B5rewatch: Babylon Squared
So new year, let's get moving; and now we come to it; strap in, this is one of the big ones.
1x20: Babylon Squared
So I usually don’t do meta stuff at the beginning except maybe for airing order debates, but I want to discuss something before even starting on the review so that I can refer to it as we go along, though I’ll probably have more to say about it by the end. And that has to do with the various eras of plans of Sinclair’s fate. Obviously I’m not JMS or even Michael O’Hare so I’m just guessing how this progressed from things I’ve read and heard over the years, but there seem to have been three maybe four distinct phases of plans for Sinclair’s character and all of them run through this episode in places. As far as I can see it, the question of Babylon 4 - introduced in The Gathering - was always going to be answered with Sinclair’s fate.
Let’s start by discussing what I’m guessing were the plans at each phase.
-The “Prime” Plan
The absolute original plan for the series was two five year stories, the story of Sinclair and Delenn and then of their son. I gather that ‘Babylon 5’ would have ended with the destruction of B5 as seen in S&P and then Sinclair and co going back to steal B4 leading in to Babylon Prime. In this plan B4 was going into the future to help fight the next great enemy and all that.
-The Intended Plan
After The Gathering JMS sat down and realized the show should be a single five year arc, a slightly retooled version of the Babylon 5 series in the Prime plan. I’m not clear on whether at this stage JMS had already latched on to Sinclair being Valen as the final act of the series, but my reading is that the idea was there. That Sinclair and Delenn would have fought all the wars and built the new galaxy, then in the equivalent of ‘Objects at Rest’ Sinclair retires and goes fishing and then in the equivalent of ‘Sleeping in Light’ picks himself up, goes to steal B4 and goes back to become Valen.
-The Evolving Plan
By mid to late season 1 JMS knew that O’Hare wasn’t going to be able to be the leading man on this show for five years. At minimum there was going to need to be a third player in the leading drama and at the other extreme he may have to abandon the Sinclair story entirely. As observed previously, the Minbari power of three became more consistent in the latter episodes of s1. I do think by this point JMS had worked out what Sinclair’s fate would be but wasn’t sure when he’d end up pulling the trigger on it; it could still have lasted until the end of the series or he might have to do it a lot sooner, he just didn’t know.
-The Resolved Plan
JMS wouldn’t get to this in reality until s2, once O’Hare had truly left the show, agreed that sometime down the road they could finish out his character’s story but couldn’t do much in the intervening time. It’s a long way from the original plan, but it either retained in Sinclair the essential elements or shifted to Sheridan the ones that could or needed to be moved.
Also the fact that this episode so clearly exists at a confluence of all the plans but Chrysalis does not is part of what makes the out of order production this season stand out (besides the episodes that are difficult to place), but I can table that discussion for later.
Okay, everybody got that? Now it’s promo time. And it’s...odd. I don’t think this would do any good at attracting non-viewers to tune in, but it would be pretty good at stoking regular watchers enthusiasm for the coming episode. It more or less tells you exactly what the episode will be about without going in to detail about it will unfold. It leaves plenty of the mystery about what’s really going on even if you know the main plot point it will revolve around. Of course there’s nothing of the B-plot, but who would expect there to be; that’s not just a lot of people talking, it’s literally a lot of people talking in a black room.
I would question where the empty plates came from for the guys’ little trick, but I just love that opening scene so much that I really can’t.
The belt buckle scratching was a really weird inclusion in the story. It didn’t really further anything, certainly no information they couldn’t have gotten through other means, or will get in about thirty seconds; it doesn’t really make sense in the story that the pilot would or could have left that “clue,;” and it doesn’t make sense that people would leap from ‘B4’ to assuming it was Babylon 4 without having already discussed the other information that what was happening could be somehow connected.
What control station is Corwin using over there? It crowds the set and looks kind of ridiculous, and I don’t think it’s ever seen again.
