Babylon 5 Ep. 14: Signs and Portents

Sometime in the early 90s J. Michael Straczynski decided the best way to realize his life-long dream of writing mediocre Spiderman and Superman comics was to create a sprawling space station drama with an overarching storyline running five seasons. That show was Babylon 5, and it was pretty good.

I always preferred Deep Space Nine, but then again I was like eight years old when the series ended and in seventh grade or so when I re-watched it all in sequence on SciFi because my family had just gotten cable. But anyway the space station setting conceptually works because it combines the whole discovery/universe building shit with the Mos Eisley stuff while also being better set up for a protracted space opera because the setting isn't changed every episode. So what I'm trying to say here is I'll probably always prefer Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine to The Next Generation because The Next Generation was a bit stingy doling out the big space battles and dudes getting shot in the face with lasers and the space station set weren't.

So here we are: in media res because I started watching the show before I thought of blogging about it and I am NOT going to suffer through a double dose of Smilin' Jeffry Sinclair's 35 minutes per episode of impotence and five minutes of deus ex machina. I seriously cannot wait until I'm finished with the first season and they shitcan the Great White Father like that Asian chick in the pilot who ended up getting replaced by Ivanova.

So yeah, Shadows and Portents? Short synopsis: shit gets real, or at least establishes that shit will be getting real in the forseeable future.

Space pirates are fucking shit up in space, Sinclair enlists Garibaldi's help in figuring out why the Minbari abducted him and wiped his memory, Londo has procured the Lost Crown Jewels and is handing them over to some Centauri aristos to smuggle back to their home world, and Mr. Morden is skulking around in the background kind of prodding G'Kar and Londo to admit that really? they want to blow each other up while Delenn and Kosh just tell him to GTFO. 

Sometimes it's nice to come back to something that you remember fondly but not in detail just so you can pick up on a hint and think to yourself "oh, shit, they're talking about that? Awesome!" One of the Centauri aristos sees the future but has a bad reputation having told the other aristo at one point that he would be killed by shadows which doesn't make any sense at a... oh, I see what you did there. (Then at the end of the episode he's blown up by the Shadows.) Really this episode has all I want from Babylon 5: it has elements of the overarching storyline, scene-chewing monologues from G'Kar and Londo, a space battle with space pirates, and a minimum of Sinclair who never does anything but make a scene, plot, or storyline worse. Fuck him. He gets to be the hero and pull the strings in the battle with the space pirates (while Garibaldi and Ivanova are actually out fucking shit up like real space-badasses), but he let's the Lost Crown Jewels get away because he is an asshole. And then he puts on a shiteating grin while Garibaldi explains that he was hand-picked by the Minbari because he's only capable of one facial expression. Michael O'Hare is a coprophiliac.

So one of the aristos has himself and the Lost Crown Jewels kidnapped, gets double crossed, gets blown up by the Shadows, and Morden delivers the LCJs to Londo because Londo is the trusting type and is absolutely fine with selling his soul to the devil. The shit? About to get real.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Episode 59

Yesterday I learned Netflix has every single episode of Power Rangers. Last night I watched my favorite episode of the show (and anything period) "Mighty Morphin Mutants."

It was everything I want from a Power Rangers episode. Evil rangers, Cool Goldar stuff, good fights and hot tunes. Along with Bulk and Skull.

Miss Applebee gives the class a self improvement course. Tommy wants to be less forgetful. Which is a call back to his first run where he was always forgetting his morpher and/or communicator. To cover up they did not have much ZyuRanger footage of Dragon Ranger fighting monsters.

Meanwhile Rita is fed up and decides to take out the Badges of Darkness to turn Putty Patrollers into Mutant Rangers. That's right its Evil Power Rangers.

We get a inspirational training sequence with Goldar training the six selected Putties. I imagine all sorts of Police Academy hijinks occurred. Maybe tricking Goldar into making out with Squat.

The training goes great except for Putty number 6 who Goldar destroys. Proclaiming no one to be worthy of being the red mutant ranger. So they just make a crab monster.

Tommy's memory training is going badly. Him and Kimberly get attacked by the Green and Pink mutants. Are first fight with a badass tune starts. They decide not to morph as the Mutants have the only available suits in American footage.

Tommy and Kim get their asses kicked and report to Zordan. You know Tommy had to phrase the story differently.

"So I had the Green Mutant down and was gonna finish him. Then he threw some dirt in my eye and ran away before I could kick his ass."

Rangers are on edge til Zordan contacts them. They morph and we get our secondf big fight set to to a kick ass rock theme. Its 5-4-1 again. Fight goes badly til Tommy shows up and the Mutant Green returns to fight him. Cool bit was the mutant Green having the Sword of Darkness that Tommy had in the Green with Evil mini series.

I should mention I thought they used some cool camera angles for the fight scenes. They did not do these type of battle royal type fights too often. Usually beinf 5 vs 1 monster.

So the mutants form a mutant blaster and kick the rangers ass. No covering up since Zordan saw the whole sorry situation. He gives them new weapons that look exactly like their old weapons.

