Noise2Signal

The Rule about Movies:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
—The Bechdel Test

Watching Babylon 5, I frequently find myself thinking about that thing that appeared in the internet’s strobe-light consciousness last November: the real lack of overlap between the shows Democrats follow and the ones Republicans do. For me, Bab 5 is an early example of that divide. Its themes and values make it a thoroughly liberal, progressive show, despite its glancing resemblance to more conservative milSF.

We’ve already had an “organized labor is good” episode (By Any Means Necessary) and an “authoritarians are bad” one (Eyes). This one, though less overt than those two, is in the same category for me. It focuses on a marked area of difference between the left and the right: the roles that women play in society, and the value and validity of different, gender-linked, forms of conflict management.

The two subplots are almost entirely detached from one another, so I’ll cover them separately.

On the one hand, there is the “fighting men, appeasing woman¹” storyline: Shai Alit Branmer, one of the war leaders of the Star Riders clan has died. His second in command, Alit Neroon, is bringing the body back to Minbar, but has turned the journey into a ceremonial tour. On Babylon 5, he tries to make it a causus belli as well. He goes out of his way to offend and confront Commander Sinclair from the start. And when the body vanishes, he becomes even more aggressive. He threatens to restart the war, suggests that he “have [his] ship assume the job of taking this station apart”, and even breaks into Sinclair’s quarters to search them. And Sinclair, though not provoking Neroon in return, is all too easily baited into shouting back at him. It’s classic to the point of stereotype, and not unlike the previous episode in tone. That bugs me. The entire clash oversimplifies the confrontational mode of disagreement, leaving it no natural outcome but the most violent.

Delenn cuts against this escalating aggression with stereotypically feminine conciliation. She intervenes in the conflict whenever it takes place in her presence, and sides alternately with each of the antagonists as she tries to defuse their clashes. Many of her interventions are the sort of thing that I do as a moderator:

Neroon: These are my requirements, Commander
Sinclair: This is my station. I don’t take orders here.
Neroon: Impetuous. Is this how you reacted on the Line, Commander?
Sinclair: This isn’t the Line.
Neroon: No. We were in control there.
Sinclair: How would you like to…
Delenn: It’s been my experience that discussions of old battles only interest historians. What do you think, Commander?
Sinclair: I think I have a station to run. Now if you’ll excuse us?

But her peacemaking efforts are rather undercut by the fact that she is the one who has stolen the body. And until Sinclair finds out about it and confronts her, she seems willing to trust that Neroon will somehow give up on his search and accept a mystical explanation. That seems unlikely; there’s no groundwork laid for that kind of outcome. Given his behavior in the episode I’d actually expect him to end up pushing war onto the humans first. And I’d expect Delenn to have seen that. The fact that she caused the conflict, and this lack of perception, really undercut the portrayal of the classic “feminine peacemaker” stereotype².

In the end, Delenn stops appeasing and changes to confrontational mode, ordering Neroon to seek a meeting of minds. And I’d say that just about redeems the subplot, because the resolution that he and Sinclair come to is consistent with their roles as warriors⁴, as problem-solvers by conflict. One of them has won, the other lost, but they both respect each other for the fight. As a multiculturalist, I approve: the lesson is that there is more than one way to deal with disagreement, and that you have to use the tools native to the problem at hand.⁵

(Neroon, by the way, becomes a recurring character. He grows and changes substantially over his own story arc. And in the end, his conversation with Delenn about whether Branmer was properly considered a member of the religious or the warrior caste is beautifully ironic.)

The other storyline concerns Alisa Beldon, a young girl from Downbelow whose latent telepathy becomes suddenly and overwhelmingly active. Talia thinks she should join PsiCorps, but Ivanova is reluctant to let her go. While she’s struggling to decide, Na’Toth offers her employment in the Narn Regime, supplying genetic material to allow the Narn to breed telepathy into their species. And in the end, she takes Delenn’s offer that she join Minbari society, where telepathy is less a job than a calling which telepaths are supported in following.

This is conflict resolution by negotiation and empowerment. Ivanova and Talia are contending over Alisa, but they both resist the temptation to use their different forms of authority to do more than force a stalemate. Ivanova insists that Alisa has to stand trial for theft, and thus cannot leave the station, but doesn’t actually put her on trial. Talia demands that Alisa be sent to join PsiCorps as the law requires, but allows her time and emotional space to choose her own path. Both persuade and argue, but do not command or compel.

Interestingly, this subplot doesn’t just pass the Bechdel test; it actually fails the reverse Bechdel. There are only two male characters even peripherally involved in it, and they don’t talk to each other. Dr. Franklin takes care of Alisa’s medical needs, but plays no decisive role in her future. And Ivanova consults Sinclair early on to get his permission to follow her best judgement. Other than that, all of the main players are female: Alisa, Talia, Ivanova, Na’Toth and Delenn. That places the conflict resolution in this subplot firmly on the distaff side of the gender divide.

Alisa is a cipher throughout the episode. She has virtually no personal characteristics apart from a rather gormless desire to be liked⁶. I’d have expected her to be more marked by the early loss of her mother and her two years supporting herself alone in Downbelow after the death of her father. Her only expressed motivation is a desire to be financially secure, and her only emotional reaction is after she touches Na’Toth’s mind and finds it disturbingly alien. In the end, I saw no reason, no thread in her narrative, for her to take Delenn’s offer.

Although this curious blankness as a character makes her final choice less comprehensible, it does allow her to be a kind of Everygirl as she chooses among her possible futures. And they’re pretty much the same range of choices that we women all wrestle with: Talia wants her to have a career; Ivanova praises marriage and children. Na’Toth’s offer is the other side of marriage and children—the committment to live with someone deeply alien to yourself and have offspring who will partake of that alienness. And Delenn’s proposal is the final choice: a life of service, giving up one’s own direct benefit for the good of others⁷.

This episode is written by D.C. Fontana, whom I first encountered as an Old Trek writer. Her scripts for that show frequently tackled the theme of difficult choices: both This Side of Paradise and The Enterprise Incident require Spock to pick between love and duty, emotion and logic. And Journey to Babel, also hers, includes a theme of bullheaded masculine conflict mediated by a woman. Although I don’t recall her previous scripts being so overtly about the experience of women, I’m not surprised by these themes appearing here.

One point I did not like in the episode was right at the end. Alisa has already picked the fate of Bremner’s body out of Delenn’s mind and reported it to Sinclair. That’s a breach of the Minbari’s mental privacy, but an unintentional and necessary one. However, when Sinclair asks Alisa what else she saw in Delenn’s mind, and Alisa answers him, they conspire against her mental integrity with no pressing need. The yield: a single mysterious word. Chrysalis.

The next entry will discuss the two-part episode, A Voice in the Wilderness.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

Ostensibly, this is a “story arc” episode, where the consequences of past choices come back to haunt the crew of Babylon 5. Having sent Bester about his business in Mind War, reinterpreted the Rush Act in By Any Means Necessary, and—as Garibaldi says—rewritten the rulebook repeatedly in recent episodes, Sinclair has powerful enemies looking for revenge. This is when they try to take it, in the form of that kind of grubby political assassination that disguises itself as a routine enquiry.

Multiple threads from previous episodes all come together in the plot. The investigator, Ari Ben Zayn, turns out to subscribe to the same theory of secret Minbari allegiance that Knight One and Knight Two did in And the Sky Full of Stars. Sinclair is questioned about the Raghesh 3 incident from Midnight on the Firing Line, the Deathwalker affair, and the sabotage in Survivors as well as the way he ended the strike in By Any Means Necessary. It looks like all the chickens are coming home to roost.

But I wasn’t impressed with this episode in that context. It’s not so much that the attempt to unseat Sinclair fails. The real problem is that there are no new threads leading forward into the next conflict. None of the recurring characters changes, in position or in personality, because of the events that occur. Everyone is right where they were when the action started. The command crew keep their positions. EarthGov remains divided about Babylon 5 and the aliens. Bester still lurks in the shadows. Life goes on.

Having said that, I think this episode did have a number of thematic and character-related aspects that are worth dwelling on.

I’m not going to do a detailed plot summary here. The short version is that an EarthForce officer, Colonel Ari Ben Zayn, and Harriman Grey, his PsiCorps adjunct, are sent to Babylon 5 to investigate Sinclair’s command history and check the crew’s loyalty to EarthForce. It becomes clear that they are actually on a witch hunt, instigated by Bester and by Sinclair’s enemies in EarthGov, and intend to use Grey to probe for evidence. Ivanova, refusing to be scanned, considers resigning her commission. Sinclair challenges PsiCorps’ involvement in the investigation and, when that doesn’t work, gets Grey to scan Ben Zayn as well. Grey, seeing that the investigation is not an honest one, takes the Babylon 5 crew’s side, and the mission is shut down. In the meantime, Lennier helps Garibaldi to build a 1990’s motorcycle.

The most interesting thing to me is what we see of Ivanova in the story. This is when her profound weaknesses as an officer come to the fore. She’s many things: a competent leader, a good fighter pilot, a dedicated administrator, and a fiercely loyal team player. But she’s really not a people person, and that costs the command crew in this episode. Harriman Grey does everything but fall at her feet in an ecstasy of puppy love, but she can’t see past her own fear and anger to the opportunity that presents. It would have been trivially easy for her to turn him against Ben Zayn before events escalated, but she leaves that kind of thing to Sinclair. This draws out and intensifies the conflict, which, though good television, is bad command tactics.

This is also the episode where Ivanova breaks, in the sense that Garibaldi broke in Survivors—and the way she did not in TKO. And there’s material for some interesting comparison between the two characters in the way this plays out.

Their breakpoints are the same: the loss of their careers. Garibaldi was framed for sabotage and stripped of his position. Ivanova sees the choice between allowing herself to be psionically scanned and resigning her commission, and for her there is no choice. Sinclair manages to talk her down once, but she’s quick to despair again:

Ivanova: I won’t submit to a scan.
Garibaldi: He’ll charge you with insubordination.
Ivanova: And I’ll be replaced, and dishonorably discharged. It’s a very Russian ending. I should have expected it.

Both of them turn to drink when everything seems hopeless. Now, alcohol is an interesting revealer of personality, both in real life and in fiction. And the two of them come out very differently when they’ve had a few. Garibaldi, who’s kind of a professional misanthrope, turns out to be a chummy drunk. And that rings true, because there are scenes when he’s sober that expose his friendly side as well (for instance, inviting Delenn over for popcorn and cartoons). But the veritas of vino yields no equivalent warmth in Ivanova; it merely moves her self-defensive aggression¹ from the verbal to the physical.

