Star Trek: Discovery - Season 3, Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about Discovery's third season. This time I'm covering episodes 5 to 7:

• 3-05 - Die Trying
  
• 3-06 - Scavengers
  
• 3-07 - Unification III
  

Here's some trivia for Discovery's third year: it's the first season of the series to be run by the same showrunner from start to finish, with limited writers' room drama. Season one was started by Bryan Fuller and finished by Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts. They stayed for season two but were fired after episode 5 and replaced by executive producer Alex Kurtzman, who handed the series over to Michelle Paradise this year. This is actually fairly normal for Trek, but the series tend to get much better when someone finally sticks around for a while.

Alright, I already said this before but these reviews are basically from right after I watched the episodes, so I genuinely didn't know where the story was going. Beware of MASSIVE SPOILERS.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 3, Part 1

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing some words about the third season of Star Trek: Discovery. And by 'some' I mean 'lots'. In fact I'm going to have to split this up into four articles, with this first part covering the first four episodes:

• 3-01 - That Hope is You, Part 1
  
• 3-02 - Far From Home
  
• 3-03 - People of Earth
  
• 3-04 - Forget Me Not
  

Here's a fun fact about this season: they've changed the logo! Star Trek series do change their openings a bit sometimes, Enterprise even added the words 'Star Trek' to its title sequence a few episodes into the third year, but I can't think of a series ever changing its title font like this before. It's a good change I reckon and it fits the theme of this season being a fresh start, but then I like it when series have a different opening each season so of course I would say that.

This is one of those times where I already wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes, so was genuinely clueless about what was going to happen next, aside from the glimpses in the trailer after each episode. Well okay to be honest I wrote a first draft, these have been rewritten a bit since then, but I'm not exactly editing in correct guesses to make me seem like the best at Star Trek.

There will be HUGE SPOILERS for every episode this season, plus earlier episodes too. I mean I can't even mention the season's premise without spoiling the end of season 2.

Babylon 5: Season 4 - No Surrender, No Retreat Review

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'll be writing a bit about the fourth season of Babylon 5, titled No Surrender, No Retreat. TV seasons don't often get titles, but this one did.

You know what else the season got this year? A proper HD Remaster! That's one thing Deep Space Nine doesn't have. Unfortunately my reviews are missing out on all those beautiful high-resolution shots as my screencaps came from the old DVDs. No one's going to stumble across my reviews by clicking on one of my pictures in a Google image search ever again, it's a tragedy.

Anyway, this is going to contain giant SPOILERS for everything in season 4 from The Hour of the Wolf to The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, but I won't spoil anything about season 5 or the movies. Or Crusade. Or Legend of the Rangers. Or The Lost Tales.

Babylon 5 4-22: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars

Episode:

88

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

Stephen Furst

|

Air Date:

27-Oct-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the Babylon 5 season 4 finale: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars! There's a proper pretentious title for you, it's great.

Babylon 5 was intended from the start to be a five year long novel for television, so it was a bit awkward when their network, PTEN, was set to be shut down after year four. Showrunner jms figured that the best they could do was to accelerate the major arcs so that we reached the original s4 finale, Intersections in Real Time, four episodes early. That way the series had time to reach some kind of closure before the episodes ran out, and they were able to film a replacement s4 finale called Sleeping in Light to wrap it all up properly. Babylon 5 was done. And then the producers made a deal with TNT to get their fifth season after all.

This was great news, but the trouble they had now was that Sleeping in Light was an emotional and unambiguous conclusion to the entire saga, and not the ideal way to launch the story into a new chapter. Fortunately the series was blessed with a huge four month break between the airing of ep 18 (Intersections in Real Time) and ep 19 (Between the Darkness and the Light), giving the production crew the time they needed to film a replacement ep 22... which is the episode I'm writing about now.

tl;dr: Season four was originally intended to end with Intersections in Real Time, which got moved up four episodes and replaced with Sleeping in Light, then after filming they changed it again to Deconstruction of Falling Stars.

SPOILER WARNING: This review is for people who've been watching the series at least up to this episode, as it's going to spoil everything that happens in it, along with the events that led up to it. I won't spoil a thing about season 5 though... well, except for the things that the episode itself spoils.

Also if you've got the DVD commentary, you should maybe hang onto that until you've seen the whole series. It's a bit spoilery too.

Babylon 5 4-21: Rising Star

Episode:

87

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

Tony Dow

|

Air Date:

20-Oct-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the penultimate episode of Babylon 5's fourth season: Rising Star. Hang on, I recognise this picture: that's the same CGI stock shot of a shuttle arriving they used for the start of No Surrender, No Retreat! I guess the VFX team needed a week off to recover after that last story.

Writer jms must have liked this title as he wrote a comic series a couple of years later called Rising Stars, about the lives of people born with superpowers due to a mysterious comet. I remember the comic being pretty good, though I don't remember much more than that I'm afraid. I'll have things to say about Rising Star though, with any luck.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be writing about every scene that takes place in episode 87 of a heavily serialised TV show, so this isn't the best place to jump in if you're just curious about it. But anyone watching through the series for the first time will be safe here as I'll not be spoiling anything that happens after this story.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian - Season 2 Review

This week's Sci-Fi Adventures just happens to land on May the 4th so I figured I'd go with something Star Wars flavoured this time.

I wrote about The Mandalorian's first season last year and I generally liked it. There was one small issue I had with it though: I felt like I was missing pieces of the backstory because I hadn't seen The Clone Wars or Rebels and I knew they had a lot of Mandalorian drama in them. I did have a good reason for skipping them though: I was a big fan of the original Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoon and I was kind of put off when it was replaced with ropey-looking CGI series apparently aimed at younger kids. Plus the reviews said that the movie was terrible and they'd given Anakin a teenage sidekick that calls him 'Skyguy'!

Anyway, I decided to try to make an effort to get through The Clone Wars to prepare for The Mandalorian season 2 and it turns out that I was an idiot for writing the series off so quickly. You just have to skip the episodes with Jar Jar Binks in them and it's great! It does a good job of rehabilitating the character of Anakin Skywalker, and his relationship with his apprentice Ahsoka Tano works really well. I'm not surprised she pulled a Harley Quinn and made the jump from making appearances in a cartoon to leading her own live-action series.

Though I'm not writing about The Clone Wars here, I'm writing about more The Mandalorian. Well, to be honest I actually wrote these reviews ages ago, right after watching the episodes. So if I sound like I don't know what's coming next, that's because I actually didn't at the time.

There'll be SPOILERS here for the whole series so far, and maybe a few of the movies and cartoons, so I recommend you stop reading here if that's going to be a problem.