Ah, with this episode Keffer - briefly - comes into relevance. His firing towards the Cortez in this episode is, literally, the only time Keffer will do anything cool or interesting (yes, I remember Gropos, and Robert Russler is terrible in that episode).
Keffer was added to the vast because the network insisted on having a Starfury pilot among the regular cast. JMS didn't really like the idea, and it's utterly OBVIOUS JMS hated Keffer. Here's Keffer's entire arc:
Keffer doesn't get to finish a (holo) letter from home. Keffer is immediately established as annoying. Robert Russler manages, with one line, to establish himself as the worst actor among any credited during the opening titles.
Keffer sees a Shadow vessel in hyperspace. This becomes pretty much his entire personality.
Keffer fires in the direction of Cortez - this is the only time Keffer will actually be portrayed as competent.
Keffer goes looking.
Keffer is NOT Sheridan's wingman in "All Alone in the Night." Instead, a single episode guest actor will be Sheridan's wingman, but will die in the episode. This random dead pilot is still more interesting than Keffer.
Keffer makes friends with some infantry troops who are infinitely more and charismatic - but they all die.
Keffer gets told to stop looking for Shadow vessels, but does it anyway. The show will stop killing more interesting one-off Earthforce characters.
Keffer gets utterly humiliated by Sheridan in a training exercise - Sheridan tells Zeta Wing to "Learn from Zeta leader's mistakes."
Keffer finds a Shadow vessel, and manages to eject his flight recorder. Then he dies.
Keffer's death is his most significant moment - only because he manages to launch the flight recorder. Also, if you frame-by-frame the relevant scene, you'll see his face melts.
Figures I'll get all my Keffer complaining out of the way here. Well. Until we get to GROPOS. Then we'll point out how Robert Russler can ruin a great scene.
I think the GROPOS scenes you reference with Keffer making friends is the first episode I saw if B5 and the earliest one that sticks in my memory, anyway; I had no idea then that he was basically a one-season wonder. Yikes.
Non spoiler detail on hyperspace and Explorer ships.
This episode mostly says it all, but hyperspace navigation in B5 works like this:
There is a beacon inside each jumpgate. The beacon itself is an omnidirectional transmitter. Because of the nature of hyperspace - random energy discharges, extreme (and shifting) gravity wells, etc - the beacon has limited effective range. Other jumpgate beacons are basically out of range, so these beacons can't be used for triangulation. They are more-or-less emergency reference, and also used by ships which have their own jump engines. A ship can navigate within a system with a jumpgate using the omnidirectional beacon as reference to enter and leave hyperspace close to the gate without losing lock.
The majority of navigation uses a second set of transmitter/receivers. Selected gate pairs have narrow-beam transmissions between them these beams define "motorways" in hyperspace. Gate pair A/B have a route. Gate pair A/C does not. Gate C may be in the same system as gate B, but Gate C is paired with Gate D. You can see this in s1 "Signs and Portents" when Ivanova leads Alpha Wing out against the Raiders. Alpha Wing drops from a gate and is moving to intercept a freighter hours away. Obviously this freighter has emerged from another gate at least several more hours away (otherwise, if the other gate was closer, the freighter would have run for home, not for Babylon 5's gate), but within the same system.
There will be one more observation on gates in the Spoiler notes.
Explorer class ships, therefore, have an extremely dangerous job. Either an Explorer is looking for an ancient gate no one had used in centuries (those do exist... After all G'kar used on in "Revelations..."), or someone is doing very complex math to find approximate hyperspace coordinates and map them to approximate realspace coordinates, and the Explorer ship powers through hyperspace, maybe occasionally ducking back to realspace to take a position reading from star patterns.
This episode's subplot with Sheridan questioning his fitness to command Babylon 5 works well - especially when those doubts are (seemingly) placed in his mind by a former commander, friend, and, I'd say, mentor. It works because it organically flows from a conversation between people who have known each other for, probably, close to two decades. For the timeline, we're now 11 years out from the Earth-Minbari War, the war itself was a bit over two years (c.f. "In the Beginning") plus however much time it took Sheridan to rise from his first posting on the Moon-Mars run - basically a bus route - to XO of EAS Lexington (c.f. "In the Beginning").
