Episode 047 – GROPOS
Dr. Franklin’s father visits the station and he brings 25,000 troops with him. What’s the worst that could happen? Guest host Jan bunks with us as we discuss episode 2×10 – “GROPOS”.
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Tags: a babylon 5 introcast, downbelow, episode 2x10, GROPOS
October 31st, 2014 at 2:39 am
[Spoilers, but not very many, for All Alone in the Night]
OK, in defence of Keffer:- Here’s the thing. At this point when I first watched, I didn’t know that Keffer hadn’t been in the first season. I also didn’t know that JMS hadn’t wanted to add him, didn’t like the character, and didn’t like that entire type of character.
All I knew was two things. One, Keffer was in the credits, and therefore presumably important. Other characters in the credits had also hardly appeared for me. The luck of repeats meant that I had missed all of the big S2 Talia episodes, for instance. (Will, I imagine, will feel that this explains how I became hooked on the show.) I assumed that there was a background of Keffer-centered episodes that I simply hadn’t seen.
Two, Keffer was a little different from the other humans. He was younger, for one thing, and more normal, more of an everyman. Keffer seemed perfectly adequate at his job, but he wasn’t presented as an exceptionally capable pilot or an outstanding officer like Sheridan or Ivanova. Ridiculously good-looking, admittedly, but this was television. Keffer, in fact, was for me the human counterpart to Lennier and Vir. This seemed like a deliberate storytelling choice, and not a bad one. Keffer would be the character where we saw how extraordinary events might affect a comparatively ordinary person.
Obviously, I now know that this was all accidental. But I still think that there was a gap for a Keffer-like character. And I would still maintain that Keffer is no more boring than Sheridan is at this point.
Which brings me to All Alone in the Night. Basically, it’s Sheridan as Heroic Space Captain again. At the end, one is supposed to think that no-one would suspect that he was a man of principle who would follow his convictions rather than authority – and honestly, I find this hopelessly unconvincing.
The saving grace is, though, Boxleitner is good at playing a straightforward hero who does what’s right without hesitation or complexity. When he says in this episode that the first duty of a prisoner is to escape, you know that he means it utterly and sincerely without the tiniest of doubts. Boxleitner should have played Superman.