The Wanderers Return

Wandering Loonies, that is – well, sort of. Have I said before how much season 5 of Babylon 5 reminds me, in a funny way, of season 1? Probably due to the sense of something starting from scratch, although season 5’s ambitions are necessarily different. Certainly the most recent quartet has done nothing to dispel this impression, partly because the episodes are less about people in rooms arguing about political philosophy and more about oddballs visiting the station and bringing the plot with them.

However, it would be stretching a point to suggest that these are the startling wandering loonies of old – the days of Jack the Ripper or King Arthur turning up on the station are gone, alas. In Learning Curve the visitors are a bunch of senior Rangers and their trainees, who turn up to have a bit of a natter with Delenn about nothing terribly important. However, their presence does enable a story to get going where one of the trainees gets on the wrong side of one of the station’s gangsters: he is, of course, a Gaw-Blimey-Cockernee gangster of the kind JMS seems oddly fond and yet incapable of writing credibly.

It all ends up with a lot of moderately oblique Minbari philosophy and people hitting each other with pipes. This is not especially interesting as a story, except for the way in which the Rangers adopt a rule-through-terror philosophy against their enemies, overruling the local authorities as they do so. Once again, this seems very authoritarian and undemocratic – the Rangers come across as not far removed from a secret police force operating without any real checks, but there’s no sense that this is ambiguity is in any way intended by JMS, any more than earlier when the Alliance was promulgated.

Threaded through this story is a plotline about tension and distrust between Garibaldi and Lochley, which becomes more central in Strange Relations, the episode immediately following. However, this story is more about the plight of glossy-barneted Byron and his fellow telepaths as they are pursued by the very-possibly-synthetically-coiffured Bester and his fascist colleagues. Bester actually isn’t in the episode very much, and the confrontation between him and Garibaldi is bumped to a future point. There are some striking confrontations in this episode, but I do get the sense that this episode is more about setting up future plot developments than concentrating on this particular plot – the season arc starts to take on a bit more shape from this point on.

Secrets of the Soul comes next and would normally be considered a bit of an oddity, given that – of all the characters featuring in the title sequence – only three actually appear in the story, and minor ones at that. I would suspect the show of a little surreptitious double-banking if I didn’t know better. Anyway, Dr Franklin gets involved in a sort-of Trek-ish story about an alien race with a terrible secret, which works as well as it does only because Richard Biggs is as solid as ever as the doc. The main event is more stuff with Byron and his fellow telepaths being harassed by more British ruffians, and Lyta’s efforts to help him. This would work better if Byron was a slightly less irritating character, and there’s more apparently-unconscious ambiguity – irritating or not, Byron comes across as a cult leader and Lyta as someone deeply troubled getting in over her head.

It concludes with some telepathic whoa-ho-ho and a flashback sequence which I didn’t recall in the slightest, but then the only previous time I saw this episode  was on its original Sunday lunchtime broadcast in  the UK, when it was probably savagely cut for the sex and violence. Not content with getting his leg over, Byron goes all allegorical-Zionist and declares he wants the telepaths to have their own homeworld, something which is obviously going to have ominous consequences.

Only not just yet. Next, in the DVD set if not in broadcast or recommended chronological order, comes a genuine oddity, Day of the Dead, notable for being the only mid- or late-period Babylon 5 episode not written by JMS – instead the writer responsible is one Neil Gaiman, of thingy fame.

After nearly three years of JMS, a new narrative voice is very noticeable – and the story itself is very much the antithesis of Straczynski’s style. Where JMS tends to tell hard-headed SF action thrillers or character pieces, but do so using wildly eccentric plot structures and experimental techniques, Gaiman opts for a full-on fantasy story, but told in a very conventional manner. There’s a very rare alien religious festival about to happen and as part of the preparations for this, the aliens temporarily buy a large chunk of the station. G’Kar issues various grave warnings of strange events in the offing, but as usual no-one listens to him (you’d have thought, by this point…).

When the festival gets underway, the purchased area and everyone inside it is cut off, and instruments suggest it is in some way physically now on the alien homeworld. As if this wasn’t strange enough, everyone inside the affected zone is visited by the embodiment of someone they knew who has died. Londo’s old girlfriend from the start of season 1 comes back, along with someone Garibaldi nearly got it on with in season 2. Lochley is visited by a friend who died of an OD before she joined up, while – most promisingly – Lennier has an encounter with Morden, who appears to have changed his hairstyle since he died, but is still the same warm loveable human being. Rather curiously, no-one seems very interested in actually talking to their visitor, except Lochley, and this is because her subplot is just there to fill in her background a bit. It’s an interesting, if rather weird premise, but not very much comes from it.

‘…and, then as a punishment, they did this to my hair.’

Meanwhile, in a B-plot, Penn and Teller guest-star as a legendary comedy team visiting the station. I like Penn and Teller very much, but they are almost supernaturally unfunny as the comedians here, and the forced fake laughter of every other actor in the scenes where they are supposedly being hilarious is deeply grating. Once again, this thread doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and the episode as a whole doesn’t really live up to Gaiman’s reputation – it didn’t really at the time, and it certainly doesn’t now. Nevertheless the break from JMS is rather welcome, and makes one wish he’d given someone else the reins more often.