Babylon 5 Second Season
Original air dates: November 1994 – November 1995
Executive producers: Douglas Netter, J. Michael Straczynski
It was the dawn of the third age… Lots of changes on B5 from the very first couple of episodes, as we get a new CO in Captain John Sheridan, a new pilot character in Lieutenant Keffer, a new security guard in Zack Allan, a new actor playing Na’Toth, and a new look for Delenn, who now presents as a mix of Minbari and human.
We also get a new Earth Alliance President, and Clark starts out under a cloud of suspicion, as he left the presidential transport carrying Santiago right before it went boom. Sheridan, it turns out, is part of a cabal of EarthForce officers who are concerned about the direction Earth is taking under Clark, including the greater power of Psi Corps. Ivanova, Garibaldi, and Franklin join that coalition quite eagerly. Actions by Psi Corps—including embedding a sleeper agent personality inside Winters, and brutally hunting down what they deem as rogue telepaths—give credence to this concern, as do the actions of the newly formed Ministry of Peace. Among the latter’s actions are creating NightWatch, a citizen watch group that is tasked with reporting behavior that might be detrimental to Earth.
On the wider galactic stage, there is concern about “the coming darkness,” which is eventually revealed to be the Shadows—who are also the “associates” of Morden’s who have been assisting Mollari in his rise to greater prominence in the Centauri Republic. Mollari also gets an apparent new ally in Lord Refa. While the Centauri emperor wishes to make amends with the Narn Regime, he dies before he can make that wish a reality, and Mollari and Refa take advantage of his demise to start a war against the Narn. Between aid from the Shadows and Refa’s use of (incredibly illegal and immoral) mass drivers on the Narn homeworld, the Centauri win that war handily, resulting in Narn being once again conquered and made part of the republic. G’Kar is stripped of his diplomatic post, and is granted asylum on B5, the only thing keeping him safe from arrest by the Centauri.
In addition, we learn about the Rangers, a group of humans and Minbari who are working to fight the Shadows—initially, just by gathering intelligence, though they also start working more in the field, particularly in getting a message from the conquered Narn homeworld to B5. Sinclair is in charge of the Rangers on Minbar, with Sheridan and Delenn sharing command of the Rangers on B5, with Garibaldi as the liaison.
At the end of the season, EarthDome signs a nonaggression pact with the ever-expanding Centauri Republic. Kosh reveals himself to the assembled multitudes in order to rescue Sheridan, and we discover that people see Vorlons as angelic beings from whatever their mythology is. (Tellingly, Mollari sees nothing.) And Keffer’s final act before being destroyed by a Shadow ship is to send out his flight recorder, which is picked up by ISN. Now everyone knows there’s a nasty-looking spider-like ship out there…
Favorite Get the hell out of our galaxy! From “The Geometry of Shadows”: Sheridan threads the needle very nicely when talking to Garibaldi, making it clear that he can have his job back, but also that the captain will understand if he doesn’t want to come back. I particularly like his response to Garibaldi speculating that it would be easier if he resigned and moved on: “The universe doesn’t give you any points for doing things that are easy.”
Favorite Nothing’s the same anymore. From “The Coming of Shadows”: While Sinclair is indeed serving as Earth’s ambassador to Minbar, he is also now in charge of the Rangers, though Earth doesn’t know that…
Favorite Ivanova is God. From “GROPOS”: Ivanova starts the episode talking about how much she enjoys the quiet, which is always a recipe for things to stop being quiet any second. You’d think she’d know better. She also urges Franklin to be good to his father, so he doesn’t get the same regrets we saw her express in “TKO” at her father’s shiva.
Favorite The household god of frustration. From “Hunter, Prey”: Garibaldi thinks he can move easily through downbelow as long as he’s out of uniform and in a fedora because (a) he doesn’t spend much time in downbelow and (b) the people down there usually only see the badge. This is belied by the number of times he’s been in downbelow just in the show to-date, plus he, um, doesn’t actually wear a badge…
Favorite If you value your lives, be somewhere else. From “And Now for a Word”: Torqueman’s interview with Delenn starts out friendly, asking her about Minbar, but it turns ugly quickly as the reporter all but accuses her of taunting the families of the humans who died in the Earth-Minbari War with her transformation into looking human-like. Delenn is very visibly affected by this.
Favorite In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… From “There All the Honor Lies”: Both Mollari and Vir got sent to B5 because it was a shitty useless posting, but now that Mollari has made it less shitty for himself, it becomes untenable for Vir until Mollari steps in. Of course, given how soul-crushing it’s been for Vir, it’s telling that he still views staying as better than going home to his family…
Favorite Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. From “The Coming of Shadows”: Quite a busy episode for G’Kar—he goes from righteous indignation about the emperor’s visit to planning the emperor’s assassination to being frustrated by the emperor’s collapse before he can be killed to being given hope by the emperor’s words to being devastated by Mollari and Refa’s actions to being the spokesperson for a people now at war.
Favorite We live for the one, we die for the one. From “The Coming of Shadows”: We’re introduced to the Rangers. All we know about them thus far is that they’re a small but potent army made up of humans and Minbari, they’re mostly just gathering intelligence at the moment, they’re headquartered on Minbar, and Sinclair is their leader.
Favorite The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. From “Soul Mates”: Psi Corps has been experimenting on their people to make them powerful enough to influence someone else’s thoughts and actions. (This is identified as being an empath in dialogue, which isn’t exactly what the word means, but whatever.)
Favorite Never contradict a technomage when he’s saving your life—again. From “The Geometry of Shadows”: We’re introduced to techno-mages, who are able to manipulate technology to an impressive degree, most of which seems to involve holograms, recordings, and the ability to take over the controlling systems of electronic equipment.
Favorite The Shadowy Vorlons. From “The Coming of Shadows”: The Shadows wipe out Quadrant 14 on Mollari’s behalf. Meanwhile, Kosh has all of two lines of dialogue, but they’re quite effective: The emperor asks how this will all end, and the Vorlon says, “In fire.” So that’s encouraging…
Favorite Looking ahead. From “The Coming of Shadows”: Mollari has one of his prophetic dreams. He sees his hand reaching out from a star. He sees himself being crowned emperor looking the same age as he is now. He sees himself standing on a desert, watching Shadow vessels fly overhead. He sees himself several decades hence, sitting on the throne, and then himself and G’Kar strangling each other, the Narn with one eye missing.
The hand reaching out of a star is a dramatization of something Elric described to him in “The Geometry of Shadows.” His watching the Shadows overhead will come to fruition in “The Hour of the Wolf.” His foreseeing himself dying with his hands around G’Kar’s throat was first mentioned in “Midnight on the Firing Line,” and will be seen in full context in “War Without End, Part II.”
Favorite No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. From “Confessions and Lamentations”: Before Delenn and Lennier go into the Markab isolation vault, Sheridan asks that, if they survive, that Delenn call him “John” moving forward. Afterward, a devastated Delenn collapses crying into Sheridan’s arms saying, “Oh, John.” (That last image is sufficiently powerful that it will be used in the opening credits of season three in a manner that makes it seems like she’s crying about the Shadow War.)
Favorite Welcome aboard. Back for more this year are recurring regulars Macaulay Bruton as Jack, Ardwight Chamberlain as the voice of Kosh, Joshua Cox as Corwin, David L. Crowley as Welch, Maggie Egan as an ISN anchor, and the great Ed Wasser as Morden.
Guests from season one who return and become recurring include Walter Koenig as Bester, Gary McGurk as Clark, and José Rey as Delvientos. Also, former opening credits regulars Michael O’Hare (“The Coming of Shadows”) and Patricia Tallman (“Divided Loyalties”) make return appearances, as does Caitlin Brown in a new role (“There All the Honor Lies”).
New recurring characters include Jeff Conaway as Allan, William Forward as Refa, Robert Foxworth as Hague, and Marie Marshall as Dodger.
Three guests from season one return in different roles in season two: Marshall Teague as Ta’Lon (“All Alone in the Night”), Jim Norton as Lazarenn (“Confessions and Lamentations”), and W. Morgan Sheppard as G’Sten (“The Long, Twilight Struggle”).
There’s some recasting-related stuff: John Schuck takes over the recurring role of Draal from Louis Turrene in “The Long, Twilight Struggle.” Beth Toussaint debuts the role of Anna Sheridan in “Revelations” (and also in a picture in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum”), but that role will be taken over by Melissa Gilbert when she next appears.
Some very strong one-off guests, including Ian Abercrombie as Correlimurzon (“Acts of Sacrifice”), Wayne Alexander as Sebastian (“Comes the Inquisitor”), the great Michael Ansara as Elric (“The Geometry of Shadows”), the great Adrienne Barbeau as Carter (“A Spider in the Web”), the great Turhan Bey as the Centauri emperor (“The Coming of Shadows”), the great Jane Carr as Timov (“Soul Mates”), Wanda De Jesus as Sarah (“Hunter, Prey”), Richard Grove as Kalain (“Points of Departure”), Alex Hyde-White as Macabee (“In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum”), Jack Kehler as Chase (“Comes the Inquisitor”), Beverly Leech as Liz (“Revelations”), Richard Moll as Max (“Hunter, Prey”), Lois Nettleton as Daggair (“Soul Mates”), the great Dwight Schultz as Amis (“The Long Dark”), James Shigeta as Isogi (“A Spider in the Web”), Tony Steedman as Jacobs (“Hunter, Prey”), Keith Szarabajka as Stoner (“Soul Mates”), the great Russ Tamblyn as Maynard (“A Distant Star”), the great Malachi Throne as the Centauri prime minister (“The Coming of Shadows”), the great Jessica Walter criminally underused as Voudreau (“A Spider in the Web”), Paul Williams as Taq (“Acts of Sacrifice”), the great Paul Winfield as General Franklin (“GROPOS”), and Kim Zimmer’s tour de force appearance as Torqueman (“And Now for a Word”).
We’ve got a few Robert Knepper moments: the great Carmen Argenziano in “Knives,” the great Roy Dotrice in “The Fall of Night,” and Carel Struycken in “Soul Mates.”
But the most impressive guests are the powerfully voiced ones who showed their versatility in playing two different roles this season: Robin Sachs, who played Hedronn in “Points of Departure” and “All Alone in the Night” and Na’Kal in “The Fall of Night,” and John Vickery, who returned as Neroon in “All Alone in the Night” and also played Welles in “The Fall of Night.”
Favorite Trivial matters. The one for “There All the Honor Lies” because of the absolutely ridiculous teddy bear story that crossed over into Space Cases.
Favorite The echoes of all of our conversations. From “A Distant Star”:
“You think that’s good, wait till dessert.”
“Now wait a minute, I didn’t authorize dessert.”
“No? Then you can’t have any.”
“What is it?”
“Doesn’t matter—you’re not getting any.”
“No no no, let’s not be hasty.”
“No no no no no, too late.”
—Garibaldi torturing Franklin over bagna càuda.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I’m out of it for a few days, and the whole place goes to hell.” This season is a fascinating combination of whirlwind changes to the status quo, yet also of a seemingly glacial pace when it comes to parceling out revelations. Some of this is eventually revealed to be deliberate: Delenn, Lennier, and Kosh avoid giving away too much because they need the Shadows to think that their return remains a secret until they are better prepared.
In general, though, the main thing this season accomplishes is to take things we saw in season one and deepening and/or expanding them, and often making them way more interesting.
It starts, alas, with the person billed first in the opening credits. With all due respect to the memory of Michael O’Hare—who was a friendly acquaintance of your humble rewatcher—Bruce Boxleitner is definitely trading up. His charisma and relaxed charm works so much better in the commanding officer role. In particular, Sheridan is more compelling in multiple modes, whether it’s as the friendly leader, the talented former ship commander, the brilliant strategist, the diplomat, the clandestine leader, and so on.
Delenn goes through some brutal changes, as her transformation has many unexpected consequences, from humorous (her issues with hair care after being hairless for her entire life) to brutal (being ostracized by both humans and Minbari, being kicked out of the Grey Council). It seems that, just when she needs to be at her strongest to fight the Shadows, she’s at her weakest, with much less support from her own people.
As ever, the real stars of the show are Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas. After spending most of the first season as semi-humorous antagonists—Mollari as the drunken ambassador of a failing empire, G’Kar as the mustache-twirling villain trying to improve the Narn’s standing—both take a turn for the tragic.
Mollari watches as his deal with the devil goes about as well as those things usually go. While the benefits seem nifty and keen at first—including enabling him to divorce two of his three wives, which he views as addition by subtraction—he soon discovers the awfulness of what he’s done, both large-scale (he watches in horror as mass drivers all but destroy the Narn homeworld) and small-scale (Refa manipulating events so that Mollari is forced to kill his best friend).
