Midnight on the Firing Line

“Tell them we’re under attack. Tell them it’s the-“
Anyone familiar with the series will know it’s the Narn attacking.

Season 1: Signs and Portents
Episode 1: Midnight on the Firing Line

Which brings up a quandary in writing this series. Do I avoid all mention of what is to come or do I try to leave some mystery? At least for now I will approach the writing of this series with the understanding that the reader has some familiarity with the show.

I’ve decided not to reveal major plot points from future episodes, but that won’t prevent me from mentioning the future. After all “Midnight on the Firing Line” sets up almost every major premise from the show and it would be a shame not to point this out.

Another thing I want to avoid are synopses. Watch the damn show, that’s the point. If you want the capsule plot arc, take a look at the Wikipedia entry.

One thing I have undyingly disliked about this show are the titles telling you where (and sometimes when) you are. Series creator J. Michael Straczynski is better than this and he was better than this at the time. Show me a planet, fill in the rest with dialog later. Christ, if George Lucas will dumb it down that far, you should be able to do so as well.

Still, after all of these years I still love the intro. Look at that space station! Have you ever seen anything before or since in film or television? It’s huge, it spins, it has giant vanes! Seeing the station being built is such a nice touch behind the iconic voice over.

If you’d never seen the show before (and apart from a little early-90s syndicated television cheesiness) this intro really does help create a sense of adventure and mystery. Learning that the series takes place in 2258 means it’s far enough away to be different, but not so far that it’s alien. I like being reminded of this every episode.

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In this episode habits are introduced. Species behave certain ways; are habitual. The characters have habits. Sinclair is usually found at a specific time of day for ten minutes with his link off. Later on we find Ivanova can usually be found in the casino bar when her shift’s up. Garibaldi seems to be the one to point this out to everyone.

These types of specific habits are not terribly important to the characters through the rest of the series; they never repeat them again. However, each sets up a habitual trait for the characters. Sinclair’s introspection, Ivanova’s solitariness (especially with a drink), even G’Kar’s habits open up his later development.

On a side note, this episode introduces Delta 7, a Starfury designation which appears throughout the rest of the series. This is also where we see Starfuries in action for the first time. They have a cool name, they manoeuver with various thrusters, and their tactics reflect this. Love it!

When it comes to characters there are three (maybe four) that stick out for me in this first episode. Londo is, at first blush, almost a buffoon. His hair a shambles, almost a shyster to Garibaldi, his protestations of Centauri greatness coexist with an acknowledgement of his lack of station. Viz. his pronouncement “This is it,” when introducing Vir as his diplomatic staff.

This episode initiates and explains from start to finish one of my favourite pairings of the series: Londo Mollari and G’Kar. Londo’s clownishness initially couples well with G’Kar’s outward perfidy and pettiness. We learn Londo will die in 20 years at G’Kar’s hands, which also allows Straczynski to introduce an element of mysticism. Somehow Centauri can often see the moment of their own deaths.

midnight-lg

Still it is Londo who appears to have depth in this episode. G’Kar is definitively more than a one-dimensional opposition, but barely. His characterization here can hardly be said to presage G’Kar’s future spiritual flowering, which perhaps makes it all the more surprising. Is it the fool who still believes he is mighty continuously realizing he’s not who is the more pitiable character? Or is it the once warrior and now small tyrant?

That these two are a microcosm of the greater conflict between the Narn and Centauri is obvious, though Londo is at the time is unimportant and unable to press political change. Both cultures also resonate with pre-World War II European conflicts; the taking and ceding of land, the just punishment of the vanquished, and the heavyhanded scheming for gain.

Ivanova is interesting to me because, like Stephen Furst’s Vir, Claudia Christian comes to the role already with a firm grasp of who she is. Christian seems to have the least need to establish a baseline for Ivanova who is both officious, competent, and cold, but with personality. In fact my one complaint about the character is that she’s written as too much of a Russian stereotype. The obviously-Russian lines sound clunky and stilted.

Her conversation in the casino with Talia Winters is a fine explanation of a major background element (the treatment of telepaths) without beating the audience over the head with explanation. That Talia was brought up within the Psi Corps is the perfect foil for Ivanova explaining what it’s like from the outside. She already has a good working relationship with Sinclair, who seems to trust her enough to know she will bend the rules for him.

Definitively not fully-formed yet is Garibaldi. Compared to the character I come to know over five seasons, this Garibaldi is quaint. He doesn’t quite show Garibaldi’s deviousness and all of his humour falls flat. In fact, Jerry Doyle’s delivery on the serious notes is much better. This certainly gives the character much more room to grow, though it’s at first hard to see what importance the man will play while all the mystery surrounds Sinclair and the Minbari.

