"I Thought I Was Alone": Thoughts on Sense8

You could probably run an interesting poll among genre fans to see which ones find the elevator-pitch description for Netflix's new show Sense8--a globe-spanning genre series from the minds of the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski--an immediate selling point, and which ones see it as a reason to stay away.  I have to admit that I'm in the latter group. The involvement of the Wachowskis, whose recent work has vacillated between glorious messes (Cloud Atlas) and tedious ones (Jupiter Ascending) was cause for some concern, if also no small amount of curiosity.  But Straczynski, best-known for the formally innovative but cliché-ridden and self-satisfied Babylon 5, gave me some genuine pause.  It was some time before I could bring myself to get past my expectation of long-winded speeches and juvenile cod-philosophy and give the show a try.  I can't exactly say that Sense8 defied these lowered expectations.  It is a mess, and it is cliché-ridden.  But it's also not at all the sort of show I would have expected from Straczynski (whose input into the show's plot and central ideas is actually quite hard to discern) or even the Wachowskis (whose frequent preoccupations, for example from Cloud Atlas, appear here, but in very different ways than what I'm used to seeing from them).  Sense8 isn't exactly a good show, but it is an interesting and unusual one, and in ways that make it extremely worth watching.

Sense8 focuses on eight characters: Will, a Chicago cop (Brian J. Smith); Nomi, a transgender blogger and hacktivist in San Francisco (Jamie Clayton); Lito, a closeted matinee idol in Mexico City (Miguel Ángel Silvestre); Capheus, a bus driver from a Nairobi slum (Aml Ameen); Sun, a Korean businesswoman who moonlights in Seoul's underground boxing scene (Doona Bae); Kala, a chemist from Mumbai (Tina Desai); Wolfgang, a German criminal (Max Riemelt); and Riley, an Icelandic DJ working in London (Tuppence Middleton).  As the series opens, they begin to experience shared dreams and hallucinations, and to feel each other's emotions and physical sensations.  A mysterious stranger called Jonas (Naveen Andrews) informs them that they are a "sensate cluster"--eight individuals who are part of a single self, an alternate form of humanity that has existed, hidden, for millennia.  The discovery of their shared connection both interferes and aids in the various dramas going on in the characters' lives--Kala is conflicted about her upcoming marriage to a rich man whom she doesn't love; Capheus is desperate to get money with which to buy medicine for his HIV-positive mother; Sun is being pressured by her father and brother to take responsibility for the latter's embezzlement in order to save the family business.  At the same time, the cluster's awakening draws the attention of a sinister figure known as Whispers (Terrence Mann), who, aided by the authorities, seeks to hunt them down and subject them to personality-destroying brain surgery.

While watching Sense8, I found myself comparing it to Orphan Black, another present-set technothriller about a group of disparate strangers who are forced to band together due to a quirk of their biology.  The two shows share a slapdash approach to plotting, and a tendency to rely on broad stereotypes when drawing their main characters (of course Capheus's mother has HIV; of course Sun is a martial arts expert).  They also share the choice to build their storytelling around a central gimmick.  On Orphan Black, this is the fact that most of the show's characters are played by the same actress, who often performs opposite herself--an intimate device, whose success is measured by its failure to call attention to itself (how many times in the show's recently concluded season have I caught myself thinking "wow, Sarah really reminded me of Alison in that scene"?).  Sense8, on the other hand, goes large.  Its defining gimmick is the rapid intercutting between several vividly and beautifully shot locations (the show was filmed in Chicago, San Francisco, London, Reykjavik, Nairobi, Seoul, Mumbai, Berlin, and Mexico City, with different directors--including the Wachowskis and their Cloud Atlas collaborator Tom Tykwer--taking over directing duties in each location).

The logistics of this project were obviously enormously complex--because the connection between the characters allows them to appear to each other and even take over each other's bodies, the entire cast had to be present in each location, and many scenes had to be shot multiple times with different actors playing the lead each time.  As it is on Orphan Black, however, the result is more than just an impressive technical accomplishment.  The visual device at the heart of Sense8 helps to drive home the show's central theme of interconnectedness.  Its shifting between multiple, gorgeous locations contributes to the epic feeling of the story (even as the story itself lags in validating such pretensions).  Whatever else it is, Sense8 is never boring to watch.

