In Memorandum: The First Season of Babylon 5
From Midnight on the Firing Line to Chrysalis--how far we've come.
Essay by Lady Keela Shanri
I wasn't sure whether to put this on the Season One Reviews page or here, but since this section is all lonely with nothing in it yet...what the heck...
First of all, the main difference between the first season and the second, or for that matter ANY of the others, is that we have an entirely different guy in charge! Commander Jeffrey Sinclair instead of Captain John Sheridan (and notice: the guy who writes/produces/creates this thing is named Joe Michael Straczynski; and BOTH commanders have the first and last initials "J.S.". HMMMN...). I'd like to take a moment here to write a bit of a tribute to the good Commander.
Many, if not most, B5 fans say that Sheridan is MUCH better than Sinclair, and good riddance to bad rubbish. I disagree. Sure, Bruce Boxleitner may be a better actor than Michael O'Hare, in general, but when HE first came on (Sheridan that is), the fans WERE complaining about him, too! They called him "Captain Smiley". They attacked him for showing too MUCH emotion while they also attacked Sinclair for showing too LITTLE. Make up your minds, people.
And, while they did eventually choose Sheridan as the "better" head guy, they were still very SHOCKED when they turned on Babylon 5 one week and the commander of the entire station was just GONE! (Well, those that were not on the Internet, anyway...)
I think both head honchos have their good points and their bad. Sheridan's will be discussed in a later essay. Here, we talk about the first season, so this space belongs to the FIRST guy, Commander Sinclair.
Sinclair was, in general, a bit too quiet. But I wouldn't call his style of acting "wooden", more like...subtle. A lift of the eyebrows or a wise-aleck smirk instead of a huge grin, out-loud laugh, or yell. A slight lowering of the voice when he gets mad, instead of screaming (although he DID yell every now and then). And he had some great moments--suddenly just changing from "The Commander" to "one of the guys" when he wanted to fool the guy running the nightclub in "Born to the Purple", his snotty comeback to G'Kar's threat in "Midnight on the Firing Line", his shock and amazement in "Babylon Squared", etc. Not to mention, the whole "hole in your mind" thing was a fascinating mystery.
By far his best acting was in "By Any Means Necessary", in which the poor commander had to stay up for 48 hours STRAIGHT, AND managed, somehow, to solve problems left and right with not only grace and trickiness, but also a sense of humour. Michael O'Hare did a GREAT job in this episode. He not only LOOKED as if he had been up for two whole days by the end of it, he ACTED like it, too, and I could feel myself getting weary just looking at him. And they say he's a bad actor. Ha.
Other people during the first season:
Talia: She did a decent enough acting job, but she was a little too tragic for me; she was always being sad or persectuted or having horrible memory flashbacks, etc. The ONLY moments when she was not like this was in "Born to the Purple", when she came up with that NASTY little scheme to fool Trakis, and in the ones where she was either smacking Garibaldi where it would REALLY hurt, or avoiding him altogether, in the elevator. (TALIA: I think I'll take the stairs. SINCLAIR: I think I'll join you!) She was clever and funny in those scenes--too bad they don't give Andrea Thompson a chance to be involved in comedy more often.
Delenn: The "classic" or "old-school" Delenn was a lot more angry, in-your-face, and willing to fight than the newer, "remixed" Delenn of later seasons. Witness how she just LUNGED for Garibaldi's PPG and tried to KILL the Soul Hunter in the episode of the same name--would the Delenn WE know, the one who has "bad hair days", do that? Not very likely. The very closest thing we've gotten to the old Delenn's fire since those days is the "Be somewhere ELSE" speech in the third season, but that's it.
Ivanova: Ivanova was basically herself in this season, but she started off as REALLY cold to the point of nastiness, and supposedly she originally had a fake Russian accent for the first few episodes. I must be deaf 'cos I never heard it. However, she DID do that "It's a Russian thing" absolutely TO DEATH. Thank the gods by the second season she seems to have calmed down a bit in that regard.
Garibaldi: He had HAIR here! (I'm used to seeing him the really "Gari-BALDY" way that he is later). He was his usual funny-with-a-dark-past self. Garibaldi changes the least of the main characters until the fourth season, when he changes BIG time. As always, Jerry Doyle puts on a wonderfully wry and sarcastic performance. I think that he joins Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Stephen Furst, and Bill Mumy on the list of the best actors of the show.
Franklin: here, the good Doctor is a conscientious (if a bit overconfident) young man who tries to do right. Unfortunately, sometimes he FORCES his morals on others just a bit, but most of the time, he IS right, and so I tend to not hate him as much as most other fans seem to. He doesn't really have his dark side here yet, as his stim addiction hasn't been revealed...
