Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the final third of the 5th Babylon 5 movie, A Call to Arms.

I'm getting really close to the end of the Babylon 5 franchise now, with only 13 episodes of Crusade, one more pilot movie and two Lost Tales left to go before it's all over. Oh, plus an animated movie that came out of nowhere recently. And there is always the threat of that reboot series actually getting made, along with more animated films. But after all that I'll be done.

I suppose it could be worse. I could be working my way through Doctor Who or Star Trek...

This is the third and final part of my A Call to Arms review, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the appropriate text. This is going to include big SPOILERS for the movie and the rest of Babylon 5, but I'll not spoil anything about Crusade.

---

Previously, on Babylon 5: A Call to Arms:

President Sheridan is on a mission from a wizard to save the Earth, with the aid of a thief, a rogue Earthforce crew and a pair of hijacked prototype destroyers. The two ships, Excalibur and Victory, set a course for Daltron 7, a barren world Sheridan visited in a dream, and discovered that the Drakh had rendered it just as lifeless in reality. They soon encountered Drakh vessels and pretty much wiped the floor with them, but the Excalibur drifted into a null field and discovered a whole Drakh fleet hiding inside.

And now, the conclusion:

ACT FIVE

Here's something you don't see every day in science fiction: a starship firing its reverse thrusters to slow down. I'm not sure these visible thrusters fit with what we know about the Minbari and Vorlon technology they've used in the Victory's design, but hey it's a prototype built by humans who barely understand how any of it works, so I can live with it being a bit inconsistent.

Captain Anderson has the sense to park the Victory outside the null field instead of following the Excalibur inside, but there's not much they can do from out here as their sensors won't penetrate it. Also, it turns out that they've maybe parked a little too close as Anderson barely has the time to react when something comes hurtling out of the darkness.

See, if he'd waited just one moment later to turn they could've lost both their prototype destroyers here!

These are the two most advanced and powerful vessels in the Alliance fleet, more deadly than a Minbari cruiser or a White Star but against this many Drakh ships, all they can do is make a run for it! Sheridan has a plan though: open up a jump point and escape into hyperspace. That's it, that's the whole plan.

The Excalibur is the first to jump out and a few of the pursuing Drakh vessels are a little too close when it goes, getting destroyed by collapsing jump point

Then the Victory opens up her own jump point, blowing up more of them as the vortex forms. It's a jump point massacre! I'm starting to see why Sinclair kept telling Ivanova to stay the hell away from enemy ships whenever they retreated into hyperspace.

The majority of the Drakh fleet is already in hyperspace on their way to Earth, but they can only travel as fast as their slowest ship, so the Excalibur and Victory can outrun them. They can also slip by them by going off the hyperspace beacon, which is a new trick I think. They're showing off their enhanced navigation system.

Sheridan's gotten a 3-hour lead on the Drakh fleet by the time he decides to give Lochley a call. She still isn't entirely convinced that there's anything really going on and tries to talk him into dropping by Babylon 5 so they can have a chat. He's way past that part of the story now though, so he's not even listening to that.

Of course, he's got plenty of evidence to back up his claims at this point and there's no point in secrecy anymore with the Drakh already on the move... but he's not giving her any of it. She's just going to have to trust him. She's also going to have to get on the phone with Earthforce and tell them to gather all of their ships in Earth's defence. It'll sound better coming from her as he's just the President of the Interstellar Alliance. He's already convinced Delenn to get an Alliance fleet together, now it's her turn.

So Lochley makes a quip about how she always knew she'd be court-martialled for something, and she goes and wakes up President Luchenko at three in the morning. Hey, Luchenko's still the Earth president!

Garibaldi's not 100% eager to believe Sheridan either, especially when the guy admits he got his information from a dream. But Sheridan doesn't actually need his help to save the Earth, he is just calling to warn him that they have a leak.

Now that they've given me a good unobstructed view of this bridge I can tell that they've altered it a little since its previous appearance in Objects at Rest, turning the glowing strips on the back wall red and painting the columns on either side of the door purple. The captain of White Star 90 just had to be different I guess.

Anyway, Garibaldi's got an idea who the traitor could be, telling Sheridan that his new favourite thief is actually part of the Thieves Guild! She doesn't deny it, she just says that when you're in a secret society you don't typically tell everyone about it. You also don't leak information telling the enemy how to destroy the ship that you're on.

Garibaldi has enough pieces of the puzzle now to figure out who the leak really is, but then Drake reveals himself early by aiming a PPG at his head.