It is perhaps for this reason that the weakness of Sense8's plot(s) doesn't really register.  None of the individual characters' stories are particularly engrossing in themselves, and some are barely stories at all--Kala, for example, could call off her wedding in an instant; the only reason she doesn't is an increasingly inexplicable unwillingness to hurt her fiancé's feelings and disappoint her ecstatic but ultimately supportive family.  Meanwhile, the thriller plot that surrounds Whispers's pursuit of the cluster is barely developed, even by the end of the first season's twelve hours.  (One of the few Straczynski-esque touches to the show is that he has announced that he has a five-year plan for the story, with the final episode already mapped out, perhaps explaining the first season's slowness.  This should also give prospective viewers pause, given how lukewarm the show's critical and commercial reception has been.  Netflix might give Sense8 a second season, but there's no way it'll give it another four.)  A season into the show, it's hard to say that very much has happened on it, for all its frenetic switching between storylines and repeated reaching for a sense of grandeur and portent.

And yet, Sense8 remains one of the most effortlessly watchable shows I've seen in a while, its twelve hours passing almost in a flash.  (It's interesting, for example, to contrast the show with Daredevil, whose plot problems were comparatively negligible, but whose final episodes were nevertheless a slog in comparison.)  The reason for this is clear--it's not just that if any one plotline bores you, another is sure to cut in, but that the characters from the different plotlines are constantly interfering with each other in unexpected and frequently amusing ways, involving, for example, Wolfgang's crime drama with Kala's domestic dilemma and Lito's identity crisis.  And, of course, if none of those can hold your interests, there's always a gunfight, a dance number, a car chase, a karaoke performance, or several very explicit (but decidedly non-prurient) sex scenes to look forward to.

Again like Orphan Black, Sense8 pretends to be about issues of personhood and identity, but doesn't really have much to say about them.  Just as it isn't actually believable that all of Tatiana Maslany's characters have exactly the same genetic potential, we never really buy that all of Sense8's leads are part of the same person.  (This, incidentally, makes it easier to accept that four of the cluster's members--Wolfgang and Kala, and Will and Riley--become romantic couples, which we'd otherwise have to read as not much different from masturbation.)  And just as Orphan Black uses an SFnal trope that it isn't really interested in to reflect on the issues that are at its heart--namely, female bodily autonomy and the way that it is often violated by scientific, government, and military interests--Sense8 uses the connection between its characters to reflect not on unity, but on empathy.

Being linked to one another doesn't mean that the cluster immediately knows everything about each other (in fact the season's only completed throughline involves getting to the bottom of the trauma that has left Riley so fragile and prone to self-harm).  Rather, it gives them the opportunity to get to know one another, despite their different circumstances and the distances separating them.  The best scenes in the series are the ones in which the characters simply sit and talk about their lives and histories, and through that talking, discover new things about themselves--when Nomi explains to Lito how she found the courage to be true to herself, or when Capheus helps Sun choose whether to sacrifice herself for her family.  The sensate connection becomes a metaphor for the power of empathy, kindness, and open-mindedness to overcome barriers of language, nationality, and geography, and to allow people--some of whom are disadvantaged by gender, race, sexuality, or class--to help each other, pooling their strengths, skills, and advantages and becoming a more resilient whole.  "I thought I was alone," Riley says to Sun, and this is clearly true of all the show's characters.  But together, they find companionship and solace even in their darkest, loneliest moments.

