Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the middle third of the Babylon 5 movie A Call to Arms, which is basically the pilot for the short-lived spin-off series Crusade. Or the prologue to it at least. It lays the groundwork.

The film aired on TNT right at the start of 1999, just 7 weeks after the previous movie, The River of Souls... which was arguably a bit too soon. Especially considering that it had only been a month since viewers had said an emotional goodbye to the characters in Sleeping in Light. It's like when half the Star Trek cast came back for the movie Star Trek: Generations right after wrapping their era up with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, except worse because those guys at least waited three years!

This is part two (of three) so if you want to go back to PART ONE, click that text. This will include big SPOILERS for the movie and the rest of Babylon 5, so be aware of that. I'll not spoil anything about Crusade, however.

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Previously, on Babylon 5: A Call to Arms:

It's 2266, four years after the events of season 5, and President Sheridan has gone a bit weird. He's been getting visions from a Technomage called Galen compelling him to find a group of strangers to help him stop the Drakh from destroying Earth the same way that they wiped out Daltron 7. The catch is that he can't tell anyone about what he's up to, which is making Garibaldi all kinds of suspicious. Especially when he loses interest in his demonstration of the advanced prototype destroyer Excalibur and rushes off on an unplanned trip to Babylon 5 station instead.

And now, the continuation:

ACT THREE

Okay, I think we're in act three now (unless I missed a fade out), and it begins with Sheridan and Garibaldi flying to Babylon 5 on the White Star... I think. It's a bit hard to see what's going on when the camera keeps hiding behind stuff in the foreground like this. This is something that director Mike Vejar likes to do occassionally, to make the shot more dynamic, but he usually chooses to put something subtle in the way, not a whole damn chair or whatever.

I like it when characters are smart about how they act on information that they have and others don't to avoid giving away their secret agenda... so this scene's a bit disappointing really. Sheridan's sitting there in the captain's chair sketching faces and being annoyingly vague about why they're rushing to Babylon 5. He's got Garibaldi worried that he's cracking under the stress, and he suggests that Sheridan could go visit Delenn on Minbar instead.

Wow, Sheridan did a really good job at sketching the people he glimpsed in a dream for 5 seconds. He even gave them the right hair, despite the faces in his dream not having any. I don't think the series has ever established that Sheridan has art skills, but I don't remember him saying that he couldn't draw either. Plus it's been four years since season 5, so he's had plenty of time to draw sketches during long boring meetings. It's what I do when I'm watching long boring episodes!

Sheridan can't tell Garibaldi anything because there are Drakh spies everywhere, and if they think Sheridan knows what they're up to they're going to make their move early. It's like the Shadow War all over again. But he does tell him to investigate Daltron 7... right in front of all the people on the bridge. That's kind of a dead giveaway that he's onto them considering it's the planet they just attacked! Garibaldi's kind of grumpy about it but it seems like he's going to get it done.

Meanwhile, on an Earth Alliance Omega-class destroyer called the Charon, the captain is confusing his first officer in much the same way. They're supposed to be doing a routine security patrol but he's ordered a change of course to Babylon 5. I guess he's been recruited by Galen like Sheridan and Dureena, though we didn't get to see his dream.

This is the third bridge set in this movie and I honestly I think I prefer the Charon and White Star bridges to the new Excalibur bridge, even if this is probably just a redress of C&C. It's nice to see the old-school Earthforce uniforms again as well.

We don't get the captain's name here so I'm going to call him Tony Todd, but Scott MacDonald's character is called Phil. Both actors are Star Trek veterans, with Todd playing Worf's brother Kurn, an older version of Jake Sisko, and a Hirogen, while MacDonald played lots of characters in heavy makeup, like DS9's Tosk and Goran'Agar, and Enterprise's Dolim. Speaking of names, in mythology Charon is the ferryman who carries the souls of the deceased across a river (either the Acheron or the Styx) to the land of the dead, so that's a bit ominous.

Sheridan arrives at Babylon 5 first and meets Lochley in the customs area. There's no honour guard or reporters around to greet him, but he still figures out right away that Garibaldi must have called ahead and warned her. This works out fine for him however as he wants her to run that sketch he's done through the computer and see if they can find a match for the faces on it. Hey, isn't this the kind of job that Brother Theo's monks are good at? The ones that arrived in the season 3 episode Convictions. I wonder if they're even still on the station by this point.

