Archive for the ‘Babylon 5-Crusade’ Category
WITH MY JUSTIFIABLE CRITIQUE OF SUPERFICIAL CRITICS
A few days ago, I read that my favorite science fiction series, Babylon 5, will return in a rebooted form. J. Michael Straczynski, the creative genius who created and wrote most of the original series, will helm the rebooted series.
This reality fills me with optimism about the integrity of the upcoming series.
Most of the articles I read about the reboot of Babylon 5 mentioned subpar special effects of the 1993-1998 series. I have heard of people younger than I choosing not to watch B5 because of its special effects. In the 1990s, the special effects of B5 were state-of-the-art. Technology has moved on.
The writing, acting, and character development in B5 are excellent. The show, a pioneer in serialized storytelling, stands the test of time. Those who cannot see past now-dated special effects to appreciate the changes in the characters of G’Kar and Londo Mollari, for example, are superficial critics. I own the original Star Trek series (1966-1969) on blu-rays. I have the option of watching episodes with original effects or new effects. Spock’s Brain with enhanced special effects is just as stupid as it is with the original effects. Likewise, The City on the Edge of Forever is no less impressive with original effects than with enhanced effects. Emphasizing storytelling is better than focusing on special effects.
KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR
SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 COMMON ERA
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Above: ROBOT CHEERLEADER TERRORIZES!
All images in this post are screen captures.
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The Stepford Cheerleaders
Canadian Television Rating = PG
Hyperlink to Episode
Aired February 22, 2002
Production Number = 5009-01-104
Starring
Chad Willett as Tucker Burns
Jon Polito as Donald Stern
Reno Wilson as Wes Freewald
Rena Sofer as Grace Hall
Sharon Sachs as Vera
Main Guest Cast
Christopher Glenn as Sperry
Nicholas Gomez as Lyle
Bryan Greenberg as Damon Furberg
David Purdham as Lionel Carson
Alicia Leigh Willis as Alexis Carson
Kathy Wagner as Jennifer
Behind the Camera
Writer = Henry A. Myers
Director = Perry Lang
Consulting Producer = Naren Shankar
Above: Too Old to Pass for Teenagers
Brief Summary
Something is odd at Robertstowne High School, Robertstowne, New York. Recently, someone has bent parking meters, ripped off locker doors, and torn a metal bleacher in two. Last week, in August 2000, someone also beat up a drunken, randy quarterback (Lyle) who was assaulting a cheerleader (Jennifer) and hung him by his shirt from the top of a football goal post.
Donald Stern sends Tucker Burns, Wes Freewald, and Grace Hall undercover as high school students for a few days. Tucker is concerned that they are too old to pass for adolescents. Grace, however, cites the example of the high school students in Beverly Hills 90210. How old were they? The publisher has two theories of the cause of the recent, unusual events in Robertstowne. The culprit may be either a mutant swamp monster from New Jersey or an extraterrestrial acting out adolescent aggression. The culprit, Stern insists, cannot be a pixie, for pixies have not been in the United States since 1982.
The undercover reporters split up and pursue leads. Tucker makes contact with Damon Furberg, the editor of the campus newspaper. Damon cares nothing about journalistic integrity; he wants to get the story, win awards, and get ahead. Tucker offers Damon a joint credit on a story in the World Chronicle. The high school newspaper editor agrees. Wes Freewald meets a bullied geek, Sperry, and follows a chemistry teacher, Lionel Carson. Grace Hall meets the injured Kyle, cheerleader Jennifer (who takes the same hormone supplement Mark McGuire did) and her best friend, head cheerleader Alexis Carson.
Something is suspicious about Mr. Carson; acid does not burn his hand. He has a bionic limb. He has had that limb for a year and a half, since an automotive accident.
Grace tries out for the cheerleader squad, but Alexis declares her moves too “Paula Abdul.” The current moves are “Britney Spears.” However, Grace does notice that Jennifer exhibits physical weakness.
One night, after Damon and Tucker break into an office and read personnel records pertaining to Lionel Carson, someone attacks Damon’s vehicle, rips the roof open, and attacks him. The next day, Wes discovers evidence that the attacker had a prosthetic arm. Our heroes immediately suspect Lionel Carson, formerly the Head Designer for Experimental Bionics at Dynomec. They read that he resigned after his wife died of cancer.