The only problem with this message is that you don't really need to watch twelve hours of Sense8 to grasp it.  That this is what the show is driving at is obvious already from its trailer, or a random gifset on tumblr.  What the show amounts to, then, is a lot of embroidering around this theme, not all of which serves it well.  It's one thing, for example, for Jonas to tell Will that ordinary humans' lack of connection makes them better killers, but when Capheus calls on Sun's help when one gangster is about to force him to kill another gangster, and she coolly slices her way through a dozen of the first gangster's henchmen, the show's messages can start to seem a little mixed.  And though the show clearly has a commitment to issues of social justice, and particularly the positive representation of queer characters and relationships, it also has some odd blind spots--as when Will, a white man, saves the life of a black teenage criminal, only to have his partner, a nurse, and a retired cop, all of whom are people of color, express the belief that doing so was wrong because the boy might grow up to kill cops.  Or the subplot in which Lito and his boyfriend Hernando's (Alfonso Herrera) life is invaded by Lito's unwitting beard Daniela (Eréndira Ibarra), who first sexually harasses Lito, and then, when she finds out about Hernando, immediately assumes that he and Lito are her new gay BFFs, exclaiming "I love gay porn!" and taking illicit pictures of them having sex, all of which is treated as cute rather than offensive and invasive.

Despite its forays into clichés and offensive tropes, one of the things that helps sell Sense8 as an exploration of interconnectedness and empathy is the breadth of its world.  The show is set in eight different countries and cultures, and though obviously I can't say how true any of its depictions of those cultures are (and in fact I suspect, given how frequently it plumps for stereotypes, that these depictions are flawed at best), what does ring true is the sense of their difference from each other, and from what we're used to seeing on American TV.  To watch Sense8 is to gain a greater appreciation for how narrow the cultural landscape that appears in most anglophone entertainment actually is--especially when those entertainments depict non-anglophone cultures.  How many other shows, for example, would set a scene in the Diego Rivera museum, the better for their characters to explain to each other Rivera's Marxist sympathies, and how these were betrayed by subsequent generations looking to monetize his heritage?  How many acknowledge the existence of streams of Christianity such as Russian Orthodoxy, Wolfgang's religion, or are capable of imagining an intersection of faith, secularism, and religious fanaticism that is completely different from how those forces interact in American culture, as Sense8 does in Kala's storyline?

There's certainly room to criticize Sense8--as others have already done--for fictionalizing its settings, and for often remaining trapped in a stereotypical, American perspective on them.  But to me that criticism is incomplete.  It ignores the fact that, alongside some obvious stereotypes, many scenes in Sense8 feature cultural touchstones that are obvious to the characters and to other people from their culture, but opaque to us.  When we flash back to Lito's birth, we see his family crowded around the TV watching a soap opera.  Nomi and her girlfriend Amanita (Freema Agyeman) attend a dance/spoken word performance about the ravages of the AIDS crisis.  Wolfgang meets a buyer for his stolen diamonds in a maze of concrete columns.  It's left to the observant or obsessive viewer to work out that these are, respectively, the finale of Cuna de Lobos, the most successful soap opera on Mexican TV, a real performance piece by Sean Dorsey, and the Berlin Holocaust memorial.  Even a viewer who doesn't pick up on these details, however, will take away from Sense8 the message that not everyone's cultural landscape looks the way it does on American TV.  That other historical events, religious observances, and cultural milestones might loom largest for people from other parts of the globe.

If you take a look at the current state of genre TV--almost all of which is dominated by superheroes or stories that don't veer very far from that template--a dispiriting picture begins to emerge.  Thoughtless power fantasies abound.  Stories that are supposedly about justice and protecting the weak only lightly conceal a might-is-right message.  Agents of SHIELD took a premise that could have been used to reflect on the seductiveness of ungoverned, unaccountable power and the ease with which it is abused, and turned it into a ratification of the fascist worldview.  The main character of the supposedly sunny and grimdark-free The Flash illegally imprisons the people he defeats without trial, legal recourse, or any hope of release, and his only comeuppance is to be praised for not killing them outright.  In this climate, Sense8, for all its flaws, feels utterly essential.  For a genre story to center empathy, compassion, and understanding, even in ways that are imperfect, is almost revolutionary.  So while Sense8, as I've said, isn't exactly good TV, it's so different--and in ways that so sharply reveal the shortcomings of our current genre landscape--that I have no hesitation in recommending it.  It's not surprising that the show hasn't enjoyed the critical and commercial success that Daredevil has, but, precisely because it acts as a counterpoint to so many of the Marvel show's thoughtless assumptions, I hope that it's granted a second season.

