Noise2Signal

[W]e are discussing a TV show on Making Light, a blog run by several close friends where we can talk about writing and politics.
— Steven Brust

There’s a subtle technique to bringing a reader into a story; Jo Walton dubbed it “incluing”. Because the rule show, don’t tell doesn’t always cover introductions. Sometimes you have to tactfully mention something the viewer needs to know but isn’t yet aware of. It’s a fine line: too much of it too obviously, and the characters jaw each other dead rehashing things they are already entirely aware of. Not only does it rob the story of momentum, but it’s also deeply annoying. You’re an idiot, says the author, and need a good firm whack with this here clue-stick to figure out what’s going on.

Babylon 5 has a terrible case of it in the first half of the first season, both in the micro and the macro. The series of Problem of the Week episodes that follow Midnight on the Firing Line are fractal patterns of patronizing exposition, from their existence in the first place through their carefully character-revealing plots, and right down to their excruciating dialog. A wiser writer would have dropped us into the big plot and trusted us to figure out the personalities on the fly.

This entry will use the first five PotW episodes to rant about the problems of excessive exposition; feel free to join in in the comments. There’s enough summary here that you can skip the episodes completely, or watch them as worked examples of incluing gone horribly wrong.

Soul Hunter

This is a Delenn episode, making up for the fact that her name is never even uttered in Midnight on the Firing Line. She deserves the attention; she’s important to both the culture of Babylon 5 and the plot to come.

Unfortunately, the episode reveals a completely different, and much less admirable, person than the one we see in the rest of the series. It’s the equivalent of the “Éowyn is a bad cook and prone to giggling” scene in the extended version of The Two Towers. Delenn starts off by waving a loaded weapon around Medlab, to the peril of everyone there, then excuses herself by explaining that Soul Hunters are bogeymen for Minbari children. Later, she allows herself to be captured and tied up, alternately shrieks and faints, and ends up being rescued by a guy with a gun. The episode closes with her petting soul-globes like little kittens.

This is a strange contrast to the stern Satai Delenn who helped shield the dying Dukhat from the Soul Hunter during their last encounter. Religious-caste Minbari don’t end up on the Grey Council by being the equivalent of Penelope Pittstop, but that’s what we see of her here. There’s also very little here on which to build a character who can tell an entire war fleet to “be somewhere else”, and see them fly off.

The one good piece of characterization in the whole thing isn’t about Delenn at all. It’s Ivanova’s funeral for the murdered grifter. Her simple recitation of the prayer for space burial is both businesslike and deeply felt. It even pulls Dr. Franklin into a reflective mood. (We’ll come back to Ivanova, and faith in general, in another entry.)

Born to the Purple

This episode, written by Larry DiTillio rather than JMS, is probably my favorite of the group. It’s Londo’s turn in the spotlight. We’re supposed to be fond of him at this point in the long plot, and episodes like this make that easy. He is a fool and a buffoon, but all the world loves a lover.

The plot is straight-up “hooker with a heart of gold”: Adira, a Centauri slave and dancing girl, is forced by her owner to obtain files of secret blackmail material from Londo. She and Londo are having an intense affair, so much so that he’s neglecting important negotiations with the Narn Regime. But it’s clear that Adira and Londo do care for each other: she’s deeply reluctant to betray him, and he, on finding himself betrayed, is still desperate to protect her.

In the meantime, Garibaldi is investigating a misuse of the station’s priority communications channels. He finally hacks into the signal in time to see Ivanova talking to her dying father back on Earth.

The expository dialog in the episode is spectacularly dreadful. Both Londo and Adira preface emotional statements with, “I am Centauri,” as though after the time they’ve spent in bed there could be any species-doubt left. And Garibaldi’s “As you know” explanation of the Gold Channels to Ivanova is a classic of the type. What of the following would she not already know?

Lieutenant Commander, Gold Channels are priority access, usable only by express permission of Commander Sinclair. No one outside of the ambassadors and the senior officers even knows they exist.

