Category: Babylon5

An upside surprise of an episode. I’d remembered this as being a pretty silly episode. By all rights an episode about a psychic alien versus someone seeking the holy grail shouldn’t work. But somehow it does, because those things are treated in the show seriously, but also as being beyond the normal bounds of what…

I had high expectations for this, the second of the episodes with the big ‘woah’ moments. And it lived up to it. There’s a great mix of consequential action and also advancement of the arc. The Morden part of the episode is still the star. Ed Wasser puts in an incredible performance that is polite,…

Union struggles come to SF. It’s nice to see the difficulties of actually running a space station, and the realities of a world where money requires hard choices between things and tight budgets. I’ve never liked the utopian money-free future of Star Trek, it just doesn’t feel like a real possible future. There’s a bit…

This episode showed something of an ongoing flaw in the season to date. There are some good stories and good characters, but the characterisation is turned up to 11. So we get a lot of scenes of angry people shouting past each other, totally unwilling to engage in give or take. It’s ultimately a bit…

Finally an episode that really underperformed my memory. I remembered this as being quite a strong story about medical ethics, with a dark ending Trek would never touch. And while those are both true, I didn’t remember the terrible characterisation on Franklin required to get there, and a weakfish child actor. Franklin is borderline irredeemable…

One that from memory was quite weak, but surprised me for the most part. The story is a good example of the kind of SF concept that would be difficult or impossible to make work in Star Trek, but feels natural here. The various manoeuvring and compromises among the different races and factions is interesting…

Just as great as I remembered it. The fist time Babylon 5 really shifts into a higher gear in terms of the big arc. Michael O’Hare’s performance as haunted and scarred so far exceeds everything else that he does in this show. Knowing the back story that’s quite tragic. But he also brings a core…

A confession – as is obvious from the date stamps I’ve been away from this project for a while. As a result I’ve been watching a largish batch of episodes before writing up the reviews. And when I sat down now to write about this episode I could barely recall what it was about or…

This was one of the ‘major’ episodes in my memory, and I was glad to see it stood up to scrutiny after all these years. It’s not quite as subtle as I remembered – George Takei as Bester must have put on quite a few kilos with all the chewed scenery. But it’s a combination…

This is a fun but ultimately low calorie episode. None of the plot threads really do anything incredible in terms of moving things forward. And there are some bits that are a bit on the nose. For instance, yes, it’s nice to see Earth has diversity of beliefs. But do none of the other aliens…