| Written By: | J. Michael Straczynski | | | Directed By: | Mike Vejar | | | Release Date: | 1998 |
Great news! Sci-Fi Adventures is back for another two months and I'm getting right back into Babylon 5. I've finally reached the fifth and final season... though before I carry on to the end I have to first go back to the beginning.
Babylon 5 had been on shaky ground for its whole run, renewal was never guaranteed, and in its fourth year that ground collapsed entirely due to their network getting cancelled. Fortunately cable network TNT stepped in to give its first four seasons a new home and asked for a couple of new B5 TV movies (In the Beginning and Thirdspace) to stir up some interest. So the show went from losing its final year, to getting bonus content that creator jms had never planned for. In fact TNT decided they'd do one better than that and paid for a complete fifth season!
This was around the same time that Star Wars was gearing up to be a movie franchise again, with the original trilogy getting a theatrically released Special Edition in 1997 and the upcoming prequel (The Phantom Menace) generating huge amounts of hype, so I'm not surprised TNT wanted a bit of that for themselves. They decided to kick off their B5 run with a movie double-bill: the new prequel, In the Beginning, followed by a special edition re-edit of the original pilot The Gathering. This led straight into a season 1 rerun and, a couple of weeks later, the brand new season 5 stories.
Man this would've been confusing for new viewers.
In the Beginning can function as a new introduction to the series, but it's got pretty massive SPOILERS for all the way up to the end of season 4 and jms is happy leaving it to viewers to decide for themselves where it should be watched. Either way, I definitely wouldn't recommend reading this review until after season 4.
If you're a new viewer, all you know about this woman is that she's here to hype up the events of the movie. No really, she's speaking directly to the audience here.
A character talking to directly to the audience accompanied by clips of space battles isn't considered to be the ideal way to start a movie, so I'm almost wondering if this introduction was thrown in late in the process when they realised that they'd forgotten the action-packed teaser.
Delenn's not the only character in this intro though, as we also get this guy:
By the way, this is the only shot of the station in the whole movie. I almost wish it wasn't here, but only because the idea of a Babylon 5 movie with absolutely no Babylon 5 amuses me. The station is mentioned though, as the two of them reveal that these are the historical events that led to it being created. In the pain of the war the future was born, a future that would one day have a name whispered on a hundred worlds. It's never explained why they couldn't just say it out loud. Maybe they were worried about Star Trek fans giving them grief.
Anyway, once the two of them have done all they can to keep viewers from changing the channel, the movie's title appears. But I've shown that already so I'll share this instead:
You might think that text under the logo is in error, as The Gathering was released as a movie five years earlier, but they've put the word 'first' before the word 'sensational', so it works. No one ever accused The Gathering of being sensational.
Don't worry I'm not taking these screencaps from a VHS tape, I have the DVD as part of my "The Movie Collection" box set. Though hang on, something doesn't seem right here...
It's not just a problem with In the Beginning either. All the movies in this set are the blatantly the season 5 DVDs tinted green. They came in a beautiful shiny box though, so I would definitely recommend it to fans of shiny boxes.
It's also weird to see that my season 5 disc actually allows both rental and resale. It just wants to be shared!
We've been here once before, when the season 3 story War Without End took Sheridan time travelling to Centauri Prime's future, and we learned that these fires were caused by minions of the Shadows. We never learned why though, or what happened.
Babylon 5's never had a huge budget, but the throne room used to be especially cheap. In fact it was mostly just translucent curtains at first, implying that the must be elaborately decorated walls and ornate furniture on the other side of them that we couldn't quite make out. The movie uses that to its advantage though, as we see a pair of young kids playing hide and seek in the maze of curtains and finding themselves at the window. The sight of their beautiful city in flames kind of ruins the fun though.
It's never mentioned in the movie, but the novelisation apparently reveals that the kids are part of Urza Jaddo's family, brought into House Mollari in Knives. It's also never mentioned if the woman who catches them is related to them, but she's definitely keen to get them out of the throne room for their own good. Unfortunately it turns out that Emperor Londo Mollari was there the whole time, sitting in his shadowy throne. You'd think it'd be hard to hide in the shadows in such a well-lit room, but anything's possible when you've got this many curtains.
Oh, there's another spoiler for new viewers: Londo becomes emperor.
Man, Londo's life could've turned out very different if he'd just asked Morden for a story, and the guy knows it, telling Luc he chose better than he did. He's also going to grant him his wish. So now we're up to our third alien narrator, one even further removed from the events of the war, but the story's finally getting started.
This particular story starts on Earth 35 years ago, which would put the next scene around the year 2243, 15 years before season 1.
