jedi_of_urth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jedi_of_urth) wrote2015-06-28 10:08 pm
jedi_of_urth) wrote2015-06-28 10:08 pm
B5rewatch: And the Sky Full of Stars
So it’s been an age since I wrote one of these things, although not so much since I posted one. Fortunately I get to come back to an episode I really like.
1x08: And the Sky Full of Stars
As for the promo, it’s a pretty good one, which makes sense; having one clear plotline makes for fairly easy promo creation. It’s maybe a little spoilery for the same reason, but nothing too bad; and perhaps a touch misleading, but again nothing very off; so it balances out I guess. It might even work at pulling people in, which I have felt was true for so few of these promos. It seems a little bland now, but that’s probably just it not aging well, or maybe that’s just that I’m already a know it all with this story, either way I give it a solid promo rating.
Diving right in, I feel like I should say that the Knight waiting in the docking bay is being too obvious, but this was the early/mid 90s and we used to be able to just go hang out at the airports, and that has definitely seemed to case on B5 already and will continue to, so I don’t think it seemed quite so weird in that context.
I’m not sure I get why Sinclair was handling the Benson matter with Garibaldi, especially as they had no reason to suspect that he was a clear and present security risk (a potential one I suppose but not extreme). This seems like the sort of thing that Garibaldi could handle in house; in fact it seems like the kind of thing Mike *would* handle in house, looking out for his people and all that. I’m sure he would have had to file a report and Sinclair could have asked him how the situation was going so we could get their discussion portion of the scene, but I’m not sure I buy that Jeff would insert himself into the matter from the get go. That said, the ‘everybody lies’ point is well written and delivered, and for all the stories out there that use the opening part of the point (that ‘everybody lies’) few do so with depth of the rest of the point here, so this is what I always think of when something else uses the basic idea.
While clearly exposition, Franklin discussing his past with Delenn manages to feel natural enough while telling us a whole lot about him and about Earth during the war. But then of course Delenn puts off the topic of her own actions during the war until season 4 (as she is not yet ready to say “I started it, and ended it, and somewhere in the middle I captured you, Stephen; with G’Kar; and the tall, pretty human”). Aside from teasing us about questions most people will stop worrying about the answers to by the time we finally get them, it is thematically relevant to this episode as it’s about people’s, and specifically Delenn’s, actions during the war.
I kind of wonder if anyone has ever made it very far without realizing Sinclair has to be dreaming the empty station. I suppose you could think he’d been locked in his room and had his computer and link access cut off, but even in the part in his quarters it doesn’t feel realistic, probably owing to the direction and the music primarily but I often don’t pick up on those things consciously enough to be sure what was done differently. And as soon as he leaves his quarters and the station is empty, you really can’t see how this is real, so you’re just waiting for him to get on the same page.
Although I do suddenly realize that this could have had powerful echoes if it had been Sinclair in a Sleeping in Light situation; the empty station without its usual life, a little dreamlike and unreal because it’s all wrong. Though to be fair, I’ve always felt the sudden supposed tie between Sheridan and B5 didn’t quite work when it came to SiL, so thinking that element might have worked better with Sinclair is easy enough. (It’s too early to start getting into my many many issues with the finale, but trust me, I’ve got plenty that I’ll get into down the road.)
In the here and now though, I’ll note that when the sets are full of people and set dressings, it’s easier to pretend the flat floor and mat painting extension indicate the round station; it’s never quite believable but it’s easier to suspend disbelief when you can’t see so much of the flat floor. In the empty set it looks bad though.
Does anyone have good enough screencaps that they can actually read the infamous newspaper of relevance? Like the Takashima access code bit in The Gathering I rarely if ever manage to pause and check it out or myself, and doing so now reveals that I can only really read the headlines (which even then is probably better than some people could do at the time). One point of note though I found somebody that said the Homeguard headline meant they had gotten someone else sent up for the crime rather than Malcolm, but it’s clearly a different Homeguard attack that the paper is referencing; as I noted repeatedly last time, resolving the issue with Malcolm’s cell (with its – I must say again – a *really* god damn stupid plan) really isn’t going to end the problem overall. Also, there was an attack on the Minbari Embassy (one presumes on Earth) and nobody went to war over it; nice growth as a culture, Minbari.
