Babylon 5: The River of Souls - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still making my way through the 1998 Babylon 5 TV movie, The River of Souls. This is part 2 of 2, so if you want to go back to part 1, click HERE.

There are actually six Babylon 5 movies, kind of:

• The Gathering (1993) - The original pilot movie.
• In the Beginning (1998) - A prequel about the Earth-Minbari War.
  
• Thirdspace (1998) - Lovecraftian weirdness during season 4.
  
• The River of Souls (1998) - You are here.
  
• A Call to Arms (1999) - A lead-in to the Crusade spin-off.
  
• The Legend of the Rangers (2002) - The pilot for a spin-off that never made it to a series.
  

So even though I'm in the final stretch now there's plenty left for me to write about. In another timeline I'd be going straight into writing about the Babylon 5 reboot series afterwards, but that's seeming less than likely at this point. Still, at least I can write about a couple of episodes of Crusade. Yay.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be writing about this whole movie and mentioning things that happened during the series. I'll not spoil a thing about Crusade or Legend of the Rangers however.

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Previously, on Babylon 5: The River of Souls:

It's 2263, six months after the events of season 5, and Lochley's settled in as Babylon 5's commander. She was getting used to the quiet as well until Garibaldi visited the station to meet with a fanatical archaeologist who stole a ball full of souls. A Soul Hunter arrives to get his stuff back, before an increasingly unhinged Dr Bryson can free them in the fire of the station's exploding fusion reactor. Meanwhile there's a B plot about a holobrothel owner called Jacob Mayhew and his lawyer Riley threatening to sue Lochley for sending Zack to shut them down.

And now, the conclusion:

ACT FOUR

Act four starts with Lochley getting a room full of B5 staff together in her office (including a Starfury pilot, weirdly) to give them orders to track Dr Bryson down.... and then Riley shows up again.

Lochley tells him to go chase an ambulance because she's busy, so he replies that if she's not interested in settling this amicably they'll have to take this to court. Which means she'll be liable for the court costs, in addition to statutory and punitive damages. Then he helps himself to some of the snacks on her desk! Who allowed him into her office anyway? Also shouldn't Lochley have her own lawyer for him to deal with?

Riley leaves and Lochley waits a moment for him to get out of hearing range before saying "Damages... damage him if he comes in here one more time."

Though she's still composed enough to barely have a reaction when she accidentally sits on the love bat and triggers it to say "I love you. I forgive you." She wields it for a moment like some violence is about to happen, and then she gently places it down.

Lochley's arc in the movie is actually inspired by a true story apparently. The story of how showrunner jms got driven slowly insane by running a TV series for five years. I don't know if he eventually went on a rampage with a padded bat, but I'm only halfway through the movie and Lochley has to be halfway there by this point.

It's just a shame that so much of her scenes in the film take place in this office set, as it's not the prettiest location on the station.

Though even the establishing shots of the station can look a bit crap in this movie. I can barely make B5 out against Epsilon 3.

Bryson has set himself up some secluded section of DownBelow, so he has to take another wall apart to find more power cables to plug into his stolen Soul Hunter gadget. He reconnects it to the globe to allow the souls to stray into the station's circuitry again. And that's pretty much his role in the movie done. He'll spend the rest of the film staring at his ball.

This time the soul energy skips the wiring and just flies down the ducts.

I don't want to keep criticising the CGI, because they had a lot of shots to work on in a short amount of time without a lot of money... in 1998, but this sequence surprised me a little. It's just tubes in a metal box, so why does it look so bad?

And why did they reuse the same orange splat texture for both the left side and the right side? Did they assume that no one would take a screencap of a single frame 24 years later and overanalyse it? Because that was a mistake.

Then we actually get to see one of the holobrothel customers wearing the trippy haptic suit in one of the private rooms. Somehow I'm getting the impression that the guy's supposed to come off as kind of pathetic and maybe a little bit creepy seeing as he's paid for a sexy hologram of the woman he works next door to.

Things don't entirely go as he planned though, as a male hologram appears and starts making out with his fantasy woman.