JMS, Plagiarizing Himself

For the last couple of months, I've been boggling at the positive buzz surrounding Clint Eastwood's The Changeling, for the simple reason that the script is by J. Michael Straczynski. Was it possible, I wondered, that in the decade since Babylon 5 went off the air Straczynski had learned how to write dialogue that didn't make its hearers simultaneously cringe and guffaw?

The film's IMDb page would seem to indicate otherwise:

Christine Collins: I used to tell Walter, "Never start a fight, but always finish it." I didn't start this fight, but by God I'm going to finish it.

That settles it: it's going to be impossible for genre fans to watch this film without laughing inappropriately.

Babylon 5: Addenda

Some scattered thoughts, having finally managed to watch the end of the fourth season:

I suspect I'm alone in this, but I really do think that out of the show's three main 'battle arcs'--the original break from Earth ("Messages From Earth" through "Ceremonies of Light and Dark"), the final battle against the Shadows and the Vorlons ("The Summoning" through "Into the Fire"), and the fight to liberate Earth ("No Surrender, No Retreat" through "Endgame")--it's the last one that is the most successful and the best made. There's a darkness and a complexity to the storyline that simply wasn't there before. Sheridan is leading a partly alien fleet to attack his own home planet, in a decision that, while ultimately correct, is still questionable. The face of the enemy is not only familiar, it is our own (in sharp contrast to the Shadows and the Vorlons, who have no faces). The stakes are higher on a personal level, too--Sheridan is captured and tortured, Garibaldi betrays Sheridan and then discovers that he's been used by Bester, Ivanova is mortally wounded, Marcus dies[1]. And, of course, when the whole thing ends, the aftermath isn't fireworks, parades, and dancing in the streets, but recriminations, back-room deals, and unsavory political machinations. It's probably the most successful storyline in the show's run, the one that came closest to truly affecting me, and a good high point to end the story on.

Which is not to say that the arc didn't have its weaknesses. I realize that once you get into the battle episodes, character exploration gets left by the wayside, but for most of the latter half of the fourth season the show is shedding sympathetic characters, so that by the time the great victory comes around, there's no one left to root for. Sheridan becomes cold and thoroughly unlikable[2]. Delenn, apart from a rather boring interlude on Minbar in which Neroon steals all her scenes, is given nothing to do. Ivanova and Franklin are sidelined. Lyta gets shoved into a closet and only taken out when a really strong telepath is suddenly needed (which, in all fairness, was pretty much her character arc from day one, and Talia's before her). Londo and G'Kar, after going through an unearned, quickie reconciliation, are reduced to comic relief.

The only character who remains even vaguely compelling is Garibaldi, who practically from day one was the most interesting member of the cast for the simple reason that he constantly confounded the viewers' expectations[3]. Sure, he was the paranoid, hard-boiled detective who often had more in common with the criminals he chased than the masters he served, but he was also the guy who resigned his commission rather than stand by and watch as Sheridan violated Morden's rights; the only one of Franklin's friends who noticed that the good doctor was sinking into substance abuse, and the only one to make serious efforts to reach him and offer him help[4]; the man who, instead of an afternoon of casual sex with an attractive woman, would rather have a frank talk about his feelings. Throughout the fourth season, we see Garibaldi in a deep crisis--he loses a significant amount of time, alienates himself from his friends, becomes disillusioned with their cause, and is the only credible person who dares to suggest that there might something unwholesome about the cult of personality that rises around Sheridan.

But, of course, as we discover at the end of the fourth season (and as, in all fairness, we probably should have guessed beforehand), Garibaldi hasn't been in control of his actions. The crisis was not of his own making and the emotions he felt weren't his[5] and therefore we shouldn't give any credence to the legitimate points that he raised in his altered state. Even more disappointing is the fact that, once Garibaldi is cleared of responsibility for his actions (quick! Break Lyta out of that packing crate!), he interacts with his friends as if nothing's happened. The next time we see him, he's trading quips with Franklin, and although Sheridan throws him a nasty look when they next meet, the two of them have no meaningful interaction, no discussion of Garibaldi's actions and any residual guilt or resentment there might be on either side[6]. This lack of communication persists not only until the end of the fourth season but until the end of the show. In other words, Garibaldi's slide into darkness, the only meaningful character arc of the season, has neither significance nor consequence, and as a result the entire battle-for-Earth arc seems flatter and less engaging.

