B5, "Infection," S01E04

Babylon 5 is... a really strange show so far. My best description I can give for it so far is "A Scifi's scifi." It is so far doing its damnedest to throw in every costumed alien, laser blast, and computer graphic space dogfight possible.

...Which doesn't really forgive some of its cheese. I can see what they're doing, and I like it. They're taking most of the "soft" elements of Star Trek and filling them with other, more reasonable premises. So far, they're surviving without shields or transporters or replicators, but they're still using technobabble, pseudoscience, and one-liners as a crutch.

I'm willing to forgive, however. I'm only four episodes in, and between the cheese there are pretty interesting dialogues, character developments, and plot twists. People are *actually* devious, rather than just having the camera cutting away to them making devious faces. And when commanding officers make magnificently bad leadership decisions, their reporting officers actually report on it.

This episode was bizarre, as it managed to mix in: eugenics, criticisms against academia, the necessity for space travel for the human race to survive the death of the sun, and religious fanaticism.

It certainly wasn't one of the best episodes of television I've seen. But for the amount of shit they crammed into there, I was impressed.