I really enjoyed seeing Garibaldi and Delenn watching Duck Dodgers at the end of the episode. It hearkens, for me, to several future episodes explicitly about the comprehensibility of one culture to another. Most directly is the Season 5 episode “Day of the Dead,” featuring Penn & Teller, where the guest stars explain in some depth the different bases of comedy for each culture. More immediately the upcoming Season 1 episode “The Parliament of Dreams” will cover the same idea relative to religion.

Initially you’d come to think of Babylon 5 as a hyped-up United Nations, which is somewhat true. It’s set up for the purpose of peace, but I think series creator J. Michael Straczynski is already hinting at the Season 3 opening when the episode starts in fire and ends in tension. None of the great powers will take a stand and the minor powers as of yet only play a small political role.

In the end I find it interesting that the first episode of the series solves a conflict through no official action at all. As if the station’s intended function is irrelevant. So much appears to hinge on personal interaction, which is really what the series itself hinges upon.

Having seen the rest of the season, I believe “Midnight on the Firing Line” is one of the best episodes of a generally poor season. Where Season 1 steps away from the core plot into serialized episodes, it invariably fails (such as the episode “Infection”). But in episodes like this and “The Parliament of Dreams,” the season lays down its future legacy of great writing and characterization.

Blogging Babylon 5

1993 was about the only year in which I was an early-adopter. Sure, in 2001 I was using the very first iPod, and in 2007 my hands clutched the first-generation iPhone. That these are both Apple products is probably coincidence. They are both cool tools and it’s perhaps the coolness that ties these both to 1993. That was the year Babylon 5 dipped a toe in reality.

While I’m not sure when exactly the phrase was first used to market the show, I’ll go along with the posters saying that Babylon 5 was lightyears ahead of anything on television. The pilot film was something I saw upon its initial release and, though crude, 13 year-old me was hooked.
Space opera I understood. Star Wars, with its archetypes, loose-playing with the scientific facts, and space battles was obviously The Wizard of Oz for my generation. Science fiction in written form was something I embraced fully on my own without influence from peers or parents.

Deluging myself with Bradbury, Asimov, Niven, Heinlein, and the one-off auteurs of the genre, the scope of ideation struck home. That people could think of predicting the future of humanity by using mathematics or inspire beauty through the collapse of a far-gone civilization sparked my imagination.

Any true student of the genre will admit that characterization was lacking in the early writing. Heroes, while they may not all have been blue-eyed, blond-haired heroes with big pecs, were still rather flat. Women might be brainy, but for the most part they had tits. Heinlein wanted us to fuck our sisters.

This is where I was pushed into the written work of short science fiction and written space opera. While I grappled with the allusions and metaphor of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, I broke ground with the collected year’s best series edited by Gardner Dozois. These showed sci-fi at the depth of character study, operatic counterfactualism, and fantastic ideas tied concretely to scientific fact.

In this mélange I fell in love with Babylon 5.
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Now I’ll come clean and admit I don’t really remember seeing it for the first time. I’ve seen The Gathering (the pilot film) maybe ten times in the intervening 16 years, but I at least recall a sense of wonder here. Of course I’d seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by this point, but who cares. That show was horrible.

What I saw here was something I’d never seen before on television: a mostly-realistic idea for a space station, obvious and grander character and plot arcs, computerized animation, aliens with varying levels of technology and awesome speeches!

The characters and plot were, I think, what hooked me. From the beginning it was obvious this was a story just beyond what seemed possible at the time and that it would take me through something grand. However, it was the focus on character that was obvious.

It wasn’t, I think, a conscious comparison, but after the fact it’s easy to see that Sinclair, the captain of the station, was no archetypal Kirk or neutered Picard. It also wasn’t quite clear what he was because The Gathering, like Season 1, suffered from any show’s budding familiarity with its material. Still he was none of the Star Wars protagonists or Hari Seldon. I do think Sinclair owes something to the Martian Chronicles and at least half reminds me of Fedmahn Kassad from the Hyperion Cantos.

At any rate I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I waited for a long time, much of the next year in fact, before the show made it permanently (mostly) on the air. When it did show up again, the aliens were a bit softened, the visual effects heightened, and the arcs still only a hint. Good friends familiar with the show would rather forget that first season, and we’ll discuss that more at length later.

Babylon 5 continued to be an important piece of literature for me over the ensuing decade and a half. And yes, I do consider creator J. Michael Straczynski’s work to be literature. It is referential without relying upon reference, the characters speak with something exactly between realism and Shakespeare, the score of Christopher Franke was fantastic and only suffered from the fact it wasn’t recorded by a real orchestra, and while the visual effects have not stood the test of time they destroyed anything available then. Archetype is used, but only in an over-arching way; every conflict retains humanity.

Through the show’s five seasons I became an adult, watched the show with a couple of girlfriends, moved to another state for college, stayed there, and started on the rest of my life. The show left a mark on me, one which indelibly affected my perceptions of morality, human interaction, fiction writing, and comedy.