The argument could be made here that there's no time for heart-to-heart talks in the final episodes of the fourth season, crammed as they are with, you know, the battle for Earth. This argument crumbles when you notice that much like the rest of the show, these episodes are padded like an attack-dog trainer. I've often wondered why Babylon 5, with its emphasis on multi-episode and even multi-season storylines, never instituted a permanent 'previously on Babylon 5' segment before each episode. Then I realized that if they had done this, the writers would have found many of their most pivotal episodes clocking in at about 25 minutes. For example, the 'In the beginning, the ancient races bestrode the stars like giants' spiel is repeated about half a dozen times during the two years in which it is relevant. In "Endgame", the penultimate episode of the fourth season battle for Earth arc, the fourth act begins with a newscaster showing us several minutes of the gigantic space battle we just finished watching at the end of the third act. Even better is the revelation, in that same episode, of Marcus' decision to sacrifice his life for Ivanova's--first we see Marcus watching Franklin's MedLab reports and realizing that an alien device exists that will allow him to give Ivanova his life energy; then we see Franklin watching that very same recording[7]; then we get a flashback of the scene to which the recording refers--all told, maybe five or six minutes that could have been used to, say, show us how things are now between Sheridan and Garibaldi.

For all their flaws, however, there was enough in the closing episodes of the fourth season to make me sorry that the story was ending, which means that it was very considerate of J. Michael Straczynski to end the season (and, as far as he knew at the time, the show) with the assiest hour of television he's ever put his name on, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars"[8]. Seriously, what it is with the mockumentary style? Over the show's lifetime, Straczynski uses it three or four times, never to any great effect. I realize that he was working ten years ago, but surely, even then, people knew that mockumentaries always sound like a good idea and are only rarely successful[9]. As a final statement about the show, "Deconstruction" seems to determined to concentrate not on Sheridan and Co.'s accomplishments but on the fact that later generations doubted their motives, their morality, and their very existence. This emphasis can be taken as a reinforcement of one of the show's most powerful themes, introduced all the way back in the pilot and constantly reiterated--that no matter what you've been taught to believe, one person can fight the system, make a difference, make the world a better place--by showing us how even after Sheridan's victory, those who follow him can't quite wrap their minds around the magnitude of his ambitions and accomplishments. I see it as a rather mean-spirited, in-your-face attempt to garner just a bit more sympathy from the audience[10]--see how unloved, how unsung my characters are by their own contemporaries, and even by the generations that followed them! But in the end, they were right! They created something that will last a million years and bring humanity to its rightful place in the stars! How dare anyone doubt them!

To understand just why the tone of the episode makes me uncomfortable, here are some of Straczynski's comments about "Deconstruction" on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5:

That, and the truth that in 10 years the naysayers will be forgotten, and made irrelevant...but the show, the *show*...goes on. And will be around long after they and I have gone to dust. And all people will know when they see [a title card at the end of the episode, which reads "Dedicated to all the people who predicted that the Babylon project would fail in its mission. Faith manages"], 50 years from now, was that some jerks said it couldn't be done, and they were wrong, because they are *always* wrong.

Straczynski is comparing his own accomplishment--getting a television show made and appealing to millions of viewers worldwide, which is by no means an insignificant accomplishment--to that of his characters, and he bashes his own detractors by having cartoonish villains nip at the heels of his larger-than-life heroes. What he fails to acknowledge, here or at any other point during the show's run (except rather obliquely during "Comes the Inquisitor") is that faith, confidence and determination, while necessary for the success of any great undertaking, are not sufficient to ensure that success. Believing in yourself is a good thing, but only if you're right to do so--somehow it isn't surprising to discover that Straczynski has missed that half of the equation.

