If you're not familiar already, in "The Empire Strikes Back," there's a shot of an extra fleeing Bespin with an ice cream mixer. There are countless fan theories/jokes about what it "really" is.
I think IG-88's head is part of a coffee machine. Or it's a lamp. Either way, it's also a recycled piece from Owen and Beru's farm and the Mos Eisley Cantina.
Ah, the Battle of the Line. Of course this is all part of B5's time loop subplot. Here we see the Triluminary for the first time. It glows for Sinclair to indicate he contains Valen's DNA. As Sinclair is Valen, this makes sense. The Triluminary can also initiate a re-write of DNA. Yes, we'll see the Triluminary in use at the end of the season.
Benson and the Knights... Poor Benson shouldn't have gotten himself in financial trouble. Yup, he was compromised and drawn into a bad situation. In retrospect it's obvious Benson was used to avoid risking compromising an existing asset - Garibaldi's aide. It's also obvious in retrospect Garibaldi's aide ended up being used anyways. Who else helped Knight One throw Benson's body out a zero-G airlock without detection, and without the airlock use leaving a record? Garibaldi's aide, lurking around in the background creating all kinds of problems.
We can't really pin down who the Knights are working for, but it's certainly one of the unsavory groups which have infiltrated EarthGov. The recall to Earth tells us that. Could be tied to Psi-Corp, could be the black ops group reverse-engineering Shadow tech, but it's certainly related to whoever sends Col. Ben-Zayn out in the episode "Eyes."
There's a prequel film titled "In the Beginning," not included in the series Blu-ray (one can hope the movies also get remastered and released), about the Earth-Minbari War. It's a fantastic prequel which does well what so many prequels fail to do - hit all the established story beats while adding in plot or character beats which surprise and illuminate what we already knew.
For example, Dr. Franklin... During the war we've learned he destroyed his research so Earthforce couldn't use his data to create bioweapons. In "In the Beginning" we learn that, for this action, Franklin was arrested and spent the rest of the war in a military prison... Which probably didn't help with Franklin's problematic relationship with his father - an Earthforce ground forces General we'll meet in season 2.
"In the Beginning" also gives us another look at the Battle of the Line (the Earth Alliance President gets one hell of a good speech leading into it). The new VFX for the Line benefit from three years of advancement in tech (by then B5 rendered on SGI workstations, not Amigas, plus software updates), but I admit, I think "And the Sky Full of Stars" is more stylish.
"In the Beginning" revisits other plot points which have already been discussed at this point in season 1. The death of Dukhat and the start of the war is... Quite horrifying. Captain Jankowski did-done fuck up. The script has a scene which was cut, but exists in a novel. Jankowski testifies to his superiors and EarthGov Senate the Minbari fired first. Jankowski later takes his own life.
Boy, this episode is a real kick in the pants. Janet Greek brings almost operatic style to her camera work with use of crane shots, wide angle and distorting lenses, and harsh lighting. She finds some really creative angles, too, like shooting Sinclair being wheeled aboard the Minbari ship through a ceiling plate, or a rather nice pan from behind a sculpture in Delenn's room. Twice she takes a character off-screen, then uses lighting to throw silhouettes on a back wall. That dolly around Sinclair in the tag scene with the fade to black before the last line. There's good reason she becomes B5's second most prolific director, after Mike Vejar. Sadly, her IMDB shows this was near the end of her directing career - and that a disproportionate amount of her credits are Weird Al Yankovich videos (Although Al does great videos). She only directed (not counting videos) for a dozen or so shows over 15 years. She's so good you'd think she'd have more.
Michael O' Hare is particularly strong here. Anyone wanna bet this goes back to having a "Battle of the Line" flashback in the pilot and "Midnight on the Firing Line?" I suspect that O' Hare mulling over his own backstory for a year helped his performance as we peel away a layer of plot-onion. And peeling that layer brought tears (as Simon noted - a detail neither of us had noted before).
Ok, I LIKE Christopher Neame's OTT, twitchy performance. It's quite theatrical. Neame was the third actor approached for the part. First it was offered to Walter Koenig, but Koenig was recovering from a heart attack (but Bester is a better role, so that worked out for Walter). Next, "The Prisoner," himself, Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan liked the script, but was out of the US at the time. Neame... He kinda McGoohans it up, doesn't he?
Simon, why you gotta pick on Judson Scott? OK, I'm biased as I always liked him (and his signature mullet) in the short-lived 80's series "The Phoenix," and as Khan's #2, Joachim, in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," so I was excited to see him on B5. Twitchy? He's practically understated.
