Thirdspace

Jeff: Welcome to Babylon 5 for the first time not a Star Trek podcast. My name is Jeff Akin and I am the one who was

Brent: And I'm Brent Allen and I am the one who will be.

Jeff: And we are watching Babylon 5 for the first time for you, the one who is,

Brent: That's right. Jeff and I are two veterans, Star Trek podcasters searching for the important messages in Babylon five, this new show. Neither one of us have seen. But we're looking for how Babylon five is delivering those messages in its own unique way.

Jeff: and to be really clear, not in a Star Trek way. In fact, Brent, we are so much, not a Star Trek podcast. It's literally in the name of our show. And we play a game to prove it. That game is called the rule of three. This is a game where we limit ourselves to no more than three references to Star Trek per episode.

Total. That's it. Three. Uno, dos, tres. No substitutions, exchanges or refunds.

Brent: And if we make one of those references, you're going to hear.

Jeff: You're gonna hear this bad boy.

Brent: That's right, Jeff. Well, no, sorry. Is that the note is the note is off. It's not our normal notes. He goes like, wait, that's not how I say this,

Jeff: Cause we don't do the thing, so it's just uh, you know.

Brent: but we did the thing this time.

Jeff: But we don't do the, the sound and the thing and the whatever, unless we want to, but

Brent: That's fair. All right. Hey, give me a, give me a, give me a buzz. That's right, Jeff. And right along with our game, the rule of three, there's another game that we like to play here. It's a tradition. I tried to turn on the shun at this point, Jeff. We're at the end of an episode. We take a look at the title of the next, in this case, movie that we are watching, and we make a guess as to what that movie might be about.

Well, this is now time for us to play.

Jeff: Time to play the piper. I'm going to have to insert

Brent: the sound drop.

Jeff: I don't, I pulled that one off quick. That's

Brent: gotta be prepared here, Jeff. Uh, let's hear it. Time to prepare. Yes, that's right. And we revisit our prediction from last week to see just how right we were. Jeff, what did you say third space was going to be about? How hard did you ride my coattails on this particular prediction?

Jeff: we wrote the same coattails to the, just to a word pretty much at the end. So we were both very much right in there's regular space. There's hyperspace and there's third space.

Brent: nailed it.

Jeff: Boom. They're done.

Brent: I was gonna say that's a hundred. No, that's a hundred percent. I don't care what the other stuff was. That's it. That's what this movie was.

Jeff: Now I will say the prediction I took on was that it would involve techno mages and it's a real shame. They did not.

Brent: I, I talked about being beyond the rim

Jeff: You did.

Brent: and that's where these guys are from is from beyond the rim. So

Jeff: Are they though?

Brent: it was my understanding of it.

Jeff: We'll talk about it.

Brent: That's, that's the, that's, that's part of it. Like they're out there in the thing. So we'll see,

Jeff: We'll find out. We might be unlocking the multiverse in, uh, in our conversation, but already there's gotta be some people out there who are a little confused about what do they mean beyond the rim? How could it possibly be that? What is this third space thing? So if you haven't seen this film in a while, don't remember anything about it.

Watched it, erased it from your memory for some reason. Brent, why don't you remind all of us what third space is about?

Brent: The place Babylon five, a space station out in the middle of nowhere. Time, a nondescript period in the middle of season 4, sometime after the Shadow War, but before the Earth Civil War. Ivanova is out with a bunch of Starfuries, being a badass. After a very successful mission of trapping some pirates, Ivanova and her Starfury crew come across an object in hyperspace.

A very, very, very large object. Thankfully in space, even very, very, very large objects are still pretty much weightless. Which makes it no problem for this little group of Starfuries to tow this big bad boy back to the station. News of this discovery has reached Earth and IPX has arrived at the station to check it out.

At a million years old, they're suuuper interested. So Dr. Trent, IPX's stooge, and her team begin to study the object. Meanwhile, on the station, people are beginning to exhibit really strange behavior. They're becoming aggressive, agitated, and even violent. Lita, on the other hand, is going full on Benny Russell. Writing on the walls, muttering to herself, and even demanding that the artifact be destroyed. It's dangerous, she says. In fact, she's so far into this trance. Zach finally works up the courage to ask her out, but his timing is off. All wrong. She has absolutely no response, doesn't hear a word he says, but he takes that as rejection, thus answering our question, Jeff, from many, many, many episodes ago.

Hey, whatever happened there? Well, lots and lots and lots of minutes of this movie are spent showing how the artifact is impacting folks on B5 and showing how IPX is discovering almost nothing about it and just making us wonder, okay, what is it? Finally. We eventually get an answer as to what the object actually is.

Leta, going full on Marvel Cyclops here and channeling whatever echo of the Vorlons remain in this galaxy, tells us the whole thing in one big exposition dump. This object is in fact an ancient jump gate created by the Vorlons themselves when they were in an era of pride and hubris that only the Goa'uld could relate to.

as an attempt as they attempted to make contact with what they thought were actual gods, not just the fake gods that they had been posing as they had discovered this sort of parallel universe, not normal space, not hyperspace, but a, a third space to get in between the two. If you will, this universe was inhabited by beings older, more telepathic and much more violent than they themselves were.

It's a race hell bent on exterminating all lower life forms in the universe, which is pretty much every life form. That's not them. Unfortunately, that jump gate that the Vorlons built was not just a one way door. And unwittingly, the Vorlons allowed these Maleficent beings into our universe. A battle ensued, resulting in a stalemate, really, at best.

But the Vorlons were finally able to shut the gate down. But the gate wound up getting launched into hyperspace to hide it, to prevent the Vorlons from actually destroying it. So we lost it. We didn't really know where it was until Ivanova and her crew found it. Lita tells Sheridan how to destroy it once and for all.

So first, what they have to do is they have to open it up. Then, they gotta go get Randy Quaid to fly a jet with a bomb stuck to its wing right into the light while yelling, UP YOURS! Lots of pew pew pew ensues. Big battle scenes, more fighting back on the station and in space. The plan works. The object's destroyed, the telepathic links to all the folks on the station are severed, and everyone starts to return to normal.

Now, while Sheridan does his best to cover up what really happened because we can't tell folks what's going on, Lita is left to stew over this just being one of the many, many mistakes that our friends, the Vorlons made during their time in this galaxy. Jeff, what did you make of this movie? Third space.

Jeff: But I loved this movie. This was good. Hard sci fi, like just sci fi. There wasn't, uh, there really, like we had Babylon five story, you know, of course, woven in with the whole Vorlon stuff and everything, but this was just. Sci fi. I loved it. The, I, I, I'm glad you mentioned it in the thing. I was kind of confused on the timeline a couple of times and I got, part of it is, I think I'm still like sleeping in light and war without end and, you know, kind of these.

In the future things. And so remembering that the interstellar Alliance doesn't exist. That, uh, Lita hasn't been Byron yet, you know? And so it's like, Oh, okay. Okay. That's right. But I had this aha near the end that ultimately this is Babylon five's take on Star Trek, the motion picture. Like. They stole scenes directly from that Spock flying in a space suit into VJR, they use the exact same camera angles with Sheridan flying into the artifact.

And I'm not saying that as a, as a derisive thing at all. Like that's a visually, that is a film that should be copied. It's a, it's a visually gorgeous movie and they did a really good job with this thing. I loved the Mass Effect vibes that this had the US. So you had the artifact that was there in Mass Effect.

We have the Reapers and they had a really similar indoctrination, kind of a protocol that happened. It rang me back to the show, the hundred and I think it was the second season when they had the city of light storyline. Going on of like, oh, we want to go to this place, but I didn't catch this on my first watch But when I was watching it and taking notes, it hit me that this not only is a good hard sci fi This is a good like Lovecraftian horror film So you've got like Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhu or Cthulhu or however you say that I say Cthulhu where Cthulhu You know what? I doubt any of those are right.

Brent: I'm correct. Everyone else is wrong. That's just how it goes. Just remember me and Ivanova, when in doubt, trust us.

Jeff: Can't argue with that, really. But for those not familiar,

Brent: everybody who's listened to this show for any amount of time is like, oh really? Shall we go to the tape Brent?

Jeff: And here, and here, and here. They have their own red yarn little thing back here. Just like, They're like, no. Ah, gosh, so there's so many. So, where was I? So you got Cthulhu. Who is an old god comes up from the depths of the ocean to destroy all humanity and be worshipped essentially This is the same thing these Whatever's come from the depths of hyperspace to destroy everything They even had like in the call of Cthulhu the city He was in there was called like Rylea or Rael or something like that.

I forget but all this like You know, like non Euclidean geometry, like architecture and weird stuff going big spires. Well, that's what the city thing looked like. Here's a big spire going up into there. I really feel that this was a, an intentional take on, uh, call it Cthulhu and HP Lovecraft stuff.