The episode also gives some insight into how she’s become who she is. She describes being raised by a telepath:

You can’t imagine what it’s like. To share your own mother’s love for you? To feel it in your thoughts? No one’s ever been that close to me, Commander.

Before PsiCorps intervened, Ivanova’s mother created an experience of love that no non-telepath³ could reproduce. Even leaving aside the side-effects of the psi-suppression drugs, her mother’s suicide, her brother’s death and her father’s failures of affection, Susan Ivanova was destined be lonely. What kind of romantic relationship could stand up to the memory of feeling unconditional love inside her own head?

When I first watched Babylon 5, I wanted to grow up to be like Ivanova. I still admire her passion and her strength of character, but seeing this episode again causes me to reconsider that ambition.

Ivanova’s failings are highlit by the fact that her antagonist, Harriman Grey, is interesting and well-drawn. He’s a powerful reminder that the best plots are not created by setting good against evil, but by setting it against another, different good. Because despite being a member of an unsavory organization and the tool of unscrupulous men, Grey is unambiguously good, as earnest and as honest as the hero of a Heinlein juvenile. And despite Ivanova’s violently expressed dislike of him (“I’ll twist your head off and use it as a chamber pot!”), he repeatedly tries to reconcile her to being scanned rather than throw her career away.

In the end, it’s Grey who tilts the balance of the conflict. My favorite moment in the entire episode is a brief shot of him sitting, hand against his temple, watching Sinclair goad Ben Zayn into revealing the real motivation behind the investigation. And once he reads Ben Zayn, he doesn’t hesitate to choose sides: he accuses his commander of lying, calls his ambition “filthy”, and uses psionic power as a weapon against him.

In contrast to the collision between Ivanova and Grey, the conflict between Sinclair and Ben Zayn is much more crudely drawn. Ben Zayn is a strawman authoritarian, a caricature of military command. He tests people like an enemy (offering Garibaldi a drink) and barks orders at the bridge crew. He uses words like “sack time” and demands prompt responses and short sleep. One can’t picture him dealing sympathetically with a subrdinate’s refusal to be scanned.

Sinclair, meanwhile, continues to be wise, controlled and clever. First he tries his usual tactic, making an end-run around rules that get in his way by quoting a different, more useful rule. But when that fails, he becomes the personified contrast to Ben Zayn’s authoritarian approach, a kind of canonical collborative leader. Because if the essence of authoritarianism is an expectation of unquestioning obedience from subordinates, then its opposite is an encouragement of independent action by them. And that’s what Sinclair does with Grey: he essentially steals him from Ben Zayn’s command, encourages him to consider both sides of the conflict equally, and lets him make his own choice. Of course, Sinclair is then proved right and Ben Zayn not just wrong but crazy.

This cartoonish clash between insane ambition and measured cooperation underlines my growing problem with Sinclair as a character. He simply does not make mistakes, get things wrong, or doubt himself. His reaction to the investigation is typical: he has no fear that Ben Zayn will find any instances of bad judgement, fleeting inattention, or simple human error. Everything he does has been perfect and is defensible. It’s of a piece with his unfailing wisdom and compassion in interpersonal matters, all delivered in a soothing and avuncular voice.

See, I’m doing a busy and complicated job right now, though it’s several orders of magnitude less judgemental and all-consuming than Sinclair’s. And I know I’m doing well at it. But I also know that if someone came looking at my work in detail, they’d find plenty of places where I dropped the ball, or prioritized the wrong thing, or simply made a mistake. In the light of that, Sinclair’s confidence that his successes aren’t similarly granular strikes me as either glib or deluded. In any case, it undermines the already fragile realism of his character.

I’m not sure if Sinclair is a Gary Stu or simply cardboard. I don’t know enough about JMS to tell. What I do know is that I am increasingly treating him as part of the set or the setting rather than a real character in his own right. At this point, he’s as reliable, as unchanging, and as predictable as the computer on the Enterprise.

This doesn’t damage his value to the greater plot. The mystery around his time in Minbari custody is interesting for what it will reveal about them, even if I don’t expect it to make him one whit more fallible. But it disappoints me. I wanted to be interested in Sinclair as well as the other characters.

So in the end, I found this episode deeply unsatisfying. The realistic characterization showed me that my favorite character isn’t the person I thought she was, and the unrealistic characterization finally damaged my suspension of disbelief to the point where I had to find a workaround. And the plot gets under my skin, too: surely Ben Zayn knew that the Minbari would not accept him as a substitute for Sinclair. Absent actual detachment from consensus reality, how could he seriously discount the probability that they would unseat him from his newly stolen command?

Although I had a mixed reaction to the main plot, I did find the motorcycle subplot adorable. Lennier’s deep geekery is a treasure and a delight⁴, from his research into the history of the vehicle (“sexual prowess and rebellion…?”) to his use of “domo arigato” after spending too long reading the Japanese manual. Even the inevitable “old stuff that’s contemporaneous with the show’s production date” trope⁵ doesn’t diminish the charm.

The next entry will discuss Legacies

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

When he tugged off his belt, made a loop in it, and moved clumsily toward her, the unicorn was more pleased than frightened. The man knew what she was, and what he himself was for: to hoe turnips and pursue something that shone and could run faster than he could. She sidestepped his first lunge as lightly as though the wind of it had blown her out of his reach. “I have been hunted with bells and banners in my time,” she told him. “Men knew that the only way to hunt me was to make the chase so wondrous that I would come near to see it. And even so I was never once captured.”
—The Last Unicorn

There’s a lot to dislike about this episode. It’s another Freak of the Week story, and its mix of bad acting and woo makes it hard to take at all seriously. It’s not the worst of Season 1, but coming so shortly after the series looked to be taking fire, its disappointments are magnified. Sometimes the doldrums are worse than disaster.

But the biggest problem with it is that it’s trying to tell two stories from two different genres, one of which is not native to the show. The subplot about discovering what is blanking people’s mind and applying pressure to the Centauri to get the information they need is standard B5: light science fiction plus diplomacy. But the quest of Aldus and the redemption of Jinxo is basic genre fantasy† transplanted out of its habitat. And genres are like typecast actors: they make awkward guest stars.

I’m not just saying this because it’s a quest story. Indeed, it’s the setting that really pushes the story over the genre lines. The Babylon 5 that Aldus and Jinxo travel through is less a diplomatic meeting-ground and military base and more a space-faring version of one of the intricate and crime-ridden cities I’ve been reading about since I was a teen. This is a story that could be set in Sanctuary or Lankhmar, Riverside or Adrilankha, or even later Ankh-Morpork.

Something like this:

Into the twisting corridors and darkened spaces of Babhylon, Fifth of the Name, where the law’s reach is tenuous and all who survive do so by their wits, comes a searcher. Although he does not find what he seeks, the power of his quest affects and transforms those he encounters: the overworked judge, the petty thief with a fearsome curse, the criminal leader using a terrifying and exotic beast to tighten his hold on the underworld, and even the police and ambassadors of the upper levels…

(You will please, of your kindness, read all of the italicized sections in your best Heraldic Fantasy Inner Voice, and the Roman ones in a fine and steely Science Fiction Inner Voice)

We begin our tale as the Commander of Babhylon, Fifth of the Name, and his chief of plice meet in a public hostelry for their midday meal. They have barely begun before the two Minbari ambassadors arrive, announcing the coming of an important stranger to the station. Commander Sinclair and Chief Garibaldi have heard nothing of this arrival, but they abandon their food and prepare to welcome him.

Meanwhile, in the shadowed and chilly spaces of Downbelow , a man is being threatened. Jinxo, otherwise Thomas Jordan, owes a smuggler and loan shark called Deuce a large sum of money. By virtue of the time he spent building the station, Jinxo knows many hidden ways, ones the police are ignorant of. Deuce gives Jinxo a choice: pay back the money, or teach him the secrets of Babhylon. If he will not, or cannot, he will suffer a terrible fate. As proof, Deuce shows Jinxo his monstrous pet: a creature whose tentacles steal people’s minds. It dwells in an encounter suit in the Vorlon style, and Deuce addresses it as “Ambassador Kosh.”

There follows a brief and comical interlude about a lawsuit between the descendant of an alien abductee and that of the Grey that snatched him. With this we see the petty court system of Babhylon, presided over by an Ombuds who arbitrates both civil and criminal cases.

Our story then returns to Commander Sinclair and Chief Garibaldi, standing at the arrivals gate alongside Delenn and Lennier. Their quarry arrives: a tall man, dressed in pale colors and carrying a staff. He is Aldus Gajic, and he is the last of his unnamed order. He has come to further his quest, hoping that the aliens of Babhylon will be able to help him.

I am seeking the sacred Vessel of Regeneration, also known as the Cup of the Goddess, or by its more common name, the Holy Grail.

When Aldus visits a moneychanger, Jinxo steals his wallet. He is caught by Garibaldi, and must now face the Ombuds. It is his third offense, but because he is a builder of some skill, Ombuds Wellington offers to pay his passage to another station where he can find work. Jinxo will have none of it, insisting that he must stay on Babhylon or it will be destroyed. Aldus declares that he will take Jinxo into his custody and stand surety for his good behavior, and the Ombuds agrees.

Meanwhile, Dr Franklin is investigating yet another case of mysterious mindwiping from Downbelow. It’s new problem: people from the underworld are turning up with no memories, and barely enough cognitive function to be alive. They can be retrained, but their memories are gone.

The latest case annoys Garibaldi. The woman in question was going to testify against Deuce on charges of extortion. Without her testimony, the trial can’t proceed, and Deuce walks free.

Jinxo accompanies Aldus to his quarters. There he explains the curse that keeps him on Babhylon, Fifth of the Name. He worked on the construction crew for each of the five stations. The first three, each sabotaged in turn, exploded as soon as he left them. The fourth, completed, vanished as he departed. He will not leave the station lest this Babhylon suffer the same fate. If he is captured and killed by Deuce, he fears that Babhylon, Fifth of the Name, will fall as well. He begs Aldus to flee. But his companion does not believe that he is cursed, and names him Lucky for having four times escaped disaster*. He later tells Jinxo that staying on Babhylon to prevent its destruction marks him as a man of “infinite promise and goodness.”

Franklin contacts Sinclair. He’s eliminated any form of mechanical interference with the victims’ brains.. After some research, he and Ivanova identify a creature from Centauri space whose effects match their observations: the Na’ka’leen Feeder. Sinclair tracks Londo down to the casino and asks after the Feeder. Londo gives Sinclair the information he needs, but is clearly terrified. He rushes out of the casino and locks himself in his quarters.

