Episode 3.21: Shadow Dancing

This was a mixed episode for me: one half very good Franklin stuff, and one half “check your phone” space battle. I’m not going to talk much about the space battle half, because all you need to know is that they fought the Shadows and won, but with massive casualties (to unnamed alien extras; no main characters were harmed). We do see that, yes, the primary psychics used to attack the Shadows were Minbari, and we also see that Marcus continues to be hopelessly in love with Ivanova, but I still think that relationship is going nowhere. Marcus is either dying in the next episode or hanging on for another season, and I suspect that either way he’s going to profess his love for her and she’s going to rebuff him. But, other than that: the good guys fight the bad guys and mostly win, and nobody has any big character moments, and no one resolves or kicks off a mystery. There’s some stuff at the end, but you can just skip the plot itself and go straight to the aftermath and still know everything you need to know.

What’s worse, you can see them struggling to find a way to depict the space battles in an interesting way, and it still doesn’t work. The new innovation is a big holographic room that Sheridan can stand in and watch the battle and shout orders, and that’s obviously what it is even before Delenn finally deigns to tell him that, which I think is ridiculous: she literally refuses to tell him until the actual battle starts, and then they turn it on and expect him to be an expert in the interface without any practice or warm-up, which is dumb, but not really the point. The point is that even with Sheridan standing there in open space, watching the ships swirl around him, the battle is still boring. Someday I’m going to have to compare B5 to something like Battlestar Galactica, so see what the latter did to make the battles work, and what unknown balls B5 keeps dropping. 

The Franklin stuff, on the other hand, is great. We start with a conversation between Garibaldi and Zack, in which Garibaldi worries that he mishandled the situation when Franklin left: “Sometimes when somebody leaves it’s because they want to be alone, and sometimes it’s because they want to see if you care enough to follow them.” That’s a profound observation of human nature, and while I don’t think Franklin falls in the latter category it’s certainly interesting to think about it.

Franklin himself is out wandering, and stumbles onto some kind of Down Below mugging or mobster hit; he steps in to help, and gets stabbed and abandoned for his troubles. No one will help him, including the guy he saved, and he realizes that he’s finally gotten the one thing he wanted on his walkabout: he’s found himself, and now they get to talk. Richard Biggs plays both parts: the real Franklin bleeding to death in a hole, and the dream Franklin in full uniform who taunts and abuses him. Because, as Franklin says later, he really doesn’t like himself: he’s a man who tries to be good, but with a long history or running away from other people’s opinions. He didn’t want to get fired, so he quit; he didn’t want his father to be disappointed in his military career, so he left to become a doctor. He’ll do incredible things if he can do them in the dark—his underground railroad for psychics, for example, which isn’t mentioned here because his alter ego is focusing on the bad stuff—but when he has to confront somebody in person he crumbles and runs away.

Toward the end of this plotline, the real Franklin starts repeating the phrase “I want to start over,” which feels like the wrong sentiment here, but it’s only a few degrees off at worst. I don’t know what I want him to say instead, but I don’t feel like the conversation led us to that point specifically. But he starts fighting to drag himself out somewhere people can see him, and dream Franklin starts screaming at him to move move move, and that didn’t feel right either: I feel like dream Franklin was either being a jerk to motivate real Franklin, because that’s what he needed, or he was being a jerk because Franklin is kind of a jerk, and now he’s confronted that side of himself and has to deal with it. I think the episode was trying to have it both ways, but I don’t think it totally clicks. The latter conclusion is the one Franklin himself draws while sitting in medlab, and it’s a powerful moment of character growth, and I really liked it.

In the end, the two plots converge when the survivors of the space battle are brought back to medlab while Franklin is recovering, and he looks out and sees all the people suffering and dying and realizes that part of this problem is caused by him: it was his responsibility to be here and help them, and he ran away instead and now it’s chaos. This is never said out loud, but you can read it on his face as plain as day, and it’s—again—a powerful character moment. He gets up, his wounds already treated, and drags himself to a desk to start issuing orders. He brings an instant sense of order to the chaos, and when Sheridan shows up he asks for his job back, which Sheridan readily grants. I feel like Franklin has really changed, and I hope to see a little more surety from him in the future to reflect it.

The episode ends with two neat little Delenn/Sheridan things. First is a Minbari ritual that I find delightful; it’s clearly a mating ritual, though never described as such, because the two are being almost pointlessly cagey about the nature of their relationship at this point, but whatever. Delenn says that men show a false face to the world when they’re awake, putting on a facade of power or authority or competence or even likability. It’s customary, then, for a woman to watch a man while she sleeps, to see if she likes the face she sees when he’s completely and fully unguarded. I don’t think this would actually work in practice, but it’s a delightful folk tradition, and the clearest sign yet that there’s something serious going on between them. So the final scene shows Sheridan asleep, and Delenn watching with a weird, beatific smile, and then someone arrives on the station and walks toward his quarters in first person viewpoint, and then Delenn picks up the snow globe and we know that the person coming is Sheridan’s old wife, because we saw this scene already in one of Delenn’s visions in WAR WITHOUT END. So Mrs. Sheridan shows up, and Delenn drops the snow globe, and roll credits. It’s a cool ending, and I’m excited to see what’s up with the presumed-dead wife, especially because she went missing on the same mission that turned Morden into the Mouth of Sauron. Is she possessed or brainwashed by the Shadows? Is she a sleeper agent? It can’t be anything good, and the next episode is the finale, so buckle up I guess.