“Survivors”
Written by Marc Scott Zicree
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 11
Production episode 111
Original air date: May 4, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… President Santiago is going to visit Babylon 5, partly to deliver a new fighter wing to the station. Garibaldi is complaining about the fact that they should’ve gotten this fighter wing two years ago, and also that the Cobra Bays are being remodeled by inexperienced crews and something will probably go horribly wrong.
Just as Ivanova is congratulating the security chief on how Russian he’s sounding, he’s proven right, as there’s an explosion. A worker is blown out into space, and another—Nolan—is badly burned. Franklin treats him—he’s too out of it to answer questions. Garibaldi’s initial investigation doesn’t show any signs of sabotage, but also no ability to rule it out.
The head of Santiago’s security detail, Major Lianna Kemmer, has arrived and demands to see Sinclair immediately. Garibaldi reacts to her name, revealing to Sinclair that he was close friends with her father and knew her as a child, but hasn’t seen her in seventeen years.
There’s obvious tension between Kemmer and Garibaldi, and she demands that she be put in charge of the investigation. Garibaldi agrees, and then he angrily goes to the Zocalo and picks on a thief named Dagool, roughing him up some before Sinclair stops him. The commander confronts Garibaldi, who explains the source of the tension between him and Kemmer.
Seventeen years earlier, Garibaldi was working on Europa, which was a cesspool of corruption. Garibaldi drank in order to deal with it. His only friend was a shuttle pilot named Frank Kemmer, and Garibaldi was semi-adopted by the Kemmer family.
Because he refused to be on the take, Garibaldi made a lot of enemies and they had Frank killed and framed Garibaldi for being guilty of negligence. It just led to Garibaldi drinking more, especially after he broke the news to the Kemmer family, including Frank’s little daughter.
Said daughter is all grow’d up and has kicked Franklin out of Medlab and has Nolan revived and interrogated, against Franklin’s medical advice, as that will probably kill him—which it does, but not until Nolan fingers Garibaldi for being the saboteur. Adding insult to injury is that Kemmer’s aide, Cutter, finds detailed plans for the Cobra Bays and Centauri currency in Garibaldi’s quarters.
Garibaldi’s response to this accusation of sabotage is to assault Cutter and run away. Kemmer immediately puts out a fugitive alert. Sinclair and Ivanova—who were not present when Cutter showed off the specs and apparent bribe—cancel the alert. Sinclair accuses Kemmer of having a vendetta against Garibaldi that’s clouding her judgment. She counters that she has full authority here as the head of presidential security. Sinclair counters right back that it’s his station, thank you very much, and kicks her out of CinC. (“You are going to resist, I hope?” Ivanova says sweetly.) Sinclair admits to Ivanova that Kemmer will get the authority she needs eventually, but he’s hoping to find Garibaldi before that. To help matters, Ivanova orders a maintenance cycle on the communications array, which keeps Kemmer from contacting Earth.
Garibaldi steals some clothes and finds Mollari in the casino. Mollari denies that he set Garibaldi up, despite the Centauri currency that’s among the evidence against him. Mollari doesn’t deny that he would set Garibaldi up if he had good reason—but he doesn’t and he didn’t. In a reversal of their usual positions, Garibaldi asks Mollari for a loan, which the ambassador is amused to be able to grant, as he’s had some luck at the casino lately. Mollari also thinks that this smells of G’Kar.
For his part, G’Kar—who knew Garibaldi was coming, as his spies saw him talking to Mollari, just as Mollari’s spies have no doubt seen Garibaldi sneaking around the ambassadorial wing—also denies setting Garibaldi up. G’Kar admits to admiring the plan and wishing he’d thought of it, but he didn’t. However, the only help he can provide Garibaldi is to offer to let him live in exile in Narn space. Garibaldi refuses, as he’s not that desperate…
Garibaldi’s next stop is N’Grath, but the gangster wants nothing to do with a policeman, even a defrocked one. Then Garibaldi is accosted by Dagool, who’s brought a couple of Drazi along to pay Garibaldi back for his treatment in the Zocalo. Sinclair shows up in the nick of time to chase them off—but then Garibaldi sneaks off when Sinclair is distracted by being told that General Netter wants to speak to him.
The general makes it clear that Sinclair is to provide Kemmer with full cooperation. Sinclair acquiesces, but once again accuses Kemmer of a vendetta. He also orders Nolan’s quarters to be searched.
Garibaldi goes to a seedy dive in Downbelow, evading security and—for the first time in a long time—having a drink. But, since he’s an alcoholic, he can’t have just one drink, and after guzzling an entire bottle, he stumbles out into the corridor where Kemmer and her people stop him with ridiculous ease, as he’s swozzled (and still injured from being beaten up by Dagool and the Drazi—which is totally the name of my next band).
EarthForce One is due to arrive within the hour. Cutter volunteers to check the Cobra Bays one more time.
Welch, one of Garibaldi’s security people, reports to Kemmer what they found in Nolan’s quarters after the search Sinclair ordered: Homeguard propaganda and a bomb detonator. Garibaldi, getting more sober by the second, hypothesizes that Nolan is the saboteur, but his bomb went off prematurely, and he pointed the finger at Garibaldi as a distraction. (And possibly as revenge, as Garibaldi had written him up for damaging a shop owned by a non-human.) And Cutter’s the one who “found” the evidence in Garibaldi’s quarters and now is supposedly checking the Cobra Bay. Garibaldi convinces Kemmer to check the bay herself, which she does, taking Garibaldi at gunpoint with her just to be safe.
Before she can start the inspection, Cutter takes her out with a shock stick, but Garibaldi is able to subdue him and convince Ivanova to stop the launch of Zeta Wing. Turns out that Cutter put a whole mess of explosives all along the Cobra Bay.
Cutter is revealed to be on Homeguard’s payroll, and he’s arrested. Kemmer—who is now wearing her hair down after having it up in a severe bun through the episode—reconciles with Garibaldi.
Santiago’s visit is a great success, but Garibaldi is unhappy about the fact that he fell off the wagon.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair is not at all happy with Kemmer’s throwing her weight around, and is also convinced that Garibaldi is not the saboteur.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova isn’t all that thrilled with Kemmer, either, giving her mock-pleasant bureaucratic runarounds when denying her the use of the communications systems.
The houshold god of frustration. We get a big chunk of Garibaldi’s backstory, finding out a part of why he has such a crappy reputation. We also learn that he’s an alcoholic, and that he’d been sober for a while before this episode.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari has been blessed by Ilarus, the goddess of luck and patron saint of gamblers in the Centauri religion, which is why he’s able to float a loan to Garibaldi. Mollari says that he has a somewhat contentious relationship with that particular goddess…
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar is first seen complaining about the seating arrangements for Santiago’s visit, then later does the mustache-twirling bad-guy thing with Garibaldi…
Welcome aboard. Elaine Thomas plays Kemmer (with Robin Wake playing the little-kid version of Kemmer in Garibaldi’s hallucination/recollection), Tom Donaldson plays Cutter, and Rod Perry plays Netter. Maggie Egan returns as the ISN reporter from “Midnight on the Firing Line”—she’ll continue in that role through all five seasons, and also in Crusade.
Trivial matters. The original title of this episode was “A Knife in the Shadows,” which, unlike the one they used, actually fits the story….
Homeguard was last seen in “The War Prayer.” Both Mollari and G’Kar reference the Narn invasion of Ragesh III in “Midnight on the Firing Line.”
Garibaldi’s time on Europa is fleshed out in the seventh issue of the Babylon 5 comic book DC published in 1995, in a story by Tim DeHaas & John Ridgway, based on an outline by J. Michael Straczynski.
When we first met Mollari in “The Gathering,” he was in the casino trying to borrow money from Garibaldi. That their positions are now reversed is commented on by the Centauri ambassador.
General Netter is named after executive producer Douglas Netter.
This is Marc Scott Zicree’s only writing credit for B5. Most recently, Zicree is the co-creator of Space Command, a crowdfunded science fiction series that features (among others) B5 stars Mira Furlan, Bill Mumy, and Bruce Boxleitner. Amusingly, the main character of Space Command also has the family name of Kemmer, which was also the name of the lead actor in the 1950s TV series Space Patrol.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Mr. Garibaldi! Do you really think that I would do such a thing to you—my good and dear friend?”
“In a minute.”
“You’re right. But I didn’t.”
—Mollari and Garibaldi.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.” As a vehicle of exposition and backstory regarding the character of Michael Garibaldi, this is excellent. The pain of his relationship with the Kemmer family and the character’s vicious struggle with alcoholism are very well portrayed by scripter Marc Scott Zicree (with uncredited rewrites by show creator J. Michael Straczynski) and by actor Jerry Doyle.
Unfortunately, that’s the only way the episode is even a little good—in general as an episode of a television show, it’s tiresomely predictable, riddled with clichés, and really badly acted.
B5’s hit-and-miss casting has two misses this time, as Elaine Thomas is spectacularly wooden as Kemmer. She only has one bland facial expression, and she has none of the bitterness or ruthlessness that the script insists she has. Her fatal interrogation of Nolan has no bite to it due to Thomas’ shortcomings. And in the end, they have to change her hair to show that she’s softened because the actor herself doing it has proven to be beyond her means.
As for Tom Donaldson as Cutter, he’s practically wearing a sign on his forehead that says “I’m the secret bad guy.” Indeed, Cutter’s status as the real saboteur is one hundred percent inevitable, as he’s the only character with a speaking part who it could be, thus draining all suspense from the storyline.
I’ve never had much patience with stories where a character becomes a fugitive in order to clear their name, because the very act of becoming a fugitive makes that impossible. I mean, sure, Garibaldi is cleared of sabotage, but he’s now guilty of resisting arrest, assaulting both military personnel and civilians, theft (of the clothes he’s wearing), and disobeying orders from his commanding officer. But—as with Franklin last week—Doyle’s in the opening credits, so he suffers no consequences. (Well, except for the consequences of drinking again, something the show will, to its credit, continue to address.)
And then we have my biggest problem with the episode, which is a problem I had with the entire series: we never even see Santiago. Santiago is never seen in the flesh, and his vice-president and successor Clark is only seen briefly on screens in three episodes, finally seen in the flesh very briefly in his fourth and final appearance. These are two incredibly important characters to the storyline, yet they have no kind of significant presence in the foreground, which severely dilutes their impact (especially Clark’s, but Santiago’s, too).
Next week: “By Any Means Necessary.”
They do eventually deal with Garibaldi’s alcoholism, but as I recall, his falling off of the wagon in this episode is more-or-less forgotten by the next one.
I can’t say I much like this one; besides the problem with the guest actors, it feels like a script from a police procedural that’s only been perfunctorily rewritten to be set on a space station. Maybe that’s my problem with Garibaldi (and Franklin too, to a lesser extent): He feels like a character from a different genre entirely.
As for Tom Donaldson as Cutter, he’s practically wearing a sign on his forehead that says “I’m the secret bad guy.”
The fact that he responded to an order with, “My pleasure,” straight up outed him as evil.
And then we have my biggest problem with the episode, which is a problem I had with the entire series: we never even see Santiago.
IIRC there had been plans to have Douglas Netter appear in front of the camera for this episode, but it got nixed (don’t recall why, though).
This is also the first of seven appearances by David L. Crowley as Lou Welch (the next will be in “Eyes”). The character also crops up in Peter David’s Legions of Fire trilogy, where he comes to a bad end.
As for the positives, I loved how Ivanova (and Sinclair) handled Kemmer. The episode was super predictable, but at least entertaining…and yeah, Elaine Thomas and Tom Donaldson were absurdly terrible in their roles. Garibaldi was great though, I also liked the ambassadors as usual, so all in all, it wasn’t totally terrible fortunately. :D
(and to be honest, my alternative expectation was that if the bad guy is not Cutter, then they’ll just pull in some random guy again for the part of the evil saboteur as they had done before.)
Yeah, it’s one big ball of clichés, but parts of it are executed fairly well. Mostly that’s Jerry Doyle. He had his own struggles with alcohol, but I don’t know if any of that came before or not. He was a stockbroker for several years, so he had to have at least seen a fair amount of substance abuse whether or not it was first-hand experience.
Elaine Thomas, on the other hand, is not good. I’ll accept her wooden, stone-faced thing when she’s being extremely official and throwing her weight around, but the role needs more range.
As for the title, it apparently comes from the conversation between Garibaldi and Lianna at the end, where they talk about surviving and going on after their losses. It’s not great, but it’s not entirely inapplicable.
One of my more surreal convention memories is from a show in Indianapolis in 2001 that both Doyle and I are guests at. My then-girlfriend and I were staying with members of her family so we were driving to and from the con.
In the bar, when he learned that we were driving, Doyle — who was VERY drunk — gave me a very lengthy, rambling lecture on the evils of drunk driving……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
On top of the general cliché of the Wrongfully Accused mystery-type storyline, and the failure to recognize that Garibaldi’s character development was far more important than the whodunnit aspect, to me the script was hamstrung by the storytelling convention (particularly for TV of that era) that pushes The Reveal as late in the final act as possible. Leaning into dramatic irony by revealing Cutter’s involvement earlier would have made for a more interesting episode. It still would have been undercut by the performances of Thomas and Donaldson, however.
I may be wrong about how current military services handle these sorts of security roles, but it has always seemed to me that Major was too junior a rank for Kemmer’s billet. It seems to be a contrivance both to set up the Sinclair/Ivanova chain-of-command machinations and to fit Garibaldi’s timeline. It seems to me that a simple fix would have been to make Kemmer a teenager at the time of her father’s death, making her old enough to have more plausibly just reached Lt. Colonel (i.e. equal with Sinclair).
Londo seemed oddly irritated & subdued for someone who just won a bunch of money, I wonder if they were trying to convey something that eventually got dropped. But at least we saw some glimpses of depths that will serve him well in later seasons.
The only really useful storylines to take from this one are the re-emergence of Homeguard as a significant threat, and Santiago’s belief in the importance of B5 and its mission. Both will pay off by the end of the season.
Certainly not the worst episode of B5, but one of the most meh and forgettable episodes. Really, whenever I rewatch B5, when I see this title I go “which one is that?”. Then when I remember the answer to that question, I tend to skip it. Good fleshing out of Garibaldi’s back story, but we continue to get that throughout the series. I few good lines, Ivanova’s I hope you resist, G’Kar’s analysis of what makes the world work and the Mollari Garibaldi back and forth. Other than that I pretty unnecessary episode.
I didn’t know about Space Command. I know Zicree’s work mostly because of his two well-known Star Trek credits, TNG’s “First Contact” and DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars”- both strong contenders for ranking among Trek’s best ever episodes, especially the latter. And yeah, B5’s “Survivors” doesn’t even come close.
I do give it a fair amount of credit for the way it puts us in Garibaldi’s shoes. The hallucination scene where he sees young Kemmer asking “Drunk again Uncle Mike?” is a heartbreaking one. That shot alone does a lot of the work in filling in Garibaldi’s troubled backstory. If only Elaine Thomas had been half as good an actor as the one who played her 10 year old self.
That aside, Jerry Doyle’s face on that hallucination scene alone more than sells Garibaldi’s guilt and shame. No wonder Garibaldi’s alcoholism is brought up again throughout the show. It’s one of the better longterm arcs.
As for the plot, I’m a bit of a sucker for these where the protagonist is framed for something he didn’t do. You get the tension out of what’s essentially a pretty unfair scenario. So, it somewhat works for me. Still, the less said about the guest star performances the better. In fact, there’s very little to differentiate Cutter from Malcolm Biggs. They’re both sniveling personalities played with little to no nuance. Straczynski’s Home Guard characters might as well be caricatures.
In retrospect, I find it ironic that both Garibaldi and Zack Allan (introduced in season 2) had similar backstories of problematic behavior in the job, and were both played by actors with substance abuse problems. I’m guessing Straczynski created Zack as a fallback option in case the show had prematurely lost Jerry Doyle.
There’s one part I disagree though. The notion that Santiago and Clark are almost never, if ever, on screen is somehow problematical. I don’t see it that way. I said this before, B5 is a show about characters in the front lines, who have to enforce orders from above while being in the thick of any given situation. Making Clark an almost faceless evil sort of reinforces the idea that the biggest atrocities come from above, from behind the scenes – stuff that would never be said out in the open. This sort of fits into a show like B5, that’s about what happens within the shadows.
I became aware of Zicree as the author of the book The Twilight Zone Companion, and for his work in 1980s animation, including He-Man (where Straczynski got his start) and The Real Ghostbusters (where JMS was the story editor). He was also a producer on the fourth season of Sliders, the first of the two seasons on The Sci-Fi Channel after FOX cancelled it, and a vast improvement over the astonishing awfulness of season 3.
And funny, I thought the “Drunk again, Uncle Mike?” insert was corny and maudlin.
Indeed, I’d forgotten he worked on He-Man. Only recently that I found out that a lot of these writers whose work I follow came from 80s/90s shows I used to watch. Case in point, I recently discovered that half of the X-Men animated series writers had already went through numerous script assignments in older Disney shows like Chip and Dale and Darkwing Duck. I tended to overlook them because most of these shows put those names in the ending credits that go by so fast we simply aren’t given enough time to read them.
That line might sound corny coming from adult Kemmer, for sure. But it sounded way more natural coming from her younger self, at least to me.
I was bothered less by Garibaldi facing no consequences than by Kemmer facing no consequences. She literally killed a guy. She was also obviously compromised by her history with Garibaldi and should have recused herself, or failing that, Sinclair should’ve demanded she be replaced with an objective investigator. The whole thing just felt deeply contrived. I mean, we’ve seen plenty of cases in the recent news where people in government have refused to recuse themselves when they should have, but that’s a symptom of rampant corruption, and Santiago’s supposed to be the good president. If nothing else, the script was way, way too forgiving of Kemmer at the end, given her outrageously unethical behavior in the first half.
I also found it odd how cursorily Garibaldi’s falling off the wagon was treated. That’s not something you just shrug off with a “don’t let it happen again.” Doesn’t he have a sponsor he can call, a meeting he can go to? He’d need help to get through this. (Although you’d think that 23rd-century medicine might have a cure for addiction.)
I agree that Thomas was poorly cast — an example of the not uncommon practice of casting an actress for beauty over talent when talent is what the role needs more. I disagree that she failed to convey bitterness, if only in that her deadpan peformance seemed to convey a hard, closed-off personality pretty well, at least until later when she played other moods in almost exactly the same way.
One notable thing is that this is the first time we actually see the stars rotating outside the observation dome windows, as they should’ve been doing all along. The motionless stars always bugged me. But while the stars are an improvement, it’s hard to see why the trajectory of someone blown out the bays on the side would somehow loop around and pass in front of the station like that. Maybe it’s supposed to be that station gravity thing they talked about the other week, but it seemed to me that the fighter bays were rotating fast enough that he’d have fallen straight outward from the station too fast for its relatively weak gravity to pull back. I mean, that’s kind of the whole idea, I think — that they’re drop bays the fighters literally fall out of under centrifugal gravity.
Incidentally, it finally occurred to me to wonder: Did JMS ever explain what the first and second ages of mankind were? And did he have to say “mankind” instead of “humankind?”
I don’t know if I necessarily agree that Santiago is straightforwardly a “good president”. My impression, particularly from the next episode, “Eyes,” and the Mars Rebellion arc later in the season is that Earthgov is already starting to degenerate into authoritarianism and plutocracy.
As an AA member I’m aware it can be really hard for people who are well known, or high up in a hierarchy like Garibaldi, to go to a regular AA meeting. In larger cities like NYC, LA, or DC there are special interest meetings for people in whatever The Business (locally) is, but Babylon 5 isn’t really a big city. And it can be really tough for someone in a position like Garibaldi to be sponsored (or for someone to sponsor them!)
I’ll take your word for it, but it’s still odd that the script didn’t even acknowledge that sponsorship was a thing that existed. It didn’t say that Garibaldi wanted to go to a meeting or talk to a sponsor but was unable to; it just ignored the existence of such coping mechanisms altogether and treated it as a given that Garibaldi’s only option was to overcome his addiction through sheer willpower. Which is not only strange but irresponsible; a story that touches on a subject affecting many of its viewers should try to let them know they’re not alone and there are ways they can get help. Treating it like a matter of willpower makes it seem like a moral failing to fall off the wagon, and that’s not helpful at all. The script should have at least acknowledged that there are ways for addicts to get help. There should’ve been a scene with Franklin talking to Garibaldi about his options for treatment/therapy, instead of just Sinclair saying “I’m here to talk if you need it.” Or, heck, they could’ve established that Sinclair had his own addiction issues and was Garibaldi’s sponsor. Given Sinclair’s lingering postwar trauma and his established addiction to danger, it would be perfectly in character.
