Episode 2.9: The Coming of Shadows

Well hot damn.

This episode was spectacular. Almost every character gets to do something cool, and some of the characters get to do something great. Londo and G’Kar in particular are stellar, and even Vir is suddenly a real character instead of an attendant lord (deferential, glad to be of use). Sheridan gets to make his angry face, Franklin gets to be secretively noble, Garibaldi gets to outwit a special ops commando, and—be still my beating heart—OG Sinclair shows up to let us know that he knows everything, that he’s saving the universe from behind the scenes, and that he’s training a secret army of Human and Minbari rangers. All we need is Ivanova in a bar fight and we’d have the greatest episode of television ever.

Where do I even start? I’ll start with the plans, because Babylon 5 is always at its best when there are secret plans. The emperor of the Centauri, who looks more like the king in a Mr. Rogers opera than they were probably intending, decides he’s going to visit B5 and give a speech, and everyone goes into Machiavelli mode to try to take advantage of this: for Londo and Refa, who are both obviously using each other, this means giving a carefully-prepared speech that will make the emperor look weak; for G’Kar, this means sacrificing his own life to stab the emperor in front of everybody and thus get revenge for the crimes against his people. And the great thing about these plans is that either of them would have made for a good episode, and both together would have made for a great episode, but neither of them get to happen at all. The episode literally shows us a bunch of shady machinations and then pulls out the rug and gives us something better. The emperor is sick, and almost dies, and tells Franklin to tell G’Kar that he’s sorry, and that he’s willing to be the first to admit he was wrong if it means finding peace, and it’s big and noble and G’Kar is genuinely moved by it, but meanwhile Londo and Refa realize that a dying emperor means they have to accelerate their plans to take over the government, which they can only do by presenting the Centauri people with a stunning military victory. Refa knows they can never do this in time, but Londo has an evil alien empire in his pocket. He tells Vir to go get Morden, Vir BLOWS UP IN HIS FACE, Londo insists, and then Morden summons the Shadows who go and shoot the everloving crap out of a Narn colony in what the Centauri beleive should be their territory. It’s brutal, but not half as brutal as the scene where G’Kar doesn’t know the attack has happened yet and sits down with a shell-shocked Londo for an overture of peace.

When G’Kar finally learns the truth, he goes berserk, trashing his own quarters before storming through the halls, beating the crap out of security agents and diplomatic aides while shouting for Londo’s head. Andreas Katsulas can act circles around the rest of the cast, and this episode was like a great big gift-wrapped actor present to him from the writers, with a card that says “The scenery is delicious, feel free to chew on it.” Sheridan manages to talk him down, and by the end of the episode G’Kar thanks him, but in such a way that we can’t really tell whether he’s planning to follow the emperor’s example or Londo’s. If Londo’s dream is to be believed, though, G’Kar and Londo will end up strangling each other to death as old men, so it’s not likely to be a very happy future for anybody.

And Sinclair is back! I miss him. There’s a creepy guy on the station who starts following Garibaldi around, and because Garibaldi is good at his job he turns the table and catches him and throws him in jail. But because Garibaldi is only occasionally good at this job he lets Kenickie pull the creepy guy out of his cell and bring him to Garibaldi’s office, alone, still carrying all his stuff. But this turns out to be okay and totally not dangerous because the creepy guy is a Ranger—a secret commando warrior and part of an army Sinclair is forming to help combat the coming war. We don’t know exactly how much Sinclair knows about the war, or the Shadows, but he knows something and he has special contacts on the Minbari homeworld. We assume that Delenn is one of these contacts, because the two of them have been buddies the whole friggin’ time, but the end of the episode shows Delenn receiving the same message Garibaldi just got, which implies that she didn’t actually know anything about what he was doing.

We even get a good bit from Kosh, who we haven’t seen in a long time. The dying Centauri emperor asks to see him, and Kosh obliges, and the emperor asks "How will this all end?" Kosh, in his inimitable Kosh style, simply says "In fire," thus continuing Kosh's unbroken streak of short but incredibly awesome lines of dialogue. They haven't stepped wrong with his character yet.

After Kosh, the emperor summons Londo and Refa to be with him when he dies. He's about to give his final words to Refa, but then shoves him away and whispers to Londo instead. Londo reports his final words as a call to take their people back to the stars, which is only going to make this new war worse, though he confides later to Refa that the real words were "We are both damned." I don't know who the "we" is; obviously one is Londo, but is the other Refa or the emperor himself? It could go either way, though I suppose it doesn't matter a ton. Then the emperor dies, and Refa says he needs to take of something real quick, and then murders the shiz out of the emperor's Prime Minister, who looks more like the general from MOM AND DAD SAVE THE WORLD than they probably intended. We get the impression that he was a good man, and that the emperor kept him back on Centauri Prime to keep him safe, so now that he's dead the odds are very good that the Centauri government is in bad hands. I doubt it will be Londo or Refa personally, though either could happen in the future; its more likely to be someone else for now, so we can build toward Emperor Londo more dramatically.

This episode won a Hugo award, and it's easy to see why. It's the best episode of the series so far, and manages to simultaneously pay off a ton of cool plot threads and kick off a bunch of new ones. The start of a war kicked Deep Space Nine into high gear, and I get the impression that the Narn-Centauri war will do the same for Babylon 5. I can't wait.