"Signs & Portents"
So I'm up to the midway point of Season 1 of Babylon 5, which I admit I'm going through at a snail's pace. Part of it is that the show hasn't particularly grabbed me yet, another is that the parts of it that are piquing my interest all deal with Sinclair and his lost 24-hours at the end of the Earth-Minbari War. Which is unfortunate, because I know that this storyline, while it may be important long term, is also something of a dead horse because I already know that, for whatever reason, Michael O'Hare is going to leave the show at the end of this season and any investment I have in Commander Sinclair is going to go right out the window in favor of Bruce Boxleitner's Sheridan.
Which is a damn shame, because the last episode I watched, "Signs and Portents" was spectacular, and should have had me chomping at the bit for more, like the best episodes of Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica. Instead, the first major episode of the series long myth-arc lands before me with a bit of a thud - and that was almost a week ago at this point.
I don't know if I'd say Michael O'Hare is all that great as Sinclair but the dude has a killer voice. It's definitely a theatrical voice, which probably explains why he hasn't done anything imdb worthy since leaving B5 - his brief biography there indicates a preference for Broadway. The voice, the rank, the similarity of the starting consonants in the syllables of the names - it's very easy to draw connections between Michael O'Hare as Sinclair and Avery Brooks as Sisko, which is only exacerbated by the notion that Deep Space Nine, as great as it was, is tainted by being a pre-emptive rip-off of Babylon 5.
The earlier comments mmaresca made about the writers in this season not entirely getting that they weren't writing for Trek is so true. The episode dealing with the parents who refused medical treatment for their dying son was straight up Next Generation treacle - though I don't know that Trek would have had the balls to have the parents kill the kid after the doctor tainted him by performing the procedure anyway. Oh yeah, that reminds me - I'm glad he hasn't been in it much thus far because I find the doctor insufferable, and not in that good "finding his space legs" way that Julian Bashir was "insufferable" during the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine - just straight up, sanctimonious, would have been at home on the Enterprise-D insufferable.
Wow... I didn't realize until writing this just how much my opinion of Next Generation has declined over the years. I mean, I always knew I hated Data and Brent Spiner's "acting", but now, about the only things from TNG that I still love without reservation are Patrick Stewart (and by extension the character of Picard) and the character of Will Riker (not so much Jonathan Frakes - nothing against him, he just doesn't capture my attention on his own the way Patrick Stewart does in even non-Trek capacities - just that I always felt the character of Riker was criminally underdeveloped and could have been so much more, especially when they introduced his not!evil transporter twin).
At any rate, the one thing that's amused me most about Babylon 5's Michael Garibaldi - more specifically, Jerry Doyle, the actor who plays him. I don't know if it's just Doyle's look or if Straczynski was actually gunning for it, but everything about Garibaldi thus far screams "Poor Man's Bruce Willis" to me. Right down to the receding hairline - you could have plucked Bruce right off the set of Moonlighting, swapped him out for Jerry Doyle and it probably would have taken people several weeks for some people to notice the change.
Which is a damn shame, because the last episode I watched, "Signs and Portents" was spectacular, and should have had me chomping at the bit for more, like the best episodes of Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica. Instead, the first major episode of the series long myth-arc lands before me with a bit of a thud - and that was almost a week ago at this point.
I don't know if I'd say Michael O'Hare is all that great as Sinclair but the dude has a killer voice. It's definitely a theatrical voice, which probably explains why he hasn't done anything imdb worthy since leaving B5 - his brief biography there indicates a preference for Broadway. The voice, the rank, the similarity of the starting consonants in the syllables of the names - it's very easy to draw connections between Michael O'Hare as Sinclair and Avery Brooks as Sisko, which is only exacerbated by the notion that Deep Space Nine, as great as it was, is tainted by being a pre-emptive rip-off of Babylon 5.
The earlier comments mmaresca made about the writers in this season not entirely getting that they weren't writing for Trek is so true. The episode dealing with the parents who refused medical treatment for their dying son was straight up Next Generation treacle - though I don't know that Trek would have had the balls to have the parents kill the kid after the doctor tainted him by performing the procedure anyway. Oh yeah, that reminds me - I'm glad he hasn't been in it much thus far because I find the doctor insufferable, and not in that good "finding his space legs" way that Julian Bashir was "insufferable" during the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine - just straight up, sanctimonious, would have been at home on the Enterprise-D insufferable.
Wow... I didn't realize until writing this just how much my opinion of Next Generation has declined over the years. I mean, I always knew I hated Data and Brent Spiner's "acting", but now, about the only things from TNG that I still love without reservation are Patrick Stewart (and by extension the character of Picard) and the character of Will Riker (not so much Jonathan Frakes - nothing against him, he just doesn't capture my attention on his own the way Patrick Stewart does in even non-Trek capacities - just that I always felt the character of Riker was criminally underdeveloped and could have been so much more, especially when they introduced his not!evil transporter twin).
At any rate, the one thing that's amused me most about Babylon 5's Michael Garibaldi - more specifically, Jerry Doyle, the actor who plays him. I don't know if it's just Doyle's look or if Straczynski was actually gunning for it, but everything about Garibaldi thus far screams "Poor Man's Bruce Willis" to me. Right down to the receding hairline - you could have plucked Bruce right off the set of Moonlighting, swapped him out for Jerry Doyle and it probably would have taken people several weeks for some people to notice the change.