While obviously the sub-channel ID does need to be explained to the audience, I wish JMS had thought of a better way that Sinclair explaining to Garibaldi something Garibaldi should certainly already know.
I’m usually against the whole ‘If anyone wants to back out’ cliché when no one ever does, but this is a less egregious example than some. This is a rescue operation and a mystery, I feel like that would keep most people from walking away. I’m a total coward and obviously not a military professional, and I feel like I’d go on this mission with only mild hesitation.
For as great as this episode is, you kind of have to appreciate that the fasten/zip conversation was one of the most enduring elements of it. It’s just so much fun, and good to have in this episode that’s so heavy with arc stuff otherwise.
So over the years I’ve done the math; if this is 10 cycles since Dukhat died and in human terms it’s 11-12 since the end of the EMW (depending on whether it’s The Gathering or MOTFL that’s ‘ten years after the Earth-Minbari War’), which means it’s been 13-14 since Dukhat died, clearly Minbari cycles are longer than human years. I point this out more because of the expanded universe (it’s mostly a logical curiosity in canon); the year to cycle ratio is maintained in City of Sorrows as I recall, but I think the Centauri books, in an effort to salvage the timeline of when things should happen with David, claims Minbari cycles are shorter than Earth years.
Delenn’s calling is to serve, not to lead; I think she actually thinks that, even believes that about herself, believes she is always serving by what she does; but I call it BS as she’s clearly setting herself up to lead the galaxy into a new age, and considering where I know she is going I just laugh at this claim.
How do their sensors not pick up B4 until they can see it with their own eyes plain as day?
I’ve always kind of wondered about the guy that attacks them when they first get on the station, what had he been flashing to that made his freak out like that? Does he go on to fight in the Shadow Was and was seeing flashes of that? Was he previously in the EMW and thinks they’re Minbari, thus being ironic in Jeff’s case? I don’t see what he could have gone through outside of the flashes that would have unhinged him so much, or was there something else going on that was never explained? It’s something I still wonder about.
Delenn’s statement that if she accepts leadership of the Council she will never leave it again could be considered a continuity issue since we never see the leader there after this and City of Sorrows fully contracts it, but I allow it here. If Delenn took on the role, she would do it as Dukhat had done, and he pretty much stuck it out with the Council
The scenes with Zathrus (in a way, most of the scenes once they get to B4) are always odd to me since I watched WWE so many times before seeing this episode; I feel like I’m in on the joke. It’s not dramatic or annoying to me by not knowing, it’s funny, because I know the punchline.
A few times this season I’ve noted that the floor-backdrop boundary can look really bad, but they do a better job with it this time; it’s good to give praise.
Delenn’s choice to refuse the Council is a lot weightier when considering later revealed info than it is given weight for in the present. Dukhat chose her to be on the Council and is probably the main reason she’s being offered his old job; he has been to date the most important person in her life and now she could continue to walk in his footsteps as she must have long desired. But he is also the reason she now has to look beyond the calling of the Council because those things she sometimes regrets have set her on a different path.
Funny, the background jump is just more noticeable of B5 than it was on B4, when I know they’re the same set. Maybe it’s the lighting...I don’t know.
So I kind of got distracted after the episode ended for about two weeks, so let’s see if I can decipher my notes for wrapping up this one. Obviously, it’s a very good episode, that I suspect is a pretty good episode to those watching in order and I just never got to enjoy it that way; but it certainly ism’t hurt by knowing the end, even knowing it first.
But something that’s bugged me for ages I might as well get off my chest here. The math does not work for how they get people evacuated in the time they have. To evacuate ~1300 people at 250 a trip would take more than five trips; at 6+ hours to go out, pick people up, come back to B5 and unload them; so we’re talking closer to 30 hours than the ten Ivanova puts forth. I could see an argument for 15-ish if assume she meant to start with half the shuttles, then once they’re out there send the other half, and each half would take 250 people; that’s not what it sounded like, but might have been the idea. Maybe they could cut it down slightly assuming B4 had its own shuttles to help? But it also sure doesn’t feel like they’re on B4 nearly that long.
