Episode 3.4: Passing Through Gethsemane
I worry that this episode was overhyped. I’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s one of their favorites, and then I watched it, and...okay? I’m glad you like it? I didn’t hate it, but I did spend the whole time waiting for it to connect to the mytharc, and then it never did, and then I was sad. It’s an episode that a) is almost painfully obvious and b) clearly belonged in Season 1 or 2, before the main story got rolling, so I looked up the backstory on the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 and sure enough, this was originally intended for Season 2 but had to be delayed for the most ridiculous reason ever: remember how I said the story was painfully obvious? It was so obvious that a fan independently suggested it online while JMS was writing it, and they had to spend an entire year working out the origination proofs before they could continue. That, dear readers, is a clear sign that your idea is maybe a little too obvious.
But I’ve got a massive rant about that, and we’ll get to it later.
The episode begins with the triumphant return of Lyta, who’s apparently in cahoots with the Vorlons now—or, more accurately, is now essentially a Vorlon cultist who thinks they’re the best and wants to serve them. And since they have plenty of use for a convenient human psychic cultist, they say yes and bring her in and assign her to Babylon 5 where she can help Kosh and run out to do occasional jobs in other places. Franklin does a full medical scan and discovers that not only is she in peak physical health, her congenital heart problems we’ve never heard about before are now gone. Somehow he misses the fact that she has gills, but you’ve got to cut him some slack: he’s on stims! And overworked! And not suffering any visible detrimental effects from either because this is not an episode about how he’s on stims and overworked!
It’s so clearly obvious that this episode was written for Season 2 and then haphazardly retooled for Season 3, it's killing me.
So anyway, Lyta's hanging around, which will eventually be important for future mytharc reasons but in this episode is only important for the ten-second sequence in which they need to interrogate a perp and he refuses to talk so instead of asking a second time or whatever they just bring in their friendly neighborhood non-Psi-Corps psychic and she reads his mind, the end.
And why do they need to read a guy's mind? Because of the whole big main plot, starring a very young Wormtongue in one of the only non-evil roles he's ever played (this is about a year after Brad Dourif made one of the best X-Files episodes ever, and about a year before he was one of Star Trek's only interesting serial killers). He appears here as Brother Edward, one of the monks from the last episode, who's trying to be pious and wonderful but keeps have funky visions about black roses and bloody writing on the walls. The monks are trying to find all the names of God, so he has a quick interview with Lennier and Delenn, and he asks them some questions and then they ask him a question and he tells them the story of Christ in Gethsemane; he has a personal connection to the "let this cup pass from me" bit, and has always wondered if he would have the same courage to stay and accept inevitable torture and death to atone for someone else's sin. "Hmm," says the audience, "I wonder if, sometime in the next half hour, this man will be placed in a position to stay and accept inevitable torture and death to atone for someone else's sin?" Yes he will! This is not so much "foreshadowing" as it is "giant roadside Burmashave billboards." In the grand tradition of B5 telegraphing major plot points way too obviously, this might be the worst one yet.
But how will he be forced to atone for some sins? Garibaldi watches a news report about a guy who had the same memory wipe thingy from QUALITY OF MERCY, where they bury a violent criminal's personality and replace it with a new one, and it doesn't relate to anything else in the show so we know it has to relate to this. Sure enough, Brother Edward is a former serial killer named Charlie, and his memories of such are slowly returning thanks to the now-grown-up children of his former victims, who've hunted him across the galaxy to stalk him and harass him and hire a Centauri telepath to loosen the lid on the buried memories. Sheridan and Ivanova don't have anything else to do, I guess, so this is their top priority, and they help Garibaldi try to find the stalkers before they kill Brother Edward. They find the telepath first, and I guess newly christened Vorlon agent Lyta ALSO doesn't have anything else to do because she rips the planned murder site out of the guy's mind and everybody races down to stop them. They get there too late, and find a dying Brother Edward tied to a wall (in a crucified position, in case anyone in the audience didn't Get It yet), and then he says that now he knows that he would indeed wait and accept death. And then he dies, and this clearly worked for a lot of people but it didn't work for me.
