Yora reviews Babylon 5

[Fyraltari]

Slowly catching up.

S1E17: Legacies

I am seriously disapointed in Delenn here. She wants to give her old friend a funeral that respects his wishes. Fine and dandy. Her friend's second-in-command wants a grand funeral for some reason. OBviously she's pissed. And her solution is to steal the corpse while it's on B5 seriously jeopardizing the good but fragile relationship between minbari and humans while framing a random alien, therefore also putting their diplomacy in risk and finally to cover it up by fabricating a miracle. And when Sinclair and Garibaldi confront her about it she has the galls to tell them they screwed up. The hypocrisy is staggering. Aaaaand her final solution is to pull rank and Neroon and tell him that if he doesn't become an accomplice to her action the Gray Council will destroy his clan. What. The. Actual. Hell.
(Hell, if as a Gray Council member she is that powerful, why not just pull rank and order Neroon to have the funeral she wants?)
Mrs "Let's all get along" almost strat a second war, get a random citizen detained and cavity-searched (and frankly the dialog read to me that they searched the stomach of all member of that species onboard) and furthered the rift between her people's two castes.
Mrs "Spirituality is really important" disregard any respect to her people's and her own religious beliefs by faking a freaking miracle.

And all of that because she doesn't want to listen to Neroon's viewpoint. "He didn't want to be a general... He only joined the war because he thought it was a righteous one" Sounds like he wanted to be a general, Delenn.
What's particularly infuriating is that there is the obvious solution to have both. Parade the corspe around as Neroon wants and then scatter his ashes as Delenn wants. That way you acknowledge both parts of the man's life (he even literally had mixed parentage) and that he was important to both the warriors and the priests, you could even turn him into symbol of unification between the two castes ("Our philosophies aren't that different, look at Branmer he was both a great general and a great highpriest). This series is based around diplomacy, compromise should be the answer.

The one other complaint I have about the episode (acting aside, because none of the season 1 acting is that great, including some of the regulars) is the whole business with the Minbari cruiser at the beginning. People: You fought a WAR over this mistake. This is something that would have been addressed at some point! What's worse is that Delenn clearly KNOWS that this might cause a misunderstanding. This is a scheduled visit of a funeral party, not a surprise visit out of the blue. Delenn would have known they were coming and informed the Babylon 5 command crew about the proper protocols for welcoming the ship. It's literally her JOB to do so.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if she was deliberately engineering tensions between Sinclair and Neroon. It'd be out-of-character with what we've seen of her so far, but... see above, she is wildly out of characrter here anyways.
Of course the real reason, mandatory cliffhanger aside, is to paint Neroon as jerk who's looking for a fight so that the viewer will suspect him of having hidden the body (he insisted on having his own guards and the frequent shots of his cruiser remind us that there is another place security isn't searching) in order to get a casus belli.


How come the theft wasn't discovered until the ceremony, by the way? Did Delenn and her cohorts wipe the guards' memory or what?

[Yora]

Yes, they did. They were shown using some gadgets on the guards when they stole the body.

And te important thing to remember is: The Minbari are not the good guys, not even the priests.

Spoiler

Show

And Delenn is complicated.

How in Valen's name did that system ever work?
I mean, I guess the side that wins would have the more dedicated followers- anyone who doesn't like their colour can just toss the rag for starters.

Green!

Purple!

You humans do not understand.

[Daimbert]

Londo did get what he wanted. He got advice from the Techno-mage. It might not have been what Londo wanted the advice to be, but he still got it.

Londo didn't want advice. He wanted an endorsement, something that he could show the people to make the link back to the first Emperor. So he really, really didn't get what he wanted.

[Rodin]

Maybe this is something that tends to happen in small, isolated groups of Drazi (like the ones on the station), that *doesn't* happen to the species as a whole? Otherwise they'd probably have destroyed themselves years ago.

Having said that, murdering each other over a random colour assignment doesn't really make any *less* sense than murdering each other over random genetic factors or place of birth...

