“Learning Curve”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by David J. Eagle
Season 5, Episode 5
Production episode 506
Original air date: February 18, 1998
It was the dawn of the third age… On Minbar, we see Turval teaching new Ranger recruits how to meditate—with varying degrees of success—when Durhan arrives. He has been summoned to B5 to give Delenn—who is now Ranger One—an update on the training, and wishes Turval to accompany him. They also bring two students, Tannier and Rastenn.
On B5 in downbelow, there’s new thug in town! Trace is trying to make a name for himself as the new crime boss, and is showing his bonafides by killing someone who owes him money.
Delenn happily greets the arriving Rangers. Turval was a teacher of hers, and Durhan is one of the most respected members of the Warrior Caste. She offers the four of them a tour of the station.
Garibaldi invites both Lochley and Allan to join him for lunch. The conversation starts out pleasantly enough, talking about their Starfury shortage, but modulates into an argument between Garibaldi and Lochley (with a beleaguered Allan trying and failing to change the subject) about Lochley’s alliances during the recent civil war. Lochley storms off in a huff, encountering Sheridan in a lift. Sheridan offers to talk to Garibaldi for her, but she says she can handle it.
Allan investigates the latest murder in downbelow. Trace—who is responsible for all three murders that Allan is now investigating—decides that his next target should be Allan. His people caution against that. Lurkers killing lurkers is one thing, but you start going after the higher-ups and they’ll come down on Trace like a ton of bricks. But Trace insists that this is the way to get security in their pocket, which shows a hilarious misreading of this station’s personnel.
Delenn, Turval, and Durhan discuss the Ranger training, including the difficulties in training a pak’ma’ra to be a Ranger. Delenn makes some clever suggestions on how to use the pak’ma’ra. Turval also talks with Delenn about Cole and Lennier. The former was his finest student, but he also joined the Rangers for the wrong reasons, which is probably why did the dumb thing he did to get himself dead. The latter is training a little too hard, as if he has something to prove.
In Allan’s office, Garibaldi briefs two of Byron’s rogue telepaths on their new jobs as intelligence gatherers. After they leave, Garibaldi tries and fails to convince Allan to let him look at Lochley’s personnel file. Allan is then summoned to meet with an informant.
Said informant is actually working for Trace, luring Allan into a trap. The informant is angry when she realizes that Trace plans to kill Allan—she though they were just going to rough him up a bit. Trace then orders her killed, because that’s apparently his only move…
Unluckily for him, Tannier and Rastenn hear her screaming and run to help. That is to say, Tannier runs to help. Rastenn thinks it’s none of their business and they don’t know enough to intervene. Tannier saves the informant, but gets his ass kicked.
Delenn specifically requests of Lochley that the Rangers handle this rather than station security, citing the Rangers’ independence and the IA constitution and Sheridan’s agreement. Lochley isn’t thrilled, but acquiesces. Tannier, injuries and all, must confront his terror and get justice by confronting Trace.
On Lochley’s orders, Allan clears all security from the sector Trace is in. The criminal thinks this means his actions are having the right effect, and oh boy, is he wrong. Durhan, Turval, and Rastenn dispose of Trace’s henchthugs, while Tannier confronts Trace directly. Durhan promises Trace that, if he defeats Trace, the rest of them will let him go.
Trace isn’t thrilled at any of this, and his attempts to fight back are poor at best. He’s not much of a fighter, he prefers to have other people do his dirty work. Even wounded, Tannier doesn’t have too much trouble taking him down.
Allan then comes in and arrests Trace.
The Rangers head off, with Delenn wishing them well and asking Turval to keep an eye on Lennier for her.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! After a comment from Lochley that indicates that she knows Sheridan better than she’s let on, Delenn confronts Sheridan, who admits to knowing Lochley previously, though the specifics are given off-camera.
Never work with your ex. Lochley refuses to give Garibaldi a straight answer regarding what side she was on during the civil war, though she makes it clear that she was not okay with Sheridan’s actions.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is frustrated by his lack of knowledge of which side Lochley was on. Lochley also surprisingly doesn’t bring up the fact that a major victory for Clark’s side was Sheridan’s capture, which Garibaldi orchestrated (under Bester’s control, but I doubt that part was public knowledge).