There's a scene at the end of "Points of Departure" which doesn't work so well - Franklin, Ivanova, and (inexplicably) Keffer having the "What do you think of the new Captain?" conversation, which is quite clunky, by having the characters say, "Oh, I like him." It's not as bad as, say, Steven Moffat having the 11th Doctor call his own future to tell Clara, "Like him, he's still me," in the Doctor Who episode "Deep Breath," which absolutely smacked of desperation. Back to Babylon 5, wouldn't that "Points of Departure" scene been a good time for Ivanova to list off some good points about Sheridan from her time with him at Station Io, rather than just a couple of, "from what I've seen, I like him?" We'd still have the audience being told Sheridan is a cool guy by characters, but it would flow better and have organic motivation.
Bringing it back to "A Distant Star," there's a minor inconsistency in dialog since Sheridan does his whole, "I'm a Starship Commander, not a Station Commander," thing. Um. Yeah. You're a Station Commander, too. That's where you met Ivanova - when you commanded STATION IO!
Ok, enough nitpicking JMS's scripts - no, wait, this is me... We'll keep nitpicking, but just other points.
I'd forgotten Keffer got promoted to squadron leader due to the death of Commander Galus. Then again, Galus is only in this episode, and mysteriously appears from nowhere in another awkward scene where he's eating with senior command staff.
Look, TV production is difficult, and there's a lot to juggle with casting, and I get this (in some cases from experience), but season 1 did better at juggling these minor characters. Garibaldi's aide, Jack, had multiple appearances before being revealed as a traitor. Delta Seven appears in multiple episodes, even though he only gets one or two lines total, and a close up, which is reused in multiple episodes before he dies of time dilation exposure in "Babylon Squared." Besides Officer Welch a lot of the security staff are recurrent faces, as are C&C staff, and even the ISN anchor. Technically a spoiler, but vague, some of recurring faces in the prior sentence will even get little mini arcs of their own! So, sometimes, when Babylon 5 has to resort to "Suddenly this person we've never seen before is hanging out with our leads" it totally signposts either 1) bad person of the episode, or 2) cannon fodder of the episode.
All I'm saying is, there's not really any true need to kill Commander Galus in the episode other than to ratchet up the tension by killing someone. Keffer could have ALWAYS been Zeta Leader, the mysterious ship flyby can still take out his nav systems and thrusters, and Keffer can still do his cool thing.
Yes, Keffer does a cool thing. We'll say that one more time, because it'll be the last time I say anything nice about Keffer. Holding his cool, firing towards the jumpgate beacon, and even figuring out how to get back on the beacon - it hints at a better character than we got. Keffer remains hampered by 1) JMS resenting the studio note to add him, 2) Robert Russler being a mediocre performer. Dude has NO charisma.
Does the EAS Cortez hold up to modern VFX? Of course not. Is the design awesome? Yes, it is. Cortez gets a brilliant series of introduction introductions, first via a nicely staged shot through jumpgate pylons, then her entrance to Babylon 5's sector, with the Starfury passing onto her shadow, then the reverse angle where the Starfury his main engines (so we can see ir), then finally pulling aside Babylon 5. Cortez is staggeringly huge. She's easily more than half as long as Babylon 5, has her own huge centrifuge, and that docking bay looks like it could hold a Hyperion-class Earthforce destroyer. Being a Chris Foss fan, I like her paint scheme. Hell, Cortez even gets a kickass fanfare (and I'm not that huge a fan of Christopher Franke's scoring. He's very hit and miss for me, but, sometimes, he nails it, and the Cortez fanfare nails it).
I'd forgotten this episode has a subplot where Delenn faces - and let's call it what it is - some naked racism from other Minbari. It dovetails nicely with the Sheridan self-doubt subplot, and leads to that nice scene with the two in the Zen garden.
Franklin and the food plan. I love the subplot. Again, it's organic growth: Franklin has two injured senior staff under his care, so he's absolutely within his remit to monitor their nutrition. Sheridan is just a bonus. But the scene in the Zocalo where they all swap meals always puts a smile on my face. Add in Garibaldi's tale of his father and the subplot back doors in some backstory as well as character growth. From this episode on Garibaldi and Franklin aren't merely co-workers, they are friends.