Down in DownBelow, Dureena is being a sneaky thief, using her finger knife to slice the strings on a literal purse hanging from someone's belt, like in medieval times. But she realises that security's coming after her and she makes a run for it.

The security officers explain that they just want to talk, but when Dureena decides to opt out of talking one of them yells "GET HER!" and they give chase.

She dives into two of the officers, tackling them to the ground so hard that the camera shakes, but the others grab her and it's all over. She's not even being accused of anything, she's just a civilian Sheridan would like to talk to!

Lochley gives Sheridan the information on their captive, revealing that Dureena Nafeel is a petty thief, but a pretty good one. Also, if anyone calls her by anything other than her full name in this movie I'll let you know.

They've never seen an alien like her before but they know she's from Zander Prime, which is one of the worlds wiped out during the Shadow War. This gets Sheridan to go into full flashback mode as he tells Lochley about the shadow weapon used to destroy her world.
 

We see a familiar shot of the Shadow Death Cloud introduced at the end of the war as Sheridan explains what we're seeing. A structure envelops the entire planet and fires missiles down into the core, which then explode and makes it uninhabitable. It's a truly horrifying weapon, but unfortunately the name 'Death Cloud' really isn't up to the job of selling it.

They've told Dureena that she'll be deported for theft to hopefully make her more cooperative when Sheridan meets with her. Though now I'm wondering where they'd deport her to if she's lost her world. It also has me wondering why there are so many Lurkers trapped on B5 without the money to pay for a ticket home, if all you gotta do to get kicked out is get caught trying to rob someone!

Just then they get a call from Tony Todd (aka. Captain Anderson), who they recognise immediately from Sheridan's sketch. If Lochley had any doubts about Sheridan's sanity before now I hope this helps alleviate her concerns a little. Anderson comes over to the station to chat in private and Dureena is brought in to join them.

The thief immediately starts screaming, rushes over and tackles Sheridan to the ground!

She tried to do the same thing in her dream earlier but this is the actual Sheridan this time, so she has a lot more success. Fortunately, Anderson and a pair of security officers are there to drag her away from the president of the galaxy before she murders him. I like this unusual angle by the way. I have a suspicion that the table on the right is cleverly covering up a gap where the ceiling should be, but I could be wrong about that.

It turns out that Dureena's a little distraught because her world, her people and her family are all dead, and it's his fault.

Then the episode cuts to Lochley and Garibaldi having their own private meeting in what looks like the exact same room. In fact, the scene even starts with the camera placed not so far from where it was at the end of the last scene.

Lochley says that two of the three sketches panned out, but that could just be random chance. Yes Lochley, it must have been random chance that an Earthforce captain called up at this exact time, with that exact face, saying that he believes that they're expecting him.

She doesn't believe that Sheridan's acting rationally and she's worried that he's under an outside influence. Garibaldi surprised me here, as he remembers the gibberish message he got and suspects that it downloaded something into his brain. I suppose he's the expert when it comes to people being manipulated by coded video messages after what he went through under Bester's reprogramming. Plus he's not even wrong! The two of them have limited options though, considering he's the president of the Interstellar Alliance. Lochley reckons that there are two possibilities: either something's really happening, or someone's trying to trick Sheridan into thinking there is, maybe to discredit him. All they can do is stick close enough to help him if he's right or stop him if he's wrong.

Back in private meeting #1, security zip-ties Dureena to a chair so that Sheridan can give his side of the story (apparently plastic ties are a lot harder to escape than those manacles she slipped out of earlier.) He's been thinking over his actions during the Shadow War, about whether he could've done more to save worlds like Zander Prime, and he's decided that the answer is 'no'. Even if they could've gotten there in time, they didn't have the firepower needed to take down a Shadow planet killer.

Sheridan gives her an alternate target for her rage: the Drakh. They were the ones who operated the planet killer, and they may have even built the thing. Also, he calls her 'Dureena' on its own instead of saying her full name, which is nice. Dureena thinks back to her dream, specifically the part where imaginary Sheridan turned into an imaginary Drakh, and she understands the symbolism now. Weirdly her flashback isn't black and white, which is how it typically works on Babylon 5. She explains that she thought the dream was a memory of her own world, but maybe it was a premonition.

It kind of feels like they're assembling the cast for the spin-off here, though Anderson points out that there are three people in his sketch, which means that they're missing someone: a Drazi.