I think the episode actually states that Drazi on the homeworld start killing each other, and that's what prompts the Babylon 5 Drazi to escalate.

In continuity terms, this should have had all sorts of consequences. The Drazi are having a civil war that affects the entire species, and it will go on for an entire year. That should be affecting what we see from them right into season 3. Since this is a filler episode, it never comes up again. I think the Drazi do where the sashes for the appropriate time, but that's all we hear about it.

I suppose you could argue that we just never hear the news from the Drazi homeworld, and that the fighting is all off-screen. I don't remember how much the Drazi feature in this portion of the show. You'd still think it would be making the news for an entire species to be warring on itself in a 50/50 split.

And yeah, the whole thing is just a humorously exaggerated look at real life tribalism. In many ways we'd be better off picking at random - at least the winning side will have a diverse perspective!

[factotum]

And te important thing to remember is: The Minbari are not the good guys, not even the priests.

This is Babylon 5. I don't think *anybody* counts as the "good guys". Heck, even the Vorlons have shown themselves perfectly willing to murder people in cold blood if it suits their purposes, and even if the person in question was really a nasty piece of work, it still indicates they're not quite as pure as the driven snow.

Spoiler: Later seasons

Show

Of course, we later find out that they're perfectly willing to destroy entire planets and their population if just one person on that planet is tainted by the Shadows.

[Lord Vukodlak]

This is Babylon 5. I don't think *anybody* counts as the "good guys".

Vir Cotto.

[comicshorse]

Vir Cotto.

" Vir, there is a terrible truth: As one accumulates power, one loses friends. One only has those who wish to use you, and those you wish to use. And yet, in all of this, you have somehow managed to walk through the corridors of power and not be touched. I can only assume you have not been paying attention."

Londo Mollari

[factotum]

Vir Cotto.

One good guy among their ranks does not make the Centauri "good *guys*", though, any more than the existence of Sheridan, Franklin etc. make the Earth Alliance good.

[Lord Vukodlak]

One good guy among their ranks does not make the Centauri "good *guys*", though, any more than the existence of Sheridan, Franklin etc. make the Earth Alliance good.

Next time say any-group rather then anybody.

[Yora]

S2E4: A Distant Star

The station is visited by a massive deep space exploration ship that has returned to known space to resupply. It's commanded by Sherridan's old captain Maynard. Maynard is surprised to find Sherridan on a post like this, but Sherridan has started to really appreciate the new duties he's been given.

Franklin thinks Garibaldi's wound isn't healing very well and tells him he needs to adjust his eating. Garibaldi hates it, but since it's a military outpost, he can order him to follow his recommendations.

Maynard tells stories about strange things in the far regions of hyperspace. Sherridan thinks he's telling tall tales to impress others, but Maynard insists that he saw something big and black moving across the stars while scouting once. When he asked the other pilot if he saw something, he told him there was something that disapeared into nothing.

Since he's already at it, Franklin decides that Sherridan could lose some weight, And Ivanova needs a more balanced diet.

Delenn is visited by a Minbari who voices the concerns of some of them that she might no longer be fully suited to represent them on the station. They are all loyal to their Minabri leaders, but in this case they need to know what happened to her to have certainty that she still is a Minbari.

Ivanova noticed that Sherridan has been absent minded recently and asks if there's anything wrong. He thinks Meynard was right and running a station and dealing with politics is not really something he enjoys.

The exploration ship leaves has a big malfunction that causes a fire on the bridge and also lose the navigations system in hyperspace. Fortunately they are not far enough away from the station yet to be out of range of communication and they manage to send an emergency call. Sherridan immediately sends out search teams, but finding anything drifting in hyperspace is extremely impossible.
The plan is to send fighters into hyperspace and turn off their engines to be carried by the energy currents until they reach the limit of the navigation signal from the jump gate. Then one fighter will hold that position, with the others continuing on until they can just maintain contact with the first fighter, and so on. But if any two fighters lose contact, the whole rest of the chain will get lost.