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Turval was yet another one of Delenn’s mentors, the third we’ve met, after Draal and Dukhat.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Two of Bryon’s telepaths start working for Garibaldi as intelligence operatives. They don’t say anything during Garibaldi’s briefing for them, which prompts a snotty comment from Garibaldi, and which prompts amusement from your humble rewatcher that the show’s budget had been sufficiently cut by TNT that they had to make all the non-Byron rogue telepaths extras who have no lines and get paid much less.
We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers have gone from only being humans or Minbari to accepting any member of the IA. Accepting a pak’ma’ra has proven challenging.
Also a badly wounded Ranger fresh out of the hospital can still totally kick your ass.
Looking ahead. We are teased with the specifics of the past that Sheridan and Lochley have, which won’t be revealed to the viewer until the next episode.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. After Sheridan tells Delenn the truth about his past with Lochley, Delenn sleeps with her back to him.
Welcome aboard. Turhan Bey, last seen as the Centauri emperor in “The Coming of Shadows,” plays Turval. The other Minbari are played by Nathan Anderson (Rastenn), Brendan Ford (Tannier), and Brian McDermott (Durhan). The character of Tannier will return in the movie Legend of the Rangers, played by Todd Sandomirsky.
Dawn Comer gives Allan somebody to talk to as an unnamed security guard, while Trevor Goddard plays Trace and the delightfully named Mongo Brownlee plays Trace’s second. (Amazingly, IMDB only lists about thirty roles for him, none since 2008, which is surprising—how can you resist casting someone named Mongo Brownlee???? A name like that, you make a role for him, dagnabbit.)
Trivial matters. This was Turhan Bey’s final role. He retired from acting after this, and died in 2012 at the age of 90.
Delenn was officially made Ranger One (following Sinclair’s travelling back in time to become Valen in “War Without End, Part 2”) in “Grey 17 is Missing.” Lennier left Delenn’s service to train as a Ranger in “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari.” Cole sacrificed himself to save Ivanova in “Endgame.”
Durhan was mentioned as being the one who trained Neroon in using the pike in “Grey 17 is Missing,” and the character also appeared in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan.
N’Grath, who was established in season one as running most of the criminal activity in downbelow, is apparently no longer around, though what happened to him is not specified (beyond “hoo boy, did the CGI not work on that one…”).
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Did it ever occur to you that just because somebody doesn’t agree with you, that doesn’t mean they’re the enemy?”
“No.”
—Allan asking a simple question, and Garibaldi saying, “Bazinga!”
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “At the end, Captain, we all stand alone.” One thing that has proven to be B5 Kryptonite is whenever they show us bad guys in downbelow, because it almost never works. In this particular instance, the entire plotline is done in by an exacta of bad casting and weak writing.
Trevor Goddard is first-season-level bad as Trace. He’s about as menacing as a guy cosplaying badly as an “evil” knight at a Renaissance Festival. It doesn’t help that he’s written so poorly. In stories like this, J. Michael Straczynski tends to default to tired crime-drama clichés that have no bearing on reality whatsoever. For starters, if someone owes you money, killing them is a poor way to punish them, as that guarantees that you’ll never collect the debt, which is a shitty way to do business. And the notion that you’ve made an example of them is hilariously pointless, as decades and decades of evidence has proven that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent to crime. Trace kills three people in this episode, and plans to kill two more, and that doesn’t make him a successful crime boss, it makes him a serial killer. (Well, serial orderer, since he doesn’t actually commit the killings himself, but still.) We even have his lieutenant telling him that this is a bad strategy (said lieutenant played by the superlatively named Mongo Brownlee—seriously, best name ever), to no avail.
Sadly, it takes the wind out of the sails of that entire plotline. By the time Tannier confronts Trace, we’ve been given no reason to take Trace in the least bit seriously as a threat thanks to Goddard’s awful acting and Straczynski’s weak writing.
But hey, at least we got Mongo Brownlee…
The Minbari/Rangers stuff is fine, though it feels like we’ve been down some of these roads before, particularly with Delenn meeting up with an old teacher. And I would rather have seen Lennier’s overdoing it in training rather than be told about it second-hand. Still, the banter among Durhan, Turval, and the trainees in the teaser is delightful, and nobody ever went wrong casting Turhan Bey.
Finally, the Lochley/Garibaldi pas-de-deux continues to fall flat, mainly due to Tracy Scoggins’ stiffness, which stifles her ability to convey emotion. Her rant at Garibaldi over lunch has neither passion nor intensity, at least one of which is required to make the dialogue land. Instead, it’s just dull shouting. (Also, Garibaldi still shouldn’t have his job, but that’s rapidly becoming a dead horse of mine…)
Mongo Brownlee!
