does security, &c) like there's a sort of assumption that they'll get filled in, that they don't need something defining to begin with, because the audience already knows about humans and now has to play catch-up on everyone else. So we get the blustering militant Narn a couple scenes ago, and we get Delenn, sitting in the garden, contemplating the Zen pool. As you do.
And our introduction to Londo is in the casino, of course, trying to wheedle credits out of Garibaldi. Oh Londo. I do like that, aside from a certain messiness of his hair crest, Londo's design is mostly in order. Actually, the thing that seems most off is his accent; I don't think Peter Jurasik had it quite ironed out yet, and it's sort of cute if a little cognitive-dissonancy. I also adore the way they do his costuming, especially coming back to this fairly soon after having finished s5 -- he's covered in bright colors, and his various brooches are tacky, and not very spiky. Is he actually happier here? I don't know. Probably not.
This exchange is interesting:
LONDO. Garibaldi! My good, close friend, Garibaldi!
GARIBALDI. Oh no. No you don't. Not again.
LONDO. Lend me your support! Your good cheer!
GARIBALDI. My wallet?
Because apparently Garibaldi has lent Londo money before. Oh Mike, what? I bet he hates hanging out in the casino, too. This is directly followed by something that breaks my heart a little: Londo going off about how his beloved Centauri Republic conquered the Beta System in nine days! Came out of the sky like a veritable cloud of starships! And Garibaldi just cuts him off, and tells him N-O, no, stop, and to be a good little ambassador and go down to the docking bay in two hours. From this it's obvious enough that Garibaldi is babysitting him, and Londo blusters but Londo accepts it.
Aside from makeup, things I am desperately glad got changed: Lyta to Talia, until Patricia Tallman magically learned how to act by mid-s2; the switching of Sinclair's pilot girlfriend Carolyn Sykes with the GODAWFUL HAIR for Catherine Sakai, who is AWESOME; the lighting, dear god, people, your bridge is in the DARK; and Laurel Takashima for Susan Ivanova, not so much because I don't think Takashima's actress couldn't have become better than because Ivanova is a hole in my heart when she's not in the show. Things I am kind of sad they changed: the Earth Alliance uniforms. The pilot ones are kind of snazzy.
(Something that keeps on freaking me out is that techie in C&C, who IMDb lists as a character named Guerra, is played by Ed Wasser. You do not belong in C&C, Ed Wasser, you're Mr. Morden!)
Here is the infamous G'Kar-propositioning-Lyta scene! I can barely watch it, because it's so fucking skeevy, but I think it's sort of great if you put it back-to-back with the same scene between them in s5. Both of their character arcs are incredible. (Also, apparently G'Kar has gill implants? He and Lyta can be friends who breathe weird atmospheres on new planets! \o/ Or something.)
Delenn breaks my brain in this. Even back in the pilot, G'Kar says things to the effect of "Mollari was the only one who wasn't there to meet Kosh! Mollari must have done it!" which is totally par the course. But Delenn responds that G'Kar's view of the Centauri is colored by the fact that the Narn used to be their slaves, and when G'Kar rightly takes offense, she merely smiles and says, "The word was ... ill-chosen." And then she starts CRUSHING G'KAR WITH A GRAVITY RING. Which is ... less subtle than usual. Pilot!Delenn is weirdly like a mirror universe Delenn from the warrior caste, and she scares me even more than normal Delenn does.
Early G'Kar, as I said, makes me squirmy and uncomfortable. Back when he was sort of a plot device to make everyone's lives difficult, I didn't mind so much, but now I am attached, I want him to be better than he yet is. Seriously, in the pilot G'Kar is motivated by a sheer bloody-minded determination to make trouble and break fledgling alliances between anyone who might be a threat to the Narn. He also apparently has the power to intimidate Londo into voting the way G'Kar wants him to, which fascinates me. Of course it's via the medium of blackmail, which is how both of them get a lot of shit done, but I also find it interesting that "Certain atrocities were committed by my grandfather" actually would have any besmirching effect on the Mollari name.
And here we have the first instance of Londo's recurring, self-dooming mantra: "I had no choice." Oh Londo. He's astonishingly self-aware already, though: Garibaldi asks him whether he'd have voted differently if he'd known the vote wasn't deadlocked, and Londo says, "No. No, I'm afraid not. Commander Sinclair is a good man; I would hate to lose him. It is my weakness, my failure, and I'm sorry. Truly sorry." He doesn't have anything to gain from the admittance, and it doesn't make him any happier to know these things about himself, but Londo is terribly honest, and even has a perfectly good moral compass. He's already breaking my damn heart and it's still the stupid pilot.