They return for one last fight. The tune we get is appropriately "Fight". The Mutants form the Mutant Blaster but the Rangers beat them to the punch firing the Power Blaster and killing Mutant Yellow and Pink. Their poor pseudo female hearts unable to take the strain.

Rita makes the remaining mutants and Commander Crayfish (the previously mentioned Crab monster) grow. Rangers form Megazord and Tommy summons Dragonzord. But the Commander is a brilliant strategist and forms the Tower of Gloom technique by riding the three remaining mutants. Staying above the blasters. I don't know why they can't blast the Mutants instead. Well after getting hit with an energy beam channeled thru mutant green's dragon shield, the Rangers say "fuck this" and summon Titantus and the Ultrazord blasting the Mutant team and their crustaceans leader to paste.


Later Bulk and Skull are dressed as gentlemen as a harpsichord version of their theme plays. Only to have their prank on Miss Applebee backfire. Everyone laughs roll credits stay tuned for Eek the Cat.

The X-Files: Season 1, Episode 1

Pilot

It was a simpler time, people. It was the 90's.

The FOX executives had no idea what they were doing, and for the Fall of '93 they green-lit two new shows for Friday nights: a trippy Western with Bruce Campbell, and a science-fiction mystery show about aliens with the guy from Red Shoe Diaries. I'm pretty sure that the rationale here was that no one watches TV on Friday nights anyway, so they really had nothing to lose. And, "What the hell, maybe the Twin Peaks weirdos will watch one of our shows for once."

The weirdos pulled through on this one. Later on, even the normal people caught on, but that's for a different blog post.

SYNOPSIS: FBI Agent Dana Scully, a ultra-rational skeptic, is assigned by mysterious forces within the Bureau to work with Agent Fox Mulder on the FBI's garbage dump for paranormal phenomenon, The X-Files. The timing isn't so hot for the [SPOILER] black-oil-vaccine-alien/human hybrid-colonizing-worldwide conspiracy though, as Mulder is just starting his biggest case ever: a group of unexplained deaths through the Pacific Northwest that may or may not be connected to aliens and coma patients. Sexual tension ensues.

The things to remember about about pilot episodes from any time before very recently are:

1. They're cheap.
2. They suck.

Which is why it's almost a miracle that this one is fantastic. The leads are pretty much fully formed from the door, and the first scene between the two is wonderful. Sure, Scully is a brunette and is a bit too cheerful, and Duchovny hadn't quite honed his mutant ability to underplay every scene in exact inverse proportion to however freaked out a normal human would be, but the chemistry is totally there. Check out this exchange:

Scully: Do you have a theory?
Mulder: I have lots of theories...Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?
Scully: Logically, I would have to say no...
Mulder: When convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?
Scully: ...What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.
Mulder: That's why they put the I in FBI.

I mean, minus a dude smoking (more on him later) and a damn good opening title sequence, that's the entire hook of the show, right there. I feel the need to point out how incredibly uncommon the personal dynamics are on this show: I cannot recall a show before this where two young, extremely attractive, lead actors of compatible gender who showed as much chemistry as these two were placed into a business casual relationship. The show was still finding it's way through this season, but the one constant was how watchable the two leads are. As we will (soon) see, there were times where it was the only thing holding an episode together.

There's a scene in the third act that sort of crystallizes everything that's cool about these two: Scully arrives at Mulder's hotel-room door in a bathrobe during a power outage and strips down to her underwear. She's felt bumps on her back and thinks they might be the same marks the dead kids turned up with. Mulder bends down to check them and then tells her they're mosquito bites. She quickly covers back up, and collapses gratefully into a hug. Mulder isn't sure how he feels about it. We cut to Scully in Mulder's bed, while Mulder sits on the floor and tells her (and us) about his sister; the X Files; and what he knows about the Conspiracy. It's the first time either character is vulnerable, and you don't recognize how powerfully it works until you've seen it a couple times. It's the moment they know they can trust one another.

The mystery itself is like a hot-air balloon ride atmospheric, but a bit dull: Kids from the same graduating class are being abducted and killed, and the aliens are using a kid in a coma to do it. At the end, Mulder interrupts the kid and the aliens run off. That said, even here there are some wonderful little creepy bits: an exhumed coffin contains what looks like a mummified ape; a girl develops a spontaneous nosebleed while talking to Mulder and Scully; the only remaining piece of physical evidence from the case is filed away in a secret Pentagon warehouse by an ominous smoking man.

Since I mentioned the Smoking Man, I'd better talk a bit about the conspiracy here. The producers didn't really have a vision for where the series was going at this point, but what they are sure about is pretty good. Apart from a couple of cameos by the Smoking Man, and vague intimations from Mulder we don't ever hear them named directly or see them work, and in a lot of ways that's scarier: bodies are dug up from graves in the middle of the night; hotel rooms are burned to the ground; and paperwork is conveniently misplaced and all we're left with is a silent smoking guy in the Pentagon.

As I finish this review, I feel the same way I did when I first saw the show: It'll be fun to see where it goes from here.

What do I know?