The last two fighters reach the exploration ship but one of the great black ships appears and destroys one of them and damages the other. The surviving pilot is able to point them in the direction of the other fighters, but his engines are out and he's drifting away, so he tells the ship to just get going and don't lose the course while trying to get after him.

Delenn is having a conversation with Sherridan that I'm not sure where it's supposed to go. But I think she quotes Carl Sagan.

The lost pilot in hyperspace manages to get his engines restarted but is running out of oxygen. He barely makes it back to the station and only was able to guess the course to the jump gate by following the general by following one of the black ships that is passing by him.

Sherridan goes back to his office to clear his desk of all the paperwork that has piled up.

--

Come ooon! Do something interesting!

This episode is adequately produced, but nothing of any consequence actually happened. We see the black ships again, but that's it. I was surprised when the episode ended because I thought there was more coming, but I didn't exactly feel bored sitting through it, so I don't rate it as a bad one.

[Rodin]

The bit with the diets cracks me up every time. Ivanova's line "I wanted to expand the Russian frontier. Now, I am the expanding Russian frontier" is another classic.

This episode admittedly doesn't have that much going on as a standalone episode. It's a kick off episode that starts several different plot threads off and serves as a proper introduction to Lieutenant Keffer.

[GrayDeath]

And its a good SLice of Life Episode. Nothing more, nothing less.

Even for Babylon 5, not evrything HAS to ,be about the coming Doom, ya know? ^^

[factotum]

This episode goes back to what I was saying earlier about them not having figured out the scale of anything at this point in the series, because that Explorer vessel is just *way* too big--it's almost as big as the station! How the heck it ever fitted through a jumpgate is beyond me.

Another thing that puzzled me, which may well have been explained in the episode and I just forgot--why does a ship whose entire purpose is *exploration* get lost in hyperspace just as easily as any other ship? Even with the navigation systems out you'd think they could just jump to normal space and sit there while they performed repairs, it's a bit silly if they don't have the capability to do that given they're supposed to be a long way from civilised space on a regular basis.

Lastly--why did the Shadow ship blow up those fighters? They're supposed to still be hiding themselves at this point, and I'm sure they could have just taken a route around the fighters. Just for the lulz? It just doesn't seem to match the Shadows' purposes to do this.

[Olinser]

This episode goes back to what I was saying earlier about them not having figured out the scale of anything at this point in the series, because that Explorer vessel is just *way* too big--it's almost as big as the station! How the heck it ever fitted through a jumpgate is beyond me.

Another thing that puzzled me, which may well have been explained in the episode and I just forgot--why does a ship whose entire purpose is *exploration* get lost in hyperspace just as easily as any other ship? Even with the navigation systems out you'd think they could just jump to normal space and sit there while they performed repairs, it's a bit silly if they don't have the capability to do that given they're supposed to be a long way from civilised space on a regular basis.

Lastly--why did the Shadow ship blow up those fighters? They're supposed to still be hiding themselves at this point, and I'm sure they could have just taken a route around the fighters. Just for the lulz? It just doesn't seem to match the Shadows' purposes to do this.

They didn't say it explicitly, but the implication was that their jump capability was out as well. They COULDN'T get out of hyperspace without a jumpgate, and they couldn't find the jumpgate with their navigation out.

As far as the Shadows, they fired BECAUSE they were still hiding. They knew they were seen so they eliminated the witnesses. The real question is why they didn't stick around to make sure they actually got rid of all the witnesses.

[Lord Vukodlak]

As far as the Shadows, they fired BECAUSE they were still hiding. They knew they were seen so they eliminated the witnesses. The real question is why they didn't stick around to make sure they actually got rid of all the witnesses.

Its said at a point or two in the series that engagements in hyperspace are extremely dangerous, furthermore its scanners could probably detect the fighters sensors were out and it have no way to prove they existed and further conflict would risk the ship being seen by another ship.
So Big Foot decided rather then circle back and risk being seen killing this guy he'd wager on him being dismissed as a loan nut.