Thereafter does Jinxo serve as a kind of esquire to Aldus, accompanying him on visits to the different ambassadors. The Minbari receive them hospitably, but have no useful information. The Centauri solicit money, but have nothing to offer either. While en route to their final appointment, the two are set on by a gang of Deuce’s toughs. Aldus repels them with his staff, and he and Jinxo continue on their way. But the meeting is with Ambassador Kosh, and when Jinxo sees the Vorlon encounter suit, he flees. Aldus must perforce follow.

Following the custom of the stories of Babhylon, Fifth of the Name, the two quests become one during the telling. Deuce’s men kidnap Ombuds Wellington. And a greater quantity of them appear to abduct Aldus. Jinxo, escaping, seeks out Commander Sinclair, and the pair of them, after summoning assistance, go Downbelow to rescue the captives. But Aldus has not been idle. He has already begun to exert whatever influence his quest and character provide. He confronts the Feeder and it does not eat his mind. He commands it out of its encounter suit and it emerges. The two of them, man and Feeder, confront each other, but are interrupted when the security patrol arrives.

In the subsequent fighting, the Feeder escapes into the ductwork. It reappears beside Deuce and eats his mind (neatly ending his criminal career). Jinxo, seeing his chance, goes to release the Ombuds. One of Deuce’s gang takes aim at him, but Aldus steps into the line of fire and is shot. The feeder reappears and is killed. The fight is over.

Aldus, mortally wounded, wills all that he dies possessed of to Jinxo, who vows to take up his quest. “I see in Thomas the Grail,” says the seeker as he dies.

Jinxo, wearing Aldus’ clothing and carrying his staff, accompanies his body off of the station. And Babhylon, Fifth of the Name, does not explode when his ship leaves.

– o0o –

See what I mean? The Aldus plot still not great genre fantasy, but it’s better fantasy than it is science fiction. It requires there to be a kind of magic in his quest, capable of bending judges to his will, redeeming the hopeless in a few short hours, and taming savage beasts. That’s a completely different suspension of disbelief than the one that allows Franklin to compensate for Centauri brain function in order to identify the Na’ka’leen Feeder’s peculiar effects.

(This episode also proves that, snark aside, the rest of Babylon 5 is not fantasy. Despite its Arthurian themes, it’s more SF than F in execution.)

There are also some useful tidbits of information in the episode. For instance, here’s Delenn on Aldus, and Sinclair:

Delenn: He is a holy man, a true seeker. Among my people, a true seeker is treated with the utmost reverence and respect. It doesn’t matter that his goal may or may not exist. What matters is that he strives for the perfection of his soul, the salvation of his race. He has never wavered, or lost faith.
Sinclair: I wish him luck. He’s probably the only true seeker we have.
Delenn: Then perhaps you do not know yourself as well as you think.

On the population of Downbelow:

Garibaldi: Make me a happy man. Let me clean out Downbelow. If I put all my teams on it, I could wipe out nine-tenths of the crime rate in one sweep.
Sinclair: Look, most of them are just people with nowhere else to go. They come here looking for a new life, a new job, and when don’t find it they can’t afford transport back. What are you going to do, Mr. Garibaldi? Shove them out an airlock?
Garibaldi: Don’t tempt me.

On the fates of the first four Babylon stations:

Jinxo: The day I started work on the Babylon station—we didn’t number the first, you know—that was the best day of my life. I worked a few months, had some leave, so I took it. And the station’s infrastructure collapsed. It was sabotage. They never found out who.
Aldus: I remember.
Jinxo: So I went to work on the second. The firm still owned my contract till the station was finished. I took leave a second time, and that station was sabotaged. And then when B3 blew up, well…that’s when I got the name Jinxo. When I went to work on B4, I didn’t take any leave. I was there every minute until we finished it. I thought the curse was gone. Then as I was leaving on the shuttle, I looked back, and the station just sort of…wrinkled. Twisted, like putty, then just disappeared. The minute I left.

On the Minbari castes:

Lennier: There are two castes of Minbari, warrior caste and the religious caste. The warrior caste would not understand. It is not their way.
Delenn: So we will not tell them, and spare them the confusion.
Aldus: These two sides of your culture, do they ever agree on anything?
Delenn: Yes. And when they do, it is a terrible thing. A terrible power, as recent events have shown us. Let us hope it never again happens in our lifetime.

And, of course, on the destruction of Babylon 5:

Garibaldi: No boom?
Sinclair: No boom.
Ivanova: No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always a boom tomorrow…What? Look, somebody’s gotta have some damn perspective around here. Boom. Sooner or later. Boom!

† Indeed, it’s not far off being Extruded Fantasy Product
* This reminds me of the fact that in the Orthodox tradition, “Doubting Thomas” is known as “Believing Thomas”.

The next entry will look at Eyes.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

I think this is the first episode of Babylon 5 that’s not lived up to my memories of it. I wouldn’t say the Suck Fairy’s done more than pop by it for a cup of tea, but the Meh Fairy seems to have settled in and put her feet up on the coffee table.

I’d remembered it as being an emotionally powerful journey, as Ivanova gradually came to terms with her father’s death and, to a certain extent, her own relationship with the religion of her childhood. It was interspersed with some pointless boxing subplot, but it was the sort of intense episode I wanted to deal with on its own, and maybe even hang some of my coalescing thoughts about religion and faith in the show off of.

But looking at it now, the Ivanova plot seems mechanical, while the fighting plot, for all of its own weaknesses, is a useful counterpoint to it. On the surface, the two of them are a meditation on the value of ritual; on a deeper level, they’re a compare-and-contrast study on friendship and influence.

It’s still not the intense story I remember from before, but there’s some food for thought here.

The episode opens with two men disembarking from the shuttle, talking to each other. One is a Classic Rabbi straight from Central Casting, a heavy, bearded man with a dark suit, a yarmulke, and an Eastern European accent. The other is broad-shouldered and muscular, even for the super-toned cast of this show.

Each of them has a friend on-station: Rabbi Koslov has known Ivanova since childhood, and Walker Smith is an old crony of Garibaldi’s. From this point on, the two stories run in parallel, with the usual layering of scenes to compare and contrast two subplots.

Rabbi Koslov has come to Babylon 5, ostensibly to give Ivanova her late father’s legacy. But what he really wants to do is help her to deal with her difficult relationship with him. Unfortunately, he goes about this in a deeply damaging way. Ivanova claims that one reason she did not go to the funeral or sit shiva for her father was lack of time off from work. Rabbi Koslov, showing less interpersonal perception than I would expect of a man whose job is people, takes this excuse at face value and sets out to solve it.

One of Ivanova’s problems with her father centers on control: she feels that he tried to run her life, and that one of the reasons he showed her too little love was that he disapproved of the choices she’d made. So when Koslov goes to Sinclair and arranges time off for her, she is furious. She stalks away from dinner with him.

In the meantime, Smith has been discussing his reasons with visiting Babylon 5 with Garibaldi. He was a professional boxer, but when he wouldn’t throw a title fight, the organizers framed him for drug use. He hears that there is an alien fight on the station—the Mutai—which no human has ever participated in. He wants to be the first to do so, in the hopes that the publicity will relaunch his career.

Smith goes to the dojo where participants in the Mutai practice, and makes an ass of himself, insulting the aliens and disrespecting what is for them an important ritual. The Muta-do, who runs whole thing, bans him from participating. Garibaldi is fine with this; he’s worried that Smith could be injured or killed in a fight with “no rounds, no rules, no gloves.”

Now both problems are set up; each character has a choice to make about a ritual. Neither is in the right state of mind to go through with it. Each gets a helpful intervention.

Caliban, one of the aliens from the dojo, takes Smith aside and offers to show him how to get into the Mutai, “but with respect. And it will require great courage.” Smith is keen, and goes off with Caliban.

Meanwhile, Sinclair summons Ivanova to his office. He offers condolences on her father’s death, and grants her indefinite leave to sit shiva. She refuses the leave. Sinclair emphasizes his professional and personal respect for her before trying to advise—but not compel—her:

Sinclair: You’re the best officer I’ve ever served with, Ivanova. I couldn’t run this station without you. But I also consider you a friend. And as your friend, I’m telling you, it does no good to bottle up your feelings. Your father’s dead. You need to express your grief or it’ll eat you up.
Ivanova: I appreciate your concern, Commander. And your friendship. But my feelings are my own, and how I display them, or not, is my choice. Now, if I may return to my duty?
Sinclair: Susan…before you make that choice, be sure you know what it is you’re really feeling.

Then focus shifts back to Smith. He’s got tickets for a Mutai fight that night, and wants Garibaldi to come with him. They go to the bout, which is as brutal as broadcast TV would let it be, I guess (which is to say, not very). There’s a phase in the ritual when the Muta-do throws open a challenge, and Smith takes it up. The fight is scheduled for three days hence. Both Garibaldi and the aliens watching the fight are angry at Smith: Garibaldi because he wants to protect his friend from injury, and the audience because they think this human is a disrespectful meddler.

Rabbi Koslov comes by Ivanova’s quarters to say goodbye and give her her father’s samovar, which is an heirloom from the days of the tsars. He asks again about sitting shiva, and Ivanova refuses. She explains the ways she felt that her father left her unloved, then blamed her for leaving him when she joined EarthForce. She is deeply upset, and unable to forgive. But then, when the rabbi is leaving the station, Ivanova remembers her father’s apology to her as he died. She decides to sit shiva after all.

Meanwhile, Smith is practicing for the fight under Caliban’s tutelage. Garibaldi and Caliban agree to stand as his seconds. Smith seems to have grasped a deeper meaning to the fight, and tries to explain it to his friend:

To be the best, you have to face the best. I could take Vesaro on crutches. But Gyor? He’s going to show me where my heart is. And maybe I’ll show him a little something, too.”

Ivanova goes to Sinclair and requests leave to sit shiva. Sinclair invites himself to it as a friend of the family, for which Ivanova is grateful.

The shiva scene is intercut with the fight; together they’re the climax of the episode. Ivanova tells a story from her adolescence, of a moment when she and her father were close. Meanwhile, Smith faces Gyor, the champion of the Mutai. The fight is closely balanced, and ends in a draw when neither participant can stand any more. Meanwhile Ivanova breaks into uncontrolled weeping after the mourning prayer.

The episode closes with both Rabbi Koslov and Walker Smith leaving the station, each with their own farewells from the people they leave behind.