It’s been observed in ASOIAF fandom that Jory is a character you don’t really notice when you first read AGOT, but on reread you notice him everywhere up until he dies. Jack is kind of like evil-Jory. You really wouldn’t notice him or think anything of him until you’ve seen the effect of his presence and then you can’t help but notice him when you come back through. But at the same time, he’s not really a character, he’s a walking Chekhov gun here, innocently set on the shelf in the first act so he can go off in the third. I wish he had been more of a character so that when he went off it would have some meaning to us beyond hurting Garibaldi.
Here’s the thing about the ‘Sinclair is a closet racist’ half-jokes that crop up, it’s not like the text doesn’t offer evidence to support it. I don’t so much think that was the intent, so much as the idea that Jeff had had to get over his issues with the Minbari seemed like a reasonable thing for JMS to write into this episode. My point just remains that in The War Prayer Jeff has way more in common with his not so closet racist act than that episode was willing to explore. I think JMS was aware of the character’s flaws but saw him as able to control those flaws – which isn’t a choice a lot of writers make about characters, for good and bad reasons – while other writers had less understanding of how the character worked.
This may be one of those ‘I already love this show so I can’t be objective’ things, and I admit this is probably being really generous, but I’m willing to make allowances for the unimpressive effects in this one. It’s a dream/memory/drug induced flashback, and it kind of feels like it. The effects aren’t as crisp as one wants them to be, either fuzzy or jumps in a lot of places...which works in this case because it’s a dream state. Anyway, I know I give this show lots of allowances so make of my reading what you will.
The thing that confuses me more is wondering how the scenes of Jeff standing surrounded by the Grey Council could possibly have actually happened. I kind of don’t think they did, they maybe stood around him while he was playing Minbari Jesus on the Minbari triangle-cross and he’s combining that with speculation and his suspicions about Delenn from other sources. Even ignoring ITB, I don’t know why the GC would have had their human prisoner running around their meeting room while they stood around in silence...actually it might make more sense with ITB that they’d want to observe him awake for a little bit.
Back to Jack, he must have made an interesting report since he saw the Sinclair and Delenn facedown, that definitely must look suspicious to the conspiracy that already thinks Jeff’s been coerced by the Minbari.
Plot bunny I will probably never even attempt to write about, so free to a good home. And really it’s more to offer some payoff to the Knight’s (look, I can never remember which is One and Two) parting line than thinking it was meant to have payoff in canon. But what if there is a recorded echo of Sinclair in the cybernet? And somewhere down the line the Minbari get ahold of it and attempt to resurrect Sinclair-Valen? Or some anti Minbari or Alliance group brings back the more racist and douchey Sinclair as an attack on the Minbari tradition? It’s not a good parting line, but there are things one could do with it...
I actually still have a few thigs I want to talk about having reached the end, but let’s talk about overall quality for a bit. On the whole this is a pretty solid episode on a technical level; the writing is solid, the acting seems a lot better than the average so far, it moves the arc forward (and fills in backstory), and I’d say the directing was a little more interesting than it has been too. However, is it just my copy or does this one have really low video quality? It seemed all poppy and scratchy in places even watching it on DVD; damn this show needs a high quality cleaned up re-release.
I want to make a special note about how well it worked out having the stark lighting of the mindscape setting of the scenes between Sinclair and the Knight fit next to the stark lighting of the Minbari ship. It adds a little extra layer of ambiguity to what’s memory and what’s hallucination during those scenes. Or possibly it shows off Jeff’s Minbari nature that the inside of his mind looks like Minbari décor.