---

[1] A moment of silence, please, for Jason Carter and his beautiful hair. Between them they brought more energy and charisma to their performance than the rest of the cast put together.

[2] Not to mention his completely untenable and immoral use of unconscious people as living weapons.

[3] The only other character of which this can consistently be said is Lennier, and he didn't get anything near the amount of screen time and storylines that Garibaldi did.

[4] And boy, wasn't Franklin just there to pay the favor back when it was Garibaldi's turn to fall off the wagon in The Season That Must Not Be Named.

[5] This isn't made entirely clear. According to Bester, Garibaldi's programming simply accentuated already-present qualities--paranoia, distrust of authority figures, irritability. A few minutes later, however, he tells us that subconscious commands quickly overrode Garibaldi's own personality, leaving the original Garibaldi trapped in his own head and powerless to act on his own desires. There might have been an interesting discussion of the degree to which programmed Garibaldi's actions tracked with Garibaldi's own impulses--surely he wouldn't have betrayed Sheridan, but what does it say about him that a simple tweak can bring him to the point of becoming a traitor? Sadly, the show never dealt with these questions in any meaningful way.

[6] And I think there's a case to be made for Sheridan feeling guilty and Garibaldi feeling resentful.

[7] In a storytelling device only slightly less hackneyed than the detective who plays a certain segment of a recording over and over again because he's got an idea, dammit!

[8] It's possible that the fifth season episode "A View From the Gallery" might be able to wrest this crown away from "Deconstruction", but some other, braver soul than I is going to have to rewatch it and make the final determination.

[9] The only decent one that comes to mind is the X-Files episode in which Mulder and Scully stumble upon a taping of Cops.

[10] Also, it could be Straczynski trying to get just one more dig at the journalism profession, which he seems to hold in slightly more contempt than he does politicians. Journalists on the show ran the gamut from shallow and insensitive (we know the journalist in "And Now For a Word" is evil because she makes Delenn cry) to cynical propaganda-mongers.

Alas, Babylon

At my brother's prompting, my family and I have gone back and re-watched that seminal 90s SF phenomenon, Babylon 5. Now that I'm nearly at the end of the show's four-season run* I find myself having to rethink my assessment of it. Up until now, I've always thought of B5 as a better-than-average show with a poor first season, an execrable fifth season, and three deeply flawed yet ultimately successful middle seasons. And as it turns out, I was wrong, because Babylon 5, from beginning to end, both sucks and blows.

I suspect this is something a lot of people already knew--people who watched the show when they were older than 15, the age I was when I became a fan, and people who have gone back to it in the intervening years. More than anything else, Babylon 5 is a show for teenagers. The overblown dialogue, the broad humor, the melodramatic plots, the frequent monologues and speeches, and just in general the show's palpable sense of its own profundity must have been irresistible to the teenage set--to viewers looking for something grand and inspiring who weren't too interested in, or capable of, noticing the bad writing and obvious plotting. Who but a teenager, after all, could watch an EarthGov representative, who has just negotiated a non-aggression treaty with the patently evil Centauri, blissfully announce that "we will finally have peace in our time" without rolling their eyes? Who else would put up with entire paragraphs from 1984 being turned into dialogue for Night Watch representatives?

Come back to the show ten years later, however, with a bit more experience under your belt and with the genre television landscape having undergone a profound change (one that Babylon 5 was at least partly responsible for) and the whole thing looks rather pathetic. When I went looking for negative opinions about B5 I naturally started with that pithy curmudgeon of genre television, Andrew Rilstone, but sadly he went the succinct route. He did, however, point me towards this intriguing critique of the series by Nick Eden (written near the end of the fourth season):

The problem is that there is a single mind driving the entire show. That single mind, belonging to J. Michael Straczynski, is thinking up every idea, overseeing all the production and writing every script. And that single mind isn't up to it. The single mind that should be providing creative vision to the show is doing everything. The single mind is trying to see both the fine detail and the big picture at the same time, and as we all know, trying to do that means you don't get to do either very well and you get a splitting headache out of it.