On one level, this is an episode about rituals, about when they do and do not have value to us. Both Ivanova and Smith have to arrive at the right state of mind before they can participate in their very different rites. Smith is the less-prepared at the start of the episode, seeing the Mutai as less than a prize fight (because he cares what happens in a prize fight). Ivanova, at least, knows the value of sitting shiva—she simply does not want to go into that emotional territory.

There are other similarities as well: both Smith and Ivanova do these things in the presence of strangers, detached from all but one or two people whom they know and trust. (I get the feeling that Rabbi Koslov scraped together the other participants from the station’s Jewish community; none of them seemed at all close to Ivanova.) But most importantly in each case, when the participants are ready, the ritual is a profoundly transformative experience. Neither Ivanova nor Smith will be the same after that day. Old damage has been healed, and new possibilities opened up.

But there’s another facet to the episode that interests me. I don’t know that it’s intentional, but the episode is a philosophical statement about friendships, one we should think about as the series unfolds. What do the writers value in friendship?

If I may be permitted a brief digression: during my year abroad in Scotland, there was a time when I was dating N, a lovely fellow, while in love with someone else. (I am not proud of this.) The someone else, J, was gay. But he loved me back, and we wrestled for months with these complex and agonizing emotions, as only twenty year olds can.

Though N was a good guy, I did myself profound and unhelpful damage with him. Meanwhile, the product of all of the to-ing and fro-ing with J was the emotional readiness to form a lifelong bond, which I did shortly afterward. As J said once, “N is good to you, but he is not good for you. I, meanwhile, am not good to you, not at all. But I am clearly good for you. I only wish you could find someone who was both good to you and good for you.”*

Garibaldi tries to dissuade Smith from participating in the Mutai, because he’s concerned that his friend will get hurt. But the bout is a way out of a trap for Smith, not just professionally but personally. Garibaldi’s concern for his physical wellbeing isn’t, in the end, helpful. Garibaldi is good to Smith, but he is not good for him.

Rabbi Koslov, meanwhile, is so keen to get Ivanova to sit shiva for her father that he overrides the two things she values most: her privacy and her independence. Had she wanted Sinclair to know of her father’s death, she would have told him. And arranging time off for her behind her back is deeply creepy. But his intervention helps her in the end, opening up her friendship with Sinclair and forcing her to confront how much pain she’s in. Koslov is not good to Ivanova, but he is good for her.

And Sinclair? Although he’s cursed with a paternalistic voice, his intervention in Ivanova’s emotional life is explicitly based on his esteem for her. He advises her, but respects her agency and her emotional barriers. And when she needs him at the end of the shiva, he’s there. He’s both good to her and good for her.

(The other thing I noticed in this episode was Ivanova’s unfailing good manners. Even when she’s running away from the restaurant table in tears, she asks Rabbi Koslov to “please excuse” her. When she’s almost incoherently upset, she still thanks him for bringing the samovar. It’s a nice and telling piece of characterization; she’s clearly used formal manners as a shield until they have become second nature.)

* I did. And, Reader, I married him.

The next entry will look at Grail.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
—The Hollow Men, TS Eliot

I’m a huge fan of roller coasters. And one of the best parts of every ride, for me, is when the cars have been cranked all the way up the long slope and sit poised at the top, with the entire track laid out beneath them. There’s just time for comprehension to sink in before the long, swift descent into what awaits.

This is that moment.

The episode has much the same rough shape as the earlier ones this season, albeit with a higher plot density. Instead of two or three parallel streams that may or may not intersect at the end, there are four: one with ships and shooting, one digging into Sinclair’s past, one about Centauri politics, and one that looks like yet more character exposition.

The first major narrative stream concerns yet more attacks by the ubiquitous raiders. There’s a new pattern to their activities: they’re striking and escaping faster than should be possible. Raider vessels are generally too small to generate their own jump gates, but these ships aren’t matching expected travel times to known ones. After yet another freighter is hit, Sinclair, Garibaldi and Ivanova are at a loss to understand how they do it. The meet to discuss strategies for figuring the matter out.

After Ivanova leaves, Sinclair tells Garibaldi what he recalls of the missing time after the Battle of the Line and asks him to dig into things. It’s a strikingly-filmed conversation, with the camera following Sinclair tightly as he walks in circles, explaining the situation.

Meanwhile, in the political thread, Londo has arranged purchase of something called The Eye. It’s “the oldest symbol of Centauri nobility, property of the very first emperor.” It cost his government the price of a small planet, and they are keen to get it back to Centauri Prime discreetly. That way its “rediscovery” can help consolidate the Emperor’s position.

The man chosen to transport it, Lord Kiro, arrives on Babylon 5 with his aunt. The Lady Ladira is a seer, and starts having visions of “death, pain, and fire” as soon as she arrives on-station. But Kiro doubts her prophetic abilities. “On my first birthday, she said someday I would be killed by a shadow,” he chuckles at Londo*.

Lord Kiro has his own agenda. He doesn’t want to be messenger boy for the current emperor; he wants to use the Eye to catapult himself onto the throne. He tries to enlist Londo’s help, but Mollari isn’t sanguine about his chances and declines to get involved.

We see that the two dramatic subplots, the raiders and the Eye, are related when an attack on the Achilles lures the Delta Wing away from the station. A shady character on Babylon 5, who has also been following Kiro, reports that “they’ve taken the bait”.

Sinclair, without this insight, has to piece the next part of the plot together himself. The cargo manifest of the Achilles shows nothing of real value. He realizes that the attack is a diversion, and that the real target is probably Kiro’s ship. By the time he goes to warn Kiro, the man who’s been sneaking around the station has shot two guards and taken the three Centauri nobles hostage. When Sinclair interrupts them, he lets Londo and Ladira go and escapes with Kiro and the Eye.

Sinclair blocks the jump gate from accepting the Centauri liner’s codes, which should trap it at Babylon 5. Then we find out how the raiders have been moving their small fighters around: they have a ship large enough to generate its own jump gate. It appears (in the midst of a really well-filmed space battle) and spirits Kiro’s liner away.

And it turns out that the kidnapping was a ruse. Kiro funded the ship for the raiders so that they could disrupt his trip back to the homeworld with the Eye and give him his chance at the throne. But those who are bought don’t stay bought; the raiders aren’t interested in furthering his Imperial ambitions. They’re in the midst of ransoming both him and the Eye back to Centauri Prime when a mysterious ship appears and destroys them all. Ladira, back on Babylon 5, has a vision of his death.

Now, all of that would be enough plot for an episode. But there’s been one more thread running as well: the last subplot, the character-revelation one. If anything, it seems a little weak in contrast to all these Centauri politics and raider machinations. It’s just a guy, Mr. Morden, asking ambassadors the same question over and over: what do you want?

He gets an answer from G’Kar:

G’Kar: What do I want? The Centauri stripped my world. I want justice.
Morden: But what do you want?
G’Kar: To suck the marrow from their bones, and grind their skulls to powder.
Morden: What do you want?
G’Kar: To tear down their cities, blacken their sky, sow their ground with salt. To completely, utterly erase them.
Morden: And then what?
G’Kar: I don’t know. As long as my homeworld’s safety is guaranteed, I don’t know that it matters.

Delenn doesn’t answer. A triangle appears on her forehead, which she covers up, and she sends Morden away unsatisfied. “They’re here,” she says, with rather more dread than communicativeness, when the door closes behind him.

He’s more successful with Londo:

I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars. I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to be. I want…I want it all back, the way that it was.

Morden seems to be hiding from Kosh, but the two of them meet during the space battle. Things are not the same as with the other ambassadors. Morden doesn’t ask his question. And Kosh seems to know him already, and tells him to “leave this place. They are not for you. Go. Leave. Now.” Morden smiles, but doesn’t look minded to depart. We don’t see what happens next, but Kosh’s encounter suit is listed as damaged at the end of the battle.

If you’ve seen more of Babylon 5, you know who Morden is and how significant this episode is. But remember that by this point in the series, the characters have been overtly explaining themselves so much that this dialog is unremarkable. The audience is used to this level of exposition, and used to discounting it. What with all the more dramatic action, this subplot can almost slip by the first-time viewer.

But there are signs that Morden is not merely a Bob for expository dialog. The way Delenn and Kosh react is a warning. While G’Kar’s and Londo’s answers are not firearms laid openly on the mantlepiece, not Chekhov’s guns, it’s possible to figure out that they’re Chow’s (warning: graphic violence†).

Londo, despairing of his career at the end of the episode, gets a taste of this when Morden gives him a gift from “friends you didn’t know you have”. In a case rather the worse for wear, Londo finds the Eye. And there’s a strong hint of a price to come, when he’s told that the givers “will find” him.

By this point we’re almost out of time, so the last couple of threads to get wrapped up feel rather rushed. First, Garibaldi tells Sinclair§ that the Minbari government had veto power over who was chosen to run Babylon 5. Apparently, they declined every nominee before him.

Then Sinclair rushes to the departure lounge to see Lady Ladira off, and she does the Centauri equivalent of a mind-meld with him in order to share her vision of the destruction of Babylon 5. She assures him that it is “a possible future” rather than a guaranteed one. “We create the future with our words, our deeds, and with our beliefs.”

The episode has an excellent Ivanova quote early on, before the plot gets going:

Sinclair: Sleep well?
Ivanova: Sleeping is not the problem. Waking up, that is the problem. I’ve always had a hard time getting up when it’s dark outside.
Sinclair: But in space it’s always dark outside.
Ivanova: I know. I know.

* Kiro needs to read more TV Tropes.
† If you don’t want to watch the video: it’s a scene from A Better Tomorrow where Chow Yun-Fat is going into a restaurant to kill someone. As he walks down the hall to the dining room, canoodling with a woman, he places guns in the flowerpots that line the walls. Then, when he’s retreating under fire, they’re readily to hand.
§ In the men’s room. A toilet on a space station. Win.

The next entry will look at TKO.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

…can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
—Henry V, Act I, Prologue

You know, the problem Shakespeare’s referring to doesn’t go away when you move onto multiple sets and break out the CGI. At a certain point, you still end up with a bunch of actors hanging around on a sound-stage, twiddling the scenery and trying to sell the idea they’re standing inside two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. There is no magic by Shakespeare or Straczynski that can turn the map into the territory.

But the problem of setting is deeper than mere staging. Even if you could film the show on a real, life-sized Babylon 5, the way Firefly did with the Serenity set, you still have to show your audience that you’re on a space station. It’s not merely some weirdly-shaped office building with insufficient windows and a bunch of very funny-looking tenants. Setting has to influence plot, affect characters, and create tension and interest, or it’s just backdrop.

