Episode 1.5: The Parliament of Dreams

Credit where credit is due: Londo is barely in this episode, but his few minutes of screen time actually work really well, and his character is starting to gel. The episode is about a big holiday on the station, where every species celebrates its religious heritage, and we open with the Centauri: they're celebrating their ancestral victory over their home planet's other sentient species, which they annihilated milennia ago. And that's a cool and brutal backstory, but what really sells it is the contrast to the Minbari: they're having a slow, staid ceremony, while the Centauri are basically having a drunken bacchanalia, culminating with Londo literally crawling across the table and passing out. Vir Cotto says that he's not blackout drunk, he's "at one with his inner self," and for whatever reason the fact that their big religious ceremony is really just a fancy frat party totally clicked for me. It's like the revelation of Sinclair's PTSD in the previous episode: it's a piece of the backstory puzzle that makes everything around it work. Londo's more ridiculous traits are now, in hindsight, part of a consistent cultural tradition that values excess and ostentation as a way of celebrating the fact that they haven't died yet, even though they know that their glory is fading and their best days are behind them.

The main plot of the episode is actually about G'Kar, who in the cold open learns that a political rival has died and, as his final act, sent an assassin to kill G'Kar. Much is made of the fact that the rival wants him to suffer in paranoia before dying, and as we watch G'Kar start to fall apart, mistrusting his aide's and missing meetings and such, I started to think that the whole assassination threat was a mind game designed to ruin G'Kar's career or something clever like that, but nope: it's a real assassination attempt, and the assassin is exactly who you'd expect, and it all goes as predictably as possible. I like what this storyline suggests about the Narn, continuing to build them up as deceitful, treacherous, politically savvy, and (for lack of a better term) Romulan-esque. What I don't like is how poorly G'Kar seems to fit into his own culture: if the Narn are all about plans within plans and sneaky mind games, G'Kar plays that game super poorly. A rival that he already knows hates him sends him one unconfirmed threat against his life, and G'Kar frigging FALLS APART. It doesn't even take long. He's a nervous, paranoid wreck almost instantly, and he comes off as an incompetent buffoon. How did he rise to the rank of ambassador in this culture? How does he not already have a plan in place to keep himself safe and find an enemy assassin? Why does he have to go hire a third-party bodyguard--how is it even conceivable that he doesn't already have his own? Hell, he should have an entire network in place, with spies and contacts and listening devices all over the station. Every plotline we've ever seen him in has been a showcase for how duplicitous and clever he is, and now that it really counts he has nothing. I love G'Kar, and I want to see him as the smart operator the other episodes have portrayed him as--and as the finale of this episodes pretends that he is again--so I choose to read this sudden lapse of competence as a weakness in the writing, not the character himself. I guess time will tell.

One of the weirdest parts of this whole plotline is G'Kar's aide, who according to wikipedia is not the same aide he got last week. The actress who showed up in episode 1.4 had to leave the show, so they brought in a new actress to replace her, and even though they are functionally and visually identical they decided to kill off the first aide and introduce a new one. They did this so subtly that I didn't notice, and assumed they were the same character. And I suppose there's nothing wrong with the way they did it, though it feels like they really missed an opportunity to play up the first one's death as a sign of how dangerous the station is, or how treacherous Narn politics is, or how precarious G'Kar's safety is, or whatever. And maybe that's what they were going for, but again: it was too subtle. If I can't tell what you're doing until I read the wikipedia summary of the episode, you're not doing it right. G'Kar had a female assistant in the last episode, and he has one in the this episode, and they could literally change the actress every week if they wanted and no one would be able to notice under the makeup. Whatever. It's not really a problem, I just thought it was super weird.

The humans are mostly in the background in this episode, though we learn at the end that there was apparently a B-plot they forgot to show us about how Sinclair's really worried about how to present Earth's religious heritage to the rest of the station. He solves this riddle by bringing a long line of priests and rabbis and imams and so on, one from every religion on Earth, which is a nice touch and a cool visual to end the episode, but without any buildup it's not nearly as efective as it could be. We learn so much about who the Centauri are as a species, and who the Narn are as a spiecies, and we get some little hints about who the Minbari are as a species (though it mostly just boils down to "space elves mired in stoic tradition"), and this would have been a great opportunity to showcase humans in contrast to them. Is our religious variety really the most interesting thing about us? Probably, but the episode could have dug so much deeper into this, and didn't. It's a neat ending, and a neat idea, but it could have been so much more.

Also: I didn't see anyone in the line of religious leaders that I could immediately identify as Mormon. You couldn't throw in a couple of 19-year-old boys with suits and nametags? Come on, guys.

Also also: there's a hint near the end of the episode that the boring Minbari ceremony we watched was actually a wedding of some kind, but they don't tell us who it was for or if it was important. I suppose we'll find out in the future? I mean, they wouldn't make such a big deal of it unless it mattered, right? I'm hoping for a screwball comedy episode where it turns out Sinclair is now married to Delenn, and shenanigans ensue, but I suspect it's something more mysterious and dramatic (and, because it's about the Minbari, boring).