But what saves the episode for me is Londo’s final words to Adira:

I am an old man. I have been in love many times, and I have been hurt many times. I’ll survive.

Because sometimes people really do explain themselves to each other in the clear.

Infection

I actually have a theory that this is a long-lost Old Trek episode. JMS found it in a trunk somewhere and tweaked it to show us some more of Dr. Franklin. The setup has all the hallmarks: species-level conflict, imminent peril to the ship station, easy good guy/bad guy distinctions, and a swift solution with no longer-term repercussions. There’s a plot hole the size of a jump gate (they got the guy’s name from his alien-species RNA-equivalent in under half an hour? A day ago they were tentatively guessing that the artifacts might be biological.) And the climactic battle between the gung-ho commander and the monster finishes with a moralistic speech about tolerance and the value of science over religious orthodoxy.

Key takeaways, if you want to skip this episode:

1. There are big corporations in this universe. They use their money in unethical ways.
2. Dr. Franklin is a highly principled man. He can be tempted, briefly, by a lot of money, but will resist in the end. Particularly if there’s murder involved.
3. Sinclair is very clever, and can think and talk as well as fight.
4. Garibaldi thinks Sinclair is being too much of a daredevil.
5. The Babylon 5 Generic Reporter Character can be intimidated by Susan Ivanova. (“Don’t. You’re too young to experience that much pain.”)

Parliament of Dreams

In my opinion, this is the worst episode in all of Babylon 5. (At least we get it over with early.) The three subplots neither intersect nor mirror one another. And they are almost entirely dreadful.

The fierce-hearted representative of the Narn Regime, G’Kar, tempered by generations of genocide and war, hears that an old enemy has sent an assassin to Babylon 5 to kill him. He immediately panics, decides he mistrusts his new aide Na’Toth, hires a thuggish grunt from the underworld to protect himself, lets Garibaldi find lacy red human underwear in his quarters during the investigation of the grunt’s murder, and nearly loses track of the little crayfish he intends to have for dinner. He is, of course, captured, subjected to great pain, and rescued by Na’Toth. And their glee at framing the assassin with his own guild is as shallow and pointless as the rest of the subplot.

Meanwhile, Sinclair’s old flame, Catherine Sakai, has come to Babylon 5 to arrange some survey work. The subsequent romance is plagued by a chronic case of As You Know, Bob My Darling about their long and tangled past. Mind you, I don’t have a problem with that kind of behavior between consenting adults, but I wish they’d take it behind closed doors. It scares the horses and bores the audience. I’ll be nasty and ruin the surprise: they do in fact get back together, still protesting that this is a bad idea because it never works out. As they both know. Darling. Smooch.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of a celebration of the various religions on Babylon 5. For most of the episode, this is just a weird distraction. I suppose it’s informative to find out that Centauri celebrations involve cheering about genocide, getting drunk, and yodeling, and that the Minbari have a shared-meal ritual. I’m baffled why the deeply religious Narn don’t get a look-in till a later episode. But this is the thread that redeems the story for me, just a little, when Sinclair is supposed to show the ambassadors the “dominant belief system” of Earth. He simply arranges a long receiving line of members of different Terran religious traditions and introduces the aliens to everyone. The two touches I particularly appreciated were that he started with an atheist, and that there are multiple tribes of Native American represented.

Mind War

This is neither the worst nor the best of the episodes in this sequence. But it’s a good place to stop and show how all of this frightful exposition could have been done better. Also, it’s got my favorite casting decision in the whole series: Bester, the PsiCop, played with dead-eyed brilliance by Walter Koenig. If you’re only going to watch one of this set, watch this one.

Bester and a colleague (Kelsey) come onto Babylon 5 in pursuit of a rogue telepath, Jason Ironheart. Ironheart is rather like River Tam, a psionic driven mad by people trying to boost his power. He’s also an old friend and lover of Talia’s; the episode is partly to set her up as a “good” telepath, in opposition to the Psi-Corps.

This involves making sure that we know that the Psi-Corps is bad. Ironheart tells us all about it, first when talking to Talia:

We all thought Psi-Corps was controlled by the government, but that’s changing. They’re starting to pull the strings behind the scenes. They’re more powerful than you can begin to imagine. Telepaths make the ultimate blackmailers, Talia. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all.

(Note the repetition at the end of the speech. That’s a particular quirk of JMS’s scripting, intended to emphasize the last point. It can get tiresome. It can get tiresome.)

Ironheart also warns Sinclair about the Psi-Corps:

The Psi-Corps is dedicated to one thing, Commander: control. Control over telepaths, the economy, the courts, over matter, over thought itself.

Thing is, these warnings are entirely unnecessary. In simple pursuit of the plot, Bester and Kelsey ream Talia’s mind in distressing fashion, mislead Sinclair in order to constrain his choices and control his actions, reach into people’s minds without asking their permission, and out-menace Garibaldi. Bester, creepy to the last, leaves the station with the salute, “Be seeing you.” Since when do we need to be told they’re sinister and controlling?

Likewise, this kind of speech isn’t how to show that Talia and Ironheart were close:

We were lovers. He was everything to me, the perfect model of what it meant to be in the Corps. Do you know what it’s like when telepaths make love, Commander? You drop every defense, and it’s all mirrors reflecting each other’s feelings. Deeper and deeper, until, somewhere along the line, your souls mix, and it’s a feeling so profound it makes you hurt. It’s the only moment in a telepath’s life when you no longer hear the voices. He came to say goodbye, Commander. He came to say goodbye.

There’s too little spark between the characters in the episode, so this speech doesn’t work. But it would have taken very few touches or long looks to wordlessly establish everything that Talia says to Commander Sinclair. It would have been more tasteful as well, and reduced the amount of bad bluescreening in the episode by a marked degree.

By contrast, while Talia is engaged in frantic exposition with someone who will shortly resemble a character out of Reboot, Catherine Sakai is learning some genuinely interesting things about her fellow characters and the universe at large. There’s only minimal gratuitous speechifying involved. She’s been contracted to explore a world in Narn space, though G’Kar has warned her that it’s not safe. She insists on going anyway. Before she leaves, he carefully clears off a gun-sized area on the mantlepiece:

Let me pass on to you the one thing I’ve learned about this place. No one here is exactly what he appears.

Catherine’s subsequent encounter with a mysterious ship, and her rescue by the Narn vessels that G’Kar sent, are good exposition. From this we learn that there are bigger forces in the universe than the species who inhabit Babylon 5, and that G’Kar can be subtle and gracious in his own way.

And then, at the end of the episode, we see the newest gun on the mantlepiece: a brief glimpse of the G’Kar that is to come.

They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not yet explained everything.

In some ways, seeing that kind of good self-explanation just makes all the wrong attempts worse.

Next up will be The War Prayer and And the Sky Full of Stars, two early steps into the larger plot of the series.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

A person, a place, and a problem. Action and movement. Often a time of year or a time of day.
These are not bad things to get into the first chapter. If you can get ’em onto the first page, even better.
— Learn Writing with Uncle Jim

And so we begin. The show starts at shift change on an orbital defense station, with a surprise attack by unidentified ships. That very first scene is like a Tarot card of the series: succession of powers, war from peace, enemies recognized just too late, death.

JMS has a lot to do in this first episode. He’s got to establish as many of the major characters as he can, using as little cardboard as possible. He has to make us feel at home in the setting, both physical and cultural. At the same time, he must get the plot and conflict moving.

These goals sound more contradictory than they are. If he can prove that their conflicts have momentum and history, he’ll be a long way to creating realistic characters out of the funny-looking people in their weird clothes. Answering why? gives him who?, what? and where? if not for free, at least at a deep discount.

He also has to signal to us the audience that this is not episodic SF. We can’t forget what’s happening now, because it’s going to influence what happens next. Actions will have consequences. Promises will be made that must be kept. Remember Chekhov’s rule about plotting? One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. Chekhov’s guns are promises of plot to come, and Straczynski isn’t shy about strewing them around the characters’ mental spaces.