There's, um, God, there's even a whole thing. I, all I'm doing is using references to give my opening thoughts. That's it. But to stay on the BioWare tip, Dragon Age, right? So, so much of the Dragon Age story are the old ancient magisters going up into the golden city to take on the gods. And become gods themselves.

That was all of Dragon Age Inquisition was Corypheus. Who was one of them who, you know, became, became one of the dark gods, essentially, you know, it's, it's the same story. Just, it was the Vorlons going. To do it to whatever these things were. I love it. And I'm not saying any of these references in a way to, to bag on this.

I think that good sci fi is inspired by other good sci fi. And this was a beautiful amalgamation of all these different references. I love this movie. Also probably one or two of my top three Sheridan and Dillon interactions in this one. I really liked them as a couple. In this film. What were your first thoughts on it?

Brent: Jeff I really enjoyed this. In fact, I'll go out on a limb. I enjoyed this more than in the beginning I really did. You know, I know I know a lot of people love in the beginning. They say it's the best of the movies. I Thoroughly liked this this film.

I will also say this did not feel like a movie

Jeff: It had the episode feel

Brent: This felt, this felt exactly like an episode of Babylon five more than it felt like anything else to me. It just felt like a two part episode that they smashed together. You know, um, I, I do feel like it was a little long. Um, it, it was the material they had in here was more than one episode, but not quite enough for two episodes.

And so that I, I found myself. Probably about the 35 minute mark up till we got Lita explaining what was going on, which was like an hour and 10. Like there was like this whole 30 minute segment that was just like, okay, I get it. We don't know what this thing is. Yes, it's messing with people on the station.

Okay. What is it? Oh, look, they don't know what it is some more. Okay. Like I was like, come on, let's, let's, let's get on with it. You know? Um, but gosh, I, I loved this. I loved this movie. I, this, what this movie did was it told me that season four actually had 24 episodes, not 22.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: You know, this, this was just, it was, this was a set of episodes that was in the middle of the season.

And, and really probably should be watched at whatever point it comes in, in the middle of the season, there are key pieces of overall plot that it gives us. We got, we got more of Vanova in this episode than I think we got in most of season four, like, like a Vanova felt, you know what we were saying about, about her, like in that last season, especially we just sort of like, we lost something from her.

You know, uh, this like, it was like, Oh, a Vaughn of us back. Like, like, this is the kind of a Vaughn of a stuff that we'd come to expect. And, uh, I loved that from her. I a hundred percent agree with you about Sheridan and Dillon. In fact, my note down here was they're so cute.

Jeff: Yeah, they

Brent: They're so cute. They were adorable and not married yet, you know, but they were just so cute.

The Zach and Lita stuff, Jeff, we're going to get into this a whole lot later, but Hey. We were wondering what was going on and this kind of gave us an answer. Was it a good answer? Was it not an answer? Was it satisfying? We'll discuss that in a few moments, but regardless of all of my criticisms of this episode, the effects were on point.

The story was on point. The pacing was on point. This is good television that we've come to expect from JMS and the production crew there at Babylon five. I loved

Jeff: you know, you say that about the middle kind of 30 ish minutes or so. And I think I made a comment when I watched it the first time around the pacing of it, but I agree. I think it's such a great way to describe it. It's a one, it's a one and a half parter. This would have really benefited from a B story.

Brent: it.

Jeff: Just to fill stuff in a little bit, you know, and I don't know what it would have been. And although what it could have been, I don't know. So one of the things I loved about this, let's just call it an episode. One of these, I loved about the episode was just the continuity pieces. We had deuce

Brent: Mm hmm.

Jeff: from all the way back in grail.

He had that knuckle lean feeder thing. He was the little crime boss guy. So we had deuce come

Brent: thought I recognized him.

Jeff: Yeah,

Brent: You're talking about the dude with the, the real Southern drawl accent guy. Yeah. I thought I recognized him. I was like, I know this guy.

Jeff: It was funny cuz he came on I remember saying something like hey, there's a that guy I just don't know what who that and then I said that's deuce It totally was same actor who played deuce they had when in the episode where Ivana was trying to like Get people to start breaking the blockade and shipping stuff and she's got the Raiders in the room and they talk about you know Garibaldi going bald and all that dad that super bleach blonde Guy in there.

He was just running around in the background like he was there Super great continuity there could have been a whole second story of just that right, you know, just I don't know That's the only rewrite, one of the only rewrites I would, I would've done in this whole thing. But we'll get . He said, we'll, we'll get to that one, but, uh, I don't know.

Let's talk about IPX and Elizabeth Trent a little bit.

Brent: Okay. Can I tell you my response as soon as they came on screen or as soon as they mentioned them? I was like, I know these guys. I got this one.

Jeff: I dunno.

Brent: I remember these guys.

Jeff: I said, uh, yeah, he is like, IPXI. Dear parole, my God, that's a, that I, when they said, I think it was IPX, or when they said, one of the things I was like, oh my God, are they gonna bring Catherine Saka back? Like, is this the chance? No, it.

Brent: Mm hmm.

Jeff: It wasn't, but the note I really made, I said, insert the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk trope into Babylon five.

And you get Elizabeth Trent. I'm your evil corporation person. Was it just my viewing or was she super orange? Like distractingly. So,

Brent: No, I think that was probably the settings on your TV. I did not. It didn't do anything to me.

Jeff: Oh, I, I couldn't not see it. Did you recognize her second? Uh huh.

Brent: Um, uh, Bill Morishi and who we've seen him, what episode was, and he was this character. Was he the one who was like flying them down to the, down to Epsilon three and back up or something like that?

Jeff: He was in, I think it was, um, spider in the web. I forget. I forget which one he was in. You should know him from somewhere else though.

Brent: He probably an Admiral on Star Trek or

Jeff: Yeah. Admiral Nakamura in the next generation. He, I looked him up just because I want to make sure that he had, you know, was in the things he was. His first acting credit was in 1974

Brent: Wow.

Jeff: and he's still working Like to this day. Yeah.

Brent: Good for him.

Jeff: I was impressed, but I felt pretty early on, I'm like, yeah, this guy's, uh, this guy's gonna die. It's not gonna go well. What did you think, though, about the end, to get to the end, a little bit with her, when she was like totally, like she totally took the blame, took accountability for everything that happened.

Brent: I actually, I think my note was, I want to hear what Jeff has to say about this.

Jeff: Oh, really?

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: I thought it was awesome. I, I, I think the trope is, you know, Rah, you pesky socialists. I'll get you next time and make more money and whatever. And she sat down and she's like, yeah, I got way out of control. I messed up and I need to go away for a while. It wasn't even, I'm going to quit or whatever.

It's, I'm going to go away for a while and figure out if this is what I actually want to be doing. Or

Brent: hmm. Mm hmm.

Jeff: that might have been message wise. One of the most powerful scenes in this, it was just like, Oh my God. And I love it too. You know, part of my professional life is acknowledging second chances, rehabilitation change that people, people can experience.

And we saw it happen here, you know, and, and now that I'm saying that too, Let's juxtapose, let's overlay that with a person who is sadly missing from this episode but had a decent stand in, Lando Malari. At various points he did not, and did, take accountability for the things that happened with him. And in fact, one of our top episodes of the series, I'm gonna imagine, was him coming to terms with taking accountability for killing all the Narns and treating Jakar like a piece of garbage.

Brent: hmm.

Jeff: So I don't know, just, uh, it was, I think it was a really great way of, uh, hitting that Babylon 5 message. I keep wanting to talk about the, this theme, but we'll get to it in a minute. Let's transition from that really quick. The stand in for Londo, Vier got a lot to do in this episode.

Brent: beer got some, so, okay. Help me out. Was beer in, in the beginning? I don't think he was.

Jeff: mm.

Brent: Okay. So let's, let's track this. Who was missing from in the beginning? Was Garibaldi in, in the beginning?

Jeff: Garibaldi was missing.

Brent: Linear.

Jeff: Lanier was missing.

Brent: Jakar. No, he was there. Um, Franklin was in it. Londo was in it. Sheridan, Dillon. That's our cast. Leta, Leta wasn't there.

Um, that's, that's pretty much our cast.

Jeff: Yeah. I think, yeah.

Brent: In this movie, we're missing Londo, Jakar, Lanier,

Jeff: Garibaldi.

Brent: Garibaldi. I didn't even real, know that we were missing Garibaldi till the end of the, till the end. I was

Jeff: It took me a while. Yeah, same.

Brent: Garibaldi's not even been like, I think they mentioned his name and I was like, Oh, wait a minute.

Where has he been this film?