Next week: “Strange Relations.”
“henchthugs”, nice.
I remembered absolutely nothing about this episode. Probably won’t remember anything about it in a month, either.
Same. Oh well, at least Turhan Bey was OK.
I don’t remember this episode at all.
At least it’s Minbari-appropriate for Delenn to have three mentors.
Point.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was going to accuse JMS of a specific bit of creative burnout, but if Durhan was mentioned a long time ago, I may have been a little unfair. After the Centauri emperor got retconned into being named Turhan, I was highly suspicious when the two Minbari teachers are named TURval and DurHAN. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
I’m not sure if the… let’s call it the ironic smashcut is a special sin of B5 or of 90s TV in general. Going from “a place of peace” or whatever it was that Turval said to a guy being thrown across the room really made me roll my eyes. And it’s far from the first time B5 has done it. But like I said, it could be a more generic 90s thing.
It’s older than that. TV Tropes calls it the “Gilligan Cut.”
I suppose it has its place, especially in comedy. I can even see its use in a drama to lighten an otherwise very heavy script. But here it’s right at the beginning, before there’s a need to ease off the gas pedal and let the audience breathe. This one just really got to me.
Haven’t seen this episode in a long time, but I’m pretty sure that “Trace” should be “Tannier” in the sentence “Durhan promises Trace that, if he defeats
TraceTannier, the rest of them will let him go.”Last week, I mentioned that when I was the Editor of The Prydonian Renegade, I selected “A View From The Gallery” as Worst Episode of Season Five. I selected this episode as Runner-Up stating that Trace was pure cardboard as a villain.
I agree with Keith in describing Trace as a First Season bad guy (and I was thinking of Tristian Rogers from “The War Prayer”).
To make matters worse, I even kept thinking of the bad guys from 1970s cop shows (and I kept defaulting to Hawaii Five-O) where some clown arrives in town and thinks he will run everything everywhere from now on and no one will get in his way. Of course, at the end he loses everything and ends up either in jail or killed. JMS must have had the TV on to one of these shows when writing this episode.
And to make things ridiculously worse, it wasn’t the hero/series lead who took out the main bad guy, it was some injured trainee/rookie. How pathetic.
As I have mentioned so many times, JMS needed a real script editor or farm out some episodes and this clearly this was one of them.
And while Trevor Goddard was terrible in this episode, he was very popular when he recurred on JAG.
JMS worked on cheesy cop shows, like Jake and The Fat Man. He also was the original supervising producer for Walker, Texas Ranger before he left to do B5.
I think it speaks volumes that JMS himself would prefer that every copy of this episode would disappear into the void, never to return. Not an exact quote, but I don’t have the script books with me at the moment. But that’s the gist of it.
But hey, when the guy who wrote it says it stinks, that’s saying something.
I like parts of it, but man, if this is what the Rangers consider the “application of terror”, what else doesn’t live up to the name? I didn’t buy it when I first saw the episode back in 1998, and I buy it even less now, several times later. It’s too bad, because the whole Ranger situation begs for a more careful look at exactly how the jurisdiction between the Rangers and the local authorities might actually work. “The Rangers get to do whatever they damn well please” is not really a workable operating model. But the lines seem to shift with the needs of the plot.
I also really dislike Lochley’s answer to Garibaldi. Sure, he’s being a jerk about it, but her answer is unsatisfying. Plus it raises a pretty big question about what kind of consequences came to those who followed Clark’s illegal orders. She never says she did (and, to be fair, hints strongly that she didn’t), but leaving it wide open is a bad look. How exactly did she apply those three words of “loyalty, duty, and honor” in that situation? Because that says a lot more than her invocation of the words on their own. I’m sure a lot of people who fought for Clark would say the same, which makes the applause at the end of the scene a little sketchy.
My thing is, it would have been just as easy for her to say everything she did and point out clearly that she stood down, if that’s what her decision was. It would have undercut Garibaldi just as much and also underscored that she understood Clark was out of line. As it stands, this is presented as the final word on the matter, as it never comes up again. But it leaves a lot unsaid.
Of course, if there were trials taking place on Earth for those who followed Clark’s illegal orders, and Lochley wasn’t involved in those trials, then Garibaldi would already know the answer and wouldn’t have to ask the question…
Delenn did personally save the station two years ago, besides being married to the ISA President who is also the previous station commander. Security on a random world is much less likely to cooperate, regardless of what the expectations may be, and we see that happen later in S5.
