Garibaldi telling the reporter than he and Sheridan walked 50 miles through Martian desert comes back twice - an entire issue of the DC Comic series (which was script approved by JMS himself, and, unlike the first run of novels, remains "canon" for those who care about such things), and B5 Season 3, Episode 8, "Messages from Earth." Sinclair and Garibaldi stumbled across - without realizing the significance of either - both the Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX) dig uncovering a Shadow Battlecrab, AND the Psi-Corp facility where Talia Winters is conditioned with her backup personality.
In the Non-Spoiler section I said in some ways this episode is a macrocosm of the series.
Well yeah... For most of the show we're building up to, fighting, then seeing the aftermath of a Shadow War. The last one was 1000 years ago.
The Ikarran bio weapon - confirmed by JMS to be developed from Shadow Tech - has now been taken by EarthGov. EarthGov/IPX has, of course, been looking for Shadow Tech since finding the Battlecrab on Mars. We will see other examples of species a thousand years ago playing with Shadow Tech and getting burned. The Markab Virus from S2 is a variation on the same virus the Drakh will drop on Earth during "A Call to Arms." The Ikarran suit merges Shadow tech with Ikarran tech to form a bio weapon, and Earth will fuse Shadow Tech with Earth tech to create modified Omega destroyers. I think Warlocks might have Shadow Tech as well?
Either way we're already getting hints of the 1000 year old war. We're already getting hints of the war to come.
The Ikarrans were all about their racial purity, but we're seeing that happening with Earth - President Santiago RAN on a platform of "protecting Earth cultures from alien influence, and Homeguard/Earth First and Knightwatch are all coming.
The Minbari are all about their racial purity. The information that some humans have Minbari souls is held to the Gray Council. The truth of Valen children by Catherine Sakai being part human... That information is also held by the Gray Council.
If a Minbari makes the Triluminari glow, means they have human DNA. Delenn does... She's Sinclair/Valen's great-to-the-nth grandchild.
But that's a tangent.
Narns, oddly, don't seem to be overly into the "racial purity" thing. Especially not G'Kar who would LOVE to add some human telepath genetics to his species. Also, G'Kar just has a thing for human women in general.
Centauri? They wiped out the Xon - the other sentient species on their planet. Yeah, they've got the "racial purity" stick up their asses.
Many of the League worlds do as well - Abbai, Drazi, Markab, and Brakiri for sure.
Point is Infection shows us the last remnant of a species which took technology from an outside species, adapted it for their own military, used it in a war, and got bitten by it. We see Earth (and, it's hinted at, others) doing the same thing. We see the Ikarran's downfall was basically via their own racism, and we see too many doing the same in the 23rd century.
How do the "good guys" win the 23rd cent Shadow War? Because the "human superpower" in the show isn't having the best tech, the mightiest military, or the superior civilization... Instead, as Delenn puts it, "Humans build communities." It's the humans - and humans still struggle with racism in the 23rd century, as will come up soon enough - who have enough people willing to NOT be racist and treat every species with respect which allows them to build Babylon 5 as a location for all ti work out differences, peacefully (something none of the other species ever tried). It will be Sheridan's team building bridges and alliances between everyone which turns the tide, and sets up what may be a flawed peace, but one which will last a thousand years, and will be rebuilt after that next war.
JMS is an avowed atheist who writes religion quite respectfully - look at next week's "Parliament of Dreams," but arguably, B5's two greatest themes are:
1) Rejection of religion/God. The Shadows and Vorlons very obviously serve as inspirations for many religions in the B5 universe, INCLUDING EARTH, and the "Third Age of (Human)kind" is us realizing we don't need follow the Shadows or the Vorlons anymore and we can make our own way. That's a literal rejection of God.
2) "Can't We All Just Get Along?" Consistently in the B5 universe species who pull away from others, who refuse to mingle, merge, grow from, and learn from each other do poorly. By working together we become stronger. We won't see too many of the fruits of this during the show (other than convincing the Gods and Demons to go the fuck away) as that type of change takes generations to solidify, but the ISA Destroyer Excalibur, merging Human, Minbari and Vorlon tech being created by a group of Human, Minbari, and League engineers is a concrete example.
Ikarra fell to its own insular nature. The same crap the fascist ("nationalist") movements want to drag us back to.