Thing 1: Remember how Ivanova hates psychics with a deep and passionate hatred? And remember how now we have a new one on the station, and she doesn't care, and then her trusted friends and colleagues use that new psychic to forcibly tear thoughts from someone's head, and she doesn't care? What the hell?
Thing 2: Brother Edward's speech about the grotesque inhumanity of replacing someone's personality with a new one is amazing and wise and powerful, but the show doesn't know what to do with it. How can someone repent of a sin they don't remember? How can he improve himself spiritually, and make up for what he's done, when he can't remember ever doing it? These are good questions that seem to strike right at the heart of both the technology and the episode's story, and yet the episode ends by betraying it completely: one of the stalkers (but only one, because Parallelism) is tried and convicted and sentenced to the same thing Charlie was, and he joins Brother Theo and the rest of the monks as a newly-minted mind-wipe who thinks he's a lifelong seeker of righteousness. I was kind of horrified by this, because it's such a stark middle finger in the face of Brother Edward's heartfelt pleas, but the episode (and the aforementioned Lurker's Guide) presents this situation as a unilateral good. So screw you, Brother Edward, and your apparently inconsequential existential horror! We're going to keep doing the same thing to everyone else, and it's going to be Right because we say it's right!
Thing 3: If personality replacement technology exists, and works so well at turning psychopathic murderers into servile monks that even when it fails the people in question meekly accept their own death as punishment for their previous life's sins, WHY ON EARTH ARE THE EVIL OVERLORDS OF THE UNIVERSE NOT USING IT ON EVERYONE??? There's your story. The people who have access to this power are the Psi-Corps, Earth Force, and the Centauri Empire, who you may have noticed are also the worst people in the entire galaxy. Why do they not have vast armies of cheerful slaves, with implanted personalities custom designed for maximum We Love Big Brother? If we don't see at least a strike force of helplessly loyal psychically-altered soldier-fanatics by the end of the series, I'm going to be very disappointed.
Thing 4: If you put 100 science fiction authors in a room and say "there's a technology that can remove someone's memories and give them a new personality," approximately 127 of them will write a story about a death penalty alternative that turns convicted killers into productive members of society and then one of the killers starts to remember their old life. It's literally the single most obvious direction to take that idea. I wrote a short story like that eight years ago, and everyone I showed it to said "yeah, I wrote this same story, you need to try harder." Earlier this year someone sold that same exact idea to Netflix, and JMS jumped on twitter and said "um, dude, I already wrote this," which is a) true, but b) remarkably forgetful of the fact that this story is such ridiculously low-hanging fruit that one of his own fans scooped him a full year before the episode even aired. THE QUALITY OF MERCY showed us a serial killer who was about to get his mind-wiped, and the entire viewing audience said "oooh, they should do an episode where that guy starts to remember being a murderer," and somehow JMS still thought it was an original idea. His take on it was certainly cool--my version of the story didn't have the neat monk/Gethsemane/atone-for-your-previous-self angle, which was ham-fisted but still awesome--but the core concept is as well-trammeled as an SF idea can get. We have a saying in science fiction: when you get a cool idea, and start thinking of stories you can tell about it, throw away the first three that come to mind. Dig deeper, and tell a story that no one else could possibly tell. Memory replacement technology is a cool toy to play with, but it's been around a long time, and you have to really try to come up with something we haven't already seen 127 times.
Obviously, as I said in the beginning, this episode worked for a lot of people. And stories, to be sure, live or die almost entirely on the strength of their execution, regardless of how original or cliche the central premise may be--that's why prime time TV can be an endless sea of cop shows and lawyer shows and doctor shows and people can still have preferences between them. Some people think the idea in PASSING THROUGH GETHSEMANE is clever, and some people think the idea is obvious but the execution is clever, and some people (like me) think both the idea and the execution were a wide miss. And the important thing about writing--one of the most important things, in my mind--is that no story is going to please all of those audiences, so don't bother trying. Tell the story you want to tell, and the people who'll love it will love it, and the rest of us can go and boil our heads. And people, to be sure, genuinely love this episode: that doesn't make them wrong or me wrong or anything else, it just means that they liked it and I didn't. That's how entertainment works. So I guess all I'm really complaining about here, in the grand scheme of things, is this: if you write a super-cliched story, don't complain when someone else sells their own version of the same super-cliched story to Netflix.