This episode goes back to what I was saying earlier about them not having figured out the scale of anything at this point in the series, because that Explorer vessel is just *way* too big--it's almost as big as the station! How the heck it ever fitted through a jumpgate is beyond me.

Because its long not wide or even tall., it doesn't matter that the ship is 75% the length of the station. So long as it isn't to wide or tall for the struts that make up a jump gate. Length would only be an issue if you hit something before fully exiting the gate.

[Grey Watcher]

This episode goes back to what I was saying earlier about them not having figured out the scale of anything at this point in the series, because that Explorer vessel is just *way* too big--it's almost as big as the station! How the heck it ever fitted through a jumpgate is beyond me.

Also, I think it makes some sense for the Explorer Class ships to be that big. The nature of the work means they have to be entirely self-sufficient for years at a time. So they need all kinds of supplies and personnel that other ships typically return to base to get access to. For example, while I'm sure they don't have anything as extensive or elaborate as B5's, they almost assuredly have some kind of garden aboard to help produce oxygen and some basic foodstuffs beyond whatever the heck is in meal bars.

If anything, it'd the shape that seems weird to me. Strung out over miles feels weird. Surely in a pinch, you want your stuff closet at hand than 2 miles?

[factotum]

Also, I think it makes some sense for the Explorer Class ships to be that big. The nature of the work means they have to be entirely self-sufficient for years at a time.

But that goes back to my quibble from earlier--if a single malfunction is sufficient to take out the ship's nav systems and make it impossible for it to jump to real space, then it's a really, really crap design for a ship that's supposed to be spending years away from any repair docks. I think this episode would have made more sense with pretty much any other type of ship than an Explorer as the main thrust of it--something like an Omega would not only make more sense for the whole "getting lost in hyperspace" thing, it would also echo back to Sheridan's most recent command and give him the same sense of "Why am I stuck in this station?".

[Daimbert]

But that goes back to my quibble from earlier--if a single malfunction is sufficient to take out the ship's nav systems and make it impossible for it to jump to real space, then it's a really, really crap design for a ship that's supposed to be spending years away from any repair docks. I think this episode would have made more sense with pretty much any other type of ship than an Explorer as the main thrust of it--something like an Omega would not only make more sense for the whole "getting lost in hyperspace" thing, it would also echo back to Sheridan's most recent command and give him the same sense of "Why am I stuck in this station?".

From reading what everyone else has said and my own recollections of the episode, isn't it the combination of two major issues? First, that the jump engines go offline so they can't jump out on their own, and second that their nav goes out long enough that they drift too far off the beacon to find their way back to the jump gate? They do get the nav back, but are too far off the beacon to find their way back. Remember, the Starfuries had to use that chaining to make sure they don't get lost, and when Dallas' ship is destroyed Keffer can't find the beacon either.

And it was also a catastrophic failure, as evidenced by the open fire in command, and I believe damage to their communications as well (making it difficult to pick up their signal).

[factotum]

But all that stuff is why you have redundant systems in a ship that, as I keep saying, is designed to still work when away from repair docks for long periods. What if this had happened, instead of when the ship was only a few hours out from B5, when it was out on the Rim doing a long-term exploration mission? Well, guess you just lost your ship and its entire crew, sucks to be you! And there really wasn't any good reason why it *had* to be an Explorer class ship, as I said above, an Omega would have made at least as much sense.

[comicshorse]

But all that stuff is why you have redundant systems in a ship that, as I keep saying, is designed to still work when away from repair docks for long periods. What if this had happened, instead of when the ship was only a few hours out from B5, when it was out on the Rim doing a long-term exploration mission? Well, guess you just lost your ship and its entire crew, sucks to be you! And there really wasn't any good reason why it *had* to be an Explorer class ship, as I said above, an Omega would have made at least as much sense.