It’s an odd omission, given that JMS said online that he’d seen generations of alcoholism in his family, and that he rewrote a lot of the script. It feels like a more naive treatment of alcoholism than it should.
By his own accounts, JMS’ family experience of alcoholism is of people who don’t want, and don’t seek, treatment.
Which doesn’t justify the way it was written, as if nobody else was aware that there were treatment options. We didn’t see Franklin talking to Garibaldi about seeking help, and Sinclair seemed to be right on board with Garibaldi in assuming it could be fixed with nothing more than Garibaldi’s willpower and Sinclair being there to listen on an informal, friendly basis. If the problem is that Garibaldi refuses treatment, show that. Show him getting offered help and rejecting it. Don’t write it as if no help exists, period.
Some of that happens later. I’m not sure I agree that it has to happen in this episode. Franklin’s comment about his BAC is a bit too glib, yes. But Franklin is also an addict. We just don’t know that yet. Anyway, friends, and even professionals, will overlook a lot before they work up the nerve to intervene. I don’t think any of this is unrealistic.
I understand you are not talking about verisimilitude, but rather the message that is conveyed to the viewer. But, for my part, I think the show actually does a good job of that in the longer term. If this episode had jumped straight into a treatment or intervention dynamics, it would have risked being “a very special episode”. I don’t think that would have been necessary or helpful.
Actually, is Franklin an addict yet? I thought that we actually see him start to take stims in the show.
He does start using them more frequently in the second season.
Fair question. He mentions using stims in one of the earlier episodes. But I don’t think there is any way to really know when that use becomes abuse or dependency.
Argh! Knew I forgot something! In my litany of complaints about the episode, I meant to mention Kemmer’s murder of Nolan, and I plum forgot. Sigh.
Thank you, Christopher, for bringing it up…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The first and second age? There’s an explanation for that in season 4 – “Into the Fire”.
Good catch on Kemmer’s actions. You’re certainly right. The episode lets her off too easily. But I’m guessing the portrayal of Earthforce officers like her, taking matters into their own hands with no consequences, is a symptom of how the Santiago administration can be very chaotic and disorganized, which leaves ample room for Clark’s eventual coup as the alliance slides far right into pure fascism (with plenty of support amongst hardline military personnel).
Even as a deep apologist for most things Babylon 5, I find it hard to give this one much time or effort. It’s just very forgettable, even if it does introduce elements that come into play later.
I like seeing more of Garibaldi’s backstory, and Doyle does a fairly good job with a prominent role in the episode. While Garibaldi’s alcoholism is an important part of his character, it feels a bit odd that he could fall off the wagon here and climb right back on without an issue, when such things are given more time and attention later.
Garibaldi’s friendship with Londo continues, something that will continue to evolve.
G’Kar’s line about the nature of the universe stands out, but I always think it comes from a different, better episode.
It’s generally important to see how far Homeguard has crept into the ranks, as it is laying the foundation for the future of what such movements will become.
I struggle to remember much about this episode even after this rewatch, so I can’t immediately think of anything else that is particularly meaningful.
Not much to add to the general discontent with the episode quality. Very cliché. My recollection is that it was late in the season before I felt like the actors and scripts aligned in quality.
As for the lack of presence of the Earth President, it really didn’t bother me that much. Certainly I would not expect any presence on station – for all B5’s importance it is far from the center of Earth internal politics. With that said, there should have been speeches and soundbites from the President on ISN regularly on the show. The lack of that is definitely a miss.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought this was horribly acted, though that may be as much about the material as it is about the caliber of the performers, because I could not bring myself to care about this episode. I did appreciate getting some backstory for Garibaldi, even if it wasn’t a particularly original backstory, but overall I found myself just struggling to stay awake. I did like the president’s ship, though.
Oh and the train on the main picture. OMG that looked terrible. It had a very meh interior design, but the computer graphics were beyond ugly, especially considering that in the other parts of the show they are at least acceptably bad. :D
The compositing of live action with CGI was relatively novel at the time. The DVD version looks really bad on a modern screen, but I don’t recall it being distracting in the original broadcasts.
But, man, that warning sign has terrible semiotics.