It turns out that the souls of a husband and wife are inhabiting the holographic bodies, which kind of makes sense. I suppose the holograms must be simulated in a way that allows them to interact with other holograms (so they don't clip through each other during threesomes)... so I guess the souls are able to access data on collisions and interpret it as a sense of touch. Somehow.

This is actually another comedy scene, as the guy starts mumbling about how he's not opposed to the idea of a hot guy joining in, and his psychological profile did maybe hint that he was bi. Plus there was that time at camp... Anyway, it soon sinks in that he's not really welcome here and he leaves the holograms to it.

Then we get to see a glimpse of what the two souls really look like. Clones basically! It's like the concept artist came up with the look for one of them and then they decided to copy it for the other one too to save time.

The customer goes outside to complain and then spots another hologram he'd rather have instead...

Holo Elvira!
 
Actually it's Holo Lochley. Mayhew actually had the nerve to create a hologram of the person he was suing. Like he wasn't punchable enough already. The Soul Hunters take people's minds without their consent and it's becoming really obvious now that he's taking people's bodies without consent.

I've read that Lochley's actress, Tracy Scoggins, had been competing in swimming and gymnastics in a leotard or swimsuit since she was a kid, so the costume didn't bother her. It's a bit awkward how the movie's only real female character is also the only one to get objectified like this though.

Meanwhile someone in DownBelow is trying to get a broken BabCom unit to work by hitting it a bit, when suddenly the Grim Reaper materialises out of it.

Seriously, it's the Grim Reaper, with a scythe and everything! I don't even know what's going on here. Is it the soul of a cosplayer manifested by Bryson's stolen Soul Hunter gadget or is it a soul-possessed hologram projected from the holobrothel? Who has sexy fantasies about the Grim Reaper? Here's a better question, why is he harassing some completely innocent person in a corridor?

He corners the guy against a wall and it fades to black

ACT FIVE

The real Lochley arrives home with some food, but her meal gets interrupted again, this time by the Soul Hunter. He was being taken somewhere he didn't want to be, so he chose to come here and lurk in her quarters instead. That's just how the Soul Hunters roll; they spend their lives going to where the souls are and typically only find locked doors in their way, and he found his spirit moved him to be here. Out of curiosity mostly.

She's impressively calm about the whole thing (I suppose she does have a knife handy), and the two discuss his work for a bit. Turns out that the Soul Hunters really do just spend their lives getting souls and putting them in great halls, and that's it. He explains that the souls don't have any needs after being freed from their bodies, so they're satisfied with just continuing.

Lochley suggests that what people do is what makes them who they are. Save the soul of a concert pianist and stick him on a shelf, and he's not a pianist anymore. It sounds like a very Captain Kirk 'a life without work isn't worth living!' kind of argument, but in this case she's talking about doing anything at all.

Basically if Zack's right about there being a Heaven then the Soul Hunters are keeping the Ralga souls from reaching it, and if there isn't an afterlife then the souls are in the closest thing to a man-made Hell right now. That kind of seems like a crime beyond description to her. Wow she's really done a 180 from her 'we should give the stolen property back' position she had a few minutes ago.

It makes perfect sense though why the Soul Hunters would think that what the souls have is enough, because between hunts they're basically living the brain-on-a-shelf lifestyle already. They have no contact with other people, or entertainment, or creative outlets. They can sense death but they don't understand life.

Suddenly the lights go out, along with Lochley's link, and the Soul Hunter tells her to get behind him. Wow, he's far more heroic than that serial killer Soul Hunter we had in that other episode!

Her electronics start exploding and the ghost energy escapes, so she dives down to do something with this handle hidden in the wall. I didn't quite get what she was doing until I went back and paused it. Turns out that it's a manual release for door, so now they can both get out even with the power down.

Unfortunately the energy goes straight for the Soul Hunter, and Lochley decides it's her turn to be the hero, shoving him out of the way.

So Lochley takes the full force of the blast herself.

I criticised the CGI a bit earlier, but I honestly can't tell here if they drew a matte around a real plant to put the energy behind it, or if they rendered a fake CG plant and cupboard, and put it in front of it.

Lochley's eyes close and it doesn't look good for her. But I suppose the Soul Hunter would know if she's actually dying or not. In fact he would've seen it coming.