But I’ve got a massive rant about that, and we’ll get to it later.
The episode begins with the triumphant return of Lyta, who’s apparently in cahoots with the Vorlons now—or, more accurately, is now essentially a Vorlon cultist who thinks they’re the best and wants to serve them. And since they have plenty of use for a convenient human psychic cultist, they say yes and bring her in and assign her to Babylon 5 where she can help Kosh and run out to do occasional jobs in other places. Franklin does a full medical scan and discovers that not only is she in peak physical health, her congenital heart problems we’ve never heard about before are now gone. Somehow he misses the fact that she has gills, but you’ve got to cut him some slack: he’s on stims! And overworked! And not suffering any visible detrimental effects from either because this is not an episode about how he’s on stims and overworked!
It’s so clearly obvious that this episode was written for Season 2 and then haphazardly retooled for Season 3, it's killing me.
So anyway, Lyta's hanging around, which will eventually be important for future mytharc reasons but in this episode is only important for the ten-second sequence in which they need to interrogate a perp and he refuses to talk so instead of asking a second time or whatever they just bring in their friendly neighborhood non-Psi-Corps psychic and she reads his mind, the end.
And why do they need to read a guy's mind? Because of the whole big main plot, starring a very young Wormtongue in one of the only non-evil roles he's ever played (this is about a year after Brad Dourif made one of the best X-Files episodes ever, and about a year before he was one of Star Trek's only interesting serial killers). He appears here as Brother Edward, one of the monks from the last episode, who's trying to be pious and wonderful but keeps have funky visions about black roses and bloody writing on the walls. The monks are trying to find all the names of God, so he has a quick interview with Lennier and Delenn, and he asks them some questions and then they ask him a question and he tells them the story of Christ in Gethsemane; he has a personal connection to the "let this cup pass from me" bit, and has always wondered if he would have the same courage to stay and accept inevitable torture and death to atone for someone else's sin. "Hmm," says the audience, "I wonder if, sometime in the next half hour, this man will be placed in a position to stay and accept inevitable torture and death to atone for someone else's sin?" Yes he will! This is not so much "foreshadowing" as it is "giant roadside Burmashave billboards." In the grand tradition of B5 telegraphing major plot points way too obviously, this might be the worst one yet.
But how will he be forced to atone for some sins? Garibaldi watches a news report about a guy who had the same memory wipe thingy from QUALITY OF MERCY, where they bury a violent criminal's personality and replace it with a new one, and it doesn't relate to anything else in the show so we know it has to relate to this. Sure enough, Brother Edward is a former serial killer named Charlie, and his memories of such are slowly returning thanks to the now-grown-up children of his former victims, who've hunted him across the galaxy to stalk him and harass him and hire a Centauri telepath to loosen the lid on the buried memories. Sheridan and Ivanova don't have anything else to do, I guess, so this is their top priority, and they help Garibaldi try to find the stalkers before they kill Brother Edward. They find the telepath first, and I guess newly christened Vorlon agent Lyta ALSO doesn't have anything else to do because she rips the planned murder site out of the guy's mind and everybody races down to stop them. They get there too late, and find a dying Brother Edward tied to a wall (in a crucified position, in case anyone in the audience didn't Get It yet), and then he says that now he knows that he would indeed wait and accept death. And then he dies, and this clearly worked for a lot of people but it didn't work for me.
Thing 1: Remember how Ivanova hates psychics with a deep and passionate hatred? And remember how now we have a new one on the station, and she doesn't care, and then her trusted friends and colleagues use that new psychic to forcibly tear thoughts from someone's head, and she doesn't care? What the hell?
