Werthead

BABYLON 5: Season 2, Episodes 21-22 Comes the Inquisitor is a nicely-played beast but Americans are now officially banned from ever using Jack the Ripper in anything ever again. Stop it. The Fall of Night is a going-against-expectations finale in which big things happen, but it's not a massive gamechanger like the Season 1 finale. We don't even find out what Kosh really looks like, we just "think" we do. Some really good stuff and of course Roy Dotrice makes for a splendid guest star.

For those in the UK and Ireland, Babylon 5 is re-airing on Pick TV from tomorrow evening.

BABYLON 5 Season 2, Episodes 19-20 Divided Loyalties, which was more shocking before we knew it came about because JMS was being cheap-arse and then doing his normal grudge thing against an actor who'd had the temerity to disagree with him. The Long, Twilight Struggle, which is one of the best episodes of the series. An absolute gut-punch and stellar stuff from the Jurasik and Katsulas team.

No probs. Between Stranger Things S2 (and rewatching S1) I'd gotten a week and a half behind anyway.

BABYLON 5 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 17-18 One of the best one-two punches in the show's history. In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum finally tells us WTF is going on and makes the stakes clear. Confessions and Lamentations is simply incredibly well-paced and delivers a massively bleak ending, all framed by one of Christopher Franke's scores. It's also, easily, the best non-arc episode the show ever did.

BABYLON 5 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 15-16 And Now For a Word: Babylon 5 doing Fake News before it was cool. Knives: The last episode of Babylon 5 written before J. Michael Straczynski's ego gained complete creative control of the series.

BABYLON 5 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 13-14 Hunter, Prey is a very solid episode, although I was a bit upset to hear that guest star Bernie Casey had only just passed away (last month!). He was very good in both B5 and DS9 as the founder of the Maquis. There All the Honour Lies was a lot better than I remembered: the digs at DS9, the merchandise store, the "perfect beauty" scene and the very, very witty script (Ivanova gets the best lines) are all excellent. The Minbari murder story is pretty boring though. It's a shame Peter David didn't get a chance to write for the main series again, although some of his novels for the show are very good.

BABYLON 5 Rewatch: Season 2, Episodes 11-12 All Alone in the Night is a pretty good story. The two twists (the dream and the revelation that Sheridan's part of a counter-conspiracy against President Clark) are excellent do some economical storytelling, getting Sheridan involved in that storyline despite not being present in the build-up to it in Season 1, and it's good to see Earthforce show up and kick some arse for once. Acts of Sacrifice has some fantastic Londo and G'Kar scenes (it's underrated in how important it is for both of their character devleopment, I think) but it's also a bit slight and the Lumati storyline is way too silly. But it's not offensively bad.

BABYLON 5 Rewatch, Season 2 Episodes 9-10 The Coming of Shadows, which may be the best episode of the entire series, and GROPOS, which isn't, but it's still decent despite doing that odd American thing of obsessing over father-child relationships to the point of utter insanity.

Season 2, Episodes 7-8 A Race Through Dark Places is a weird episode that sets up a lot of stuff, only for Divided Loyalties to completely render it all moot. Soul Mates is one half of a very good, very funny episode but the tedious Matt Stoner/Talia stuff lets it down.

Comics 5-8 I could be wrong, but I believe this is the first time ever that a live-action TV show establishes storylines in a comic-book spin-off that later become critically important on the show and even had flashbacks to the same events. Multimedia storytelling long before it was cool, and actually done properly (unlike Star Wars' very one-sided approach at the moment).

Comics 2-4 Season 2, Episodes 5-6

Season 2, Episodes 3-4 Geometry of Shadows has a lot of fun elements to it, like Straczynski referencing both Moorcock and Tolkien at the same time, and Michael Ansara is brilliant. A Distant Star is a little undercooked (there isn't enough time to do a really tense disaster story, and we don't know or care enough about the crew of the Cortez) but has some cracking scenes and lines. They're both great and maybe a bit underrated as episodes.

Not in either the UK or USA. It was taken off a while back. It's on a new service in the USA at the moment though.

Season 2, Episodes 1-2 Plus the first comic, which Straczynski used to help paper over the cracks of Sinclair leaving and Sheridan taking over. That's a really huge change and it's quite impressive how they ran with that and made it work.

Babylon 5: Season 1, Episodes 21-22. Quality of Mercy is a fun and underrated episode. Chrsyalis is a really good season finale. It changes the style and feel of the show in a compelling way and really changes things, at a time when TV simply didn't change and everything remained static. It's the moment Babylon 5 came of age and is still pretty good twenty-three years later (!).

Babylon 5: Season 1, Episodes 17-18, Episodes 19-20 Babylon 4 is a seriously cool, badass design, a lot better than B5. Shame they didn't do more with it.