Sheridan assumes that they must each bring something to the mission that will increase the odds that they can pull it off. They can't afford to wait for the mysterious Drazi to show up however as they've got a world to save. Anderson feels like they'll need a more powerful ship than the Charon if they're going to pull this off and fortunately Sheridan has exactly what they need. There's an external shot of the station to indicate the passage of time, and Garibaldi returns to Lochley's office ready to discuss some stuff with Sheridan as they arranged. The guy's nowhere to be found though, and when they check on him they find he's left a goofy video answering machine message. 

I wish jms would stop writing scenes like this, it only encourages the composer to do more comedy music. Though that didn't happen this time, thankfully.

The two of them chat to C&C (with Garibaldi talking into the link on Lochley's hand) and find out that the White Star's still there, so Sheridan hasn't run off with it. But the Charon has gone! Well, at least he took the slower ship. I've been told (in this movie) that nothing can keep up with a White Star at full burn.

Sheridan phones up Drake from the Charon bridge, telling him to only accept messages from his frequency. That way Garibaldi can't warn him about what he's up to before he gets there. We're getting a lot of Drake in this movie, enough to maybe make you wonder if he's being set up as a character in Crusade as well. I mean the person who built the ship wouldn't be the worst choice for its chief engineer.

With that job done Sheridan shows the Charon crew his secret superpower of being able to hijack any captain's chair in his vicinity.

Anderson seems fine with this. More than fine in fact, as he tells Sheridan a story about how he was on the other side in the Earth Civil War 5 years ago. It's become blatantly obvious that he picked the wrong team back then and he doesn't intend to make the same mistake twice.

I like how Dureena's lurking in the background during this scene with no lines. She's just standing there in silence, sharpening a knife. Hey, she must have gotten her knives back from Zack!

Man, they really need some bigger corridors on this ship. They do have ceilings though! Babylon 5 wishes it had ceilings.

The Charon arrives at the prototype destroyer dock and Sheridan invites Anderson's whole crew over for a tour, to Drake's dismay. Drake tries to protest, but Sheridan puts his arm around his shoulder and leads him down the corridor to the bridge... then sits his ass down in the captain's chair.

Drake's kind of a weird character for Babylon 5, as I don't remember Sheridan or Garibaldi ever pushing a subordinate around like this before. And Drake just gets completely trampled over as the president takes his ships from him. Hey, I guess he must have gotten the engines working while they were gone!

Things are still a bit murky on the White Star, as the director's putting stuff between the characters and the camera again. It draws attention to itself because it only seems to really happen when someone's on the White Star. It's like they didn't have confidence in the set.

We get to hear the ship's number when Garibaldi tries and fails to get through to Drake. It's White Star 90, the one that got wrecked back in The Paragon of Animals, so either they were able to fix it or replace it, or they just gave the number to another ship.

The first officer wonders why Sheridan's going back to the spacedock as it's not like he's going to steal the ships... and then realises he's answered his own question. It's a bit weird because they're Sheridan's ships to command anyway, but he can't explain himself to anyone... even to the White Star's crew of Rangers, who you'd assume would be as trustworthy as you get. Garibaldi has no doubt that Sheridan would steal the ships, if he thought he was right. Now I'm wondering if we're supposed to have any doubt about Sheridan's visions. Are we supposed to suspect that Sheridan's being manipulated?

Back at the spacedock, we finally learn the name of the other ship. Sheridan will be commanding the Excalibur, while Anderson commands the Victory. Both weirdly British names, but I'm not complaining. It would've been nice if they'd given the ships different colours though so I can tell them apart.

We get a 'zoom into the bridge window' shot here to establish where it's located on the ships. It reminds me of the way the camera would zoom into the C&C window in the opening credits. It doesn't really work so great in a screencap though.

They can't actually get the ships moving while they're still connected to the dock, however, so Sheridan uses this remarkably flimsy-looking touchscreen to fire the guns at it, cutting them free. Then we learn that Sheridan didn't actually have a step 2 in mind after 'steal the prototype ships'! After a bit of thought, he decides to set course for Daltron 7.

They activate their jump engines and it turns out that they... work! So that's good. It would've been a bit awkward if they all had to pile back into the Charon, which I guess has just been abandoned nearby.

