Episode 4.3: The Summoning
How can an episode filled with so many important moments be boring?
We have five major plots going in this episode. The most interesting is the one that doesn't matter: Emperor Cartagia wants G'Kar to scream, so he tortures him in increasingly horrible ways until finally provoking one. The end. This plotline feels weaker than it should because although G'Kar is in it, he is primarily defined by his silence, so we don't get any juicy Andreas Katsulas acting to sink our teeth into. Even his big moment, where he endures 39 lashes before screaming, is played wrong--we needed a pause before the scream, to make it clear that this is a choice and not a reaction to Cartagia's torture. As it is, it's just a guy being whipped and then screaming, which is certainly impactful but not really dramatic, in the theatrical sense. It hasn't told us anything, except that a guy got whipped and then screamed. This plotline does give us the episode's best scene, though, when Cartagia confronts Londo and Vir in a garden and tells them that if G'Kar doesn't scream he's going to kill him. Cartagia's casual brutality in this scene is absolutely stellar--Cartagia has been a consistently wonderful villain--all done while washing G'Kar's blood off his hands, and culminating in a perfect moment where he pours the bloody water into a bush. But then the scene keeps going for a few extra, misguided seconds, and Cartagia ruins the moment by booping it on the nose and giving a little speech about blood and water and life and death, and for crying out loud just let the moment breathe. So yeah, it's the best of the five plotlines, because it focuses on character and emotion rather than moving pieces on a board, but it still steps wrong in its two key scenes. That should tell you a lot about my feelings on the rest of the episode.
What else? Oh yeah: Zack goes out in a Starfury to look for Garibaldi, because why not? Everyone can fly a Starfury, they're like cars. And even though he has no good reason to look in the right place, he does, and he finds Garibaldi and brings him home. And Garibaldi lays in the medbay for a bit and then wakes up and goes back to work, and people kind of react to these things but they also really, really don't, and the entire thing seems simultaneous rushed and really drawn out--I guess a better way of saying this is that the things we see happen are not the things that we need to see happening. Garibaldi has been missing for so long, and is found more or less at random, and returns with zero ceremony or sense of reunion. Remember when I said last time that Garibaldi and Franklin are one of the few believable friendships on this show? Well NOT ANYMORE, because there are absolutely zero scenes of "Hey buddy, you're back! I'm so glad you're okay! It's so good to see you! I was worried sick!" Garibaldi's sick, and Franklin heals him, and then there's some little conversation about not remembering anything about his time away, and then there's the standard "You're still sick you should stay in bed!" conversation, and then he's right back at work. Now, I get that this is all being set up for a future plotline--Garibaldi has been either brainwashed or given an implanted psychic personality, Talia-style, and that's why he was so easy to find, and that's why the show doesn't have time for any of this joyful reunion nonsense because that's not what this Garibaldi story is about, it's about him acting as a sleeper agent for the Psi-Corps. But it SHOULD be about a joyful reunion, in addition to the other stuff, because that is exactly what would happen in real life between real people, and sometimes this show needs to get out of its own way and let its characters act like human beings instead of note cards in an outline.
And while we're on the subject, the continuing distinction between Garibaldi's and Sheridan's situations is really starting to bug the crap out of me. Every voiceover keeps separating them ("It's been X number of days since Sheridan went missing, and since Garibaldi went missing"), and now their dual return throws even more light on the differences: Sheridan returns to massive pomp and circumstance, and crowds are in awe, and people react with emotions, but Garibaldi returns to basically nothing. He gets the same emergency room treatment any injured hobo from Down Below would get (because that's the medbay's job), and then...welcome back, I guess. We don't have time to react to your shocking return, we're too busy reacting to SHERIDAN LOOK IT'S SHERIDAN HE'S THE MAIN CHARACTER YAY HE'S BACK. And some of that can be explained by the fact that they thought Sheridan was dead, but a) no they didn't, or they would have given Ivanova a field promotion to station commander a lot sooner than the nearly two weeks they spent without one, and b) any reasonable assessment would have determined that Garibaldi was dead as well. It's the same situation. Sheridan is certainly more important politically, and his return was purposefully staged for maximum effect, but I'm not talking about politics or spectacle. Nobody welcomed Garibaldi back, or talked to him like a person, or treated him like a friend. On a show that continues to insist that everyone has some kind of close friendship with Garibaldi, this is beyond weird.
