| The Epic New Babylon 5 Movie! River Of Souls |
| This TV movie is set after the fifth season has ended, and with it, the series. Sheridan and Delenn have moved to Minbar, to rule the Universe from there instead of Babylon 5, and Captain Elizabeth Lockley (Tracy Scoggins) is still in charge of the station. She has developed the theory of the Sheridan-Garibaldi Effect. This is that crises only arise when they are around. Clearly Garibaldi is only included, instead of, say, Delenn or Ivanova, because he turns up in this movie. There's no real point to Garibaldi's presence, except perhaps that there's really no-one else noteworthy still on the station other than aging totty Lockley, who is trying run things with only the help of her vacuous lieutenant, who was an extra for the entire series. Garibaldi's tenuous link to the plot is that he employs Doctor Bryson (Ian McShane), who has excavated a glowing glass ball in his search for immortality. This globe actually holds the souls of about a billion beings, the inhabitants of a planet captured at the moment of death by the Soul Hunters. The Soul Hunters are drawn to great people who are about to die, and capture the souls for prosperity. The Ball begins to take over Bryson. A Soul Hunter arrives at the station, played by Martin Sheen. When he first steps from his ship, he speaks in a very strange style, leaving gaps in odd places during sentences and putting emphasis on odd words. By the next scene,, though he's speaking quite normally, which is good, because his other mode of communication would have this movie seem even more interminable. The imprisoned souls don't particularly want to return to their imprisonment, and try to escape, some take on the forms of virtual whores, from Babylon 5's dodgy Holographic Brothel. There is at least some honesty here, I mean, who really believes that everyone on Star Trek uses the holoDeck to prance about pretending to be Sherlock Holmes or talk to Leonardo Da Vinci? Lockley befriends the visiting Soul Hunter when she saves his life, throwing herself in front of an energy blast from the captured souls. They suck her into the globe, and one of the beings appears to her as Doctor Franklin. He explains that some of the souls have gone mad, and it is they who want to wreak terrible vengeance, because when the Soul Hunters took then, they were not dying but evolving to beings of pure energy, like the Vorlons. The mad souls are prepared to destroy Babylon 5 rather than go back, and a fleet of Soul Hunter ships arrives through the Jump Gate, also declaring their intention to destroy Babylon 5 should the globe not be returned. The day is saved, however when the friendly Soul Hunter agrees to try and free the Souls, and sacrifices himself to the globe as a show of good will. he realises, after about five minutes conversation with Lockley that the past four thousand years he has been alive he has been doing souls an injustice by locking them up, and keeping them from getting to Heaven. This is a pretty bog-standard Season five adventure, without the impetuous of the story-arc, and very few interesting characters it meanders along, with a threat you don't really take that seriously, to it's predictable conclusion. |
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