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?
Non Spoiler.
Good episode. Lots going on. It's never specified if the Streib are independents, or collecting data for the Shadows. Thoughts? (JMS says independent. Thus, reality kills the fun thought experiment.)
The whole abduction plot is enjoyable. The few shots with pure CG or CG set extensions are very well done. As are the new shots of Sheridan in his Starfury from the outside POV.
The sets in the Streib ship are pretty effectively creepy until Sheridan and the Narn escape. Then the floor ends up being way too smooth. The blue lighting kills the painting on the floor. The Streib makeup - we never get a good look at it. JMS notes they had red, slit-pupil eyes.
The fight between Sheridan and the Narn is better performed than the fight between Sheridan and the Narn. Marshal Teague is a martial artist, stuntman, and former special forces military. The actor playing the Drazi is one of the "Alien Rep Company" actors. Obviously one of them was better with fight choreography. With several years of martial arts training and a couple years of fencing, kendo, and stage combat training myself, I will note it's not easy. Especially when having to reset for camera and do multiple takes from multiple angles all day.
If anyone is curious, the hardest part of stage combat, and where most injuries occur is being the person hit. Let's say you are "punching" me. You just need to throw your hand in the general direction of my face (depending on camera/audience angle your hand might not even be within 6 inches/15 cm of me). *I'm* the one who sells the move by snapping my head back and falling over. It can be a lot of fun, but, in my day I've been in fight sequences gone wrong. I've had cracked ribs, a cracked jaw, been thrown THROUGH a wall (grips set the stage wrong so we were out of position), and have a dueling scar from a foil which came within about an inch (3cm) from taking out my eye. When I occasionally compliment or critique B5's fight scenes, it's with respect, because it's a very difficult task to choreograph, rehearse, and film on a 90's TV schedule with 6 production days (5 in s5) to get it in the can.
The ship design for the Streib is lovely. Beautiful asymmetrical design, a mixture of mechanical and organic elements (It's got a claw!), and an impressive optical illusion: The hull looks like it has a pebbled surface, which, on a low poly model would normally be done with a bump or normal map. Lightwave didn't have those yet. Yup, that hull texture comes from a carefully created specular map driving highlights.
A few spectacular Starfury shots, too. A new establishing shot of B5 near the end of the episode with Starfuries flying past the camera comes to mind.
While there are a lot of solid performances in the episode, it's Lennier who stands out. Delenn herself brings it up in the episode - how much Lennier has changed since the top of season 1. He also gets the line of the episode.
Delenn: Have I told you recently how much I... appreciate you, Lennier?
Lennier: No. But it will give us something to discuss on our journey.
S1 Lennier could never crack that joke.
Ramirez: Sigh. Yes, yes, I get that plot requirements wanted to make sure no squad leaders were available so Sheridan would fly the mission, but his other comments about flight pay, and his nerves about Hague are enough to justify him going anyway. Which means we could have had KEFFER in this episode.
Yes, readers of my comments all know I'm not a fan of Keffer, but, instead of random pilot who immediately dies after hanging with senior staff, we could have given Keffer the bet (and some personality), still had the radiation leak - just not terminal (and some heroism), and basically given some worth to a useless character. Bye, Ramirez. We hardly knew ye.
Neroon on the Gray Council can never cause complications. At all.
Also, have I mentioned how awesome Lennier is in this episode? What a stalwart white knight! What a true friend! It's somewhere around this episode he became my favorite character.
B5 is terribly underrated and under appreciated. Quirky and campy at times, but overall a ground or maybe space breaker. What subsequent movies/shows did it influence? What, if anything, has been its lasting effect? Amazon’s The Expanse seems to have some shared DNA.