| |
|
OK, the reasons why I believe B5 started going downhill when the Shadow War ended:
1)Garibaldi. It would have been quite a good arc if we were under the impression that everything he did in s4 was of his own free will. But because we knew that the Psi-Corps had brainwashed him it was extremely irritating. Combined with some extremely bad plotting by JMS (the scene where Sheridan goes to see Garibaldi to try and patch things up, and wouldn't you know it, at the same time an alien who thinks Sheridan is the Messiah turns up, how convenient! Or that, even though Garibaldi and Sheridan hate each others guts Sheridan decides in the middle of a war to sneak off to Mars to go with him to find his Dad. Alone. Delegate Rangers to it you big arse!) it's really bad.
JMS humour. You're not amusing. Allright, the Zathras/Ivanova scene is funny, but that's because the two actors were so brilliant, but the breakfast scene where Sheridan keeps chuckling to himself? Bad. Or, when you have three people trying to infiltrate the most secret and well-guarded facility on Mars, at a tense time that will decide whether they all live or die in the next 24 hours, they stop for a comedy discussion about who is drinking the water too fast. Come on!
The fact that the White Star fleet has this sudden power-down thing where they're suddenly far less super once they aren't fighting Vorlons and Shadows any more. I hear that an episode for the proposed-but-never-happened Season 6 had half the White Star fleet get taken out by a kid with a conker on a length of string.
Marcus/Ivanova. Now, I don't mind Marcus dying as such, even though I personally thought he was a great character. He would have been superfluous in Season 5 and it would have set Ivanova up nicely if CC had stayed on. What I object to is the whole 'it becoming blatantly obvious to Ivanova that Marcus fancies her ten minutes before she gets a girder in the face' and then Lennier's sudden tactlessness in more or less telling Marcus that something could be done to save her. Now, Marcus leaves in a White Star while everyone is at Mars. The jammers stopping people from broadcasting extend as far as Mars. So no-one could have gone outside the jamming range and sent a warning to B5, then caught up with the others? Or that someone at Earthdome couldn't have given them the frequencies that would have worked when they save the world? Or that it takes them a very short time to reach Earth from Mars to attack Clark but a strangely long time for Franklin to fly a White Star out past the jammers on his way to try and stop Marcus?
Finally, the graphics. Each year the graphics got better, but not this year. Take the episode with the Drakh. The White Stars are supposed to be swooping along the larger ship then quickly looping the loop to attack. Instead we have slow lazy motion from a unispired camera angle. Ivanova's battle with the Earth Destroyers made of Shadow technology, the destroyers look hardly any different and again, uninspired shots.
There are good things about season 4. The battle for Proxima, when Babylon 5 has nameless people dying somewhere far off it never works, when you get to know them, even slightly, it helps. When we see the captains of the ships talking amongst themselves it humanises the conflict. 'Intersections in Real Time' is really good. 'Deconstruction' I'm less keen on, because I don't like what it has to say about people, even if I have to admit it's probably true. As a piece of drama it's brilliant, the scenes with the monks is wonderful. |
|
|
