Episode 3.15: Interludes and Examinations

Oh man, guys: remember BORN TO THE PURPLE? The only episode so bad I actually turned it off? There have been some recent episodes that made me want to give up, but only one in the history of the series that actually made me do it. BORN TO THE PURPLE probably isn’t the worst episode (at this point, I’d say that’s either TKO or SIC TRANSIT VIR), but it is the episode that broke me. Even TKO had a redeeming subplot; BORN TO THE PURPLE has nothing but dross. And lucky us, we get to watch a whole bunch of it again!

There are three major things going on in INTERLUDES AND EXAMINATIONS, all of them payoffs, and as a result the show feels simultaneously awesome and odd—there isn’t really a story, but there are three climaxes, and that’s a weird balance. All three payoffs are huge and series-altering, but only two of them are fun to watch because one of them is so deeply embedded in BORN TO THE PURPLE that it becomes impossible to care about. We'll talk about the bad one first, and save the good stuff for last. The idea is this: that one stripper who Londo kind of fell for and then never mentioned again (maybe once? I forget) is coming back! And we don’t know why but it doesn’t matter, because she’s not a character she’s a Macguffin. We’re supposed to believe, despite his utter lack of prior interest, that Londo is deeply in love with her, and that she is the light of his life and the wind beneath his wings, and there’s nowhere this could possibly be leading other than her death because there’s no other reason to be hitting these notes so hard. Well, and Morden pitching a huge fit and swearing vengeance is kind of a hint as well.

It turns out that Londo’s poisoning of Refa actually worked, and he's towing the line again, and this pisses off the Shadows, and they try to pretend that this somehow represents Londo going back on their deal even though Londo is 100% correct and he is fully within his rights to do everything he’s doing. And the Shadows can go ahead and be angry about it—they’re the villains, after all—but I don’t understand where this “you broke the deal” stuff comes from because it doesn’t hold any water. And I don’t think Morden is lying, I just think it’s written weird. Anyway. Morden looks for some way to get leverage on Londo, realizes that Londo is suddenly and conveniently in love, and decides to commit a murder. He does it via poison, apparently intending for Londo to blame Refa, which I guess makes sense but we've just spent the whole episode watching Morden plot to do it so it feels incredibly bizarre when Londo immediately jumps to an entirely different conclusion than everyone in the audience has already jumped to. The end result is that Londo, in his wrath, goes full supervillain and throws in with the Shadows again and vows to destroy anyone and everyone who's ever wronged him. And this is a Big Deal, but it doesn't work, and for so many reasons. For starters, we've seen what a powerful "Londo changes his heart" moment looks like, in the famed window scene in THE LONG, TWILIGHT STRUGGLE, and this is nowhere near that level. And then there's the Adira thing: even if that was purposefully planted in order to pay off here, it happened so long ago that nobody remembers it, let alone cares, which means that an embarrassingly large percentage of the screen time in this subplot is given up to black and white flashbacks to BORN TO THE PURPLE, so we can watch the whole story all over again and remind ourselves why we're supposed to care about this person coming back. This culminates in another flashback sequence when Londo sees her body, showing the poison conversation with Refa from CEREMONIES OF LIGHT AND DARK. All of these flashbacks serve as incredibly awkward replacements for actual storytelling: we don't see Londo falling in love with Adira, we just get a clip show assuring us that it totally happened and we need to just accept it and move on; we don't see Londo piecing together clues about Adira's death ant tying it to Refa, we just get a clip show assuring us that it's totally poison and Londo totally figured it out, and we need to just accept it and move on.

How great would it have been, if this Adira thing really was the plan all along, to bring it into Season 3 instead? To show them meeting, to get a few episodes with her in the background and him giving her the eye, and then eventually introducing himself, and then slowly falling in love? So that we could actually see and believe and invest ourselves in this relationship? It would serve to humanize (or Centauri-ize?) Londo in a way that this season was kind of trying to do anyway, and it would make the relationship and the eventual death actually mean something to the audience. The thing about love stories is the same thing about horror stories: you have to actually get the audience to feel the emotion the characters are feeling, or we won't care. WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING doesn't just tell us two characters like each other, it introduces us to both of them, and they demonstrate their lovable characteristics, and we spend time with them and fall in love with them, and thus we absolutely believe it when the characters fall in love with each other. If you don't love the love interest in a story, you won't believe that the character does either, anymore than you'll believe that they're afraid of something you're not afraid of. And this is something B5 has been guilty of since the beginning: sometimes they really sell a reaction or a relationship, but sometimes they just tell us that it's true and expect us to go along with it. If they took the time to develop those relationships, instead of dropping them for two and a half seasons and then reminding us with a kludgy flashback, they wouldn't have that problem. And the poison thing at the end is the same: why couldn't that time be spent in a conversation instead of a flashback? Why present the doctors has clueless and Londo as miraculously deductive, when it would be just as easy (arguably easier) to have him run up to the doctors and say "Oh no! what happened!" and they look at him and say "she was poisoned," and then Garibaldi says "Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt her? Or to hurt you?" and THEN Garibaldi can put two and two together and decide that it's Refa. As it is, the doctors are so mysterious about the cause of death, with no signs of break-in or struggle, that it only makes it look MORE like the Shadows did it. This is what we mean by "show don't tell": don't just tell us that Londo's in love with Adira, show it. Don't just tell us Refa poisoned her, show Londo figuring it out. Londo's snarling vow to destroy his enemies at the end of the episode is cool, and it promises cool things in the future, but the path we took to get there was about as awkward as possible.

