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Babylon 5 3.01 - "Matters of Honor"
I very much like the contrast between Kosh in the opening of this episode, giving Sheridan a series of obscure, cryptic answers for what looks like the sheer fun of it, and the influx of pilgrims and spiritual seekers eager to be near something so connected to the divine in the next.
On the other hand, I was equal parts frustrated and despairing over Londo's attempt to disentangle himself from Morden. You don't call on someone for those kinds of favors and then pleasantly sever the association with no further costs. Even worse, Morden doesn't need Londo any more; Londo's ambitions and schemes gave him the opening, but now he's making his own contacts. My blood ran a little cold when he said that he'd been in direct communication with Refa; Londo had had limited ambitions, and a trace of scruples, but Refa has neither to hold him back from making the Centauri the shadows' perfect tool. But even worse, Morden is reaching out and making other contacts on Earth. Endawi had seemed like a reasonable public servant, genuinely interested in following the trail where his investigation took him, so I figured he couldn't be one of Clark's men; it's probably worse, though, that he reported to the Senate, the only possible counterbalancing power on Earth, and that the person he reported to was one of Morden's associates.
We in the audience have seen all of the shadow attacks on the Narn, and Delenn and Sheridan know what they're dealing with, so it took me a moment to twig that Londo doesn't, at least not yet: that the only time he's seen them was in that vision, with him as decrepit emperor and G'Kar strangling him and the fleets of shadows passing over head. And of course that makes sense, because if he knew what he'd been toying with, he would have behaved differently; but nobody has quite enough information, and the incentives to ignore the qualms are too tempting, and that's how evil usually operates in the everyday. G'Kar's desperate joy that someone would finally listen to what he was saying about the shadows was more than a little heartbreaking. (And I loved that Garibaldi steered Endawi to G'Kar, suggested a way for the two of them to talk, produced a surprisingly convincing nonsensical patter about not letting himself know the things he shouldn't know to ease the way.)
In the meantime, Frodo and Sam Delenn and Lennier meet Aragorn Marcus at the Prancing Pony some dive in the Downbelow, where he shows them his elven special brooch, in order that we might see a scene demonstrating Marcus's badassitude. (Which, in all fairness, is particularly necessary because of his hair.) But it's all in service of the first adventure of that improbable alliance, and a sign of the way the new battle will be fought at first: in low level skirmishes, by people who are trying to disguise their own involvement, using others as a cover. At least Sheridan's responsibility for the rangers gives him a legitimate excuse to command the new ship; and the ship itself is a hybrid, and deliberately designed to disguise the involvement of both the Vorlons and the Minbari, just as the Centauri mines are the way the shadows disguise their own blockade on the ranger camp, until they are finally ready to attack. The blockade was what Morden went to Refa about, and Refa gave him what he wanted, and Londo wasn't involved this time, which might be better for what's left of Londo's soul, but probably isn't very good for his position.
Babylon 5 3.02 - "Convictions"
The plotting in this episode is actually pretty thin, hinging as it does on the craaaaaaazy wild-eyed bomber's motivations being that, well, he's crazy. I was hoping for a little more solid backstory, some kind of connection to economic unrest and dislocation on Earth, or to other fringe political movements, or to the Mars rebellion. But, no. Fortunately, there was enough other stuff going on to mitigate that flaw, though.
For one thing, just as the war heats up, Babylon 5 becomes the focal point of an entirely other kind of movement: a site of pilgrimage and religious inquiry, a place of miracles. That's a neat counterpoint. (I also liked that the monks were presented as scholars and experts who plan to trade their skills for a place on the station, and the intertwining of inquiry and scholarship and faith that it implies.) I also thought the explosions themselves were pretty well done, and gave a real sense of damage and chaos. (In general, the effects are noticeably better this season, and part of that may have been budget, but it seems like the technology was better too, especially with the CGI.) Garibaldi and Zack Allen, TEOCF, put the clues together as they came in. And I adored that Lennier acted unthinkingly to save Londo's life, that Londo went and sat at his bedside and tried to annoy him out of his coma, that the two of them had that friendship, but that Lennier wonders in the end if what he did was really the right thing, if it served the greater good. It was as vivid a picture as any of the ambiguous place Londo has come to occupy in the hearts of his former friends.
G'Kar's feelings about Londo, on the other hand, are anything but ambiguous. I thought there could be no more awkward elevator scene than the one between G'Kar and Vir at the end of the last season, but I was WRONG. I don't know how the show does it, because G'Kar and Londo are such a cranky odd couple together, and it's actually genuinely funny, but there's also a sharp, black edge of horror to all of their interactions, because Londo is responsible for the devastation of G'Kar's entire planet, and he made that choice of his own free will. Londo calls G'Kar crazy, and G'Kar calls Londo a monster, and they're both right. And Londo has to face the fact, trapped in that elevator, that G'Kar represenents every unforgivable thing that he's done, that G'Kar would kill him if he could, and will happily watch him die instead, and that it's not the tit-for-tat abstract argument of Narn vs. Centauri but something incredibly personal, something about the two of them specifically. G'Kar is everyone else's Cassandra, but he's Londo's tell-tale heart.
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- I just got a new keyboard at work. I think I basically broke the old one through sheer volume of crumbs trapped under the keys, which is kind of gross but inevitable given how many meals I eat at my desk, and it all came to a crisis point when CTRL stopped working and I couldn't even log in, since that requires CTRL+ALT+Delete. The new keyboard takes a very different amount and angle of pressure from my fingers than my last keyboard did, so suddenly I'm very conscious of the motion of my typing, and it's kind of a weird feeling.
- Via asta77, word that Stargate: Universe is a go. I'm very wait-and-see about the whole thing, and I can't say I'm exactly surprised that they're targeting a younger audience. (I'm more surprised that they apparently haven't learned the lessons of Voyager about the dangers of the lost ship conceit.) But one of the things that had always appealed to me about SG-1--and that I also think was true of SGA, though I stopped watching it for other reasons--was that it was a show about adults, people in their thirties and forties with some experience under their belt and baggage in their arms that they could bring to the week's adventures, and that I could relate to that (without, obviously, the space travel and atypical physical beauty). I'm rapidly passing out of the age demographic that the SciFi execs, in their wisdom, seek to court--and I've never been a member of the right gender--and when I look at my paycheck and my viewing habits, it's hard not to feel a little bitter about that. When they canceled SG-1, I thought to myself, all of the people I spend Friday night with on SciFi are going to be younger than I am now; this is where it starts. That said, I'll be interested to see what they do with the new show, and how prophetic the Teen SG-1 sequence in "200" turns out to be they execute the concept. I have a lot of affection for the franchise; sometimes I'm surprised how much.
- Speaking of Stargate (if you doubt the segue, may I point you to 5.21, where Fandoms Collide), this list of problems solved by MacGuyver is the best Internet Timewaster (TM) ever.
It's Friiiiiidaaaaaaaaay! Woo hoo! If only McGuyver had figured out a way to speed up time so I could leave work already. This weekend I have to make some agonizing decisions about which shoes to pack for Dragon*Con. AGONIZING.