Growing up in the US, I cannot believe the "self-evident-truth" we were taught in Social Studies - that the rise of the US to being such a strong, democratic, forward thinking, LEADING country was due to being a "melting pot" which accepted all who moved there, then learned from and took/adapted the strengths of all the cultures who joined. To see so many reject that for "America First/Only," and "Close the Borders" is shocking and upsetting. Pisses me off to see parts of Ireland pushing that way, too.
Those central themes heavily influenced me as a teenager, and you can probably draw a direct line from them to my rejection of Brexit and all the populist, nationalist, strongman tripe that's infected western politics over the last decade. And which infuses a lot of my own writing, obviously.
I'd sort of forgotten how influential B5's themes were on my nascent teenage brain. I watched B5 just after my family got back from living in Italy for 3 years, where I went to an international school. Every single person in my class (more or less) was from a different country, and it was glorious and just worked. That massively affected my thinking around borders, nationality, identity and so on - albeit subconsciously at the time, as I was only 11 - and then B5 reinforced all of it.
My brain still ticks to JMS' beat, 30 years later.
B5 was University for me, so... I'd grown up on 60's Trek, which, despite its flaws, is basically progressive, optimistic, and "Let's all get along." TNG carried those themes forward, and, if at times, we can be critical of the Federation for having standards for applicants to join, the Federation does allow member worlds to self-govern, as long as they meet certain standards. This is similar to how bodies like the US or EU work. Each US State, or EU member remains self-governing, but is subject to certain Federal-level rules. The EU doesn't set, say, minimum wage, tax brackets, or VAT for Ireland, but Irish food product must meet EU standards to be sold to other countries.
I grew up on classic Doctor Who, and there's another show about the importance of working together while maintaining diversity. The Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans are all warnings against xenophobia. Hell, so are the Time Lords, for that matter. The Doctor left Gallifrey to help others, in violation of Gallifreyan custom and law.
I ALSO grew up on Blake's 7, but no real moral lessons there - just learning you could write compelling fiction even when the leads (Blake and Avon) were very morally questionable, and where we can follow the "good(ish) guys" for years, only to have them utterly fail in the end. Boy, the final episode of that... Nothing else in film or TV has ever hit like the ending of Blake's 7.
B5 for me was more about analyzing structure. How TV could actually do long-form, evolving storytelling without basically returning to the status quo at the end. Also realizing how the production workflow of the show was about to bring a new paradigm to creatives.
Right, first episode shot... JMS has noted he hadn't really re/found character voices yet, and this episode is one of two or three JMS himself wished disappeared.
Ikarran suit is pretty cool, Sinclair's last speech of the episode is good, and that "survivor's guilt/death wish" chat between Sinclair and Garibaldi was the type of thing basically unseen in SF (or, just most) TV till that point.
Episode utterly wastes David McCallum with a boring character.
Episode is utterly ham-fisted in setting up it's central theme which is odd, because, in some ways this episode is a total macrocosm of the entire show. We'll come back that in the Spoiler section.
Richard Compton somehow manages to choose the most boring way of shooting every scene that isn't in C&C. But IN C&C... He's got that beautifully staged shot with the three techs talking about energy surges, nice an low to the floor of the upper walkway. Then he cuts to a high angle, looking down at the tech pit. Shots to Ivanova or Sinclair come FROM the tech pit to bring in the ceiling... I was a cam op for quite awhile, so I really look at cinematography, and I just don't get how Compton could find interesting angles to shoot C&C then put no effort into anything else. Some low angles looking up at the Ikarran mech suit letting the moving light fixture flare into camera would have been sweet. Well, Compton is only around for the first 9 filmed episodes... Come "Grail," he'll be gone, and better directors like Jim Johnston, Janet Greek, and Mike Vejar will pick more interesting angles. Especially Vejar.
Still, this is one of three episodes (the others are "TKO" and "Gray 17 is Missing.") I'll usually skip.
On this watch something caught my eye on the readout of the Ikarran artifact's composition. So I freeze framed it.
The artifact contains Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Xanthan, Maltodextrin, and "Okudazin."
Basically, it's edible. Would be sweet. And it's good for you, with all those vitamin B compounds. ALSO, it helps you make panel displays for Federation starships.