It took the revolution of DVD to bring me back into the Babylon 5 fold. This took place almost four years after the show ended, by which time I was working on writing for filmed entertainment myself. So it was with a new eye and a good friend who had never seen the show previously that I delved into the magnum opus of J. Michael Straczynski. It caught fire with my friend, too. He had his criticisms (some of which I’ll mention in writing this series), but he too found a touchstone for literative screenwriting in the series.

Last week I lazily brought up Babylon 5 at Hulu.com when my queue ran out and watched the pilot. Whilst watching I again caught the bug of why I loved this show so much; why it had such an influence. In my head I began critiquing the first season, thought of how to explain this show to others, and hit upon the idea of writing about each episode as I watched it all over again.

Of course I’ve watched through the entire series at least a dozen times over the years, delving more into nuance, questioning, studying, learning, but never have I written down my reactions or my experience.

And so begins my current project.

From hereon out I will bring you an entry with my reactions for each episode of the series. Where I can I will link to the episode online (wherever I believe that will benefit the show’s creator). We will explore the show through what I consider the main body of work: Seasons 1 – 5.

Upon completion of this review I will likely turn back to The Gathering, the made-for-television movies, and The Lost Tales. Only the first and last of those do I consider on-par with anything the main series produced. While I enjoy the spin-off series Crusade, I don’t particularly wish to cover it. If there’s enough of a demand, I might, but it’s not anywhere close to what Babylon 5 is.

So here we go! Expect a couple of updates a week on each episode of the series. If you, my audience, demand it, I might increase those updates some more.

Dear Blackbirds Bar

Dear Blackbirds Bar,
I wanted to like you, I really did. Even though you had yet to acquire that patina of age and that feeling of really being a cool neighbourhood bar, you had promise. So many kinds of beer, so much good food. A dart board. Hell, the sports fans even seemed to appreciate me yelling out “Go local sports team” whenever they got excited about a football basket.

I spent the better part of four months of Sundays in your establishment. It was the only regularly-scheduled item on my agenda every week. Whatever kind of craziness my week brought me, I was in Blackbirds on Sunday eating hot wings between 1:30 and 2:00 PM. Did I mention your hot wings are the best in Astoria?

But about a month ago things went bad. So let’s imagine this, shall we? I enter your establishment at around 1:30 PM. I’m dressed in black pants, a camouflage jacket, and a hoodie. The hoodie has flames on it, by the way. Strangely this time around the bar seems full, but the tables are empty, which is the reverse of how it normally goes. Okay, so I take off my coat and sit down at a table. I forgot to mention, I’ve got a big, fat copy of the New York Post on me.

So I sit down with this copy of the New York Post, crack it open and begin reading. One of your friendly waiters comes over to me and asks what I want. I tell him “I’ll have a Peroni, and an order of very hot wings well done.”

This is really where my day turned to absolute shit. Look, I know there are starving people in Zimbabwe and I understand that the overrun of certain areas of Pakistan by elements of the Taliban is a problem; however, on Sunday at a sports bar I expect wings.
I hope you’ll understand that that’s why what your waiter (who was very nice) said to me next was so baffling.

“We don’t have the regular menu today because we’re serving brunch.”

I gave him a blank look and he, to his credit, looked a tad sheepish.

“You see, all the stuff for brunch takes over the kitchen, so we can’t cook the regular menu.”

My look now was a little less blank, but I’ll give your waiter (who I mentioned was really nice, didn’t I) a little less credit for his next statement.

“Would you like to take a look at our brunch menu?”

No. No I don’t want to take a look at your brunch menu. I’m a guy in a camo jacket with a copy of the New York Post. Do you see me with anyone else? Brunch is for couples. It’s something guys do when they’re with girls because the girls like it and maybe the food’s okay.
Or it’s something you do when one of your “bros” is in from out of town and you want to go check out the cute waitresses and feel okay getting trashed at 11AM. It’s not something a lone guy who looks like an escapee from the Montana Militia is going to do.

No, Jeremy is here for wings. Which, as I was putting my coat on and leaving, your waiter (who’s still friendly, regardless) said he would communicate to you. On my way out (without spending a dime), I noticed an omelet station.

An omelet station. In a sports bar. There were a couple of hot plates and a dude in a silly hat. Really. Here are a couple of better ideas for a station in your bar:

1. a gimlet station
It sounds about the same and makes more sense for a bar to have. “I’ll have a gin gimlet, hold the emasculating bullshit.”

2. a wing station
See, you have a guy out there cooking the wings you can’t make in your kitchen now, apparently. Everyone wins. “I’ll have a dozen very hot wings. Then I’m going to read about the destabilization of the Zimbabwean dollar because of Robert Mugabe’s regime.”