Babylon 5 does pretty well at creating and using realistic setting. There are certainly areas that feel like office space, or a rather bland convention center: Blue and Green sectors, which are where the nice quarters are; Medlab; the Zocalo. But the station also has a darker side, which tugs at the plot from very early on. Soul Hunter includes two sequences in Brown sector, where the dregs and hull rats hang out. It’s clearly underheated; most of the people down there are shown wearing hats and gloves. It’s also underlit, complicated, and full of niches where murder can be done before help will arrive.

There’s an entire criminal underworld on the station, too, controlled by what appears to be a large preying mantis in the non-oxygen breathers’ area. Shady characters run strip clubs (Born to the Purple), own slaves (ibid), sell access to better areas (Soul Hunter), and hire out toughs (The Parliament of Dreams). Sinclair is aware of this underworld, and knows the names of some of the principal players (Born to the Purple), but he doesn’t have any illusions that he controls it, or could put an end to it. That tells us a lot about the size and complexity of the station population. (Can you picture Kirk allowing an underworld among the 400-odd people on the Enterprise?*)

I note in passing that this knowledge is the product of good exposition and incluing. No one asyouknowbobbed it into us. When characters buy access to the better levels from the underworld, we learn that levels are access-controlled as well as that the underworld exists. We see the vast green of the hydroponics section when Sinclair and Talia trade unrealistic dialog as they go through it in Mind War, but neither of them feels compelled to say, “Look! Hydroponics! Those plants give us food and oxygen.”

All of this musing is brought on by the next two episodes, whose plots are both shaped by various aspects of the setting of the show.

Survivors

The episode starts with an interesting slice of setting and a wry piece of exposition. Garibaldi and Ivanova, along with a mixed crowd of civilians, file through a low-gravity area (a voice in the background reminds them to grab the handholds at all times) and discuss the upcoming visit of the newly-elected President Santiago. It’s classic As You Know, Bob plot setup, all about how the President is giving the space station a new fighter wing, which should have been theirs some time before; how the fighter bay was mothballed and now needs urgent refurbishment; and how the people doing it are inexperienced and overworked. Then we get a good Ivanova quote, which at least waves in the direction of explaining why they’re talking:

Ivanova: What, does something about this surprise you, Mr Garibaldi?
Garibaldi: Nothing the government does surprises me.
Ivanova: That’s a very Russian attitude. I commend you.

Then there’s an explosion in the new fighter bay, and the plot starts rolling.

Only one person survives the explosion, a tech named Nolan. He’s unconscious in Medlab as the investigation gets underway, starting with the umpteenth turf battle of the season so far. Major Liana Kemmer, of the President’s security staff, wants to be in charge. She clearly doesn’t trust Garibaldi, and he is clearly hurt and angry. It turns out that they knew each other 17 years ago, when he worked security in an ice mining installation on Europa. She was a child at the time, and he was a friend of the family. When her father died after sabotage intended to take him out, she blamed him. He blamed himself as well, and turned to drink, which (as it so often does) made everything much worse.

While Garibaldi has been explaining this to Sinclair, Major Kemmer has been interrogating the dying Nolan. He says the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by Garibaldi. Kemmer insists that Garibaldi be suspended. Then a search of his quarters yields a plan of the bay and a large quantity of Centauri ducats, and Garibaldi flees to avoid arrest.

So now we’re into a classic “the Fugitive” plot; Garibaldi has to investigate while on the lam. He goes to Londo, who denies any involvement, accuses G’Kar, and lends him some money. G’Kar also protests his innocence, but offers Garibaldi the chance to defect to the Narn regime. The underworld is equally unhelpful; even with Londo’s funds he can’t buy the access he needs to check things out further. Then he’s cornered and beaten up by some of the station’s less reputable inhabitants, who have a grudge against him. Only Sinclair’s timely arrival prevents real injury. But Sinclair wants him to hand himself in, and he flees again rather than do so. He ends up hiding in a truly regrettable dive, the Happy Daze Bar, and starts drinking. He gets into the “happy fun drunk” phase of falling off the wagon, then falls over at Major Kemmer’s feet when he leaves.

During the subsequent interrogation, Garibaldi manages to extract enough information from Kemmer to piece together the plot against him: Nolan was a member of the Homeguard, and set the bomb himself. He died because it went off early. Kemmer’s first officer, Cutter, was one of the few who knows Nolan had named Garibaldi, and is the person who “found” the evidence in his quarters. When it turns out that Cutter is also the one inspecting the hangar before wing leaves for its ceremonial fly-by, Garibaldi persuades Kemmer to take him along on a final personal check.

Cutter is, of course, the bad guy. He disables Kemmer, then has a nicely dramatic fight with Garibaldi during the countdown for launch. At the very last second, Garibaldi manages to get Ivanova to call off the flyby. It then turns out that all the bay doors were rigged to explode, and everyone is quite pleased with this outcome. There is subsequent unravelling and reconciling. One can tell that Major Kemmer is more comfortable with her emotions at the end because she’s got her hair loose, but no one staying on the station is shown to have changed much.

So why do I call this a setting-intensive episode? Well, first off, it has a lot of interesting places in it. I particularly like that it shows more than one kind of faintly disreputable dive. Garibaldi finds Londo in a tacky nightclub, complete with holographic tabletop dueling knights. He then ends up in a thoroughly unpleasant place while on the run. It’s one of those realistic touches that there are gradations of grubby drinking establishment on-station, rather than Ye Solitarye Dysreputable Cantina (with band).

But more importantly, it’s an episode that could not have happened just anywhere. Both Santiago’s visit and the Homeguard sabotage are the product of Babylon 5’s unique position in the show’s universe. Just as we see Garibaldi’s character in many aspects, from his poor temper control, impulsiveness and tendency to alcoholism to his determination, passion for justice, and fierce loyalty to his friends, so we see multiple facets of the station. The action ranges from the most to the least official spaces, from the controlled to the uncontrolled, and all of them, among them, create an understanding of the essential whole of the place. It’s nuanced characterization of a location.

Mind you, all this fun with the setting still leaves time for some good quotes:

Londo: You’re a very suspicious man, Garibaldi. But yes, there is a reason. We are alike, you and I. We’re both—as you say—the odd man out. I have been in your place. I can feel how you are pinned. And it would give me some small pleasure to know that things can work out, even for us.

G’Kar: The universe is governed by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

Kemmer: I demand you open a channel to Earth at once.
Ivanova: I am a lieutenant commander in Earthforce, Major. I do not take demands. If you have a request, I’ll consider it.
Kemmer: Very well then, I request that you open a channel to EarthDome.
Ivanova: Request denied. Have a nice day.

By Any Means Necessary

This episode centers around another aspect of Babylon 5 as a physical place: its function as a freight port. It’s logical that if the station is both a trade destination and home to many people, it’s going to need a lot of material shipped to it. And all of that material needs loading, unloading, and managing.

Unfortunately, the (space) dockworkers have been the victims of tightening budgets. They’re working long shifts with substandard, badly-maintained equipment. The episode opens with one consequence of that: a Narn freighter crashes and its cargo is destroyed. One of the dockworkers is killed in the explosion. This is the last straw for the rest of the crew. Contractually barred from going on strike, they start calling in sick, and pretty much all freight shipment to the station stops. Earth sends a negotiator, Orin Zento, with authority to invoke the “Rush Act”† if the dockworkers cannot be persuaded to back down. This would grant Sinclair all but unlimited powers to break the union; the workers themselves expect to go to jail if it’s invoked.

The crash of the Narn freighter has another effect as well. Among its cargo was a G’Quan Eth plant, whose seeds G’Kar needs for a particular ritual on a particular day. It turns out that the only replacement obtainable before the ceremony is in Londo’s possession. He vacillates between offering to sell it at an obscene price and simply using it to infuriate G’Kar. Despite its deeply-felt undercurrents, this squabbling of the two ambassadors is the lightweight foil to the more serious antagonism between labor and management.

The labor negotiations fail, of course. Zento is not portrayed as an honest broker, and there is no serious attempt to address the strikers’ grievances. Nor is the union disposed to trust him; the previous year’s contract negotiations had been concluded with a verbal promise of a pay increase, which was never written down or enforced. Inevitably, a riot breaks out, the Rush Act is invoked, and Sinclair is ordered to end the strike “by any means necessary”. The means he chooses are unexpected: he reallocates funds from the military budget to meet the strikers’ pay and equipment demands and declares an amnesty for participants in the illegal strike.

In the meantime, the escalating quarrel between Londo and G’Kar has taken a comical turn: G’Kar has caused the statue of one of the Centauri gods to be stolen. Sinclair sits the two ambassadors down like minor characters from The Breakfast Club and forces a compromise: G’Kar will return the statue, and Londo will sell the plant to him. Londo agrees, partly because it’s now too late for G’Kar to do his ritual. It’s supposed to be performed in the light of the sunrise of a particular day on Narn, and Londo has managed to delay the matter beyond the appointed hour.

Sinclair, clearly infected with a case of intellectual over-cuteness, points out that the light of the correct sunrise ten years ago will shortly be reaching Babylon 5, and that G’Kar can do the ritual when it hits the station. (Again, Babylon 5’s physical location is relevant to the plot.)

I found this episode really interesting in the ways that it illustrates a particular point in G’Kar’s growing faith. Londo accuses him of caring about the ritual less for religious reasons than out of a desire to maintain his status in the Narn community, and I suspect that that’s a reasonable reading of G’Kar at the start of the series. But I also think we can already see a change in his relationship with his religion. There’s a point in the episode where he is throwing his possessions around the room in frustration at being unable to get a G’Quan Eth plant. He is about to hurl his Book of G’Quan, but then chooses not to. That’s the act of someone in transition: an unbeliever would have thrown it; a faithful follower of G’Quan would never have considered doing so.

I’ve been in that place myself, when the tentative desire for deepening has not yet become channelled into the rules of the faith one is headed into. People do strange things in that time: they’ll take the advice of the most astonishingly inexpert people, reinterpret the rules in the oddest ways, and (if they’re lucky) reach through the thicket of regulations to the heart of the matter. Watching the ritual that closes the episode, as G’Kar recites a litany of the gifts of his life, I tend to think he was that kind of lucky.

