Episode 039 – A Distant Star
An old friend pays Sheridan a visit and Dr. Franklin has a plan for everyone. Elias joins us to explore episode 2×04 – “A Distant Star”.
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Tags: a babylon 5 in, a distant star, downbelow, episode 2x04
September 12th, 2014 at 3:48 pm
[Spoilers for The Long Dark]
The best thing about this episode is the title.
The rest of the episode is no more than OK, but that may have been the point.
I’m 90% certain that TLD was one of the first episodes that I saw when the show was originally being broadcast. Not when it was first broadcast, but when it was rerun later in the season, since I started watching midway through, and saw several episodes for the first time out of order. The fact that I don’t have a clear enough memory to be 100% certain that I saw it then is, I think, a sign of how profoundly average an episode this is.
It’s another instance of the genre of B5-stories-that-could-have-been-on-TNG, and tellingly guest-stars an actor most recognizable to me then and now as “That guy from those TNG episodes that I didn’t like.” (No reflection on Dwight Schultz as an actor. I just hated those particular stories.)
As a B5-does-TNG story, TLD isn’t bad. It shows a surer hand than first-season instances like Believers in having hints of the overall arc in the background but still giving you a straightforward self-contained science-fiction story in the foreground that you can latch onto and follow without having seen much else.
Basically, I don’t think it’s just that The Long Dark is routine. I think The Long Dark flaunts just how routine it is, and to the new viewer, it says “On a routine basis, this show will be at least OK by the standards of what you’re used to in this genre. You might as well keep watching.”