Ok now, I pretty much love everything about this episode. Considering how early the episode was (only the second ever broadcast), it's pretty amazing.

Among the myriad of races, there is a group known collectively as "Soul Hunters" ... Most of the aliens have stories of them, but the Humans have never heard of them. Until now.

A rogue Soul Hunter has been injured and is brought on board the station. In MedLab, the new doctor, Stephen Franklin, nurses him back to health, only to get really freaked out when he does get healthy again.

Soul Hunters are stuff of legends. Minbari children are taught to be good and say their prayers, for fear the Hunters will come and steal their souls during the night. Whether they actually do that or not, well, it's up to the viewer to decide. What we do know is this ... At the moment of death, the Soul Hunter takes something, whether it's the actual soul, or a copy of their brain, something, and stores it in their collection. They talk to these souls, who can be thousands of years old, and treat them as the Hunter's children.

Years ago, during the Earth-Minbari war, the Minbari leader Dukhat was killed. To prevent his soul from being taken, they built a wall of bodies around him. That was where it began to go bad for this particular gentleman. He has decided to stop waiting around for death. When he stumbles upon someone he deems worthy, he kills them, taking the soul in the process.

And that's when he finds Satai Delenn, currently "playing Ambassador" on the station.

The viewer finds out right then what that means ... Satai is a member of the Grey Council, the ruling body of the Minbari. What is one of these Satai doing on the station? What greater purpose - or nefarious plans? - will be coming?

A second Hunter shows up to help stop the first, and after a fashion, he does. Not before Sinclair starts investigating Delenn, however.

This will definitely be touched upon again.

Notes and comments ...

Doctor Kyle is name-dropped. He's working with the President back home now. I miss him already.

We are introduced to "Down Below" ... my, what clean walls they have. :P

When the scammer is caught ("Where she stops, nobody knows"), there is a brief, perhaps two-second shot, a close-up of the Hunter's eye opening and his pupil going all wonkey ... That shot is freaking gorgeous. The director was very skilled, I'll say that.

"Gone now. Gone. Gone. Goooone." ... oh it's heartbreaking. The Hunter is so sad with the death of this lurker. He's an unimportant nobody, but even so, the fact that he is gone is ripping the Hunter's heart right out, and there's nothing he can do to get to the soul and save him. He recovers quickly, or seems to, but you can see it in his eyes for the next several minutes, he's just crushed.

One quick production note here ... The stunt double looks nothing at all like Morgan Sheppard. It's like having some kid from The O.C. with a fake white beard doubling for J. R. Ewing. They don't even resemble each other in the least. I always find myself with a case of the giggles when the double is onscreen.

Aboard a station orbiting the colony Ragesh 3, the Centauri are attacked. In classic cheesy writing, the commander orders a communications channel open to their homeworld to "Tell them we're under attack. Tell them it's the-" and then cut away, the line unfinished.

On Babylon 5, Mister Garibaldi has changed his name. Yes, he doesn't care for the name Garibaldi anymore. No, he much prefers to be called Mister Exposition. That's what I make of him in this episode. It's exposition this, exposition that. Whenever somebody needs to know anything at all, it's Mister Exposition.

In the "A" story, the Centauri are attacked by the Narn. G'Kar claims not to know anything about this, but soon tells anyone who will listen that the colony tried to get help from their homeworld and when ignored, asked the Narn for help. Of course, it's total BS. G'Kar is, after all, more bullshitter than anything else at this point.

In the "B" story, Raiders are attacking shipping lines, murdering those aboard the ships and taking anything of value. It ties in with the "A" story at the end, when Sinclair learns that the Narn have provided weapons to the Raiders, and have evidence in their ship's computers that Ragesh 3 was an unprovoked attack after all.

In the "C" story, Talia Winters is the new telepath on the station. She tries to check in with Lt. Commander Can't Smile. I'm sure I meant to say Susan Ivanova. Susan gives her the cold shoulder and it seems like these two will never be best friends.

In the "D" story, there's an election going on back home. It gives us an opportunity to meet Jane. There's one good thing! :)

Commentary and such ...

How does Vir know that fighters, "wave after wave after wave" of them are attacking Ragesh 3, but doesn't know who they are? Seems kind of odd, I think. If they're able to get the message out about the "wave after wave after wave" wouldn't a single syllable word like "Narn" be pretty easy to get into that message?

Susan is either a real bitch, or she hates bottle blondes.

Londo and G'Kar's verbal sparring is really rather entertaining. It made me regret I didn't have a bowl of popcorn handy. I could watch that scene over and over again. "What's wrong, run out of small children to butcher?" lmao

Man, Londo's quarters are so ... eighties! That ghastly "artwork" behind his couch mixed with those awful pillows adorning said cough, they're enough to make one hear "Back in Time..." from a certain Michael J Fox movie.

Has Susan ever seen anyone eat a meal before? I question this because of her questioning. Michael is at the bar and takes two pretend bites. I say pretend because there's nothing on the fork! when he "bites" ... She says he's eating like a starving man. Really? How many starving men do you know, when sitting in front of a bounty of food, prefer to take imaginary bites? And only two of said imaginary bites?

Warning - Plot hole here ... Garibaldi is trying to track ships, and does so with Ivanva's computer console. He says that all ships in the area register with her console, letting them know their flight plans. That's great, in fact, I can think of a dozen really good reasons for this. Just one question ... Why isn't her console plugged into the rest of the station? They're saying the Chief of Security can only get this information from one computer station, and it's not his? Sounds kind of odd, wouldn't you say?

Ok, the Senator needs to go. The Babylon Project created the five Babylon stations so there would be a place of peace, a place where those at war could come and work out their differences peacefully. This jackass is ordering Sinclair to just look the other way when that very charter says "help them"? Oh shut up. Typical fucked-up politician with his priorities completely screwed.

Susan didn't smile once in the entire episode. She *almost* started to smirk once, when she and Sinclair were being conspiratorial, but even then it didn't come to fruition. Is she being paid per sour look or what?

Delenn in the Gathering was an odd sort of look. She certainly wasn't "pretty" ... she was just ... odd. Delenn in this episode was the very definition of the word "beauty". She looked amazing here.

Man, it seems like I'm being so hard with this episode, but I really did like it. There's just so much to rag on, being the first regular episode shown. I'm sure if this seems bad, I'll probably have very little positive to say about "Infection" ... Gotta take the bad with the good. And boy, there is a lot of good in B5.

In the year 2257, Humanity has reached out to the stars, building ships and a space station. And they are not alone.

In fact, there are many strange and unusual alien races with whom they live with in a neutral corner of space, on a five-mile long space station, called Babylon 5.

The fifth in a line, it is the most cheaply built. The first three stations were blown up before completion. The fourth vanished less than 24 hours after going operational. The fifth, well, no one expects it to last very long.

And that's when we're introduced to a funny little comical character named Londo Mollari. He has all the personality traits of a used car salesman. He is a gambler and a drunkard, and his pockets don't run very deep.

He is a Centauri, a race of aliens that look Human, but have longer canine teeth. Other than that, when they let their hair down, they look just like us.

Not so of the Narn. They were slaves of the Centauri for a hundred years. Recently, they left their former slaves behind, leaving behind a destroyed, barren world, barely inhabitable.

The Narn are a reptilian-like species, and G'Kar is their ambassador on the station. He is a schemer, and threatens to murder the station's commander. He certainly looks like he could do it, too.

He has a mate at home, and this mate has apparently agreed to let him explore his ... relationships ... with other women.

You see, the Narn have no telepaths. Nearly every other race has them, including Humans. They began popping up about six generations ago. As far as the records show, anyway. There are Minbari and Centauri and other telepaths, but none for the Narn. G'Kar, this Narn schemer, has no problem propositioning the first telepath he runs into, either to have sexual relations with her, or to buy her DNA to make clones.

That telepath, Lyta Alexander, is understandably appalled at the idea.

And then we have Delenn. She is a member of the Minbari, a race Humans were at war with only 10 years ago. The Minbari had fought all the way to Earth, and were minutes away from destroying the last remaining Humans on Earth when they surrendered. And no one knows exactly why they did it. But Delenn knows. It's one secret she's keeping to herself, among many.