Londo: What a GREAT character. Londo changes the MOST, I'm willing to argue, out of any of the main characters on the show. Here, we see the roly-poly ball of mirth that we all love at his funniest, wildest, loudest, and most flambouyant. A loose, high-living, decadent old nobleman--but still with a hint of something dangerous underneath...
This character ALONE is the main, if not the sole, reason that I first got hooked on the Centauri. After all, he is the very first one we ever see. If he was not such a wonderful character (and Peter Jurasik not such a wonderful actor) I'd still be thinking of the Centauri as "the guys with the weird hair" and nothing more. While he "darkens" quite a bit in later seasons, these traits are always still there, if buried. The Londo of the first season--drinking, gambling, drooling over the girls, barbrawling, and using his GENITALS to cheat at poker (!) is a far cry from the sinister schemer who "carves up the galaxy" with Mr. Morden and gets Lord Refa HORRIBLY killed for revenge in later seasons, and an even farther cry from the tortured, decrepit, self-sacrificing Emperor he will become in the future. However, this is how our dear Centauri Ambassador started, and as long as bars, cards, and scantily-clad women exist, he will enjoy them. He'll always be wearing purple in his hearts...
Vir: The Centauri attaché is a real DORK in this season. But he's STILL lovable, even at his most subservient! The chubby little round-faced sidekick runs around in a goofy layered Colonial-style blue-and-lavendar outfit, bows, rubs his hands together, walks in a slight crouch, and gibbers nervously when Londo goes into one of his drunken rages. However, even early on, he'll occasionally stand up to Londo. Vir has fire underneath his goofball wimp surface, and even here, it's evident. And as a side-note--I always found it amusing that the SWEETEST of all the Centauri has the very LONGEST and sharpest fangs! Wonderful visual irony, it just completely messes with your mind.
Lennier: He is his usual quiet but brave and loyal self here, basically subservient, and, you THINK, harmless. That is, until "The Quality of Mercy", when he suddenly does all these fancy kung-fu style moves and wipes out several people in seconds! Lennier is another character who stays pretty steady, but I LIKE him, so he can stay that way all he wants as far as I'm concerned.
And now, the Narns (notice I put them LAST, well, this is CENTAURI Prime after all, heh heh!), G'Kar and Na'Toth.
G'Kar is another character who changes a LOT over time. While Londo becomes more sinister and eventually tragic, G'Kar eventually becomes quiet and spiritual.
But there is NO trace of that here. No, sir. The season one G'Kar is just as loud, obnoxious, flambouyant, drunken, randy and rascally as Londo! In fact, for two people who claim to HATE each other as much as they do, they are an amazing amount alike! This G'Kar is more violent and threatening (he says something about having Sinclair "skinned alive" in "Midnight on the Firing Line"), and he owes right up to attacking the Centauri colony on Ragesh III once he is cornered about it. He drinks, he sings little ditties while cooking dinner, he sleeps with ANYTHING, he has little tiny lacey pink panties, he drools over women in the nightclub--are we seeing any similarities here, folks? He's a likeable character, but both he AND the original Londo are so much bigger than life it almost overwhelms the small screen. However, seeing him HERE, I can see why so many people pick G'Kar as their favourite character, or one of them. When I first started watching the show, he had already calmed down quite a bit, and I did not get the attraction.
And his assistant--Na'Toth. She replaced "Snarl-Woman", or Ko'Dath as her more proper name was, when the latter met with an unfortunate...accident...involving an airlock. Good riddance, 'cos while Ko'Dath was mildy entertaining, Na'Toth is a GREAT character. I especially liked her in "The Parliament of Dreams", where she was wonderfully sarcastic and had a downright EVIL sense of humour. "It is not MY place to speculate on how ANYTHING gets into your bed, Ambassador!" she says slyly to G'Kar when he confronts her about the "death blossom" left on his pillow. She remains one of the very few Narns I actually like.
Now for the season itself. What can be said, that has not already been said in my episode reviews? It had its good times, ("Born to the Purple", "The Parliament of Dreams", "And the Sky Full of Stars", "By Any Means Necessary", "Signs and Portents", "Eyes", "Babylon Squared", and "Chrysalis", namely) and it's bad ("Soul Hunter", "Infection", "T.K.O."). It introduced stuff, such as well, obviously, the CHARACTERS!, Psi Corps, the telepaths in general, the different races, the history of the Earth/Minbari war--and the Shadows. It had some enclosed stories, and some that were actually just setting up hints for later seasons.
All in all, for an introductory season, where you expect the storytelling to be rocky and the actors to be stiff, it had a surprising amount of quality acting and good scripts.
As first seasons go, on the average--it wasn't half bad.
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