But back to the acting, during much of the interrogation scenes Sinclair and the Knight manage to sell some objectively very ridiculous dialog. O’Hare doesn’t hold it quite as well when he tries to be both intense and emotional, but managing to sell the ‘virtual reality cybernet’ without any trace of hesitation deserves something. On the flip side, Delenn is not well acted this episode, except maybe in her scene with Franklin and even then not great. I don’t know where to put the blame for her seeming so...bland and meek this episode, except maybe that there was a subtext to her scenes in JMS’ writing that he utterly failed to explain to director or actress; because the actions and even attitudes don’t feel wrong exactly but the performance just isn’t Delenn in those actions and behaviors. I know I’m not explaining it well, but it feels really off to me.
Not unconnected with Delenn’s awkward performance, the overall nature of the Minbari plan as presented here is really not well tracked with the shape their plan will be revealed to have. I can almost believe the Grey Council is divided on how to treat the lingering question that is Sinclair and some would think killing him was a logical move; but Minbari do not kill Minbari, and Delenn of all people is not going to kill Sinclair as her first course of action. I kind of wish we had only seen Delenn in this episode from Sinclair’s POV so she would be inscrutable and her role in things completely cast in shadows (pun only slightly intended) and we would have been spared the perplexing scene between her and the other Minbari guy that doesn’t make sense.
Now, onto another round of ‘never having seen this without knowing the end of the story I only sort of understand the newbie experience.’ I kind of feel like this is one of those areas where being ahead of its time at the time now dates it a lot; the arc plots in s1 were slow moving but they were building the arc, which was new and unexpected in the 90s, but now seems very slow and untwisted. And in both situations, it’s a difference you either buy into or you don’t, old school we had to deal with people who couldn’t get onboard and now we have to deal with people who want it to be something it’s not.
But I can’t speak to what I would speculate if I saw this without knowing where it leads, either then or now. Would I think the Minbari did something to Sinclair’s mind? Would I think it was some complicated conspiracy? And importantly, would I think the writer/s had a plan for where this was going? I never had to deal with those questions for myself when it comes to B5, and weirdly I’m not sure the answers have changed that much from people just starting out with the show, though I think the reasons behind those answers maybe aren’t the same now as they were then.
As a final note, I would be a bad Babble On Project fan if I didn’t close out with a hearty MITCHELL!!!! Though he’s a long way from the first Mitchell-of-the-week, he is the namesake of that bit. MITCHELL!!!
Next time: Deathwalker, hey I could do more BOP screaming
1x08: And the Sky Full of Stars
As for the promo, it’s a pretty good one, which makes sense; having one clear plotline makes for fairly easy promo creation. It’s maybe a little spoilery for the same reason, but nothing too bad; and perhaps a touch misleading, but again nothing very off; so it balances out I guess. It might even work at pulling people in, which I have felt was true for so few of these promos. It seems a little bland now, but that’s probably just it not aging well, or maybe that’s just that I’m already a know it all with this story, either way I give it a solid promo rating.
Diving right in, I feel like I should say that the Knight waiting in the docking bay is being too obvious, but this was the early/mid 90s and we used to be able to just go hang out at the airports, and that has definitely seemed to case on B5 already and will continue to, so I don’t think it seemed quite so weird in that context.
I’m not sure I get why Sinclair was handling the Benson matter with Garibaldi, especially as they had no reason to suspect that he was a clear and present security risk (a potential one I suppose but not extreme). This seems like the sort of thing that Garibaldi could handle in house; in fact it seems like the kind of thing Mike *would* handle in house, looking out for his people and all that. I’m sure he would have had to file a report and Sinclair could have asked him how the situation was going so we could get their discussion portion of the scene, but I’m not sure I buy that Jeff would insert himself into the matter from the get go. That said, the ‘everybody lies’ point is well written and delivered, and for all the stories out there that use the opening part of the point (that ‘everybody lies’) few do so with depth of the rest of the point here, so this is what I always think of when something else uses the basic idea.
While clearly exposition, Franklin discussing his past with Delenn manages to feel natural enough while telling us a whole lot about him and about Earth during the war. But then of course Delenn puts off the topic of her own actions during the war until season 4 (as she is not yet ready to say “I started it, and ended it, and somewhere in the middle I captured you, Stephen; with G’Kar; and the tall, pretty human”). Aside from teasing us about questions most people will stop worrying about the answers to by the time we finally get them, it is thematically relevant to this episode as it’s about people’s, and specifically Delenn’s, actions during the war.
