Episode 3.2: Convictions

CONVICTIONS is an okay episode with two genuinely outstanding sections. I think of it as a Lennier episode, even though he’s barely in it—and is unconscious for most of his screen time—because much of the episode revolves around him. It’s probably more accurate to call this a Londo episode, though it doesn’t fit the “Londo episode” pattern because it’s not annoying (credit where it's due: Londo is spectacular here). I suppose the truest label is to call this an ensemble episode, because the action is pretty evenly divided between everybody, but some of those scenes are much better than others.

We’ll start with the weakest part first. The main plot of the episode revolves around a series of terrorist bombings on the station, that become increasingly larger and more dangerous as time goes on. This seems promising enough until they finally find the guy, and he turns out to be an incredibly pedestrian “angry stupid person,” which is not an archetype I enjoy in my mass murderers. He’s not killing for political reasons, he’s not part of the war, and he doesn’t even have an interesting motivation; he’s blowing up everything because life is hard, and his wife left him or something, and somehow that translates into a poorly-defined need to make people feel afraid. The guy doesn’t have any of the craziness or passion required to make that motivation work, and thus the final sequence is just counting time until Sheridan finally just punches him in the face and wrestles him to the floor and we don’t have to listen to him anymore. Maybe if we saw him actually getting a thrill from other people’s fear? Or if he had a better motivation to begin with? 

I strongly suspect that his motivations were mostly an afterthought, because the main thrust of the episode lies not with the bomber himself but with the way the station reacts to them: they had a great idea for a noble self-sacrifice by Lennier, and an ingenious sequence with G’Kar and Londo trapped in an elevator together, and so they came up with this bomber idea as a way of linking them together; then they got to the end and realized they needed and showdown and an explanation and didn’t have time to come up with anything. Most galling of all is the total miss on the episode title: Lennier saves a war criminal’s life because of his conviction that life is worth saving, and G’Kar is willing to sacrifice his own life to see Londo dead because of his conviction that Londo deserves to die, and that’s all awesome but then it turns out the ultimate villain of the episode doesn’t have any convictions at all. He’s just killing people because the plot needed him to kill people. Oh well.

But! Let’s get to the good stuff. Early in the episode we see Lennier waiting in the docking terminal for Delenn, and just as they’re leaving it one of the bombs goes off behind them. Lennier shoves Delenn through the door to safety, the computer voice announces that the door is being closed for pressure reasons, and Lennier has just enough time to grab the person behind him and shove him through the door as well. It turns out said person is Londo Mollari, the most hated man on Babylon 5, but Lennier doesn’t hesitate. He saves Londo's life at the expense of his own—there’s no time to get himself through the door after Londo—and thus he is caught in the aftereffects of the explosion, suffering severe burns and a fractured skull. Franklin rushes him to sick bay, with both Delenn and Londo following with panicked expressions. Delenn has to rush off to talk to some of the next of kin of other injured and dead Minbari, but Londo stays, and we get a pretty amazing monologue as he talks to the unconscious Lennier. No one, Londo realizes, has ever saved his life before. He doesn't know what to think, and clearly has no sense of how to react or move forward. He talks to Lennier's body with a vulnerability and a candidness we've never seen him show around anyone else, and it's genuinely touching. Londo is, in some ways, a victim of his own culture and situation, constantly jockeying for position and reveling in excess and grasping at power, and this simple act of selfless sacrifice on his behalf--especially after all the horrible things he's done--has shaken him to the core. Londo is not the same person at the end of this scene that he was in the beginning, and I assume this marks a major turning point in his character.

Londo does eventually have to leave the sick bay, and he ends up waiting for an elevator in a long, empty hallway. The doors open, and G'Kar is inside, and after a pretty awesome staredown Londo wisely decides to wait or the next one. He turns to go, but another explosion rocks the ship, right at the end of the hallway; the fireball and the shockwave rush toward him, and he has nowhere else to run, so he dives into the elevator just in time. He lives, but the shockwave destroys the elevator and knocks him unconscious. This is where it gets really good. Londo wakes up two hours later to find himself still trapped, and G'Kar just sitting there watching him. Has G'Kar been calling for help? No. Trying to escape? No. The door is too hot to touch--there's clearly a fire on the far side that could kill them in a matter of hours, so why isn't G'Kar doing anything? Because G'Kar has found a loophole. He's got Londo Mollari, the most hated man on Babylon 5, right here at his mercy, but the terms of the Narn surrender say that if a Narn kills a Centauri the Centauri government will respond by killing 500 Narn, including the killer's family. But: if G'Kar just sits here and does nothing, he's not liablt for anything and he still gets to watch Londo die. It's the best of both worlds! G'Kar's speech here is as all of his speeches are, chilling and tragic and incredibly powerful. He would rather die than escape, if it means Londo dies with him. If any of you were wondering whether G'Kar could be terrifying even when he's doing absolutely nothing, the good news is: yes he definitely can. And honestly: how could some no-name, half-backed bomber without any real convictions possibly be expected to follow this? This is the good stuff: this scene, and these emotions, are why we watch this show.

Remember what I said last time about B5's biggest moments being payoffs? This scene is a payoff, built on two full seasons of slowly-growing hatred between the two men. Londo's utter shock at Lennier saving his life is a payoff, both of Lennier's goodness and of Londo's search for meaning and self. When Lennier wakes up, and laments that his own instinct to preserve life may have caused the loss of more life in the future, because Londo is a monster, that is a payoff. We know these characters, and we know their emotions and their choices and their weaknesses and their strengths. Their actions have weight and meaning because of it. And riding on that meaning, ignoring the weak climax to the bomber plot, CONVICTIONS is on track to be one of my favorite episodes of the season. I'm calling it now.

Side note: the station is starting to fill up with religious pilgrims all coming to see and/or rejoice in their culture's religious figure, who Kosh appeared to be. Some of these are played for laughs, because who cares about the Drazi, amiright? Others are played more seriously, and seem like obvious setups for the future, as when Ivanova talks to a group of human monks who are also scientists, and whom she eventually uses to form a kind of living facial recognition scan on the station's cameras, eventually identifying the bomber. I suppose it's possible that this is the only time we'll see those monks, but they make such a big deal of them, and the show is obviously building toward a religious thread, so I assume we'll see them again.

Comments

  1. Ahh brother Theo. Did you recognize the actor? Same guy who played Draal (the Minbari in the Machine) back in his first appearance.

    They had to switch actors for Draal's subsequent appearances.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts