Text 16636, 73 rader
Skriven 2007-08-02 07:05:35 av bh (3112.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: Lost Tales: My Review (SPOILERS, obviously!)
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Gregory Weston <uce@splook.com> writes:
> The second half redeemed it for me.

Not me.

The biggest problem, for me, was how artificial the plot situation was.
Galen wants to kill this Centauri prince, and he has the ability to cause
malfunctions in the Starfuries.  So, why monkey with *Sheridan's* ship?
Why not just blow up the prince's ship?  Involving Sheridan in this way is
just begging for conspiracy theories, and a general weakening of Sheridan's
position -- some people will never believe he wasn't firing deliberately,
no matter what the Warren Commission decides.  The malfunction might make
the weapons fire, but it'd be quite a coincidence that they were pointing
in just the right direction to hit such a small target.

And if I can think of that, why didn't Sheridan?  That is, why didn't he
raise the question with Galen in the first place?

And, by the way, after they land, does Sheridan drop a hint to someone in
maintenance that there might be something wrong with the Starfury he was
using?  If so, there's the risk that the whole story will come out.

For that matter, just how exactly does the symbolism of having Sheridan
arrive on B5 in a fighter rather than a civilian transport help the goals
of the IA?

Also, this whole business of Galen's prediction of the Centauri attack is
pretty dubious.  Technomages are good at spying, and so they often have
privileged access to information about what's happening now and what happened
in the past, but they can't see the future, and people (even Centauri) are
too complicated to allow for Foundation-style psychohistoric predictions.
We know more about chaotic systems now than we did back when Asimov thought
up that idea.  So Sheridan should have been more skeptical about Galen's
prediction in the first place, and, even less believable for me, he shouldn't
have been so reliant on Galen having said there are "ways" to prevent this
future in order to understand, on his own, that there are other ways.
(In fact, the episode would have made its point about Sheridan's character
more strongly if he'd come up with the alternative plan while Galen was
insisting that his was the only way to solve the problem.)

What I did like in the episode was the acting of the young prince; you could
see the arrogance of power, the naivete of youth, and the possibility of
different futures really clearly in his behavior.

I also found painful the conversation between Lochley and Sheridan in which
we hear why hardly any of the B5 actors are in this production.  The part
about G'Kar and Franklin "beyond the rim" was touching, but the rest of the
litany of Delenn, Mollari, Garibaldi, all with excuses, just seemed
embarrassing to me.  (The layout of the front cover of the DVD case also
just rubbed in how few B5 actors signed on -- Galen is just not important
enough in the B5 hierarchy to deserve a third of the real estate.  It'd be
different if there'd been a third story revolving around him.)


I also found the plot situation in the first half somewhat artificial.
I don't mean the premise of someone being possessed, but rather this
supposed either/or choice between a secret exorcism and a publicized
non-exorcism.  Why not a publicized examination of the miracles, with
lots of scientists involved, and *then* an exorcism, thereby making the
church seem more relevant *and* doing the ethically right thing?  (I'm
talking, of course, about the situation as it first appears, not the truth
uncovered by Lochley.)

And I agree with everyone else about the hideous docking bay, the general
lack of life (i.e., extras) on the station, and missing the A and B story
structure of the real B5 episodes.

Btw, it was interesting to learn, from his comments in the Extras part of
the DVD, that Peter Woodward clearly hasn't read the Technomage trilogy,
since he talks about how little Joe told him about his character's origins
and characteristics.
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
 * Origin: Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 (1:14/400)