It is fair to complain that there’s no trials of Earthforce personnel or even members of Clark’s government that get mentioned in S5, but it is also, unfortunately, very realistic. The show takes it a little for granted—Mr. Wells even shows up again in Crusade without a long conversation about trials, and he was high up in Nigjtwatch—and the nuanced take we’d expect here leans too far into “plenty of Earthforce personnel did nothing wrong” territory. OTOH, if you removed everyone who supported the Clark regime in largely passive ways from Earthforce and retained only those who refused orders or joined Sheridan, that’s a handful of ships and Earth’s defense grid is gone.
Disobeying illegal orders may be a requirement, but that doesn’t make it easy to do, especially under a repressive regime. Did any Russian soldier refuse orders to attack Ukraine? Or any American soldier refuse to bomb or sail as part of an illegal “military exercise”? “Endgame” suggests that while Clark’s people may mostly be removed, it’s the same senators who allowed him to exercise unchecked power who are in charge now, and they have strong disincentive to prosecute.
It’d be a better S5 plotline than the telepaths, but it’s harder to set on the station, involves a lot more new speaking parts that TNT money can’t afford, and would mostly focus on characters we’ve never met unless the focus is on Lochley. Making her a war criminal instead of (or in addition to) her connection with Sheridan would certainly have been a bold move. That probably wouldn’t square with JMS using her to indirectly warn Jerry Doyle about his alchoholism, though.
While I understand your point about Delenn and why she might get some leeway, that lack of clarity on the jurisdiction between the IA and Lochley’s command of B5 is going to be a bit of an issue going forward. It feels like the line is drawn wherever it’s useful for the plot.
When it comes to Lochley, I guess I’m just thinking that this could (and should) have been a longer discussion about the state of play on Earth and within EarthForce. After spending so much time on Earth’s liberation, there is precious little follow-through in the fifth season, which is weird. Even some exposition from Lochley and/or Sheridan about it would have been plenty. But it’s just dropped.
I don’t think Sheridan would have recommended an actual war criminal to the command of B5, of course. But playing around the edges of the deeper discussion of what happens after a fascist regime is toppled is a bit unsatisfying for me.
I think the idea was that it wasn’t about inflicting terror on the enemy, but about Tannier overcoming his own terror, and Delenn’s earlier ominous intonations about terror were red herrings. But in that case, calling it an “appication of terror” doesn’t really work.
If you were on GEnie or one of the other boards JMS was posting on in the 90s, you would have seen how he would always claim how great every script was, as if every scene, every spoken line was pure golden perfection. And everyone bought it up because JMS was on practically every day, responding to everyone’s posts.
Sadly, the final product is too often very different from the hype. And only then does JMS admit the problems.
Now if this was a First Season episode, this might have been acceptable. But now that we are in Fifth Season, it is not. JMS (and especially veteran director David Eagle) should have been able to see the problems with episodes like this early and tried to correct them. But this did not happen. Believing in one’s own hype and abilities doesn’t always work.
Any examples of a similiarly online showrunner openly trashing his own show online while it’s in production? Because that sounds like a really good way to have your show canceled, or to get kicked out as showrunner while the show continues.
I mean, it’s fair to call out JMS for his sometimes grandiose self-delusions, although my personal response to that given the context of his autobiography is “he has something of his father in him, but this is probably the least bad part to have.” But “I have ten more episodes to produce, just spent $650,000 on an episode that didn’t work out quite as a hoped, and thought a few performances were off, so let’s go online and come clean before the epsiode airs” is just a really weird and stupid thing to do.
JMS does similar things, certainly: ending his animation career by exposing the ways consultants and censors spoiled The Real Ghostbusters, or all the principled resignations. And he was willing to badmouth George RR Martin in Becoming Superman which probably won’t help him work with HBO in the future. But he doesn’t bad mouth in real time; even the behind-the-scenes for Crusade he kept talking up the show while it was on.
JMS describes Jake and the Fatman as “He can’t act, he can’t walk, together they fight crime” but he didn’t do that while working on the show. (He also describes himself then as “a pompous ass.” See Becoming Superman 296-7.)
Genie may have been different, but my experience of B5 fan communities at the time was that they were more tolerant of criticism or departures from groupthink than, say, Star Wars fans now (just try bringing up an opinion about The Last Jedi online and someone will still be very angry). But fans are fans. Here I am defending JMS’ behavior online decades after the fact (because I think the accusation unfair and overstated). And he was willing to criticize: look at the Lurker’s Guide for Grey 17 is Missing and he’s critical of aspects he thinks doesn’t work, after the episode airs but during the season.
