Babylon 5 4-22: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars

Episode:

88

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

Stephen Furst

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Air Date:

27-Oct-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the Babylon 5 season 4 finale: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars! There's a proper pretentious title for you, it's great.

Babylon 5 was intended from the start to be a five year long novel for television, so it was a bit awkward when their network, PTEN, was set to be shut down after year four. Showrunner jms figured that the best they could do was to accelerate the major arcs so that we reached the original s4 finale, Intersections in Real Time, four episodes early. That way the series had time to reach some kind of closure before the episodes ran out, and they were able to film a replacement s4 finale called Sleeping in Light to wrap it all up properly. Babylon 5 was done. And then the producers made a deal with TNT to get their fifth season after all.

This was great news, but the trouble they had now was that Sleeping in Light was an emotional and unambiguous conclusion to the entire saga, and not the ideal way to launch the story into a new chapter. Fortunately the series was blessed with a huge four month break between the airing of ep 18 (Intersections in Real Time) and ep 19 (Between the Darkness and the Light), giving the production crew the time they needed to film a replacement ep 22... which is the episode I'm writing about now.

tl;dr: Season four was originally intended to end with Intersections in Real Time, which got moved up four episodes and replaced with Sleeping in Light, then after filming they changed it again to Deconstruction of Falling Stars.

SPOILER WARNING: This review is for people who've been watching the series at least up to this episode, as it's going to spoil everything that happens in it, along with the events that led up to it. I won't spoil a thing about season 5 though... well, except for the things that the episode itself spoils.

Also if you've got the DVD commentary, you should maybe hang onto that until you've seen the whole series. It's a bit spoilery too.

Babylon 5 4-21: Rising Star

Episode:

87

|

Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

|

Director:

Tony Dow

|

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

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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.