Jeff: I couldn't remember like in the placement of season 4 was this when he ran off to Edgar's like is this when he was on Mars meeting with William Edgar's probably but I love I loved Veer walking in with Sheridan and Glen. So actually let's talk about this whole scene. So we found the artifact. It's come up. It's outside of Babylon 5. Sheridan and Delanner are walking down the corridor and Veer's, you know, kind of chasing up behind him. And he's like, Hey, my people need to be there while you're doing this.

And Sheridan's like, no, not going to happen. And he just kept going. I loved how Veer just didn't take no for an answer. Like he pushed, that was good stuff.

Brent: hmm. Mm hmm. But he was also still veer. He's like, uh, so, you know, I'm here and I'm speaking for the league and What's going on? You need to tell us

Jeff: Yeah. You need to be open with us.

Brent: Yeah See, I loved Veer just he was being his normal squirrely self because remember this isn't the Veer who took a katana blade and chopped up somebody's shop yet,

Jeff: Exactly. He had to build up to that.

Brent: but he but this was him building in that like getting the chutzpah to start doing stuff like that.

So yeah, no, I'm with you. I said that I love Veer coming in and speaking for the league.

Jeff: then, so then after that Sheridan. I had a real problem with Sheridan in this whole scene because I, I was, go ahead. I'll, I'm not afraid,

Brent: Bring it on bro. You're like 84 years old now.

Jeff: Although dude, such a hardcore, when he did the cameo for us, that the, our amazing discord community set up for us, he had COVID and still did the, the kid. Maybe I don't want to. You're good, man. You're

Brent: Listen, I did, I did one of these, two of these shows with COVID. So, you

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.

Brent: don't, don't mess with me.

Jeff: It's, it's, it's hard stuff. It takes a, it takes a to get through that. Right.

Brent: Right.

Jeff: But I was really critical of Sheridan and the interstellar Alliance all through season five of just like, is this the league? Is this a, just now a new dictatorship or a tyranny, you know, with Sheridan at the top and he's dressed it with all this fancy verbiage.

This was exactly that Sheridan and Delenn in a bubble, making a decision that impacted all of the galaxy. Now, yes, there's jurisdiction and things like that because it's Babylon 5, but At this point, they have their Babylon treaty with people, you know, they've signed as they've seceded from earth. There's still like the council advisory council, the league of non aligned worlds are still a thing.

And he's just in a bubble making his decisions. I thought that was uncool. And I appreciated Dylan basically calling him on it. She's just like, every time something new comes in, you do this. And it was such a great scene. Like she's just talking and talking and she's like, it just, these two sons rising up and then you're just like, they say mine, mine, mine.

She was amazing.

Brent: So I'll vamp while Jeff does the stuff. Um, yeah, we are, uh, we're real family men and family always comes first. So

Jeff: Alright, we're good.

Brent: good, man. You are

Jeff: It's uh, it's early evening here and uh, she's wanting to go play outside and stuff like that. So,

Brent: Set the ground rules and let her go. Yeah. Do the dad thing. You're good dad, Jeff. I've seen it firsthand. You're a good dad. You really

Jeff: Thank you. Thank you.

Brent: The only thing I really wanted to hear at that point was for Dylan to just be sitting there going mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

Jeff: In fact, if it doesn't exist already, I want one of you out there to make that take that little movie clip. Yep. Just drop that over it.

Brent: you know, but here's the, here's the thing, I think what that really showed was Sheridan, despite his duty, despite his, his, uh, position, despite his, Hey, we just broke away from earth and we're kind of hanging out here on our own is still a guy who has his own personal. Ideas and wants and desires and curiosities and his own pride and his own, he still has his own territory, you know, like, like he's still just that.

And he's like, no, that's not, well, okay. Okay. Maybe, maybe just, and like, he didn't even like, like, he just had a smile on his face about it. Like, yeah, that's yeah. It's okay. I'm yeah. Like I loved it. And she just, she was just like, it's all you, but she's calling him on it and she's smiling at it and just, and they're so cute.

Jeff: they are is, and it, and it spoke so much to just the, the trust and vulnerability in their relationship that she's just totally flicking crap at him and he's like, yeah, you're right. Yep.

Brent: Right. Well, and she, cause at one point she's like, she's like, it's the truth. And he's like, well, the truth is damned inconvenient. She's like, the truth is always damned inconvenience. Like, yeah,

Jeff: the time.

Brent: Great line. By the way, JMS, I know you watch every single one of these. No, he doesn't. Uh, that was a great line.

Great line. Good job.

Jeff: There are a couple of really good lines in

Brent: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hold on. Oh, there's a lot in this episode or movie episode

Jeff: one of my other favorite lines following the veer passes after he and Ivanova share a dream and they're in the lift together. He's like, yeah, there's you and a couple other women, a couple of ladies. We don't need to go into details, but I love that so much because it was a foreshadow of. Him president scrubing in sleeping in light,

Brent: I, you know, listen, I was going to sit there and go like, wait, here's a man right now. Do you look at him? Go dude. Go. Yeah,

Jeff: get indoctrinated as well. And I love that. He got indoctrinated It made it made it sympathetic for us if it was deuce and some, you know, some lurkers from down below Oh, that sucks, whatever, but they got veer man. They got fear. I thought it was a really good move.

Brent: I don't remember if it was in the scene that we were talking about, which was Sheridan or if it was a different scene later, but there's a moment where he goes full on draw and he goes exciting. Isn't it?

Jeff: Oh

Brent: And he says it just like drawl did that one time. That's now like a big gift. I was like, yes,

Jeff: And again, another missed opportunity withdrawal. The artifact might've been impacting the great machine

Brent: right.

Jeff: and everything. I'm going to bring that. We need draw in these movies.

Brent: I, I hope, I hope that's, that's a thing. Um, I want to talk about Ivanova for a few.

Jeff: Yeah,

Brent: It's cause there's, cause there's a lot of great Ivanova moments in this episode. There's the opening piece, which she's going to go out. They're going to do this thing. Hey, congratulations, commander. You set the mousetrap.

There's the cheese. You set the mousetrap. Okay, immediately knew when I saw that that's going to come back into play later at the end of this film, which is exactly they had to set the mousetrap again in order to make something happen. But. When, when she's out there with her group and she's commanding them, okay, you stay here and be the anchor and you're going to go over there and you're going to go here and you're going to do this and I'm going to fly here.

And no, we don't need to go home. We can just go check this out. We're good. We're going to fly this. She's, she's just boss Ivanova, you know? Um, and, and, oh, I just, but I think my favorite moment, my favorite Ivanova moment in the entire episode, she's having a conversation with Franklin.

Jeff: Yep. This is mine too.

Brent: how many of these guys do you think I could kill before they were talking about the IPX people, right?

How many could they kill before they would start to notice Franklin sets the over under at six,

Jeff: The six.

Brent: like a bottom. It was going to take the over as well. She's like,

Jeff: She's like, I'll give that a shot. That sounds good.

Brent: yeah, I don't think they'll notice till we get six. That's that's that's when

Jeff: I feel like Franklin had another side bet somewhere of like, can we get Ivanova to kill a bunch of people? And he's like, here's, here's my chance.

Brent: Well, he eventually was like, just, you could do one. It's fine. Just, just get one,

Jeff: settle down and own, be reasonable here and only do one. In that opening scene, when she was out in the Starfury, I couldn't help but think back to in the beginning, when we saw her say goodbye to Ganya, right, and at that point in her life, she wasn't going to be a career military person necessarily, you know, and that whole thing led to her joining up and whatever, which led to that moment of her just Leading a whole squad, Delta squad, like she had them and it was just killing it and I don't know, having just watched in the beginning, I think that scene had a lot more emotional punch in it than was intended, but I thought it was really, really great,

Brent: I did not connect those two pieces

Jeff: you

Brent: and yeah, that's good. That's a good call. I like that.

Jeff: yeah, just seeing her in the helmet took me there, there's like, Oh my

Brent: Well, did you also notice on her star theory? She had the, like, and I, I was looking, I didn't see other Personalized Starfury is out there, but Ivanova had her. I couldn't tell what it was. I just have like a Phoenix or something like that.

Like a Griffin. Yeah. Yeah. She like, you could see it painted on her Starfury. She was flying away.

Jeff: I didn't even notice that. That's cool.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty cool. It

Jeff: It's like you get to a certain rank, you get a beyond Kefir and then you can personalize your star theory.

Brent: Uh,

Jeff: as a total side note, I forget the actor who played Kefir, but he has a movie called like damning Babylon or something like that.

And it's like, it's just happens to just

Brent: I, one more thing about Ivanova, um, to go back to the dream sequence. You were referencing earlier, uh, when she, when she's in this dream and she's walking around and like she opens the door and there's the light and all that sort of stuff, and all of a sudden all I could think is I just want to hear this voice come out there and go, I am z Are you the gatekeeper or the key master? I saw. I was just like, that's what this is, man.

