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.

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.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms - Part 1

Written By:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Directed By:

Mike Vejar

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Release Date:

1999

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first part of my three-part review of the Babylon 5 TV movie A Call to Arms! Here's a fun fact for you straight away: this is one of only two Babylon 5 stories to share its name with a Deep Space Nine episode (the other being Chrysalis). 

A Call to Arms is the last of the four Babylon 5 TV movies made for TNT, as The Legend of the Rangers was actually made for the Sci Fi Channel. Legend of the Rangers features a new cast and new sets, and it goes off doing its own things. Call to Arms, on the other hand, is a proper Babylon 5 movie, featuring the station and the lead characters and everything. A Call to Arms and The Legend of the Rangers are similar in some ways though, as they were both designed to function as a pilot movie and both of their spin-offs got cancelled before a single episode had aired. At least Call to Arms' series, Crusade, was able to get 13 episodes filmed before being shut down.

Call to Arms also had the proper Babylon 5 production team behind it, with J. Michael Straczynski writing and Mike Vejar returning to direct. They didn't bring back composer Christopher Franke however, making this the first B5 story to be missing his music since the original pilot (and they eventually went back and rescored that to match the rest of the series). Instead, this features a soundtrack by Evan Chen, who'd continue to work on the Crusade series.

Alright, I'm going to go through the whole film scene by scene sharing my reactions and observations, so there will be huge SPOILERS here for the movie and perhaps the rest of Babylon 5. I won't spoil a thing about Crusade or Legend of the Rangers, however.

Doctor Who (2005) 1-02: The End of the World

Episode:

698

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Serial:

158

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Euros Lyn

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Air Date:

26-Mar-2005

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally getting around to the second episode of the 2005 Doctor Who revival: The End of the World! I wrote about episode 1, Rose, back in 2018 when I was covering all the modern regeneration stories leading up to the debut of the Thirteenth Doctor. Now we're about to get the Fourteenth Doctor, and I'm writing about episode 2, so at this rate I should be done with series 1 by the time the Twenty-Fifth Doctor comes around.

I'll be screencapping the whole episode and sharing my thoughts and observations as I go, so there will be SPOILERS here, but probably only really for this and Rose. I definitely won't be spoiling anything that comes after them.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 1 Review, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the epic finale of Strange New Worlds' first season! I wanted to get this published before the second season started so I've made it just under the wire.

I've got three reviews for you this time, covering these three episodes:

• 1-08 - The Elysian Kingdom
  
• 1-09 - All Those Who Wander
  
• 1-10 - A Quality of Mercy
  

Then afterwards I'll talk a little bit about the season overall afterwards. Will I be showering the series with glowing praise or going on an angry rant? The only way to find out is to keep reading until the end. Or I suppose you could just scroll down to the bottom, if you're in a hurry or whatever.

This will have SPOILERS for Picard season 2, the TOS story The Menagerie, and a whole bunch of other episodes. I know I'm writing about Strange New Worlds, but I just want to be certain you know that my spoilers will spread to other Trek series as well. I won't say a thing about anything that happens afterwards though. I mean at the time I'm writing this is the latest season, nothing else has happened past this point, but I've heard a few things about season 2 that I'll keep quiet about.

Star Trek: The Original Series 1-18: Arena

Episode:

18

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Writer:

Gene L. Coon

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Director:

Joseph Pevney

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Air Date:

19-Jan-1967

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I should really finish writing about Strange New Worlds season one before the second season starts, but I felt like I should cover this episode of the classic series first, for some reason. Like there's something in here that might be relevant...

Anyway, Arena was the 18th episode of Star Trek: The Original Series in its US airing order, coming just a few weeks after the last episode I wrote about, Balance of Terror. Here's some trivia you won't find anywhere else on the internet: Arena is the only episode of Star Trek to share its name with an Elder Scrolls game, and one of two to share its name with a Wing Commander game.

I've got some better trivia for you: they gave a 'story by' credit to writer Frederic Brown even though he didn't do any work on the episode whatsoever. In fact, Gene Coon came up with the whole script by himself. But then he learned that it had similarities to another story printed 20 years earlier in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which was also called Arena. So Coon decided to just pretend he'd based it on Brown's idea and asked him for permission.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to go through Arena one scene at a time, writing down what happens and I what I think about that, so if you don't know what happens in the episode now, you will do by the time you reach the end. I'll not be spoiling anything that aired after it however, so if you're watching through Star Trek for the first time there'll be no Next Generation or Strange New Worlds spoilers to worry about here.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 5

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the epic finale to my Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace article! Part five of five. You can jump to one of the earlier parts by clicking the text: PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR.

It's hard to say what disappointed or confused fans the most about The Phantom Menace, but you could claim that the first thing to really trigger a wave of negativity was the title. From what I can tell, internet polls at the time showed that roughly 25% of people didn't entirely hate it! Fans had been hoping for something that sounded epic and cool, something like Balance of the Force, or Guardians of the Force, or Children of the Force ('the Force' seemed to show up a lot in rumoured titles).

By comparison, The Phantom Menace sounded cheesy, childish, hokey, and old-fashioned. Some people loved it because it sounded like a chapter in a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serial from the 30s, others hated it for the same reason. Some were even convinced that a title that bad had to be a hoax, maybe caused by someone hacking the Star Wars website, maybe planted by George Lucas himself as part of a cunning deception!

Personally, I have no idea what I thought of the name when I first saw it. At this point, it's just the title of the film for me and I wouldn't want it to be called anything else. And I have a feeling most of the people who hated the name eventually accepted it and moved on... to complaining about Episode II being called Attack of the Clones.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to write about the ending of the film and then share my thoughts about the movie overall. I'll also be spoiling things about the Original Trilogy films, but nothing about the Sequel Trilogy, the cartoons or the TV series. I won't spoil anything about the Ewoks movies either, but that's just because I don't actually know anything about the Ewoks movies.