Also: remember that episode last season when Ivanova and Marcus went out to recruit some Old Ones to join their war? So did the show! And despite the fact that those Old Ones have yet to left so much as an ancient finger in actually fighting the war, Ivanova decides that what they really need are MORE Old Ones to join their team, so she zooms off in a White Star and, let's see, Marcus isn't doing anything so why not send him along with her? Randomly looking for Old Ones without any reason or any idea of where they might be turns out to be as fruitless as we all thought it would be, which is nice, but it does give Ivanova and Marcus to have a terrible conversation about romance that is either Marcus confessing his feelings for her or Marcus not having the courage to confess his feelings for her, and either way I don't care because it is terrible. The man had one good line last episode, and I thought he had turned a corner into interesting-ness, but nope. Get bent, Marcus.
You know what else is going on in this episode? Ulkesh is treating Lyta even worse than before, but whereas before it was "my employer is an inscrutable alien," now it's just full-on "my employer is an abusive boyfriend from Criminal Minds." It's one thing to ask her to do a lot of hard, even violating stuff as a part of her job, but to pointlessly demand that she have no furniture or possessions of any kind? And then just in case you didn't Get It, the next conversation between them describes their relationship in the most rape-y terms possible, and ends with him mind-slapping her into a wall. There is no reason for any of this behavior except to telegraph the idea that the "subtle" phase of the series outline has ended, and the Vorlons are bad guys now, so get with the program, audience. And indeed, the one thing Ivanova discovers out in her failed mission is a massive fleet of thousands of Vorlon ships, including one "3 to 4 miles across," which destroys a planet.
I have trouble accepting this as a plot twist. The ultimate motivation of the Shadows, as ham-fisted as the reveal may have been, still goes a long way toward explaining why a species so mind-bogglingly powerful would spend so much time being subtle: they don't want to destroy everything, they want to foster a dangerous environment in which only the strongest of the younger species will survive and thrive and become even stronger. It makes sense, then, that they didn't just blow up everything on sight. But why, we are now forced to ask, if the Vorlons have such incredible power and a massive fleet of planet-killing spaceships, did they spend three seasons dicking around with prophecies and manipulation? Why raise up Sheridan as their galaxy-saving messiah if they didn't actually need him? Alternately, if they DID need him before but don't anymore, what changed? What caused the Vorlons to just throw up their hands and start burning the galaxy to the ground? Other than the series outline, I mean, which is clearly in the driver's seat here. None of the motivations are in place, and most of the dots that might make this work are still unconnected, but doggonit the outline says the Vorlons are an active military antagonist now so buckle up and watch them turn on a dime. And yes, they've always been creepy and kind of untrustworthy and dangerously fascist. They fact that they would eventually become an antagonist is not on trial here: I even predicted it last week, and thought it sounded like a great development. What I'm complaining about is the speed and lack of nuance. I wanted to watch people slowly come to realize that the Vorlons were just as dangerous as the Shadows, and maybe show that they're stuck in the same kind of Faustian bargain with them that the Centauri are with the Shadows, but no: the script says they're evil now, so they Death Starred a planet full of babies and puppies and now the heroes can fight them without any shades of gray to get in their way.