The directing for the episode is... Odd. As Simon noted the scenes on Cortez seem inconsistent in terms of portraying a threat level. Some yelling, some not, and there aren't really any cool angles of Cortez's bridge. When explosions and smoke are going on, speaking for myself, I'd try to find interesting or off-kilter camera angles. Jim Johnston is usually solid, so, without current evidence (and my level of reference material WILL change by the end of the year, according to my Kickstarter updates), I will assume the Cortez scenes were all shot at the end of schedule (Cortez would be a redress of C&C, like Agamemnon). This episode has a LOT of complex walk and talk shots through and around the central corridor and Zocalo with lots of extras and their associated business. Therefore I'm just gonna assume by the time Johnston got to Cortez he was running low on time and just had to get everything in the can.
Let's end on a positive: Simon, I agree with you - Miguel Nuñez Jr takes the little nothing part of Orwell the dock worker and gives him so much personality you just wanna see him come back. Good job, minor guest star!
Why did the Shadow vessel in hyperspace leave Cortez alone? Do Shadow weapons not function in hyperspace, or did the Shadow assume Cortez was an allied vessel? We will learn, for example, Psi-Corp has at least one ship in hyperspace off-beacon.
Poor Delenn isn't done facing racism yet. Humans and Minbari.
On the note about hyperspace and gates - we'll see a gate pair in "Coming of Shadows." The Centauri approach the destroyed Narn base from gate A, the Narns from gate B. This shows the non-directional beacons are quite short range, and demonstrates again how hyperspace messes up communication. Neither fleet can detect the other, or the other's use of a jumpgate, despite emerging in proximity to each other. This also implies a limited distance for narrow beam transmissions, which helps explain the limited distances of gate pairs, and why systems need multiple gates.
Snarky Spoiler comment:
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Ah, with this episode Keffer - briefly - comes into relevance. His firing towards the Cortez in this episode is, literally, the only time Keffer will do anything cool or interesting (yes, I remember Gropos, and Robert Russler is terrible in that episode).
Keffer was added to the vast because the network insisted on having a Starfury pilot among the regular cast. JMS didn't really like the idea, and it's utterly OBVIOUS JMS hated Keffer. Here's Keffer's entire arc:
Keffer doesn't get to finish a (holo) letter from home. Keffer is immediately established as annoying. Robert Russler manages, with one line, to establish himself as the worst actor among any credited during the opening titles.
Keffer sees a Shadow vessel in hyperspace. This becomes pretty much his entire personality.
Keffer fires in the direction of Cortez - this is the only time Keffer will actually be portrayed as competent.
Keffer goes looking.
Keffer is NOT Sheridan's wingman in "All Alone in the Night." Instead, a single episode guest actor will be Sheridan's wingman, but will die in the episode. This random dead pilot is still more interesting than Keffer.
Keffer makes friends with some infantry troops who are infinitely more and charismatic - but they all die.
Keffer gets told to stop looking for Shadow vessels, but does it anyway. The show will stop killing more interesting one-off Earthforce characters.
Keffer gets utterly humiliated by Sheridan in a training exercise - Sheridan tells Zeta Wing to "Learn from Zeta leader's mistakes."
Keffer finds a Shadow vessel, and manages to eject his flight recorder. Then he dies.
Keffer's death is his most significant moment - only because he manages to launch the flight recorder. Also, if you frame-by-frame the relevant scene, you'll see his face melts.
Figures I'll get all my Keffer complaining out of the way here. Well. Until we get to GROPOS. Then we'll point out how Robert Russler can ruin a great scene.
I think the GROPOS scenes you reference with Keffer making friends is the first episode I saw if B5 and the earliest one that sticks in my memory, anyway; I had no idea then that he was basically a one-season wonder. Yikes.
Obvious at the time I didn't know he was a one-season wonder, either, but certainly didn't miss him when he was gone.
GROPOS is a solid episode.
Non spoiler detail on hyperspace and Explorer ships.
