Babylon 5 3-21: Shadow Dancing

Episode:

65

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Air Date:

21-Oct-1996

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's Shadow Dancing!

Wikipedia tells me that Shadow Dancing is a song by Andy Gibb from an album of the same name, a Canadian thriller starring Christopher Plummer, and the penultimate episode of Babylon 5's third season, but really it's only that last one I care about.

When you see the word 'shadow' show up in a Babylon 5 episode title you know there's a fair chance that events are soon to transpire. Sure The Geometry of Shadows was fairly tame, but you couldn't say that about The Coming of Shadows or In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum. Hey, 'Z'ha'dum', there's another word that shows up in titles sometimes...

The episode was directed by Kim Friedman, who's more famous these days for being the mother from the crazyjewishmom Instagram account. This was her first and only episode of Babylon 5, but that was possibly because she was busy with all the Star Trek she was doing. She directed four fairly rubbish episodes of Voyager overall (three of them generally ranked in the bottom third of the entire run) and six pretty good episodes of Deep Space Nine (four of them ranked in the top third), so this episode could go either way really.

This recap/review is mainly intended for people who've seen the series up to this point, so I won't be holding back with the SPOILERS. Though if you're watching the series for the first time you'll be fine, I won't ruin what comes next.

Star Trek: Picard - Season 1 Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've got some relatively tiny Star Trek: Picard reviews for you! Well, more like 'observations and other thoughts that entered my head while watching it'. Sorry for making you wait, but it took this long for my internet to finally get fixed.

Picard's first season was only ten episodes, making it the shortest season of full-length live-action Trek ever, but that's still a lot of episodes to read about in one go. (I was going to write 'ten stories' for a moment, but it's not that kind of series.) Fortunately for you I already wrote about the first episode, Remembrance, back when it came out, so that cuts it down to just nine. I could've copy and pasted all that text here to the whole season in one place, but... no.

Oh, I should mention that I wrote the first draft of these reviews right after each episode hit the internet, so any predictions and concerns are genuine. I really didn't know for sure where the story was going at the time. I also cut myself off from outside opinions for a while, because you know what fans are like when a new Trek series launches: they have a wide variety of different reactions just like you'd expect from any diverse group... but you're for sure going to hear about how it's a complete failure and a massive insult to everything that came before it. They may well be right, it is the first season of a Trek show after all, but I don't need to be rehashing second-hand negativity. If I'm going to hate on it, I want it to be for my own reasons!

There's going to be lots of SPOILERS past this point, mostly just for season one Picard, but I might throw in a few from earlier Trek if they seem relevant. So I'd suggest watching all 30+ seasons before reading this, just in case.