Jim Youngs as Benson does quite well, as does Justin Williams as Mitchell, and Macaulay Bruton as Garibaldi's aide.
Mark Hendrickson returns for the fourth time this series - he's played two Narns and a Drazi before this week's turn as a Minbari of the Gray Council. Drink for Mark! (See prior comment about "Babylon 5 drinking games on whatever episode I dropped it on."
Plot onion - so we know what happened at the Battle of the Line. Sinclair was captured, interrogated, mindwiped, and released. Now the new mystery is in place: the "WHY" behind the "WHAT?"
Franklin: can we give a cheer for him? Sometimes Franklin leans too hard into his "I'm a Doctor," lines (another thing in the drinking game, BTW), but can't help but admire him for refusing to let his notes be used for bioweapons.
Something is happening on Earth. Are the "Knights" related to Homeguard? Psi Corp? IPX? Knight Two being taken back to Earth for crimes committed on Babylon 5? Hinky.
Hey, the episode begins with Sinclair's speech about "everybody lies," and more or less ends with Sinclair and Delenn lying at each other. Clever-clever.
Garibaldi's newspaper: I think this is a recycled prop, same as the issue he reads earlier in the season, but let's list the headlines (thanks to the Lurker's Guide for making this a cut/paste).
*Sports: Zero-G Tennis Results Inside
*Is There Something Living in Hyperspace?
*Homeguard Leader Convicted: Jacob Lester Found Guilty In Attack on Minbari Embassy
*Narns settle Raghesh 3 Controversy
*EA President Promises Balanced Budget by 2260
*Psi Corps in Election Tangle: Did Psi-Corps Violate its Charter by Endorsing Vice-President?
*San Diego Still Considered Too Radioactive for Occupancy:
A new study published by Earthforce Nuclear Regulatory Office declares San Diego, struck by the American States first act of nuclear terrorism over 100 years ago, still uninhabitable for the next 300 years.
*SPECIAL SECTION: Pros & Cons of Interspecies Mating
*Copyright Trial Continues in Bookzap Flap: Books Downloaded Directly into Brain: Who Owns Them?
*Is There Something Living in Hyperspace? (a repeat)
*New Binary Star Discovered
*Inside: Universe Today: Babylon 5 Edition:
Classified 5-70
Crossword 60
Editorial/Opinion 10-11A
Lotteries 11C
Horoscope 8A
HoloComics 9E
Much to unpack there. Sinclair has discussed the terrorist nuking of San Diego before. JMS went to University there, so... Make of that what you will. Something living in Hyperspace? Ominous. Psi-Corp endorsing EA VP Morgan Clark? I'm sure it's nothing. Screw Homeguard. Yay for settling Ragesh Three! That should make the EA Senate feel more confident in the Babylon Project! Interspecies mating? Careful. Some species eat their mates (c.f. "The Gathering.")
"There is a hole in your mind." Speaking of the pilot! Production note: initially Minbari were intended as female actors with makeup and voice treatment used to make them more "masculine." After the pilot was filmed the voice treatment was dropped on Mira Furlan, and the makeup redesigned to better show her features. "There is a hole in your mind" remains the only line in B5 where the vocal effect was left in.
Battle of the Line: The step-printed look on the CG gives a dreamlike feel. Unfortunately (sorry Janet, I'm throwing you under the bus), the director didn't get the memo. O'Hare was ALSO supposed to be step-printed. Comments by JMS that the shift from step-print to normal motion was a style choice. Nope.
It's a brutal sequence. Mitchell ejects, and the Minbari blast his ejection module! Oof. If that not bad enough, Sinclair gets to see someone's freaking HEAD fly by his cockpit! Nasty-nasty.
Now to address what Simon called "piddly" explosions. Oh, I'm about to disagree here. See, I have a buddy who is a literal former NASA rocket scientist (along with brain surgeon, the go to profession for the, "this person is smart" metaphor), and he and I discussed the explosions here.
From a VFX standpoint, you have two expanding spheres textured with a noise pattern, and a particle generator tossing sparks. Animator Mojo Lebowitz sliced up the models, patched them, and hand animated all the debris.
Ok, the two textured spheres... We're used to seeing real explosions in atmosphere. Pressure waves interacting with surrounding air causes all kinds of lovely distortion, rippling and smoke. The surrounding atmosphere can help fuel the boom as well.
None of this happens in space. The only thing to burn is fuel (the suit has its own air). What you're seeing is the fuel core quickly burning out. The expanding sphere (fades fast) of the vaporized fuel expanding and cooling, the inner sphere the burning mass. The sparks come from heated metal.