G’Kar, meanwhile, goes on the worst kind of roller coaster: anger at the Centauri’s continued aggression, joy at learning that the emperor wishes to improve relations, anger at the emperor’s death meaning greater Centauri aggression, joy at the promise of assistance from Sheridan and Delenn, anger at discovering that their help is far less than expected and will not include official assistance from their respective governments, joy at the possibility of destroying a major Centauri supply line, despair at that campaign failing and the homeworld falling, righteous indignation at being stripped of his diplomatic post, and hope as he tries to rally the Narn to his cause.
Throughout all this, Jurasik and Katsulas simply nail every single emotional beat, every character nuance, every bit of drama, pathos, and tragedy. Both try so desperately to do what is right for their people, and both fail rather spectacularly—though, amusingly, in both cases it’s entirely the fault of Mollari’s hubris.
As usual, the stuff with the humans is the least interesting part of the season. But aside from Sheridan, who as a new character needs to be introduced and fleshed out, there’s not much by way of character development for any of the humans. We meet Franklin’s father, which is fine—aided by an actor of Paul Winfield’s calibre playing the part—and Ivanova is revealed to be a latent telepath, but that’s about it for the non-Sheridan humans. Far too many of their storylines don’t have anywhere near the interest as the ones for the non-humans, resorting to simple stuff like alien abductions, energy-being possessions, war-movie clichés, creepy romances, bitching about commerce, and so on. Some of this works—for example, I liked Sheridan (along with a reluctant Ivanova) committing civil disobedience to protest being charged rent for accommodations on a post he was assigned to, and pretty much any story that directly related to Earth’s creeping fascism was well done—but too much of it just doesn’t work as well. Tellingly, the best human-centric story was “And Now for a Word,” a brilliant special report on B5 that was actually more interesting for its revelations about the non-humans than it was the humans.
Still, as complaints go that, and the parsimonious doling out of revelations, are both extremely minor. This is a much more powerful set of episodes than the first season, building nicely on what came before, and, more to the point, making what came before more interesting in retrospect. And it gives us three of the strongest hours of television you’re likely to see in “The Coming of Shadows,” “The Long, Twilight Struggle,” and the aforementioned “And Now for a Word.”
Next week: “Matters of Honor.”
“Refa’s use of (incredibly illegal and immoral) mass drivers…”
Don’t forget mispronounced!
Come to think of it, I don’t buy the idea that mass drivers would be an illegal WMD, because their primary use would be for simple shipping, as it were — launching payloads through space without the need for rocket thrust. I’ve read about mass drivers potentially being used to launch mined ore from the Lunar surface into Earth orbit where it could be captured and utilized. They’d only be destructive if they were aimed specifically at a populated planet surface. But the same goes for pretty much any powerful space drive. If you have engines that can accelerate a ship to any significant fraction of the speed of light, they could also drive it into a planet with extinction-level destructive impact. If your engines use antimatter as a power source, their explosion in an atmosphere would be devastating. And just imagine what would happen if someone opened a hyperspace jump point in a major city. The gravitational distortion would tear it apart.
So it doesn’t make sense for the technology itself to be illegal, just its specific use in a destructive context rather than a constructive one. (E.g. it’s legal to use dynamite in construction, mining, or demolition, but not as a bomb targeted at people.)
Interesting point about how the human characters were underdeveloped this season. You didn’t even mention the character beat that would’ve been the biggest deal at the time — the romance between Susan and Talia — because it was almost homeopathically underplayed, even by the standards of contemporary portrayals of same-sex relationships on TV.
They could have used Swedish Meatballs
I am sure that when it comes to mass drivers, it is simply their use as a weapon of war that is illegal under treaty. Just like today, where it’s legal to spray insecticide on crops but not nerve gas on people, or to grow pathogens in cultures to produce vaccines but not to produce biological weapons.
I’d add a superb Television moment to the above Season 2 List of TV Awesomeness: Vir’s reply to Morden in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’Dum.”
I didn’t want to re-litigate the departure of Andrea Thompson, as I covered that pretty thoroughly in the “Divided Loyalties” rewatch and my blood pressure is high enough, thanks…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was thinking of it more in terms of character development for Ivanova, a second revelation about her alongside the latent-telepath thing you did mention.
This season is pretty solid once you reach “The Coming of Shadows”, but there’s just way too much build-up beforehand.
I agree. It’s hard to say how much having to introduce a new captain affected that. Instead of going into the story they spent 2, arguably 3 episodes establishing Sheridan’s character. If it had been Sinclair, those episodes would not have been necessary and more time could have been devoted to to the other characters. I would say introducing a totally new character also took up time, but let’s face it Keffer had ZERO impact on time being devoted to his character.