All of these threads (except the Centauri one) come together in the final scene of the fifth and biggest plot, which is the return of Sheridan. Most of the early bits of this plot involve Delenn trying to get the League of Unimportant Aliens to help them invade Z'ha'dum, to which the aliens rightly reply that invading Z'ha'dum is dumb. "But we have to attack!" says Delenn, "The date is already set!" Well, Delenn, you're the one who set that date, and you did it based on grief without any military intel to back you up, and the aliens are 100% right about absolutely everything throughout the entire episode. And then Sheridan shows up and makes them look dumb, which is the wrong way to handle this because they weren't: based on the facts they had access to, invading Z'ha'dum would have been stupid. Sheridan showing up with proof that it can be done, and vital data to help make it happen, changes the situation completely, but the way it's presented it looks like Delenn was right all along, which she technically is but only because of pure luck and oblivious hope. Also, Sheridan's speech is filled with missteps: he starts off by saying "I WAS dead, but I got better," which is a great line but really undermines his "I survived Z'ha'dum so you can too" angle. Then he refers to himself as "the only man to survive Z'ha'dum," which a) again, isn't really true, and b) is terrible marketing. "The man who nuked Z'ha'dum in the face" would make it sound like a victory; that's a repeatable act we can all be inspired by. "The man who went to Z'ha'dum alone and without backup and STILL kicked its ass" makes him sound like a conquering hero. When he lists his accomplishment as surviving it makes him sound weak, like he barely got out by the skin of his teeth, and that's not the image he's trying to convey. At least he's smart enough to not say "I was brought back to life by a magic man with lateral nostrils," which would really hit home how much his plan relies on bravado and deus ex machina.
Also: could they have possibly telegraphed Sheridan's appearance any harder? That alien ambassador was one step away from saying "Unless Captain Sheridan himself steps gets up on this stage right now and says we can do it, we'll never do it!" I mean, it was SO OBVIOUSLY Sheridan on that mysterious ship, and a dramatic reveal is good and all but they dragged that out well past the point where it was a surprise to anyone when he finally showed his face.
At the end of the day, the show just waved its hands and said "The missing characters are back now, and the Vorlons are evil. Go!" and now we start a new phase of the story. It skipped a whole bunch of steps to get us there, but we knew we'd get there eventually anyway so part of me's actually glad we jumped over the interim stuff and got right to the meat. I've heard that Season 4 is filled with this kind of glaring abbreviation, as they didn't know if they'd get a fifth season and thus had to cram two years' worth of story into one. I hope the other compressions are smoother than this one, because wow. But I'm also excited to get to the next bit, so yay.
We have five major plots going in this episode. The most interesting is the one that doesn't matter: Emperor Cartagia wants G'Kar to scream, so he tortures him in increasingly horrible ways until finally provoking one. The end. This plotline feels weaker than it should because although G'Kar is in it, he is primarily defined by his silence, so we don't get any juicy Andreas Katsulas acting to sink our teeth into. Even his big moment, where he endures 39 lashes before screaming, is played wrong--we needed a pause before the scream, to make it clear that this is a choice and not a reaction to Cartagia's torture. As it is, it's just a guy being whipped and then screaming, which is certainly impactful but not really dramatic, in the theatrical sense. It hasn't told us anything, except that a guy got whipped and then screamed. This plotline does give us the episode's best scene, though, when Cartagia confronts Londo and Vir in a garden and tells them that if G'Kar doesn't scream he's going to kill him. Cartagia's casual brutality in this scene is absolutely stellar--Cartagia has been a consistently wonderful villain--all done while washing G'Kar's blood off his hands, and culminating in a perfect moment where he pours the bloody water into a bush. But then the scene keeps going for a few extra, misguided seconds, and Cartagia ruins the moment by booping it on the nose and giving a little speech about blood and water and life and death, and for crying out loud just let the moment breathe. So yeah, it's the best of the five plotlines, because it focuses on character and emotion rather than moving pieces on a board, but it still steps wrong in its two key scenes. That should tell you a lot about my feelings on the rest of the episode.