Jeff: It was with a bunch of like alien, like with the little like xenomorph tentacles coming out to grab her and stuff like

Brent: right up on her face and everything. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But could you imagine Claudia Christian in Ghostbusters instead of like, say Sigourney Weaver? Totally would have worked.

Jeff: Yeah. Absolutely.

Brent: Right.

Jeff: Zuul is God. But I think, I also love, speaking of loving Veer being indoctrinated, I love that Ivanova wasn't. Like she got pulled in to the city, it checked her out and was like, no, you're not, you're not going to be helpful for us.

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: I thought that was cool. Well, that kind of leaves

Brent: you think, do you think it had anything to do with her latent telepath

Jeff: I was thinking that same thing. I think I even brought that up a couple of times and even when they were pulling the artifact and she had a couple, like there's a couple like, you know, kind of move things that she had maybe. But then on the other hand, well, did it indoctrinate Lita?

Not so much, but it used, it communicated with

Brent: not the artifact. Didn't

Jeff: Yeah, it was just the Vorlon

Brent: it was the Vorlon thing that was, that was hit and bleed it the whole time. Yeah. In fact, that was my note was it's not the artifact. It's the Vorlines that have been doing this to her, which makes sense because her response was entirely different

Jeff: yeah,

Brent: everybody else's.

Jeff: Yeah, so maybe, maybe it was her telepathy, because I can't, I don't think anybody that we know of, you know, with a sigh rating. I did, transitioning over to Leta,

Brent: Well, before you do that, before you did, I have a question. Did we know that they could expand the jump gate struts for bigger ships?

Jeff: that seemed, that seemed really risky to me. Like, what if you can't pull them back? Like

Brent: How far can you expand them? Cause they said this thing was what, 15 miles across or something stupid like that.

Jeff: just huge.

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: That was, it was a cool scene, but as soon as it started happening, I'm like, Oh my God, like they're going to lose their jump gate. It let's pull it apart. Oh shoot. That one's struck. Oh, well,

Brent: What did you, what, so transitioning to lead to, let's start with where we began with Lita. What did you make of the whole scene with the two brothers and the affair and all that kind of stuff, right at the top of the film?

Jeff: It's dumb. It was, it wasn't dumb.

Brent: I thought it was so funny. And I was like, there's no way this brother had an affair with his wife.

He's going to get through all this. And it turns out he's not. And I was up nailed. I mean,

Jeff: Well, you think you need it. So my question with that was. Was she totally distracted and didn't actually read him at all? And it's just like, ah, no, like, I'll just, I'll just call it. I thought it was a dumb scene. It was funny. It was an okay, like it wasn't, it wasn't like bad. It was just dumb. And there, there's a handful of scenes throughout Babylon five.

There was the one. Where Garibaldi was starting his finding lost things business after the, the Centauri war stuff. And the Dom, the, the dime store Dom DeLuise that he was working with that one time was just like a little over the top and a little like, uh, and then there's, um, the AI and the computer that you liked and other people liked.

And I think was, might, might be even dumber than Byron in the canon of Babylon five.

Brent: you're wrong, Jeff. I'm sorry. You're just wrong. It was so good.

Jeff: maybe, you know, and as I'm thinking that maybe all those things are like of a type of humor and I just don't find that I don't find it offensive or bad except for the AI. That was just,

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: but yeah, it was okay and it served its purpose. I didn't really laugh at it at all.

Brent: So Jeff, I have a whole thing where I really want to get in to talk about Lita and the Vorlons and, and what's going on there and that whole deal. Um, but there's this whole other thing with Lita that I feel like we need to address. Do you want to do that first? Do you want to, do you want to save

Jeff: let's just get it out of the way.

Brent: All right, Lita and Zach in an elevator. Yep,

Jeff: Oof.

Brent: living it up while Zach is going down

Jeff: Going down in flames. Let me just get to create the container around this conversation. This scene was 248 seconds long

Brent: I can't believe you actually went and looked at that.

Jeff: four minutes, eight seconds. The second time I watched it when I was taking notes, like it just kept going and I'm like, how fricking, it's actually, I went back and like marked the time of the whole thing.

This took almost five minutes,

Brent: pretty sure Jeff for whatever it's worth. I'm pretty sure. Um, that I've heard that particular scene was added because they were running a little short on time.

Jeff: a little, just a little,

Brent: about four minutes and however many seconds it was.

Jeff: scene would have been incredible if it was about 30 seconds long. Him given a, let me just say my problem, my primary problem. I hear it. I despise that scene. I, I hate it. I would love to surgically extract it and put with nothing happening for five minutes in there.

It would be, it would be better. This just totally undercut Zach in so many ways. He is. An incredible head of security. He is amazing. He's observant. He sees patterns he's able to, you know, I mean, just, we've seen him be so competent at his job and to not notice that she isn't even like she's mouthing things and not even there.

Like I get it for a little while because it took courage and he's got the adrenaline and the whatever, and he's saying this stuff, but like, he's not going to notice that she's totally somewhere else. He's going to keep going for that long.

Brent: I don't know, Jeff. You get me around my wife sometimes like that. And I'm just like, uh, she's pretty. I like her.

Jeff: That's fair. Also, you're not the head of security for anywhere. Like, I

Brent: is truth. This is truth. So here's the thing. I didn't mind the scene. I thought the scene was fine. This isn't why they wound up. This is why they never wound up together. This is all those things. Okay, fine. My biggest problem with the scene was they didn't come back to it later. They, they left this as the resolution to that whole thing.

And what I needed in my soul was a little scene at the end of the film where Lita acknowledges that she heard what Zach was saying and still says no. Or Zach tried again and Lita's like, no, or I can't because the, you know, like, Like this could have been the, the thing that really began to accelerate Lita's sigh uppage.

Jeff: Right.

Brent: You know what I mean? Like, like it really could have been. And for her to be like, look, my main, my brain is just jacked right now. I can't do anything for you. Sorry. You know, I'd love to, but, or even just to, Hey, let's go out for pizza and as friends, like,

Jeff: Yeah. Or, or even, or even Delenn him a little bit of like, have him come and be like, Hey, so about the thing in the lift. And she's like, what thing in the lift? I don't know what you're talking about. Like, you know, give him a shred of, you know, try and give him some dignity

Brent: Yeah, but I just, I needed, I needed them to come back to that and to, and just to have her address that at the end. And they didn't because what this, what this goes out on, and this is where I'm really disappointed with Zach as a character, because we've seen Zach be squirrelly. We've seen Zach be, uh, you know, He sold himself for 50 bucks a week

Jeff: Right. Yeah.

Brent: until he didn't.

And he ripped off that armband and he made all these strides and made all these strides. And now he goes into an elevator and, and he. He shoots a shot, Jeff,

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: he works up the courage, you know, and I know I, I don't care how old you are, that that's still a nervous thing to put yourself out there when you say stuff like that, you know, Um, he, he shoots that out there and as your point, he doesn't even notice anything about it, but he just talks himself out of it.

Oh, okay. Well, okay. I guess I must've read that wrong. I probably shouldn't have said anything at all. Okay. Maybe I just shouldn't have brought it up. Uh, yeah, let's, let's just pretend like this. Never like, and she's like, she never said anything,

Jeff: Exactly.

Brent: know? And listen, can I give some advice to the young folk out there? All right. Whether you're male, female, you're the one asking now or whatever. Sometimes here's what you need to do. Shut up and live in the silence until they talk.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: And it's awkward, but just stop trying to fill the silence. And just live there and wait for the response and don't, don't, don't assume, don't assume that no response is a response because that's not always the case, you know, so I

Jeff: That's not just, that's just not hitting on people. That's people like say your thing. Shut up.

Brent: yeah, I just, I just really needed them to come back to that at the end when Lita was back in her right brain and they didn't and so I'm, I'm disappointed as much as we talked about what happened with them, what happened with them, what happened with them. Oh, this is it

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: is really how I'm left with it.

So, but I thought the scene was fine, you know, but

Jeff: I, I can see. How people like the scene. You know? You know what I mean? Like, because it's, I mean it's, you can look at it and play it for laughs and it, it's great. Jeff Conaway did an a, it was, it was great. They were both great in their roles for what happened in there. The writing was okay. I mean it, a lot of the lines he used probably worked then in the late nineties.

They're not translatable nowadays to to, to stuff. Uh, so, but I don't want to apply today's lens. To, to what was written back then, but I could see it being funny. I, I think honestly, I respect the character of Zach so much that I feel personally offended by how he was done in this

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Not necessarily as offended as I felt about the way linear was done,

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: but yeah,

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: still offended.