When did his gripes about Jeremiah become public? I honestly don’t remember, but wasn’t it before the second season aired?
I remember those GEnie days. I wasn’t in the B5 boards much after the early first season because I was chased away for daring to say anything negative about the show, which was not tolerated.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This does feel like a first season episode. An above average one if your first season is like TNG. Forgettable in the details but with some nice hints for later (surely the “application of terror” is going to lead to something really cool).
Yeah, I was around back then. Mostly in the newsgroups but sometimes in the GEnie boards, though I couldn’t tell you at this point what name it would have been under.
Quoth Keith:
Because “Mongo just pawn in game of life.”
Sorry, but I just keep think of Blazing Saddles with the classic lines “Candygram for Mongo” and “Mongo is more of a what”
Lochley’s “but the constitution” is pretty weak when Clarke’s regime had already torn it up. Rather than a principled stance it sounds like she wanted someone else to make the hard decisions so she could keep her hands clean.
Trace’s plan to murder his way into control of downbelow was very stupid though I’m a little concerned that I assumed Sheridan or Garibaldi would arrange an accident if they couldn’t get him legally. I guess it’s that Garibaldi is a bad cop and Sheridan is a soldier. It seems they like due process well enough but don’t take it as gospel. (It helps that they are protagonists)
So can you like the idea of a character but still hate the acting? That’s what I get with Lochley. I love the idea and when her actions are described in the abstract, ishe sounds like a good character. But when you actually watch her….ugh.
People often blame season 5’s shortcomings on the Byron telepath arc, but this episode is just as indicative of the quality drop in the first half.
The idea of doing a Ranger-centric episode is an interesting one (which would be further explored in the 2002 TV movie), And it provides us a springboard for future Lennier-focused episodes as we’ll see later in the season. But what we end up getting here? Sigh…
Yeah, Trace is a bad cardboard character coming out of some dreadful C-level crime story. But his predictable clichéd impractical behavior is only part of the problem.
The big issue with the episode lies with the Rangers and their supposed jurisdiction. It is really uncomfortable to see a paramilitary organization imposing its own brand of justice without any kind of legal safety checks. And given the Interstellar Alliance was born out of a need to have ways to combat fascist empires like the Earth Alliance during the Clark era and the Centauri’s multi-pronged aggression, it’s deeply troubling to see the fighting force that helped end the Shadow War be deployed like this.
In the 1990s, I didn’t see it quite like that. It read more as a junior high-esque tale of standing up to your bully. But in the near three decades since, I’ve come to see it differently. And the script is fully aware of it, given Lochley’s rightful critical objection to the whole thing.
Trace himself I actually get a few laughs out of. He’s such a walking talking cliché, it almost feels like “Spock’s Brain” at times – which the recap and review here really reinforces. Shockingly bad, but in a fun way.
And for what it’s worth, Turval is a memorable character, thanks in no small part to Turhan Bey. And I really like Zack’s question to Garibaldi. Democracy is about accepting and living with the small differences. And of course Garibaldi of all people would respond the way he did.
JMS claimed dropping one day of production didn’t really hurt the show, but it obviously meant fewer takes and less directorial assistance for performances. The established cast had everything down, but guest performers, Atkin Downes, and Scoggins very obviously needed help they weren’t getting (whereas on S1 they had the time, but at least Richard Compton had no interest in the performances and several other directors may have been about as bad).
JMS worsened the situation, too, by splitting characters off where one or two regulars would be playing against new or guest cast instead of all old hands. That’s worst in the telepath subplot because Byron is almost always there and only Lyta of the established cast can stand in for the telepath side. If Christian has still been on the show he might have gotten away with it, but asking Tallman and new castmembers to carry most of the plot just doesn’t work. Witness how much things improve when old hand Walter Koenig shows up and the others have to try to match his performance.
The Centauri Prime subplot, OTOH, is our mainstay performers and alien speaking role actors with experience. Far fewer dodgy performances.
Compton’s unfocused approach to performances is rather ironic, considering he began as an actor before moving to directing, even playing a one-time guest engineer on Star Trek in the 60s.
Yeah, as much as JMS claims they were perfectly fine with the accelerated schedule, the evidence speaks strongly to the contrary. Because at the same time, he cites the time pressure on the scripts for some of the mistakes that he made. And that’s just on his end; there are a thousand other areas where the seams show because they just don’t have the time to address them.
