"Sooner or later, everyone comes to Babylon 5" (B5 Pilot "The Gathering" '98)

I Love you, Carolyn.  Now, we'll never speak of you again.

January 4, 1998

(Synopsis at The Lurker's Guide)

As was pointed out in the comments of my last analysis, it is possible to watch the '93 version of "The Gathering" online.  The question is, outside of its value as a historical artifact, why would you want to?

Overall, the special edition re-release from 1998 is the superior product.  For one thing, while there are fans of Stewart Copeland out there, Christopher Franke did an excellent job doing the music for the rest of the series so replacing Copeland's score with Franke's in the re-release just makes more sense vis a vis continuity with the rest of the show.  Also, and Straczynski cops to this during the the commentary track of the re-release, there just wasn't enough music in the original version.  There's only something around 20 minutes of music to be had which isn't much for 90 minutes.  Franke's score more than doubles that to around 45 minutes.

The re-release is also 14 minutes longer, and includes whole scenes that got cut from the original '93 release. One is a throwaway scene about a guy trying to pick up an alien woman who turns out to be from a species where the females eat their mates.  Given that the race in question doesn't appear again it's really only there to lighten the mood somewhat.  Another scene that's new is one where Sinclair handles a hostage situation by talking the criminal down and letting him go, albeit with a death threat if he ever returns.  While useful to see that Sinclair prefers negotiation to violence and is willing to put his life on the line for others, the scene itself, especially the final threat, comes off as weird.  After all, the criminal who was smuggling drugs and took a hostage was a human standing on an Earth Alliance space station.  That's not really the kind of mistake you should be able to walk away from.  Of course, it does suggest a more frontier justice kind of feel to Babylon 5, but given what we'll see later on the show, that isn't really the way things are.

Alas, poor Ben.  I knew him well.

The third major scene that was re-added was a conversation between Doctor Benjamin Kyle and first officer Laurel Takashima.  Given that neither character would return for the main series, one cannot see the scene of them discussing Laurel's background on Mars as anything but deeply ironic.  It took guts to put that scene back in five years later knowing that neither character was still around.

Of the two characters, the one whose loss is more painful is that of Doctor Benjamin Kyle.  Though his performance has some rough spots, the easy camaraderie he displays with the other human characters, especially Sinclair, would have made for an interesting dynamic.  Granted, we wouldn't have had Richard Biggs' performance as Stephen Franklin, which was good.  But one can't help but wonder how Ben Kyle would have done in Franklin's place.  Alas, Johnny Sekka developed health problems and couldn't continue with Babylon 5.  Indeed, "The Gathering" was Sekka's last performance before he retired from acting prior to his death from lung cancer.  Oddly enough, he would survive until 2006, and thus lived two years longer than his successor, Richard Biggs, who died in 2004.

Doctor Kyle's departure from the show triggered what Straczynski liked to call his character trap doors.  When an actor left the show the unresolved plot elements for that character would be transferred to another. Sometimes to that character's direct replacement, and sometimes not.  In Kyle's case, his eventual stim addiction is first mentioned here when Kyle stays up for 48 hours to keep Kosh alive, so the doctor uses stims to stay awake and alert.  Eventually, Kyle's replacement Doctor Franklin would find himself going down the same road, leading to his disgrace and resignation in Season Three.

I'm going with Takashima in the Guest Quarters with the PPG!

On the other hand, Laurel Takashima's plotline would get jumped from herself to the replacement telepath on the show, Talia Winters.  Laurel, you see, was meant to be the traitor with an artificial personality agent working in her subconscious.  The first clue of her eventual betrayal was here in "The Gathering" where the assassin uses her ID code to get into secured quarters.  Her direct replacement, Ivanova, would pick up the latent telepath plotline instead.

Unlike my wistfulness about the departed Doctor Kyle, I can't find myself missing Laurel Takashima very much.  Tamlyn Tomita's performance was stiff and difficult to watch.  Evan back in 1993 on the black & white TV, I could see she wasn't comfortable with the role.  The producers, the WB suits, and even Tomita herself eventually agreed with that assessment, and thus she left the show.  Which, considering that Claudia Christian's Ivanova was one of the standout characters of the show, ended up being the best solution for everyone with the possible exception of Tomita's bank account.

The only problem was that in the end, the traitor plotline ends up not working as well as it should.  Rather than Laurel shooting Garibaldi in the back, we ended up with Jack, Garibaldi's second in command.  At least they managed to get Jack into the show a few times before he was revealed to be treacherous, but the impact wasn't there the way it could have been had it been a trusted character like Laurel doing the shooting instead.  Unfortunately, by shifting the traitor card to Talia, you found yourself playing a longer game that was itself short circuited when Andrea Thompson left the show in Season Two.

So wait, if Talia's the telepath, what happened to Lyta Alexander?  And haven't I seen her in later episodes? Yes, you have.  In a weird turn of events that is the exact reason Straczynski put in his trapdoors in the first place, Patricia Tallman chose not to return to the series.  Despite the fact that she'd done pretty well with the role and, indeed, Straczynski had written it with her in mind, she didn't see enough future in Lyta to come back.  So Andrea Thompson will be getting introduced in the series proper as Lyta's replacement.  Eventually, after Thompson herself gets in a fight with the producers and quits the show (or is fired, reports differ) Lyta comes back as a telepath on the run.  Lyta was meant to have her story conclude in an episode of Crusade, but Tallman couldn't get as much money as she wanted for the appearance and passed, leaving some nameless telepath we've never heard of before or since to be the one who martyrs herself to destroy the PsiCorps.

Bester was right, telepaths can't get any breaks!

What do you mean this is all I get?

The final casualty among the pilot's cast was Sinclair's lover, Carolyn Sykes.  Blaire Baron kind of got a raw deal out of this one.  Straczynski wanted a racially diverse cast.  When he lost the African Benjamin Kyle, he replaced him with African-American Stephen Franklin.  However, when he lost Asian Laurel Takashima, he replaced her with Russian Susan Ivanova.  So, to keep an Asian in the main cast he replaced Baron's Carolyn Sykes with Julie Nickson-Soul's Catherine Sakai as Sinclairs new girlfriend.  Alas, when Sinclair left the show at the end of the first season there wasn't a good reason for Sakai to keep showing up, so she vanished as well.  By that time, Straczynski just threw up his hands and gave up, and there was no significant Asian character thereafter.  In all honesty, though, neither Baron nor Nickson-Soul manage to do all that much with their characters.  Maybe I slightly prefer Sakai to Sykes, but that's only because I saw more of the former than the latter.

As far as other changes from the pilot to the main show, they're mostly cosmetic.  The guns change from elongated phaser-looking ones in the pilot to the stubby PPGs of the show.  Delenn has a set of magic rings in her quarters that are decided to be too powerful and eliminated without further mention.  G'kar's makeup and Londo's hair go through revisions.  There are fewer flashing lights once the show gets going than in the pilot, but they also increase the lighting overall.  It had been such a pain in the ass to use the floating mechanism for Kosh that they went with a less elegant but much easier to use version.  And so on, and so forth.

Thus "The Gathering".  Some of the performances don't work, the plot is too exposition heavy for anyone's good, and some of the special effects fail.  On the other hand, some of the performances rock, the story is intriguing, and there's hints of better times ahead.  It was promising enough, despite the flaws, to get back on the air in a year, and that's about as much as you can ask for from a pilot.

So we set aside Babylon 5 for a while longer and return to Bajor and Deep Space Nine.  I'll meet you there.