Babylon 5 4-21: Rising Star

Episode:

87

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

Tony Dow

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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.

Babylon 5 4-20: Endgame

Episode:

86

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

John Copeland

|

Air Date:

13-Oct-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Babylon 5's Endgame! Not to be confused with Star Trek: Voyager's Endgame, Avengers: Endgame, or Highlander: Endgame...

Other series with an episode titled 'Endgame' or 'End Game' include:

• Stargate SG-1
• Alias
• La Femme Nikita 
• CSI
  
• NCIS
• NCIS: Los Angeles
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent
• The Fugitive
  
• Painkiller Jane
• The Pretender
  
• Xena: Warrior Princess
• Holby City
• The Tomorrow People
  
• Transporter: The Series
• Melrose Place
  
• The Equalizer
• The Unit
  
• Homicide: Life on the Street
• The Legend of Korra
• Dallas
• Young Justice
• All Saints
  
• One Foot in the Grave
• Nash Bridges
• All Saints (again)
• The Last Ship
  
• Person of Interest
  

And so on. But not The X-Files surprisingly. Hang on, I'm wrong, there is an X-Files episode called End Game in season 2.

Babylon 5's Endgame was the first episode to be directed by producer John Copeland. Visual effects supervisor Tony Dow directed the next episode, Rising Star, then showrunner jms directed Sleeping in Light, so I guess the senior staff felt they should steer the ship directly for the last few stories. Then the series got a surprise renewal on a new network and these weren't the last few episodes anymore, so John Copeland went and directed the penultimate episode of season 5 as well.

SPOILER WARNING: If you're a first-time viewer who's seen the whole series up to this point, then you're in luck! There's nothing here that'll ruin later episodes. There's plenty here that'll ruin earlier episodes though, and I'm definitely going to spoil this one.

Babylon 5 4-19: Between the Darkness and the Light

Episode:

85

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

David J. Eagle

|

Air Date:

06-Oct-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm up to Babylon 5 episode 4-19, Between the Darkness and the Light. The way the title comes up over a shot of a lightbulb swinging in a gloomy cave may not be entirely coincidental.

Between the Darkness and the Light is one of the few titles shared by both Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine... well, kind of. The DS9 episode was the one that aired first, coming out earlier the same year, and it's just called The Darkness and the Light. It was directed by frequent B5 director Mike Vejar, his first episode for the series (but far from his last).

The Babylon 5 episode, on the other hand, was directed by similarly frequent B5 director David Eagle, who was responsible for episodes like Severed Dreams, And the Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place, and The Hour of the Wolf. His episodes have a habit of ending up at the top of episode rankings, so I have a feeling this is going to be pretty watchable.

SPOILER WARNING: If you've a first-time viewer and you've reached this point in the series then you've got nothing to worry about here, I won't mention a thing about later episodes. Otherwise I'd recommend watching all 85 episodes first and then coming back, because there'll be spoilers for lots of them here.

Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 1 Review - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the second half of Star Trek: Lower Decks' first season. Well, I mean I already wrote about each episode right after watching them for the first time, I'm just posting all my reviews in one block under the assumption that it's more convenient somehow.

If you'd rather go back to the first block of reviews and read about the first five episodes, then you should click THIS LINK.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling the events of every episode I review and probably something from earlier Trek episodes as well.

Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 1 Review - Part 1

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm writing about Star Trek: Lower Decks, the second of the two new Trek series to debut in 2020! We did well for Trek in the 90s, but we've never had two series launching in the same year like this, and we've definitely never had four series releasing new eps in the same year (Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks and Discovery). That's still only 33 episodes in total, so we're a little short of the 50+ eps and a movie we were blessed with in the Golden Age of Trek, but it's getting there.

Lower Decks is also the first animated Star Trek series since 1974 and the first Trek series to be named after a seventh season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They could've gone with Star Trek: The Pegasus, and made it about a young Will Riker, or Star Trek: Masks, about a group of vigilantes, but I think they made the right choice. Much better than Star Trek: Sub Rosa.

The series is set in 2380, putting it ten years after the episode that inspired it, but it's still firmly in my beloved Next Gen era, even more so than Star Trek: Picard. It starts a year after Star Trek: Nemesis, and a few years after the end of DS9 and Voyager, so I've basically been waiting for this since 2003.

Anyway, these are my authentic first reactions to all ten episodes in season one, written before I had any idea what was coming next. I'll be following the same SPOILER rules as the episodes themselves: basically anything that happened in Trek up to this point is fair game. Unless it happened in the future.

Babylon 5 4-18: Intersections in Real Time

Episode:

84

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

John Lafia

|

Air Date:

16-Jun-1997

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That's a nice looking title image up there I reckon, with a good render of the station. Shame it's a complete fiction. The actual screencap was bit too spoilery to be displayed on the front page of my site where anyone could see it, so I decided that bending the truth a little by Photoshopping my own one would be thematically appropriate for this story.

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Babylon 5's Intersections in Real Time, perhaps the only episode of television to get its name from its own commercial breaks. Well not the act breaks specifically, but the way the episode is sliced up by them to form blocks of story that we intersect with. The 'real time' part of the title is perhaps more self evident:

This is episode 84 of Babylon 5, which doesn't seem like a milestone at first glance, but the 60s Lost in Space series only managed 83 episodes during its three season run. Which means that if you'd made a list of the longest running US space opera TV series of all time at this point in 1997 it would've looked something like this:

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation (176 episodes)
2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (122 episodes)
3. Babylon 5 (84 episodes)
4. Lost in Space (83 episodes)
5. Star Trek (79 episodes)
6. Star Trek: Voyager (67 episodes)
7. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (37 episodes)
8. Battlestar Galactica (24 episodes)
9. Space: Above and Beyond (23 episodes)
10. Galactica 1980 (10 episodes)

Third place!

Non-Star Trek US space sci-fi had much more success afterwards, with series like Andromeda (110 episodes) and Battlestar Galactica 2004 (76). But seeing as only Stargate SG-1 (214), Deep Space Nine (176), and Voyager (172) have beaten Babylon 5's final score since, the series is still top 5 to this day!

SPOILER WARNING: I won't spoil anything that happens after this story, but everything else is fair game.