This episode mostly says it all, but hyperspace navigation in B5 works like this:
There is a beacon inside each jumpgate. The beacon itself is an omnidirectional transmitter. Because of the nature of hyperspace - random energy discharges, extreme (and shifting) gravity wells, etc - the beacon has limited effective range. Other jumpgate beacons are basically out of range, so these beacons can't be used for triangulation. They are more-or-less emergency reference, and also used by ships which have their own jump engines. A ship can navigate within a system with a jumpgate using the omnidirectional beacon as reference to enter and leave hyperspace close to the gate without losing lock.
The majority of navigation uses a second set of transmitter/receivers. Selected gate pairs have narrow-beam transmissions between them these beams define "motorways" in hyperspace. Gate pair A/B have a route. Gate pair A/C does not. Gate C may be in the same system as gate B, but Gate C is paired with Gate D. You can see this in s1 "Signs and Portents" when Ivanova leads Alpha Wing out against the Raiders. Alpha Wing drops from a gate and is moving to intercept a freighter hours away. Obviously this freighter has emerged from another gate at least several more hours away (otherwise, if the other gate was closer, the freighter would have run for home, not for Babylon 5's gate), but within the same system.
There will be one more observation on gates in the Spoiler notes.
Explorer class ships, therefore, have an extremely dangerous job. Either an Explorer is looking for an ancient gate no one had used in centuries (those do exist... After all G'kar used on in "Revelations..."), or someone is doing very complex math to find approximate hyperspace coordinates and map them to approximate realspace coordinates, and the Explorer ship powers through hyperspace, maybe occasionally ducking back to realspace to take a position reading from star patterns.
So, losing your fusion reactors is bad.
Non Spoiler:
This episode's subplot with Sheridan questioning his fitness to command Babylon 5 works well - especially when those doubts are (seemingly) placed in his mind by a former commander, friend, and, I'd say, mentor. It works because it organically flows from a conversation between people who have known each other for, probably, close to two decades. For the timeline, we're now 11 years out from the Earth-Minbari War, the war itself was a bit over two years (c.f. "In the Beginning") plus however much time it took Sheridan to rise from his first posting on the Moon-Mars run - basically a bus route - to XO of EAS Lexington (c.f. "In the Beginning").
There's a scene at the end of "Points of Departure" which doesn't work so well - Franklin, Ivanova, and (inexplicably) Keffer having the "What do you think of the new Captain?" conversation, which is quite clunky, by having the characters say, "Oh, I like him." It's not as bad as, say, Steven Moffat having the 11th Doctor call his own future to tell Clara, "Like him, he's still me," in the Doctor Who episode "Deep Breath," which absolutely smacked of desperation. Back to Babylon 5, wouldn't that "Points of Departure" scene been a good time for Ivanova to list off some good points about Sheridan from her time with him at Station Io, rather than just a couple of, "from what I've seen, I like him?" We'd still have the audience being told Sheridan is a cool guy by characters, but it would flow better and have organic motivation.
Bringing it back to "A Distant Star," there's a minor inconsistency in dialog since Sheridan does his whole, "I'm a Starship Commander, not a Station Commander," thing. Um. Yeah. You're a Station Commander, too. That's where you met Ivanova - when you commanded STATION IO!
Ok, enough nitpicking JMS's scripts - no, wait, this is me... We'll keep nitpicking, but just other points.
I'd forgotten Keffer got promoted to squadron leader due to the death of Commander Galus. Then again, Galus is only in this episode, and mysteriously appears from nowhere in another awkward scene where he's eating with senior command staff.
Look, TV production is difficult, and there's a lot to juggle with casting, and I get this (in some cases from experience), but season 1 did better at juggling these minor characters. Garibaldi's aide, Jack, had multiple appearances before being revealed as a traitor. Delta Seven appears in multiple episodes, even though he only gets one or two lines total, and a close up, which is reused in multiple episodes before he dies of time dilation exposure in "Babylon Squared." Besides Officer Welch a lot of the security staff are recurrent faces, as are C&C staff, and even the ISN anchor. Technically a spoiler, but vague, some of recurring faces in the prior sentence will even get little mini arcs of their own! So, sometimes, when Babylon 5 has to resort to "Suddenly this person we've never seen before is hanging out with our leads" it totally signposts either 1) bad person of the episode, or 2) cannon fodder of the episode.
