Episode 3.12: Sic Transit Vir

Halfway through this episode I was seriously considering how to gracefully bow out of this blog. It was a perfect summation of my closing statements in my last post: I worry that this show is simply not for me. The first half of this episode was SO BORING. And it wasn’t “bad,” I just didn’t care about any of it. And since plenty of people—including a good 95% of my readers on this site—are fans of the show who love it, it doesn’t seem fair or productive to spend any more time bagging on a perfectly good show that you all love and I simply don’t get into. We’re only halfway through the series, not counting the movies—do you really want to sit through two and a half more seasons of me saying “meh, a bunch of stuff happened but I don’t care”? If I hated the episodes I could mock them, and if I loved them I could praise them, but if I just shrug and say “I bet this is awesome if you care what happens” that’s mostly just wasting everybody’s time.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through this episode, I got interested. It turns out that Vir is the Centauri Schindler, running a host of illegal programs and forgeries to help get Narn off of Homeworld and out into freedom. This is something I can get behind. This is a story.

The interesting-to-Dan portion of the episode lasted a couple of minutes, but at least it was there.

About three-fourths of the way through this episode, the show doubles down on the Nazi parallels--and goes very thoroughly off the rails--in a long scene with Vir’s fiance, Lyndisty, which I think was supposed to be shocking or tragic but mostly just reminded me of the Nightwatch from last week: simply put, this show has no idea how to paint their villains in shades of gray. The Nightwatch are either lazy morons, or snarling, deformed murderers. Lyndisty is either a cute, Allyson-Hannigan-esque dreamgirl, or an emotionless, dead-eyed sociopath. There is no middle ground. She tries to convince Vir that it’s okay to kill Narns, because they’re basically just animals anyway, and she’s done it hundreds of times with her dad when he'd bring her along to help "cull the herds." And there are two things about that:

1) Yes, Nazi Germany was full of "Good Germans" who looked the other way and allowed atrocities to happen. Yes, the imperialist history of the human race is full of powerful civilizations oppressing, torturing, and traumatizing cultures and ethnicities they consider to be inferior, often in unimaginably horrible ways. But the vast majority of those "Good Germans" were not dispassionate monsters who delighted in the shedding of blood. Look around at our culture today: even among the hardcore Trump supporters who are one hundred percent behind, say, the keeping of immigrant children in cages, or detaining muslims and at the border, or the policies that allow for the shooting of unarmed black men, most of them are not going to speak in glowing tones about the "hundreds" of politically undesirable sub-humans they've personally killed. Most of them are not going to be okay with the extra-legal execution of a defenseless man tied up on your bedroom floor. There are absolutely people who WOULD be okay with that, and I'll get to them in a minute, but the vast majority would not, and I think that these kinds of depictions of racists as slavering monsters are harmful to us as a society because they make it so much harder to recognize the more common type of racist when we see them. Modern politicians can stand up in public and say that we have to keep Muslims out of our country because they're inherently dangerous, and people can hear them and say "but he's not racist, though, because he's not personally slitting their throats while they're tied up on his floor." And no, of course I'm not saying that our current national crisis is directly caused by Babylon Five's over-the-top depiction of systemic racism twenty-five years ago. But I am saying that we, as a culture, are very bad at recognizing problems below a certain scale because our media is very good at ignoring everything below that scale and focusing on the extremes. Lyndisty isn't bad because she refuses to recognize the personhood of another race, she's bad because she personally murdered hundreds of people and talks about it in a sweet voice. So, to sum up point one: I believe that people like Lyndisty exist, just like I believe that people like the Nightwatch thugs exist, but if this show wants me to take it seriously as a nuanced depiction of complicated realities, it needs to at some point show some nuance.

2) How do I know that the show is trying to present a nuanced depiction of complicated realities? Because NOBODY PUSHES BACK. If your goal is to present us with an obvious, over-the-top villain, awesome: I like those just as much as I like nuanced villains, but you have to be willing to commit. You have to balance that over-the-top monster with an over-the-top hero. Sheridan no longer has the backing of Earth Force's fleet (if he ever had it at all), so he can't just fly into Centauris space and start freeing people, and I understand that. You could even make the argument that he can't openly decry the Centauri government as murderers and war criminals, because of the possible repercussions if they decide to swoop in and blow him up; I think he could get away with it, but you could make the argument that he couldn't. But Sheridan's disconnection from Earth also means that he can say whatever the hell he wants to, now that he's no longer beholden to the treaty that stifled him at the end of Season 2, and here's his big chance and he says nothing. He and Ivanova are alone in a room with Vir and Londo, and Londo goes ON AND ON about how murdering Narns is a good thing, and trying to save them is awful, and Vir should be ashamed of himself, and neither of them calls Londo on ANY of it. Babylon 5 is its own political entity now--they can say whatever they want--and neither of them thinks to stand up and tell this mass murdering asshat to go screw himself. Vir I can understand staying quiet--it is in his character to do so--but Sheridan and Ivanova are the two characters with the least amount of patience for evil, and the most amount of power to say something about it, and nobody does. They don't stand up against the Centauri empire, they don't stand up to Londo, they don't even stand up for Vir--nobody ever says "hey, come on now, he's saving tens of thousands of lives!" NOBODY. And then at the end of the episode, when Lyndisty Mengele says her goodbyes, Vir apparently STILL HOLDS OUT HOPE that he can make their marriage work. Watching his moral disgust at Lyndisty's description of culling Narn villages was the only good part of this whole episode, and by the end he's forgotten it. He makes the old, cliched "what relationship DOESN'T have its ups and downs?" joke, and smiles to himself like this is an 80s sitcom, because she may be a cold-blooded Nazi psychopath but she's also a great kisser who kind of sort of looks like Allyson Hannigan. A little T&A covers a multitude of sins, I guess.

The show wants to have it both ways: villains who are allowed to be extreme, but heroes who are forced (without explanation) to be subtle. And while the first half of the episode bothered me because nothing happened, the second half bothered me because I didn't believe it. Vir turns out to be Oskar Schindler, and Lyndisty turns out to be an alt-right comment section, and nobody treats either situation with anything approaching the gravity it deserves. The best Ivanova can muster is to very quietly take over some broken portion of Vir's underground railroad, and the best Sheridan can muster is to listen to Ivanova's moral triumph for maybe twenty whole seconds before cussing her out for sitting in his chair. And we close with the visual joke of Sheridan's photo retouched to look like a Centauri, ha ha ha.

I just DON'T CARE. If the show's not going to take itself seriously, why should I? And to bring this back around to my opening paragraph: I know that most of you loved this episode. I know that this story worked for you, and that you saw things in it that I didn't, and that means it was effective and powerful--and if a work of art is effective and powerful for some portion of its audience, then it is doing a good job and is Good Art. So why am I complaining about it? Why should I have to sit through 60 more episodes, and you sit through 60 more blog posts, if it's just going to make us frustrated and angry?

I will stick with this for a few more episodes, hoping that it either becomes good enough ro bad enough to make my responses interesting, but I am, as I said, seriously considering just dropping this whole project.