This raises an interesting question about how we should judge the pacing of any single season. B5 was designed to be a five-year story arc. For now we can ignore what happens with seasons 4 and 5 with regards to those plans as those issues have not yet appeared. Should we judge season 2 on its arc alone, or should we judge it in the context of what will happen in season 3 when the pace really picks up. I put my marker on that the pacing for season 2 is fine, given what it is building to. I think that it was not the pace of the build that is the problem here. Rather, as pointed out in the summary, that JMS wasted an opportunity for more development of the human characters that would have led to more nuance to what will happen to each of them next season.
I will say that, regardless of how we judge it now (with changing fashions and viewing habits), at the time I thought the pacing was fine. The season is a bit back-heavy with its best episodes mostly concentrated towards the end, but this was normal. I don’t think there are any long runs of consecutive weak episodes. The weakest stretch for me, is probably from A Distant Star to A Spider in the Web, and that’s only 3 episodes.
I agree. B5 came out in a time when most non-soap-opera TV drama was still basically episodic. So it was an episodic show where the events of the episodes had lasting impact and added up to an evolving story arc, but it wasn’t anywhere near as serialized as modern shows tend to be. Or rather, it gradually evolved from an episodic show with strong continuity, like other shows of its day, into a more serialized narrative in later seasons.
Audiences tend to be chauvinistic about their own preferences. We assume that, because serialized TV is more popular these days, that means it’s intrinsically superior. But in the 1950s-70s, serialization was seen as cheap and cheesy, the stuff of daytime soaps and kiddie adventure shows, while classy dramas were either pure anthologies or shows with continuing casts and premises that nonetheless tried to be as anthology-like as possible, so that each individual episode was a satisfying whole instead of just a fragment of something larger (which made sense in the days before home video when there was no guarantee you’d get to see every episode of a show). The truth is, neither option is intrinsically any smarter or better than the other; they both have their strengths and weaknesses.
So it wasn’t a failing for early B5 to focus more on episodic stories; it was just a creative choice, one that was normal and expected in the TV of the era. It was a chance to let audiences get to know the characters and the worldbuilding, to invest in them over time so that it would be more meaningful to them when the big story-arc stuff finally kicked in. And it was just a chance to tell individual science fiction stories and character stories that were (hopefully) interesting in their own right rather than for what they contributed to something outside of themselves. As you say, if season 2 had a flaw, it wasn’t that it told such self-contained stories, but that it didn’t make them as interesting or as meaningful to character development as they could have been.
As you mention another con to serialization in the pre-00s is that if a viewer missed a week or two, they would be abruptly out of touch with the story and that increased the chances they would just drop the show and watch something else. I remember a show I watched back in about ’96, The Burning Zone (which I just realized featured B5 pilot alum Tamlyn Tomita! It seems this is the show she decided to do instead of B5 as the pilots were shot around the same time). I missed a week and when I got back to it half the original cast was gone and I missed the single line explaining what happened. I bounced off that pretty quickly (it also wasn’t the greatest…).
At the end of the 90s into the early 00s, there were a couple of technological advances that went mainstream that started swinging the penduum towards more serialization – DVDs and DVRs. DVDs were able to hold much more content than a VHS tape, and while they certainly were not cheap, it became easier to get whole seasons of TV shows on DVD. That’s how I watched 24 – a friend loaned me her box sets of seasons 1-3 and that may have been the first TV series I seriously binged.
DVRs started making it much easier for people to set an automated recording for a program, and even the early DVRs could hold large amounts of recordings (SD television required a lot fewer resources!). So now people were no longer bound by the appointment times set by network programmers.
Now there was less of a chance of losing viewers with more serialized content, and some creators really leapt onto the opportunity like the aforementioned 24 or JJ Abrams with Alias and later Lost.
Something I have been enjoying with my watching of B5 (this is my first time through it and almost done with S3 right now) compared a lot of contemporary TV is how much room the 22-23 episode seasons give for exploring more about the characters or the setting. And there seems to be a patience in B5 that is missing in contemporary shows. They’re willing to have some episodes that aren’t always driving the main story forward, but add more context when the big moments happen and therefore more impact.