One thing for sure. Despite what a lot of people like to say about tight budgets inspiring creative decisions with great end results, the truth is 90% of the time, having a smaller budget and less time to film usually translates to a subpar production. Not having the time or money for that extra rewrite or extra take is usually bad. Even Berman-era Star Trek, with 8 days to shoot each episode, still ended up delivering the occasional dud. Six days to do a full episode is a case of a network begging for bad results.
Well, sure. As with anything else, what matters isn’t what you have to work with, but how well you use it. A tight budget can inspire innovative ideas and strong storytelling if handled with skill, but the most skillfully done things are always in the minority.
N’Grath was a practical creature effect, not CGI, though it’s true that the character was dropped because JMS was unsatisified with how the effect turned out. The N’Grath puppet was reused in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a mantis demon whose human guise was played by another B5 veteran, Musetta Vander. (Another “best name ever” nominee.)
This was a weak one. Trace’s villainy was indeed an unconvincing threat since he was so obviously out of his depth, but I found the Ranger customs equally unconvincing. Seriously, the custom requires someone who’s barely able to stand to confront the person who nearly killed them? That would surely end in their death something like 90% of the time. As Tannier staggered down the corridor toward the confrontation, I was saying to the screen, “That’s a stupid custom!”
I thought Lochley did say clearly that she wasn’t on Sheridan and Garibaldi’s side, and that she obeyed her superiors’ orders, which means she was effectively on Clark’s side. And the show is repeating the same premise I’ve questioned before, that Sheridan was the one whose actions were unconstitutional or treasonous. Clark came to power through assassination and issued all sorts of illegal orders, so surely his side was the unconstitutional and treasonous one.
This is the first time I’ve started to see Keith’s point about Tracy Scoggins. I don’t think she’s that bad in general, but she wasn’t particularly good when called on to express strong emotion or give a big speech.
Does the show say Sheridan was treasonous, or just characters on the show? Because if anything I’d expect more friction between Earthforce and the ISA President than we get.
See my post about the production losing a day in the context of Scoggins. I think that, in the opposite of being given direction, she’s defaulting to “military leader on duty” in ways that S1 Christian defaults with Ivanova, though in S1 she had “Russian, pessimistic, Jewish” to grab onto where what Scoggins gets is mostly unhelpful (married briefly to Sheridan is not going to help her relax into the role). Scoggins auditioned going at Doyle-as-Garibaldi and was cast for that, which reinforced a somewhat one-note performance.
She improves after “Day of the Dead” for obvious reasons, and I think she’s better in the spin off appearances.
Characters both here and in the season 4 finale suggest that Sheridan was the one who violated the constitution by going against Clark, and nobody challenges them on that interpretation, implying that it’s supposed to be correct.
And we’re also supposed to believe that all those Rangers standing around would have just let Tannier get beaten to death if he wasn’t able to handle Trace on his own, in his weakened state? Bizarre.
Stay, stay, Powerless Rangers.
It wouldn’t have done anything about the silliness of killing people who owe you money, but every time they have a Downbelow villain, I wish they’d kept that giant grasshopper crime boss from the first season.
Hmmm… If there are Minbari named Lennier and Tannier, it implies the possibility of Minbari named Pannier, Cannier, Sunnier, Skinnier, and Funnier.
That just begs for a musician named Tinnier.
I commented about the season premiere that it felt more like a first season episode. I’m beginning to wonder if the entirety of season five is going to feel the same way. Perhaps it’s just the consequence of already having wrapped up the show’s two main story arcs (the Shadow War and the Earth civil war), but none of this feels particularly consequential, which would be fine if I had any reason to believe it was eventually going somewhere. That they filmed the series finale before this season went into production doesn’t fill me with confidence.
As for Lochley’s speech, I had less of an issue with how she delivered it than I had with its contents, which I was obviously supposed to approve of, since everyone broke into applause when she was finished. I was a bit confused by how the episode ended, thinking I might have missed a big reveal about the particulars of her past with Sheridan, but apparently they just decided not to tell me yet. It seems clear that they know one another more than they’re letting on, which is odd, since they didn’t act like they knew one another in earlier episodes, even when they were alone. It also makes it even weirder that he doesn’t care what side of the war she was on.
The problem with Season Five is that JMS had to start from scratch when all of his planned stories concluded at the end of Season Four. So he had to come up with new storylines and new characters.