And that’s before you try and make it fit with the timeframe WWE seemed to be using. Especially when you add on time at the beginning for the starfury pilot to see B4 appear and return to B5, then B5 organize things for the evacuation.
So let’s talk about the time flashes for a minute. We could easily have seen more of them, both here and in WWE (there were clearly ones that happened in WWE where we didn’t see what anyone saw, because the ones that happened during this episode must have still happened to the 2260 crew); the B4 crew had obviously been dealing with them a fair bit since they got unstuck from time so they must be happening more often than we necessarily see. But also, I find them a bit confusing (probably intentionally). Are people actually moving through time when the flashes happen? Do they have any ability to interact with what they’re seeing or is the temporally displaced consciousness just watching events play out as they did/will without time flashing?
Considering Garibaldi will later claim to have seen the same flash Sinclair had of fighting off an attack on the station, I’m having an idea how it might have worked; maybe it’s like Flashforward (and I’m talking the book because I watched the pilot of the show and concluded they had taken only the kernel of an idea from the book but probably changed how it actually made it make sense), where each time a time flash happens, it’s to the same point in the future for everyone, so Sinclair and Garibaldi were both flashing forward to the fight on the station at that point, along with everyone else flashing to that moment in alt-2260 where ever they were (since the B4 crew would likely scatter after this, none of them could compare and see that they were seeing the same thing, and who knows if Jeff and Michael ever compared notes); later on the time flash went to 2256 (I think) and since the B4 crew didn’t live through 2256 they kept on panicking at evacuation while any B5 crew were having that flashback. And like in Flashforward, the flashforwarder isn’t in control of events happening in the flash but as a viewer(/reader) we see it from their perspective. I’m not sure that was JMS’ thought, but I think it will be how I interpret it from here on.
Now I’m going to start wrapping this around to where I started this whole thing. Let’s think for a second where B4 could have been going. Maybe it’s me knowing the end talking, but going to the past makes a lot more sense; to the future it might be symbolic, the Babylon station reborn and if they’re under time pressure and can’t build a new big station this fills a need. But in the past it offers something new, something probably advanced (the thousand years ago Minbari probably weren’t more advanced than humans of the third age), something mysterious and hopeful. But at the same time, I think if you were watching this in order you could certainly think it was going to the future; at this point the ancient stories haven’t really been told yet and you would expect to see the payoff of the story and so for that it seems like it would be going forward. But since I can’t say what I would think of it, I can’t offer much on how it seems in the moment.
On the con side of thinking JMS had started planning the new form of things, I’m not sure what caste the Grey Council members we see speak would be. Are they supposed to be the other Religious Caste members and I’m just being obtuse because I can’t help thinking Rathenn is supposed to be on the Council? Are they maybe the most senior members and they’re whatever caste they are? Maybe it would make sense if they were Religious and Warrior taking charge and ignoring the Workers? Even if the Council was still supposed to be all Religious (as initially presented) it would cause some issues with the portrayal in Legacies of the Council being mostly a unified force as even just the two who get to talk clearly have very different views, and of course the vote only avoids being a tie because it can’t be with nine members. So again, the GC is clearly not quite fixed in the writing yet.
However on the other side, putting these plots together speaks to a knowledge of where Sinclair’s fate is headed. We get a lot more Valen talk this time than we’ve ever gotten before, and the fate of B4 is intricately tied to Minbari history and therefore the GC itself. It could be seeing connections in hindsight, but it really looks connected to me; it probably isn’t obvious without hindsight, but this seems kind of structured to think about B4 and Minbari stuff and while we don’t see the connective tissue yet, they’re there next to each other for anyone to see.
That’s probably enough, though there will be a lot to say in a couple seasons when we get to WWE...assuming we make it that far.