What else? Oh yeah: Zack goes out in a Starfury to look for Garibaldi, because why not? Everyone can fly a Starfury, they're like cars. And even though he has no good reason to look in the right place, he does, and he finds Garibaldi and brings him home. And Garibaldi lays in the medbay for a bit and then wakes up and goes back to work, and people kind of react to these things but they also really, really don't, and the entire thing seems simultaneous rushed and really drawn out--I guess a better way of saying this is that the things we see happen are not the things that we need to see happening. Garibaldi has been missing for so long, and is found more or less at random, and returns with zero ceremony or sense of reunion. Remember when I said last time that Garibaldi and Franklin are one of the few believable friendships on this show? Well NOT ANYMORE, because there are absolutely zero scenes of "Hey buddy, you're back! I'm so glad you're okay! It's so good to see you! I was worried sick!" Garibaldi's sick, and Franklin heals him, and then there's some little conversation about not remembering anything about his time away, and then there's the standard "You're still sick you should stay in bed!" conversation, and then he's right back at work. Now, I get that this is all being set up for a future plotline--Garibaldi has been either brainwashed or given an implanted psychic personality, Talia-style, and that's why he was so easy to find, and that's why the show doesn't have time for any of this joyful reunion nonsense because that's not what this Garibaldi story is about, it's about him acting as a sleeper agent for the Psi-Corps. But it SHOULD be about a joyful reunion, in addition to the other stuff, because that is exactly what would happen in real life between real people, and sometimes this show needs to get out of its own way and let its characters act like human beings instead of note cards in an outline.
And while we're on the subject, the continuing distinction between Garibaldi's and Sheridan's situations is really starting to bug the crap out of me. Every voiceover keeps separating them ("It's been X number of days since Sheridan went missing, and since Garibaldi went missing"), and now their dual return throws even more light on the differences: Sheridan returns to massive pomp and circumstance, and crowds are in awe, and people react with emotions, but Garibaldi returns to basically nothing. He gets the same emergency room treatment any injured hobo from Down Below would get (because that's the medbay's job), and then...welcome back, I guess. We don't have time to react to your shocking return, we're too busy reacting to SHERIDAN LOOK IT'S SHERIDAN HE'S THE MAIN CHARACTER YAY HE'S BACK. And some of that can be explained by the fact that they thought Sheridan was dead, but a) no they didn't, or they would have given Ivanova a field promotion to station commander a lot sooner than the nearly two weeks they spent without one, and b) any reasonable assessment would have determined that Garibaldi was dead as well. It's the same situation. Sheridan is certainly more important politically, and his return was purposefully staged for maximum effect, but I'm not talking about politics or spectacle. Nobody welcomed Garibaldi back, or talked to him like a person, or treated him like a friend. On a show that continues to insist that everyone has some kind of close friendship with Garibaldi, this is beyond weird.
Also: remember that episode last season when Ivanova and Marcus went out to recruit some Old Ones to join their war? So did the show! And despite the fact that those Old Ones have yet to left so much as an ancient finger in actually fighting the war, Ivanova decides that what they really need are MORE Old Ones to join their team, so she zooms off in a White Star and, let's see, Marcus isn't doing anything so why not send him along with her? Randomly looking for Old Ones without any reason or any idea of where they might be turns out to be as fruitless as we all thought it would be, which is nice, but it does give Ivanova and Marcus to have a terrible conversation about romance that is either Marcus confessing his feelings for her or Marcus not having the courage to confess his feelings for her, and either way I don't care because it is terrible. The man had one good line last episode, and I thought he had turned a corner into interesting-ness, but nope. Get bent, Marcus.
You know what else is going on in this episode? Ulkesh is treating Lyta even worse than before, but whereas before it was "my employer is an inscrutable alien," now it's just full-on "my employer is an abusive boyfriend from Criminal Minds." It's one thing to ask her to do a lot of hard, even violating stuff as a part of her job, but to pointlessly demand that she have no furniture or possessions of any kind? And then just in case you didn't Get It, the next conversation between them describes their relationship in the most rape-y terms possible, and ends with him mind-slapping her into a wall. There is no reason for any of this behavior except to telegraph the idea that the "subtle" phase of the series outline has ended, and the Vorlons are bad guys now, so get with the program, audience. And indeed, the one thing Ivanova discovers out in her failed mission is a massive fleet of thousands of Vorlon ships, including one "3 to 4 miles across," which destroys a planet.