But that leads into the other problem in that JMS did not have a writer’s room where everyone could throw out and share ideas, take the best and form an outline for the season. Instead, the B5 writer’s room only had one member: JMS. And it shows. If only he hadn’t tried to do in Season Five what he did in Seasons Three and Four and write nearly every episode himself. He might had had some decent ideas and plots, but the final scripting was not up to par. And again, it shows.
The contents of season five are perhaps a matter of debate. There is the version of the story that JMS gives, for example, that contradicts the notion that all of season five was new material. As he tells it, the telepath arc, the resolution to the Londo/G’Kar arc (especially this), and the early struggles of the Interstellar Alliance were all in the works for season five and couldn’t be moved into the end of season four. He goes into some detail in the script books, for example, in terms of pitches being made regarding a fifth season to TNT, even as the fourth season was in production. Much of what was pitched was centered around a potential Rangers spinoff in discussion at the time (which was revamped into Crusade), so some of the proposed storylines were designed to feed into that, (Recalling that a spinoff series was already ordered and in development with TNT, along with the TV movies, so the only question was whether there would be a fifth season on top of that. JMS further claims that if the fifth season hadn’t emerged, some of that material would have been moved into the spinoff.) The point being, there are lots of places where JMS details that the storylines were in mind ahead of time. And of course, there is the story about the notecards for the fifth season being lost at Blackpool, a story that has been told pretty consistently over the years.
Of course, the counter argument is that some fans simply don’t believe any of that to be true, and that JMS is just trying to retroactively justify the storytelling and existence of the fifth season.
JMS also took his 3×5 cards mapping out S5 to a convention in the UK, where the hotel promptly threw them all in the trash. I don’t think he invented the story of rooting around in the giant bins out back looking for them (the hotel was unhelpful). The front half of S5 does seem like a mix of clearly articulated ideas and half-remembered story stubs.
Would a writer’s room have helped? Maybe: “Day of the Dead” suggests B5 now has enough lore for other writers to pick up on, as opposed to early seasons where lore created by other writers mostly disappears from the show after their episodes conclude. But JMS started S1 as an inexperienced showrunner, who in his eyes got sabotaged in S1 by director/exec producer Richard Compton, who focused on effects shots, thought doing characterization in sci-fi a waste of time, and deliberately didn’t do coverage to deny JMS control in the edits. He was ousted after S1 and JMS is a very jealous Great Maker for the remainder of the show. I’m not sure we arrive at S5 if there’s a writers room in S1. By all accounts, JMS and DiTillio got on well, but the latter felt increasingly sidelined and most of his contributions get ignored; for that matter, most of the worst S1/S2 scripts are by outside writers, so if JMS and DT together couldn’t fix their stuff, why expect anything better from a room?
TNT in S5 certainly wouldn’t have wanted to ADD an expensive writers room in S5. If the show had one they might have been shed to save costs, leaving JMS to work alone anyway.
But ultimately, I’m not sure if JMS would have been in a good place to run such a team at any point in the show’s five seasons. I’d expect at best a “Dan Harmon and Community” situation: creating production problems even if the results may be better in terms of the writing.
By all accounts, the production side of B5 ran quite well, though not without its scandals. Part of that was having scripts early in the production process which rarely underwent major revisions. From a writerly perspective, “uncritical first draft” is bad, but from a production perspective, “constant reshoots” or “half the script has been revised daily” is worse.
Not from scratch, really. As I understand it, JMS built season 5 largely from his plans for a potential sequel series, plus some leftover threads he’d pulled from the original season 4-5 plan when he compressed it to one season.
But yes, at this point he did seem to be burning out from going solo for too long.
I thought it was pretty obvious from context that Lochley is Sheridan’s ex-wife or ex-girlfriend. Why else would Delenn react that way? And when Lochley talked about meeting a second man as stubborn as she was, Sheridan didn’t ask who the first was, because implicitly it was him.
Although it bugs me that Delenn, a member of an alien civilization with different values, reacted like a stereotypical sitcom wife learning about her husband’s ex.
I appreciate the character work in Delenn — habitual teller of lies and half-truths, and keeper of secrets — being hypocritically annoyed with Sheridan that he never told her that Lochley was his ex. Once again, she demonstrates that it’s fine when she does it, but not when she’s on the receiving end. But the way it came out was very sitcom-y.