(Michael Okuda is the production artist for the Trek franchise, who, among other things, codified the look of the backlit LCARS displays used in Enterprise-D, so, the shout-out is worthy. Backlit panels in Trek shows are still referred to as "Okudagrams")
Again, freeze-framing video displays and newspapers is a good way to catch in-jokes and Easter Eggs on B5, but are also a good way to get world-building and/or plot teasers. The headlines from Garibaldi's paper in "Born to the Purple" will all be relevant.
"Infection" seeds important concepts which recur throughout the series - organic tech, Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX), EarthGov actively seeking artifacts, and pay attention to how many things happened "a thousand years ago." There's a throwaway line which comes back later...
Yeah, Sinclair's confrontation with the "IKAAAAARAAAAA!" battle-bot was a bit much; I get his plan was to make it mad (?) but at some points it almost came off like he was trying to have a reasoned conversation with it, which...doesn't seem the best plan.
Also, I miss Londo. He and G'Kar are the best parts of this rewatch so far.
I've forgotten what IE's part is in the show, but Ivanova's line at the end about nobody reading Santayana anymore really hit home for me, especially these days.
Sinclair's intercom baiting of the Ikaaaarran was a bit too theatrical for my liking, especially as Sinclair otherwise comes across as fairly grounded.
I hadn't quite clocked that this is the first episode without Londo and G'Kar, nor any Minbari. I wonder if there was a production reason for that, given this was the first episode shot?
I do like the scene with Ivanova and Franklin, and the acknowledgement that while they 'solved' the problem immediately facing the station, the larger systemic problems with the Earth Alliance and corporations are very much unsolved.
Given this is the first episode shot let's notice we also don't do much in the central corridor or Zocalo.
Let's assume, with the requirements for a big-expensive-one-time-use-suit* that leaving out our alien ambassadors is letting the makeup department get ahead on creating masks and prosthetics for episodes later in the production block - like, say, "The Parliament of Dreams" coming up next week, which requires a lot makeup than the first four episodes together.
*Suit will be reused in a s3 ep, with different head and hands.
SPOILERIFIC WONDERS!
Garibaldi telling the reporter than he and Sheridan walked 50 miles through Martian desert comes back twice - an entire issue of the DC Comic series (which was script approved by JMS himself, and, unlike the first run of novels, remains "canon" for those who care about such things), and B5 Season 3, Episode 8, "Messages from Earth." Sinclair and Garibaldi stumbled across - without realizing the significance of either - both the Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX) dig uncovering a Shadow Battlecrab, AND the Psi-Corp facility where Talia Winters is conditioned with her backup personality.
In the Non-Spoiler section I said in some ways this episode is a macrocosm of the series.
Well yeah... For most of the show we're building up to, fighting, then seeing the aftermath of a Shadow War. The last one was 1000 years ago.
The Ikarran bio weapon - confirmed by JMS to be developed from Shadow Tech - has now been taken by EarthGov. EarthGov/IPX has, of course, been looking for Shadow Tech since finding the Battlecrab on Mars. We will see other examples of species a thousand years ago playing with Shadow Tech and getting burned. The Markab Virus from S2 is a variation on the same virus the Drakh will drop on Earth during "A Call to Arms." The Ikarran suit merges Shadow tech with Ikarran tech to form a bio weapon, and Earth will fuse Shadow Tech with Earth tech to create modified Omega destroyers. I think Warlocks might have Shadow Tech as well?
Either way we're already getting hints of the 1000 year old war. We're already getting hints of the war to come.
The Ikarrans were all about their racial purity, but we're seeing that happening with Earth - President Santiago RAN on a platform of "protecting Earth cultures from alien influence, and Homeguard/Earth First and Knightwatch are all coming.
The Minbari are all about their racial purity. The information that some humans have Minbari souls is held to the Gray Council. The truth of Valen children by Catherine Sakai being part human... That information is also held by the Gray Council.
If a Minbari makes the Triluminari glow, means they have human DNA. Delenn does... She's Sinclair/Valen's great-to-the-nth grandchild.
But that's a tangent.
Narns, oddly, don't seem to be overly into the "racial purity" thing. Especially not G'Kar who would LOVE to add some human telepath genetics to his species. Also, G'Kar just has a thing for human women in general.
Centauri? They wiped out the Xon - the other sentient species on their planet. Yeah, they've got the "racial purity" stick up their asses.