Jeff: totally offended. Totally.

Brent: So Lita, let's talk about Lita as a whole with what's going on with her. Um, so. Again, keeping in the continuity of the show for where we are in the middle of season four, we really, in this episode, get more confirmation or harder evidenced confirmation of her advanced psi abilities from the Vorlons.

Like that she was altered and, and we really get a hardcore deal with that. Um, the whole deal about her backstory, Jeff, where she was, she was dropped off by the shuttle or she was dropped off by the ship and she was hanging out in a shuttle craft and at the last, once they went away and kind of at the last moment she was rescued by the Vorlons and they took her and had their way with her

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: and I'd use those words very specifically. We knew that this is not new news to us. Right?

Jeff: No, we just got to see it. Here there, there was, there was no new information imparted in here. I think this was one, it was showing it to us. And I think it was exposition for people who were new to the series or whatever. Just bringing up to speed on who this leader was and whatever.

Um,

Brent: thing, right. And she's writing on the walls and she's like, it's dangerous. And we got to, we got to do something. We had to do something. We got to do something. What are you making of leaders? And again, in those minutes, that 30 minute, like, Oh my God, leaders, like she's still going crazy.

Just like, we can't figure out what the hell that thing is out there. Like it just went on too long in my opinion. But what are you thinking about Lita as she's losing her mind?

Jeff: I thought she, I thought the acting was really well done. I think it fit. I think my favorite moment in all of it, that my two favorite moments. So when you already referenced a little bit, but when. Uh, they had the, well, it was all when she was in, uh, med bay and they had the cameras on her and like, she looks right at

Brent: yeah.

Jeff: which, you know, later on in, um, if I think long enough, I'll remember the, the, the episode, but in late season five where she's like Garibaldi is like, Hey, we'll keep it quiet because of that camera.

And she's like, what camera? Like I just took it out. So it was neat foreshadowing, but I loved, I loved that. And then I loved just her interaction with Franklin. It was really cool. Franklin was so Confused he didn't know what was going on. And so he's just like grasping at straws and she's just like bro I told you I don't know.

Can I please just go home? I don't know. I think as much as we liked the Dillon and Sheridan relationship thing This was a really cool Lita and Franklin relationship moment

Brent: Watch out, Lita. Warning,

Jeff: She's a little she's a little she they know each you know, he knows her so

Brent: Yeah, yeah. He wants to know her.

Jeff: yeah, but, uh, but I was curious in that whole thing, how Dr. Trent knew about her getting altered by the Borlawn.

Brent: Is it possible that that's actually like, I don't want to say public knowledge, but it's in a report

Jeff: I

Brent: that she might have had access to?

Jeff: because I think at this point that was all still like, it was still speculative. This had to have been after, um, was it moments of transition? The episode where Bester came and is like, Hey, I want your body. And, uh, you know, instead of the deal basically, cause she was working, she was as working psych or person at the beginning.

So it's after that episode. And I think he knew something was up, but he didn't know what was up. Cause he wanted to dissect her when she was done and figure it out. So I, I, I don't think it was like, I think anybody knew necessarily at this point, well, no, no, because she, they knew because she was used in the, like on Mars, she was on the Mars operation with the teepsicles.

Yeah, maybe, maybe that might be what,

Brent: Yeah. There's it's just, it's gotta be a report out there somewhere that has that. So then Lita goes all Cyclops finally to tell us what the freak is actually happening here and she's doing this whole thing where she's embodying a Vorlon like that was not Lita. That was somebody else taking over. I felt like we were in the middle of a Star Trek episode at that point.

Jeff: Mm.

Brent: I mean, we've seen this in Star Trek before we've seen this.

And honestly, chill guys. It's not just Star Trek. It's a sci fi thing. Like we've how often we had it in Stargate, a whole, a whole entity takes over one of our cast members and talks to us and has a whole thing like,

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: good.

Jeff: Oh, no, you, you, please.

Brent: I was gonna say they start just word vomiting, everything of, of what happened and. Honestly, I thought the explanation was really well done. It was really well delivered. Um, a lot of times when I hear expeditious exposition dumps like that, it, it takes me a couple of times of watching it before I really fully process the threads of what they're talking about.

Um, but this one was really not that hard to follow, you know, like, like it was, it was pretty like, oh, I, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense at that moment though. I w I had my note in here that it was, oh, it was the Vorlons contacting Lita, not the artifact. Cause I was still under the impression. It was the artifact all the way up till that moment.

Jeff: Yeah. It, with it being the Vorlons that contacted her, I, my note was, shoot, maybe we shouldn't have been so quick to send the Vorlons beyond the ramp. They probably could have really helped with this thing. Mm hmm.

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: Kicking themselves a little bit, but I, I, I agree. If it was a huge exposition dump, I think it was super, or a couple of lines in there that were just beautiful.

You know, we, we wanted to touch the face of God and say, Oh my God, that's so great, but I also liked that they showed a lot of it wasn't just her with light shining out of her face talking. Like we got some visuals and the visuals looked really good,

Brent: Yeah.

Jeff: but to your earlier point. We have 30 minutes of this thing that we could have done anything else with and actually let's make it even tighter you have 248 seconds that you could have used totally differently in this thing made it a little bit better what did you think when she's done like she gives us here's everything and then shared and asks like well what do we do about it then she's like i mean light vomit into your face what do you like what did she tell him what did she share

Brent: Jeff, I'm going to, I'm going to pause you real, real quick. You are cutting out. I don't know if you can hear me or not, but you're cutting out. Your voice is getting all weird.

Jeff: oh

Brent: Uh, and your video is frozen for me right now. Okay.

Jeff: oh really

Brent: And I'm, I'm worried that your local recordings are not going to get what you needed to

Jeff: That would be bad. Yeah, I should so I sound good on my side and I'm clean on my side I don't even have the I don't even have the warning thing for connection. That's kind of weird.

Brent: Yeah. Hey Jeff, I need you to open up the, uh, the private chat cause I don't have, I can't, I can't hear a word you're saying. All I hear is you sound like max headroom right now.

Jeff: Hi YouTube I hope you can hear me. Well, maybe you will afterwards so About my back back back back back.

Brent: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.

Jeff: I wonder what's going on

Brent: Oh wait,

Jeff: are you good now?

Brent: you're back. Yeah, there you go.

Jeff: oh, what happened?

Brent: I have no idea.

Jeff: Huh?

Brent: I have no idea. Maybe it was all on my side. I just.

Jeff: who knows?

Brent: I, my signal is strong though, but who knows?

Jeff: Internet's a scary place

Brent: I'm just, I'm worried. I'm worried about your local side of that freaking out. So I want you to go back and say what you were saying. And also I have no idea what you said. Good luck trying to remember that.

Jeff: I remember, I remember what I was trying to remember. Did, did, did you do that? Did you talk about your impression of it? No, we didn't get to that point yet. Okay. I'm curious, Brent of your take. So she's just word dump, word dump, word dump. And then Sheridan's like, so what do we do about it? And then she grabs his face and like, ah, like light vomits into him.

And then, and then he goes and grabs a nuke. Like, what did she, what do you think? Like, what did she, what was that? Like, I'm going to tell you all this, but I'm not going to say, oh, and also just go blow him up with a nuke. Do you have a nuke? Go blow him. Like. Why did you have to light vomit into him?

Brent: I mean, I, I think one that was, it was visually appealing. There's also the story piece of like, she has to tell him what to do, but you can't tell the audience. Because as the audience, we have to see Sheridan doing it. So rather than just cutting it, they did this, but you know what it really reminded me of was Lita was doing to Sheridan then what we saw Kosh doing to Lita.

Remember when he pulled out of her so fast,

Jeff: That was, that was the old old

Brent: that was all cash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, even, even the other like regular Kosh pulled out, you know,

Jeff: the method they use pretty frequently. I understand.

Brent: but here's the, if I can encapsulate that entire. Exposition dump. You know what it was and get your finger ready. This is what happened on the ship. Before the enterprise shows up and discovers the whole ship full of dead people where they seem to have killed each other.

And now the episode is about figuring out what happened on that ship before the enterprise folk kill each other.

Jeff: Mm

Brent: That's what this whole, that's what that whole exposition dump was, was the. Here's what happened before the enterprise showed up because people were starting to, you know, fight each other and, and get more violent, more violent, more, um, that's what I, that was my impression of that whole, whole thing.

I loved, I loved the whole piece about the Vorlons though, that, and I kind of, I guess, pivoting a little bit from Lita more into what she was saying. Um, you know, let me rewind just a little bit. You and I, like anybody else who is new to this show. Meets the shadows. We meet the Vorlons, or you hear about the shadows and we've met the Vorlons.