ACT FOUR

The ships arrive at Daltron 7 by the start of the first act, and it's becoming really clear now that jms probably could've picked a more suitable name for the planet. Something that suits being spoken ominously by a wizard and discussed with concern on the bridge of a starship.

That's Marjean Holden on the left by the way, who will be returning to play the ship's chief medical officer in Crusade. (In the commentary track, jms claims she's her twin sister.) Funnily enough Dureena's actress, Carrie Dobro, played an Earthforce doctor in the episode Exogenesis, so everyone's switching roles. Dobro also played the role of a woman who literally worshipped Sheridan due to his actions in the Shadow War (in Racing Mars), so Dureena's a bit of a 180 from that.

There are actual actors with speaking roles on the bridge (like Carlos Bernard who played Tony Almeida in 24!), but Sheridan decides to talk to the computer instead. He has it analyse the planet and they discover that it's been hit by a Shadow Death Cloud. He's a bit confused by this, as if the planet was attacked they should've heard about it by now (especially considering that he told Garibaldi to investigate it in that scene earlier!)

His crew identifies a single power source on the planet... and it's powering a distress signal of Drazi origin! Okay, so not one of his officers thought to mention that there was a distress signal going off the whole time? I guess Anderson took all the good officers and Sheridan got what was left.

Things have been getting a little more Star Trek recently, but they don't have transporters on their prototype destroyers, so Sheridan takes a standard Earth Alliance shuttle down and tells Anderson to do the same. It's a good thing that they had a couple aboard really, I wonder if they were borrowed from the Charon.

It might be a typical shuttle but this shot's very atypical for the series, as it seems like they had it mounted on a gimbal so the actors could bounce around due to the turbulence during the descent. It's a very convincing effect.

The two teams converge on the place that Sheridan and Dureena saw in their dreams, so they're really getting their money's worth from this set. Unfortunately, they find that the Drazi they've been looking for is long dead.

It's so weird to see a starship sending an away mission to an alien world in Babylon 5, as the last time anything like this happened was... season one's A Voice in the Wilderness maybe? It's cool to see that everyone's dressed appropriately, with warm coats and breathing masks, even if it probably wasn't much fun for the cast. Or the poor guy who had to record the dialogue.

They discover something pretty worrying: this attack didn't happen during the Shadow War, it happened recently. Huh, I thought we knew this already. Galen mentioned in the dream that it was a test and we saw a Drakh ship come down to check on the results.

Anderson orders that the Drazi is searched in case he's hidden a note somewhere, but when the scene cuts back the guy's still half-buried. So Dureena takes over, pulling out a knife and cutting out a data crystal. Unfortunately, this is setting up more terrible comedy music, when it's revealed that she cut into a reproductive area used by Drazi males for smuggling. They all walk off, with Anderson yelling after her that he doesn't carry anything valuable on him except a watch.

And then the shuttles take off again. This gives Sheridan and Dureena a chance to chat and build up a bit of mystery about who she is and why she knows so much about Drazi smugglers.

Then she goes a bit Ivanova for a moment and quips that they're so doomed that she should shoot herself now to save time... though the decent thing to do would be to shoot Sheridan first. Some good old-fashioned jms murder jokes.

White Star 90 has made it back to the spacedock at this point and it turns out that the VFX artists have turned off the horrible bump mapping effect so the hull's nice and smooth again.

Damn, every time this movie cuts back to Garibaldi we can see less and less of him! This is presumably the same room he and Sheridan were eating in at the start of the movie but it's really hard to tell as we're only given glimpses of the scenery.

He's chatting to a distraught Drake, who says that Sheridan was acting crazy and he was fearful for his life. Garibaldi just says "Yeah whatever," and changes the subject. He remembers that Sheridan asked him to check out Daltron 7, so he'll try to catch up with him there. Wait, so he didn't check out Daltron 7 in the end? If he'd just done what Sheridan told him to he could've found out it'd been attacked hours ago and skipped the part where he worries about the guy's sanity!

Drake convinces him to let him come along on the White Star, so he's going to get a spare bunk room downstairs. Wait, Drake's getting a whole room to himself? Poor Ivanova and Marcus always had to sleep in the same room as the rest of the crew.

Over on the Victory they've got a clear signal to Earth, so Captain Anderson gets to have a video chat with his wife Lynne. Apparently, the people back home are saying that he's deserted, but he assures her that he's been transferred by a higher force, which really doesn't sound good when you say it out loud. Or write it down. He really was though, as he was recruited by the President of the Interstellar Alliance!

