Plus, did you see those new rad cockpits? So much better than the old beige ones, I tell you. The production design on Babylon 5 gets better and better with each season and the usage of CGI to create ships with shapes that truly defy gravity and sense in our minds keeps them looking fresh and impactful even 25 some-odd years later. This isn’t the first time I’ve gushed about the ships in the show and it won’t be the last time.
Whatever the case, the image of these small ships stuck with me so much that I had to talk about them with y’all. Maybe it’s deliberate, as ticks are parasitic organisms that extract resources from an unsuspecting host and, depending on their source, re-deposit something nasty and harmful. Maybe it’s just the motif of those larger ships attempting to be replicated on a ship that serves a different function that makes it look less like a spider and more like a tick. All of the Shadow vessels look like they’re of a different time, of a world built out of darkness and terror, but thus far all of the ones we’ve seen have looked like big spiders. Out of everything that happened in this episode, and it was a lot, I somehow latched onto the blink and you’ll miss it designs of these new, micro-USB Shadow vessels. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The Shadows have spider & tick shaped ships, the propaganda will be televised, and our best friend Gooder is back and deliciously villainous.