I'm not actually sure how well the Kosh-gets-poisoned plot holds up, given what we come to know of Vorlons later. Kosh probably doesn't need to be put in the isolab, because he can sure as hell take whatever atmosphere he's given (including none at all) -- but Vorlons are kind of dicks, so that holds; if I was the Vorlon government, I'd be pretty pissed off that one of the Younger Races managed to take down my ambassador, so that holds; but the idea of Kosh being poisoned is kind of absurd. It's hard for Shadows to kill him. I suppose of all the races to know what would poison a Vorlon, it'd be the Minbari, but that still seems astronomically unlikely. And, here's the big one: why would Kosh appear to Sinclair unveiled? I mean, I don't necessarily disbelieve it, and in fact I think it might be excellent foreshadowing; it's the Kosh-let-himself-get-poisoned where I lose the sense.
Something I have never caught before: when fake!Sinclair goes to greet Kosh, Kosh's words of greeting to him are Entil'Zha Valen. I -- I don't even. Were they really planning that? How were they planning that? Actually, all the foreshadowing here is excellent: Delenn's statement that she's only here to observe Sinclair, his story of the Battle of the Line -- it's all here already. There is a hole in your mind.
The aesthetic of the pilot is very different from the rest of the show; it's probably tied in with the way that the alien ambassadors all get very specific introduction scenes, but the humans don't -- in the pilot, the alien is very alien. Delenn is distant, G'Kar is dangerous, and Londo doesn't mean anything anymore, and all of them have decently complex motivations but none of them are Us. Yet. In a lot of ways, Babylon 5 is a show about ... un-othering, maybe, in making you care about the Minbari and the Centauri and the Narn just as much as you do for the humans, and even eventually demystifying the Vorlons and the Shadows -- by the time they're kicked out of the galaxy, they can still blow up your planet but you know exactly why, and the danger is still there but a lot of the fear is gone. In the pilot, everything is a lot darker and more removed than it'll ever be again. And in some ways I think it's a lot less powerful for that.
Lastly, Bechdel score: didn't pass that one. Lyta and Takashima interact with Dr. Kyle in the conversation, Takashima and Delenn are only even in the same room at Council, and though Carolyn does go to talk to Delenn alone, they talk about Sinclair. Be better next time when you have Ivanova, show!
Okay, what have I let myself in for? I'm going to bed. /o\
What I would like to do now is a bit madder.
I'd like to rewatch a show that is a self-contained world five miles long, weighing two million, five hundred thousand tons, and spanning a hundred and ten fucking episodes plus a ridiculous pilot film. It is the dawn of the third age of mankind, I've only got a handful of episodes with me at any given point, and if I'm remotely sane (and don't give up partway through) it should take me at least all summer. Today, Aria presents: a Babylon 5 rewatch!
I'll do more than one episode in each post (usually two to four, depending on how long my commentary gets); the pilot film gets its own, though. I should probably give some general header warnings going in, the most important of which is that this is going to be spoilery like a spoilery thing, and that if you have not seen this show, plan to, and are remotely allergic to spoilers, you should stay very far away. Less important warnings: I have massive alien favouritism (ie I will spend much more time deconstructing G'Kar, Londo, and Delenn than I will anyone else, and Londo is maybe one of my favourite characters ever); I will not hesitate to bewail anything that is 'acting' instead of proper acting; I will probably sometimes be blinded by my love for this show, and not pick out the problematic things I should.
Also, I want to keep track of how well each episode passes the Bechdel Test, so if I start forgetting to do that, poke me and I'll resume.
We open with a monologue by Londo, declaring with some pride that he was there when it all began. I am not trawling deep into archives or other resources that will tell me about JMS's writing process, but I really do wonder if he had Londo's arc planned or at least sketched at the time of the pilot. Because if he did -- I may be a little choked up already. I am absurdly emotional about this show. I also think it is slightly evil of the writing to open with Londo's narration, because some of us (ie me) glom onto him as someone to pay attention to and like.
