Episode 1.12: By Any Means Necessary

I don't have much to say about this one, except that it's good. It's basically a big labor negotiation, with dockworkers and cops and senators and a smarmy government hatchet man who's so obviously villainous that I swear he was twirling a mustache he didn't even have.

Babylon 5's infrastucture is old and failing, and their hours are oppressive, and sooner or later something bad is going to happen; as a matter of fact, it happens in the cold open, where a docking system goes haywire and a ship panics and something explodes and a dockworker dies. Nobody specific is at fault--it was an equipment failure--but technically that means the budget is at fault, because they need to update their equipment, so it's time for a strike! But apparently striking is illegal, so the government gets involved and sends in the nearest 80's movie villain they can find, presumably fresh off of trying to close the community center to put up a bank. The only way he could look more like the prep school bad guy in a Goonies sequel is if he had a pastel sweater tied over his shoulders. His name is Orin Zento, and he advocates the immediate use of the Rush Act, giving Garibaldi and the local cops license to arrest these pesky dockworkers and end the strike that way. Zento's opponent is a woman named Neeoma Connally, who's so fiercely protective of dockworker rights that she probably inspired the entire second season of The Wire.

One of the best things about this very good episode is how real it feels: how dirty and greasy it is on the docks, and how the dialogue in the labor negotiation rings so true. It's rare on an SF show to see this kind of realism--there's no technobabble, there's no hydrospanners, there's just actual people doing actual work and arguing about long hours and crappy pay and obsolete equipment. Even in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which took great pains to show a wide cross-section of shipboard castes and classes, you never got anything as blue collar as Neeoma and her buddies, wearing overalls and do-rags and shouting through busy crowds of Regular Joes. It barely even feels like SF, in a way, which is part of what makes it such good SF: sure, it's the future, but there are still ships, which means there are still docks, which means there are still longshoremen, and not every problem can be solved by a guy in a clean uniform rerouting power through the main deflector. Sometimes you need an engineer, but most of the time you just need a mechanic, and he's going to get his hands dirty, and people will always just be people.

But governments will always just be governments, too, so inevitably Orin "Do You Know Who My Dad Is" Zento gets Senate approval and orders Sinclair to order Garibaldi to order all his space cops to arrest the strikers. This is where we get a bit of a deus ex machina, but honestly by this point the show has done its due diligence and it feels earned: The Rush Act gives the local leadership the power to end an illegal strike "by any means necessary," so Sinclair uses that power to just alter the budget and give the dockworkers what they want. Ha ha! In your face, The Entire Earth Government. But for some reason the angry Senate doesn't stop him, though the Senate guy who's shown up in a few episodes (Hidoshi) warns him that he's made some powerful enemies. I guess Orin Zento's dad really IS important.

As much as I'm making fun of Orin Zento, this really was a great episode and it really did keep me glued to the screen the whole time. It's only real weakness is the B-plot, but so far almost all of Babylon 5's B-plots have been lackluster, so that's no surprise. And it's really not the B-plot itself, which is mostly awesome--G'Kar and Londo gnashing their teeth at each other for an hour--it's the ending. I loved seeing that G'Kar, in addition to being a conniving bastard, is also a deeply religious man, and I also loved seeing how Londo, who still hates him for what he did in episode 1, uses G'Kar's faith to back him into a corner and hold him over a fire, laughing while he struggles. They scheme and plot at each other for a while, until finally Sinclair steps in and slaps them into shape. All of that was fine, and parts of it were great. No, the part that really bothered me was when Sinclair, on a roll from solving two unsolvable crises, decided to go for a third, and managed to reinterpret the entire Narn religion in a way that somehow made everyone happy. Nuh uh, Babylon 5. That is not how religion works.

The issue is this: G'Kar's religion requires its adherents to burn a certain flower at precisely the moment their sun's light hits a certain mountain. Thanks to Londo's shenanigans, G'Kar misses this moment, but Sinclair points out something that centuries of Narn religious scholars and priests have apparently never noticed: sunlight can travel through space! You don't have to do the ceremony at the exact moment the sun hits the Narn homeworld, because you can just calculate the time it takes that same exact sunlight to reach Bablyon 5 and then do the ceremony then! See how easy? This made me want to punch my laptop, because 1) I refuse to believe that no Narn theologian had ever thought of this before, and b) I refuse to believe that G'Kar feels not only comfortable but happy with this out-of-nowhere reinterpretation of his vital religious ceremony by an outsider, and c) the idea that someone can just step in and tell an entire race of people that they're doing their religion wrong is offensive. So many of Earth's greatest tragedies have come from old white men gleefully redefining other races' religions for them, so showing that same thing here but without any blowback, arguments, or conflicts of faith, is asinine.

But that's just one part of an overall enjoyable episode. I like most of this, like I said, and I honestly suspect that even this chicken will come home to roost in some form: Sinclair's supernatural ability to solve every conflict, often while breaking other rules, is going to bite him hard at some point, and I will be there to cheer.

Comments

  1. This is also where I put together my comparison of Star Trek vs. Babylon 5 main characters:
    * Throw a punch at Captain Kirk and he'll take it on the chin, his shirt will fall off and he'll fight back.
    * Throw a punch at Captain Picard and he'll take it and then talk you out of throwing another.
    * Throw a punch at Commander Sinclair and he'll side-step, grab your fist and pull you to the ground.

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    Replies
    1. Throw a punch at Commander Sinclair and you’ll miss, because the universe itself will conspire against you. The same thing happens when you try to punch Janeway.

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    2. Throw a punch at Sheridan and get a nuke for your troubles

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  2. I don’t remember any budget problems or blue-collar jobs in Star Trek. This is much more real.

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