I kind of wonder if anyone has ever made it very far without realizing Sinclair has to be dreaming the empty station. I suppose you could think he’d been locked in his room and had his computer and link access cut off, but even in the part in his quarters it doesn’t feel realistic, probably owing to the direction and the music primarily but I often don’t pick up on those things consciously enough to be sure what was done differently. And as soon as he leaves his quarters and the station is empty, you really can’t see how this is real, so you’re just waiting for him to get on the same page.
Although I do suddenly realize that this could have had powerful echoes if it had been Sinclair in a Sleeping in Light situation; the empty station without its usual life, a little dreamlike and unreal because it’s all wrong. Though to be fair, I’ve always felt the sudden supposed tie between Sheridan and B5 didn’t quite work when it came to SiL, so thinking that element might have worked better with Sinclair is easy enough. (It’s too early to start getting into my many many issues with the finale, but trust me, I’ve got plenty that I’ll get into down the road.)
In the here and now though, I’ll note that when the sets are full of people and set dressings, it’s easier to pretend the flat floor and mat painting extension indicate the round station; it’s never quite believable but it’s easier to suspend disbelief when you can’t see so much of the flat floor. In the empty set it looks bad though.
Does anyone have good enough screencaps that they can actually read the infamous newspaper of relevance? Like the Takashima access code bit in The Gathering I rarely if ever manage to pause and check it out or myself, and doing so now reveals that I can only really read the headlines (which even then is probably better than some people could do at the time). One point of note though I found somebody that said the Homeguard headline meant they had gotten someone else sent up for the crime rather than Malcolm, but it’s clearly a different Homeguard attack that the paper is referencing; as I noted repeatedly last time, resolving the issue with Malcolm’s cell (with its – I must say again – a *really* god damn stupid plan) really isn’t going to end the problem overall. Also, there was an attack on the Minbari Embassy (one presumes on Earth) and nobody went to war over it; nice growth as a culture, Minbari.
It’s been observed in ASOIAF fandom that Jory is a character you don’t really notice when you first read AGOT, but on reread you notice him everywhere up until he dies. Jack is kind of like evil-Jory. You really wouldn’t notice him or think anything of him until you’ve seen the effect of his presence and then you can’t help but notice him when you come back through. But at the same time, he’s not really a character, he’s a walking Chekhov gun here, innocently set on the shelf in the first act so he can go off in the third. I wish he had been more of a character so that when he went off it would have some meaning to us beyond hurting Garibaldi.
Here’s the thing about the ‘Sinclair is a closet racist’ half-jokes that crop up, it’s not like the text doesn’t offer evidence to support it. I don’t so much think that was the intent, so much as the idea that Jeff had had to get over his issues with the Minbari seemed like a reasonable thing for JMS to write into this episode. My point just remains that in The War Prayer Jeff has way more in common with his not so closet racist act than that episode was willing to explore. I think JMS was aware of the character’s flaws but saw him as able to control those flaws – which isn’t a choice a lot of writers make about characters, for good and bad reasons – while other writers had less understanding of how the character worked.
This may be one of those ‘I already love this show so I can’t be objective’ things, and I admit this is probably being really generous, but I’m willing to make allowances for the unimpressive effects in this one. It’s a dream/memory/drug induced flashback, and it kind of feels like it. The effects aren’t as crisp as one wants them to be, either fuzzy or jumps in a lot of places...which works in this case because it’s a dream state. Anyway, I know I give this show lots of allowances so make of my reading what you will.
The thing that confuses me more is wondering how the scenes of Jeff standing surrounded by the Grey Council could possibly have actually happened. I kind of don’t think they did, they maybe stood around him while he was playing Minbari Jesus on the Minbari triangle-cross and he’s combining that with speculation and his suspicions about Delenn from other sources. Even ignoring ITB, I don’t know why the GC would have had their human prisoner running around their meeting room while they stood around in silence...actually it might make more sense with ITB that they’d want to observe him awake for a little bit.