The explosions are a little small, but, according to the rocket scientist, pretty accurately designed.
In season 3 Foundation will shoot live pyro plates for visual excitement, but those are less physically accurate than the s1/s2 effects.
This could tie into a longer discussion between the enhanced reality of film vs actual reality. But, as one more quick note on explosions, film explosions are vaporized gasoline or propane to create a big fireball. Looking up real ordinance explosions (try YouTube) you'll see much less flame and much more shockwave dust.
Cuz fireballs are cool.
Season 1 and 2 of Babylon 5 use those more accurate sims for space battles. Less "cool," but closer to reality.
The Franklin scene is really strong. A single character note that tells you almost everything you need to know about him, and which will define his decisions for the rest of the show.
Re: the newspaper headlines. Have we even seen hyperspace in the show? We've seen ships coming in and out of jumpgates, but that newspaper is I think the first mention of hyperspace being 'a place', right?
Also, is this the first time we see the Grey Council chamber? Looks pretty neat on the blu-ray! Grey Council scenes were always awful on the DVDs, for obvious reasons.
On that note: ALL the scene extension shots look glorious on the blu-ray! I've been so happy with shots of the garden and of the prisoner being escorted to the ship in the hangar at the end of this one. So much better than the horrible DVDs.
That newspaper has been used before. I'm not certain if it was Soul Hunter or Infection, but it's a recycled prop.
The newspaper is not the first thing to directly mention hyperspace as being a distinct place, rather than the incorrect assumption which could be made that travel between gates is instantaneous. Prior episodes (as far back as the pilot) have mentioned hyperspace, and we've seen already that travel between gates takes time. But, no, we haven't SEEN hyperspace yet.
Yeah, the virtual set extensions have looked so much better on the Blu-ray. Docking bays, the Gray Council chambers, etc... Coming up, the Sanctuary. When they eventually show that, well, the floor is real, and the bottom foot of wall is real. The rest of the set is CG. Blending a virtual wall with a practical in the early 90's? Pretty advanced work! Also, the bridge of the Narn cruiser is virtual.
Oh, dippy thing that I should have mentioned in "Mind War," but the seat in Ironheart's ship and Catherine Sakai's ship, AND the Narn fighter, AND a Drazi fighter we'll see in season three is an exercise board used for stomach crunches repurposed as a seat back.
I love that kind of cheap-ass prop creation/reuse in Sci-fi, from 1960's Star Trek literally dumpster driving for scrap (glue, nail, paint, stick it on a wall) to Alien using vacuform panels impressed from cafeteria trays as Nostromo wall panels. L
Sometimes that repurposing can be distracting. Agents of SHIELD I recall used a car roofbox as a cryogenic chamber with absolutely no alterations. It might also have been them that used a Zoom H4N recorder as some kind of tracking device. Not to mention showing genius scientists supposedly building some amazing new invention, when they're clearly just fiddling with a hard drive enclosure and a GPU.
Repurposing only works when it's not obvious. As another Star Trek example, it's not obvious most of Dr. McCoy's medical gear are salt and pepper shakers.
On the other hand there's some arty chair with a specific name I've forgotten, which has been used across Star Trek TNG, VOY, ENT, DS9, and DISC, along with Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and a bunch of Marvel movies, Star Wars, and Babylon 5. Not just sci-fi either. It's shown up on sitcoms like Friends.
There were 11 total CDs of Babylon 5 music released, and one for Crusade.
Under Michael Atkinson's comment below, I give my longer discussion of B5 music. TL/DR version - the "Requiem for the Battle of the Line" is the best cue in the series, but I'm one of the few people who preferred Evan Chen's music in Crusade.
Here's a link to Chris Franke's site, listing the CDs he released. Most can still be found on Amazon at more or less reasonable prices. I suspect the rest are on eBay at prices between "That's cheap!" and "I don't want it THAT much!"
There were a lot more than 11! There were loads of individual episode CDs. I had a few of them, and have always liked Franke's work on the show, at least from season 2 onwards. Or, to be more precise, from the final scenes of 'Chrysalis' onwards.
When I watched the episode last night I was struck by the music, which is a testament to how good it is; I barely remember the music from the one before.
I was also struck by Sinclair's "Everyone lies" comment at the end, which seems cynical under the circumstances at first; the man is presented as more idealistic than that, you'd think. On the other hand, if I had a "hole in my mind", as the one guy put it, I imagine I'd be pretty cynical too.
I think this might be the first episode where Londo and G'Kar were absent and I didn't miss them (not as much, anyway), because the Sinclair/Minbari arc really was that compelling.
