B5: A Day in the Strife

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I'm a big fan of "Typical day in <Setting>" science fiction TV episodes, and this one is no exception. With Sheridan's initial gambit with the loud-talker guy, I took it as a sign of just how irritated and fed up he was with the whole process.

[Black_Rose3639]

With Sheridan's initial gambit with the loud-talker guy, I took it as a sign of just how irritated and fed up he was with the whole process.

So essentially, Sheridan was spicing up the day for himself?

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

More like he had reached his personal breaking point.

[CrypticMirror]

I like that JMS found a good way to handle Furst's absences, it would have been so easy to just stop writing scenes and have Londo mention Vir offhand now and then as if he was still there in the background. JMS went the extra mile and had Vir do something that advanced both his and Londo's character in the process. Spending time alone on Minbar gave Vir a level of confidence that he never had, and made his eventual standing up to and for Londo all the more believable. Londo wanting Vir away from him because he knew he was stepping fully into Darkness and Danger showed that there was still a spark of decency and kindness in Londo, not to mention shame and acknowledgment, which kept us invested in Londo and made us root for his redemption.

[Kinky Vorlon]

Which culminates in season 5 when he loses his temper with a spy and becomes the new centauri ambassador.

[Fianna]

The probe plot here feels like a Star Trek plot awkwardly dumped into Babylon 5.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Fianna, I never thought about it that way, but dang you've got a good point there.

[Beastro]

The probe plot here feels like a Star Trek plot awkwardly dumped into Babylon 5.

The more I think about it the less it makes sense in the wider picture and sounds like a typical novel Sci-Fi idea that has limited practical merit beyond possibly going into what alien logic would produce such a device.

As you say, a typical Trek idea.

I just don't see one device like that doing major harm to anyone but a nation largely centered around its homeworld, which isn't the big threats the device was made to eliminate. I mean, what we see in the episode only endangered a mere space station, not the Earth Alliance itself. You could say it was made in the hope that it would come to, say, Earth and knock it out, but to invest resources to produce such a power weapon (also assuming it's one of many) like that for such a flimsy idea doesn't hold water to me.

[Captain Crimson]

This episode was always a favorite of mine. It shows off precisely why Captain Sheridan is Da Boss, and why intuition and a keen intellect should be prerequisites for any commanding officer, not just charisma.

[PerrySimm]

Babylon 5 has an immense sense of scale and diversity in its location and in the universe it inhabits, and with all these cool people and wondrous technologies, it is just as often willing to venture into the 'negative space' between all that, to get into problems that *don't* have easy tech-tech solutions, or to get into the problems with the technology itself.

The alien builders of the probe had a logic to its design, and that logic had limits, as did the destructive power even of its immense charge. Sure, in the right spot it could blast apart a continental, planet-locked civilization, or a vessel in deep space. But despite the superficial appearance of intelligence, its preprogrammed rules were in fact rigid and inflexible; the probe could be baited and misdirected more easily than any fish or herd animal.

It leads to the conclusion that these aliens were probably not as smart as they thought they were, which is actually a pretty common moral from a B5 episode, as we saw time and again with the Narn-Centauri wars, or the Markhab refusal to confront Space-AIDS.

Sorry to compare B5 to Voyager, but if you'll bear with it for a second, it's kind of like VOY:"Dreadnought" - the builders of the super-awesome weapon apparently didn't figure out how to build it so it would not also blow itself up. Perhaps, like VOY:"Warhead" - the civilization that built a few of these fell victim to their own contraptions, when something went haywire and their own lack of lateral thinking betrayed them.