(While we’re on the subject of religion—this episode contains evidence that the Narn have more than one:

G’Kar: You’re not a follower of G’Quan, are you, Na’Toth?
Na’Toth: My father was a disciple of G’Lan. My mother didn’t believe in much of anything.
G’Kar: What do you believe in?
Na’Toth: Myself, Ambassador.
G’Kar: Too easy an answer. We all believe in something greater than ourselves. Even if it’s just the blind forces of chance.
Na’Toth: Chance favors the warrior.

So there are at least two religious traditions, plus a strain of atheism in Narn society, and the aide of its ambassador to Babylon 5 is not at threat for not being religious.)

Of all the episodes in the series, this is the one I’d least expect to be made in the present day. It’s a sympathetic portrait of a striking union, which I gather is Axiomatically Bad in current American discourse. Not only that, but many of the characters in it, from Garibaldi to Sinclair to Senator Hidoshi, take pride in being descendants of union members. But though I think it’s currently impolitic, I don’t think it’s unrealistic. These things ebb and flow; unions will be back in the future.

I do wish I could reproduce the best Ivanova quote of the show, but it’s simply her counting down from ten in an extremely firm voice.

* Another way that Babylon 5 is not like Star Trek: In the next episode, Signs and Portents, Sinclair and Garibaldi will have a conversation in the men’s room.
† Named, apparently, after one R Limbaugh.

The next entry will look at Signs and Portents.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?
—James T. Kirk

One of Babylon 5’s great strengths as a series was its ability to tackle difficult ethical questions without lapsing into Wheel of Morality style resolutions. Sometimes there’s a right answer, but you know that no one will choose it. And sometimes there’s just no good outcome possible, and all that the characters can do is hang on to their honor as the disaster unfolds around them.

The next two episodes are a salt and pepper set, one of each of the above types, on the same theme: what, if anything, is more important than life itself? And who gets to choose, who gets to judge, when our answers vary?

Both of them suffer from a surfeit of palmed cards in the setup. The questions themselves may be subtle, but the way they’re presented to the audience is not. I think this is yet another weakness in early Bab 5: it’s hard to set out a nuanced problem from a standing start each time.

Deathwalker

Na’Toth, just arrived at spacedock to meet a Narn official, attacks a newly-arrived passenger without warning or mercy. Security staff pull her off of the victim, who is taken unconscious to Medlab.

Na’Toth accuses the woman of being Jha’dur, also known as Deathwalker, one of the worst war criminals in the history of the galaxy. Jha’dur killed off entire planetary populations on the non-aligned worlds, and also performed experiments on Na’Toth’s grandfather. The entire family has sworn a blood oath for revenge.

The problem is that although the passenger is a Dilgar, which is the correct (extinct) species, she’s too young to be Jha’dur. But when she regains consciousness, she confirms Na’Toth’s identification. Her youthful appearance is the product of an “anti-agathic”, a substance which she has invented that protects against both aging and disease.

The Narn regime want to buy the anti-agathic, so G’Kar demands that Na’Toth delay her revenge until the Narn have the substance.

And so begins the slow betrayal of values. Earth, which formerly helped the non-aligned worlds throw off the Dilgar regime, orders Sinclair to sneak Jha’dur off of the station before they can demand that she stand trial. The Minbari vote against prosecuting Jha’dur because they’re ashamed that their warrior castes sheltered her. Even the non-aligned species postpone their demand for justice in exchange for a share in immortality. (As Jha’dur herself points out, political reality is that she will never be tried under the deal.)

And then the Deathwalker, who has taken great delight in watching all of the compromises and sellouts, reveals the secret of her discovery: the ultimate moral compromise, baked in.

The key ingredient of the anti-agathic cannot be synthesized. It must be taken from living beings. For one to live forever, another one must die. You will fall on one another like wolves. It will make what we did pale by comparison. The billions who want to live forever will be a testimony to my work, and the billions who are murdered to buy that immortality will be a continuance of my work. Not like us? You will become us. That’s my monument, Commander.

In the end, the Vorlon throw the ring into the Crack of Doom blow up Jha’dur’s ship as she is escorted to Earth. “You are not ready for immortality,” explains Kosh. One cannot disagree, however annoying the Vorlon intervention is.

(There is also a subplot about Kosh using a “vicar”—a VCR, an entity that records thoughts and experiences—to obtain the experiences of reflection, surprise and terror from Talia Winters’ mind.)

The episode also has a really good Ivanova quote:

Makar Ashai, our gun arrays are now fixed on your ship. They’ll fire the instant you come into range. You’ll find their power quite impressive…for a few seconds.

Believers

From the very large-scale, with billions of deaths and multiple flavors of moral compromise, we move to the intimate agony of a single family and a single choice.

M’Ola and Thara are from a deeply religious culture. Their only son, Shon, has a blockage of his internal air bladders, which is growing and slowly smothering him. It can be easily cured, and his life saved, with surgery. But their religion bans any sort of cutting, piercing or puncturing. His parents believe that his spirit will escape if he goes under the knife.

Dr. Franklin and Dr. Sanchez want to perform the surgery. Sanchez argues with the family, while Franklin invents an alternative solution that he says might work, though he knows it won’t. Basically, he wants buy time with a ruse, in the belief that he can persuade them to let him operate.

(There’s a neat parallel here: he also gives Shon a piece of glowing industrial goo, which he claims is a “gloppit egg” that the boy can care for. It’s both a good distraction from his growing respiratory distress and another lie.)

Shon’s parents remain firm in their opposition to the surgery. They believe Franklin when he says that their son will die without it. But they also believe that the surgery will let his spirit out of his body. They value his spiritual integrity more than they do his life, as is the custom of their species.

Like anyone at an impasse, both parties then go looking for allies. Franklin asks Sinclair to step in and order treatment. And M’Ola and Thara go to the different ambassadors, looking for support if Sinclair does so. (Each of them answers in their own unhelpful way: G’Kar will only aid a useful ally, Londo wants a bribe, Delenn explains that the Minbari have a policy of non-intervention in religious matters, and Kosh is simply gnomic.)

Sinclair asks Shon what he wants, and spends some time learning about the religious beliefs involved. After that conversation, he refuses to overrule the parents. They prepare to watch their son die, surrounding him with love and reassurance of a peaceful journey to “the other side”, where they believe that one day they will rejoin him.

Franklin tells them that Shon needs to rest and sends them away. Then he performs the surgery. Shon wakes up breathing normally, but his parents reject him as a demon. Then they come back and collect him, dress him for a “great journey”, and take him back to their quarters. Franklin figures out that the journey is not the one to his homeworld, and rushes to their quarters to find them sitting with his dead body.

This is not a simple episode. M’Ola, Thara, Franklin, Sanchez and Sinclair are all passionately, desperately trying to save Shon from a terrible fate. Either he will die, or he will lose his spirit and be rejected by all of his people as a demon.

It’s easy from our perspective to say that the parents were wrong to oppose the surgery and to kill Shon afterwards; that Sinclair was wrong to prevent the surgery; that Franklin was right to overrule them all and do it anyway, as though they would abandon their entire culture at his behest. (Mind you, even from our perspective, treating a patient when he, his guardians, and the local equivalent of an ethics committee have refused consent is still wrong. Our community, too, has things it values more than life.)

But from M’Ola and Thara’s point of view, Franklin released their child’s spirit before the natural time of its departure, disrupted its journey to the other side, and prevented them from singing it safely on its way. Because they are good people who understand that those not born of the Egg do not know the truth of the Chosen, and because they know he acted out of the best intentions, they come as close as they can to forgiving the butcher who did them such profound damage. They have disposed of the demonic shell he left behind like some kind of toxic waste, and they will return to their own community, deeply damaged by the humans’ high-handed intervention.

In short, aliens are aliens, with different priorities and values. Choosing courses of action that depend on them reacting like humans, or expecting them to see the primacy of human values, will lead to failure.

(The secondary plot of the story, about how Ivanova gets to be the one to take a fighter wing out to defend an incoming ship, is much more sketchily told. It does, however, contain an excellent Ivanova quote:

Ivanova: I certainly have plenty of things to occupy myself here. Yes, sir, I think I’ll just walk to and fro for a while. Maybe over to my console. After that maybe I’ll try pacing fro and to, then just for the kick of it. Oh, and there’s the view of course. Granted, it’s not quite the same as if you were outside. As someone who’s got over 100 hours of combat flying experience…
Sinclair: Well, if you’d rather…
Ivanova: No, that’s fine, don’t worry about me. I’m just gonna sit here and…knit something. Maybe a nice sweater. Some socks. Does the term stir-crazy mean something to you, commander?

I wish Uhura had been able to say that to Kirk.)

The next entry will look at Survivors and By Any Means Necessary.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

Ambassador, I have traveled far and seen much. And what I have seen is that all sentient beings are best defined by their capacity and their need for love.
—Shaal Mayan

The next two episodes make a logical pair, in that the events in them spring from the same underlying problem: a growing fear and hatred of aliens in the human community. The roots of the movement are on Earth, but there are branches and fruit on Babylon 5 as well.

It’s interesting, in kind of a painful way, to watch these in the present American political context. The Homeguard and its ilk feed on nativist feeling, playing on fears that alien influences are corrupting human society. It’s a multi-faceted movement, with places for the uneducated and the intellectual alike, rife with conspiracy theories, accusations of treason, and simplistic loyalty tests.

My impression of the mid-Nineties is that the anti-immigrant strain of American life was weaker than it is now. The movement was less evolved, and the ways that these dark sentiments work in polite society were less widely known. So one can almost read the portrayal of the Homeguard as a science fictional prediction, a casting-forward of then-present trends, and then evaluate it against our more recent understanding.

It helps, in doing this, that the episodes don’t suck. This is a relief.

The War Prayer

This starts out looking like another episode with multiple separate narrative strands, like Parliament of Dreams or Mind War. There’s the mystery of the stabbing and branding of the Minbari poet Shaal Mayan, the latest in a series of similar assaults. Meanwhile, Londo is saddled with two teenaged runaways trying to escape arranged marriages. And an old flame of Ivanova’s appears in what at first looks like a rerun of the Sinclair-Sakai reunion.

But then the thing I really love about Babylon 5 happens. Each of the strands, while retaining its own character and momentum, joins to create a greater whole. The young couple are assaulted by the same people who stabbed the poet. While Londo is visiting them in the hospital, it’s Mayan who helps him to change his mind about letting them marry each other. Meanwhile, Ivanova’s romance comes to an abrupt end when she finds out that her ex is an organizer for the anti-alien group.

(After that, plot happens. Maneuvering and gunfights ensue. Right triumphs, and the bad guys are led off of the station in restraints. Bitter words are spoken. There are summaries all over the internet, if you need details.)

