Episode 1.8: And the Sky Full of Stars
Now this is an episode. Commander Sinclair (who I've been calling "Captain" throughout this blog so far) gets kidnapped and wired into a VR machine for interrogation. The story ties together his PTSD, his hinted connections to the Minbari, the ongoing theme of anti-alien politics, and Garibaldi's knack for investigating crimes without ever having to solve them, all in one tight, compelling story. Is this my favorite episode so far? Maybe. I don't know if it beats Mind War, but it might.
The biggest Ace in this episode's hand is Sinclair himself, who gets right back to the riveting screen presence we saw from him in THE GATHERING. This is helped, I suspect, by the fact that most of his scenes are played against a villain so snarly and overwrought that you can practically see the flecks of chewed-up scenery stuck between his teeth. His job is to interrogate Sinclair as a suspected war criminal (and the episode is careful to leave clues that he might just as well be working for the Earth government as for a fringe group), but doggone it he's going to quote as many philosophers and turn as many phrases as he can along the way. How could Sinclair not reflect some of that energy back at him? And the thing is, it works: the interrogator is over the top but he's consistent about it; you can tell from his conversations with his accomplice that this is both part of his personality and part of an act. Their scenes together are melodramatic, but effective.
Part of what makes the interrogation so compelling is that the audience knows the interrogator is probably right: the show has been dropping hints since the beginning that Sinclair has some kind of mysterious link to the Minbari. One guy told him "you have a hole in your mind," and that scene gets a flashback here just in case you forgot it. Another scene that doesn't get a flashback was one with Delenn herself, when Sinclair saved her life in an early episode and she said "We chose well." Sinclair has no idea what any of these references mean, but it's clear there's something going on and, while me might not agree with the interrogator's methods, we can't help but agree that he has a very good point. Sinclair was almost certainly turned or brainwashed at some point in his past, and one of the most powerful moments in the episode shows Sinclair himself finally admitting it. He finally realizes something is up, and he submits to the VR memory procedure willingly to try to figure out what it is.
Meanwhile, in the background, Garibaldi is turning the ship inside out trying to find the missing Commander, and proving himself to pretty darn effective at it, too. We get the barest hint of a B-plot as some random redshirt turns out to have a gambling debt, but that ties back into the main plot within the first few scenes, as the redshirt sells the bad guys a power pack to help run their VR thingy. He dies, and we get some pretty great police procedural scenes as Garibaldi puts all the pieces together to help find Sinclair. Of course, none of it eventually matters, because Sinclair has the cheat codes to the universe and manages to break out of the VR thingy and run wildly through the corridors, shooting both real and imaginary bad guys. Delenn talks him down, and he has his final epiphany: the day before the war ended he was captured by the Gray Council, a semi-mystical body that runs the Minbari government, and Delenn was there. He doesn't tell her that he remembers, of course, even when she asks him directly, but he apparently has great faith in his cybersecurity because his tells his computer journal everything.
A couple of scenes excepted, the entire episode is tightly-written and tense, and packed with information that answers some old questions while asking just as many new ones. The scenes that don't work as well are the ones where they try to play with reality: an early scene where the interrogator kills multiple iterations of Garibaldi, and an almost-final scene where the brain-fried interrogator suggests that they might still be in the VR simulation instead of in the real world. The episode doesn't need any of this, because the two scenes don't matter to anything but each other: the tension in the VR doesn't come from the nature of reality, but from the painful memories dredged up from Sinclair's past. "We don't know what is real" is a really fun trope to play with--I wrote an entire book about it--but this episode brings it up without ever using it for anything, and the payoff is weak because we know that Sinclair's not actually in a simulation, so suggesting that he might be doesn't carry any weight. You can't just suddenly be Philip K. Dick, Babylon 5, you have to put in the time and do it right. A better last line from the interrogator, when his mind is completely broken and he hears Sinclair's name, would be to say "Yes, Sinclair: that's my name. Commander Jeffrey Sinclair," and then have the orderlies pat him on the back and help him into the transport to go home to Earth. You'd get the same twang of pathos right at the end, but instead of trying to tie it to a nature-of-reality theme that was never really there, you can tie it to a consumed-by-obsession theme that absolutely was. The interrogator, who is so defined by his zeal to uncover Sinclair's past that he isn't even given a name, would basically become a fractured version of Sinclair with his entire universe reduced to this one event.
(Obviously my suggestion will be moot if it turns out somewhere down the line that Sinclair really HAS been in a VR program this whole time, but that is such a terrible idea that I feel confident this show would not be nearly as beloved if they'd done it. So I will continue to hold that my version of this particular ending is better :)
One of the early hints in the show is that Sinclair was chosen as leader of this station in part because the Minbari requested him. The evidence that he is their pawn is stacking up so high that there has to be an official response soon or the Earth government is going to look pretty stupid. I guess we'll see where the story goes next.
