The Long Dark
Reviewed by Emperor Cartagia
Click HERE to see a picture from the episode.
Well...this episode was not very good. It was not a TOTAL waste, but almost...
It only had one plotline, to begin with, and with B5, that's NOT a very good thing. And it wasn't terribly original. They find an old ship from before the days of jumpgate technology (or more precisely, from before HUMANS had jumpgate technology...) drifting in space. It has a woman inside who put herself in cryogenic sleep, along with her husband, in hopes of eventually meeting an alien civilisation way out there when they wake up. The ship was programmed to lock onto any signal coming from space it found and steer towards it. They just never thought that it would be HUMAN...an OLD sci-fi idea. If they had just waited a few years more, they would have been able to get out to the stars without all this hassle! As Alanis Morissette put it, "Isn't it ironic...don't ya think?"
The lady wakes up, but her husband doesn't. He's kinda got problems, you see. He only weighs 90 pounds and all of his organs have sorta been REMOVED from his body, and with no other concrete evidence around, the lady is the main murder suspect.
One of the few highlights of this episode was Dwight Schultz, or "Mr. Broccoli--erm, I mean, BARCLAY" as the nutsoid Lurker prophet Amis. He did SUCH a good job with his acting that if his name hadn't been in the credits, I NEVER would have recognised him as Mr. Barclay. He was a lot of fun. And more than just a madman--he was a DEEP character. He was actually a heavily decorated war-hero veteran who had gone off the deep end from the trauma of a horrible incident involving the monster at his base. He turns out to actually have a brain in there, a smart, calculating brain that can still figure out strategies.
Other than that, "The Long Dark" wasn't very good. Except for a bit of foreboding and a few choice lines and bits of background info, which I'll get to in a moment, the episode failed.
The mystery was not as intriguing as it could have been had it been written COHERENTLY, the relationship between Franklin and the past-lady BUGGED me (although I must admit, they did make a really pretty couple!), and after ALL that buildup, they never SHOWED the monster! It was just some weird glowing outline thingie for all I could tell. Ooooh, I'm so SCARED...this is the thing that was feeding on people, getting into their minds, and taking out their ORGANS?!! After all that, I wanted to see something SCARY-looking!
So much for the episode's problems, which lie in all the MAIN parts of it. Now for the stuff that keeps it from being completely tossable--the details:
1. Background info: This is where we first hear that it was us CENTAURI who gave the Humans jumpgate technology, and that it happened about 100 years ago. (Or in other words, in the 22nd century).
2. Foreboding: Well, that whole thing about the creature trying to get to Za'ha'dum, "and it's scaring the HELL out of me", as Ivanova so eloquently puts it, and that bit about "the last time the darkness was defeated, it spread out, and hid itself in a hundred secret places." That's going to be VERY VERY important later on...
3. A few choice lines. The best was this one, when Amis wakes up and asks Garibaldi what was the last thing he did before he blacked out, and Garibaldi says: "Well, you were just about to accuse the Centauri Ambassador of being in league with the devil. Funny thing is, you just might be RIGHT..."
This is a GREAT line because it twists your brain around. You have TWO, completely opposite, reactions to it in a row. First, you laugh, 'cos it IS funny...and then you go, "Oh, my. Geez" and feel all sad and freaked out...because Londo HAS essentially made a pact with the devil, or the next best thing...and doesn't know it yet...
If this episode had had a slightly more original main plotline, and some better effects and editing, it could have been good. But as it is...it fails.
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