Well as pointed out it was a catastrophic failure. Lots of systems got fried including, presumably, the back ups. And yes if it had happened a long way out the ship would have been in real trouble but that's why Exploration vessels are so obviously highly regarded as its a dangerous job. But then exploring unknown territory is always a dangerous job as the history of...everybody amply demonstrates.
And I don't think it had to be an Explorer but it was a good opportunity to bring in a cool new ship, explore some of the background of the universe by showing that Earth is energetically 'boldly going' and show another path that the Commander had considered taking instead of being in charge of B5

[Daimbert]

But all that stuff is why you have redundant systems in a ship that, as I keep saying, is designed to still work when away from repair docks for long periods. What if this had happened, instead of when the ship was only a few hours out from B5, when it was out on the Rim doing a long-term exploration mission? Well, guess you just lost your ship and its entire crew, sucks to be you! And there really wasn't any good reason why it *had* to be an Explorer class ship, as I said above, an Omega would have made at least as much sense.

Well, not really, because Omegas are expected to take significant damage in any combat situation and so would have better damage control and ad hoc repair. Explorers would be equipped to repair more things at least mostly completely, but not quickly. And the main issue was that they had gone too far off the beacon by the time they repair their nav and didn't have a jump engine. Both of those going offline in the same event without the whole ship going up is rare, and again the former would have to be offline long enough to lose the beacon, which isn't necessarily common either.

[Yora]

S2E5: The Long Dark

An old human deep space exploration ship gets close to the station and is brought inside. The man in one stasis pod has been dead for ages, but the woman in the other is still alive and taken to medlab.

A crazy Dwight Schultz is ranting to people about an approaching evil and accuses Londo of serving the devil, and taken by Garibaldi to the security office to calm down. One of the security officer is annoyed by all the crazy homeless on the station, but Garibaldi is much more sympathetic towards them.
When he wakes up after having slept in a cell, he's relatively sane again and apologizes for his behavior, but doesn't want Garibaldi's offer to help him get back on his feet.

Ivanova searches the ship and finds that the stasis pods are both working and the man should still be alive. Franklin checks the body and finds that its organs are missing, but there's no signs of any blood on the ship.

The woman wakes up and Franklin tells she's been in stasis for a hundred years and her husband did not survive. He shows her around the station and seeing the aliens is very exciting, but it's also disappointing that human society did not really become any better in the meantime, and all the aliens don't seem to be any better than them. She meets G'Kar, who says things that are even more pessimistic, and she passes out. She has vague memories of something scary on her ship when she wakes up.
And really?! This woman has woken up after a hundred years and learned that her husband died maybe a few hours ago and she and Franklin are falling in love already? This writing is insulting!

Dwight Schultz comes back to the main street (what's that area called?) and start ranting about a soldier of darkness coming to kill everyone. but when Garibaldi leads him away again, he's much sane that the last time. He's certain that a monster has come on the exploration ship and its killing people in the same way that happened to his comrades during the war.

A corpse is taken to Medlab and is also missing its organs.

The Markab ambassador calls the council together to request the ship and the woman are removed from the station because they brought a soldier of darkness. Londo and Sherridan think it sounds silly, but G'Kar very much believes it. Sherridan agrees that something is going on and they need to find what's causing it.

Garibaldi wakes up in the night with bad dreams and decides to get Dwight Schultz out of his cell to show him where he thought he saw the monster in Brown Sector. They find nothing, but Garibaldi is willing to believe that he's sensing something, even if they have no real proof yet. He wants to know what exactly happened when his unit was killed in the war, and he says the monster slaughtered everyone and he only survived because it kept him alive to feed on his life force until someone would come to take them off the planet. He never really recovered from it and now can sense the creature being on the station. Then he runs off and Garibaldi loses him.

Since the monster also ate the woman's husband and was probably feeding on her, Garibaldi and Franklin asks her to help them find the creature. They get separated and Garibaldi finds Dwight Schulz being held up in the air by an invisible creature. He shots where he think the creature is and it drops the man and runs off. Sherridan arrives and they decide they need more than just two guns to seriously hurt it. While they are working on a plan to trap it, Dwight Schultz tells them it will only come to feed on him and runs off again to lure it out. It jumps him and with help from Ivanova and more security officers they shot and kill it.