Next time: Quality of Mercy, we’ll see if I can write that one in a more reasonable amount of time.
1x20: Babylon Squared
So I usually don’t do meta stuff at the beginning except maybe for airing order debates, but I want to discuss something before even starting on the review so that I can refer to it as we go along, though I’ll probably have more to say about it by the end. And that has to do with the various eras of plans of Sinclair’s fate. Obviously I’m not JMS or even Michael O’Hare so I’m just guessing how this progressed from things I’ve read and heard over the years, but there seem to have been three maybe four distinct phases of plans for Sinclair’s character and all of them run through this episode in places. As far as I can see it, the question of Babylon 4 - introduced in The Gathering - was always going to be answered with Sinclair’s fate.
Let’s start by discussing what I’m guessing were the plans at each phase.
-The “Prime” Plan
The absolute original plan for the series was two five year stories, the story of Sinclair and Delenn and then of their son. I gather that ‘Babylon 5’ would have ended with the destruction of B5 as seen in S&P and then Sinclair and co going back to steal B4 leading in to Babylon Prime. In this plan B4 was going into the future to help fight the next great enemy and all that.
-The Intended Plan
After The Gathering JMS sat down and realized the show should be a single five year arc, a slightly retooled version of the Babylon 5 series in the Prime plan. I’m not clear on whether at this stage JMS had already latched on to Sinclair being Valen as the final act of the series, but my reading is that the idea was there. That Sinclair and Delenn would have fought all the wars and built the new galaxy, then in the equivalent of ‘Objects at Rest’ Sinclair retires and goes fishing and then in the equivalent of ‘Sleeping in Light’ picks himself up, goes to steal B4 and goes back to become Valen.
-The Evolving Plan
By mid to late season 1 JMS knew that O’Hare wasn’t going to be able to be the leading man on this show for five years. At minimum there was going to need to be a third player in the leading drama and at the other extreme he may have to abandon the Sinclair story entirely. As observed previously, the Minbari power of three became more consistent in the latter episodes of s1. I do think by this point JMS had worked out what Sinclair’s fate would be but wasn’t sure when he’d end up pulling the trigger on it; it could still have lasted until the end of the series or he might have to do it a lot sooner, he just didn’t know.
-The Resolved Plan
JMS wouldn’t get to this in reality until s2, once O’Hare had truly left the show, agreed that sometime down the road they could finish out his character’s story but couldn’t do much in the intervening time. It’s a long way from the original plan, but it either retained in Sinclair the essential elements or shifted to Sheridan the ones that could or needed to be moved.
Also the fact that this episode so clearly exists at a confluence of all the plans but Chrysalis does not is part of what makes the out of order production this season stand out (besides the episodes that are difficult to place), but I can table that discussion for later.
Okay, everybody got that? Now it’s promo time. And it’s...odd. I don’t think this would do any good at attracting non-viewers to tune in, but it would be pretty good at stoking regular watchers enthusiasm for the coming episode. It more or less tells you exactly what the episode will be about without going in to detail about it will unfold. It leaves plenty of the mystery about what’s really going on even if you know the main plot point it will revolve around. Of course there’s nothing of the B-plot, but who would expect there to be; that’s not just a lot of people talking, it’s literally a lot of people talking in a black room.
I would question where the empty plates came from for the guys’ little trick, but I just love that opening scene so much that I really can’t.
The belt buckle scratching was a really weird inclusion in the story. It didn’t really further anything, certainly no information they couldn’t have gotten through other means, or will get in about thirty seconds; it doesn’t really make sense in the story that the pilot would or could have left that “clue,;” and it doesn’t make sense that people would leap from ‘B4’ to assuming it was Babylon 4 without having already discussed the other information that what was happening could be somehow connected.
What control station is Corwin using over there? It crowds the set and looks kind of ridiculous, and I don’t think it’s ever seen again.
While obviously the sub-channel ID does need to be explained to the audience, I wish JMS had thought of a better way that Sinclair explaining to Garibaldi something Garibaldi should certainly already know.