Lochley's taken to Medlab, and she looks over from her bed to see... herself. Well that doesn't make any sense! Even if her soul's slipped out somehow there should still only be one of her conscious.

This reminds me of scene that took place in this same room in The Paragon of Animals, where Lyta telepathically witnessed a person's soul disappearing through a portal. This doesn't happen to Lochley though, thankfully. Instead she drops down into the floor!

It's hard to know what a ghost falling through multiple decks should look like, but this doesn't seem right somehow. Maybe it's because she looks like she's standing there with a fan blowing her hair a little bit, maybe it's because the lighting never changes. Maybe I just don't see any floors I recognise!

I'm not sure what I thought about all this the first time I saw the episode, but I imagine my reaction might have been to pause it and go walk away to make a cup of tea or something. Sometimes I just need to mentally regroup and steel myself before going back in to a story. I'm just not keen on sci-fi series suddenly getting overtly supernatural five years in! Okay to be fair Soul Hunter introduced souls in episode 2, and there's been some occasional weirdness in season 5, but for 100+ episodes out of 110, this supernatural weirdness doesn't happen.

Lochley finds herself in that CGI shot of the Ralga city from earlier. Then she turns around to discover...

Dr Stephen Franklin, the former head of the Medlab facility! And the show's biggest sceptic when it comes to souls.

Actually it's not Franklin at all, so the opening credits were lying to me. He's an alien that Lochley's merely perceiving as Franklin, because... I guess they had the actor contracted for a movie and had to find a way to use him somehow? He explains that she felt the need for a doctor and a friend, which makes sense seeing as she's just flatlined in Medlab, but wouldn't she be seeing Dr Hobbs instead? The doctor that she's been interacting with and seeing in staff meetings for the past six months.

I don't think Richard Biggs is trying to use different mannerisms to Franklin here, but he is using a different accent. He explains that there are two factions in the soul globe right now, his side, and the side that's been driven mad by their captivity are striking out in revenge. It was his side who decided to adjust the power that hit her very slightly in order to stop her heart for a second without permanently killing her. That seems implausibly precise, but then I guess he is a doctor.

There's the city of the mad over there. It's appearance doesn't really make the place feel any less like a video game. Also it isn't really a city, none of this is actually exists, it's just their minds struggling to make sense of the impossible.

Lochley asks why they haven't made Bryson break the globe to free them, and he tells her that's what the mad ones say! He doesn't actually give her an answer though. He does give her a message to relay to the Soul Hunters though: they really screwed up here because the Ralgans weren't dying. They were turning into energy beings like the Vorlons! All of them, on the same day! Just a bit of spontaneous ascension.

While Lochley's out of action, Corwin's in charge of the entire station, so he's the one that has to deal with the news that a lot of Soul Hunter ships are pouring in through the jumpgate. Finally something for the incredibly under-utilised Corwin to do! He doesn't get to do it from C&C though and I have a feeling that the tragic reason for this is that they'd already dismantled the set by this point. Not that dismantling the sets was all that unusual for the series, as they'd reconfigure them frequently to make the best use of their limited soundstage space.

ACT SIX

The Soul Hunters have apparently got guns on their ships, as they've "taken up firing positions".

Man, this is like the Vorlon fleet showing up at the end of The Gathering all over again. Except with way better CGI, obviously. The two films were made five years apart, with The River of Souls' space scenes rendered on PCs and the The Gathering's rendered on Amigas.

The Gathering

Uh... well, okay I think The Gathering may actually have the prettier VFX shot. But then it's hard to make a shot of the station from that angle look bad.

This is Corwin's time to actually handle a crisis himself and give out the orders. So he gets on his link and gives C&C these instructions:

Okay. Activate defence grid, launch all Starfuries and if they move, shoot them. If they don't move, shoot twice. They're probably hiding something.

Corwin really is the new Ivanova now. He has learned from the master. Though I feel I have to point out that he literally ordered C&C to shoot the ships if they do or do not move. If the shooting starts, that's on him.

