Unfortunately, this is pretty obviously the point where the compression of the plot becomes obvious. The annoying thing is that there’s scenes that could have easily been cut to make room for more time on the hideously truncated Garibaldi plot – The ‘who gulped’ scene goes on too long, there’s no real reason for Garibaldi to get stabbed. For that matter, the opening scene of Sheridan being tortured seems unnecessary; after last episode, it seems to me it’d be more effective if we didn’t see Sheridan again until he’s rescued. Cut all of them for a proper confrontation between Sheridan and Garibaldi and the episode would be a lot stronger.

(Incidentally, does it bother anyone else this season how easy it apparently is to get on and off Mars? For a world under siege by Clark’s forces, the main characters seem to have no trouble hopping back and forth between Mars and the fleet on a moment’s notice…)

The Ivanova plot – well, obviously this suffers in hindsight because Ivanova leaves the series anyway. As it is… why the speech? I mean, if the Shadow-Omega fleet had been responsible for a major attack on a civilian target, or if they had some role in Sheridan’s capture, that’d be one thing, but as it is, they’re no different from the Clark-loyal destroyers at the start of the episode; why do these ones get a big dramatic speech directed at them? It’d be an over-the-top speech even if it was directed against Clark personally – against generic nameless warships, it’s very hard to take seriously.

And Marcus – you know, I actually kind of like the early Susan/Marcus scenes, when he’s funny and fairly openly flirting with her. When he’s hovering over her saying “You’ll never know…” – yeah, welcome to Creepyville.

Obviously, these are all related to the end of the season being rushed; I suspect even having one more episode here would have solved these problems.