Many of the League worlds do as well - Abbai, Drazi, Markab, and Brakiri for sure.
Point is Infection shows us the last remnant of a species which took technology from an outside species, adapted it for their own military, used it in a war, and got bitten by it. We see Earth (and, it's hinted at, others) doing the same thing. We see the Ikarran's downfall was basically via their own racism, and we see too many doing the same in the 23rd century.
How do the "good guys" win the 23rd cent Shadow War? Because the "human superpower" in the show isn't having the best tech, the mightiest military, or the superior civilization... Instead, as Delenn puts it, "Humans build communities." It's the humans - and humans still struggle with racism in the 23rd century, as will come up soon enough - who have enough people willing to NOT be racist and treat every species with respect which allows them to build Babylon 5 as a location for all ti work out differences, peacefully (something none of the other species ever tried). It will be Sheridan's team building bridges and alliances between everyone which turns the tide, and sets up what may be a flawed peace, but one which will last a thousand years, and will be rebuilt after that next war.
JMS is an avowed atheist who writes religion quite respectfully - look at next week's "Parliament of Dreams," but arguably, B5's two greatest themes are:
1) Rejection of religion/God. The Shadows and Vorlons very obviously serve as inspirations for many religions in the B5 universe, INCLUDING EARTH, and the "Third Age of (Human)kind" is us realizing we don't need follow the Shadows or the Vorlons anymore and we can make our own way. That's a literal rejection of God.
2) "Can't We All Just Get Along?" Consistently in the B5 universe species who pull away from others, who refuse to mingle, merge, grow from, and learn from each other do poorly. By working together we become stronger. We won't see too many of the fruits of this during the show (other than convincing the Gods and Demons to go the fuck away) as that type of change takes generations to solidify, but the ISA Destroyer Excalibur, merging Human, Minbari and Vorlon tech being created by a group of Human, Minbari, and League engineers is a concrete example.
Ikarra fell to its own insular nature. The same crap the fascist ("nationalist") movements want to drag us back to.
Growing up in the US, I cannot believe the "self-evident-truth" we were taught in Social Studies - that the rise of the US to being such a strong, democratic, forward thinking, LEADING country was due to being a "melting pot" which accepted all who moved there, then learned from and took/adapted the strengths of all the cultures who joined. To see so many reject that for "America First/Only," and "Close the Borders" is shocking and upsetting. Pisses me off to see parts of Ireland pushing that way, too.
But that's a different topic.
Those central themes heavily influenced me as a teenager, and you can probably draw a direct line from them to my rejection of Brexit and all the populist, nationalist, strongman tripe that's infected western politics over the last decade. And which infuses a lot of my own writing, obviously.
I'd sort of forgotten how influential B5's themes were on my nascent teenage brain. I watched B5 just after my family got back from living in Italy for 3 years, where I went to an international school. Every single person in my class (more or less) was from a different country, and it was glorious and just worked. That massively affected my thinking around borders, nationality, identity and so on - albeit subconsciously at the time, as I was only 11 - and then B5 reinforced all of it.
My brain still ticks to JMS' beat, 30 years later.
B5 was University for me, so... I'd grown up on 60's Trek, which, despite its flaws, is basically progressive, optimistic, and "Let's all get along." TNG carried those themes forward, and, if at times, we can be critical of the Federation for having standards for applicants to join, the Federation does allow member worlds to self-govern, as long as they meet certain standards. This is similar to how bodies like the US or EU work. Each US State, or EU member remains self-governing, but is subject to certain Federal-level rules. The EU doesn't set, say, minimum wage, tax brackets, or VAT for Ireland, but Irish food product must meet EU standards to be sold to other countries.
I grew up on classic Doctor Who, and there's another show about the importance of working together while maintaining diversity. The Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans are all warnings against xenophobia. Hell, so are the Time Lords, for that matter. The Doctor left Gallifrey to help others, in violation of Gallifreyan custom and law.
I ALSO grew up on Blake's 7, but no real moral lessons there - just learning you could write compelling fiction even when the leads (Blake and Avon) were very morally questionable, and where we can follow the "good(ish) guys" for years, only to have them utterly fail in the end. Boy, the final episode of that... Nothing else in film or TV has ever hit like the ending of Blake's 7.
