Things have gone from bad to worse for Delenn, while a joyride to preserve his flight pay strands Sheridan in unknown space. What did you think of their misadventures, and about that revelation at the end when General Hague came to visit?
Things have gone from bad to worse for Delenn, while a joyride to preserve his flight pay strands Sheridan in unknown space. What did you think of their misadventures, and about that revelation at the end when General Hague came to visit?
There’s a little moment in All Alone in the Night that for me encapsulates how essential Boxleitner is to Sheridan working as a character.
It’s when Sheridan says that the first duty of a prisoner is to escape. Boxleitner’s performance communicates that for Sheridan this is simply a fact, like gravity: he’s internalized rules like this to the point that for him, there’s no possible doubt.
While the actual plot of ‘Sheridan being captured and made to fight” is old hat (think the classic STTOS with Kirk and the Gorn fighting in the desert) – its all the things that happen around this plot that make this an awesome episode. Sheridan’s dream sequences here has long been a favourite scene of the show in general.
Two thoughts occur to me: 1) If Kosh could communicate over such a long distance in Sheridan’s dream, does that mean he could tell where Sheridan was? If so, gee thanks for all the help locating him, Kosh! 2) The Agamemmnon comes in guns blazing, it doesn’t even wait until it clears the jump point before opening up with it’s main guns. This to me is a clear diffence to Trek – there they would probably have tried to hail the Streib ship and then sit round discussing it, can you imagine in TNG them just opening fire on an enemy? I certainly can’t! I also liked that the capital ship was flanked by fighters, that is another thing that you never see in Trek, quite apart from it being cool, it gives you a good sense of scale of the destroyer.
Agamemnon opening fire: that’s an interesting point, because, arguably, B5 is often about how it would be better to take some time and get to know alien cultures before being too quick to treat them as hostile.
Obviously, the Streib are just plain evil, so the story is contrived to make it the right thing to do in this particular instance. But it would be interesting to go back through the episode and assemble all of what Earthforce (as distinct from the viewers) *know* about the Streib (especially, what they’re not just taking on trust from Delenn) and see how justified this action is.
Reading your comment, something just occurred to me – I always wondered how the Agamemnon knew where to hit the Streib ship – I always winced when I saw them fire, crossing fingers that Sheridan wasn’t in the part they shot. How did they know where to shoot? I always assumed they just shot and hoped for the best but perhaps Delenn gave them some sort of schematic of the alien ship? Here’s the engines, shoot this part first.
I’d forgotten pretty much all of the plot of this story apart from “I can’t believe it’s the Greys” plotline.