Of Swords and Parasols

OMG you weren’t kidding about this season! Especially, like, the whole telepath plot in the first half. Also, did the world really need a Fabio clone? And am I the only one who kept hoping he’d play with matches on a windy day? To be so perfect, that hair had to have enough chemicals in it to make it extra flammable. Also, I think it was vampire hair* that sucked the personalities out of everyone who got near it. It would explain so much.

But yeah, as I was told, it’s really obvious what was left from the original plans, and what they had to cobble together. Like how they clearly had no idea what to do with any of the characters besides Londo and G’Kar.

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Now for the movies. And maybe Crusade? Non-spoilery opinions there?

*Actually, Lyss gets credit for that.

Far too many spaceships died! I have become fond of them! Though I fear Farscape rather ruined me for other spaceships.

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Hmm...why don't I have any icons of Delenn, Ivanova or Lyta?

This show? Is far too stingy when it comes to the resident lady telepaths. I’m just saying.

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I'm actually watching episode 10 of the season now (and I'm kinda woeful that I've been spoiled for it for a while) but just realized that I hadn't posted this yet, despite drafting it last week.

(not sure about the episode number.

Dear Joss Whedon,

You're a Babylon 5 fan, aren't you?  No, really, you've done 6 major variations of this of the top of my head.

Kinda-love,

Me

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In list form, because list form is always fun.

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I have, I think, figured out why I often find it hard to latch onto space scifi, or if I do latch on to it, to like it different reasons than others seem to. When I watch space scifi with humans and aliens, I seem to want to know more about the aliens, and less about the humans. It’s rather like how I like Crichton in Farscape, but often think of him as an excuse to have all the aliens, human looking and otherwise. The shows, however, seem to make the natural assumption that since I’m a human, I’m more interested in the humans. I don’t blame them, though that only seems to be true for me with Stargate: SG-1.

Babylon 5 is a classic 90s scifi series about a space station designed to help promote peace between all the known races in the mid-23rd century, created after a war between Earth and a race called the Minbari. I haven’t learned a lot of character and race names yet (almost too many characters to keep track of, and I’m bad with names to start with), so bear with me. Possibly the most striking thing about the series, watching it for the first time in 2008, is how incredibly dated the FX are. They’re pretty decent when it’s just the FX, but when it’s FX mixed with live action, you get things like the most hilarious lightning I’ve seen. So far, I find most of the episodic plots forgettable to ok enough. The characters and their stories, though, are largely engaging.

The alien preference seems to be holding steady, though, as the only human characters who’ve really caught my attention so far are Ivanova and the blonde telepath. Ivanova because she’s superstoic and I like stoic second-in-commands. The telepath because I find it interesting how she seems to dislike and fear the Psi-Corps, yet she also buys into their doctrine regarding behavior, and that telepaths are dangerous and must be controlled. I find Sinclair, Garibaldi, the doctor, and Sinclair’s girlfriend all to be perfectly fine, if a bit typical so far, but not as attention grabbing as those two, or the aliens.

But the aliens! I adore Londo, the loud ambassador with Shi’ar-like hair who seems to be a noisy braggart and more than a little ridiculous, but who’s also rather jaded to the world, and knows how to work systems to his end. Then there’s his opposite number, a lizard-like ambassador whose race seems to have been the enemy of Londo’s, and who is almost as much of a loud braggart, but who’s rather scheming and surprisingly thoughtful at times. I also really like his super-efficient and long suffering (even after just the first day on the job) Na’Toth, who is listed in the credits, but has only been in one episode so far. My favorite, though, is Delenn, the Zhaan-like representative of the Minbari, who keeps a lot of secrets, both about her own rank, and apparently about the war.

There are several things that jar me on the human/alien front. I get why they specifically refer to everything in Earth time, because all the races have different measurements of time, and they need something to all use, but some descriptions startle me. For example, at one point, Garibaldi, who’s a security officer, is asking an alien to describe someone, and asks if they were humanoid, or looked like an alien. I mean, for starters, he’s the alien to the person he was talking to, but the wording overall was weird. Then there’s the fact that it sometimes seems that the less human an alien looks, the more likely it is to be evil. The most “Uhm…what?” moment for me, though, is when there’s a firefight and Sinclair, Ivanova, and Random Helpless Alien Ambassador (RHAA) are being shot at. RHAA is shackled and doesn’t look like she can move very fast, while Sinclair and Ivanova are uninjured and not shacckled. So Sinclair covers Ivanova while the head for cover. Now, I strongly endorse Ivanova not getting shot and/or killed, but you know, she’s clearly very physically capable and wouldn’t be second-in-command if she couldn’t handle herself in a fight. If I were Sinclair, I’d be trusting her to get to cover while I helped RHAA. Instead, we see RHAA crawling for cover, and then she’s never seen again. And so I spent the next few minutes going “But what about poor RHAA? Was she shot? Is anyone going to unshackle her? Where’d she go?”

So, fun series so far, if mostly for the characters.