It does look very much better on the recently-released blurays, if you denoise them to get rid of most of the churning film grain (use a good denoiser, or you’ll lose all the detail too).
Why would you want to get rid of the film grain? That’s part of what gives film its distinctive look.
It gives me an actual literal headache in minutes, and even without that it looks horribly distracting. I did not grow up with cinema because it cost too much to visit regularly, so I have no nostalgia for its appearance and I prefer the stuff I’m looking at to look more like what my eyes show me and rather less like a snowstorm: even when I did go to the cinema, the dust floating in the air and the grain of the film was something I saw as a flaw, not something it was desirable to preserve.
Also, my visual snow, double vision, and floaters are quite bad enough as it is. I don’t need artificial visual deficits added on top!
(Also also, the compressed file size and bandwidth requirements drop by *80%* when you throw away the film grain: I wish I was exaggerating but we’re talking 6GiB/episode just to encode the bloody grain. The grain would need to be many times more valuable than everything else to make it worth that. Mind you, at least in this case it was real film grain: what really narks me is when stuff gets digitally shot with the best equipment available and then fake grain is added that I then have to spend large amounts of machine time throwing away again.)
Not sure what you mean about semiotics, but the alien scripts are puzzling. They’re not direct cryptograms for “GRIP RAIL AT ALL TIMES” (I hate it when “alien” script is just English with the font swapped out), but they’re very nearly the same 4-4-2-3-5 sequence — the middle one is 4-4-2-2-5, and the bottom one seems to be 4-4-2-3-6. Odd that it would be that way when it’s not a letter substitution. One would expect a translation in another language to have a different syntax and word lengths — for instance, if Google Translate can be trusted, it would be “Riel de agarre en todo momento” in Spanish, and in Japanese it would probably be something like “Tsuneni tesuri o nigitte kudasai.”
It’s also amusing how the English text is in a font apparently called “Stop,” which is very much like the font used for the Star Trek: The Next Generation title logo.
I mean that the sign does a terrible job of conveying any meaning. The English text is nearly unreadable because of the poor font choice. The alien script does not appear to be much clearer.
I think the intent was that the “futuristic” font they used had become commonplace in the future and would be more legible to a 23rd-century person than it would be to us — like how we might have difficulty reading a 17th-century font where “s” looks like “f” or whatever, but it would’ve been perfectly legible to people from its own time.
Although the problem with that idea is that the font “Stop” was actually released in 1970:
http://www.tipoteca.it/en/evento/memorable-stop/
“And then we have my biggest problem with the episode, which is a problem I had with the entire series: we never even see Santiago.”
One of the original premises for The West Wing (one of the greatest shows of all time) was that it was supposed to be about the staff at The West Wing. It was not supposed to feature the president at all. Then NBC said “Where’s The President?” Originally Martin Sheen was not supposed to be full time. But then they saw his performance in the pilot, made him full time and the rest is television history.
I bring this up because Keith’s comment made me think about this situation. How The West Wing was almost without Martin Sheen as the great Josiah Bartlett and television would have been infinitely poorer for it. And one can definitely say the same for Babylon 5 without both Santiago and Clark. For example, imagine if Sheridan had regular calls with Clark and developed a relationship with him and how that would affect the rebellion against him.
I think I read somewhere that they wanted Clark to be anonymous because they wanted him to just represent fascism in general and not as a real antagnoist.
Babylon 5 was infinitely poorer for not giving screen time to Santiago and Clark? One can argue to seeing more of them in the first season to give the events to come more impact, but beyond that, I feel like the show is already pretty stuffed.
A decent but largely forgettable episode. B5 didn’t shy away from substance abuse; one of the reasons it felt more real than a lot of other SF shows.
When this first aired I was less than 6 months sober, having previously been sober for 3 1/2 years, and I really liked it. 30 years later (still sober) I really like Garibaldi, but the rest is, well, not bad. Not great, but not bad.
Many times I’ve seen someone go off the wagon for a night without obvious consequences, but the people around them are keeping an eye on them and kind of expecting it to happen again and acting accordingly.
hmm enjoyed this more more than you did as per usual I suppose. It was a vehicle for background information and did that job well. Nothing else it needed to do.