Yeah - to have a Sinclair-focused story work so well really speaks to how everything is firing on all cylinders here. Janet Greek pulled a great performance out of O'Hare for this one.
Overall, I'm not a huge fan of Chris Franke's scores (despite having a couple of CDs of B5 music). Quieter moments he often does well, but, especially with battle/action scenes, he's prone to using lots of clanky, atonal percussion (that "hammer on the mic stand" sample gets used so much), and punctuating weapons fire with orchestra hits. It's on-the-nose, and "leading" the audience, rather than "supporting" the audience*.
With that said, during the Battle of the Line flashback, he keeps it slow, quiet, and moody. A simple string arpeggio, a slow, ponderous beat, and downright funereal French horn chords.
"The Requiem for the Battle of the Line" is possibly the single best cue of the entire series. It's haunting, and grabs the audience through minimalism.
* Mind you, Franke never gets as OTT as Murray Gold whipping out a wailing chorus of DOOM any time he scores Daleks.
SPOILER: There's a reason the Requiem will eventually be used as the opening titles theme for season 3, and a faster take on it will become the end credits music for seasons 3-5. It's a good cue, and I'll listen to it whenever it pops up on shuffle on my music player. Most B5 score tracks I'll skip.
Looking waaay ahead, I always preferred Evan Chen's music for Crusade. Chen's music was strange, experimental, atonal, and utterly different from anything else on TV at the time. That's a CD where, when any of its tracks come up in my Playlist, I turn it up.
Unimportant side note. In my theater sound design days I plundered B5 music for a production of Henry V. Shakespeare, of course, doesn't have stage directions for huge battles, relying on dialog to sum up battles off-stage. So my sound design had the huge battles in the scene changes. The director combined multiple lords as characters to keep the cast down, but...
For Agincourt we had Glouster charge in with one other soldier, vs six French, Glouster's buddy takes out one French, then immediately dies, Glouster takes out all five remaining French, but the last runs him through. Glouster stands in a "god spot," holding his guts as...
The season 1 Requiem for the Line begins.
As the music plays, sounds of battle creep in. Just a swordsman or two at first, and, as the spot fades and the music builds, more and more fighting is heard until one can hear hundreds.
As the music shifts to the season 3 Requiem (opening theme) the English longbows loose. You can HEAR the French lines break and rout. Happens waaay too fast for the real battle, but for a 45-second scene change cue, it sure told the story.
First time I ran this cue in tech the director looked at me and said, "Wow, this sounds like a crane shot! I can 'hear' the camera rise over Glouster, tilt and pan to show the entire battle!" I could only respond with, "That's the intent. We'll call that Q done."
I also plundered the Crusade soundtrack for a production of Dracula. Worked well. Especially Chen's love theme for Galen and Elizabeth, which became the Dracula/Mina theme.
Fun fact, talking of Murray Gold: the Dalek theme is somewhat responsible for my marriage.
True story: I'd been talking to someone, we'd gone to a baseball game, and afterwards I had a mix CD (this was back in 2014), and I had it on, and the Dalek theme came on, and she liked it, and we realized we both liked music with minor choral music (of DOOM) and the rest is history.
Arts are largely subjective (Although with literature, TV, Film we can discuss whether or not plots hold together), and none more so than music. So, while I may not enjoy Murray Gold's Dalek themes, it obviously worked well for you and your wife! 👍😁
I have to admit, though, the music for the Battle of the Line is really really good. The only other musical cue that comes to mind (possibly because it's the only one I remember) is the one that plays when *spoiler for anyone new who hasn't seen it yet* Londo is watching the bombardment of the Narn homeworld. That music and Londo's face watching it all.... man oh man, that is a moment.
Oof. A great music cue for one of the best set pieces of the series.
SPOILER.
And utterly terrifying. The fact that one never sees the GROUND of the Narn homeworld from all the particulates blasted into the atmosphere, and, by end of the scene, even the fireballs are dimmed from occlusion. You just know the Narn homeworld will take a century to recover.
So much for comic relief season 1 Londo. I'm pretty sure that was one of his three prophecied chances (c.f. Signs and Portents) to avoid his fate.
Why not?
If you're not familiar already, in "The Empire Strikes Back," there's a shot of an extra fleeing Bespin with an ice cream mixer. There are countless fan theories/jokes about what it "really" is.
I think IG-88's head is part of a coffee machine. Or it's a lamp. Either way, it's also a recycled piece from Owen and Beru's farm and the Mos Eisley Cantina.