Meanwhile the Soul Hunter has come to visit Lochley in Medlab and he's brought her a flower! I guess they must have explained to security that he wasn't the one who assaulted her, it was ghost electricity from her BabCom unit. Incidentally the flower was apparently Martin Sheen's choice; it wasn't in the script. The Soul Hunter's incredibly grateful to her for saving him, especially because to his knowledge it's never happened before. People generally want Soul Hunters like him dead. The actor's doing a really good job of making this guy likeable, despite all the makeup he's wearing. He seems like a really nice Soul Hunter!

We learn here that Soul Hunters don't get to go into soul globes when they die because they don't consider themselves worthy of immortality. We also learn their ships are really good at burning through the hulls of ships so they can infiltrate and take what they came for, and the guys outside aren't going to wait forever.

The Soul Hunter learns something too: Lochley proves her chat with Franklin wasn't a dream by describing the planet (so there goes any ambiguity about her experience there) and then tells him that they made a mistake with the Ralga. Now they're basically a billion Vorlons in a ball and they're kind of pissed off. He decides that he has to do what he can to fix this.

Meanwhile the others have been using reports of weirdness to hunt Bryson down and have narrowed his location down to Brown Sector, level 11, right where the holobrothel is. Mayhew comes out and starts accusing them of using scare tactics against him... then he discovers the dead body on the ground of a guy who was literally scared to death.

They go to his holobrothel to see what he's complaining about and discover a huge amount of energy pouring in through the door... and Holo Lochley. He defends his use of her image like this saying that she's a public figure! So it's public domain. Free speech. It's satire! I'm starting to feel like this guy is the personification of a certain kind of person who'd been annoying jms in real life, as he's really hitting those same arguments over and over.

Zack is outraged about Holo Lochley, Garibaldi is... taking in the view. And then Real Lochley arrives. Mayhew is suddenly very concerned for his safety, but Lochley just has him dragged out of the movie so she can assess what she's seeing here. Holograms shouldn't be able to leave the brothel like this, so they must be putting a lot of power into the projectors.

And then this happens:

A bunch of glowing orange ghost blobs start sliding past Holo Lochley. The first couple of them wobble their arms a bit but after that they're just completely frozen as they drive on by.

Honestly, I wasn't prepared for this, I just burst out laughing.

I don't know if it would've been better if they'd filmed models in corsets walking by and given them a ghost glow, but they would've had to try very hard to do worse than this. Man, poor Martin Sheen. He went from Spawn to this. The dude must have thought he had some kind of CGI curse.
 

Well it's not looking any less ridiculous yet, but maybe if they keep putting them on screen I'll get used to them.

Holo Lochley changes into Lochley's Earthforce uniform and then gives a speech to her glowing army. So Tracy Scoggins is getting to play the hero and the villain! Her faction of souls are going to sacrifice themselves to strike back at the Soul Hunters, and to achieve this all they have to do is wait here.

Regular Lochley has a theory, so she goes down there with them to test it. Turns out... that they're actually just holograms. This whole hologram subplot was just a distraction!

Oh it turns out that Mayhew's in one more scene. That's him standing behind Lochley, as she looks his her security officer's pouches for a grenade. They've presumably been carrying grenades all this time, just in case a war breaks out on the station, and right now Lochley needs one to make a room disappear. She did at least make sure to ask if they're far enough from the outer hull first.

Wait, did she think to make sure no one was in there?
 

Oh that's a nice explosion. See, that's what it looks like when a blast of energy lights up the inside of a box covered in pipes! In fact the producers liked this shot so much they put it in the opening credits of Crusade.

So that's stopped the ghosts from spying on them with the holograms... apparently. It's also ruined Mayhew's day. Now Lochley's free to explain to the others that she's figured out that the souls are going to blow up the station's reactor to kill themselves and take the Soul Hunters out in the blast. I think we already knew that though.

ACT SEVEN

Then we get this very obviously CGI console showing that the reactor's going critical. The reason they went with CGI is apparently just because they couldn't afford to make it for real.

Personally if I was going to make a display warning people that the reactor is about to explode, I'd probably choose a more readable font. 'Stop' is an interesting font to look at and shows up in a lot of space-related entertainment, but it's a little hard to decipher at a glance.

