Why there needs to be a Babylon 5 "the one where"

sineala and I have decided that there needs to be a list of "the one where" for Babylon 5. The arc is incredible, and the action extends over so many episodes that unless you want to see a really key episode, where the main arc and the ep title match up (like "Severed Dreams" or "Chrysalis" or "War Without End"), there's no way in hell you can figure out which episode contains the parts of the story you want to see. Plus, there's a lot of secondary story in each episode, so you think "oh, 'Walkabout,' right, with Franklin and the blues-y singer" and forget the massive Kosh-Lyta-Sheridan and G'kar-Garibaldi and Lyta-Sheridan-Shadows secondary plots. I mean, "Walkabout" contains the lines "We are all Kosh" and "And so it begins." Not exactly the Franklin bluesy singer focused episode it appears from the title.

I mean, I recently wanted to see the ep where Ivanova sits shiva for her father, and invites Sinclair, and gets her father's samovar, and she and a rabbi have a brief conversation about how to define kosher with alien animals. I knew it was first season, before "A Voice in the Wilderness," and that was all. So I had to go to the Lurker's Guide, and click through their incredibly detailed ep synopses for most of season one before I found it. "TKO." Who knew? The one with Garibaldi's friend and the boring sorta-boxing thingy is the same as the one where the sitting shiva.

And I'm not disparaging the Lurker's Guide. I *heart* them. They have beautiful commentary, incredibly detailed synopses, backplot, a friggin' map of the station -- heck, they even have a reference page full of two-line ep summaries. It's just that two lines isn't enough, and three pages is too much. There needs to be something in the middle -- a page I can click on for season three or the shadow war or whatever and get lists of "the one where" at a little bit more detail.

So we've decided to start one right now. With "Walkabout," which is ep 3.18 and a weird place to start, but I just watched it today. Maybe we'll even post it somewhere. Concept.