RIVER SONG WAS HERE (SPOILERS)
Ah, the Battle of the Line. Of course this is all part of B5's time loop subplot. Here we see the Triluminary for the first time. It glows for Sinclair to indicate he contains Valen's DNA. As Sinclair is Valen, this makes sense. The Triluminary can also initiate a re-write of DNA. Yes, we'll see the Triluminary in use at the end of the season.
Benson and the Knights... Poor Benson shouldn't have gotten himself in financial trouble. Yup, he was compromised and drawn into a bad situation. In retrospect it's obvious Benson was used to avoid risking compromising an existing asset - Garibaldi's aide. It's also obvious in retrospect Garibaldi's aide ended up being used anyways. Who else helped Knight One throw Benson's body out a zero-G airlock without detection, and without the airlock use leaving a record? Garibaldi's aide, lurking around in the background creating all kinds of problems.
We can't really pin down who the Knights are working for, but it's certainly one of the unsavory groups which have infiltrated EarthGov. The recall to Earth tells us that. Could be tied to Psi-Corp, could be the black ops group reverse-engineering Shadow tech, but it's certainly related to whoever sends Col. Ben-Zayn out in the episode "Eyes."
SPOILER addenda.
Right - Franklin.
There's a prequel film titled "In the Beginning," not included in the series Blu-ray (one can hope the movies also get remastered and released), about the Earth-Minbari War. It's a fantastic prequel which does well what so many prequels fail to do - hit all the established story beats while adding in plot or character beats which surprise and illuminate what we already knew.
For example, Dr. Franklin... During the war we've learned he destroyed his research so Earthforce couldn't use his data to create bioweapons. In "In the Beginning" we learn that, for this action, Franklin was arrested and spent the rest of the war in a military prison... Which probably didn't help with Franklin's problematic relationship with his father - an Earthforce ground forces General we'll meet in season 2.
"In the Beginning" also gives us another look at the Battle of the Line (the Earth Alliance President gets one hell of a good speech leading into it). The new VFX for the Line benefit from three years of advancement in tech (by then B5 rendered on SGI workstations, not Amigas, plus software updates), but I admit, I think "And the Sky Full of Stars" is more stylish.
"In the Beginning" revisits other plot points which have already been discussed at this point in season 1. The death of Dukhat and the start of the war is... Quite horrifying. Captain Jankowski did-done fuck up. The script has a scene which was cut, but exists in a novel. Jankowski testifies to his superiors and EarthGov Senate the Minbari fired first. Jankowski later takes his own life.
NON SPOILER STUFF.
Boy, this episode is a real kick in the pants. Janet Greek brings almost operatic style to her camera work with use of crane shots, wide angle and distorting lenses, and harsh lighting. She finds some really creative angles, too, like shooting Sinclair being wheeled aboard the Minbari ship through a ceiling plate, or a rather nice pan from behind a sculpture in Delenn's room. Twice she takes a character off-screen, then uses lighting to throw silhouettes on a back wall. That dolly around Sinclair in the tag scene with the fade to black before the last line. There's good reason she becomes B5's second most prolific director, after Mike Vejar. Sadly, her IMDB shows this was near the end of her directing career - and that a disproportionate amount of her credits are Weird Al Yankovich videos (Although Al does great videos). She only directed (not counting videos) for a dozen or so shows over 15 years. She's so good you'd think she'd have more.
Michael O' Hare is particularly strong here. Anyone wanna bet this goes back to having a "Battle of the Line" flashback in the pilot and "Midnight on the Firing Line?" I suspect that O' Hare mulling over his own backstory for a year helped his performance as we peel away a layer of plot-onion. And peeling that layer brought tears (as Simon noted - a detail neither of us had noted before).
Ok, I LIKE Christopher Neame's OTT, twitchy performance. It's quite theatrical. Neame was the third actor approached for the part. First it was offered to Walter Koenig, but Koenig was recovering from a heart attack (but Bester is a better role, so that worked out for Walter). Next, "The Prisoner," himself, Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan liked the script, but was out of the US at the time. Neame... He kinda McGoohans it up, doesn't he?
Simon, why you gotta pick on Judson Scott? OK, I'm biased as I always liked him (and his signature mullet) in the short-lived 80's series "The Phoenix," and as Khan's #2, Joachim, in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," so I was excited to see him on B5. Twitchy? He's practically understated.
Jim Youngs as Benson does quite well, as does Justin Williams as Mitchell, and Macaulay Bruton as Garibaldi's aide.
Mark Hendrickson returns for the fourth time this series - he's played two Narns and a Drazi before this week's turn as a Minbari of the Gray Council. Drink for Mark! (See prior comment about "Babylon 5 drinking games on whatever episode I dropped it on."
