Saturday, April 25, 2009

Watching Babylon 5: 2x3 - The Geometry of Shadows

My impressions of the third episode of the second season:

A big WTF. Just WTF were you thinking, JMS? I am completely amazed at this episode. No, not because Kang was a techno mage. Yes, a techno mage, these things apparently exist. Not like the dude Teknoman from the UPN cartoon. A techno mage, sorta like a ripoff of a ComStar adept I guess? Whatever, that was fine...

What was not fine was the terrible CGI they used to create this.. big ogre-like creature in the techno mage's dwelling. That was uh, pretty fucking awful. I dunno why they didn't just keep it shrouded in the shadows, that would've given us an impression of a big threatening hulk instead of showing us this really poor CGI creation that looked like something from Poser. A really early edition of Poser.

The real meat of this episode was the Drazi. The motherfucking Drazi with their idiotic green and purple ribbons. This is what we're supposed to be entertained by? Fucking Drazi fighting over two colors? Wow... way to treat your audience like children, JMS. This is humor that 6 year olds might find funny in a cartoon show. But... from what I've read, Babylon 5 is supposed to be some sort of deep, adult drama that happens to be set in a scifi universe? Did I get that right? From the man himself:

"Once I had the locale, I began to populate it with characters, and sketch out directions that might be interesting. I dragged out my notes on religion, philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, science (the ones that didn't make my head explode), and started stitching together a crazy quilt pattern that eventually formed a picture."

Really? So this gritty adult take on the human condition, cobbled together with your ponderings on weighty issues like religion, philosophy, sociology, and science... it's to give us scenes of idiot Drazi killing each other because of green or purple ribbons? Wow dude... just wow. I dunno what you're smoking, but it's something awful strong. This... this is just mindboggling. Why, why would you sabotage your own apparent magnum opus with this childish bullshit? Why subject us, the viewers, to this imbecilic display of vapid nonsense? Please... for the love of God, don't write anymore episodes like this. Drama is good, science and politics are good... aliens who wage war for colors and then follow the person who snatches a leader ribbon from the leader... that's fucking horrible and awful and BAD.

BTW, did anyone notice if those crutches Ivanova used were standard medical crutches, or were they made to look like futuristic scifi crutches?

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