Wes, Tucker, and Grace drive to the Carson residence. They peak through a window and observe Lionel Carson remove one of his daughter’s artificial arms, to repair a damaged hand. He also tells her she should control her temper and stop attacking people. Alexis attacked Kyle and Damon. Damon is still unconscious in the hospital. Alexis lost both her arms in the automotive accident a year and a half prior; Lionel fitted her with artificial limbs. Now she feels like a freak. She would feel less like a freak if someone else (other than her father) were like her. Wes’s cellular phone gives our heroes’ location away. They escape, with some difficulty; Alexis briefly prevents Wes’s car from leaving by holding the front bumper.
Jennifer, the only other person who understands Alexis, wants to become a cyborg. Jennifer despises her weak body. That night, our heroes return to the Carson residence. In the laboratory in the basement, Mr. Carson is preparing to transform Jennifer into a cyborg. Alexis lifts Wes and Tucker with one arm each. She finally releases them before they choke. Then Alexis attacks Grace. Lionel prevents Alexis from harming anyone else by using a remote device to disable her bionic arms. Jennifer does not become a cyborg.
A few days later, Tucker mails the newest issue of the World Chronicle to Damon Furberg, wearing a neck brace. Damon sees the joint byline. Lyle, reading the story in another copy, turns to Lionel Carson and makes a request. Lyle’s injury sidelined his plans for a football scholarship. Would Mr. Carson give him two bionic arms?
Above: Lyle, Hanging from the Goal Post
Character Beats
Tucker Burns was the editor of his high school newspaper.
Wes Freewald was overweight in high school.
Grace Hall was a cheerleader in high school ten years prior, before her first alien abduction.
Above: Lionel and Alicia Carson
Great Lines
Wes Freewald, on Damon Furberg’s vehicle: “Man! It looks like the canned ham minus the ham.”
Tucker Burns: “Great! We have a six million dollar science teacher here.”
Grace Hall: “It’s always been my experience that the deepest, darkest secrets come packaged like Mayberry.”
Headline: “SNIPER HIRED TO THWART CRAZED POST OFFICE TERRORISTS.”
Above: Wes, Tucker, and Damon’s Damaged Vehicle
In-Universe
Tucker Burns and Wes Freewald are roommates at 7657 Main Street, New York, New York. (In real life, this is commercial property.)
Donald Stern and Vera are hilarious on the telephone as they pretend to be Tucker’s parents.
The registration of Damon Furberg’s vehicle expires in May 2001.
Above: Jennifer
Comments
The Stepford Cheerleaders is the fifth episode produced and the eighteenth one broadcast. The temporal setting is late August-early September 2000. I recommend watching The Stepford Cheerleaders immediately after Baby Got Back, for reasons of internal chronology. Baby Got Back is the third episode produced and the fourth one broadcast.
In I See Dead Fat People (the fourth episode produced and the fifteenth episode aired), Tucker learned that Wes Freewald had been an overweight teenager. The temporal setting for I See Dead Fat People is July 2001, however. Now the internal chronology does not work on this point.
For more commentary on screwy internal chronology and production order versus broadcast order or episodes, see Hot from the Oven.
Watching guest actors who were 23 or 24 years old at the time of episode filming play high school students is not a new experience.
At the time of filming, Chad Willett was 29, Reno Wilson was 32, and Rena Sofer was 33 years old.
David Purdham played the noble and patriotic Captain James at the tail end of the fourth season of Babylon 5. Captain James was captain of the E.A.S. Agamemnon, succeeding John Sheridan in that post. Captain James and the crew signed on with Sheridan’s rebellion against the evil Earth Alliance President William Morgan Clark, who had his predecessor assassinated then transformed the Earth Alliance from a republic into a xenophobic, totalitarian state modeled on 1984. After President Clark committed suicide rather than accept arrest and trial, James helped Sheridan save the Eastern Seaboard of North America from destruction by the planetary defense system, which Clark had turned against the Earth.
The Stepford Cheerleaders is odd to watch in broadcast order. It feels like an early episode because it is one. The balance of the serious and the whimsical holds up well, though.
KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR
JUNE 7, 2020 COMMON ERA
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Above: Blessed Maurice Tornay
Image in the Public Domain
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BLESSED MAURICE TORNAY (AUGUST 31, 1910-AUGUST 11, 1949)
Swiss Roman Catholic Missionary to Tibet, and Martyr, 1949
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To fulfill my vocation to leave the world and devote myself entirely to the service of souls to lead them to God, and save myself.
–Blessed Maurice Tornay, 1932
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One of the recurring problems in Christian history has been that imperial incursions have led to hostility to foreigners, thereby making life and work more perilous for missionaries. Another reason for this has been that many missionaries have, unfortunately, been more agents of their empire than of Christ. That reality has made matters worse for the missionaries who have not been imperial agents. The British invasion of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1904 led to anti-Christian sentiment and violence in Tibet. Buddhist monks attacked missionaries. Blessed Maurice Tornay had to contend with such hostility.
Tornay, born in Rosière, Valais, Switzerland, on August 31, 1910, was devout from an early age. The seventh child (of eight) of Jean-Joseph Tornay and Faustina Dossier grew up in a pious family. He was also a fine student, especially of French literature, as well as the writings of St. Francis de Sales and St. Therésè of Lisieux.
Tornay joined the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, Hospitallers of Saint Nicholas and Grand-St-Bernard of Mont Joux. He, a novice from August 25, 1931, made his first vows on September 8, 1932, and his final vows in 1935. Surgery for a stomach ulcer, followed by recuperation, interrupted preparation for missionary work in 1934, but he, healed, headed for the borderlands of Tibet and China in 1936.
At Weixi, Yunnan, China, Tornay continued preparation. He learned the local language, studied dentistry, medicine, and theology, and prepared for the priesthood. Our saint, ordained in Hanoi on April 24, 1938, founded and led the Houa-Lo-Pa seminary. The Japanese invasion of 1939 forced him to resort to begging to acquire food for his students.
In 1945 Tornay became the pastor of the Yerkalo mission in Tibet. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama had died in 1933. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, born in 1935, although enthroned in 1940, did not begin to rule until 1950. Anti-Christian persecution forced Tornay to leave Tibet and seek diplomatic pressure to intervene with the Tibetan government. All diplomatic intervention failed. On August 11, 1949, our saint was en route to Lhasa, to seek a meeting with the Tibetan government, when guards ambushed and shot him at To-Thong, Tibet. He was 37 years old.
Pope John Paul II declared Tornay a Venerable in 1992 then a Blessed the following year.
I recall a scene from The Needs of Earth, an episode of Crusade (1999), a series the TNT channel never gave a chance. In the scene Captain Matthew Gideon of the Starship Excalibur tells an alien,
When Mozart was my age, he was dead.
When Blessed Maurice Tornay was my age, he was dead. And what he had done for the glory of God puts me to shame.
KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR
JUNE 15, 2018 COMMON ERA
THE FEAST OF JOHN ELLERTON, ANGLICAN PRIEST AND HYMN WRITER AND TRANSLATOR
THE FEAST OF CARL HEINRICH VON BOGATSKY, HUNGARIAN-GERMAN LUTHERAN HYMN WRITER
THE FEAST OF DOROTHY FRANCES BLOMFIELD GURNEY, ENGLISH POET AND HYMN WRITER
THE FEAST OF SAINT LANDELINUS OF VAUX, ROMAN CATHOLIC ABBOT; SAINT AUBERT OF CAMBRAI, ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOP; SAINT URSMAR OF LOBBES, ROMAN CATHOLIC ABBOT AND MISSIONARY BISHOP; AND SAINTS DOMITIAN, HADELIN, AND DODO OF LOBBES, ROMAN CATHOLIC MONKS
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Almighty and everlasting God we thank you for your servant Blessed Maurice Tornay,
whom you called to preach the Gospel to the people of China and Tibet.
Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom,
that your church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ;
who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 96 or 96:1-7
Acts 1:1-9
Luke 10:1-9
–Adapted from Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (2010), 716
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Above: Lt. Commander Laurel Takashima in 2257
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War Without End, Parts I and II:
https://neatnik2009.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/babylon-5-war-without-end-parts-i-and-ii-1996/
In the Beginning:
https://neatnik2009.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/babylon-5-in-the-beginning-1998/
The Gathering:
Referenced Here: https://neatnik2009.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/babylon-5-divided-loyalties-1995/
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SUNDRY THOUGHTS 
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