Damn, I should've known something was up when my spell-checker kept trying to change 'Drakh' to 'Drake'.

So this explains why Drake was dragging his feet getting the Excalibur and the Victory finished. He's from Mars and wants revenge on Earth as much as the Drakh do, so they've been bribing him to sabotage the project. Weird how he didn't tell them what his ships look like though.

Garibaldi keeps walking towards Drake, making him back away, putting him on the defensive. He points out that the moment he shoots him, the Rangers surrounding him are going to kick his ass. Then when Drake's distracted for a second he seizes his chance and grabs him by the neck!

This is a great Garibaldi moment, spoiled only very slightly by how he's been intimidating Drake all episode. It's less cathartic when Garibaldi's always had the upper hand.

Garibaldi gets in touch with Sheridan again to let him know that Drake talked and it turns out that the Drakh only have the one Death Cloud. Wait, the Drakh told Drake that? Why would they do that? He doesn't mention anything about whether Drake had a Drakh Keeper controlling him, but I suppose they don't know to look for them yet.

Sheridan's nearly at Earth at this point, and he hopes that President Luchenko believed Lochley when she called up and told them to pull every ship they have back to defend the planet.

Cut to about a billion ships around Earth. It's the Battle of the Line, Part II!

The fleet commander doesn't seem entirely convinced that they're about to be attacked, but the Drakh arrive before Sheridan can even finish his conversation. Hey, I thought the Excalibur and the Victory were three hours ahead of them because of their faster engines! What, did Sheridan take a detour to Minbar to pick up his lucky socks or something?

Sheridan tells the commander that the planet's defence grid can handle the enemy fleet and they need to focus on getting the Excalibur and the Victory through to the Death Cloud so they can kill it.

ACT SIX

Then there's a big space battle with the Excalibur and the Victory carving through Drakh ships with their forward guns. Yeah, Sheridan just said that they weren't supposed to go after the ships, but these ones were in the way!

One thing that bothers me about the design of the ship, is that it's constructed like a flower kind of, with overlapping petals in the middle section and four on the head. It makes it look like it's all folded shapes and no solid ship underneath. I mean look at all that empty space in front of the beam weapons.

Sheridan decides to fire the main guns at the Death Cloud for a bit even though they're too far away to damage it. The plan is to get an idea of its structure by seeing where the beams impact, and it works! Then he gets the even better idea of using the ship's advanced scanners to just scan it.

After an awkward delay, they discover that the Death Cloud is a big nasty web massive enough to wrap around an entire planet, and in the middle there's something that looks like it might be a command centre. So that's what they're going to shoot.

Dureena flashes back to her dream, when Galen told her to pick the right target, and she interrupts Sheridan again. She then spends a while explaining that Galen recruited her because she thinks like a thief, and thieves know that the best loot isn't hidden in the obvious place. She's sure that they're keeping the Death Cloud's true command centre somewhere less conspicuous... like an unremarkable joint between sections of the device that's suspiciously well guarded by short-range weaponry.

I'm not keen on this dynamic between the two characters, as it seems like Dureena's continually doing Sheridan's job for him. He's supposed to be one of the galaxy's greatest tacticians and a pretty good starship captain, but she's the one telling him how to determine a target's weak point. Worse, Sheridan keeps us in suspense, waiting to see if he's going to do the smart thing and listen to her obviously correct advice.

Then the movie does that thing where the sound effects and voices fade out to leave the music telling the story on its own. Babylon 5 did this a few times and it always worked out pretty well... unfortunately Evan Chen's soundtrack is from a parallel universe and doesn't function correctly in our reality, so the scene's not a complete success.

The two prototype super-ships are holding together pretty well in the chaos. Sure the Victory's rear weapons are destroyed, but they're attacking things in front of them so it's fine. Captain Anderson's less optimistic; he tells XO Phil that he promised his daughter he'd protect them from the monsters, then calls Sheridan with a new plan.

It's not a particularly crazy idea: the Excalibur will fire her main gun and Victory will cover her while she powers back up. Then Victory will fire her main gun and Excalibur will provide cover. They're apparently still out of range of Dureena's target, but a blast will help clear a path for the ships.
 

So the Excalibur fires her superweapon and... it misses the target by 0.6 degrees! So all that talk from Galen about only having the one shot, Dureena's insistence that they hit the target she's chosen, the whole introduction of the ship's superweapon, it all went nowhere in the end!

Though hang on, they said they couldn't hit it from here anyway and they were just clearing the way for the Victory. So why is it such a disaster that they were 0.6 degrees off target? I'm kind of confused right now.