Hey the Soul Hunter and Dr Bryson are back! Well, the Soul Hunter's back anyway, Bryson might as well be a prop at this point. He's just sitting there in silence, surrounded by a barrier of swirling ghost faces. There's some impressive effects work here though as the camera slowly orbits him in one unbroken 30 second shot, while Lochley and the others enter the room and security gets into position.

By this point they know that the Soul Hunters are going to attack the station in 20 minutes and the station's going to explode in 15, so they're going to have to work this problem out fast. No one's mentioned anything about evacuation, so I suppose they just don't have the time, and there's no point warning the Soul Hunters to back away as they wouldn't believe them. They didn't even believe Martin Sheen's Soul Hunter when he told them how they made a mistake.
 

Garibaldi goes up and tries to talk to Bryson, but he has to run for cover when the swirly ghost faces get angry and shoot a fireball at him. Good thing he guest starred in this movie, he's made a real impact on the plot. Then security tries shooting Bryson, but he's protected by that ghost forcefield. Wait, where's the ghost forcefield gone in this shot? Bryson's just sitting there holding a lamp.

The Soul Hunter finally realises that this is all his people's fault for storing their soul vessels in the dark where the souls would go mad. Then he revises his epiphany, saying that they never should've claimed the souls in the first place! The Soul Hunters have been monsters, a terror worse than death. Wow, Lochley really got through to this guy.

He decides to try talking to the souls himself and offers to try to free them all.

But to convince them he's telling the truth he has to let them kill him and take his soul into the vessel! They can't kill him for 1 second like they did with Lochley though, this has to be permanent, because... it wouldn't be a tragic sacrifice otherwise? It's funny, the episode Soul Hunter ended with the Soul Hunter getting sucked into a soul globe as well. This happens 100% of the time!

It's also funny that the Soul Hunter has done a much better job convincing the mad souls to stand down than he did his convincing his own people. I hope they change their minds and actually live up to their end of his deal like he just promised they would.

And Lochley, Zack and Garibaldi have just saved Babylon 5 once again. Well, they watched from the side-lines while somebody else saved Babylon 5. I suppose they did their job way earlier when they gave the Soul Hunter a reason to rethink his beliefs.

Over in the customs area Lochley hands the soul globe over to another Soul Hunter while Soul Hunter #1 watches from inside. I like how her giant face in the sky is reflected in the water. Man, they must have been staring at a giant Bryson face for hours. Longer, in fact, as time has no meaning here. Oh and it turns out that the image Soul Hunter #1 sees when he looks at someone here is also Lochley. She was his Franklin!

Lochley gives the Soul Hunters a threat to take home as well, saying that she'll hunt them if they don't keep his promise to save the Ralga souls, though I'm not sure how she ever intends to back that up. Especially as it might take a hundred or so more years to figure out how to get them out. (I still think it's weird that no one's explained why they can't just crack it open like Delenn did in Soul Hunter).

Hang on, is this the river of souls that the title comes from? Or was the river the energy stream flowing to the holobrothel?

Back in Lochley's office, Garibaldi lets her know that Bryson's apparently recovered and he's going back out there to search for immortality again, even without financing. We'll have to take Garibaldi's word on that though, as Bryson's already left the set and is in his car back home.

And Garibaldi's going to be leaving too, as he's got plenty more black projects to investigate on Mars. Though he does let her know that he's planning to drop by again in a month or so.

And as he walks out the vase Lochley bought at the start tumbles off a table like it's been knocked over by a poltergeist. At the start of the episode it wasn't Garibaldi's arrival that coincided with the fight in the Zocalo, it was Lochley realising he was here, and now another event has coincided with Garibaldi telling her that he'll be back. I don't think Garibaldi's cursed, I think Lochley's belief in the curse is causing her to alter reality itself whenever she's reminded of it. Or maybe it was an invisible monkey demon that did it. It's the supernatural, nothing has to make any damn sense!

And then Riley shows back up again. He's here to bring criminal charges against Lochley, for blowing up Mayhew's business!

This is the end of the movie though, so Riley's fun is over.