What's actually happened is that the big picture dominates everything, drives every episode, every sub-plot, but at the same time there hasn't been enough time to make that big picture work when you get down to the detail. A conventional writing arrangement probably does things better - if the single guiding intellect is able to just get on and guide then he's got the time to make sure that the stories being told by the individual writers work as stories and fit into the bit picture.

But that's not how it goes on Babylon 5, because everything's being done by one man. One man who lacks either the time, the ability or the vision to see any single episode of Babylon 5 as anything more than a tiny segment of a five year story. He doesn't see stories, or characters, just pawns that are part of a greater whole. Individual characters are routinely sacrificed because the Plot demands that they go and do something, never mind that it doesn't fit with what they were doing a couple of weeks ago. Episodes don't have beginnings or middles or ends. They are just scenes in a tapestry. If you've not been watching from the start then you'd better not risk starting now. There are no jumping on points, only "bugger this for a game of soldiers, I'm going to bed" points.

Which, when I come to think of it, is fairly accurate. Take "In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum", one of the most important episodes in the second season--Sheridan discovers the connection between Morden and his wife, and Delenn and Kosh are forced to reveal to him the upcoming conflict with the Shadows. In the episode's final act, Sheridan is faced with a dilemma: if he releases Morden, he might lose his only chance of discovering exactly what happened to his wife, but keeping Morden in prison might cause the Shadows to attack sooner than they had planned, before the army of light can marshall their forces and mount a defense.

Sheridan's choice to release Morden is a pivotal moment for the character--by doing so, he is committing himself to the fight against the Shadows and making the first of many painful sacrifices to that cause. It's a decision reached with the help of a history lesson: as Sheridan tells Zack, during WWII Churchill chose not to evacuate a city he knew was about to be bombed by the Germans in order not to reveal that the Allies had cracked the German codes. If we're to believe Straczynski, Sheridan's situation parallels Churchill's--both men were forced to make a painful sacrifice in order to ensure the greater good. But, of course, the two situations aren't even remotely comparable. Churchill was forced to choose between the certain death of thousands of his citizens if he didn't order the evacuation and the possible subjugation of his entire country if the Germans changed their codes and the Allies lost the war. Sheridan is forced to choose between personal vengeance and the fate of the entire galaxy. Neither decision is easy, but only Sheridan's has an obvious right choice. In other words, Sheridan makes one of the most important choices of his life because he's a bad historian, and the fact that Straczynski expects us not to notice this--the fact that he seems not to have noticed it himself--indicates a sloppiness in his writing that tracks with Eden's view of him as a big picture man who can't, or won't, erect a proper foundation for the towers in his mind.

Or take Londo Molari, one of the most important characters on the show. According to Straczynski, Londo is a tragic figure--motivated by the desire to see his people regain their place as a major galactic power, Londo gives the Shadows a foothold on his planet and in its government, and soon finds himself in over his head as they begin setting up his species for a massive fall. And I'm sorry, but that's not what's showing up on screen. The Londo we see is a horrible person, who knowingly does horrible things for reasons which are, OK, vaguely honorable** but still not a sufficient excuse, and his exploitation by the Shadows can only be explained by his having the political instincts of a stunned wombat, which is plainly not the case. Londo is a mass of contradictions--one moment he's cringing at the bombardment of the Narn homeworld, and the next he's congratulating Vir for personally orchestrating the deaths of thousands of Narns (in reality, Vir has smuggled the Narns to safety, a grave disappointment to Londo)--which in the real world would suggest not a complicated personality but a sociopathic one, but in Londo's case is yet more evidence of a lack of attention to detail on the writer's part.

But I think it's giving Straczynski too much credit to suggest that there was something inherently wrong with the way Babylon 5's production was organized--to suggest, in other words, that any other person, working under the same restrictions as Straczynski, would have produced sup-bar work. Because J. Michael Straczynski is not only a talentless hack, he's a talentless hack who truly believes himself to be God's gift to the writing profession (go read some of his comments on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5--just pick an episode at random. I dare you not to come away from them feeling that Straczynski has an ego the size of China). In almost every respect, Straczynski failed Babylon 5.