And it becomes real clear right around season two, especially when you see Angel Kosh. Oh, these guys are the angels. These guys are the spiritual, but these guys are the good benevolent wanting to help people move people through protectors in the shadows or darkness. Dark and evil and they're black and, and, you know, they've got the black hat with the, with the mustache and they're twirling it and they're, they're the bad guys.

And you kind of maintain that thought all the way until Kosh dies. There is killed and all cash comes in and goes batshit crazy. Pardon my language. Um, and the whole Vorlon fleet just starts obliterating everybody. And you're like, those guys weren't actually the best. And then you get into that wonderful, amazing, beautiful episode.

Season 4 episode 6, whatever the name of that was.

Jeff: Uh, the long night I think. No fire.

Brent: Jeff, I'm so disappointed in

Jeff: Uh, you should be I'm, oh

Brent: so disappointed in you right

Jeff: It was such a great, it was the most amazing episode.

Brent: was, it was, it's, it's gotta be a top three episode for me for the whole series, like so good. It was such a great conclusion to that whole, that whole story. Um, just looking, I'm giving you

Jeff: I am . I feel like a

Brent: to know

Jeff: Let's see here. Into the fire.

Brent: there it is.

Jeff: I knew fire was in there. My goodness.

Brent: Um, And, and basically we get the, Oh no, these guys basically were trying there, they're just the other side of the coin from the shadows is all they are. And they're frankly all like just as bad as the shadows

Jeff: Yeah. If not worse. . Really? Yeah,

Brent: had tons of people saying that people in our discord community, people in YouTube and Patrion and, and various people just talking about how, yeah, it turns out the Vorlons are jackasses too, you know, cause whatever, even after watching into the fire, I still feel Borlons are good guys.

Shadows are bad guys. I've never felt the Vorlons are bad guys. I,

Jeff: Kesh was, Ol Kesh and the Planet Killer were bad guys, but everyone else was

Brent: they, they all lost their minds for a bit and started like, but until that moment, they were actually good guys. Like what they were doing was the right thing. They were handling it the right way. This episode though, third space. Makes you sit back because what did, what did they say? The Vorlons here and through Leda finally confess who and what they are.

They were beings of light posing as gods who eventually believed their own lie that they were the gods.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: who they say they were. And they made all these mistakes and lead is sitting there going. This is just one out of so many mistakes. And now I'm like, what are the other mistakes?

Jeff: Right?

Brent: What else is out there

Jeff: Killing Deathwalker, that might have been one of them.

Brent: or not? That actually, you know, no, you don't need immortality right now. Think sorry,

Jeff: Yeah, you

Brent: not happening. Um, but I just like this. Right here. We'll recolor my understanding of the Vorlons when we do Babylon five for the second time, more so than knowing what happens at the end of, in, of into fire and where they go,

Jeff: It even makes me think, we just watched them a week ago, and in the beginning, How just they're like, I'm, I'm, I'm reimagining even cautious tone, right? We always thought like, well, you know, he's just being mysterious. No, there's, there's straight up arrogance. Like even if Kosh, who's the cool one, there's still that like, yeah, I'm totally better than you kind of a thing.

Yeah. I think it's going to have a very different view of the whole thing from go. Yeah,

Brent: of, well, and then also hearing the Vorlons admit their own mistakes,

Jeff: that was huge, which to my.

Brent: was.

Jeff: I'll say my earlier point. Dr. Trent admits her mistake takes accountability here. They might be a theme here.

Brent: What do you think, huh?

What did you make of the idea that there is a race yet, another race older than the Vorlons.

Jeff: I think that makes complete sense. When Lorianne gave us the history of the world part one, that's what he's, you know, there was us, there's me and my people, and then there are the others and the others and others. And eventually there were the Vorlons and the shadows and the others. And so I really got the hint.

The, the, but I also heard. They were in an entirely different space. I don't know if it's a different universe, but you know, they were in a different dimension, like this was an interdimensional jump gate, essentially.

Brent: yes, do you know what it was? Are we are we out of them yet? Have we used

Jeff: Got one more. We got one more. I

Brent: I'm gonna use it. Can I use it the end of Picard season one? They're calling the AI the the the wormholes are opening up and they're starting to pour through.

Jeff: Mm hmm.

Brent: Okay, Marvel The, the, the Tesseract and, uh, Loki has used it to open up the things and the, the, the bad dudes are, are pouring through into the streets of New York.

Like it was, it was that kind of, uh, of an idea. Yeah. They were definitely, if they were not from this universe, because the way I understand the jump, the, the jump gate itself, the third space thing. Was you and I were right. There's normal space, there's hyperspace, and then there's third space. Third space is not necessarily where they lived as much as it is just infinitely faster way to travel than hyperspace.

And hyperspace is pretty damn fast.

Jeff: Mm hmm.

Brent: Like it, it, it puts hyperspace to shame. Like you're talking about the difference between, uh, regular travel, warp travel, going through the stargate.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly.

Brent: You know what I mean? Like, like, that's really the difference there, um, between these three spaces. So, so third space wasn't necessarily where they were from, unless just like you can hang out in hyperspace, they're living in the third space

Jeff: Or hyperspace and third space are the meat in the universe sandwich, right? So there's this universe. There's just universe. We can use hyperspace to cut through things. They can use third space and third space is powerful enough. It can actually, actually be opened on both sides.

Brent: something like that. But I think my, and I mentioned it in my recap, like they're from a parallel universe is kind of what I understood it to be. And the third space was the thing that opened the, like, that's the way to go between the parallel. It, it's how you get into, jeez, I can't do this because we're out of, out of references and I'm not going to violate the rule.

It's how you get to, it's how, when, in Stargate, when they have the mirror that jumps them into other things, that's how it flashes, that's third space. Is it, it's what bridges the multiverse.

Jeff: It's a in mass effect. It's called dark space. It's where the Reapers live during the cycle or between cycles.

Brent: there you go,

Jeff: it, uh, it hits me to how, so Vorlon Lita says in where they're from, where they're from in their galaxy, they've, they've destroyed thousands of races. They want to destroy the ones here too.

It's one of those things of like, they were fine genociding their galaxy. Then the Vorlons punched a hole through and they're like, Oh, there's a whole other place with inferior beings. Cool. We want through. We want to destroy you also. We were fine before you came up and wanted to, you know, touch the face of us. You touched it and here, here, here we are.

Brent: right? Alright, I have a question, and this is going to more focus on the nature of the third space and the beings and the revelation of what's happening in Les Leda. Did you, like, as the show's going on, especially in that 30 minutes of like, okay, just tell me what this is. What were some of the theories maybe that kind of popped into your head?

Do you remember any of them of what this thing is? Like, what is this big device that they have?

Jeff: You know, I, I, I had a hard time landing on anything. One of the things I thought was it was, it was just an intergalactic transport. It was like a guild navigator from their guild navigation ship. A highliner from Dune could fold space, you know, and end up wherever it was. Um, I went on a thing where I thought it was like, almost xenomorphs that were, you know, like, there's this alien race living on this thing and it's coming out, you know, to, to, to kill people, which is pretty close to what it was, I guess, but it was just a gate.

I don't know. And I feel like so much of the emphasis was on just the, the people, you know, and so I don't know. That's where I started pulling my theories of like the hundred and, you know, city of light and mass effect and things like that. That's where a lot of those theories came was from that kind of. space. What about, what about you? What

Brent: So I had to, I had to one, I thought that the people who built third space. Were the original gate builders. They're the ones who built all the, all the stuff. Like

Jeff: I brought that up too. I think at one point I was like, I was like the ancient ones. Are these the ancients that

Brent: Yeah. The ancients, right? But no, you know what I like? And I was on this for a long time throughout the course of the film, um, because it's something they showed us.

That was like, Oh, is that that? And it wasn't until they said, no, it's actually this that I was like, okay, I'm gonna let it go. Yeah. I thought that this third space, this mechanism, this, this spire with whatever is where the shadows came from. It's where they were birthed from. It's how they came into being. Shadow shadow, and that made it that much more menacing because this is actually what's putting more shadow, like this is shadows reproducing or whatever that's, I was on that for, it was the birth of the shadows. I was on that for a, for a hot minute throughout the course of this film.

Jeff: That makes a lot of sense. Cause so many of the effects, like the tentacles and the sharp lines and things were very shadow ask. I think even, I remember, I think I heard the shadow sound more than once. Mm hmm.

Brent: you,

Jeff: I think, I think I remember hearing that.

Brent: so we get to the spot where. Here it is, we've learned what it is. We're going, there's a moment, Jeff. I don't know about you, but I'm sitting there and I've, I typed it in all caps in my notes and I'm in the video. I'm just, I'm like, show me the monster, show me the monster. I want to see the monster. Cause they kept like panning around and all this kind of stuff.