So here’s a gun of Londo’s:

In my dream, I am an old man—it’s twenty years from now—and I am dying, my hands wrapped around someone’s throat, and his around mine. We have squeezed the life out of each other. The first time I saw G’Kar, I recognized him as the one from the dream. It will happen. Twenty years from now, we will die with our hands around each other’s throats.

A second gun; G’Kar’s had it a while:

I will confess that I look forward to the day when we have cleansed the universe of the Centauri, and carved their bones into little flutes for Narn children. It is a dream I have.

Another in Londo’s arsenal. It’s new, but it fits right in:

On the issue of galactic peace, I am long past innocence and fast approaching apathy. It’s all a game, a paper fantasy of names and borders. Only one thing matters, Commander. Blood calls out for blood. If Carn is dead, there will be war. Today, tomorrow, the day after, it doesn’t matter. If it’s the last thing I do, if it’s the last breath I take, there will be war. This I swear to you, Commander. This I swear.

It’s not just the aliens. Watch Ivanova and Talia juggle this one back and forth:

Ivanova: What happened back then is not your fault. But it’s part of what you are. And yet, you’re as much of a victim as my mother.
Talia: I don’t feel like a victim.
Ivanova: No, and so far I cannot tell if that is good or bad.

And here’s a gun lying on the mantlepiece of the entire station:

[Santiago’s] agenda for the coming term includes creating a closer relationship with the Mars colony, and a greater emphasis on preserving Earth cultures in the face of growing non-Terran influences.

Of course, somewhere in the midst of all this exposition, the characters have a problem to solve. The Narn Regime has attacked a Centauri agricultural colony. They’re wrong in many ways, from the attack itself to the parading of Londo’s nephew as a hostage. But they’re not cartoon warmongers: they have some claim to the world in question, and grounds for their historic grudge against the Centauri. Does that justify interspecies war?

The characters in the thick of it want to use force to solve the problem: Londo because he blames himself for the fact that his nephew is in danger; Sinclair because he’s afraid that inaction will draw humans into another disastrous war. But both of them are working against orders from their homeworlds.

The solution is political, but with realistically messy and unbalanced politics rather than stage compromises. There is no easy middle for everyone to arrive at and be happy. Since this is storytelling rather than reality, all the threads do come together neatly: Talia’s telepathy averts Londo’s attempt at murder, and the subplot about the raiders gives Sinclair the leverage to force the Narn off of Raghesh 3.

The message is that politics and collaboration can save us from violence. We start the series as JMS means for it to go on, at least for a while.

I’d say that this particular outcome is very much a product of the time that the episode came out. It first aired on January 26, 1994, the day after Bill Clinton’s summed up his first year in office in his State of the Union address. The Northern Irish conflict was still active, but the Downing Street Declaration fostered hope of a negotiated settlement. The former Yugoslavia was at war—Srebenica was fresh in everyone’s mind—but there was also Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Divorce, a year old and working well. The Maastricht Treaty had just created the European Union, while North America was implementing NAFTA. South Africa had adopted an interim constitution in advance of the first election in which blacks could vote. And the US had recently signed treaties limiting nuclear and chemical weapons.

There were certainly troubles unsolved by diplomacy: the Tamil Tigers had assassinated the Sri Lankan president the previous year; the Zapatistas were just getting started in Mexico; and in the US, negotiation had failed disastrously in Waco. And politics wasn’t pretty: Vince Foster’s suicide the previous July was already fodder for partisan ugliness. Still, the faith was there: diplomacy works. Cooperation and collaboration work. Politics works.

I don’t know that one could express so much optimism now.

The episode closes with one of my favorite pieces of characterization: Delenn sitting with Garibaldi, trying to understand Duck Dodgers and eat popcorn. She manages neither.

Ivanova quotes:

• “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.”
• “I do not like Santiago. I’ve always thought that a leader should have a strong chin. He has no chin. And his vice-president has several. This to me is not a good combination.”
• “Mr Garibaldi. You’re sitting at my station, using my equipment. Is there a reason for this, or to save time should I just go ahead and snap your hands off at the wrist?”

