s2e11: All Alone in the Night

What could go wrong?

We’re watching the pioneering 90s TV show Babylon 5. If you want to join us, hit subscribe then go to your account and turn on the Let’s Watch notifications.

The benefits of Babylon 5’s pioneering long-form storytelling come into focus here, with an otherwise standalone episode sandwiched between exciting Earth and Minbari developments. It’s a formula that has been setting season 2 apart from season 1, and is giving the show a new kind of propulsion.

Modern shows on the streaming networks are often accused of slack pacing, despite often only consisting of 8-or-so episodes. I was reminded of this by an article in the Guardian about House of the Dragon’s second season. It’s a strange situation to be in, that modern shows can feel slow despite having so few episodes. How can it be that they feel so tedious, and so frivolous with our time, when equivalent shows in the 90s and 2000s often had 20+ episodes per season?

In short, the pacing is off, and it’s in large part — I think — because of that short number of episodes. It means there’s no room for fun one-off episodes, resulting in every episode being on the ‘critical path’. This draws the overall structure of the show closer to a movie than a traditional television show; and yet the writers still have eight hours to fill. And so we end up with modern shows often feeling like drawn-out, indulgent movies with bad pacing. They sit in an awkward spot in-between serial storytelling and movies.

A movie is inherently propulsive, with very little wasted time. Every shot, every scene, has to count. A pre-streaming TV show had a huge amount of time to play with, but rather than string out a movie-sized plot over 22-ish episodes, they instead used it to have fun, or to explore interesting ideas that weren’t part of the main thrust. Episodic storytelling.

The interesting thing that Babylon 5 brought to the table in the mid-90s was to take that long-form, episodic form and overlay a novelistic narrative structure. In my opinion it’s the best of both worlds: enough room to be creative and playful, but always with forward motion. There’s always purpose, and characters are always developing in a consistent manner, and the world is changing, but there’s space to breathe. Sometimes you have an arc-heavy episode that goes all-out, but other times you have ‘All Alone in the Night’.

Which, yes, brings me back to this week’s episode. Apologies for that diversion. In this was have a standalone A-plot with Sheridan abducted by aliens. While he tries to escape, Ivanova calls in favours from the alien governments and a visiting General Hague to mount a rescue. It’s fun stuff!

Where it gets clever is that General Hague is in the episode to flip the table and upend what we knew about Sheridan. The assistance from the Minbari ties in to Delenn being kicked out of the Grey Council, Neroon rising to power and her role as ambassador to Babylon 5 looking under threat. All of that stuff is part of the longer game, and will resonate down the rest of the season and beyond. That those B-plots also help to provide the solution to the A-plot is deeply satisfying.

The alien ship is suitably weird, the sets are simple but effective, and Sheridan’s anonymous Narn enemy-then-comrade is great (played by the same actor as Drake in ‘Infection’. All together now: Ikkaaaarraaaaaaa!).

Oh! And the Agamemnon absolutely kicks ass. Very cool to see an Earth capital ship in action, and being significantly upgraded from the Hyperion we saw way back in ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’.

At the end we discover that Sheridan has been assessing the command staff on B5 for their loyalty to Earth. That General Hague knows something bad is going down back home and is trying to figure out what it is, and stop it. Confirmation that the Psi Corps is behind a lot of it. The veil dropping on Sheridan is hugely effective: no more Mr Smiling Nice Guy — the realisation recontextualises everything we’ve seen from him before. It’s a great rug pull, spoiled only by the slightly rushed scene with Franklin, Ivanova and Garibaldi, which really needed more space.

Oh, and Kosh sneaks about being weird.

Next up is ‘Acts of Sacrifice’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

For what appears to be a throwaway (if fun) alien abduction episode, there’s a lot in here.

We meet a Narn who will eventually be named Ta’lon, and have a larger part to play in subsequent seasons. Which is cool, as Marshall Teague is fantastic.

Delenn is ejected from the council, which seems like a bad thing but will actually free her to act as she needs to in order to combat the Shadows. We get signs that Lennier feels deeply for her, which…won’t end brilliantly.

The General Hague stuff obviously sets up the entire season 3 and 4 break from Earth, although at this point we have no idea it’s going to get that serious.

Then there’s Sheridan’s vision, while on board the Stribe ship. Even as someone who has watched the show several times, I have difficulty parsing what it’s all about. Kosh is already in Sheridan’s head, it seems. There’s a shot of Sheridan in a Psi Cop uniform. Ivanova pops up in various forms. The ‘man in-between’ is searching for Sheridan: is that Lorien? It’s all quite obtuse, to the point of incomprehensibility.

Good episode, though, right?