Episode 2.10: Gropos

I admit that I wasn’t expecting to like this episode. After THE COMING OF SHADOWS I was primed for another installment full of politics and scheming and scary aliens, and “the station tries to deal with a bunch of soldiers for a few days” sounded like a lame way to tread water instead of continuing the story. There’s a war on, for crying out loud, I don’t want to see people NOT fighting. Oh, me of little faith. Though it’s obvious in hindsight, GROPOS was the show’s sneaky backdoor way of putting a face on that war, and it did so by pretending to not be a war episode at all. We spent an hour with these soldiers, we got to love them, and then every last one of them died in the fighting in the last few minutes.

We start with Ivanova relaxing in the command center, delighted that everyone’s asleep; a redshirt in the background reminds her that there is no night in space—apparently he read my review of Episode 2.1–and then the jump gate opens. An Earth Force battleship (hilariously called the EAS Schwarzkopf; hello early 90’s) arrives at B5 without warning and requests billets for 25 thousand marines, called Ground Pounders or Gropos. The General leading them is Dr. Franklin’s dad, and this becomes our primary plotline as the two of them butt heads over their rocky history. General Franklin is a career soldier, and ran his home like a platoon, and the good Doctor was always either angry at him or worried that he wouldn’t be coming home. “What if he doesn’t come home” is hit so hard and so often that it’s pretty much a given that the General is going to die on this secret attack mission, but that turns out to be a red herring: he lives, and all of the actual foot soldiers we thought were B-plots die instead; we get a moment of relief when we see him alive, followed by complete devastation when we see the others dead. Before that, though, the two Franklins fight and argue and finally overcome their differences, which makes for a nice moment but completely ignores what I consider the elephant in the room: General Franklin is a huge fracking racist. He hates aliens, he barely considers them people, and most of his problems with his son stem from the latter’s insistence that life is life and that aliens need a doctor just as much as humans do. The General wants his son to stop screwing around with xenobiology and come be a medic in Earth Force, patching up humans like a good human should. And this point is never brought up in their reconciliation. I recognize that it’s totally possible to love people you disagree with (do I ever), even over something as huge as “your close relative is a racist,” but it felt super weird that this was brought up so firmly and then dropped so completely.

Meanwhile, in the B-through-D plots, we get to know a lot of the actual Ground Pounders. There’s a nameless bald one who, following his general’s lead, hates aliens enough to try to beat up and/or murder Delenn, considering her sudden humanity an insult to the humans who died in the war. He’s obviously an a-hole, but he wins points for being the first person in the entire series to just come out and say “You have hair. Minbari don’t have hair.” I mean, he’s wrong—half the Minbari men we’ve seen on this series have beards—but at least he said it. We’ve all been thinking it, but the writers have bent over backwards finding bizarre ways to address the hair without actually saying the word ‘hair,’ so it’s nice to see them finally just throw up their hands and say it.

Baldy is stopped by another Gropo named Dodger, who jumps in and defends Delenn and starts a big fist fight. Garibaldi breaks it up, Dodger thinks he’s cute, and she turns the flirting up to 11 until they end up back in his quarters for what Garibaldi doesn’t realize is a no-strings booty call. He freaks out in the middle of the heavy petting, giving a huge speech about how he doesn’t know what to do with his love life, and maybe this thing with Dodger will go somewhere and maybe it won’t, and the whole time Dodger is just rolling her eyes because she’s only here for two days and why is this guy whining about his feelings? She leaves in a huff, not wanting his pity (a perfect line), and Garibaldi presumably learns exactly the wrong lesson about what happens when you treat a woman like a person.

Meanwhile, remember Warren Keffer, the hotshot pilot? The writers’ room suddenly did, so he’s back again: there’s so little space on this station that Keffer has to share his quarters with a career soldier named Large, who’s been doing this for 30 years, and a newbie named Yang who’s never seen combat. Keffer’s not happy to have learned about this arrangement after Large and Yang are already in his quarters, smoking up the place with stogies, but they’re nice and he’s nice and they have enough common sharing-of-war-stories ground that they become friends. This culminates in a bar scene where Keffer accidentally bumps into Baldy and spills his drink; he offers to buy him a new one, but Baldy hates flyboys almost as much as he hates Minbari, and we get another big brawl scene, kicked off by a guy so eager to swing on a light fixture that he goes straight for it before the fight has even really started. I assume he'd been standing there the whole time, waiting, knowing that as soon as a fight broke out he'd be in a perfect position to swing on that light fixture. His life's purpose is fulfilled, and even Garibaldi and Dodger join in the fun, and then the fight is broken up by the General and his super awesome Sergeant Major, who tell them it's time to ship out.

The episode ends with the whole station gathered around a TV, watching reports about the attack. I pride myself on predicting plots and plot twists, and honestly it isn't even a twist to find out that the Gropos we know and love have all died, because why else would they spend so much time making us love them? But I admit that this episode played me like a fiddle. I thought for sure that General Franklin was toast, and that the grunts would never be seen again, but instead we get that great scene where the General appears on screen and we all share Doctor Franklin's sigh of relief, and then we hear about a list of casualties and the camera pans across the dead, bloody bodies of Dodger, Large, Yang, and even Baldy. That's the one that got me, honestly: frigging Baldy. Wikipedia says his name is Kleist, and yes, Kleist was a one-dimensional character designed solely to hate people and start plot-centric bar fights, but doggonit he was a soldier, too, and he gave his life just like the others did, and right in the same place: for all we know he died defending them, or they died defending him, all differences cast aside as they fought shoulder to shoulder and did their jobs. It's an incredibly effective, melancholy, poignant end of the episode: the war we were excited to see has started, and sure it makes for a good story but it's also going to kill a lot of people, and it doesn't matter that they're only fictional people because fiction's whole purpose is to make us love people who don't exist. This was exactly the war story it needed to be--and exactly the war story I didn't think it was at first--because it took the time to make us love its characters and then it killed them. It's the same trick I use in my horror novels, and I DON'T LIKE THE TABLES BEING TURNED ON ME, BABYLON 5.

Season 2 keeps bringing the hits. No wonder you people like this show so much.

Comments

  1. This is one of a small handful of episodes I rarely include in any rewatching I do, unless I'm feeling particularly masochistic, not because it's bad, but because it does what it sets out to do really, really well.

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  2. Yes the next five episodes (with the exception of one are very good.)

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