When the Minbari reached the planet, they took one Human aboard to study. That Human was Jeffrey Sinclair. He was gone for 24 hours, a period of time he still, 10 years later, cannot remember.

And now he is the commander of Babylon 5.

The fifth major race, the Vorlons, have sent their own representative, a being known as Kosh, to the station. At this point, it is believed no one alive has ever seen a Vorlon.

Although there are stories ... one story says a man did see a Vorlon, and he turned to stone.

And this is how we are introduced to the station and its inhabitants. In the pilot, Commander Sinclair is accused of attempted murder after Kosh is poisoned within a minute of leaving his ship.

G'Kar, ever the schemer, puts him on trial. With the help of the Vorlons and his own arch-enemy Mollari, the trial ends by forcing Sinclair to the Vorlon homeworld.

Just one slight complication there. The real assassin is still on the station, and it's up to Sinclair to find him. Let's not forget about the fleet of Vorlon ships powering up their weapons only a short distance away from the station.

For its time, this was an incredible pilot. The fx were phenomenal, and Stewart Copeland's music was out of this world.

Looking back at it 15 years later, with the benefit of having seen it many times, and the series itself several times over, I see its flaws. They're there, no denying it.

And yet, for all those flaws, it truly is remarkable. The setup it has for things that won't pay of for years is all right there. Sure, storylines jumped from one character to another, but they got their start here.

For all of that, I give it a 4.5.

This rating is for the original version. I'll review the TNT version at a later time.

In late 1992, I attended a convention in Omaha. Majel Barrett was the guest, and at this convention, the cast of the then-upcoming Star Trek spin-off Deep Space ix was announced. They all had very funny names, and we tried hard to pronounce them in response to the speaker reading the list. He said the cast, though just announced, was already receiving fan mail, months before the series was even due to air.

After he finished, he told of another science fiction show that would also be coming up soon. This one was called Babylon 5. He read through the cast list of that movie, and none of them registered as anyone I knew, until he said "Andreas Katsulas" of Star Trek fame. Andreas had the recurring role of Tomalak, the Romulan commander we'd seen on at least three different occasions.

He would be working under heavy makeup, much more than his Star Trek character.

This movie was due to premiere in February 1993, and I was ready for it.

It's been fifteen years since I began my connection with the Babylon 5 universe. Those strange, exotic names now belong to old friends, and while the series has come and gone, it does live on through new fans, and dvds of the show itself.

All except one, the original version of "The Gathering" - that tv movie which started it all in 1993.

In between the fourth and fifth seasons of the series, it begin airing on TNT. As part of the deal with TNT, new movies would be filmed, and the pilot movie would be re-edited as a Special Edition version.

One that happened, the original version, for all intents and purposes, ceased to be. All videotapes and dvds of The Gathering are now the special edition. History has been rewritten, and the original forgotten.

But not by all.

When Columbia House began releasing the series on videotape, they had only the original version of the pilot. Some time later, they received the master of the special edition, and began releasing it. At that time, I ordered one single tape, that of The Gathering. And I received the very last copy (confirmed with customer service at the time) of the original. No more were made, no more exist within that company.

At times, one can find a used copy on eBay, but they are few and far between.

In Region 1 (the US and Canada), the original has never been released on dvd.

Tonight, for the first time in a few years, I hooked up a VCR and popped that tape in. It has deteriorated, sadly. About every three to five minutes, there is a slight "hiccup" for a few seconds. That footage is lost now, to my regret.

What remains is brilliant.

And while watching, I thought it might be fun to start a new review of the series, one episode at a time. They are heavily geeking on the Babylon Podcast, and there are many sites out there with other reviews of the show. So what can I add to the mix?

We shall see.

I think I'll start with this movie and then do maybe one episode every week or two, see how it goes. I'm sure it'll come faster during season 3. Who knows, maybe I'll interview a guest now and then. It's all in fun, and fun is a great description for the Babylon 5 series.

On with the show ...