Elaine Thomas is spectacularly wooden as Kemmer. She only has one bland facial expression…
And it’s Dull Surprise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTj4rd21A5Y
We learn that Garibaldi’s middle name is Alfredo. Which must mean he’s a saucy biscuit.
And it’s nice to know that’s he a cheerful drunk rather than a mean drunk.
Regarding fugitives trying to prove their own innocence stories (and only tangentially related), the film version of The Fugitive with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones had Andreas Katsulas as the One-Armed Man.
When I sat down to rewatch this episode, I realized that I remembered essentially nothing about it. That’s the first time this has happened in this rewatch and I guess it says something. The episode isn’t bad enough to be memorable as bad (e.g. Infection). It’s significant only as a vehicle to advance Garibaldi’s character arc, but it just doesn’t make much of an impression.
On rewatch, I found the sequence with N’grath and the subsequent fight with Dagool particular clumsy. I also agree with Keith that the whole premise of Garibaldi assaulting an officer and going on the run when confronted with fake evidence against him to be a dumb trope that would have been better avoided.
On the other hand, I don’t see G’Kar’s offer as particularly moustache-twirling. It’s mercenary, to be sure, but I don’t think it is intended to inflict harm or pain.
I think the contrast between Londo’s and G’Kar;s reactions is interesting and arguably one of the better parts of the episode. Londo basically offers to reciprocate the kind of help he himself has looked for in the past: short term material support that doesn’t really change or solve anything. Actually, it just makes things worse. I pretty much had a yell-at-the-TV moment when he offered to give Garibaldi more Centauri ducats and Garibaldi didn’t even suggest maybe a different currency would be preferable.
G’Kar, on the other hand, looks for a way to change the situation that, while transactional, could be mutually beneficial. I think the script goes too far in having him suggest that Garibaldi become a spy on behalf of the Narn regime, but offering to shelter him in exchange for services rendered doesn’t strike me as inherently evil or villainous. The moustache-twirling response would have been to try to force Garibaldi into accepting his offer by threatening to turn him in. He doesn’t do that.
That is, Londo reacts with empathy, but not much practicality. G’Kar is pragmatic. He’s not unkind, but he’s not willing to take a risk on Garibaldi’s behalf unless he can get something out of it.
I like the scene in the bar. In retrospect, the one thing I did remember from the episode was “Don’t want hat? Take bottle.” and the look on Jerry Doyle’s face as he stares that the bottle before opening it. That’s the high point of the episode, for me.
The turn-around and resolution is too easy and too quick. But, as others have noted, that’s fairly typical of TV story-telling at that time.
Overall, meh. Skip this one and jump to By Any Means Necessary.
I think the contrast between Londo’s and G’Kar;s reactions is interesting and arguably one of the better parts of the episode. Londo basically offers to reciprocate the kind of help he himself has looked for in the past: short term material support that doesn’t really change or solve anything. Actually, it just makes things worse. I pretty much had a yell-at-the-TV moment when he offered to give Garibaldi more Centauri ducats and Garibaldi didn’t even suggest maybe a different currency would be preferable.
That’s a really interesting point. Also: I won’t spoil what’s coming next, but it’s interesting to think what might have happened in the timeline where Garabaldi feels his goose is cooked and just defects to the Narn. G’Kar’s musings that they could use somebody like him will turn out to be pretty accurate.
We do see an image of Santiago, very briefly, during the election in episode 1 “Midnight on the Firing Line.” The image is of Doug Netter, the show’s producer. Still true that we never see him in the flesh.
So are we having a one day delay or a one week delay for the “By Any Means Necessary” entry?
Hey folks! I was busy at the Origins Game Fair this past weekend, so I ran late with the rewatch of “By Any Means Necessary.” But it’s written and ready to go, finally, so it should go live this week some time.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode is the last appearance of the N’Grath puppet in B5, but I just learned that it was recycled 3 years later as the She-Mantis in “Teacher’s Pet,” the fourth episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (The She-Mantis’s human form was played by Musetta Vander, who will appear in B5: “Between the Darkness and the Light” in season 4.)
https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/She-Mantis
Incidentally, it looks like the episodes of this rewatch are not getting indexed in Reactor’s search results. Trying to search for “Babylon 5 Rewatch” only produces hits for other rewatches or other B5-related articles.