Yay, a Garibaldi episode! I like his character more and more. And lots of wonderful Ivanova quotes as well. I’m rooting for these two to get together.
I found Major Kemmer pretty robotic. Yes, I know that her father’s death and her hatred of Garibaldi changed her, but her behaviour and acting changed -radically- in her last scene, when she had forgiven Garibaldi. It sounds as if we’re going to see her again, when the President next visits.
I hope I was wrong about seeing a couple of sparks fly between Kemmer and Garibaldi. She was calling him “Uncle Mike” in this episode, after all! Plus Garibaldi has to hook up with Ivanova.
Enjoyed the brief scene between G’Kar and Sinclair in which G’Kar complains about being seated next to the Vree. (”The entire Narn delegation has been seated next to the Vree. An intolerable situation! Have you ever seen them eat? That’s horror for you.”) Have we seen any Vree yet? I was disappointed to not see any of the banquet mainly for this reason.
Major Kemmer: I demand you open a channel to Earth at once!
Ivanova: I’m a Lieutenant Commander in Earth Force, Major. I don’t take demands. If you will request, I will consider it.
Major Kemmer: Very well, then. I request that you open a channel to Earthdome.
Ivanova: Request denied. Have a nice day.
I’m really enjoying seeing more of Ivanova’s wry sense of humour. Loved how she delivers her line to Kemmer, when Sinclair orders her to escort Kemmer out of the observation dome: “You are going to resist, I hope.”
I mainly enjoyed finding out more about Garibaldi’s character in this episode, however. Interesting to see his interactions with both G’Kar and Londo as he flees Kemmer’s security detail. Interesting also to hear Kemmer’s people tell her that Garibaldi’s only real friends are Ivanova, Sinclair and Londo Mollari.
I found Londo’s private observations to Garibaldi highly illuminating, when he told Garibaldi that he was helping him because they were both “the odd man out.”
When Garibaldi was deciding whether or not to take a drink at the club, I couldn’t help but yell “NO DON’T DO IT!” at the screen so, um, I guess I’ve warmed up to some of these B5 characters more than I thought I would. But he DID take a drink. 
It gave me a glimpse into what he was like when he was an alcoholic, and how much strength it must have taken to pull himself out of it.
Garibaldi: “I blew it, Jeff … just like I always do. When things get too rough, I crawl right back into the damn bottle. What really scares me is how much I enjoyed it.”
Interesting to hear Garibaldi confess to Sinclair that he still tends to “crawl back into the bottle” when things get really bad, so I’m assuming we’re going to see more of that struggle in future episodes.
I’m looking forward to finding out more about Garibaldi. Londo’s still my favourite B5 character so far, but Ivanova and Garibaldi are a close second.
Sinclair’s much more interesting because of the “hole in his mind” thing, but that issue hasn’t been addressed in a couple of episodes. Isn’t Sinclair going to pursue his newfound memory re: Delenn? Has he been remembering more? What happened to the whole secret Minbari marriage thing? Don’t answer any of that.
Next episode: By Any Means Necessary.
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Ivanova gets some of the best lines in the show, really.
I’m reading your reports as if I were cheering on the sidelines:
“Oh, I hope ‘Believers’ doesn’t turn her off completely!’
“‘Any Means Necessary’…yeah, I bet I know who she’ll mention after that one!”
“OMG, she’s almost up to ‘Signs and Portents’!!”
Garibaldi rules! I liked all the characters to varying degrees, but Garibaldi was my favorite from day one and he still is.
It’s wonderful to watch a show where people are PEOPLE (even the aliens are real people) with pluses and minuses and character evolution. No one’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to be. And how one deals with failure defines a person more than just about anything else.
I didn’t like Major Kemmer at all. Robotic? She makes blocks of concrete look animated! And then in the last scene she comes alive. I’m not sure if it was bad acting or bad direction but they could have done better.
Other than that this was a great episode. We get to see a bit more of the seedier side of B5. We get to see another side of Garibaldi.
The Vree look like “Greys” and fly around in the ships that look like flying saucers. I believe you see one briefly in episode 15, “Grail”.
Garibaldi edges all the other characters as my favorite, though merely by the width of a
— being solidly centered in reality makes it impossible to reject him. You were far from alone in yelling at the screen when and how you did.
MinbariNarnCentauri hair. The care and complexity taken with his character says as much about JMS as it does about Garibaldi; he’s the everyday guy, the reformed failure, who finally gets it turned around. There are times when he’s hard to like (or, rather, easy to dislike), but ultimately, his — damn, I want to say “groundedness” or “down-to-Earthedness”, both of which are highly inappropriateIn much the same way Star Wars broke out and gave us dirty and realistically decrepit starships, B5 gives us the grit and sweat of space stations. You can’t imagine a bar like that on DS9, or the space station in 2001. Those bars are slick, clean, even tourist traps — even the ones for station personnel. In doing so, the show deserves a nod above and beyond all the other praise, for the characters and the stories. Part of the problem of sf, for me, is that it’s too “THX-1138″ or even “Logan’s Run” clean, and disconnected from the human experience, and B5 brought lots of people back toward a realistic vision of the possible future with episodes and details like this.
I don’t like Survivors, much, despite the Garibaldi-love. In fact, looking back, I can think of only about seven or eight episodes of the first season I would ever care to watch again.
But I always tend to willingly suffer through the first seasons of SF shows because of my experience with TNG seasons 1 and 2. Hell, I gave Voyager and Enterprise 1 and a half seasons each before I threw up my hands.
On a side note, Garibaldi was named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian historical figure, also known as the “Leader of the Red Shirts” - quite amusing, considering B5’s Garibaldi is the security chief