I'm even more confused about the Victory suddenly switching to ramming speed instead of sticking to the plan. What was wrong with getting closer and taking another shot? And who's giving the Excalibur cover while the ship's sitting there defenceless in the middle of a space battle?

Man, they did not design this part of the Death Cloud to be viewed close up. It's so low-res that it looks like it's from Doom 3 or something.

The Victory is close enough now to get completely shredded by the short-range defensive weapons that Dureena mentioned earlier. The petals on the front of the ship all peel away giving the bridge officers some proper damage to look at, but they remain completely stoic.

Explosions are going off right behind them and stuntmen are getting thrown into the air but they don't even flinch. They're probably all lost in thought, dwelling on the choice they made to join the Victory crew instead of the Excalibur crew. Oops.

This is like a replay of the ending of the episode Endgame, with the ship going ramming speed to save the Earth, except this time there's no last-moment save. The ship collides with the command centre and explodes. They've sacrificed Victory to achieve success. So... I guess Tony Todd's not going to be in Crusade then?

Wrecking the Death Cloud's command centre has activated the mechanism before the thing was in position around the planet, so it's closing up and firing missiles and all the ships inside are making a run for it. The last time Sheridan was in a Death Cloud, in the season 4 episode Into the Fire, the extreme cold shut down his fleet's engines, so it's lucky that one's less chilly. Though it may actually be the same damn Death Cloud, in which case it's payback time!

It's weird to see those Omega-class ships hauling ass so fast. Also, there's a rare glimpse at a Warlock-class down there at the bottom. That's one of Earthforce's newest ships, with proper artificial gravity, and Ivanova's commanding one of them right now. Probably not one of these ones specifically though, or else I reckon she would've said 'hi' already.

I guess that’s the thing blowing itself up with its own missiles; it's kind of hard to see. Word of advice to anyone making a movie: don't end with a chaotic CGI sequence that takes place in the dark. It's weird how many films make this mistake!

Sheridan's fleet has gotten really lucky here as it seems like the missiles are all hitting the structure. None of them are slipping through the massive gaps and sailing off towards the Earth. Speaking of those massive gaps, the fleet seems to be completely ignoring them. They're all racing to escape the structure before it closes instead of just flying out through the side.

They make it out just in time to just sit there and stare as these other Drakh ships spray the Earth with something. The defence grid does try to blow a few of them up, but it's ultimately unable to stop them from doing their job. So basically when Sheridan said "The fleet is not our main concern. Leave them to the defence grid," he may have made a tactical error. Or maybe the Earth was doomed whatever they chose.

Back in Galen's wizard zone, we get another glimpse of the Technomages hanging out around their campfire. They vanish, leaving only Galen, and he's informed that the Circle requires his presence. Wait, I thought they were the Circle. Are they holding the meeting somewhere else just to make him walk that road of lights again? I'm so confused.

Hey, it's a rare shot of Sheridan's old office from outside the window! We've seen the outside of this window before in episodes like Geometry of Shadows and Point of No Return, and the design always seems to be slightly different. I guess they must have kept losing the CG model. Also, they forgot to put in the window frame this time.

This is very different to previous scenes on the station as this time Sheridan's explaining everything and Garibaldi and Lochley know that he's bringing nothing but facts. He says that the Drakh have basically poisoned the well: they couldn't conquer the Earth so they're going to wipe out all life instead out of spite. I'm not sure his metaphor really works though, as the Drakh's plan A was also to wipe out all life. They've just switched to a slower superweapon.

The Earth's been infected with a biogenetic plague that'll likely take five years to fully adapt to human biology (because the Drakh either didn't have time or didn't know how to set it up right). When the timer runs out every single person will be dead, and the plague was built with advanced Shadow technology, so it'll take a lot longer than that for them to figure out a cure. Which is a bit depressing.

Sheridan reveals that the Drakh hit their secret spacedock on their way out, so it'll be a while before they can build any more of these super-ships. Those Drakh must have been very confused when they got there and found that Sheridan had already shot up the place to get the ships out.

So they're going to be outfitting their surviving prototype destroyer as a research vessel and sending it out on a mission to have weekly adventures searching the galaxy for other races that might have a cure.

Sheridan's basically switched to hyping up Crusade at this point. He talks about how the ship will be manned with the best crew that they can find... so I guess they're taking the crew of the Charon off and replacing them with people who know how to check their damn sensors and can actually hit the things they're aiming at. Those who command the Excalibur will never stop, never slow down, until a cure is found or their show gets cancelled.