The woman decides to return to Earth.

Ivanova later completes the analysis of the ship and discovered that the creature somehow got on the ship in space and then changed its course, which would eventually have taken it to the planet Zahadum, where G'Kar thinks the old evil is gathering its forces.

G'Kar is in his quarters and looks at a picture of a black demon in his holy book.

--

While watching the episode I was conflicted about what I think of it, but in the end I found it just frustrating to watch. So I rate this as a bad one.

This has to be by far the most half-assed crappy single-episode romance I've ever seen. I just watched Deep Space Nine last year, and it had some really terrible episodes of this kind, but at least those made that poor attempt at romance central to the episode. But this here is even worse because it doesn't even make any effort. It makes zero sense and I find it insulting.

Crazy Dwight Schultz is not as entertaining as I thought it would. The best part of his scenes is how it lets Garibaldi show his compassion for the homeless and his understanding and support for suffering veterans. His character is kind of a cool gunslinger tough guy, but they added to that some more depth and complexity by also making him someone who understands and isn't afraid of the troubles that guys like him have. I think this wasn't the first time that he was dealing with homeless troublemakers and criminals on the station by not treating them as problems that disrupt his order, but as people he's looking out for. Even more so than many of the other security officers working for him,
Sherridan and Franklin have some very basic understanding about these things, but you see in their talks with Garialdi that they don't really get it.
Thinking about it, the human officers on this show are doing a lot of keeping an eye out for each other's mental health. There's also been several cases with Ivanova on either side. I find it noticable, especially given how they are all presented as kind of badasses in their various ways. (Except Franklin.)

Hunting and fighting the monster also wasn't very impressive.

[Rodin]

I always skip this one on re-watches.

Star Trek/Doctor Who style monster of the week.
One episode romance.
No connection to the rest of the story.
The victims of the week aren't that interesting. The lady especially.

There's just nothing to recommend this episode. I don't even think it has any memorable quotes or one-liners.

Bottom 10, easy. It's not as horrible as the worst of season 1, but it may well be the worst episode of season 2. It's got some strong competition from Where All the Honor Lies, but that episode at least has greater relevance to the Babylon 5 universe. This one is just bad and pointless.

[Droid Tony]

S2E5: The Long Dark

This is another good example of a Star Trek type plot...that really does not work for B5.

The Shadow Killer really is not that intresting. I guess the idea was to add to the mystery of THE Shadows, but it just falls kind of flat.

The Garabaldi bits about war and mental health are nice, but only are a tiny bit of the show.

The Doc Franklin romance? Pure Yuck. Of course, it's just the big problem with the character:

B5 has a Doctor Character....I guess as the Orgingnal Star Trek had one. Except it sort of fits on Star Trek as you have a crew of like 200 that are in violent combat adventure exploration mission, so every day someone will get hurt or killed or have their DNA re-writen to turn them into a caveman, spider or fish.

B5 is not that sort of show. Doc Franklin provides basic health care for like a million people. Very boring health care....so boring we don't see Doc Franklin for whole epsiodes. Worse, once the Arcs get going there is nothing for a boring doctor character to do or even contrubute to the arc at all. Sure every dozen epsiodes Doc Franklin gets a good line like ''oh there is scar tissue on the back of her neck", he gets his mini Walkabout Story and does a bit of Buddy Fun with Marcus.....but not much else.

And a crazy pointless romance out of nowhere? Wow...it's just so bad....

[factotum]

This one was written by someone called Scott Frost, who doesn't seem to have done much else--and I think we see why here, he's really not very good at it. I called this episode out a couple of pages ago as being one of the bad ones in seasons 2 and 3, and I haven't seen anything to change my opinion since!