It’s not a perfectly balanced episode. Although the two romance subplots run in parallel, so that the right scenes alternate (Mayan reminds Londo how painful it is to live without love; Ivanova discovers that her romance with Malcolm cannot continue; Londo regrets that his shoes are too tight, and that he has forgotten how to dance), they don’t ring off of each other. Ivanova could be a contrast to Aria, showing that choosing one’s own partner doesn’t always work out. Or she could see in herself the seeds of Londo’s profound loneliness, as her career leaves her increasingly unable to form close emotional bonds. A better resonance between the filming of the scenes, or a few lines of dialog, could have strengthened that link in interesting ways.

And I do have some reservations about how the anti-alien faction is portrayed. Not Malcolm; he’s appropriately subtle, smooth and persuasive. It’s Roberts, an early suspect in the assault on the poet, that caught on me. There’s an interesting casting decision here: he’s played by an actor of Asian descent. Since the things he says come most often from white lips at present, it’s a neat and genuinely science fictional choice. But he’s still an unshaven, uneducated character with a marked rural (American) accent and the habit of leaving his mouth open between sentences. Just as Delenn’s particular ways of breaking in Soul Hunter bug me because they play on sexist tropes, so the portrayal of Roberts gets on my nerves for its present-day class markers. It’s unsubtle, and allows Bab 5’s target audience to dismiss him too easily.

Also, when Sinclair is trying to establish his anti-alien credentials for Malcolm at the reception, he says speciesist things in the clear:

I served on the Line, and we had a motto there: the only good alien is a dead alien. It was true then, and it’s true now. The job description says I have to play diplomat. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I found this jarring; I would not expect such an overt statement in that context. As we know now, public appearances are the place for dog-whistles and nudges. That kind of speech would have been more plausibly saved for the private conversation in Ivanova’s quarters.

All in all, this is a decent episode. It’s another non-JMS script—by D.C. Fontana, as a matter of fact. But I think the increase in quality is as much because there’s something to talk about that stretches wider than Babylon 5’s hull, and will last longer than the credits.

And the Sky Full of Stars

This episode is another flavor of typical Babylon 5: a discovery of past events and a sowing of seeds for future ones.

Although it deals with the same forces as The War Prayer—anti-alien fanatics from Earth—it tackles the matter from an entirely different angle. Like so many xenophobic movements, the Homeguard has an inward-turning side, sniffing for traitors among “our own side”. In this case, they’re after Sinclair.

It’s not at all clear how they manage to spirit him out of his quarters, which should be secure. But they do, and then come the two hunts that course through the episode: where is Sinclair? and what happened to the lost 24 hours after he was captured by the Minbari? This kind of a quest storyline is much like a strip show: hard to summarize beyond telling the end, and heavily dependent for its interest on what is revealed and who is doing the reveal.

What’s revealed is that Sinclair was not, as the conspiracy theorists suspect, “fixed some milk and cookies and asked to work for” the Minbari during the lost time. He was interrogated and examined by a group of hooded figures. Somewhere in the process, he unveiled one of them and discovered it was Delenn. But he was never turned, or even solicited to turn.

While Sinclair is being examined, we also get a good insight into Knight One, his interrogator. He’s a third kind of xenophobe, neither Roberts’s uneducated bigot nor Malcolm’s businessman of unrest. This one is a conspiracy theorist and an authoritarian. He fancies himself a cerebral man who has come to his position through intellectual analysis. But there’s a nicely played smirk of pride when he describes how the Minbari “took one look at our defense and realized what it would cost them to invade Earth.” In the end, his position is much the same as the other two, albeit more elegantly phrased:

Look at Earth, Commander. Alien civilizations. Alien migration. Aliens buying up real estate by the square mile. Alien funding of Babylon 5. What they couldn’t take by force they’re corrupting, inch by inch.

In our present, he’d be one of the credentialed types who give the Birthers a respectable face, the kind who knows the Constitution well but only uses it to prove what he already believes. He’s a stranger to Ockham’s razor and the kind of intellectual humility that would allow him to grasp anything that contradicts his conspiracy. In short, he is all too believable.

As always, I wish that this episode had drawn more parallels between situations, in this case, between Sinclair’s treatment at the hands of the Minbari and what he gets from the Knights. But that’s just not Babylon 5 storytelling.

What is classic Babylon 5 storytelling is the swift dispersal of plot seeds at the end. Sinclair visits Delenn and lies to her: he says he doesn’t remember anything about the missing time. Another member of the Grey Council tells Delenn that if Sinclair does recover his memories, he has to die. And Sinclair records what he now remembers and his intention to investigate the matter further. All of these things will grow into longer plot points later on.

(Also, now that we’re watching for whether Delenn is portrayed as a strong character or a weak one in a crisis: note that in this episode she walks up to Sinclair while he’s hallucinating and talks him down. She stares down the business end of his PPG in the process, knowing he’s been firing at his friends, and does no more than flinch when he shoots a man behind her.)

The next entry will look at Deathwalker and Believers.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

[W]e are discussing a TV show on Making Light, a blog run by several close friends where we can talk about writing and politics.
— Steven Brust

There’s a subtle technique to bringing a reader into a story; Jo Walton dubbed it “incluing”. Because the rule show, don’t tell doesn’t always cover introductions. Sometimes you have to tactfully mention something the viewer needs to know but isn’t yet aware of. It’s a fine line: too much of it too obviously, and the characters jaw each other dead rehashing things they are already entirely aware of. Not only does it rob the story of momentum, but it’s also deeply annoying. You’re an idiot, says the author, and need a good firm whack with this here clue-stick to figure out what’s going on.

Babylon 5 has a terrible case of it in the first half of the first season, both in the micro and the macro. The series of Problem of the Week episodes that follow Midnight on the Firing Line are fractal patterns of patronizing exposition, from their existence in the first place through their carefully character-revealing plots, and right down to their excruciating dialog. A wiser writer would have dropped us into the big plot and trusted us to figure out the personalities on the fly.

This entry will use the first five PotW episodes to rant about the problems of excessive exposition; feel free to join in in the comments. There’s enough summary here that you can skip the episodes completely, or watch them as worked examples of incluing gone horribly wrong.

Soul Hunter

This is a Delenn episode, making up for the fact that her name is never even uttered in Midnight on the Firing Line. She deserves the attention; she’s important to both the culture of Babylon 5 and the plot to come.

Unfortunately, the episode reveals a completely different, and much less admirable, person than the one we see in the rest of the series. It’s the equivalent of the “Éowyn is a bad cook and prone to giggling” scene in the extended version of The Two Towers. Delenn starts off by waving a loaded weapon around Medlab, to the peril of everyone there, then excuses herself by explaining that Soul Hunters are bogeymen for Minbari children. Later, she allows herself to be captured and tied up, alternately shrieks and faints, and ends up being rescued by a guy with a gun. The episode closes with her petting soul-globes like little kittens.

This is a strange contrast to the stern Satai Delenn who helped shield the dying Dukhat from the Soul Hunter during their last encounter. Religious-caste Minbari don’t end up on the Grey Council by being the equivalent of Penelope Pittstop, but that’s what we see of her here. There’s also very little here on which to build a character who can tell an entire war fleet to “be somewhere else”, and see them fly off.

The one good piece of characterization in the whole thing isn’t about Delenn at all. It’s Ivanova’s funeral for the murdered grifter. Her simple recitation of the prayer for space burial is both businesslike and deeply felt. It even pulls Dr. Franklin into a reflective mood. (We’ll come back to Ivanova, and faith in general, in another entry.)

Born to the Purple

This episode, written by Larry DiTillio rather than JMS, is probably my favorite of the group. It’s Londo’s turn in the spotlight. We’re supposed to be fond of him at this point in the long plot, and episodes like this make that easy. He is a fool and a buffoon, but all the world loves a lover.

The plot is straight-up “hooker with a heart of gold”: Adira, a Centauri slave and dancing girl, is forced by her owner to obtain files of secret blackmail material from Londo. She and Londo are having an intense affair, so much so that he’s neglecting important negotiations with the Narn Regime. But it’s clear that Adira and Londo do care for each other: she’s deeply reluctant to betray him, and he, on finding himself betrayed, is still desperate to protect her.

In the meantime, Garibaldi is investigating a misuse of the station’s priority communications channels. He finally hacks into the signal in time to see Ivanova talking to her dying father back on Earth.

The expository dialog in the episode is spectacularly dreadful. Both Londo and Adira preface emotional statements with, “I am Centauri,” as though after the time they’ve spent in bed there could be any species-doubt left. And Garibaldi’s “As you know” explanation of the Gold Channels to Ivanova is a classic of the type. What of the following would she not already know?

Lieutenant Commander, Gold Channels are priority access, usable only by express permission of Commander Sinclair. No one outside of the ambassadors and the senior officers even knows they exist.

But what saves the episode for me is Londo’s final words to Adira:

I am an old man. I have been in love many times, and I have been hurt many times. I’ll survive.

Because sometimes people really do explain themselves to each other in the clear.

Infection

I actually have a theory that this is a long-lost Old Trek episode. JMS found it in a trunk somewhere and tweaked it to show us some more of Dr. Franklin. The setup has all the hallmarks: species-level conflict, imminent peril to the ship station, easy good guy/bad guy distinctions, and a swift solution with no longer-term repercussions. There’s a plot hole the size of a jump gate (they got the guy’s name from his alien-species RNA-equivalent in under half an hour? A day ago they were tentatively guessing that the artifacts might be biological.) And the climactic battle between the gung-ho commander and the monster finishes with a moralistic speech about tolerance and the value of science over religious orthodoxy.

Key takeaways, if you want to skip this episode:

1. There are big corporations in this universe. They use their money in unethical ways.
2. Dr. Franklin is a highly principled man. He can be tempted, briefly, by a lot of money, but will resist in the end. Particularly if there’s murder involved.
3. Sinclair is very clever, and can think and talk as well as fight.
4. Garibaldi thinks Sinclair is being too much of a daredevil.
5. The Babylon 5 Generic Reporter Character can be intimidated by Susan Ivanova. (“Don’t. You’re too young to experience that much pain.”)

Parliament of Dreams

In my opinion, this is the worst episode in all of Babylon 5. (At least we get it over with early.) The three subplots neither intersect nor mirror one another. And they are almost entirely dreadful.

