Babylon 5 5-10: A Tragedy of Telepaths

Episode:

98

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

Tony Dow

|

Air Date:

25-Mar-1998

---

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Babylon 5 season 5 episode 10: A Tragedy of Telepaths.

The word 'tragedy' in this case is a collective noun, as it's the name for a group of telepaths. You know, like a murder of crows or a litter of puppies. Or a shrewdness of apes. An implausibility of gnus. A congregation of crocodiles. A handful of stegosauruses. An exaltation of larks. A business of ferrets. A tower of giraffes.

I'd mention some trivia here or talk about the director, but I'd rather just keep listing collective nouns. A wisdom of wombats. A dazzle of zebras. A murmuration of starlings. Where do these nouns even come from? Who even uses them? Okay everyone says things like 'a pack of cards' or 'a round of drinks', they're not all bizarre, but no one has ever had to refer to an 'obstinacy of buffalo' before.

Anyway, I hope you're into SPOILERS because there'll be a lot of them coming your way very soon if you keep reading. For this episode and for earlier ones too. But if you've watched the series up to this point you have nothing to worry about as I'll not be spoiling anything that happens after the episode.

Firefly 1-01: Serenity

Episode:

1

|

Writer:

Joss Whedon

|

Director:

Joss Whedon

|

Air Date:

20-Dec-2002

---

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Firefly's feature-length pilot episode Serenity (not to be confused with the feature-length feature film Serenity that caps the series off).

Actually to be honest I'm not watching anything. I already watched the episode ages ago and I had a first draft of this article written up, just waiting for me to give it a final pass. I'd even written the text down by the 'Next Episode' picture at the bottom. The text said that the next review was going to be "Babylon 5 season 1, episode 4 - Infection", so that helps narrow down when this article was supposed to be published. Seems that it was originally meant to go up a few days before the 21st June 2016. I get distracted sometimes and forget things.

This means I watched Serenity in a more innocent time, before Joss Whedon's fan site Whedonesque.com shut down when his ex-wife accused him of multiple affairs, before he was accused of being abusive to actors, and before Justice League. Though it would've been a couple years after Adam Baldwin helped make Gamergate a thing. Honestly I think it's best I'm getting this done now, before anything worse comes out. Though if I'd just waited a few months later I could've posted this on its 20th anniversary.

Firefly aired its one short season in late 2002, at the same time that Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit season 7 and Angel reached season 4. That means that Whedon had three series he'd created running simultaneously, which is maybe a little much, even if Tim Minear was the actual showrunner of this one. I checked their US ratings, out of curiosity, and if these numbers I got from the internet are correct then all three shows were getting roughly the same viewers. (Then I threw Star Trek: Enterprise on the chart as well, seeing as that was in its season second at the time, and it was roughly the same as well.) But I guess Fox expected more from its expensive space show as it was axed after 14 episodes and they didn't even air 3 of them. Also they aired this pilot episode last!

Alright, I'm going to go through the whole story scene by scene, recapping, screencapping (from the PAL DVDs), and typing whatever commentary I can think of as I go. This article is going to feature SPOILERS for exactly one episode, this one... except I'm also going to mention something from the pilot of Outlaw Star. So exactly two episodes then. But nothing more.