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.