Happy New Year!
Why yes, I had a very nice vacation. Thanks for asking!
I sure dodged a bullet on my flight back: The Midwest got a bundle of snow over the weekend, and Chicago O'Hare was shut down for most of Saturday. Air commuters were still stranded in many places as of this morning, and the snow was still coming down in Michigan and along the Cleveland-Buffalo belt.
Fortunately for me, Midwest Express flies into Milwaukee, which was not as hard-hit, and whose snow had basically finished Sunday night. I had an 11:25 flight, which I made in plenty of time (I left 2-1/2 hours ahead of time, taking the subway in to Logan Airport in Boston), and my connection was only 40 minutes delayed because it was slow in arriving. I got home in late afternoon and even had time to run up and grab my held mail!
The cats were very glad to see me (seems like they usually are). It sounds like they've mostly been good while I was away, although Jefferson continued his erratic habit of leaving "care packages" on the linoleum. (I'm pretty sure he does this to express his displeasure with me at certain times, since he always goes in the same spot, cleaning it doesn't help, he's not messy about it, and he only does it occasionally.) And apparently they thoroughly destroyed their catnip-filled toys. But overall things seemed to be in good shape. Looks like we've gotten a lot of birds at the feeder, too!
So I worked on my finances, read my mail, and played and cuddled a lot with the cats, who really appreciated it.
I think that partly this is because I'm generally happy to be where I am and don't feel a strong desire to leave, and partly that I'm always looking for the next goal to strive towards and happy to be on my way. I guess it's like writing a term paper in high school: You really rather would not have to do it at all, and so you put it off, but once you start (usually the night before, right?) you put in a big flurry of energy and activity until it's done.
I always felt this way most strongly when I was vacationing with my family on Cape Cod (which I haven't done for several years now); leaving the cabin we stayed at was always very hard.
Of course, now I'll be moving in a big flurry of activity for the next week or so, catching up on everything, not even counting trying to decide if I want to throw myself a 30th birthday bash (less than two weeks to the big day!).
"A Call To Arms" is much better than the previous movie, "The River of Souls" (which, you may recall, I didn't think much of). It involves the former allies of the Shadows - the main antagonists of Babylon 5 - deciding to enact revenge on Earth for humanity's part in stopping the Shadows, and efforts to stop them - mainly revolving around a "Technomage" named Galen and his contacts with Captain Sheridan.
Perhaps more than anything else J. Michael Straczynski has done, "A Call To Arms" feels like an episode of Star Trek, especially in the lengthy sequences in which the Crusade ship, the Excalibur, are introduced (along with its sister ship the Victory). The "camerawork" (if you can call it that in CGI), colors, and even the humor in the ships not being quite ready are strongly reminiscent of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The very premise of Crusade evokes the original Star Trek in that the ship's mission is basically to find and explore new worlds (albeit with an added ulterior motive).
Even more eerie, the story's structure is reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode, "Encounter at Farpoint", in that it involves a gathering of unfamiliar allies, and a lengthy sequence of information-gathering before the puzzles are finally worked through. (The biggest differences are the presence of Galen, and the fact that there's a big honking space battle at the end. [In space, no one can hear you honk?])
None of this is necessarily bad, but it is peculiar. And the particular elements I've described also tend to make the movie a little slow, although it is fairly effective in building tension and suspense.
The biggest problem with the story, to my mind, is that Straczynski's weaknesses as a writer are evident in several places. Basically, Straczynski seems to too easily fall in love with his little "bits", and really needs an editor to streamline his stuff. If he's pressed for time, then he tends to do the right thing, but give him an hour and a half of story time, and things can get stretched out a bit. Things happen for no apparent reason than because they seem to be something Straczynski thinks are cool.
For instance, at one point the Excalibur comes across some Drakh ships which retreat towards a null field. In short order, my brain was thinking, "Why is there a null field here? What purpose does it serve in the story? Why is Sheridan firing his main guns at it? Why is he letting his ship drift through the field? Why didn't he just go around it? And why wasn't he blasted out of the sky when he emerged on the other side?" None of this sequence served the story; why was it there?
Still, this was probably the most fun B5 story since "Thirdspace", and the meatiest since the fourth season. Will Crusade be as good, or better? We'll find out...
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