I’m usually against the whole ‘If anyone wants to back out’ cliché when no one ever does, but this is a less egregious example than some. This is a rescue operation and a mystery, I feel like that would keep most people from walking away. I’m a total coward and obviously not a military professional, and I feel like I’d go on this mission with only mild hesitation.
For as great as this episode is, you kind of have to appreciate that the fasten/zip conversation was one of the most enduring elements of it. It’s just so much fun, and good to have in this episode that’s so heavy with arc stuff otherwise.
So over the years I’ve done the math; if this is 10 cycles since Dukhat died and in human terms it’s 11-12 since the end of the EMW (depending on whether it’s The Gathering or MOTFL that’s ‘ten years after the Earth-Minbari War’), which means it’s been 13-14 since Dukhat died, clearly Minbari cycles are longer than human years. I point this out more because of the expanded universe (it’s mostly a logical curiosity in canon); the year to cycle ratio is maintained in City of Sorrows as I recall, but I think the Centauri books, in an effort to salvage the timeline of when things should happen with David, claims Minbari cycles are shorter than Earth years.
Delenn’s calling is to serve, not to lead; I think she actually thinks that, even believes that about herself, believes she is always serving by what she does; but I call it BS as she’s clearly setting herself up to lead the galaxy into a new age, and considering where I know she is going I just laugh at this claim.
How do their sensors not pick up B4 until they can see it with their own eyes plain as day?
I’ve always kind of wondered about the guy that attacks them when they first get on the station, what had he been flashing to that made his freak out like that? Does he go on to fight in the Shadow Was and was seeing flashes of that? Was he previously in the EMW and thinks they’re Minbari, thus being ironic in Jeff’s case? I don’t see what he could have gone through outside of the flashes that would have unhinged him so much, or was there something else going on that was never explained? It’s something I still wonder about.
Delenn’s statement that if she accepts leadership of the Council she will never leave it again could be considered a continuity issue since we never see the leader there after this and City of Sorrows fully contracts it, but I allow it here. If Delenn took on the role, she would do it as Dukhat had done, and he pretty much stuck it out with the Council
The scenes with Zathrus (in a way, most of the scenes once they get to B4) are always odd to me since I watched WWE so many times before seeing this episode; I feel like I’m in on the joke. It’s not dramatic or annoying to me by not knowing, it’s funny, because I know the punchline.
A few times this season I’ve noted that the floor-backdrop boundary can look really bad, but they do a better job with it this time; it’s good to give praise.
Delenn’s choice to refuse the Council is a lot weightier when considering later revealed info than it is given weight for in the present. Dukhat chose her to be on the Council and is probably the main reason she’s being offered his old job; he has been to date the most important person in her life and now she could continue to walk in his footsteps as she must have long desired. But he is also the reason she now has to look beyond the calling of the Council because those things she sometimes regrets have set her on a different path.
Funny, the background jump is just more noticeable of B5 than it was on B4, when I know they’re the same set. Maybe it’s the lighting...I don’t know.
So I kind of got distracted after the episode ended for about two weeks, so let’s see if I can decipher my notes for wrapping up this one. Obviously, it’s a very good episode, that I suspect is a pretty good episode to those watching in order and I just never got to enjoy it that way; but it certainly ism’t hurt by knowing the end, even knowing it first.
But something that’s bugged me for ages I might as well get off my chest here. The math does not work for how they get people evacuated in the time they have. To evacuate ~1300 people at 250 a trip would take more than five trips; at 6+ hours to go out, pick people up, come back to B5 and unload them; so we’re talking closer to 30 hours than the ten Ivanova puts forth. I could see an argument for 15-ish if assume she meant to start with half the shuttles, then once they’re out there send the other half, and each half would take 250 people; that’s not what it sounded like, but might have been the idea. Maybe they could cut it down slightly assuming B4 had its own shuttles to help? But it also sure doesn’t feel like they’re on B4 nearly that long.
