Not Quite the Last Gasp

Oh, God, this seemed like a nice, fun idea when I started back in September – why not watch the complete run of Babylon 5 and occasionally write down my impressions of the series? Four seasons in, the writing, if not the watching, is beginning to feel a bit laborious – and I wonder if I’d be that bothered about the watching if I didn’t feel the need to complete the series of posts about the show.

As I’ve said before, my recollection of season 4 is that it was a tough old grind back in 1997, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that first half-dozen episodes were very watchable. Once the Shadow War storyline wrapped up, though, the ongoing story seemed to stall and go into a sort of nosedive from which it never completely recovered: the best characters had nothing to do, everyone seemed to turn into a cartoon version of him or herself, and there was a lot of corny and implausible writing from Joe Straczynski, who seemed to have lost the ability to self-edit.

Anyway, this final batch of season 4 episodes is bookended by two of Straczynski’s most soaringly experimental pieces of work. Opening the quintet is Intersections in Real Time, which seems to me to be assembled from various elements of The Prisoner and 1984. Sheridan gets interrogated at length by a banality-of-evil figure, there’s a spot of stunt casting (the guy who played Jack the Ripper and the Oldest Man in the Galaxy reappears under a new mask), and it all plays out in real time between the ad breaks. It’s certainly interesting but it also felt a bit smug and self-regarding in terms of just how out-there it is: you could easily skip it and not lose anything in terms of the bigger story.

With almost unseemly haste, Garibaldi proves he’s not actually a traitor and oversees springing his old boss in Between the Darkness and the Light, although this is not quite the main dramatic  thrust of the episode. This concerns an ambush being set for the insurrectionist fleet by evil old President Clark, using hybrid-technology starships which I fear just looked a bit silly to me. I’m not even sure the concept makes sense – we’re talking about a gulf in development even greater than that between Viking longboats and modern warships, and how would you go about splicing those two together? Suffice to say Ivanova gets gravely wounded. This episode is not actually bad, it’s just remarkably unremarkable for reasons I find very difficult to identify.

Everything (finally) climaxes in Endgame, with the final advance on Earth and the liberation of Mars and lots of other things going on. There’s a lot of action, most of it well-mounted, although I think the exactly method whereby Sheridan disables the majority of the Loyalist fleet remains a big ask for the audience and needs a bit more setting up. That said, it doesn’t carry anything like the emotional punch of earlier big battles. This is also the episode where Marcus (I’m tempted to say ‘finally’ again) snuffs it, but again, it’s quite difficult to get really excited about this either way.

I didn’t know who she was either, but now I want to see her take on Trinity Wells. FIGHT!!!

The job of tying up all the loose ends falls to Rising Star, in which everything gets amicably sorted out and justice and order are restored to the Galaxy, unless you’re Marcus, in which case you just get stuck in a fridge to be revived in a spin-off short story. Obviously, the impact of Rising Star is somewhat muffled by the fact that it’s doing a job – concluding the main part of the series – that turned out not to be necessary when season 5 got commissioned after all, but it does that job quite well. Delenn’s big speech about the brave new era and the benefits of the Interstellar Alliance still sounds very authoritarian to me – shades of Michael Rennie’s ‘behave yourselves or we’ll blow you up’ declaration at the end of The Day The Earth Stood Still, another movie perhaps not as liberal as it first looks. Londo and G’Kar’s transformation into Statler and Waldorf is not exactly winning either.

Still, at least they’re in it, which is more than you can say for The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, a very weird episode written to fulfil an almost impossible brief – filling the final slot of season 4 without introducing any new story elements in earnest, for hardly any money. As JMS says on the DVD audio track, it’s an anthology of B5 short stories, and, as he doesn’t say, an opportunity for him to indulge himself again both in terms of both story structure and his own personal interests – so he gets to have a pop at the media, academics, anyone who said the show would never get finished, and so on. Several of the segments make big demands of the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief, but considering the circumstances it’s a miracle it’s as watchable as it is.

Which leaves just season 5 and the movies. One last lap, I’m sure I can do this…