And we are not talking simply the humans here, although the Terran military meatheads depicted in this TNT-made "movie" are your standard idiots.
This "film" actually begins at the end of the entire series, when Londo is an old emperor.
This is supposed to be 20 years after the events of season five of Babylon 5, 20 years after the events of S05E18: "The fall of Centauri prime".
The only question I have ever asked about this particular scene, and there is also a scene from the same time. In "war without end part 2", is why is the capital city of Centauri prime still burning after 20 years? It was burning in war without end, and it is burning here, in this film.
But we know from Babylon five canon that there really wasn't any continued conflict past the events from "the fall of Centauri prime".
So we have an immediate mystery, maybe some aspect of the Centauri capital city allows for perpetual fire. Kind of like in Game of Thrones when they blew up Kings Landing with that green stuff, and then later it was burned up again with Drogon, Emilia Clarke going mad on his back. Earthforce certainly could have used her...
But, there are dragons here, at least there are Drakh, aliens, former servants of the shadows. Which have dragon scales that also become pieces of themselves that they can use to take over minds of guys like Londo.
But none of that is really gone into in this film: basically this film shows us exactly why the war with Minbar was started.
We have two things happening at the same time: we have Vorlons secretly meeting with Gul Dukat... excuse me, I mean Dukhat, with the purpose of figuring out how to get the humans to join in the fun when the shadow wars begin again.
But then we have these military meatheads on earth who think they are hot poo on a SilverPlatter because they beat the tar out of some race called the Dilberts. Excuse me, I mean the Dilgar. And these same military meatheads think that the Minbari will not pose any kind of worse threat. Wrong. So, they assign the job of first contact to an Earthforce captain with itchy trigger fingers.
But wait! It's not merely stupid humans that are going to go where they should not go and try to interact with a race they know nothing about, thinking that they can blow them up, no problem... there are also stupid people on the gray council of Minbar.
And so there is not even an opportunity to stop this from going Fubar, it appears that the humans and the Minbari are destined for idiocy.
Peppered into this movie or scenes from the first season episode "and the sky is full of stars", which shows what happened during the 24 hours of Jeffrey Sinclair's "hole in his mind".
But it also goes a lot farther in explaining the mythology of Babylon five.
There is clever use of archived footage, mixed in with new footage which expands on the things that we have already seen.
There are also cameos from some of the Babylon 5 regulars, we get to see Susan Ivanova before she joins earthforce and we get to meet her brother.
This was the first made by TNT Babylon five "movie", I was pleasantly surprised with the quality when I saw it.
It has been difficult to find high definition versions of this, because mostly these movies were released as a six DVD set. It is only within the last few years that they have processed these movies for high definition streaming on on places like Amazon prime, but this film and the show are no longer available there, I believe they moved over to Netflix.
Regardless of the difficulty in finding high definition copies of this, this movie is a highly recommended documentary on basic stupidity and bad luck. And maybe we can learn how to avoid bad luck by watching this.
This "film" actually begins at the end of the entire series, when Londo is an old emperor.
This is supposed to be 20 years after the events of season five of Babylon 5, 20 years after the events of S05E18: "The fall of Centauri prime".
The only question I have ever asked about this particular scene, and there is also a scene from the same time. In "war without end part 2", is why is the capital city of Centauri prime still burning after 20 years? It was burning in war without end, and it is burning here, in this film.
But we know from Babylon five canon that there really wasn't any continued conflict past the events from "the fall of Centauri prime".
So we have an immediate mystery, maybe some aspect of the Centauri capital city allows for perpetual fire. Kind of like in Game of Thrones when they blew up Kings Landing with that green stuff, and then later it was burned up again with Drogon, Emilia Clarke going mad on his back. Earthforce certainly could have used her...
But, there are dragons here, at least there are Drakh, aliens, former servants of the shadows. Which have dragon scales that also become pieces of themselves that they can use to take over minds of guys like Londo.
But none of that is really gone into in this film: basically this film shows us exactly why the war with Minbar was started.
We have two things happening at the same time: we have Vorlons secretly meeting with Gul Dukat... excuse me, I mean Dukhat, with the purpose of figuring out how to get the humans to join in the fun when the shadow wars begin again.
But then we have these military meatheads on earth who think they are hot poo on a SilverPlatter because they beat the tar out of some race called the Dilberts. Excuse me, I mean the Dilgar. And these same military meatheads think that the Minbari will not pose any kind of worse threat. Wrong. So, they assign the job of first contact to an Earthforce captain with itchy trigger fingers.
But wait! It's not merely stupid humans that are going to go where they should not go and try to interact with a race they know nothing about, thinking that they can blow them up, no problem... there are also stupid people on the gray council of Minbar.
And so there is not even an opportunity to stop this from going Fubar, it appears that the humans and the Minbari are destined for idiocy.
Peppered into this movie or scenes from the first season episode "and the sky is full of stars", which shows what happened during the 24 hours of Jeffrey Sinclair's "hole in his mind".
But it also goes a lot farther in explaining the mythology of Babylon five.
There is clever use of archived footage, mixed in with new footage which expands on the things that we have already seen.
There are also cameos from some of the Babylon 5 regulars, we get to see Susan Ivanova before she joins earthforce and we get to meet her brother.
This was the first made by TNT Babylon five "movie", I was pleasantly surprised with the quality when I saw it.
It has been difficult to find high definition versions of this, because mostly these movies were released as a six DVD set. It is only within the last few years that they have processed these movies for high definition streaming on on places like Amazon prime, but this film and the show are no longer available there, I believe they moved over to Netflix.
Regardless of the difficulty in finding high definition copies of this, this movie is a highly recommended documentary on basic stupidity and bad luck. And maybe we can learn how to avoid bad luck by watching this.