A Dangerous Place
King Crimson reference, or Babylon 5? You be the judge!
Well, okay, it's really a reference to B5 (whose first-season opening credits went, "It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last, best hope for peace."); I haven't listened to KC's Discipline album in many months.
"Between the Darkness and the Light" is the first new B5 episode to air in several months. In that time, our local station moved it from Sunday at 10 pm to Saturday at 11 pm, which is a marginal improvement, but it would have been nice if it had been earlier so we could have had a get-together to watch it. Ah, well.
This was a fundamentally troubled episode. Series creator J. Michael Straczynski (whom everyone on the net calls "JMS" which I find uncomfortably familiar unless I know the man personally, which I don't) is very good at getting his characters in trouble, but not so good at getting them out of trouble. The Shadow War wrapped up too quickly and with too many improbable or disappointing twists at the end.
In "BtDatL", several elements which have been built up or hinted at over the last two years are wrapped up in the space of about thirty minutes. Although there is some genuinely moving stuff in here - such as Sheridan re-taking command of his old ship, the Agamemnon - a lot of the potential inherent in Sheridan's interrogation, the Garibaldi situation, and Ivanova's fate are not realized. This episode could easily have been stretched out to two or three episodes and been even more powerful.
Okay, I'll cut him some slack because he was faced with the possibility at the time this was filmed that B5 would only have another 4 episodes after this to wrap up the whole story. But it's still disappointing. I have a suspicion that the next three episodes are going to be a let-down, and that we'll have to wait until the final episode of the season - and 'til next season - for some new, better stuff. (We'll see if it lives up to season three, which so far has been the series' high-water mark.)
First thing, I ran a few errands because my Mom and sister share a birthday on October 25, so I'm buying presents. I like buying presents! I also picked up for myself new albums by The Sundays, Loreena McKennitt, and the first, self-titled album by The Freddy Jones Band, just re-released on CD. I spent most of the rest of the day on-line. I put some work into my music and Star Trek pages, the former of which I expect will grow substantially in coming months, the latter of which is essentially static, but needed to be reformatted to look like my other pages. This evening I went to the coffee shop and read Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is pretty good so far. I hope to write something about the coffee shop soon - the regulars I see there, watching people come and go, etc. - but I've nattered on long enough for tonight. Maybe next week.
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