You know, even though I’m some fancy music industry dude, I don’t make a lot of money. But, I was willing to part with $20 – $30 every Sunday for you guys. Because seriously, those wings are killer.

You know what I do now instead of going to your bar? I spend an extra $15 to take a train up to the Peekskill Brewery in Westchester. There, I can get a lovely view of the Hudson River, I can choose from four times as many beers as you have, and I can get some really good hot wings.

No, they’re not as good as yours, but at least Peekskill has figured out how to serve brunch and bar food at the same time. What, your grill can’t handle a burger and truffle oil grilled cheese sandwiches with added estrogen at the same time?

Look, I know it’s not football season and you’re not going to do the wings special cheap anymore. I don’t even care about football. I don’t even know what downs are. I just want hot wings on Sunday and I want them six blocks from my house.

So fire up that deep fryer and get your act together. ‘cause brunch is really bumming me out. And I’m starting to tell my friends.

Yours truly,

Jeremy Rosen

FusionDynamo eXtreeem

Kiev, Ukraine – Fusion at last hits the mainstream! Man’s most powerful technology is no longer the province of war, nor the devilment of research laboratories the world over. The major problem in developing usable fusion power was one of control, but now with advances in power storage and transmission, fusion will become the power source of the future.

The first hint that practical fusion power was coming arrived last year when scientists at the Platha Battery Research centre announced a new theoretical technological framework for energy storage. Platha, well-known for its reliance on direct current to store and transmit power, has seen its only burgeoning technological sector evolve from the need for well-functioning direct current.

For decades the PBR centre has advanced the course of power storage. The AA battery was invented at the PBR as was the cumbersome DD battery which powered Platha’s only successful consumer electronics export: the People’s Ghetto Blaster, an overpowered combination tape deck and radio which sold moderately well between 1986 and 1988 across the U.S.

Able to last for up to 36 hours on a single charge, the DD batteries which powered the People’s Ghetto Blaster still outperform most modern portable electronics. People’s Ghetto Blasters in good condition continue to sell for hundreds of dollars at online auction sites, even while the unit’s 53 lb. weight adds substantially to the cost of shipping.

The PBR centre previously reached national prominence when its former director Nikolai Arkady was a 3-day champion on Jeopardy (later dramatized in “Jeopardy: The Movie” (see our ad on March 1, 2007)).

This publication had long been a proponent of direct power, with editorials from the period of Edison’s push for direct current extolling it as the only truly American form of power distribution. Calls for its adoption were still coming from these pages as late as 1987 with the introduction of the late-model People’s Ghetto Blaster. However, with little fanfare the subject was dropped by then Editor-in-Chief Samuel Smelt. In 2004 the subject was again raised with the introduction of direct current to Katharinetowne, WD (Volume 456-BR6, Issue 6 “March of Progress”).

With the PBR centre’s new FusionDynamo eXtreeem, the issue is now at the forefront again. The FusionDynamo eXtreeem is actually an array of 48 giant batteries. Each stands over 60 feet high, except for the first two in the chain, which reach nearly 100 feet into the sky and measure a diameter of over 700 Lincolns. Inside every battery exist billions of molecule-thin layers of voltaic cells sandwiched together with barely any space between. The entire system is able to store the entire power output of a single high-yield thermonuclear weapon and can power a small city for nearly six months.

To get the power into the FusionDynamo eXtreeem is another matter. Once the potential of the new battery system was perceived by scientists at Fermilab, and the schematics extricated from Platha by a crack team of Willinois Grenadiers, two problems with the plan were discovered. First, how to siphon off the enormous power of a thermonuclear explosion. Second, how to transmit that power effectively to the FusionDynamo eXtreeem.

The latter had the easiest solution as Fermilab called on colleagues in Velociraptor, Elizabethia, known as the nation’s Superconducting Capital. Researchers at Meissnercorp were able to provide miles of superconducting conduits for low, low prices. Often no more than 10% over wholesale.

Capturing the explosive power of a thermonuclear weapon was more problematic. The final design consists of a flattened spherical chamber located underground and over 3 miles across. The entire chamber is lined with turbines for direct conversion of the explosive power to electric current. The chamber sits underneath a second chamber of approximately the same size filled with water, which receives energy input in the form of the heat of the explosion which creates steam which turns another set of turbines. The surface of the lower chamber is coated entirely in a heat-resistant, semiconducting alloy.

The energy thus generated passes through the superconducting conduits to the FusionDynamo eXtreeem. The large initial pair of batteries accept the first set of charges from the explosion, then pass off the overflow to the remaining 46 batteries. Power distribution from this point on is quite simple and can be transferred over to an alternating current system at will.

This is of course not true fusion power as thermonuclear weapons are actually hybrid fission/fusion devices, but hopefully lasers in the future will make it happen.