Plot onion - so we know what happened at the Battle of the Line. Sinclair was captured, interrogated, mindwiped, and released. Now the new mystery is in place: the "WHY" behind the "WHAT?"
Franklin: can we give a cheer for him? Sometimes Franklin leans too hard into his "I'm a Doctor," lines (another thing in the drinking game, BTW), but can't help but admire him for refusing to let his notes be used for bioweapons.
Something is happening on Earth. Are the "Knights" related to Homeguard? Psi Corp? IPX? Knight Two being taken back to Earth for crimes committed on Babylon 5? Hinky.
Hey, the episode begins with Sinclair's speech about "everybody lies," and more or less ends with Sinclair and Delenn lying at each other. Clever-clever.
Garibaldi's newspaper: I think this is a recycled prop, same as the issue he reads earlier in the season, but let's list the headlines (thanks to the Lurker's Guide for making this a cut/paste).
*Sports: Zero-G Tennis Results Inside
*Is There Something Living in Hyperspace?
*Homeguard Leader Convicted: Jacob Lester Found Guilty In Attack on Minbari Embassy
*Narns settle Raghesh 3 Controversy
*EA President Promises Balanced Budget by 2260
*Psi Corps in Election Tangle: Did Psi-Corps Violate its Charter by Endorsing Vice-President?
*San Diego Still Considered Too Radioactive for Occupancy:
A new study published by Earthforce Nuclear Regulatory Office declares San Diego, struck by the American States first act of nuclear terrorism over 100 years ago, still uninhabitable for the next 300 years.
*SPECIAL SECTION: Pros & Cons of Interspecies Mating
*Copyright Trial Continues in Bookzap Flap: Books Downloaded Directly into Brain: Who Owns Them?
*Is There Something Living in Hyperspace? (a repeat)
*New Binary Star Discovered
*Inside: Universe Today: Babylon 5 Edition:
Classified 5-70
Crossword 60
Editorial/Opinion 10-11A
Lotteries 11C
Horoscope 8A
HoloComics 9E
Much to unpack there. Sinclair has discussed the terrorist nuking of San Diego before. JMS went to University there, so... Make of that what you will. Something living in Hyperspace? Ominous. Psi-Corp endorsing EA VP Morgan Clark? I'm sure it's nothing. Screw Homeguard. Yay for settling Ragesh Three! That should make the EA Senate feel more confident in the Babylon Project! Interspecies mating? Careful. Some species eat their mates (c.f. "The Gathering.")
"There is a hole in your mind." Speaking of the pilot! Production note: initially Minbari were intended as female actors with makeup and voice treatment used to make them more "masculine." After the pilot was filmed the voice treatment was dropped on Mira Furlan, and the makeup redesigned to better show her features. "There is a hole in your mind" remains the only line in B5 where the vocal effect was left in.
Battle of the Line: The step-printed look on the CG gives a dreamlike feel. Unfortunately (sorry Janet, I'm throwing you under the bus), the director didn't get the memo. O'Hare was ALSO supposed to be step-printed. Comments by JMS that the shift from step-print to normal motion was a style choice. Nope.
It's a brutal sequence. Mitchell ejects, and the Minbari blast his ejection module! Oof. If that not bad enough, Sinclair gets to see someone's freaking HEAD fly by his cockpit! Nasty-nasty.
Now to address what Simon called "piddly" explosions. Oh, I'm about to disagree here. See, I have a buddy who is a literal former NASA rocket scientist (along with brain surgeon, the go to profession for the, "this person is smart" metaphor), and he and I discussed the explosions here.
From a VFX standpoint, you have two expanding spheres textured with a noise pattern, and a particle generator tossing sparks. Animator Mojo Lebowitz sliced up the models, patched them, and hand animated all the debris.
Ok, the two textured spheres... We're used to seeing real explosions in atmosphere. Pressure waves interacting with surrounding air causes all kinds of lovely distortion, rippling and smoke. The surrounding atmosphere can help fuel the boom as well.
None of this happens in space. The only thing to burn is fuel (the suit has its own air). What you're seeing is the fuel core quickly burning out. The expanding sphere (fades fast) of the vaporized fuel expanding and cooling, the inner sphere the burning mass. The sparks come from heated metal.
The explosions are a little small, but, according to the rocket scientist, pretty accurately designed.
In season 3 Foundation will shoot live pyro plates for visual excitement, but those are less physically accurate than the s1/s2 effects.
