Episode 3.10: Severed Dreams

There we go. After two episodes that could have been awesome but mostly missed the target, we finally get a bullseye. SEVERED DREAMS isn’t the best episode of the season (I assume it won the Hugo because it was big and flashy, but DUST TO DUST is still better, and we’re not even halfway through), but it was certainly up there, and it did right what so many others did wrong. Aside from another long “check your phone” fight scene, and a clichéd slow clap at the end, this episode was practically perfect.

We begin with Londo, trying (wisely) to get off the station. He gripes about how the new Narn security staff are incompetent and unreliable, and then the Narn TSA guy who overhears won’t let him board the ship—he claims his identity card doesn’t work, but we have no way of knowing if that’s true or if he’s just getting revenge. It's funny, but it doesn’t go anywhere, because we never see Londo again and the fact that he’s trapped on the ship for what turns out to be a full-scale rebellion from Earth doesn’t matter. Oh well.

Then we get a space battle between two Earth Force battleships, and who’s in charge of the rebel one but Bruce McGill! I usually like to refer to guest stars by the names of their best-known characters, but how do I do that will Bruce McGill? He’s been in everything. Maybe Jack Dalton from MACGYVER? D-Day from ANIMAL HOUSE? He was on RIZZOLI & ISLES for seven years, but I didn’t watch that one. In the end I think I’ll link him to the finest piece of art he’s ever been a part of, and refer to him as Sheriff Farley from MY COUSIN VINNY. So anyway, Sheriff Farley is a Major in command of the EAS Alexander, which is supposed to be Hague’s ship but we later learn that Hague died in battle and/or the actor wasn’t available that day. They don’t want to actually fire on their own friends, which might explain why so many of the rebel ships lost so decisively in the last episode, but eventually his acting XO, Jackie Chiles from SEINFELD, convinces him to pull out the big guns and blow up the other ship. Sheriff Farley gives a touching speech, and off they go to B5 to refuel.

Sheridan is still not ready to fully commit to the resistance movement he's nominally in charge of, but he still wants to help the Alexander so he kills the station's communications and gives a--credit where it's due--awesome speech to the bridge crew: yes they're rebels, but they're also humans, and we're going to help them. This "only one foot in the door" approach to armed rebellion only last for another twenty minutes or so, when the EAS Churchill shows up and warns of a massive Earth Force fleet racing toward them. Mars is refusing to enforce the President's illegal orders, and several outer colonies (notably Orion 7, if that matters) are actively seceding, so President Clark is trying to lock down as many of the big outlying outposts as he can before losing them altogether, and B5 is arguably the most important of those strategically. He's also bombing civilians and generally being a full-on psycho dictator, so it is inevitable that Sheridan finally pulls the trigger and announces that B5 is now seceding as well.

Meanwhile we get two fantastic conversations. One is pretty one-sided: Delenn goes to the Grey Council and tears them a bunch of new buttholes, giving what is now the episode's third amazing speech. She rants, she stalks, she shames them, and at one point she even grabs a guy's staff and breaks it in half with her bare hands--she doesn't break it over her knee, just holds it in the air and snaps it like a twig. Electrical bolts run across it as she does, but I don't know if that's an effect of the staff itself or if she used Jedi powers or what. Anyway: she calls them out as cowards, shows them all the receipts that say she's been right about everything from the beginning and they all refused to listen, and then tells them if they're not going to cowboy up and do their jobs they may as well disband the Council completely. Most of them seem to agree, and leave with her, presumably to help her but only after they've applied plenty of ointment to those sick burns.

The second conversation is right before the Earth Force fleet arrives, when Sheridan calls his father to say a coded goodbye. His father turns out to be Rance Howard, who is primarily known as Ron Howard's father, but who I'm going to refer to as Bryce Dallas Howard's grandfather. His imdb credits are mostly just "Old Man" and "Irate Farmer," in about two hundred different shows and movies, and here he plays yet another irate farmer, griping about corn while the world falls apart around him. He's not oblivious, though: he knows what's going on, and he knows why Sheridan is calling, and he manages to say without saying it that he knows what Sheridan is going to do and he supports him all the way. He'll probably still get arrested if that call was being monitored, but he's down for it. At one point he asks "what did I always tell you when you were a kid?" and Sheridan says "don't start any fights, but if somebody else starts one make sure you finish it," and the fact that that's what his father always told him explains a whole heck of a lot about Sheridan.

Sheridan signs off, then announces to the entire station (in awesome speech number four, for those keeping score at home) that the President has gone off the deep end and broken the constitution and killed his own civilians and enough is enough: B5 is declaring independence, and a fleet is coming to stop them and he is going to fight back. Everyone gets ready for the battle, and I was, I admit, about 90% certain that Sinclair and Babylon 4 were going to show up to help fight them off--we saw that vision of the future back in BABYLON SQUARED, of Garibaldi fighting off boarders, and this would have been a perfect time to bring that full circle, but alas it was not to be. I assume that will come in the season finale, then, fighting the Shadows? I guess we'll find out.

What follows is a protracted space battle, interspersed with a protracted gun battle when a breacher team tries to board the ship, and it's much of a muchness and nobody cares (see my rant about fight scenes from two weeks ago). Short version: the rebels are losing, until Delenn shows up in the Defiant with a big fleet of Minbari warships at her back. She tells the Earth Force ships to stand down, they tell her to go suck an egg, and she delivers a patented "JMS badass one-liner:" "Only one human commander has ever won a battle against a Minbari fleet, and he's behind me. You're in front of me. I suggest you move." The humans deliberate for approximately one second before swinging their ships around and going home. And this is awesome, and yay we won, but it brings up a question I had back in MESSAGES FROM EARTH: the Defiant, more properly called the White Star, is a recognizably Minbari ship: even before it appeared at the front of a Minbari fleet, it was obvious where it had come from. So were Sheridan and Delenn and the Secret Ranger Club at all worried that flying it over to Mars and attacking a research station would be seen as an act of war by the Minbari? Apparently not, because the Agamemnon saw them and showed that footage to everyone and nobody asked the Minbari why they were attacking Mars. And sure, it's not a standard Minbari ship type, but it's still obviously Minbari. But I guess that doesn't matter anymore, because any "diplomatic stealth" it may have had in the past is gone now, and from now on anyone who sees it will know where it comes from. Though that then begs the further question: will anyone put two and two together, compare the footage from this battle with the footage from Mars, and ask why Minbar tried to blow up an Earth research station? Even if Earth Force keeps the Mars attack quiet (which I assume they will, because Shadows), the fight with the Agamemnon was public knowledge. That's bound to have some political repercussions, right?

Anyway. This was a great episode, and I liked it a lot, and I didn't even talk about the great scene where a news crew tried to report the truth about Orion 7 and got raided by shooting soldiers. The episode ends with a stupid slow clap, followed by an awesome slow zoom on an old Nighwatch poster--vandalized, but not torn down--saying that traitors will pay for their crimes. It's a great mix of bittersweet: we won this battle, but the war is far from over.