Episode 2.2: Revelations

This episode begins with Sheridan waiting at the docks for someone to arrive, and I thought “Is this another character with an important ex-girfriend, because I will flip this table right now,” but then a woman gets off the ship and runs up to him and says “Hey, big brother!” because that is a normal way for humans to talk to each other. And as clunky as that dialogue is I can’t be mad, because they let me know as early as possible that she was not an ex-girlfriend, so: thanks, Babylon 5. You’ve always got my back.

This feels like the episode we might have gotten last time if they hadn’t been forced to shoehorn a brand new Captain into their storyline. Every single plotline left dangling at the end of Season 1 is advanced, and it’s all interesting and awesome, and G’Kar elevates this show every time he steps onto the screen. It turns out his mysterious quest he went off to accomplish was religiously motivated: he knew there was a dangerous new faction out hiding in the galaxy somewhere, and his scriptures of G’Quan prophesy about just such a thing, so he flew out to the galaxy’s official Most Evil-Sounding Planet, Z’ha’dum, and found some creepy ships flying around. He barely escaped with his life, and came back to B5, and—this is the kicker—immediately tried to warn the other ambassadors. They spent an entire frigging season showing us a G’Kar who was endlessly self-interested—who had no time for anything that did not advance his own, often malicious agenda. If you want to convince us that your new big threat is really and truly big, have the selfish villain be the one who says “Nope, this is too important to be a dick about, I’m going to reverse my entire personality and try to get everybody to work together.” I’m not being sarcastic here: watching G’Kar—G’Kar, of all people—run straight to his nemesis Londo and tell him it was time to work together was genuinely frightening. Nothing the Shadows have done thus far has been even half as scary as the implications of G’Kar becoming instantly selfless in order to fight them.

G’Kar is already my favorite character, so I’m almost certainly biased, but he was SO GOOD in this episode. Andreas Katsulas is killing this role, and the writing they give him to work with—both line for line and overall characterization—is brilliant. We’ve already seen his faithful, religious side in BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, and that comes back in a big way here; it’s fantastic to see that G’Kar really is a true believer, and to watch him quote scriptures and proclaim prophecies with absolute conviction. He’s a layered, complex, fascinating character, and I’m loving every minute.

Meanwhile, Dr. Franklin uses the alien life force machine from THE QUALITY OF MERCY to wake up Garibaldi, and Sheridan insists on donating his own life force to do it, and I kind of expected this to be a Thing but it all happens off-screen: they talk about doing it, they argue about the dangers, and then we cut away to a Garibaldi waking up and realize that there are absolutely no repercussions to using the machine whatsoever. Okay then. But as much as I would have liked to see a cost for using a machine that is literally defined by its cost, that’s not what this storyline is about: Garibaldi’s last memory is the conspiracy against the President, and now that he’s awake he jumps right back into it. Of course, the President’s already dead, so the only thing really left to investigate is “Who shot Garibaldi,” and with Talia’s court-inadmissible help they figure out that it was no-name aide guy, at which point we learn that Garibaldi allegedly thought of him as a brother. Oh, really, writers? That’s a little out of left field, don’t you think, given that a) the only thing we’ve ever seen this guy do is shoot Garibaldi and b) HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A NAME. Frankly, the betrayal of a beloved superior officer is already a big enough deal, you don’t need to pretend like they had a close, brotherly relationship. The other security officers’ reaction to the betrayal does way more to establish a strong emotional link than any of this “I loved you like a brother” stuff.