Thing 2: Brother Edward's speech about the grotesque inhumanity of replacing someone's personality with a new one is amazing and wise and powerful, but the show doesn't know what to do with it. How can someone repent of a sin they don't remember? How can he improve himself spiritually, and make up for what he's done, when he can't remember ever doing it? These are good questions that seem to strike right at the heart of both the technology and the episode's story, and yet the episode ends by betraying it completely: one of the stalkers (but only one, because Parallelism) is tried and convicted and sentenced to the same thing Charlie was, and he joins Brother Theo and the rest of the monks as a newly-minted mind-wipe who thinks he's a lifelong seeker of righteousness. I was kind of horrified by this, because it's such a stark middle finger in the face of Brother Edward's heartfelt pleas, but the episode (and the aforementioned Lurker's Guide) presents this situation as a unilateral good. So screw you, Brother Edward, and your apparently inconsequential existential horror! We're going to keep doing the same thing to everyone else, and it's going to be Right because we say it's right!
Thing 3: If personality replacement technology exists, and works so well at turning psychopathic murderers into servile monks that even when it fails the people in question meekly accept their own death as punishment for their previous life's sins, WHY ON EARTH ARE THE EVIL OVERLORDS OF THE UNIVERSE NOT USING IT ON EVERYONE??? There's your story. The people who have access to this power are the Psi-Corps, Earth Force, and the Centauri Empire, who you may have noticed are also the worst people in the entire galaxy. Why do they not have vast armies of cheerful slaves, with implanted personalities custom designed for maximum We Love Big Brother? If we don't see at least a strike force of helplessly loyal psychically-altered soldier-fanatics by the end of the series, I'm going to be very disappointed.
Thing 4: If you put 100 science fiction authors in a room and say "there's a technology that can remove someone's memories and give them a new personality," approximately 127 of them will write a story about a death penalty alternative that turns convicted killers into productive members of society and then one of the killers starts to remember their old life. It's literally the single most obvious direction to take that idea. I wrote a short story like that eight years ago, and everyone I showed it to said "yeah, I wrote this same story, you need to try harder." Earlier this year someone sold that same exact idea to Netflix, and JMS jumped on twitter and said "um, dude, I already wrote this," which is a) true, but b) remarkably forgetful of the fact that this story is such ridiculously low-hanging fruit that one of his own fans scooped him a full year before the episode even aired. THE QUALITY OF MERCY showed us a serial killer who was about to get his mind-wiped, and the entire viewing audience said "oooh, they should do an episode where that guy starts to remember being a murderer," and somehow JMS still thought it was an original idea. His take on it was certainly cool--my version of the story didn't have the neat monk/Gethsemane/atone-for-your-previous-self angle, which was ham-fisted but still awesome--but the core concept is as well-trammeled as an SF idea can get. We have a saying in science fiction: when you get a cool idea, and start thinking of stories you can tell about it, throw away the first three that come to mind. Dig deeper, and tell a story that no one else could possibly tell. Memory replacement technology is a cool toy to play with, but it's been around a long time, and you have to really try to come up with something we haven't already seen 127 times.
Obviously, as I said in the beginning, this episode worked for a lot of people. And stories, to be sure, live or die almost entirely on the strength of their execution, regardless of how original or cliche the central premise may be--that's why prime time TV can be an endless sea of cop shows and lawyer shows and doctor shows and people can still have preferences between them. Some people think the idea in PASSING THROUGH GETHSEMANE is clever, and some people think the idea is obvious but the execution is clever, and some people (like me) think both the idea and the execution were a wide miss. And the important thing about writing--one of the most important things, in my mind--is that no story is going to please all of those audiences, so don't bother trying. Tell the story you want to tell, and the people who'll love it will love it, and the rest of us can go and boil our heads. And people, to be sure, genuinely love this episode: that doesn't make them wrong or me wrong or anything else, it just means that they liked it and I didn't. That's how entertainment works. So I guess all I'm really complaining about here, in the grand scheme of things, is this: if you write a super-cliched story, don't complain when someone else sells their own version of the same super-cliched story to Netflix.
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