The next post will deal with Soul Hunter, Born to the Purple, Infection, Parliament of Dreams, and Mind War.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war, by creating a place where humans and aliens can work out their differences peacefully. It’s a port of call, a home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens, wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal…all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it’s our last best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.

In the world of science fiction TV, Babylon 5 is generally considered the first of the modern* story-arc series. It’s a genuine departure from the “Wagon Train to the Stars” paradigm that Old Trek created. I don’t think we’d have had Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the Battlestar Galactica reboot without it and Deep Space Nine to convince the studios that genre audiences had long attention spans and an appetite for moral complexity.

For me personally, Bab 5 was the the TV series of my mid-twenties. I watched it as I settled into married life and into the strange rhythms of being an expat. I watched it as my professional life and a good deal of my interior life fell apart. I watched it as I built both back up and started to become who I am now.

And then I never watched it again.

But I realized this past November that I wanted to go back through the whole series, to see how it looks to a 40 year old. I’ve grown up enough, and seen enough of the real world, to more deeply appreciate the themes of failure and redemption that run through it. And I’ve become more aware of the technical side of storytelling; another thing I’m doing right now is reading Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. Straczynski planned the series as a novel-length story, and I’m interested to see the techniques he used to tell it.

Or perhaps it will be pyrite: fool’s gold. Perhaps the Suck Fairy will have visited it in the 16 years since it first aired.

It also strikes me that it might be amusing to blog this process. I’m not planning on going episode by episode, but rather tackling it in somewhat larger chunks of plot. I don’t know how many of my friends are fans, or have seen it, and might be interested in discussing it. But I thought it might be an interesting thing to try.

SPOILER POLICY: This is a TV series from the last century. I’m not going to put entries behind the cut, or discourage digressions and side discussions in the threads. If you haven’t seen the series and don’t want to know what happens in it, scroll on by. I’m not going to reveal things I remember but haven’t yet seen again. I may foreshadow them—for instance, mentioning how terribly sad Lennier’s placid innocence makes me feel—but I won’t reveal things out of sequence in my write-ups. But I don’t have a problem with people doing so in the threads.

We’re already about halfway through the first series, so I have some catching up to do. I’ll post the first-episode reflections tomorrow, but I wanted to start with a few general observations.

First of all, I notice that the main characters are now my contemporaries. In 1996, I identified with the juniors: Vir, Lennir, Na’Toth, Ivanova‡, Dr. Franklin. Characters like Delenn, Londo and G’Kar were additionally alien to me because they were older.

But now the junior characters look young and rather gormless. In the meantime, I’ve discovered in myself a deep and unexpected affection for Londo, a lot less alarm at G’Kar, and a kind of collegial affection for Sinclair. I’m interested to see how this changes as first two evolve.

On a more cinematic level, I have to say that the special effects hold up better than I feared. The CGI stuff doesn’t look bad to my inexpert eyes, and the alien makeup is still plausibly transformative (once you accept the premise that all intelligent life is roughly humaniform). The set is nicely grubby and workmanlike. The only place that really creaks is when live action and CGI mix; the bluescreening is awful.

The off-duty human hair and costumes are often dreadfully dated; fluffy perms and blouson jackets really are the future of the past. But apart from the leatherette panels on the crew uniforms, the on-duty costumes and alien clothes are well-designed and made from reasonably classic materials. The individual tastes of each species are well-represented, from the proto-steampunk Centauri to the oddly Khan-esque Narn. And I still want Delenn’s wardrobe.

Overall, I’d say the accidents of the show don’t damage my suspension of disbelief. I’m willing to relax into the story.

* Blakes Seven did it a generation earlier, but in Britain and with worse special effects†.
† possibly redundant phrasing there
‡ My particular aim, back in the 1990’s, was to grow up to be Susan Ivanova. Looking at the work I do now, I see that somewhere in the intervening years, I’ve pretty much achieved that.§
§ Now I can go on to my next goal, which is to grow up to be Cordelia Vorkosigan.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.