This could tie into a longer discussion between the enhanced reality of film vs actual reality. But, as one more quick note on explosions, film explosions are vaporized gasoline or propane to create a big fireball. Looking up real ordinance explosions (try YouTube) you'll see much less flame and much more shockwave dust.
Cuz fireballs are cool.
Season 1 and 2 of Babylon 5 use those more accurate sims for space battles. Less "cool," but closer to reality.
The Franklin scene is really strong. A single character note that tells you almost everything you need to know about him, and which will define his decisions for the rest of the show.
Re: the newspaper headlines. Have we even seen hyperspace in the show? We've seen ships coming in and out of jumpgates, but that newspaper is I think the first mention of hyperspace being 'a place', right?
Also, is this the first time we see the Grey Council chamber? Looks pretty neat on the blu-ray! Grey Council scenes were always awful on the DVDs, for obvious reasons.
On that note: ALL the scene extension shots look glorious on the blu-ray! I've been so happy with shots of the garden and of the prisoner being escorted to the ship in the hangar at the end of this one. So much better than the horrible DVDs.
That newspaper has been used before. I'm not certain if it was Soul Hunter or Infection, but it's a recycled prop.
The newspaper is not the first thing to directly mention hyperspace as being a distinct place, rather than the incorrect assumption which could be made that travel between gates is instantaneous. Prior episodes (as far back as the pilot) have mentioned hyperspace, and we've seen already that travel between gates takes time. But, no, we haven't SEEN hyperspace yet.
Yeah, the virtual set extensions have looked so much better on the Blu-ray. Docking bays, the Gray Council chambers, etc... Coming up, the Sanctuary. When they eventually show that, well, the floor is real, and the bottom foot of wall is real. The rest of the set is CG. Blending a virtual wall with a practical in the early 90's? Pretty advanced work! Also, the bridge of the Narn cruiser is virtual.
Oh, dippy thing that I should have mentioned in "Mind War," but the seat in Ironheart's ship and Catherine Sakai's ship, AND the Narn fighter, AND a Drazi fighter we'll see in season three is an exercise board used for stomach crunches repurposed as a seat back.
I love that kind of cheap-ass prop creation/reuse in Sci-fi, from 1960's Star Trek literally dumpster driving for scrap (glue, nail, paint, stick it on a wall) to Alien using vacuform panels impressed from cafeteria trays as Nostromo wall panels. L
Sometimes that repurposing can be distracting. Agents of SHIELD I recall used a car roofbox as a cryogenic chamber with absolutely no alterations. It might also have been them that used a Zoom H4N recorder as some kind of tracking device. Not to mention showing genius scientists supposedly building some amazing new invention, when they're clearly just fiddling with a hard drive enclosure and a GPU.
Those are pretty bad.
Repurposing only works when it's not obvious. As another Star Trek example, it's not obvious most of Dr. McCoy's medical gear are salt and pepper shakers.
On the other hand there's some arty chair with a specific name I've forgotten, which has been used across Star Trek TNG, VOY, ENT, DS9, and DISC, along with Stargate SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and a bunch of Marvel movies, Star Wars, and Babylon 5. Not just sci-fi either. It's shown up on sitcoms like Friends.
It's this one.
https://www.hlsl.co.uk/blog/2014/7/13/worf-isnt-the-only-90s-character-with-a-strange-taste-in-furniture
Ha, amazing.
We have a vegetable steamer that opens up like a satellite. I keep wanting to do some kind of miniature shoot with it.
There were at least 2 CD soundtracks available. Had them both. (All? Maybe there were more?)
There were 11 total CDs of Babylon 5 music released, and one for Crusade.
Under Michael Atkinson's comment below, I give my longer discussion of B5 music. TL/DR version - the "Requiem for the Battle of the Line" is the best cue in the series, but I'm one of the few people who preferred Evan Chen's music in Crusade.
Wow! They must have kept going after I stopped paying attention. I don't think I had more than four.
Here's a link to Chris Franke's site, listing the CDs he released. Most can still be found on Amazon at more or less reasonable prices. I suspect the rest are on eBay at prices between "That's cheap!" and "I don't want it THAT much!"
There were a lot more than 11! There were loads of individual episode CDs. I had a few of them, and have always liked Franke's work on the show, at least from season 2 onwards. Or, to be more precise, from the final scenes of 'Chrysalis' onwards.
This week's ep is when it really clicked, though.
When I watched the episode last night I was struck by the music, which is a testament to how good it is; I barely remember the music from the one before.
I was also struck by Sinclair's "Everyone lies" comment at the end, which seems cynical under the circumstances at first; the man is presented as more idealistic than that, you'd think. On the other hand, if I had a "hole in my mind", as the one guy put it, I imagine I'd be pretty cynical too.
