Babylon 5: Jews in Space

I've been watching Babylon 5 on DVD and just finished the first season. In the episode titled, TKO, Ivanova has to face the admonition of her Rabbi who makes the expensive trip all the way from Earth to B5 to assist her in sitting Shiva for her dead father. First off, it was good to know that about two hundred years into the future people will wear retro-eighties stylings but rabbis will still don the cloth of the early Twentieth Century. Rabbi Koslov could have been a character on a Saturday Night Live skit where a Rabbi comes to minister to Jim Kirk in a Star Trek spoof. The guy comes off the shuttle with nothing but his Torah, his black hat and his Russian accent. At first I began to wonder, "Did B5 actually just 'jump the shark'?"

It gets better. Not only does Ivanova have to fend the good intentions of Rabbi Koslov but Garibaldi's friend, Walker Smith, comes to B5 in order to try out for the part in Karate Kid Part XXIII. Or was it Bloodsport Part XXXX? By the time I hear that it was the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind, I'm pretty convinced of it.

Walker Smith isn't really on B5 to attend the Ralph Macchio convention; he's there to compete for the (highly suspect) Mutari tournament. This is probably the most ridiculous excuse for a contest that a human can't enter since Anakin Skywalker got into himself a podrace. I try to give a writer credit when they have to invent a contest that, "no human in the entire universe can ever compete." We really don't have any idea what that could be since everything we can think of to put on film would probably be a human-based event.