Babylon 5 Rewatch: Season 1, Episodes 15-16 Grail has a superb cast - William Sanderson, David Warner and Jim Norton - but doesn't do much with them. The Na'ka'leen Feeder is pretty cool but the CG looks pretty awful these days on DVD and a HD TV (on a smaller CRT back in the day, it looked pretty cool). I'm not quite sure why JMS hates this episode so much though. It's not the best, but it's nowhere near the worst and there's probably five or six weaker episodes (at least). Eyes is similar in that it has a fantastic guest actor - DS9's Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun/Brunt) - but doesn't give him much to do. I like the fact that they effectively did a flashback episode without any lazy flashbacks, but it doesn't really go anywhere.

Yup. The original arc was bonkers, and not as good as what we got. A major change was in Legacies. The "You talk like a Minbari, Commander" line from Neroon really got Straczynski's mind whirling and he realised he could take the story in a completely different direction. O'Hare leaving actually reinforced the need to take the story in that direction.

I'll get into it more in Legacies, but D.C. Fontana apparently dropped an idea into the script (that ended up with the "You talk like a Minbari" line) that blew Straczynski's mind, and made him completely redirect the entire 10-year arc of both Babylon 5 and its originally-planned spin-off show, Babylon Prime. Weirdly, that change of plan made it much easier to write out Sinclair than it would have been if he'd ended Season 1 with the original plan firmly in place. But still, the Babylon 5 version 1.5 story arc would have moved War Without End to the end of Season 5 instead but otherwise would have had Sinclair as the hero throughout. Both plans prevented him from killing off Sinclair. It wasn't a goer.

You see how complete Babylon 1 was: the docking sphere was complete but the rest of the station was basically scaffolding and not much else. They recaptured the docking sphere for B2, built a bit more of the station and the structure collapsed. They salvaged what they could for B3 and so on until B4 was built and completed. That all happened between 2249 and 2254. B4 then vanished in mid-to-late 2254. Babylon 5 went online in February 2256 or thereabouts. That's way too little time, IMO. Babylon 4 was colossal and should have taken a lot longer to build, and even B5 was a huge undertaking for all it was smaller than B4. Babylon 5 Rewatch: Season 1, Episodes 13-14 Signs and Portents, one of the very best episodes of the first season, and TKO, which...isn't.

To be honest, it's a bit that was never really convincing. If you look at the dates, B5 was built from scratch in less than 18 months after the disappearance of B4. Completely impossible. I think the problem was more that Straczynski liked "5" as the number and then bent the story to make it work, even thought it doesn't. You have to kind of roll with it. Straczynski has confirmed that O'Hare left due to his mental health problems. Apparently the severity of those problems was quite high at various points during the filming of Season 1, to the point where Jerry Doyle pointblank refused to act with him ever again (which is why they only appear in different locations and on different viewscreens in War Without End and Coming of Shadows). From the look of it - convention appearances, O'Hare's later return appearances and the articles he wrote for various magazines - O'Hare's health did improve, at least for a while, once he was free of the stress and the rigourous filming schedule for the first season, but not to the point where he could handle this kind of schedule again. Boxleitner, of course, could eat up that schedule for breakfast, which he did with gusto.

Babylon 5 Rewatch: Season 1: Episodes 11-12 Survivors has Jerry Doyle becoming a better actor but it still a bit rote. By Any Means Necessary is a lot better, even if the idea of B5 having cargo hauled around by the 23rd equivalent of Frank Sobotka and his team from Season 2 of The Wire is a bit hard to swallow.

Babylon 5 Rewatch: Season1, Episodes 9-10 Deathwalker was a very fine episode, maybe the best non-JMS episode, whilst Believers was a bit weaker but still having a strong ethical dilemma.

The killer app in the proposal was Thornton's CGI reel. That's really what saved the show and got it the greenlight. Before that point WB were sceptical because they didn't think they could afford ST:TNG style full screen opticals. It was when the guy who'd worked on V said "This is how we get round it" and Thornton pointed out that he'd created the graphics on a sub-$1,000 computer that WB realised they could pull off the effects on the budget they had. Sure. Basically Christian got an offer to do a movie, so she asked JMS for 3-4 weeks off (probably 3-4 episodes max) to do the film. He said okay, but could only give a verbal guarantee. The movie producers wanted a written contract. Warner Brothers didn't want to do that: her contract bound her to agree to do all 22 eps even if JMS only wrote her into 17-18 episodes. That created a stalemate, as the movie company wouldn't give her the role unless WB gave a written guarantee she would be free and WB couldn't do that (it would actually create a contract renegotiation situation, which was a headache they didn't want to deal with). Part of the problem is that Christian believed that JMS was guaranteeing that written contract and he wasn't. The whole thing blew up at a B5 convention in Blackpool (in the UK) so Christian didn't have her agent to hand and JMS couldn't talk to the studio immediately very easily, and there was a lot of crossed wires. Actually, it would. B5 is an Earth Alliance station. The diplomatic immunity and free passes the ambassadors get is very much an Earth ideal they've put on the station so it can work. The ordinary alien citizens are all bound by the rule of the station, including not committing murder. Sinclair made a judgement call to boot the parents of the station to avoid a major diplomatic crisis with their race, who probably weren't all that (I don't think they even rated membership of the League) but why create the storm in the first place?