And then they showed us the monster and you know what it was. It was a fish from the deep sea. That's all it was like that thing was in the Mariana trench and you plucked it out and made it really big. That's all it is like, I

Jeff: honest, that the space battle that was going on with the ships, you know, flying out and everything was gorgeous and amazing. And I loved it, but everything else was really kind of disappointing. Like, so I'm going to, I'm, I'm Sheridan and I'm going to EVA myself into this thing. And you know, it's fine.

There's literal. Lasers and all kinds of good, but I'm just going to, it's fine. And then I'm just going to plant this nuke, turn it on, go away. Look at a fish disappear. Game over. Like it was just like, that's,

Brent: was, I was really disappointed that the answer for how Sheridan got away was he rode the shock wave.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: Did you talk about a sci fi trope that is just used way too much?

Jeff: well, especially right before that happened, we saw the shock wave envelop one of the ships and blow it up, blow it up, but Sheridan out there in just a space suit,

Brent: He just got, he surfed

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: like really come on. I mean, Sheridan can't die because we still have another season and a half of show left to go. But.

Jeff: but still just like, uh, you know what, now that you mentioned that, that alone, that might be one of the big flaws in this is the episode. Literally the movie started with, Hey, so this horrible thing happened and we're okay now. So all the, all the stakes were actually gone before anything happened.

Brent: Yeah, but it's, it's the journey of how you got there.

Jeff: Yeah,

Brent: How'd you get back to it? You know, I mean, you, cause that, that is, you can take that exact same thing and apply it to any television show out of any time outside of game of Thrones,

Jeff: absolutely.

Brent: you're, if your face was on the DVD cover, you were not dying unless your contract was out. And there, and we all knew that you were dying at that

Jeff: Mm hmm,

Brent: Like,

Jeff: that's a good point. But I

Brent: know, it just.

Jeff: yeah, I think more so just I mean it literally just tells you And we're gonna tell you I mean, it's fine. You're gonna tell me the story or whatever But I'm also never really worried You know, I'm which actually might have made it better because I just got to sit back Okay, I'm gonna enjoy the story that's going on after After he rides that wave though.

I got my other favorite Sheridan Dillon moment He's like, Hey, so I'm at a gas.

Brent: yeah.

Jeff: She's like, good for you. Good luck out there, buddy.

Brent: Dylan, this isn't funny. Yeah, it is.

Jeff: It is.

Brent: hilarious.

Jeff: I thought that scene was fantastic.

Brent: I, by the way, that is absolutely something my wife would do to me. You've, you've met her. She, she would be like, Nope, I'm not coming to get you. Suck it up buttercup. You'll be fine.

Jeff: Take a picture. Send it to me. Let me see that. Like good

Brent: babe, babe. Come on, come on. Stop. Stop playing. Stop playing, babe. Come on. Come get me.

Jeff: good. Good

Brent: fine. You'll be all right. Put some ice on it.

You'll be okay. Take some Tylenol.

Jeff: I did. I did think also, so it was one, one nuclear device.

Brent: Uh huh.

Jeff: Took this thing down.

Brent: Right?

Jeff: Yeah. And it had a

Brent: miles wide and a million years old. And yeah.

Jeff: One plate size little thing that had an old, you know, 90s style countdown, digital countdown on it. That I kind of thought was hilarious. I actually expected it to get to one and then stop.

And then it's really artifact basically to be like, Oh, this is what you're doing. I shut it down. Like now you got to bring something. Oh, Nope. Just that one totally blew it up. Where were those nukes when the Vorlons were killing planets? Where were those at the battle of Koreana six? Where they're like, we need the first ones here to help us.

It's so bad. And I just here in the station, I got nukes. Did no one, is that what the face vomit was? There's a nuke. I hit it over here. You can

Brent: know what we get out of this, Jeff? It's John Newcomb Sheridan rides again. That's what this is.

Jeff: totally. Yeah. Do I have that one? Yeah, he, he gets hit. Here's the nuke and he just goes, I don't have time to pay the piper, but I have that. That's good.

Brent: At least you got your priorities straight,

Jeff: Exactly. So then we get that closing monologue. That was totally like noir detective, you know, kind of stories. Uh, the Dame came in and you know, if a little lie got her out the door, that's fine with her. That's fine with her. Fine with me too. I don't know that I felt weird about the closing monologue and where I completely lost it.

And I was like, yeah, nope, I'm out. So Mr. Garibaldi has been known to say, we all lie. What? That's the huge, profound wisdom of Michael Garibaldi that you have to what?

Brent: Yeah. It, this, this was a film. Now I'm going to go back to my original statement. I loved this. I don't want to say I loved it. I liked this one and I think I liked it better than I did in the beginning. Right. So I am a fan of this film. I would rather watch this one before I watched in the beginning again

Jeff: Okay.

Brent: at this point.

So, um,

there was that 30 minutes of nothingness in the middle of the thing and the ending got so rushed,

Jeff: did.

Brent: you know what I mean? Like, like it's almost like JMS forgot that day new mall part, which he took an entire season to do.

Jeff: Mm

Brent: Like, so I, you know, yeah, it was, it was, I mean, maybe I can't use that example. Yeah. It just, like they could have used a little bit more on that.

I thought,

Jeff: It hit me. It was like, they had three, two or three things of, Hey, we're going to talk about the truth is and what a lie is, then we're gonna have the whole rest of the movie that actually has almost nothing to do with that at all. But then we're going to intersect. Another thing where we talk about it a little bit, it's like, I have a really cool idea that I want to explore and I want to explore it by offering this mistake, the war lawns made the mistakes.

Truth lies. But then we didn't really weave it into the story that much. So to me, it felt very shoe horned in. So with that, I'm kind of curious, Brent, if I've been poking this entire conversation at this theme, this message, this something you this week get to rate this movie on a scale of zero to five white stars as to how strong it's sci fi messages. Is it? Give us any hope for the future. Is it hold up a mirror to society?

Does it show us we can be better in any way? Does it teach us a lesson of any kind? Brent, what did you find in this one?

Brent: yeah, I think it did. It's a great episode of, of sci fi. It's a great episode of Babylon five and it does the Babylon five thing. And I think it does it in a uniquely Babylon five way. All the way through there's a couple of great lines in here, uh, it says you can't kill them for being under outside control. Like, I can't, I can't kill you. Like Zach says that I think it is

Jeff: Zach did have some really good,

Brent: dang it.

Jeff: he had some really good

Brent: I'd shoot them, but I can't because like, I gotta be the hero, right? Like I'm the

Jeff: We've gone hand to hand, so we don't hurt it. We don't kill him.

Brent: Right. I also think very much like in the beginning with that whole message of pride and hubris of humanity is, is almost you're undoing.

We see that again, but this time in the four lawns, especially, um, there's another one where it says there's times we don't need the whole truth, you know, you know, there's times we don't need the whole truth. And that's true. I think that's very, very true. Um, but I love this one. I was this Sheridan who said this at one point, maybe it was Vanova said, uh, we have enough trouble of our own.

We don't need to inherit other people's mistakes,

Jeff: Yeah. I think that was Sheridan.

Brent: but with that, that ties right into what I think honestly, Jeff is the, the main theme really going through this whole episode, a set of episodes movie. Is, and we went back to it. What is it to admit your mistake? Now I hadn't considered Dr. Trent. I really was just considering the Vorlons.

And what it means because think about it for them to have this echo around that they leave as a warning to for future generations that might encounter this thing so they can know how to defeat it. And, you know, they're, they're admitting their own junk and this is the stuff that almost killed us. And it's that again, the pride and that hubris.

Of even the four lawns that we saw

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: and how this almost carrying over from, in the beginning, this is the thing that will do it. Great verse from Proverbs. I think maybe something else, but pride goes before the fall,

Jeff: Right.

Brent: you know? And I think that's really what we're, what we're saying here. But when you can admit those mistakes. You can begin to correct, right? So I think in, in many ways, that's a lot of the message that I pulled out of this, Jeff. I, I know you're, you kind of look like you're chomping at the bit about something over there. So I'll give you a chance before I render my, my white star rating. What did you pull out of this one?

Jeff: I pulled the exact same message. However, I think the message is beautiful. And I think it was the intention of this film. I have a little theory. It's going to be the intention of many of the films is going to be the kind of a thread through them. But Brent, it was done so sloppily and it's like, I think that the Dr.

Trent piece, the Vorlon piece was fine, but they had just, they interspersed all this stuff, lead it at the very end one mistake. Out of so many what why why did you say that it's tacked on you're clouding actually what and even the piece when they're walking down and Sheridan's like we shouldn't have to inherit other people's mistakes he goes on to say that the Vorlons made a mistake that we are having to pay for

Brent: hmm.