Lefcourt explains that humanity has earned a lot of good will after defeating a race called the Dilgar, and they're currently taking advantage of it to make deals and treaties with the other races. They're also planning on sending an expedition to the Minbari border to see if they're going to be a threat to their plans to expand their sphere of influence.
Lefcourt assures him that they can handle the Minbari, which is such a ridiculous statement that Londo can't help but call him an arrogant idiot to his face. This is a very talky scene all about delivering exposition, but now emotions are getting raised and there's a hint of drama to make it more compelling.
But Emperor Londo explains in his narration that arrogance isn't exclusive to humans, and the movie cuts to the Minbari homeworld next.
- They're also known as the Rangers.
- Lenonn is their leader.
- The Minbari have kept them around for 1000 years as a debt to someone called Valen.
- They specialise in reports from distant places.
- The prophecy says they'll soon be needed most.
- The Caste Elders aren't giving them the support they need.
Oh, here's another interesting fact: Lenonn was played by Theodore Bikel, who also played a rabbi in season one, and Worf's dad in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The guy was very good at being likeable.
I was wondering what was going to happen here to get them up to the ship, as they don't have transporter technology in Babylon 5. And the answer is...
Then again, it's unclear how much of this actually happened. I mean the movie certainly treats it all as objective truth, but it's a story told by a Centauri who wasn't here and probably never met any of these people, so it's possible we're only getting his version of events.
I think we've only seen four kinds of Minbari vessels up to this point: the giant fish-shaped cruisers, the flyer shuttles, the fighters, and the ancient cruisers from the previous Shadow War, so this transport increases the number of ships we know about by 25%. It's just a shame I couldn't get a better shot of it.
Lenonn is taken to the Grey Council's own cruiser, which looks just like all the rest of them, and is brought their special pitch-black council chambers. Possibly the cheapest set in Babylon 5, depending on how much spotlights cost.
Dukhat's great, I really like the actor's performance, but Luc's lost patience with all the meetings and exposition at this point and wants to know when the space battle's going to start.
But Londo doesn't just promise the kids a war, he also teases his own part in it, saying that a lot of the blood is on his hands for secret reasons that he'll reveal later. I don't know why he's so desperate to keep people watching, this is a movie not an episode, it's not like it's going to have ad breaks... oh wait, it's a TV movie. Never mind then.
ACT TWO
Dukhat points out that the prophecy falls under the category of 'religious' and the council is made up of three castes, Religious, Warrior, and Worker, therefore 67% of them are going to need a bit more convincing before they start putting resources towards a war.
Coplann is Warrior Caste and is of the opinion that they should wait and see if parts of the prophecy to come true first before gearing up for war and they definitely shouldn't send any ships over to go speak to the Vorlons. Because the Vorlons are scary.
Someone else also removes their hood and it turns out to be Delenn!
Dukhat agrees it's better that the Warrior Caste doesn't openly send ships to Z'ha'dum... so that's why the Grey Council will go themselves in secret! He even thanks Coplann for giving him the idea. Coplann doesn't have to say 'You absolute bastard' because it's written plainly on his face.
So now the humans are sending an expedition out to check on the ancient and powerful Minbari to see if they're a threat and the Minbari are sending an expedition out to check on the even more ancient and powerful Shadows to see if they're a threat. I'm glad that symmetry's there, because otherwise I'd have to wonder what any of this has to do with the Earth-Minbari War.
In fact there's been no mention of the humans at all so far, which is interesting as we saw a whole flashback of the council discussing making first contact themselves, back in Atonement.
By the way, that council chamber door in the background is brand new for this movie and it really stands out. I'm not used to seeing doors on Minbari ships, especially not circular ones that split into three.
Anyway, Delenn and Dukhat have a chat after the council meeting about how the Vorlons really should've contacted them by now if the prophecy is true, with Dukhat saying enough to give Delenn reason to wonder if he knows something he's not saying. Then Dukhat heads through another fancy new door to his sanctum...
They definitely didn't just reuse a Kosh encounter suit they had in storage though, as the film crew really hated that suit. They hated it so much that once he was dead and there was no chance it'd be needed for any more flashbacks they tied it to a pickup truck and drove it around their car park, cheering. So they had to build a new one just for this movie.
Anyway, this shows that Dukhat's not just leaning towards Lenonn's side, he's actually 100% pro-prophecy. He just needs to carefully bring the others in the Grey Council on side before he can get the Rangers their support.
Sheridan's the same rank that Ivanova was in season 1 and he's currently first officer on the Lexington. But it turns out that Lefcourt is a friend of his dad and has decided to do him a favour. He moves over to his comfy couch to make things a little more casual and then offers him the position of XO on the Prometheus: the ship leading the expedition to Minbari space.