The fierce-hearted representative of the Narn Regime, G’Kar, tempered by generations of genocide and war, hears that an old enemy has sent an assassin to Babylon 5 to kill him. He immediately panics, decides he mistrusts his new aide Na’Toth, hires a thuggish grunt from the underworld to protect himself, lets Garibaldi find lacy red human underwear in his quarters during the investigation of the grunt’s murder, and nearly loses track of the little crayfish he intends to have for dinner. He is, of course, captured, subjected to great pain, and rescued by Na’Toth. And their glee at framing the assassin with his own guild is as shallow and pointless as the rest of the subplot.

Meanwhile, Sinclair’s old flame, Catherine Sakai, has come to Babylon 5 to arrange some survey work. The subsequent romance is plagued by a chronic case of As You Know, Bob My Darling about their long and tangled past. Mind you, I don’t have a problem with that kind of behavior between consenting adults, but I wish they’d take it behind closed doors. It scares the horses and bores the audience. I’ll be nasty and ruin the surprise: they do in fact get back together, still protesting that this is a bad idea because it never works out. As they both know. Darling. Smooch.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of a celebration of the various religions on Babylon 5. For most of the episode, this is just a weird distraction. I suppose it’s informative to find out that Centauri celebrations involve cheering about genocide, getting drunk, and yodeling, and that the Minbari have a shared-meal ritual. I’m baffled why the deeply religious Narn don’t get a look-in till a later episode. But this is the thread that redeems the story for me, just a little, when Sinclair is supposed to show the ambassadors the “dominant belief system” of Earth. He simply arranges a long receiving line of members of different Terran religious traditions and introduces the aliens to everyone. The two touches I particularly appreciated were that he started with an atheist, and that there are multiple tribes of Native American represented.

Mind War

This is neither the worst nor the best of the episodes in this sequence. But it’s a good place to stop and show how all of this frightful exposition could have been done better. Also, it’s got my favorite casting decision in the whole series: Bester, the PsiCop, played with dead-eyed brilliance by Walter Koenig. If you’re only going to watch one of this set, watch this one.

Bester and a colleague (Kelsey) come onto Babylon 5 in pursuit of a rogue telepath, Jason Ironheart. Ironheart is rather like River Tam, a psionic driven mad by people trying to boost his power. He’s also an old friend and lover of Talia’s; the episode is partly to set her up as a “good” telepath, in opposition to the Psi-Corps.

This involves making sure that we know that the Psi-Corps is bad. Ironheart tells us all about it, first when talking to Talia:

We all thought Psi-Corps was controlled by the government, but that’s changing. They’re starting to pull the strings behind the scenes. They’re more powerful than you can begin to imagine. Telepaths make the ultimate blackmailers, Talia. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all.

(Note the repetition at the end of the speech. That’s a particular quirk of JMS’s scripting, intended to emphasize the last point. It can get tiresome. It can get tiresome.)

Ironheart also warns Sinclair about the Psi-Corps:

The Psi-Corps is dedicated to one thing, Commander: control. Control over telepaths, the economy, the courts, over matter, over thought itself.

Thing is, these warnings are entirely unnecessary. In simple pursuit of the plot, Bester and Kelsey ream Talia’s mind in distressing fashion, mislead Sinclair in order to constrain his choices and control his actions, reach into people’s minds without asking their permission, and out-menace Garibaldi. Bester, creepy to the last, leaves the station with the salute, “Be seeing you.” Since when do we need to be told they’re sinister and controlling?

Likewise, this kind of speech isn’t how to show that Talia and Ironheart were close:

We were lovers. He was everything to me, the perfect model of what it meant to be in the Corps. Do you know what it’s like when telepaths make love, Commander? You drop every defense, and it’s all mirrors reflecting each other’s feelings. Deeper and deeper, until, somewhere along the line, your souls mix, and it’s a feeling so profound it makes you hurt. It’s the only moment in a telepath’s life when you no longer hear the voices. He came to say goodbye, Commander. He came to say goodbye.

There’s too little spark between the characters in the episode, so this speech doesn’t work. But it would have taken very few touches or long looks to wordlessly establish everything that Talia says to Commander Sinclair. It would have been more tasteful as well, and reduced the amount of bad bluescreening in the episode by a marked degree.

By contrast, while Talia is engaged in frantic exposition with someone who will shortly resemble a character out of Reboot, Catherine Sakai is learning some genuinely interesting things about her fellow characters and the universe at large. There’s only minimal gratuitous speechifying involved. She’s been contracted to explore a world in Narn space, though G’Kar has warned her that it’s not safe. She insists on going anyway. Before she leaves, he carefully clears off a gun-sized area on the mantlepiece:

Let me pass on to you the one thing I’ve learned about this place. No one here is exactly what he appears.

Catherine’s subsequent encounter with a mysterious ship, and her rescue by the Narn vessels that G’Kar sent, are good exposition. From this we learn that there are bigger forces in the universe than the species who inhabit Babylon 5, and that G’Kar can be subtle and gracious in his own way.

And then, at the end of the episode, we see the newest gun on the mantlepiece: a brief glimpse of the G’Kar that is to come.

They are a mystery. And I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not yet explained everything.

In some ways, seeing that kind of good self-explanation just makes all the wrong attempts worse.

Next up will be The War Prayer and And the Sky Full of Stars, two early steps into the larger plot of the series.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

– o0o –

Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.

A person, a place, and a problem. Action and movement. Often a time of year or a time of day.
These are not bad things to get into the first chapter. If you can get ’em onto the first page, even better.
— Learn Writing with Uncle Jim

And so we begin. The show starts at shift change on an orbital defense station, with a surprise attack by unidentified ships. That very first scene is like a Tarot card of the series: succession of powers, war from peace, enemies recognized just too late, death.

JMS has a lot to do in this first episode. He’s got to establish as many of the major characters as he can, using as little cardboard as possible. He has to make us feel at home in the setting, both physical and cultural. At the same time, he must get the plot and conflict moving.

These goals sound more contradictory than they are. If he can prove that their conflicts have momentum and history, he’ll be a long way to creating realistic characters out of the funny-looking people in their weird clothes. Answering why? gives him who?, what? and where? if not for free, at least at a deep discount.

He also has to signal to us the audience that this is not episodic SF. We can’t forget what’s happening now, because it’s going to influence what happens next. Actions will have consequences. Promises will be made that must be kept. Remember Chekhov’s rule about plotting? One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. Chekhov’s guns are promises of plot to come, and Straczynski isn’t shy about strewing them around the characters’ mental spaces.

So here’s a gun of Londo’s:

In my dream, I am an old man—it’s twenty years from now—and I am dying, my hands wrapped around someone’s throat, and his around mine. We have squeezed the life out of each other. The first time I saw G’Kar, I recognized him as the one from the dream. It will happen. Twenty years from now, we will die with our hands around each other’s throats.

A second gun; G’Kar’s had it a while:

I will confess that I look forward to the day when we have cleansed the universe of the Centauri, and carved their bones into little flutes for Narn children. It is a dream I have.

Another in Londo’s arsenal. It’s new, but it fits right in:

On the issue of galactic peace, I am long past innocence and fast approaching apathy. It’s all a game, a paper fantasy of names and borders. Only one thing matters, Commander. Blood calls out for blood. If Carn is dead, there will be war. Today, tomorrow, the day after, it doesn’t matter. If it’s the last thing I do, if it’s the last breath I take, there will be war. This I swear to you, Commander. This I swear.

It’s not just the aliens. Watch Ivanova and Talia juggle this one back and forth:

Ivanova: What happened back then is not your fault. But it’s part of what you are. And yet, you’re as much of a victim as my mother.
Talia: I don’t feel like a victim.
Ivanova: No, and so far I cannot tell if that is good or bad.

And here’s a gun lying on the mantlepiece of the entire station:

[Santiago’s] agenda for the coming term includes creating a closer relationship with the Mars colony, and a greater emphasis on preserving Earth cultures in the face of growing non-Terran influences.

Of course, somewhere in the midst of all this exposition, the characters have a problem to solve. The Narn Regime has attacked a Centauri agricultural colony. They’re wrong in many ways, from the attack itself to the parading of Londo’s nephew as a hostage. But they’re not cartoon warmongers: they have some claim to the world in question, and grounds for their historic grudge against the Centauri. Does that justify interspecies war?

The characters in the thick of it want to use force to solve the problem: Londo because he blames himself for the fact that his nephew is in danger; Sinclair because he’s afraid that inaction will draw humans into another disastrous war. But both of them are working against orders from their homeworlds.

The solution is political, but with realistically messy and unbalanced politics rather than stage compromises. There is no easy middle for everyone to arrive at and be happy. Since this is storytelling rather than reality, all the threads do come together neatly: Talia’s telepathy averts Londo’s attempt at murder, and the subplot about the raiders gives Sinclair the leverage to force the Narn off of Raghesh 3.

The message is that politics and collaboration can save us from violence. We start the series as JMS means for it to go on, at least for a while.

I’d say that this particular outcome is very much a product of the time that the episode came out. It first aired on January 26, 1994, the day after Bill Clinton’s summed up his first year in office in his State of the Union address. The Northern Irish conflict was still active, but the Downing Street Declaration fostered hope of a negotiated settlement. The former Yugoslavia was at war—Srebenica was fresh in everyone’s mind—but there was also Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Divorce, a year old and working well. The Maastricht Treaty had just created the European Union, while North America was implementing NAFTA. South Africa had adopted an interim constitution in advance of the first election in which blacks could vote. And the US had recently signed treaties limiting nuclear and chemical weapons.

There were certainly troubles unsolved by diplomacy: the Tamil Tigers had assassinated the Sri Lankan president the previous year; the Zapatistas were just getting started in Mexico; and in the US, negotiation had failed disastrously in Waco. And politics wasn’t pretty: Vince Foster’s suicide the previous July was already fodder for partisan ugliness. Still, the faith was there: diplomacy works. Cooperation and collaboration work. Politics works.

I don’t know that one could express so much optimism now.

The episode closes with one of my favorite pieces of characterization: Delenn sitting with Garibaldi, trying to understand Duck Dodgers and eat popcorn. She manages neither.

Ivanova quotes:

• “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.”
• “I do not like Santiago. I’ve always thought that a leader should have a strong chin. He has no chin. And his vice-president has several. This to me is not a good combination.”
• “Mr Garibaldi. You’re sitting at my station, using my equipment. Is there a reason for this, or to save time should I just go ahead and snap your hands off at the wrist?”

The next post will deal with Soul Hunter, Born to the Purple, Infection, Parliament of Dreams, and Mind War.

Index of Babylon 5 posts

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Originally posted and discussed on Making Light.