I think this might be the first episode where Londo and G'Kar were absent and I didn't miss them (not as much, anyway), because the Sinclair/Minbari arc really was that compelling.
Yeah - to have a Sinclair-focused story work so well really speaks to how everything is firing on all cylinders here. Janet Greek pulled a great performance out of O'Hare for this one.
Overall, I'm not a huge fan of Chris Franke's scores (despite having a couple of CDs of B5 music). Quieter moments he often does well, but, especially with battle/action scenes, he's prone to using lots of clanky, atonal percussion (that "hammer on the mic stand" sample gets used so much), and punctuating weapons fire with orchestra hits. It's on-the-nose, and "leading" the audience, rather than "supporting" the audience*.
With that said, during the Battle of the Line flashback, he keeps it slow, quiet, and moody. A simple string arpeggio, a slow, ponderous beat, and downright funereal French horn chords.
"The Requiem for the Battle of the Line" is possibly the single best cue of the entire series. It's haunting, and grabs the audience through minimalism.
* Mind you, Franke never gets as OTT as Murray Gold whipping out a wailing chorus of DOOM any time he scores Daleks.
SPOILER: There's a reason the Requiem will eventually be used as the opening titles theme for season 3, and a faster take on it will become the end credits music for seasons 3-5. It's a good cue, and I'll listen to it whenever it pops up on shuffle on my music player. Most B5 score tracks I'll skip.
Looking waaay ahead, I always preferred Evan Chen's music for Crusade. Chen's music was strange, experimental, atonal, and utterly different from anything else on TV at the time. That's a CD where, when any of its tracks come up in my Playlist, I turn it up.
Unimportant side note. In my theater sound design days I plundered B5 music for a production of Henry V. Shakespeare, of course, doesn't have stage directions for huge battles, relying on dialog to sum up battles off-stage. So my sound design had the huge battles in the scene changes. The director combined multiple lords as characters to keep the cast down, but...
For Agincourt we had Glouster charge in with one other soldier, vs six French, Glouster's buddy takes out one French, then immediately dies, Glouster takes out all five remaining French, but the last runs him through. Glouster stands in a "god spot," holding his guts as...
The season 1 Requiem for the Line begins.
As the music plays, sounds of battle creep in. Just a swordsman or two at first, and, as the spot fades and the music builds, more and more fighting is heard until one can hear hundreds.
As the music shifts to the season 3 Requiem (opening theme) the English longbows loose. You can HEAR the French lines break and rout. Happens waaay too fast for the real battle, but for a 45-second scene change cue, it sure told the story.
First time I ran this cue in tech the director looked at me and said, "Wow, this sounds like a crane shot! I can 'hear' the camera rise over Glouster, tilt and pan to show the entire battle!" I could only respond with, "That's the intent. We'll call that Q done."
I also plundered the Crusade soundtrack for a production of Dracula. Worked well. Especially Chen's love theme for Galen and Elizabeth, which became the Dracula/Mina theme.
Fun fact, talking of Murray Gold: the Dalek theme is somewhat responsible for my marriage.
True story: I'd been talking to someone, we'd gone to a baseball game, and afterwards I had a mix CD (this was back in 2014), and I had it on, and the Dalek theme came on, and she liked it, and we realized we both liked music with minor choral music (of DOOM) and the rest is history.
Nice!
Arts are largely subjective (Although with literature, TV, Film we can discuss whether or not plots hold together), and none more so than music. So, while I may not enjoy Murray Gold's Dalek themes, it obviously worked well for you and your wife! 👍😁
I have to admit, though, the music for the Battle of the Line is really really good. The only other musical cue that comes to mind (possibly because it's the only one I remember) is the one that plays when *spoiler for anyone new who hasn't seen it yet* Londo is watching the bombardment of the Narn homeworld. That music and Londo's face watching it all.... man oh man, that is a moment.
Oof. A great music cue for one of the best set pieces of the series.
SPOILER.
And utterly terrifying. The fact that one never sees the GROUND of the Narn homeworld from all the particulates blasted into the atmosphere, and, by end of the scene, even the fireballs are dimmed from occlusion. You just know the Narn homeworld will take a century to recover.
So much for comic relief season 1 Londo. I'm pretty sure that was one of his three prophecied chances (c.f. Signs and Portents) to avoid his fate.
"This is the story of the last of Babylon stations."
https://youtu.be/BtrUhIuEqdY?si=gVtG1eOjTtRKQ2HQ