Hang on, he's got a leather strip down the front of his uniform. That was a new addition to the costume introduced after the first pilot movie. Well if Earthforce wants to keep adding and removing leather strips from their uniforms every few years that's their own business I suppose.
Dukhat and Delenn have a little chat about how the Vorlons, and how they have no idea what they look like. It means it would be very easy for someone to pretend to be a Vorlon and deceive them. Dukhat asks if she thinks that he's being deceived, she asks if he thinks he's seen a Vorlon, but neither of them claim to be saying anything... except for this: if you look into the face of a Vorlon all of your doubts will vanish forever. So that explains why Delenn was so eager to see what Kosh looked like before going through with her transformation at the end of Chrysalis.
I don't know if this was deliberate, but it works out well that the ships in season 4's Earth Alliance Civil War arc were all scary grey blocks, but these Earth vessels are curvy with blue stripes. It makes them seem friendlier and more heroic. Good guy ships.
That said, the first time one of these ships turned up in the series (the EAS Hyperion in A Voice in the Wilderness, Part II) it brought nothing but trouble.
This looks very different from the other Earth Alliance vessels we've seen in the series, mostly because it's got a brand new bridge set instead of using a redress of Babylon 5's C&C set for a change. It's a little more compact, primitive and claustrophobic, and it doesn't have 'wild' walls that can be pulled out to get the cameras in there. Instead the whole thing was built as a complete room with a small hole for a camera crane to get through, allowing them to move it around inside the narrow space without sending a steadicam operator tripping over the floor rails.
I remember reading that they used a camera crane on Enterprise to get shots of the similarly cramped NX-01 bridge as well. It's a shame that the Enterprise bridge set hadn't been a little more similar to this one, as it conveys the idea of a relatively low tech military starship without being completely oppressively monochrome.
We already heard that Sheridan thinks Jankowski is a loose cannon, and Lefcourt mentioned he was cleared of responsibility for the 'Omega incident', so we've been encouraged to question the decisions he makes here. His new first officer's not entirely on the same page as him either, as he keeps having to point out that they've been ordered to avoid making first contact.
But Jankowski wants to get a little closer and take better scans because "they'll be handing out medals by the bucket," and "We handled the Dilgar and we can handle a few stray ships."
4-09 - Atonement
I'll be marking recycled shots like this with a blue border just so you can see how much of the movie is actually a secret clip show.
4-09 - Atonement
This is Robin Atkin Downes playing Morann by the way, reprising his role from Atonement. Well, he will do later anyway, once they've stopped reusing footage. This means that half the Minbari we see on the Council are played by someone called Robin.
All the scenes on the Minbari side of this first contact seem to have come from Atonement, but there's footage from the episode they haven't used.
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4-09 - Atonement |
Over on the Prometheus, the crew are freaking out a bit because the Minbari scanners are disrupting their systems. We learned in Legacies that if they'd been able to scan the Minbari ships they'd would've seen that their weapons aren't actually armed, but the disruption makes that impossible, and it's also preventing them from opening a jump point. They're trapped.
Captain Jankowski wants out at this point and orders his crew to open fire on the Minbari scanners to allow them to make a run for it.
3-13 - A Late Delivery from Avalon
That episode was all about this guy's trauma over being the one who pulled the trigger, but all the flashbacks we got to the battle that followed were very dreamlike and unclear.
4-09 - Atonement
Earth vessels of this era (or maybe any era) generally can't hurt Minbari ships, because they can't track them, but somehow this situation proves to be an exception as they blast holes in the Grey Council's headquarters sending bits of the ceiling crashing down on people. Dukhat is injured in the attack and dies on the floor in front of a distraught Delenn.
The other Grey Councillors have been having a chat about what to do, but they've reached a deadlock and need Delenn's vote to break the tie. Do they pick option a: violent revenge, or option b: investigation?
4-09 - Atonement
This is interesting, as Delenn never told Sheridan about her part in starting the Earth-Minbari War (there's never a good time to tell your husband you nearly wiped out his species), but it turns out that Londo knows!
I feel like there's a moral in this tale somewhere, about arrogance and stupidity, and making the choice to save you own crew at the expense of your entire people. Still, things could've been worse. One of those shots could've killed Kosh and started a war with the Vorlons as well. A movie about the Earth-Vorlon War would've been a lot shorter.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO
TOMORROW
There's been plenty to talk about already though, so if you want to leave a comment now, that's cool.
I suppose inability to track on radar or whatever doesn't matter when your opponent isn't trying to dodge and you're close enough to see that their gunports are open.
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