A certain point in space...

For those who don't know, the original (original) plan for season one of Babylon 5 was for second-in-command Lieutenant Commander Laurel Takashima to be revealed as a traitor as the season progressed. She would be exposed as part of the assassination attempt on Ambassador Kosh in "The Gathering", and also be the one to shoot Garibaldi in the back during the assassination of President Luis Santiago. However, her actress Tamlyn Tomita declined to return for the series after shooting the pilot, so the character never reappeared during the series proper and this idea was abandoned. The only legacy on-screen is that the assassin in "The Gathering" used her passcard to access a door (Only visible if you freeze the playback).

However, something they did try to do was capitalize on this vague thought "Maybe we can't trust the second-in-command" and tried to set up Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova as a potentially-suspicious character.

Throughout the first half of season one, separate episodes introduced plotpoints that could indicate she was some sort of informant or mole working for the raiders that were preying on shipping throughout the region. The idea was that it would never be enough to make anybody accuse her in the show, but the audience would be suspicious and feel very clever at having "figured it out". Only for the viewers to be massively shocked in the finale when it turned out to be Jack, Garibaldi's second-in-command, who was the traitor.

Except....they never made anybody in the audience actually suspicious of her. Each "suspicious" action had a legitimate explanation offered in the same episode that it was introduced, so the audience just took it at face value that she was trustworthy. Most people don't even notice it on re-watch (I didn't notice it myself until somebody else pointed it out to me).

For example, in the first episode, "Midnight of the Firing Line", everybody is stumped as to how the raiders seem to know the schedules and routes of the freighters that they are attacking. While tracking things down, Garibaldi notes that the only place all of the information is collected together is Ivanova's console. Suspicious! ...except later in the episode they discover that the company who sells these routes had their computers hacked and the data was stolen from them.

In the episode "Born to the Purple", Garibaldi detects suspicious use of the high-priority Gold Channel communication system, but Ivanova seems oddly unconcered when he reports it to her. At times she seems to be deliberately impeding his investigation, and gloats when he fails to turn anything up. SUSPICIOUS! ...except it turns out that while she is behind the unauthorized communications, she's just contacting Earth to speak with her dying father, not passing on any secret info.

In "Believers", Ivanova is caught outnumbered and exposed by an entire squadron of raider starfighters and escape seems impossible. But without even seeing the fight we next see her back on the station, unconcerned and apparently uninjured. How did she escape unless they let her go? SUSPICIOUS! ...except it turns out that she's just a great pilot and outran them in her superior starfury.

I think they stopped trying to make her look suspicious after "Believers", because they realized it just wasn't working. They were too subtle and the audience never picked up that they were supposed to keep being suspicious after the explanation was offered.

It's good...but not GREAT. The concept is a fresh look at the classic "Set Right What Once Went Wrong" staple and the cast/characters are fascinating, but the story seemed to meander as it went along. Ironically I found myself bringing out my phone and browsing tumblr at a few points where it couldn't hold my focus (yeah yeah "you're exactly what they're talking about!". It still couldn't hold my focus).

The most striking individual scene was the school shooting sequence with Susan's son. That was absolutely haunting. Her arriving and sitting in her car was a quality short film all by itself. The entire follow-up sequence as she goes to The Store was also brilliant. The desperation, and the hope, but also the shoddiness and shallow results. That was worth the movie all on its own.

Unfortunately for the story as a whole, despite the meta references to Groundhog Day and The Man From The Future talking about all the ways he's tried to make it through the night, they never address many of the commmon-sense things that people always bring up about dealing with Time Loops. For example, since one of the first obstacles he faces is surviving the police onslaught responding to reports of a man with a bomb at a diner...why doesn't he just not announce that he has a bomb? Instead of making a threatening scene, why not pull a Phil Connors and start demonstrating his future knowledge to get accomplices without making anybody scared enough to call the cops? I began wondering this the first time he talked about how difficult it was to escape the cops, and he never offered any explanation.

The final "showdown" with the AI was also very generic and underwhelming. I suppose that might have been deliberate, because we learn that the AI has actually tricked them and is feeding them a vision of their victory when it has actually already won. So I suppose it could have been a clue to make us mistrust what we're seeing. But whatever the reason, it's still a ten minute sequence filled with extremely generic special effects imagery and pseudo-philosophy that we've seen in a dozen other movies (and already gone over in this film several times already).