The biggest Ace in this episode's hand is Sinclair himself, who gets right back to the riveting screen presence we saw from him in THE GATHERING. This is helped, I suspect, by the fact that most of his scenes are played against a villain so snarly and overwrought that you can practically see the flecks of chewed-up scenery stuck between his teeth. His job is to interrogate Sinclair as a suspected war criminal (and the episode is careful to leave clues that he might just as well be working for the Earth government as for a fringe group), but doggone it he's going to quote as many philosophers and turn as many phrases as he can along the way. How could Sinclair not reflect some of that energy back at him? And the thing is, it works: the interrogator is over the top but he's consistent about it; you can tell from his conversations with his accomplice that this is both part of his personality and part of an act. Their scenes together are melodramatic, but effective.
Part of what makes the interrogation so compelling is that the audience knows the interrogator is probably right: the show has been dropping hints since the beginning that Sinclair has some kind of mysterious link to the Minbari. One guy told him "you have a hole in your mind," and that scene gets a flashback here just in case you forgot it. Another scene that doesn't get a flashback was one with Delenn herself, when Sinclair saved her life in an early episode and she said "We chose well." Sinclair has no idea what any of these references mean, but it's clear there's something going on and, while me might not agree with the interrogator's methods, we can't help but agree that he has a very good point. Sinclair was almost certainly turned or brainwashed at some point in his past, and one of the most powerful moments in the episode shows Sinclair himself finally admitting it. He finally realizes something is up, and he submits to the VR memory procedure willingly to try to figure out what it is.
Meanwhile, in the background, Garibaldi is turning the ship inside out trying to find the missing Commander, and proving himself to pretty darn effective at it, too. We get the barest hint of a B-plot as some random redshirt turns out to have a gambling debt, but that ties back into the main plot within the first few scenes, as the redshirt sells the bad guys a power pack to help run their VR thingy. He dies, and we get some pretty great police procedural scenes as Garibaldi puts all the pieces together to help find Sinclair. Of course, none of it eventually matters, because Sinclair has the cheat codes to the universe and manages to break out of the VR thingy and run wildly through the corridors, shooting both real and imaginary bad guys. Delenn talks him down, and he has his final epiphany: the day before the war ended he was captured by the Gray Council, a semi-mystical body that runs the Minbari government, and Delenn was there. He doesn't tell her that he remembers, of course, even when she asks him directly, but he apparently has great faith in his cybersecurity because his tells his computer journal everything.
A couple of scenes excepted, the entire episode is tightly-written and tense, and packed with information that answers some old questions while asking just as many new ones. The scenes that don't work as well are the ones where they try to play with reality: an early scene where the interrogator kills multiple iterations of Garibaldi, and an almost-final scene where the brain-fried interrogator suggests that they might still be in the VR simulation instead of in the real world. The episode doesn't need any of this, because the two scenes don't matter to anything but each other: the tension in the VR doesn't come from the nature of reality, but from the painful memories dredged up from Sinclair's past. "We don't know what is real" is a really fun trope to play with--I wrote an entire book about it--but this episode brings it up without ever using it for anything, and the payoff is weak because we know that Sinclair's not actually in a simulation, so suggesting that he might be doesn't carry any weight. You can't just suddenly be Philip K. Dick, Babylon 5, you have to put in the time and do it right. A better last line from the interrogator, when his mind is completely broken and he hears Sinclair's name, would be to say "Yes, Sinclair: that's my name. Commander Jeffrey Sinclair," and then have the orderlies pat him on the back and help him into the transport to go home to Earth. You'd get the same twang of pathos right at the end, but instead of trying to tie it to a nature-of-reality theme that was never really there, you can tie it to a consumed-by-obsession theme that absolutely was. The interrogator, who is so defined by his zeal to uncover Sinclair's past that he isn't even given a name, would basically become a fractured version of Sinclair with his entire universe reduced to this one event.
(Obviously my suggestion will be moot if it turns out somewhere down the line that Sinclair really HAS been in a VR program this whole time, but that is such a terrible idea that I feel confident this show would not be nearly as beloved if they'd done it. So I will continue to hold that my version of this particular ending is better :)
One of the early hints in the show is that Sinclair was chosen as leader of this station in part because the Minbari requested him. The evidence that he is their pawn is stacking up so high that there has to be an official response soon or the Earth government is going to look pretty stupid. I guess we'll see where the story goes next.
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