All I'm saying is, there's not really any true need to kill Commander Galus in the episode other than to ratchet up the tension by killing someone. Keffer could have ALWAYS been Zeta Leader, the mysterious ship flyby can still take out his nav systems and thrusters, and Keffer can still do his cool thing.
Yes, Keffer does a cool thing. We'll say that one more time, because it'll be the last time I say anything nice about Keffer. Holding his cool, firing towards the jumpgate beacon, and even figuring out how to get back on the beacon - it hints at a better character than we got. Keffer remains hampered by 1) JMS resenting the studio note to add him, 2) Robert Russler being a mediocre performer. Dude has NO charisma.
Does the EAS Cortez hold up to modern VFX? Of course not. Is the design awesome? Yes, it is. Cortez gets a brilliant series of introduction introductions, first via a nicely staged shot through jumpgate pylons, then her entrance to Babylon 5's sector, with the Starfury passing onto her shadow, then the reverse angle where the Starfury his main engines (so we can see ir), then finally pulling aside Babylon 5. Cortez is staggeringly huge. She's easily more than half as long as Babylon 5, has her own huge centrifuge, and that docking bay looks like it could hold a Hyperion-class Earthforce destroyer. Being a Chris Foss fan, I like her paint scheme. Hell, Cortez even gets a kickass fanfare (and I'm not that huge a fan of Christopher Franke's scoring. He's very hit and miss for me, but, sometimes, he nails it, and the Cortez fanfare nails it).
I'd forgotten this episode has a subplot where Delenn faces - and let's call it what it is - some naked racism from other Minbari. It dovetails nicely with the Sheridan self-doubt subplot, and leads to that nice scene with the two in the Zen garden.
Franklin and the food plan. I love the subplot. Again, it's organic growth: Franklin has two injured senior staff under his care, so he's absolutely within his remit to monitor their nutrition. Sheridan is just a bonus. But the scene in the Zocalo where they all swap meals always puts a smile on my face. Add in Garibaldi's tale of his father and the subplot back doors in some backstory as well as character growth. From this episode on Garibaldi and Franklin aren't merely co-workers, they are friends.
The directing for the episode is... Odd. As Simon noted the scenes on Cortez seem inconsistent in terms of portraying a threat level. Some yelling, some not, and there aren't really any cool angles of Cortez's bridge. When explosions and smoke are going on, speaking for myself, I'd try to find interesting or off-kilter camera angles. Jim Johnston is usually solid, so, without current evidence (and my level of reference material WILL change by the end of the year, according to my Kickstarter updates), I will assume the Cortez scenes were all shot at the end of schedule (Cortez would be a redress of C&C, like Agamemnon). This episode has a LOT of complex walk and talk shots through and around the central corridor and Zocalo with lots of extras and their associated business. Therefore I'm just gonna assume by the time Johnston got to Cortez he was running low on time and just had to get everything in the can.
Let's end on a positive: Simon, I agree with you - Miguel Nuñez Jr takes the little nothing part of Orwell the dock worker and gives him so much personality you just wanna see him come back. Good job, minor guest star!
Spoilers
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Why did the Shadow vessel in hyperspace leave Cortez alone? Do Shadow weapons not function in hyperspace, or did the Shadow assume Cortez was an allied vessel? We will learn, for example, Psi-Corp has at least one ship in hyperspace off-beacon.
Poor Delenn isn't done facing racism yet. Humans and Minbari.
On the note about hyperspace and gates - we'll see a gate pair in "Coming of Shadows." The Centauri approach the destroyed Narn base from gate A, the Narns from gate B. This shows the non-directional beacons are quite short range, and demonstrates again how hyperspace messes up communication. Neither fleet can detect the other, or the other's use of a jumpgate, despite emerging in proximity to each other. This also implies a limited distance for narrow beam transmissions, which helps explain the limited distances of gate pairs, and why systems need multiple gates.
Non spoiler correction
"A Distant Star" was a D.C. Fontana script, not JMS. This mitigates a couple of my nits.