s2e6: A Spider in the Web

Sheridan is a conspiracy nut, apparently

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We are well and truly in the early-season 2 rut, apparently. After a very strong opening to the season, we’ve had the triple-whammy of ‘A Distant Star’, ‘The Long Dark’ and now ‘Spider in the Web’, which together form a pretty compelling excuse to stop watching for first time viewers.

Courtesy of

Mike Miller

I’ve been reading through a bunch of archived interviews with Babylon 5 cast and crew. They’re often fascinating and surprising — regular early B5 director Jim Johnston does not hold back — and the conversation with Larry DiTillio, script editor on the first two seasons and the writer of this episode, is especially illuminating.

There’s a difference in sensibility between DiTillio and showrunner Straczynski that sounds like it became increasingly unhealthy for all concerned. DiTillio’s scripts are more pulpy, I think, and go all-in for sci-fi tropes. That’s on full display in ‘Spider in the Web’, which feels like a very mid/late-90s, turn of the millennium, end times kind of story. It rolls around in the same mud as The X-Files and Dark Skies and general end-of-days conspiracy nonsense, but without and of the style and poise of X-Files.

We get the shadowy off-camera baddie pulling the strings. We get wibbly wobbly computer mind control. We get a cyborgy, cyberpunky killing machine. We get black ops and governments up to no good. And we get a full-on conspiracy reaching ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP!

There are problems, aside from how predictable it all is. The main one is that Sheridan magically has all the clues to figure it out. A conspiracy mystery isn’t much fun if it’s effectively solved in a single episode. It’s also an extra conspiracy on top of the already very effective conspiracy at the heart of B5, revolving around the assassination of the president and Psi Corps. It feels like a distraction, rather than a deepening of the threat. At worst, it feels like the writers aren’t talking to each other — which from the interviews sounds like it might be the case.

It’s not just the writing, though. Michael Beck is fairly terrible as Abel Horn, though I’m willing to blame the writing and direction for this one rather than the actor. I’ve always maintained that Schwarzenegger is a better physical actor than he’s ever given credit, and you can see that in comparison to Beck’s cyborg. He’s trying to do the movements, but it just doesn’t work and ends up looking silly at all times. Another comparison point is with Peter Weller’s Robocop performance, a piece of physical acting that is so convincing and remarkable that I can’t not think of him as an actual robot. Beck’s cyborg is too inconsistent and ill-defined to work. To be fair, he had a week on a TV schedule, compared to months on a film with extensive movement coaching, but still.

Then there’s Sheridan’s weird conspiracy/secrets obsession. Maybe in the mid-90s that was still seen as a cool thing to do, but in 2024 I can’t think of many conspiracy theorists who aren’t a) insane b) dangerous c) manipulative extremists or d) being manipulated by extremists. The 90s were a time when conspiracies were still kinda cool and exciting and fun, and I suspect that’s because it was still largely pre-internet. Once the internet went mainstream in the 2000, so did conspiracies. They went from being fascinating ‘what ifs’, and the sort of thing that children exchanged in the playground, to things lots of adults actually believed. At that point, conspiracies stopped being funny. Look to most of the west’s problems from 2016 onwards and they are all wrapped up in conspiracy

There are some good bits: the Mars stuff is intriguing, and the character of Isogi works really well. It’s a shame he’s killed off, as he would have made for an interesting voice for Mars. Also: Amanda Carter’s grandfather, the first man on Mars, being called John? Please. Fun references are one thing, but that was a bit blatant. As with the rest of the script, it’s just too obvious and on-the-nose

A couple of exterior CG shots are really lovely in this episode: in particular there’s one following a couple of starfuries as they flyby the station, which is edge lit but otherwise in darkness. Beautiful. Another big bonus is the unexpected appearance of one Jeff Conaway, who makes a very low-key debut on the show as a security guard. No spoilers, but we’ll be seeing him again.

This is a talky episode that does far too much of its storytelling through telling rather than showing. Hopefully we’ll start to see a return to form next week.

Next up is ‘A Race Through Dark Places’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

This is an odd one because it feels like it’s setting stuff up, but pretty much everything is a non-starter here due to DiTillio leaving the show. It’s peculiar that this ever got into production, with Bureau 13 being a total distraction from the main plot. Which perhaps was the point, but it doesn’t really work.

We do get Zach Allen showing up, which I absolutely was not expecting. I love Conaway’s performance on Babylon 5 and didn’t remember when he made his first appearance.

I suppose there’s also glimpses of Talia putting the Psi Corps before her loyalty to the B5 staff, though that also feels a bit out of place. The lack of follow-up from the Ironheart affair in season 1 is one of the weirder dropped plot points: sure, Talia exits the show later in the season, but that doesn’t explain how under-developed she is as a character up until that point.

‘A Spider in the Web’ isn’t offensive like ‘The Long Dark’, but it does feel superfluous. If anything, it feels oddly like fanfic — perhaps by this point B5 was already getting to the point of not really supporting other writers, with JMS creating a bit of a stranglehold over the story.