In stark contrast to that plot, we have two other fantastic ones. In one of them, Franklin's stim use finally comes to a head: a fellow doctor calls him out for bad judgment, Franklin doubles down and almost kills a guy, and Garibaldi sees it all. He knows about the stims, so he tries to talk to Franklin about them, but the doctors refuses to admit he has a problem. Garibaldi's line here--"remember that I came to you first, and tried to help," is heartbreaking, because he and Franklin both know how this has to end now. Garibaldi goes to the other doctor (played by Jennifer Balgobin, who you probably recognize as...this doctor, because this was her biggest role; her imdb page literally lists one of her parts as "Attractive Woman (uncredited)"). He does his standard Garibaldi thing of circumventing proper procedure, but here we can see very clearly WHY he so often disregards procedure: because getting Franklin's blood tests through proper channels means creating a paper trail, which means Franklin will 100% lose his job when the evidence comes out. Garibaldi would prefer to keep this quiet and try to approach Franklin personally at least one more time, with evidence in hand, to try to convince him to get help. Attractive Doctor (uncredited) refuses to get involved, but she does tell Garibaldi where to find the tests, and--shock!--Franklin sees them talking. He's been so angry all episode that we totally expect the worst now, but the show stays true to its characters, and Franklin has always been the moral center of the main cast, so he swallows his pride and examines the blood tests on his own, and realizes that yes, he has a problem. He and Garibaldi have an incredibly touching conversation about this, and it's super sad, and Franklin ends up going to Sheridan and resigning. And not to harp on it, but you know how easy it would have been to short circuit this whole plotline and show some flashbacks instead? Show us some stim use, and maybe the previous Garibaldi intervention from A DAY IN THE STRIFE, and boom. Done. But that wouldn't have had the power that this version has, and boy is it powerful. SHOW DON'T TELL, PEOPLE.

(Note: In Franklin's tragic confession of addiction he says that medicine can be reduced to math: if the traces in your blood are under a certain percentage, you're not addicted, and if they're above it, you are. That is not even remotely how medicine or addiction or biology in general works. But the scene and the story behind it are still awesome, so I'm going to overlook it. Except for this mention of it.)

The final plot, and the biggest of the three, shows Sheridan struggling to gather the League of Unimportant Aliens into some kind of united front against the Shadows: some people want to fight, others want to hide, and most just want to save themselves. He knows that the only way to beat the Shadows is to work together, but how do you convince them to unite? By getting one good victory, to show they can be beaten. And since we apparently don't remember the previous episode in which we learned that psychics are the key weapon for defeating the Shadows, Sheridan goes to the only weapon he DOES remember: the Vorlons. We haven't seen Kosh in a long time, but don't get too attached to him again because [SPOILER REDACTED] at the end of this episode. Sheridan confronts Kosh, and when I say 'confronts' I am not mincing my words: it is the psychic angel-monster version of a knock-down, drag-out fight in the hallway. Sheridan curses and screams at Kosh for refusing to step up to the plate and actually fight the damn war he's been preparing for three years to fight, and Kosh lashes back both verbally (calling Sheridan "disobedient" was the really creepy one) and with a series of Darth Vader force chokes that really hit home how bad things are getting. It is a much angrier conversation than I expected, but--as always happens with the Vorlons--there is more going on that we realize. Kosh eventually concedes, and promises to attack the Shadows, but warns "there will be a price." Sheridan (and the audience) interprets this to mean that Sheridan will someday have to pay for his insolence, but what's really going on here is that Kosh knows the Shadows will kill him in reprisal. It's not that the Vorlons are refusing to help, it's that they know they only have one good card, and they're waiting until the optimum moment to play it. So the Vorlons go out and kick the crap out of some Shadow ships, and then Morden breaks into Kosh's quarters with a bunch of invisible Shadows and they murder the living hell out of Kosh. Like, there's no other way to put it. We don't see the fight, just shots of Morden's face, but we know Kosh is super outnumbered, and we hear some painful sound effects, and we see his helmet in the aftermath looking like a dump truck ran over it. "There will be a price," and Kosh paid it. The League of Unimportant Aliens (which includes a new guy with a ridiculous bowl cut) are inspired by the Vorlon victory, and band together to fight the Shadows, and that's awesome, but out final shot is Kosh's living ship, which can't live without him, flying away sadly to die alone in space.

The most effective part of this whole sequence, and honestly of the entire episode, is that the Shadow fight scene we don't see is intercut with Sheridan having a dream: Rance Howard is back as his father, and gives him a heartfelt farewell that Sheridan slowly realizes is not his father at all, but a vision from Kosh. Kosh tells him he was right, that the Vorlons were afraid and waited too long, and that when he's gone Sheridan shouldn't feel bad because he made the right call, and this was the right thing to do. That's two for two so far on the single best moments of the entire season being Kosh appearing as a lead characters' father: first G'Kar's, and now Sheridan's. The scene was terrifying and sad and uplifting all at once, and I don't know if people who aren't writers know how hard that is to do. Admire the scene for what it is--a powerful payoff to a multiseason storyline, and poignant farewell to a major player--but let me assure that the technical artistry behind the scene is every bit as stunning as the scene itself. DUST TO DUST is still a better episode overall, I think, because it's not saddled with a clunky flashback subplot, but this sequence is the absolute high point of the season so far, and one of the highest points of the series.

I'd say goodbye to Kosh, but...he's already here.