And that’s before you try and make it fit with the timeframe WWE seemed to be using. Especially when you add on time at the beginning for the starfury pilot to see B4 appear and return to B5, then B5 organize things for the evacuation.
So let’s talk about the time flashes for a minute. We could easily have seen more of them, both here and in WWE (there were clearly ones that happened in WWE where we didn’t see what anyone saw, because the ones that happened during this episode must have still happened to the 2260 crew); the B4 crew had obviously been dealing with them a fair bit since they got unstuck from time so they must be happening more often than we necessarily see. But also, I find them a bit confusing (probably intentionally). Are people actually moving through time when the flashes happen? Do they have any ability to interact with what they’re seeing or is the temporally displaced consciousness just watching events play out as they did/will without time flashing?
Considering Garibaldi will later claim to have seen the same flash Sinclair had of fighting off an attack on the station, I’m having an idea how it might have worked; maybe it’s like Flashforward (and I’m talking the book because I watched the pilot of the show and concluded they had taken only the kernel of an idea from the book but probably changed how it actually made it make sense), where each time a time flash happens, it’s to the same point in the future for everyone, so Sinclair and Garibaldi were both flashing forward to the fight on the station at that point, along with everyone else flashing to that moment in alt-2260 where ever they were (since the B4 crew would likely scatter after this, none of them could compare and see that they were seeing the same thing, and who knows if Jeff and Michael ever compared notes); later on the time flash went to 2256 (I think) and since the B4 crew didn’t live through 2256 they kept on panicking at evacuation while any B5 crew were having that flashback. And like in Flashforward, the flashforwarder isn’t in control of events happening in the flash but as a viewer(/reader) we see it from their perspective. I’m not sure that was JMS’ thought, but I think it will be how I interpret it from here on.
Now I’m going to start wrapping this around to where I started this whole thing. Let’s think for a second where B4 could have been going. Maybe it’s me knowing the end talking, but going to the past makes a lot more sense; to the future it might be symbolic, the Babylon station reborn and if they’re under time pressure and can’t build a new big station this fills a need. But in the past it offers something new, something probably advanced (the thousand years ago Minbari probably weren’t more advanced than humans of the third age), something mysterious and hopeful. But at the same time, I think if you were watching this in order you could certainly think it was going to the future; at this point the ancient stories haven’t really been told yet and you would expect to see the payoff of the story and so for that it seems like it would be going forward. But since I can’t say what I would think of it, I can’t offer much on how it seems in the moment.
On the con side of thinking JMS had started planning the new form of things, I’m not sure what caste the Grey Council members we see speak would be. Are they supposed to be the other Religious Caste members and I’m just being obtuse because I can’t help thinking Rathenn is supposed to be on the Council? Are they maybe the most senior members and they’re whatever caste they are? Maybe it would make sense if they were Religious and Warrior taking charge and ignoring the Workers? Even if the Council was still supposed to be all Religious (as initially presented) it would cause some issues with the portrayal in Legacies of the Council being mostly a unified force as even just the two who get to talk clearly have very different views, and of course the vote only avoids being a tie because it can’t be with nine members. So again, the GC is clearly not quite fixed in the writing yet.
However on the other side, putting these plots together speaks to a knowledge of where Sinclair’s fate is headed. We get a lot more Valen talk this time than we’ve ever gotten before, and the fate of B4 is intricately tied to Minbari history and therefore the GC itself. It could be seeing connections in hindsight, but it really looks connected to me; it probably isn’t obvious without hindsight, but this seems kind of structured to think about B4 and Minbari stuff and while we don’t see the connective tissue yet, they’re there next to each other for anyone to see.
That’s probably enough, though there will be a lot to say in a couple seasons when we get to WWE...assuming we make it that far.
Next time: Quality of Mercy, we’ll see if I can write that one in a more reasonable amount of time.