That was the impression I got. I just wasn’t sure if something had been mentioned during the episode, since it seemed like I was already supposed to know what was going on. As it happens, someone mentioned that they’d been married in a response to one of my comments, but I wasn’t sure whether or not that person was joking, since Sheridan and Lochley definitely weren’t acting like an ex-couple.
It’s revealed in the next episode, so you didn’t miss the overt explanation. All there is to this point is subtext.
I see your Mongo Brownlee, and raise you Moon Bloodgood.
Oh, yes. The only name I know of where all the vowels are double Os. And better yet, the three pairs of Os are pronounced three different ways!
” And the notion that you’ve made an example of them is hilariously pointless, as decades and decades of evidence has proven that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent to crime. ”
I’d like to see the proof that death does not deter crime, but imprisonment does. More to the point, I doubt that Trace has seen such proof, so its existence or lack of such would not affect his actions. But ideas like killing the station security chief are silly: the police and army can always out-escalate any protection racket, so it is never a good idea to confront them directly. The police might be bought. Their political superiors might be bought (or blackmaled).
The police might be effectively a criminal gang themselves.
But they can’t be threatened by Mr Tough Guy.
Murder rates are consistently higher in states that have capital punishment than in states that don’t:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates/murder-rate-of-death-penalty-states-compared-to-non-death-penalty-states
After all, if society teaches that it’s right to kill people you don’t approve of, how exactly is that supposed to make people less likely to kill?
Although I do find it odd that Keith brought up capital punishment in reference to a gangster killing to send a message. It seems like a different subject to me. After all, Trace doesn’t want to deter people from killing, he wants to incentivize them to do what he tells them. And as a gangster, of course he’d see terrorizing people with violence as the way to do that. What makes it stupid in this case is that he’s killing people who owe him money. It seems the thing to do instead would be to threaten to kill their loved ones if they don’t pay up.
“Murder rates are consistently higher in states that have capital punishment than in states that don’t”
That sounds like evidence that high murder rates cause support for the death penalty.
Which sounds like snark, but whenever someone gives correlation as evidence of causation, you should always examine the possibility the causation goes the other way. Or the correlation might be caused by a third factor: states where people are especially predisposed to lethal violence might find that support for such encourages both homicide AND support for the death penalty.
Also, America has about 15,000 homicides per year, and 25 executions. The average murderers chances of being executed is almost nil. To work, a threat should be a) likely to be carried out if you defy it, b) unlikely to be carried out if you don’t, and c) severe enough to be worse than the consequences of NOT defying it. Also there should be d) enough time to think about the threat before choosing to defying it. The death penalty fails in America on account of a) and perhaps, in the case of impulsive crimes d).
(None of which applies to Trace, of course, who presumably knows who owes him money, and can give people plenty of time to think it over.)
As an example of something that is commonly and swiftly punished by death, consider skydiving without a parachute. The death penalty is applied by natural rather than human law, but it is certainly applied reliably, and is almost completely successful in deterring people without parachutes from skydiving. If the death penalty for murder could be applied as quickly and reliably as that, it would probably have quite an effect. But it is applied so rarely it might as well not exist. America has the death penalty for being an *unpopular* murderer.
The point is that it refutes the idea that capital punishment is a deterrent. Anything else is changing the subject.
I realized decades ago that it makes no sense to think the threat of death would deter murder. People who commit murder are often career criminals or impoverished people who expect their lives to be short anyway (and maybe find their existence unpleasant enough not to fear its ending), or people who are desperate enough to take the chance, or people narcissistic and arrogant enough to assume they’ll never get caught, or people who kill in the heat of passion without stopping to consider the consequences. None of them would be deterred by the threat of being tried and executed.
I barely remembered tis episode.
I was entrely willing to give Tracy Scoggins the benefit of the doubt when this season started, but other than two scenes (one actually with Garibaldi), the doubt about her portrayal became bad certainty. I think it was obvious she was trying, but usually only reached pedestrian level.
Bright spot – Turhan Bey – always a pleasure to watch him kill any role he’s got. Otherwise, a pretty meh episode.
WARNING: I went to watch the next episode earlier this evening and discovered the series is no longer available on Roku. So, unless you own the DVDs, it’s looking like the only viewing option left is Amazon Prime (for those who subscribe). Or possibly Fandango or Apple+ (those show prices that I can’t tell means you would have to purchase episodes outside your subscription).
I find season 5 available for purchase on Prime, YouTube, and Fandango, all for the same price. You can buy the full season or individual episodes, but buying the remaining 17 episodes individually would cost about twice as much (in HD) as the full season price.