One other thing that puzzles me--supposedly the "beast" changed the course of the explorer ship something like 100 years ago to Z'Ha'Dum. Why? The Shadows weren't "awake" then, was it just psychic and knew there'd be a need for the evulz to gather in the future? Also, what did it eat on the ship--surely the woman's husband can't have been enough to sustain it for a century, and why didn't it eat the woman as well? Why does it sometimes need to feed by taking the organs out of people, but other times, it can apparently tap their life-force directly, as it can with the Dwight Schultz character? And lastly, how did it encounter him in the first place if it's been aboard this explorer ship for 100 years?

I mean, I don't have a problem with a Trek-style monster of the week episode if it makes any darned sense, but this one simply doesn't!

[Lord Vukodlak]

Why does it sometimes need to feed by taking the organs out of people, but other times, it can apparently tap their life-force directly, as it can with the Dwight Schultz character?

Perhaps for the same reason a person both eats food and drinks water. Or taping their life force could cause the organs to shrivel up into dust as a byproduct.

One other thing that puzzles me--supposedly the "beast" changed the course of the explorer ship something like 100 years ago to Z'Ha'Dum. Why? The Shadows weren't "awake" then, was it just psychic and knew there'd be a need for the evulz to gather in the future?

Or the Shadows told him the date they'd awaken. Or had already awoken and had begun secretly gathering their forces.

And lastly, how did it encounter him in the first place if it's been aboard this explorer ship for 100 years?

It wasn't. It was on that moon and when the explorer ship passed nearby it hopped on board and reprogrammed it to head for the Z'ha'dum.

Also, what did it eat on the ship--surely the woman's husband can't have been enough to sustain it for a century, and why didn't it eat the woman as well?

Well again not a century more like a decade. And it likely possesses its own method of suspended animation. As again the solders found it on a seemingly lifeless moon.

[Cikomyr]

This one was written by someone called Scott Frost, who doesn't seem to have done much else--and I think we see why here, he's really not very good at it. I called this episode out a couple of pages ago as being one of the bad ones in seasons 2 and 3, and I haven't seen anything to change my opinion since!

One other thing that puzzles me--supposedly the "beast" changed the course of the explorer ship something like 100 years ago to Z'Ha'Dum. Why? The Shadows weren't "awake" then, was it just psychic and knew there'd be a need for the evulz to gather in the future? Also, what did it eat on the ship--surely the woman's husband can't have been enough to sustain it for a century, and why didn't it eat the woman as well? Why does it sometimes need to feed by taking the organs out of people, but other times, it can apparently tap their life-force directly, as it can with the Dwight Schultz character? And lastly, how did it encounter him in the first place if it's been aboard this explorer ship for 100 years?

I mean, I don't have a problem with a Trek-style monster of the week episode if it makes any darned sense, but this one simply doesn't!

It hasn't been with the ship for 100 years, since it held Schultz during the war 11 years ago.

[factotum]

It wasn't. It was on that moon and when the explorer ship passed nearby it hopped on board and reprogrammed it to head for the Z'ha'dum.

So it can survive in space? No other way it could have reached that ship. (Also, this is blithely ignoring just how big space is--it's enough of a coincidence this thing happens to pass close by for B5, but for it to pass close by to some entirely unrelated planet a few years beforehand is stretching belief to breaking point).

[Yora]

I looked at the available information about the locations of the various homeworlds. Apparently there are sources that place Babylon 5 at Epsilon Eridani, which 10 lightyears from Earth, and Minbar at Chi Draconis, which is 26 lightyears from Earth. (Eridanus and Draco are pretty much in opposite directions from Earth, so the distance from Babylon 5 to Minbar would be 30-35 lightyears.) We are also told that the Narn homeworld is 10 lightyears from Babylon 5 (which makes it between 0 to 20 lightyears from Earth), and that the Centauri are the first species that humans encountered, so Centauri Prime is also very likely to be within the 20-30 lightyear range of Earth.
Galactically speaking, this is a very tiny region.

