Belly up to the bar, have a “Water. Straight up,” and share your thoughts about everything “Survivors” has to say about future episodes of Babylon 5.
Belly up to the bar, have a “Water. Straight up,” and share your thoughts about everything “Survivors” has to say about future episodes of Babylon 5.
To take the low dangling fruit…
..knowing how far Garibaldi ends up down the bottle after Bester messes with his head I was actually surprised when rewatching this now how quickly he climbs back out “oooops! my bad all good now”. Maybe he got out TOO easy this time and further on just seems more realistic. But also relating to Bester’s manipulation which is just exaggerating the pre-existing paranoia Garibaldi has – this show he has AMBLE paranoia to begin with. Not to mention Garibaldi’s bad judgement calls and decision making when in stressful situations – trying to go on the lamb after being set up? He should be much much smarter than that.
I’m generally very pro-Survivors, in part because I think it’s the best Garibaldicentric S1 episode, and Garibaldi is at this point overdue for some development. But its superficial treatment of alcoholism is definitely a black mark on the episode, and contrasts with the sensitivity with which addiction is handled in S3 and S5. I really dislike it when “solving the plot problem magically equates to making falling off the wagon no longer a problem by next episode.”
I agree that some things were hand-waved because of the format, but I believed Garibaldi’s potential to recover quickly from this episode. Here he had support, even though he didn’t use it, and it was still there to see him through the aftermath.
This is another episode which I like, but whose success creates a problem for later episodes (like the failure to revisit what happened to Londo’s nephew in Midnight on the Firing Line). Major Kemmer, one can only assume, dies with the President in Chrysalis. There are obvious reasons why this detail gets lost in the shuffle of developments at the beginning of S2, but it’s a shame that she’s never mentioned again nonetheless.
We can’t “Like” comments, so I will just say it. “Like”. Great point.
Actually, JMS has gone on record saying that Kemmer wasn’t aboard the ship when it exploded, but nevertheless it is a very large and annoying dangling bit of plot/character.
Good to hear that she survived anyway.
I’d love to claim the credit for my observation, but it was actually something that I read elsewhere (I believe on TV Tropes).
Having listened to the actual podcast: –
Now that you’ve made me think about it, I think the combination of the attempted assassination here and the successful assassination in Chrysalis is the exact opposite of a problem. It’s brilliant. It exploits TV logic to create a false expectation for the viewer: “If Garibaldi heroically stops an assassination here, then for that to ‘mean something,’ we can’t have another assassination attempt where he fails – and anyway, having used a presidential assassination as the McGuffin once, the show won’t revisit that again.”
Yet another reason why Chrysalis is so good. (My favorite S1 episode, and the best B5 season finale. Yes, it’s better than Sleeping in Light.)
Maybe it’s just my feelings on Believers influencing my opinion, but I really like Survivors.
The plotline involving the assassination attempt on President Santiago and Garibaldi being framed for it ties in really nicely, intentionally or otherwise, with both the happenings of the season finale and with things that end up happening with Garibaldi’s character later on, and we also get some nice bits with Sinclair and some nice fleshing-out of the relationship between himself and Garibaldi, which is a thread that is presented in other episodes but not really ‘sewn together’ until it’s necessary to do so here.
With regards to Kemmer, I actually like her character; she’s very believable to me as the straight-laced, no-nonsense “secret service” person, which actually makes any unbelievability when it comes to her ‘letting her hair down’ with Garibaldi work for me since you can easily chalk up said unbelievability and awkwardness to the fact that she IS so straight-laced and no-nonsense for most of the rest of the episode.
It is odd that we never really heard about her again since, by the very nature of both her job and the way things end between her and Garibaldi, some further mention of her would have been very much warranted, making its absence feel more conspicuous and jarring than with the Adira thing since there’s still a little bit of room for ‘disconnect’ in that situation given Centauri Prime’s distance from Babylon 5 and the nature of Londo’s posting as Ambassador where he wouldn’t necessarily have any occasion to mention Adira on a regular/semi-regular basis.
The fact that there’s a bomb plot against President Santiago that is foiled in this episode also makes the season finale’s revelation that he’s killed in an explosion pack all that more emotional ‘oomph’ since it retroactively makes the characters’ efforts in this episode to stop such an attempt futile, which is something I rather like.