Sinclair's first lines, to some guy flirting with a hot alien: "I wouldn't. You know the rules about crossing species. Stick with the list." I am curious about this list! Who drew it up? Are the restrictions entirely biological considerations, or also cultural taboos? I ask this because I want to know if the Minbari allow any cross-species courting/sex/&c to happen -- Delenn is obviously a special case, and her clan seems more concerned with the reflection on them than honestly squicked, and I assume Valen had to have some influence re: interspecies sexuality (which of course means that making it Sinclair's opening line is strangely brilliant). I also want to know what the Narn think of it, considering their ambassador will try to seduce almost anything that is female and not Narn; I also also want to know if the Centauri would ratify a list like that. I am definitely overthinking this, but cross-species relations of all sorts are one of the most important considerations on this show, so the mention makes me want all sorts of deep political elaborations.
On the other hand, it might not be a political list in any way. It might be entirely biological, and mostly meant for things like "Warning: the female of this species eats its mate," which is the way Sinclair cites it here. I also love this little bit of scene because it tells us [a] the weird futuristicness of the world we're in, and [b] that Sinclair knows his stuff, and is at least in some ways absolutely the right person to run B5.
OH MY GOD GARIBALDI HAS ALL HIS HAIR.
G'Kar's makeup in the pilot is ... kind of cool, actually! More to the point, he comes in raging, deeply affronted that a Narn ship requesting docking must submit to a weapons search. I promptly got a huge stupid grin on my face. Lt. Commander Takashima meanwhile did not, and instead said something sarcastic about the peace-loving Narns we've all come to know and love except for those times when they invade border worlds. I don't remember if they kept that particular plot element, because while I assume the Narn homeworld was freed from Centauri rule long enough ago for the Narn to become major players, it worries me to discover that they're apparently acting like abused children who imitate their parents. I'm not surprised, though.
Delenn! How your makeup has drastically improved. I am liking the way that the humans get almost non-introductions (Sinclair is an Action Hero -- hah oh Straczynski I hope you caught on fairly quickly that he has a Hero Voice but that he's better at the introspective stuff -- Garibaldi does security, &c) like there's a sort of assumption that they'll get filled in, that they don't need something defining to begin with, because the audience already knows about humans and now has to play catch-up on everyone else. So we get the blustering militant Narn a couple scenes ago, and we get Delenn, sitting in the garden, contemplating the Zen pool. As you do.
And our introduction to Londo is in the casino, of course, trying to wheedle credits out of Garibaldi. Oh Londo. I do like that, aside from a certain messiness of his hair crest, Londo's design is mostly in order. Actually, the thing that seems most off is his accent; I don't think Peter Jurasik had it quite ironed out yet, and it's sort of cute if a little cognitive-dissonancy. I also adore the way they do his costuming, especially coming back to this fairly soon after having finished s5 -- he's covered in bright colors, and his various brooches are tacky, and not very spiky. Is he actually happier here? I don't know. Probably not.
This exchange is interesting:
LONDO. Garibaldi! My good, close friend, Garibaldi!
GARIBALDI. Oh no. No you don't. Not again.
LONDO. Lend me your support! Your good cheer!
GARIBALDI. My wallet?
Because apparently Garibaldi has lent Londo money before. Oh Mike, what? I bet he hates hanging out in the casino, too. This is directly followed by something that breaks my heart a little: Londo going off about how his beloved Centauri Republic conquered the Beta System in nine days! Came out of the sky like a veritable cloud of starships! And Garibaldi just cuts him off, and tells him N-O, no, stop, and to be a good little ambassador and go down to the docking bay in two hours. From this it's obvious enough that Garibaldi is babysitting him, and Londo blusters but Londo accepts it.
Aside from makeup, things I am desperately glad got changed: Lyta to Talia, until Patricia Tallman magically learned how to act by mid-s2; the switching of Sinclair's pilot girlfriend Carolyn Sykes with the GODAWFUL HAIR for Catherine Sakai, who is AWESOME; the lighting, dear god, people, your bridge is in the DARK; and Laurel Takashima for Susan Ivanova, not so much because I don't think Takashima's actress couldn't have become better than because Ivanova is a hole in my heart when she's not in the show. Things I am kind of sad they changed: the Earth Alliance uniforms. The pilot ones are kind of snazzy.
(Something that keeps on freaking me out is that techie in C&C, who IMDb lists as a character named Guerra, is played by Ed Wasser. You do not belong in C&C, Ed Wasser, you're Mr. Morden!)
