Yesterday's television today
Babylon 5 1.03 - "Born to the Purple"
Nothing particularly exciting or grabby happened in this episode, but I rather liked it for four reasons. (1) It was another nice piece of world-building: not only is there slavery in the galaxy, but apparently Centauri society is an oligarchy, a few powerful families at the top, maintaining their power by scratching and clawing and blackmailing everyone they can find, and a lot more people like Adira, fallen on impossibly hard times. (2) It was also a nice character piece, built around Londo's romanticism, his irrepressible, larger-than-life emotionality, his utter unfitness for his position. At this point, I'm not sure if he's typical of Centauri, or a signal of what they think of the Babylon project. But his willingness to openly squire Adira around, to give her family heirlooms, and--most importantly--to empathize with her position enough to understand why she did what she did, was pretty endearing. (Also, I am totally going to start calling people moon-faced assassins of joy. Best insult EVAH, and oh, the delivery. Good job, Peter Jurasik.) (3) I am not totally sold on Garibaldi as an effective security officer or a non-ass (although, to be fair, security on B5 seems to be pretty lacking in general; you can just walk right in to restricted areas, it seems), but the way he doggedly followed his instincts here, and read Ivanova accurately, and handled the situation with what passes for a lot of subtlety on a show that includes Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, made me like him too. (4) This episode was not "Infection." WOO.
Babylon 5 1.04 - "Infection"
It was not difficult to guess that this episode was going to be about... an infection. And it telegraphed a lot of the plot--the shady archaeologist, who might as well have been twirling his little black moustache, for example. But I have to admit that the pacing threw me off, in a way that made the plot less predictable, simply because I was expecting them to move through points A, B, and C by the end, and they moved through C by the half-hour mark. On the one hand, I was glad that there was no attempt to prolong an obvious and clumsy mystery plot; on the other, it seems that the writers wanted to move things forward so that they could fit in what felt like an interminable climactic scene that involved Sinclair--Sinclair, people!--delivering an impassioned argument about how wrong it is for monster bioweapons to behave like Nazis to Skip the Demon's poor relation--was in no way a good thing. It was, as laurashapiro observed, a very Star Trek-ian scenario, aliens who'd created weapons to destroy anyone who wasn't of their race, but had let the fanatics among them define who they were, and were destroyed by their own technology. Although the "biology" part of the situation made no sense, and as much as it pains me to say it, William Shatner would, relatively speaking, have knocked that speech out of the park. So would a sweet potato. Oh, Michael O'Hare, I hope you found a rewarding career as a dental hygienist or a skating rink announcer or something.
In world-building news, though, we learn that corporations are a major power on Earth, that xenophobia is a real problem, and that corporate interests and the xenophobia intersect.
I might have things to say about this week's TSCC if I'd actually had a chance to see it yet. I'm having a weird week, a burst of social activity at night, a bunch of WebEx conferences during the day, and between them not only very little television time but almost no Internet time either. *spasms from Internet DTs* [redacted: an extended, multi-paragraph rant on the relative wisdom of calling day-long scheduled WebEx infodump sessions with NO BREAKS, parsimoniously allowing people twenty minutes to grab some lunch and come back to eat it in the meeting after they mention that hey, people actually need to eat lunch, and then not understanding why people were not getting into the details toward the end there, in hour seven. Dude, I'm sure it's gratifying to check this item off your list, but in terms of teaching people stuff and expecting them to absorb it, no. I feel like about 12,000 violations of educational theory occurred before noon.]