Anderson can't explain all that on an open channel though (he touches his ear to indicate someone's likely listening in), but he had to make sure that she and his daughter Sarah are alright. It turns out that Sarah had a bad dream about a monster, but he assures her that he'll keep all the monsters away from them. I've seen people complain about how awkward the video chats look sometimes, but that was actually live footage on the TV. The other actors were on a different set and they could hear each other.

The bridge calls to let Anderson know that they've got the Drazi data crystal decoded so he has to go... to his inevitable doom. I mean c'mon, a scene like this should come with a spoiler warning as it makes it blatantly obvious he's going to die at the end of the movie.

They put the Drazi's message on the big screen to the left of the window so that everyone on the bridge can see it. It's a bit of an awkward shape in this movie but it gets a lot more rectangular when it shows up again in Crusade.

It turns out that he was the rare example of a Drazi who isn't an asshole, as he came to Daltron 7 because of Galen's message and when he realised what was happening he recorded the attack with a probe and then stayed behind to look for survivors. The dude was a damn hero. Sheridan asks Dureena if she really wants to stay and watch a world get destroyed like hers was, but she wants to stay and she wants to be the one who kills it. Sheridan points out that the Death Cloud's not actually alive, but she still wants to kill it.

Just then Anderson calls up to say they've detected something on the Victory's long-range scanners. Man, what is up with Sheridan's crew? Does no one pay attention to the scanners on Excalibur?

I got a bit of deja-vu here as the camera pans across Anderson's bridge, then repeats the same move on Sheridan's bridge. They each put the mysterious incoming ships on screen and it turns out that they're Soul Hunters!

Well, they looked like Soul Hunter ships to me anyway, when they were still tiny shapes in the distance.

Anderson makes a terrible quip about them being the weirdest looking pizza delivery vans he's ever seen, but they're actually Drakh ships, which last appeared way back in season 4's Lines of Communication I believe. The reason they're so yellow and stripy is because they were apparently inspired by hornets (not tigers).

The Drakh don't seem to recognise their ships and they send a video message in Interlac to ask them to identify themselves. This is a big deal as it's somehow the first time anyone on Sheridan's side has seen an unmasked Drakh. Well, except for Londo and he wasn't able to tell the tale.

Dureena interrupts Sheridan to give her own order, telling Tony Almeida to send a message back, also in Interlac, telling the Drakh that they came to Dalton 7 to deal with their enemies but they've found that someone's beaten them to it. Her plan is to make them think that they could be an ally.

Sheridan eventually agrees that it's a good idea, but they spend so long discussing it that they run out of time to actually try it. They detect an untraceable tachyon-enhanced message being sent to the Drakh ships and then the shooting starts.

I really tried to get a good shot of the fight, but this is the best I could do. The Victory takes care of the ships coming after them, while Excalibur flies off to attack the others.

There's another mention of how their awesome plasteel hull is refracting 80% of the energy from the Drakh weapons and Anderson is very impressed. These ships truly are designed to survive five 22-episode seasons of space adventure and maybe a couple of movies afterwards. It's just a shame it didn't work out that way.

While the Victory's having fun blowing up Drakh, the Excalibur watches as the ships its chasing disappear into a mysterious null field that absorbs everything, even light. So Sheridan orders his crew to fire the main gun into the null field!

I don't know what he thought that was going to achieve, but as far as I can tell it achieved absolutely nothing. Then again they can't see what's happening inside the null field... yet. The thing is, they forgot to bring the Excalibur to a relative halt before firing the guns and draining their energy reserves, so their momentum takes them into the field.

Man, this was a terrible move, especially considering that they'll be helpless for a minute while their reserves recharge. Personally, I would've at least waited for the Victory to catch up so that I had another ship to watch the Excalibur's back.

So they drift through the field and discover... this. It's a bit hard to see with the low resolution and the busy star field, but there are a lot of Drakh ships here, and right now the Excalibur can't move or fight back.

On the plus side, their location matches the one the Drazi mentioned in his recording, so they've inadvertently ended up exactly where they wanted to go next. I'm not sure they're going to want to stick around however.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the dramatic conclusion to A Call to Arms! I hope! I'm pretty sure the movie isn't going to be an epic Lord of the Rings-length 3 hour saga, because that would destroy me.

Please leave a comment if you feel like it!