Here is the infamous G'Kar-propositioning-Lyta scene! I can barely watch it, because it's so fucking skeevy, but I think it's sort of great if you put it back-to-back with the same scene between them in s5. Both of their character arcs are incredible. (Also, apparently G'Kar has gill implants? He and Lyta can be friends who breathe weird atmospheres on new planets! \o/ Or something.)
Delenn breaks my brain in this. Even back in the pilot, G'Kar says things to the effect of "Mollari was the only one who wasn't there to meet Kosh! Mollari must have done it!" which is totally par the course. But Delenn responds that G'Kar's view of the Centauri is colored by the fact that the Narn used to be their slaves, and when G'Kar rightly takes offense, she merely smiles and says, "The word was ... ill-chosen." And then she starts CRUSHING G'KAR WITH A GRAVITY RING. Which is ... less subtle than usual. Pilot!Delenn is weirdly like a mirror universe Delenn from the warrior caste, and she scares me even more than normal Delenn does.
Early G'Kar, as I said, makes me squirmy and uncomfortable. Back when he was sort of a plot device to make everyone's lives difficult, I didn't mind so much, but now I am attached, I want him to be better than he yet is. Seriously, in the pilot G'Kar is motivated by a sheer bloody-minded determination to make trouble and break fledgling alliances between anyone who might be a threat to the Narn. He also apparently has the power to intimidate Londo into voting the way G'Kar wants him to, which fascinates me. Of course it's via the medium of blackmail, which is how both of them get a lot of shit done, but I also find it interesting that "Certain atrocities were committed by my grandfather" actually would have any besmirching effect on the Mollari name.
And here we have the first instance of Londo's recurring, self-dooming mantra: "I had no choice." Oh Londo. He's astonishingly self-aware already, though: Garibaldi asks him whether he'd have voted differently if he'd known the vote wasn't deadlocked, and Londo says, "No. No, I'm afraid not. Commander Sinclair is a good man; I would hate to lose him. It is my weakness, my failure, and I'm sorry. Truly sorry." He doesn't have anything to gain from the admittance, and it doesn't make him any happier to know these things about himself, but Londo is terribly honest, and even has a perfectly good moral compass. He's already breaking my damn heart and it's still the stupid pilot.
I'm not actually sure how well the Kosh-gets-poisoned plot holds up, given what we come to know of Vorlons later. Kosh probably doesn't need to be put in the isolab, because he can sure as hell take whatever atmosphere he's given (including none at all) -- but Vorlons are kind of dicks, so that holds; if I was the Vorlon government, I'd be pretty pissed off that one of the Younger Races managed to take down my ambassador, so that holds; but the idea of Kosh being poisoned is kind of absurd. It's hard for Shadows to kill him. I suppose of all the races to know what would poison a Vorlon, it'd be the Minbari, but that still seems astronomically unlikely. And, here's the big one: why would Kosh appear to Sinclair unveiled? I mean, I don't necessarily disbelieve it, and in fact I think it might be excellent foreshadowing; it's the Kosh-let-himself-get-poisoned where I lose the sense.
Something I have never caught before: when fake!Sinclair goes to greet Kosh, Kosh's words of greeting to him are Entil'Zha Valen. I -- I don't even. Were they really planning that? How were they planning that? Actually, all the foreshadowing here is excellent: Delenn's statement that she's only here to observe Sinclair, his story of the Battle of the Line -- it's all here already. There is a hole in your mind.
The aesthetic of the pilot is very different from the rest of the show; it's probably tied in with the way that the alien ambassadors all get very specific introduction scenes, but the humans don't -- in the pilot, the alien is very alien. Delenn is distant, G'Kar is dangerous, and Londo doesn't mean anything anymore, and all of them have decently complex motivations but none of them are Us. Yet. In a lot of ways, Babylon 5 is a show about ... un-othering, maybe, in making you care about the Minbari and the Centauri and the Narn just as much as you do for the humans, and even eventually demystifying the Vorlons and the Shadows -- by the time they're kicked out of the galaxy, they can still blow up your planet but you know exactly why, and the danger is still there but a lot of the fear is gone. In the pilot, everything is a lot darker and more removed than it'll ever be again. And in some ways I think it's a lot less powerful for that.
Lastly, Bechdel score: didn't pass that one. Lyta and Takashima interact with Dr. Kyle in the conversation, Takashima and Delenn are only even in the same room at Council, and though Carolyn does go to talk to Delenn alone, they talk about Sinclair. Be better next time when you have Ivanova, show!
Okay, what have I let myself in for? I'm going to bed. /o\