Jeff: not going to tell that whole truth because we don't want to encourage anyone else to do the same what would you be encouraged they made a mistake And they gave you the thing to tell you what to do about it.

Like

Brent: Well, but at the same time, we don't want to, we don't want people to know that this is a thing that's out there. So they go looking for it and trying to rebuild the door or,

Jeff: we built that, that would make sense, but that's not what I got at all. What I got was, we're not going to tell the whole truth about the mismanagement this mistake, because we don't want people, we don't want to encourage people to repeat a mistake. How do you, how do you, how do you do that? Like there's a version of this whole thing of people don't need to know about the artifact.

They don't need to know about third space. A hundred percent that gets locked up. That gets put away. But the whole thing of the whole intersection, the whole insertion of mistake into this, I think just clouded the message a lot, at least for me, at least for me,

Brent: yeah, I, I, well, I think there's the natural thing of like, okay, what else did the Vorlons do? Because listen, this was a pretty mighty F up by the

Jeff: Yeah. This is big,

Brent: You know what I mean? And it, and it's not just that they created this door to open up and turns out the guys on the other side of that door were a bunch of MFers like, like, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm trying not to, not to, we're keeping this thing PG, right?

Like, like those guys. We're awful. And there's no way the four lines could have known that. How many times have we watched any sci fi show ever? And we go out there and do that. And Oh, turns out those guys were awful. And we had no idea. We just don't have to deal with it. Right.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brent: But still the whole other piece of the Vorlons of, we were posing as their beings of light.

We were posing as their gods. And we began to think of ourselves as gods, but we knew we weren't really gods. So we tried to go touch the things that we thought were gods. So the wheat could also become gods and it's like, wait, I thought the Vorlons were better than that

Jeff: Mm

Brent: because I still think of the Vorlons as the good guys.

I really do. Like, you know, Oh, they created the telepaths and they did this and they did that. Like, I don't

Jeff: I think that's part of the core themes of Babylon five. No one is, there is no true good and true bad. You know, the total yin, yang, there's good in a bad, bad in the good. And also just like, it was a, it was a really arrogant thing to go do. And I keep coming back to, they left the message of, Hey, so we really screwed up and here's what you can do about it.

It wasn't just like, Oh shoot, we messed that up. Cover it up. Don't tell anybody. Hopefully this doesn't come back to haunt us or kick us in the butt at all. They made a mistake. They owned it and did their best to patch it up other than just letting this thing float in hyperspace. That was, that was not a good, good choice.

Brent: Well, so I don't think the Vorlons knew where it was. Like they

Jeff: right. Yeah. Yeah.

Brent: because you, you had the, you had like, wasn't there a thing about how, like the, the, the beings on the other side of the gate started controlling Vorlons telepathically the way that we saw them controlling people on Babylon five and the Vorlons kind of had like almost like a civil war more than anything between the people who were affected and the people who weren't.

Right.

Jeff: So the one

Brent: it was.

Jeff: took it.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the, the one, like as the door is closing or whatever, uh, and they were probably looking to just actually destroy the thing, the ones who were connected to the other side were like, Oh no, here, let's click this over into hyperspace and they'll lose it. At least they won't destroy it so we can get back.

Is

Jeff: those are my

Brent: I heard. Yeah,

Jeff: That sounds right. Those are my thoughts on it. I think the message is clear, but I also think they threw a lot of mud into, into those waters as well.

Brent: that's fair. That's fair. So with that, then Jeff, it actually falls on me to render a rating on this. A lot of times we talk about how strong the message is. We talk about how, how, how much does the show revolve around that message? Regardless of the quality of the show itself, right? And the truth is this didn't really revolve around that message.

This was a horror movie. This is, you pointed out, this was a movie. This was meant to be show something with high stakes and have all this sort of stuff. And it was, these messages were woven in as we went along, but I don't know that the show or the episode really. centered around this, if that makes sense.

So that's going to, that's going to knock it down for me

out of five. Like I kind of want to just be right in the middle. Like two feels a little bit too low. Three feels a little bit too high, but I don't want to do a fraction,

Jeff: Huh?

Brent: but I think I'm going to have to, and I'm just going to go at like, it's like two and a half, like they're there. The messengers are definitely there.

I just don't know that it's truly what the episode was really about.

Jeff: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that makes sense. I'm, I have no problem with fractions.

Brent: So Jeff, well, I did the, the rating, you, my friend, get the opportunity now to do the, what's more frankly, fun part of this whole deal. You get to place this one in our 100 percent completely accurate and definitive ranking of the films of Babylon five. So far we have two on the list. We have in number one spot in the beginning from last week.

And then we also in number two spot have the gathering, that pilot episode. Jeff, where are you placing third space on the list?

Jeff: I feel like for the last, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, we've been really critical of the movie. You paused at one point to reiterate that you really enjoyed it. I want to do the same. I really liked this movie. I shared last week when I was taking notes for in the beginning, I struggled. Like I had to sit, I had to do three sittings to get through it.

I did not. With third space. I watched it right through. In fact, there were moments I had to rewind because I forgot to take notes and I was just watching the movie. So Brent, uh, this is going to be our new number one.

Brent: don't disagree. I don't disagree.

Jeff: Hopefully you don't disagree out there either. And if you do, that's okay. Cause we all can have our own opinion. That's all right. But that's it for third space. Tie a bow on it. We're done next week. We continue our trek through the films. Now we've, I want to talk a little bit about our order here. I'll share what we're going to watch next week in a moment, but we're going to watch this one, another one, and then we're going to dive into crusade because that's kind of how it happens in the chronology.

And then we'll pick up the other movies after we get through crusade. So kind of a hiccup in the watching of the movies, but as we continue into next week, we're watching river of souls. For the first time, river of souls. We don't look anything up. We haven't seen these anything at this point with the movies.

We know the names of them. That's what we know. We love playing games here on Babylon five for the first time. And one of our favorites is the prediction game. So Brent, what are you going to predict happens in river of souls?

Brent: Jeff, I've, I've actually had a while to think about this one. I, when you talk about a river of souls, there's only one thing this could be to me. Mm.

Jeff: You're right. Yep.

Brent: It's the return of the soul hunters. It's the return of the soul hunters. That's gotta be what it is. What are they doing? Are we at their home world? And there's literally like a river of these souls that they've been collecting.

I have no idea. Is this, is this a word for like the black market where the, the soul hunters trade each other's souls, like that they've collected? I don't, I have no idea what the river is, but I'm just saying this is the return of the soul hunters. That's all I got, man.

Jeff: It's not bad. I'm the exact same thing, except I should have a very specific idea of what the film is going to be.

Brent: Okay.

Jeff: I forget his name. I called him murder soul Hunter. So I will continue that. We met him in soul Hunter.

Brent: Like episode two or three or something like that.

Jeff: something like that.

Brent: what? What did he say?

Jeff: Yep. That's the guy.

Brent: There are people out there right now that are typing the actual words. He was saying in the comments right now, and I love you for it.

Jeff: I know it's awesome that you were doing it. You know, I've been looking it up. You're just like, come on, come on guys. How do you not remember?

Brent: it on screen.

Jeff: It was there

Brent: how did you miss it?

Jeff: so clear, but there was a whole story about him. So there was. There was an atonement, right? Where Dukat, we saw Dukat die, they mentioned all the soul hunters that were out there, what we've, what we heard in those early episodes was Murder Soul Hunter showed up and like the Minbari stopped him, they didn't let him get to save Dukat's soul, that led him to madness and into Murder Soul Hunter.

I think this is going to be that story.

Brent: Oh, so another like prequel of sorts.

Jeff: Yeah, we're basically, and again, kind of revolving around atonement. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we see the scene of the Minbar stopping, like blocking him from, from Ucco.

Brent: interesting.

Jeff: I'd actually be really excited. I, I, I, I forget, I, I don't even know if the actor's still alive when they, I don't know if he is an hour when they, but it would be cool if they just totally brought that guy back.

Brent: Sure.

Jeff: And just told his story. I'd be really excited about that. We'll find out right here next week.

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Brent: Hey, Jeff.

Jeff: uh, yeah, man, what, uh, what's up.

Brent: Hey, you know, so I've been, been wanting to talk to you about something for a while. Um, you know, I think you and I have, uh, a really good partnership here with this whole thing, you know? And, you know, I've really enjoyed the works we've put out and the things and the progress that we've, uh, we've made. And I, you know, I just, I think we could take this to the next level, you know, like we could, we could really just do right by each other.

You know what? No, you know, you know, Hey, listen, don't worry about it. I shouldn't have said anything. Um, I'm, I'm just going to get the hell out of here now.