Back to Jack, he must have made an interesting report since he saw the Sinclair and Delenn facedown, that definitely must look suspicious to the conspiracy that already thinks Jeff’s been coerced by the Minbari.
Plot bunny I will probably never even attempt to write about, so free to a good home. And really it’s more to offer some payoff to the Knight’s (look, I can never remember which is One and Two) parting line than thinking it was meant to have payoff in canon. But what if there is a recorded echo of Sinclair in the cybernet? And somewhere down the line the Minbari get ahold of it and attempt to resurrect Sinclair-Valen? Or some anti Minbari or Alliance group brings back the more racist and douchey Sinclair as an attack on the Minbari tradition? It’s not a good parting line, but there are things one could do with it...
I actually still have a few thigs I want to talk about having reached the end, but let’s talk about overall quality for a bit. On the whole this is a pretty solid episode on a technical level; the writing is solid, the acting seems a lot better than the average so far, it moves the arc forward (and fills in backstory), and I’d say the directing was a little more interesting than it has been too. However, is it just my copy or does this one have really low video quality? It seemed all poppy and scratchy in places even watching it on DVD; damn this show needs a high quality cleaned up re-release.
I want to make a special note about how well it worked out having the stark lighting of the mindscape setting of the scenes between Sinclair and the Knight fit next to the stark lighting of the Minbari ship. It adds a little extra layer of ambiguity to what’s memory and what’s hallucination during those scenes. Or possibly it shows off Jeff’s Minbari nature that the inside of his mind looks like Minbari décor.
But back to the acting, during much of the interrogation scenes Sinclair and the Knight manage to sell some objectively very ridiculous dialog. O’Hare doesn’t hold it quite as well when he tries to be both intense and emotional, but managing to sell the ‘virtual reality cybernet’ without any trace of hesitation deserves something. On the flip side, Delenn is not well acted this episode, except maybe in her scene with Franklin and even then not great. I don’t know where to put the blame for her seeming so...bland and meek this episode, except maybe that there was a subtext to her scenes in JMS’ writing that he utterly failed to explain to director or actress; because the actions and even attitudes don’t feel wrong exactly but the performance just isn’t Delenn in those actions and behaviors. I know I’m not explaining it well, but it feels really off to me.
Not unconnected with Delenn’s awkward performance, the overall nature of the Minbari plan as presented here is really not well tracked with the shape their plan will be revealed to have. I can almost believe the Grey Council is divided on how to treat the lingering question that is Sinclair and some would think killing him was a logical move; but Minbari do not kill Minbari, and Delenn of all people is not going to kill Sinclair as her first course of action. I kind of wish we had only seen Delenn in this episode from Sinclair’s POV so she would be inscrutable and her role in things completely cast in shadows (pun only slightly intended) and we would have been spared the perplexing scene between her and the other Minbari guy that doesn’t make sense.
Now, onto another round of ‘never having seen this without knowing the end of the story I only sort of understand the newbie experience.’ I kind of feel like this is one of those areas where being ahead of its time at the time now dates it a lot; the arc plots in s1 were slow moving but they were building the arc, which was new and unexpected in the 90s, but now seems very slow and untwisted. And in both situations, it’s a difference you either buy into or you don’t, old school we had to deal with people who couldn’t get onboard and now we have to deal with people who want it to be something it’s not.
But I can’t speak to what I would speculate if I saw this without knowing where it leads, either then or now. Would I think the Minbari did something to Sinclair’s mind? Would I think it was some complicated conspiracy? And importantly, would I think the writer/s had a plan for where this was going? I never had to deal with those questions for myself when it comes to B5, and weirdly I’m not sure the answers have changed that much from people just starting out with the show, though I think the reasons behind those answers maybe aren’t the same now as they were then.
As a final note, I would be a bad Babble On Project fan if I didn’t close out with a hearty MITCHELL!!!! Though he’s a long way from the first Mitchell-of-the-week, he is the namesake of that bit. MITCHELL!!!
Next time: Deathwalker, hey I could do more BOP screaming
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