B5 for me was more about analyzing structure. How TV could actually do long-form, evolving storytelling without basically returning to the status quo at the end. Also realizing how the production workflow of the show was about to bring a new paradigm to creatives.
NON SPOILER
Right, first episode shot... JMS has noted he hadn't really re/found character voices yet, and this episode is one of two or three JMS himself wished disappeared.
Ikarran suit is pretty cool, Sinclair's last speech of the episode is good, and that "survivor's guilt/death wish" chat between Sinclair and Garibaldi was the type of thing basically unseen in SF (or, just most) TV till that point.
Episode utterly wastes David McCallum with a boring character.
Episode is utterly ham-fisted in setting up it's central theme which is odd, because, in some ways this episode is a total macrocosm of the entire show. We'll come back that in the Spoiler section.
Richard Compton somehow manages to choose the most boring way of shooting every scene that isn't in C&C. But IN C&C... He's got that beautifully staged shot with the three techs talking about energy surges, nice an low to the floor of the upper walkway. Then he cuts to a high angle, looking down at the tech pit. Shots to Ivanova or Sinclair come FROM the tech pit to bring in the ceiling... I was a cam op for quite awhile, so I really look at cinematography, and I just don't get how Compton could find interesting angles to shoot C&C then put no effort into anything else. Some low angles looking up at the Ikarran mech suit letting the moving light fixture flare into camera would have been sweet. Well, Compton is only around for the first 9 filmed episodes... Come "Grail," he'll be gone, and better directors like Jim Johnston, Janet Greek, and Mike Vejar will pick more interesting angles. Especially Vejar.
Still, this is one of three episodes (the others are "TKO" and "Gray 17 is Missing.") I'll usually skip.
On this watch something caught my eye on the readout of the Ikarran artifact's composition. So I freeze framed it.
The artifact contains Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Xanthan, Maltodextrin, and "Okudazin."
Basically, it's edible. Would be sweet. And it's good for you, with all those vitamin B compounds. ALSO, it helps you make panel displays for Federation starships.
(Michael Okuda is the production artist for the Trek franchise, who, among other things, codified the look of the backlit LCARS displays used in Enterprise-D, so, the shout-out is worthy. Backlit panels in Trek shows are still referred to as "Okudagrams")
Again, freeze-framing video displays and newspapers is a good way to catch in-jokes and Easter Eggs on B5, but are also a good way to get world-building and/or plot teasers. The headlines from Garibaldi's paper in "Born to the Purple" will all be relevant.
"Infection" seeds important concepts which recur throughout the series - organic tech, Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX), EarthGov actively seeking artifacts, and pay attention to how many things happened "a thousand years ago." There's a throwaway line which comes back later...
Yeah, Sinclair's confrontation with the "IKAAAAARAAAAA!" battle-bot was a bit much; I get his plan was to make it mad (?) but at some points it almost came off like he was trying to have a reasoned conversation with it, which...doesn't seem the best plan.
Also, I miss Londo. He and G'Kar are the best parts of this rewatch so far.
I've forgotten what IE's part is in the show, but Ivanova's line at the end about nobody reading Santayana anymore really hit home for me, especially these days.
Sinclair's intercom baiting of the Ikaaaarran was a bit too theatrical for my liking, especially as Sinclair otherwise comes across as fairly grounded.
I hadn't quite clocked that this is the first episode without Londo and G'Kar, nor any Minbari. I wonder if there was a production reason for that, given this was the first episode shot?
I do like the scene with Ivanova and Franklin, and the acknowledgement that while they 'solved' the problem immediately facing the station, the larger systemic problems with the Earth Alliance and corporations are very much unsolved.
Given this is the first episode shot let's notice we also don't do much in the central corridor or Zocalo.
Let's assume, with the requirements for a big-expensive-one-time-use-suit* that leaving out our alien ambassadors is letting the makeup department get ahead on creating masks and prosthetics for episodes later in the production block - like, say, "The Parliament of Dreams" coming up next week, which requires a lot makeup than the first four episodes together.
*Suit will be reused in a s3 ep, with different head and hands.
To be pedantic, Interplanetary Expeditions will be abbreviated "IPX" within the show universe.
Took me a second to parse "IE."
Since IPX is quite relevant in later episodes, I get that little thing out of the way now.
Noted! :D