Babylon 5 5-17: Movements of Fire and Shadow

Episode:

105

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

John C. Flinn III

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Air Date:

17-Jun-1998

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the Babylon 5 season 5 episode Movements of Fire and Shadow. Sounds like it should be the name of a Game of Thrones novel, but you know that things are getting real when the word 'Shadow' shows up in a B5 episode title.

It was the final episode to be directed by John C. Flinn III, but he carried on in his other job as the series' director of photography until the end. The main thing I remember about Flinn's episodes is that he's not great at shooting actors in monster suits, but if they can avoid that here this might be a good one.

We're getting really close to the end now, only 5 episodes left after this one, but they decided to be cruel during the show's first airing on TNT and make people wait 19 weeks for the next episode. That's four and a half months! We had it even worse in the UK, as we had to wait 2 weeks longer than that. Though they did at least air the B5 movie Thirdspace in the meantime... which confusingly slots in during the events of season 4.

I should probably mention that there will be SPOILERS beyond this point for this episode and earlier episodes too, but I've written this warning over a hundred times now and I'm getting pretty bored of doing it, so you're just going to have to live without it this time.

Star Trek: The Next Generation 1-06: Where No One Has Gone Before

Episode:

6

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Writer:

Diane Duane and Michael Reaves

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Director:

Rob Bowman

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Air Date:

26-Oct-1987

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm jumping ahead to Star Trek: The Next Generation's sixth episode, Where No One Has Gone Before! They've gotten a bit clever with its title, as it's a callback to the classic Original Series episode Where No Man Has Gone Before, with the name updated to match the iconic line in Next Gen's politically corrected opening narration. The earlier episode was about going beyond human experience, now this time they're going beyond anyone's experience. Presumably.

The episode's credited to writers Diane Duane and Michael Reaves, though it ended up being heavily rewritten by producer Maurice Hurley, to the point where there wasn't much of their story left. This was their only script for the series, though Duane had written a number of Trek novels, including The Wounded Sky, which was actually the inspiration for this episode. It's not often that you come across a Trek episode that was based on a novel.

It's the first episode to be directed by Rob Bowman, who ended up directing 13 episodes over the first four seasons. He's probably better known for his work on The X-Files and Castle though, and was chosen to direct the first X-Files movie.

Alright I'm going to go through the whole episode scene by scene so there'll be all kinds of SPOILERS here. I might talk about events from other episodes as well, though if I mention anything from a later story/series I'll keep it extremely vague and harmless. There'll be no Star Trek: Discovery/Picard/etc. spoilers here. 

Star Trek: The Original Series 1-03: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Episode:

3

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Writer:

Samuel A. Peeples

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Director:

James Goldstone

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Air Date:

22-Sep-1966

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the third episode of Star Trek: The Original Series: Where No Man Has Gone Before. It's also the second and the first, depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes people use the term 'pilot episode' to refer to the first released episode of a series, but this story was a true pilot, created to prove the concept and get Star Trek green lit. In fact it was the second pilot, produced after The Cage failed to win executives over. Getting two pilots like this was unusual, probably still is. When Desilu (the studio) originally came to NBC (the network) they'd offered them a choice of four story concepts and NBC picked the hardest one, so they felt like they were partly to blame for it not working out like they'd hoped.

So the Star Trek folks came up with some new options for the executives to choose from: three scripts titled Mudd's Women, The Omega Glory and Where No Man Has Gone Before. All three stories were put into production eventually, with Mudd's Women being regarded as one of the worst episodes of season 1, and The Omega Glory one of the worst in season 2. Fortunately Where No Man Has Gone Before was the script chosen for the second pilot, and it got the job done, earning Star Trek its first season.

It takes a while to get a TV series going though, so they ended up sitting on the finished episode for over a year. The episode ended up airing as the third story in season one, after The Man Trap and Charlie X, which is a bit weird as it features different characters and uniforms to the episodes before and after it. It does have the same premise as Charlie X though to be fair, so the story would've been familiar enough. Also at this point 66.7% of all Star Trek episodes featured the word 'man' in the title, down from 100% a couple of episodes ago. At the time of writing Trek would have to release another 550 episodes with 'man' in the name to get the percentage back up to where it was this week in 1966.

I'd give you some more facts, like how the cinematographer, Earnest Haller, had won an Oscar for Gone with the Wind and was pulled out of retirement for one last job, but I think I've proven by now that I've read the Wikipedia page.

Okay I'm going to go through the whole episode now commenting on basically everything, so this review is going to have SPOILERS. I'll not spoil anything that aired after it however, no matter how many Gary Mitchells or galactic barriers it has.