He failed as a writer of dialogue. His humorous scenes were as wooden and posed as an episode of Gilligan's Island, his dramatic scenes invariably descended into monologues, and both were as far from realistic as it's possible to get. He failed as a director--apart from the CGI battles, B5 had a static, lifeless look. It's probably not fair to blame him for the show's paltry effects budget and for working at the very forefront of CGI (although some of the Vorlon ships look like they belong in a screen-saver), but he certainly failed to make Babylon 5 look like a real place--inside and out, it was textureless. He failed in his casting decisions***, and, having cast his actors, he failed to give them believable character arcs or decent direction****.

And yet.

If I hate the show so much, why did I love it ten years ago, and why have I breezed through it again now, constantly eager for the next installment of the story? Why does the fifth season make me so angry if I think so little of the previous four? For all its many failures, there is something to Babylon 5. I can't put my finger on it--maybe it's just that unearned sense of profundity, getting to me as thoroughly now as it did when I was a callow teenager--but I care about this world. I may be cracking snarky comments every five minutes, but when it comes down to it, and the music swells and the heroes strike their pose and the lovers are reunited, I'm touched, and I want more. I can't stand any of the parts, but I still love the whole.

Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe Babylon 5 is like a piece of marching music--you know you're being manipulated, but the drums bypass your brain and head straight for your stomach and your legs and your heart. Maybe, in the midst of all the crap he poured into that show, Straczynski concealed a heart of gold without even knowing how he did it.

It occurred to me recently that, in about 20 years, I'm going to start seeing revivals and reimaginings of shows that were seminal to my adolescence. Farscape: The Next Generation, the new Friends, a gritty, realistic X-Files. Maybe, in much the same way that Ronald D. Moore has extracted the beating heart of something as campy as the original Battlestar Galactica and transplanted it into a better, smarter body, someone will come around one day who can take whatever it was about Babylon 5 that worked, the core of the story that's still bringing me back, and give it the treatment that J. Michael Straczynski couldn't.

It was the best of shows, it was the worst of shows. We deserved better, but I can't quite write it off.

UPDATE: Some more thoughts about the end of the fourth season.

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* Fifth season? What is this fifth season of which you speak? Oh, you mean the fifth season in which Ivanova was dumped and replaced by Cat from Lois and Clark, who just happened to be Sheridan's heretofore unheard-of first wife? The fifth season in which Lyta acted like a complete ninny over some over-bred, long-haired Marcus-wannabe? The fifth season in which G'Kar finally made the transition from fascinating would-be saint to bloviating bore, who couldn't give you the time of day without making a speech out of it? The fifth season in which Garibaldi, still traumatized from having been mind-raped in the previous season, crawled back into the bottle and none of his so-called friends even noticed? The fifth season in which Lennier went from an interesting, multi-layered character to your standard best friend who loses the female lead to the virile male lead, and because he is an intellectual and a weakling, uses violence inappropriately (of course intellectuals can't be trusted to use violence responsibly) to get revenge, just so that he could redeem himself by dying nobly in the 'David meets the Drakh' arc which we're never going to see because it happens fifteen years in the frikking future? That fifth season? Never happened.

** Inasmuch as "the Narns have offended my sense of racial pride and therefore they should be subjugated, oppressed, killed off by the thousands, humiliated, and generally made to suffer" can be considered an honorable motive.

*** Although, admittedly, it would have been a rare thespian who could have made something watchable out of Straczynski's dialogue--only Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik consistently managed to weave gold out of the straw they were given--let's not forget that this is the man who thought Michael O'Hare could carry an entire series on his back.

**** My personal favorite is the Ivanova/Talia relationship. I'm willing to stipulate that between the beginning of the first season and the end of the second season, when Talia's dormant spy personality was activated, overriding her own, these two developed a friendship. But a romantic relationship? Where the hell did that come from, and how are we supposed to buy it when the two actresses look as if they're making small talk in the DMV line?