Garibaldi’s investigation leads him to suspect the former Vice President, now actual President, of being involved in the plot to assassinate his predecessor, and I thought “yeah, good, Garibaldi’s finally catching up to everyone else now that he’s out of a coma,” but then everyone else acts like they’ve never thought of this before. And I had to really think about the end of Season 1, and try to remember if anybody actually accused the Vice President of being a traitor, because it was so incredibly obvious that it was him, but yeah, it turns out that nobody on the show actually suspected him until this episode. Come on, guys. Even before you had real evidence—even before he wisks the traitorous aide away from punishment—the Vice President had a huge pile of circumstantial evidence against him. The least someone could have said was “Who do you think did it? Maybe the Veep: he got off the ship very conveniently right before it exploded, and obviously had the most to gain from the President’s death. We should look into that.” Even more frustrating is that the final piece of the puzzle that unlocks this very obvious mystery is a casual finger salute: instead of looking at the damning facts of the actual case, Garibaldi decides that his aide’s little salute thingy is kinda sorta like Bester from Psi-Corps’ little salute thingy, so therefore the entire assassination was a Psi-Corps plot to get some sympathetic political backup, which we didn’t even know was a thing they needed. Garibaldi is usually pretty good at real, believable investigations, but this one feels like a shaky house of plot railroads. Is that finger salute an actual thing that Psi-Corps people do when they're being evil? Why do they signal their treachery in advance? I mean, I could almost believe it if they had a finger-sign they used to signal co-conspirators (which would be stupid, because they're the Psi-Corps, so why not just use telepathy?), but this wasn't anything like that. I really loved this episode, but the Garibaldi stuff was riddled with problems.

And then we have Delenn, who wakes up from her coma to reveal--after the longest "don't show her face" tease in TV history--that she has dun dun dun HAIR! Aaaaah! I mean, yes, I knew this was coming because of the image on the streaming site I've been using as I watch these, so my reaction is tainted, but even so it's very hard for me to imagine this as anything other than a let-down. Three episodes of cocoon, filled to the brim with ominous glances and solemn Minbari intonations of prophecy and "nothing will ever be the same again," and all we get at the end of it is this? Hair? There's a movie which I refer to as The Official Dan Wells Most Awesome Movie Ever called YO-YO GIRL COP, which is replete with ridiculous nonsense, none of it more ridiculous than the part where the villain pulls off a black wig to reveal that he is actually blonde--there's no secret identity, no world-shattering implications, he's just blonde, and then they fight. That's what this felt like. Delenn goes through a magical process that has her entire species freaked out with it's implications, and it turns out it's just that she has hair now. I assume that she's also part-human now, but they don't actually say it so I'm going to keep mocking them. Also: no one in their entire species or culture has hair, so how do they make Delenn's look so pretty and styled? She literally just crawled out of not only a slimy cocoon but a layer of rock-like scabs covering her entire body. You know she must have looked like an absolute mess under there. But before she went to see the ambassadors and reveal the shocking truth she stopped by a salon and got her hair did. Or maybe they brought a stylist to her quarters, and then killed her to keep her quiet? Or maybe one of Lennier's many fields of study was human haircuts?

I know that Delenn becoming partly human is a big deal, but this was a comically poor way to reveal it. All that build-up, all that speculation, and then: "Hey guys I have hair now." I've seen too many aliens with hair--I've seen too many aliens shapeshift to look like humans. People on space shows have been changing their makeup to look like different kinds of aliens ever since Kirk disguised himself as a Romulan, and probably before. You can't show us something we've seen a hundred times and expect it to shock us. This is a show that goes out of its way to be epic and portentous, and this was an opportunity to do something amazing--what if she had wings, like that security guy said?--but it basically boils down to "This actress was sick of all that alien makeup so now she doesn't need a skull cap anymore."

In a roundabout way, this all comes back to Sheridan's backstory with his deceased wife--or at least the storytelling principles do. We still only barely know Sheridan, and we never knew his wife at all, and yet the show expects us to feel super sad that she's dead. It doesn't work that way. If you want us to care about something, you need to give us a reason: you need to show us the wife alive so that WE start to love her, and THEN you kill her. You need to show us Garibaldi and his aide acting like brothers, and THEN have one betray the other. And you need to show us in advance why "Delenn but with hair" is as big of a screaming deal as you obviously want it to be, because yes this is a surprise but it's not a good one.

I liked this episode a lot, and that's to its credit. It showed me mockable nonsense in three of its four storylines and I was still enamored and entertained. And it's an important episode, too: the things that were revealed in this episode are all going to change the course of the show forever. We'll see what happens in the next one.