Babylon 5 Beeline: The Gathering
Brace yourself. Watching the pilot movie “The Gathering” was. . . well, the only thing that got me through it was knowing where Babylon 5 would eventually go and knowing which characters didn’t make it past the pilot. Seriously, if the original doctor or first officer showed up in the series, I would never have made it through five seasons. They were just that bad.
The plot of “The Gathering” feels like an afterthought because the station and the aliens are the main event. We learn that Babylon 5 is a place for business and diplomatic relations between Earth Alliance and the known alien races. We also learn that Humans and the Mimbari had fought a war ten years prior that almost wiped out Earth, but the Mimbari, despite significantly more advanced technology, suddenly surrendered without explanation.
Most of the key players in the series are introduced in the pilot. They are:
Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (Micheal O’Hare)- the man in charge of the station. During the last battle in the Earth-Mimbari war, he charged a Mimbari warship with his little fighter and blacked out for 24 hours. This point becomes extremely important in later seasons.
Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle)- B5’s head of security. No one believes in him except for Sinclair.
Delenn (Mira Furlan)- the Mimbari ambassador. She’s kind of a mystic at the beginning and everything she says sounds like a fortune cookie. A cryptic, alien fortune cookie that never tells you anything positive.
G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas)- the Narn ambassador. He’s played here like a scheming lizard man, looking for any back door way to give his species an advantage, including propositioning the local psychic for breeding purposes. G’Kar has the best line in the episode: “Would you prefer to be conscious or unconscious during the mating?”
Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik)- the Centauri ambassador. In “The Gathering”, he’s an ineffective diplomat and a drunk who can’t even cover his own bets at the casino, but he’s the most interesting and important character over the course of the series. At one point in this episode, he rants in front of Garibaldi about the former greatness of the Centauri Republic and how it’s been reduced to an amusement park, open 9 to 5, Earth time. The seeds of all of his later actions are in that thirty second speech.
Kosh- the Vorlon ambassador. Kosh doesn’t do anything in “The Gathering” except introduce the Vorlon race.
So what happened in this two hour pilot (one and a half, without commercials)? Kosh arrives at Babylon 5 and is poisoned minutes after leaving his ship. Commander Sinclair is accused of attempted murder and the rest of the episode is about trying to find the real assassin, who turns out to be a Mimbari using a changeling net.
As the Mimbari assassin is being electrocuted by his malfunctioning changeling net, he says to Sinclair, “There is a hole in your mind.” That’s typical Mimbari behavior, spouting cryptic jibber jabber and not getting to the point.
The alien regulars already seemed comfortable in their roles, if not their prosthetics, but the humans had no chemistry whatsoever, unless Garibali was in the scene. He was the only one who didn’t seem like an android. Patricia Tallman as the psychic Lyta Alexander was just. . . ugh. It was a lot like watching Mark Hamill in Return of the Jedi, but with more melodrama. And more flailing.
First officer Laurel Takashima bugged the hell out of me. She delivered all of her lines like she’s me trying to say “mosquito” correctly. I can say it if I slow down and think about every single syllable, otherwise it just comes out “muhskeetah” (but never “skeeter”, thank you very much).
I know this was a pretty long column this week, but there was just so much packed into “The Gathering”, which surprised me because, overall, I thought the episode sucked. Next week, we’ll get into Babylon 5’s first regular episode, “Midnight on the Firing Line”, which starts B5’s trek to awesomeness.
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