This is a nice shot by the way. It starts off focusing on some engineers in spacesuits having a picnic or whatever at the back of the ship, then pulls back to reveal that it's parked next to Babylon 5. And we even get a group of tiny White Stars in the foreground to really establish the immense scale of the thing. Not that the scale of the White Stars was ever properly nailed down.

I just realised that I haven't even shown off the new jump point effect yet. It looks a bit more watery than the old one.

Also, there's a mysterious ship arriving at the station that looks a bit like a paper plane built for stealth.

It turns out that it belongs to Galen! The other Technomages have let him out so Dureena finally gets to meet him in the flesh! The Excalibur's flown off without them by this point, but I'm sure they'll catch up to it before the series starts as they're the only two characters from the movie who'll go on to be regulars.

This is a bit of a downer ending though. They failed to stop the Drakh and every living being on Earth might be doomed. Fortunately, we've already seen what happens next in episodes like The Deconstruction of Falling Stars and Sleeping in Light so we know they get it all sorted out in the end! It'll be fine, don't worry about it.


CONCLUSION

---

I keep calling A Call to Arms a pilot movie for the spin-off series Crusade, but it's more of a passing of the torch from the Babylon 5 cast. It's like if the Deep Space Nine pilot had Picard, Riker and Data teaming up with Odo and Quark to hijack Deep Space 9 station and save Bajor, or whatever. This becomes really obvious at the end, when the B5 characters basically throw up their hands and say "Well, it's someone else's problem now and I hope they have 5 seasons of amazing adventures!"

It's a bit of a shocking ending though, with the heroes actually failing to stop the Drakh. Well, assuming that you don't already know the premise of the show it's setting up. They did at least stop doomsday device #1, so Galen's cryptic advice and Dureena's insights did serve some purpose in the story. However, if you look at the film in isolation, all those scenes establishing their characters were pretty irrelevant.

If you take Dureena's plot and cut everything up to the point where she's swiping purses you lose next to nothing. We don't need to know that she's a good fighter, or what the Thieves Guild does, or that she collects knives, none of that is important to this movie. They could've also trimmed all the justifications she gave for her recommendations, as those scenes dragged. Plus it didn't make Sheridan look so great when a thief had to tell an experienced starship captain how to make contact with alien ships and where to shoot the Death Star.

Sheridan doesn't look great in general actually, as all the guy does in the movie is act weird, follow Galen's instructions, and let Dureena call all the shots. Then he fails to achieve anything in the end so that Anderson can save the day for him! Plus keeping his friends out of the loop just seemed bizarre. The movie argues that he has to keep what he knows to himself or else Drakh spies will learn what he's up to (which is actually what happens), but the dude was once part of two secret conspiracies simultaneously, he knows how to do this. Plus he has command of a force of fanatical secret agent monks trained to operate without the Shadows or their servants being aware of their activities and he's the president of the galaxy... he's got allies he can trust and resources that should be safe to call on.

Overall I thought the film was kind of ridiculous, with some weak dialogue, confusing CGI, and a plot that doesn't always make a lot of sense. Plus it's pretty shallow. But on the other hand, it's entertaining enough, it's well-paced, the director had fun being able to show off ceilings for a change, and the actors made sure that it's never less than watchable... as long as you can put up with the music.

Evan Chen's score is a real issue here, by far the biggest problem the movie has in my opinion. I don't blame jms for taking a chance on a very different style of music to Babylon 5 (and television in general), but I think he rolled the dice and lost this time. I expect that a few viewers like the way the soundtrack turned out, and I'm sure that jms must have been happy or else he wouldn't have brought the composer back for Crusade, but for me it spoils almost every scene with music in.

To be fair, it kind of works in scenes focusing on Galen or Dureena, and I can sort of appreciate how it subverts the tone of some of the standard sci-fi movie moments (the music really doesn't want anything in this film to come off as heroic). But the rest of the time it's undermining the drama and undermining the comedy even worse. It's not that I'm not used to it, I've seen all 13 episodes of Crusade, I just don't like it.

Also, I'm deducting points because the bridge isn't lined up with the conference room behind it.

---

NEXT EPISODE

And that's what I think about A Call to Arms. There are still two more Babylon 5 movies to go... but I won't be writing about them for a while. Instead, I'm jumping realities to the Star Trek universe to write about the Original Series episode The Trouble with Tribbles!

If you've got anything you want to say about A Call to Arms you can and must leave a comment.