Yes. I grew up in the era when TV series ran dozens of episodes every season from fall to spring, with re-runs airing in the summer. Shows with a limited number of episodes existed, but were one-offs that were classified as “mini-series”.
I’ll excuse myself now. There may be some kids I need to go tell to get off of my lawn….
Ah, the Burning Zone. Sandy and I created a masquerade entry based on it we presented at Chicon 2000. Took Best of Show with it.
I remember the name of the show, and my vague recollection is that I tried it for a few weeks and lost interest. Which is surprising if Tamlyn Tomita was in it, since I’d think that alone would’ve made me a loyal viewer. It must have been really bad if I gave up on it despite her presence.
I would put the cutoff a few decades earlier, since most of us did have home video recorders by the ’80s, so there were ways to avoid missing episodes. (Well, usually. Sometimes the VCRs didn’t work as programmed, or the power went out, or life intervened. I once missed most of a Batman: The Animated Series episode because I was out with a friend and lost track of time, and to my surprise, my father watched the episode and described it to me when I got home.)
Also, I can attest from personal experience that it is possible to keep an entire series on VHS. On extended play, you could typically fit 6 hours on one cassette, so a whole season would only be 4-5 tapes. The image quality was well below DVDs, but we were used to that.
People always assume that it was impossible to do a thing before the modern way of doing it was invented, but a lot of the time it just took a bit more work to do it.
That happened to me with Smallville. My VCR malfunctioned during the S5 finale, and then malfunctioned again during the rebroadcast. I was even fussier back then than I am now about not missing episodes, so I never saw the rest of the show until it was serialized on TNT a decade(?) later.
Oh sure, I know it was possible to hold a whole series, but commercially they didn’t really sell many VHS tapes running 6 hours because of image quality. So if you didn’t record them yourself, it was less likely to be able to buy it on video or it was prohibitively expensive.
I regularly programmed my VCR for scheduled recording (oh the fury at preemptions!), but I also remember all the jokes about the stereotypical flashing clock on VCR, because a lot of people did not go much further with their machines than putting in a tape and hitting play and (usually but not always) hitting rewind.
Commercial release is beside the point. The point is that it’s incorrect to say that audiences pre-2000 had no way to avoid missing episodes. Home video made it much easier to ensure we didn’t miss episodes, and to keep episodes for rewatch. And since the technology was commonplace by the mid-’80s or so, it might be a factor in why TV started to develop stronger continuity around then.
Also more shelf space. :)
I taped BtVS every week because it was airing at the same time as one of my regular AA meetings which worked great until “Once More, With Feeling” (the song and dance episode). Still surprised Whedon pulled that off, but it would have been nice if the surprise timing was mentioned in the tv guide in the newspaper. It was years before I saw the ending of that episode.
One thing I dislike about the modern preference for serialized TV is that watching a show today means committing to a major outlay of time, and it’s too often time I simply do not have. That’s not a problem with shows like B5, where individual episodes can often stand alone as satisfying even as they advance a larger plot.
I think having to recast the station commander was one of the reasons that the human stories weren’t as compelling as they could have been, as it required focusing more on Sheridan at the expense of the other humans’ story lines. But of course, that casting change was sadly unavoidable.
I think we’re starting to see the pendulum swing back to more episodic shows lately, e.g. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
I will be intrigued to see whether Starfleet Academy is episodic.
Yeah, SNW is intentionally retro and still has much more of a throughline and character arcs than its models in the before times. I’ll be a bit surprised if that’s continued in a show that’s more of a Discovery sequel. (Though pleasantly.)
That’s not quite true. Lower Decks was an episodic show in much the same way as SNW. And Discovery seasons tended to have a mix of episodic and serial elements — the first half of a typical season would be episodic stories loosely tied together by a shared background element or objective, and the second half would be more heavily serialized. Prodigy‘s first season was much the same way. People always try to force episodic and serial TV into an all-or-nothing binary model, but it’s more common for shows to mix both elements, with only the ratio differing.
Also, I think episodic TV is making a comeback in recent years, so it’s no longer accurate to call it retro. I’m currently watching a couple of network procedurals that are episodic overall with loose arc elements (NBC’s The Irrational and CBS’s Sherlock Holmes-based Watson, both of which are created and produced by veterans of CBS’s previous Holmes-based series Elementary), and it’s refreshing to get stories that are complete within themselves, with the only continuity being in the character arcs. According to advance reviews, Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again is somewhat episodic with a case-of-the-week courtroom drama structure, rather than a pure serial like the original Daredevil show it’s a sequel to.