10 lightyears from Earth to Babylon 5 makes a 100 year journey at sub-lightspeed actually completely plausible.

The episode also mentions that the ship's computer record an atmosphere leak 10 years ago, so apparently the alien tore a hole in the hull and then sealed it behind it. How it got from a moon to a ship at 0.1c that was probably millions if not billions of kilometers away is a different question, though.

But then, this is a series that has outright magic happening every two or three episodes, so I just treat it as fantasy in space.

[Grey Watcher]

So it can survive in space? No other way it could have reached that ship. (Also, this is blithely ignoring just how big space is--it's enough of a coincidence this thing happens to pass close by for B5, but for it to pass close by to some entirely unrelated planet a few years beforehand is stretching belief to breaking point).

Perhaps it can survive in space for short periods. Though if the ship passed even sort of close to a planet, I would've expected it to get all tangled up in the planet's (or nearest star's) gravity and either crash or end up in orbit.

Maybe the creature sort of hitchiked/stowed away on various craft? If it killed all aboard save one person for basic sustenance, and then left them too weak to survive without prompt medical intervention, I could see a few ships going missing in the vastness of space getting written off as "oh well, bad things happen sometimes" and considered tragic, but not especially remarkable. But yeah, that's still getting pretty speculative, so not exactly a plot hole it's definitely a thin spot, at least.

One other thing that puzzles me--supposedly the "beast" changed the course of the explorer ship something like 100 years ago to Z'Ha'Dum. Why? The Shadows weren't "awake" then, was it just psychic and knew there'd be a need for the evulz to gather in the future? Also, what did it eat on the ship--surely the woman's husband can't have been enough to sustain it for a century, and why didn't it eat the woman as well? Why does it sometimes need to feed by taking the organs out of people, but other times, it can apparently tap their life-force directly, as it can with the Dwight Schultz character? And lastly, how did it encounter him in the first place if it's been aboard this explorer ship for 100 years?

I always assumed it just wanted to get back to Za'Ha'Dum generally. How it got stranded (the previous Shadow War 1000 years ago?) on that planet and how it survived until the Earth Alliance set up their base, who knows (local animals? are they usable-but-less-nutritious-and/or-tasty than humanoids?). So it was just returning to base generally. Or maybe the Shadows have some sort of beacon that only their chosen servants can perceive?

RE: Life force or organs? I actually always had the sense that with the homeless veteran and the cryonic woman, what it was eating was muscle mass. Again, it seems internal organs are preferable, but musculature will do in a pinch.

RE: Romance. I think what they were trying to do was establish a pattern, specifically one that sort of defies the Star Trek formula for such matters. Rather than the captain getting the green-skinned space babe of the week, he favors long-term monogamous relationships. The ship's doctor is generally among the most principled members of a given cast (and DeForest Kelly being a fair bit older than the rest of the cast probably helped established the doctor as being less concerned with such things), so B5 went for making him the lothario.

Of course, it gets clumsily handled a lot of the time and kind of falls by the wayside eventually, but I think that was the intent.

And Dr. Franklin isn't about to restrain his gonads over something as pesky and trivial as professionalism or medical ethics, nosiree!

And I'm going against the popular consensus here and say I actually appreciate the filler episodes to some degree. Helps the setting feel more real that not everything is feeding directly into the main plot. (Though this episode in particular sort of flirts with Main Plot Relevance but never commits to it or rejects it outright.) I'll grant that B5, especially early on tilts the seesaw a little too far in that direction, but I kinda prefer that to the Harry Potter problem of "literally everything is all about you somehow, always."

My feelings about The Long Dark are that the first half of the episode is pretty good (Franklin's contractually-stipulated romance subplot notwithstanding). I like the sort of spooky mystery aspect. The payoff and the big fight scene at the end were always underwhelming given to the buildup. Needed a more interesting solution than "more guns". Honestly, as much as I rank it as The Worst, Infection does a much better job with its climactic fight scene than The Long Dark does.