Lochley points out that she and B5 aren't liable for damages resulting from military action and she just happens to have depositions from a couple of dozen security officers saying that she was entirely justified to blow that holobrothel up. And seeing as all his other charges were centred around the holobrothel business and it doesn't exist anymore, then they don't have anything more to talk about anymore. Unless he really wants her to sue Mayhew for the illegal use of her image.

He doesn't have to go back to Mayhew empty-handed though as he can have the love bat. Only she's reprogrammed it into a cutting insult bat, because as station commander she has the resources to do that. He tries it out and discovers some of the new phrases, like "I'm an idiot," and "My mommy dresses me funny," but ultimately decides to leave it behind.

I don't think that scene should've worked, but it somehow did for me. Lochley's not generally this childish, but she's been through a lot lately (including dying) and the guy did eat her snacks, so this is just about the right level of ridiculous for me. I feel like she probably should've had a lawyer herself though as soon as things got serious. Not a comedy one, a real one.


CONCLUSION

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I've been kind of dreading watching The River of Souls to be honest. Only 'kind of' though. Not full on dread. I remembered it being less than the other films but not absolutely terrible. Not as terrible as you'd expect from a cross between the season one episodes Soul Hunter and Infection anyway.

And yeah, it was watchable enough I thought. There were familiar actors and characters inhabiting the those well-worn sets and they mostly kept my attention even as the script brought me on a tour on the mid-to-low end of jms's distinctive sense of humour. It definitely has a bit of a Lovecraftian horror tinge to it like Thirdspace, but it's also trying to be the funniest of the movies. Lochley's conversations with Corwin and the holobrothel plot are mostly played for laughs, and the actors playing the brothel owner and his lawyer weren't exactly aiming for grounded realism. Even Lochley meeting Dr Bryson was played for laughs, with Garibaldi visibly bored in the background.

One thing jms likes to do sometimes is swing suddenly from comedy to drama or tragedy in order to accentuate the effect on the audience. This particular story swings from comedy to deep discussions about whether it's moral to keep a talented pianist sealed inside a glass ball on a shelf for eternity. It's shame really that Bryson pretty much disappears by the halfway point so he doesn't really get to join in, especially as he's played by Ian McShane. He's basically replaced by Martin Sheen's unnamed Soul Hunter and the two opposing characters never get to have a single conversation! Plus he's basically a retread of the scientist in Thirdspace, who wants to investigate the thing, goes too far, and is taken over by it. He could've given the heroes a proper antagonist to deal with by the end but he just sits there in silence during the entire climax. What's worse is that Lochley, Zack and Garibaldi pretty much have nothing to do during the ending either, as the 4000 year old Soul Hunter thinks about everything he's learned over the past day and decides to sacrifice himself to convince the souls in the sphere that the Soul Hunters are serious about keeping their word. (Even though none of them have shown any sign that they'll agree to this.)

On the plus side the film does finally give Lochley a starring role and Corwin very almost gets to be an Ivanova. He even gives orders at one point! Terrible quippy orders that could have caused a horrific massacre, but orders that showed he was comfortable with commanding the station and that he trusted his people not to take him literally.

Unfortunately the movie loses a lot of points for me because of its overt supernatural elements. Sure it tries to keep open the possibility that this is all scientifically explainable, like perhaps it's just people's minds that are being copied, not their souls being stolen. But the ghosts do a lot more than just remotely hack into a hologram system to give themselves form, they start shooting energy blasts and even pull Lochley into their soul globe temporarily. It strongly leans towards this being a properly supernatural phenomenon in a way that feels out of place for Babylon 5. Outside of a tiny handful of episodes like Soul Hunter and Day of the Dead I mean. But that's not the only supernatural occurrence, as Garibaldi's apparently cursed now! Lochley's decided that Sheridan and Garibaldi specifically are the epicentres of chaos in the universe and the story seems to back her up. I'm not really keen on this joke, because it's too obvious to be funny, it's too ridiculous to be believable, and I'm not keen on any series saying "All this drama happens every week simply because the main characters are present". Batman did nothing wrong.

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NEXT EPISODE

Alright I've finally made it, I'm approaching the finish line. Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I will be watching Babylon 5's final episode, Sleeping in Light!

If you'd like to share your thoughts on The River of Souls then you're welcome to leave a comment below.