Perhaps my favorite part of this second season rewatch was that I finally got curious enough to try bagna cauda this time. It did not disappoint.
Same here. I made it for the Christmas gathering, but it turned out almost everyone there disliked anchovies. Of course you might think that would result in a plus of more for me. Except consuming too much olive oil makes my intestines scream.
This season was a massive improvement over the previous one. The things I did like about the first season (the world building and visual effects) continue to stand out, but everything else has gotten better as well.
Boxleitner is so much better as a leading man that I shudder to think how the season would have played out without him in the cast. Katsulas and Jurasik are, of course, still the best actors on the show, and both of their characters are more interesting, even if I do miss how much fun G’kar used to be (I think “The Coming of Shadows” was the last time we saw flashes of that earlier version of the character), and Furlan and Christian are both still great. I even like Vir more than I ever believed I would.
I still think the show’s got a lot of room for improvement, but I’m looking forward to watching the next season a lot more than I was looking forward to this one.
Well, there’s some mini-arcs for the humans, including the anti-conspiracy, the humans gradually learning about the Rangers, Garibaldi’s recovery mini-arc (complete with contemplating suicide), and several set-ups which pay off later (Franklin’s stims use, the Sheridan/Delenn relationship) alongside the stuff that gets dropped like Talia’s whole arc.
I never said there weren’t stories for the humans. There were just too many of them that weren’t interesting…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Isn’t that the point, though? That the stories we got about the humans didn’t develop their characters as richly as the aliens.
I would also include Zack’s involvement in the Night Watch, at least as another set-up. It’s a relatively small thing, but I think effectively conveys how the changes in the Earth administration are sold to the rank and file and how they seem harmless until they don’t.
Regarding the ‘glacial pace’ of the main arc revelations, I was fine with it. This was still 1995. In terms of serialized sci-fi, there wasn’t much else going on. To use the obvious comparison example, DS9 at that point was still 95% episodic, and they didn’t even plan the notion that the Garak/Odo “Improbable Cause” episode would lead to a part 2 (being mindful they were still in season 3). Or take Twin Peaks – it took an year and a half for them to resolve Laura’s murder. B5’s S2 pace might come across as slow now in 2025, but at the time it first aired? I think the two key episodes – “The Coming of Shadows” and “In the Shadow of Z’Ha’Dum” – came at their most natural points in the season, giving us what we needed to know. Also, the second episode, “Revelations”, also did quite a welcome hefty amount of work resolving the loose ends from season 1 in a mere 42 minutes.
While some of the “human” stories haven’t aged as gracefully as the Narn/Centauri/Minbari/Vorlon/Shadow stuff, I’d say most of it was mainly relegated to the one/off episodes with little arc connection (I’m thinking of “The Lone Dark” more than anything else). Clark’s rise to power, the Psi Corps becoming the ominous threat to the Earth Alliance and Sheridan’s own journey of figuring out he can no longer trust the entity he grew up in make for some compelling television. Also, Zack Allan getting mired in the Nightwatch – I can’t think of anything more nauseating and so closely identified with current politics than that storyline. Just perfectly executed.
But if I were to describe season 2 in a more succint way, I’d say it took the framework built in season 1 and then proceeded to tear it apart. Tragedy is the name of the story. The Narn fall all over again, and the Babylon project of trying to keep the peace is left in shambles. Everything else in the season is designed around this, including the stellar soundtrack. Plus, a near perfect conclusion that sets the stage for the darkest section of the show: seasons 3 and 4.
Season Two was a massive step up from Season One. The characters were now established, which allowed more attention to be paid to plot and story. It is a funny coincidence that both STTNG and B5 found their footing in their second season. Just like when seeing beardless Riker in TNG reruns, I was disappointed to see B5 reruns where Sinclair was still in charge (not because of the actor, who I liked, but just the quality of those Season One episodes).
And now, in Season Three, the show definitely hits its stride!
I still disagree about the CO. I did get used to Sheridan and the way he operates, but i find Sinclair’s character and Michael O’Hare’s acting much more fitting for the role. Sheridan’s role for me is Kirk compared to Sinclair’s more Picardish character. But Boxleitner’s acting is great at least, he’s a good fit for the role and he’s convincing in it.
(But i stand by my eariler statement that O’Hare was doing great whenever the script allowed him).