I have trouble accepting this as a plot twist. The ultimate motivation of the Shadows, as ham-fisted as the reveal may have been, still goes a long way toward explaining why a species so mind-bogglingly powerful would spend so much time being subtle: they don't want to destroy everything, they want to foster a dangerous environment in which only the strongest of the younger species will survive and thrive and become even stronger. It makes sense, then, that they didn't just blow up everything on sight. But why, we are now forced to ask, if the Vorlons have such incredible power and a massive fleet of planet-killing spaceships, did they spend three seasons dicking around with prophecies and manipulation? Why raise up Sheridan as their galaxy-saving messiah if they didn't actually need him? Alternately, if they DID need him before but don't anymore, what changed? What caused the Vorlons to just throw up their hands and start burning the galaxy to the ground? Other than the series outline, I mean, which is clearly in the driver's seat here. None of the motivations are in place, and most of the dots that might make this work are still unconnected, but doggonit the outline says the Vorlons are an active military antagonist now so buckle up and watch them turn on a dime. And yes, they've always been creepy and kind of untrustworthy and dangerously fascist. They fact that they would eventually become an antagonist is not on trial here: I even predicted it last week, and thought it sounded like a great development. What I'm complaining about is the speed and lack of nuance. I wanted to watch people slowly come to realize that the Vorlons were just as dangerous as the Shadows, and maybe show that they're stuck in the same kind of Faustian bargain with them that the Centauri are with the Shadows, but no: the script says they're evil now, so they Death Starred a planet full of babies and puppies and now the heroes can fight them without any shades of gray to get in their way.
All of these threads (except the Centauri one) come together in the final scene of the fifth and biggest plot, which is the return of Sheridan. Most of the early bits of this plot involve Delenn trying to get the League of Unimportant Aliens to help them invade Z'ha'dum, to which the aliens rightly reply that invading Z'ha'dum is dumb. "But we have to attack!" says Delenn, "The date is already set!" Well, Delenn, you're the one who set that date, and you did it based on grief without any military intel to back you up, and the aliens are 100% right about absolutely everything throughout the entire episode. And then Sheridan shows up and makes them look dumb, which is the wrong way to handle this because they weren't: based on the facts they had access to, invading Z'ha'dum would have been stupid. Sheridan showing up with proof that it can be done, and vital data to help make it happen, changes the situation completely, but the way it's presented it looks like Delenn was right all along, which she technically is but only because of pure luck and oblivious hope. Also, Sheridan's speech is filled with missteps: he starts off by saying "I WAS dead, but I got better," which is a great line but really undermines his "I survived Z'ha'dum so you can too" angle. Then he refers to himself as "the only man to survive Z'ha'dum," which a) again, isn't really true, and b) is terrible marketing. "The man who nuked Z'ha'dum in the face" would make it sound like a victory; that's a repeatable act we can all be inspired by. "The man who went to Z'ha'dum alone and without backup and STILL kicked its ass" makes him sound like a conquering hero. When he lists his accomplishment as surviving it makes him sound weak, like he barely got out by the skin of his teeth, and that's not the image he's trying to convey. At least he's smart enough to not say "I was brought back to life by a magic man with lateral nostrils," which would really hit home how much his plan relies on bravado and deus ex machina.
Also: could they have possibly telegraphed Sheridan's appearance any harder? That alien ambassador was one step away from saying "Unless Captain Sheridan himself steps gets up on this stage right now and says we can do it, we'll never do it!" I mean, it was SO OBVIOUSLY Sheridan on that mysterious ship, and a dramatic reveal is good and all but they dragged that out well past the point where it was a surprise to anyone when he finally showed his face.
At the end of the day, the show just waved its hands and said "The missing characters are back now, and the Vorlons are evil. Go!" and now we start a new phase of the story. It skipped a whole bunch of steps to get us there, but we knew we'd get there eventually anyway so part of me's actually glad we jumped over the interim stuff and got right to the meat. I've heard that Season 4 is filled with this kind of glaring abbreviation, as they didn't know if they'd get a fifth season and thus had to cram two years' worth of story into one. I hope the other compressions are smoother than this one, because wow. But I'm also excited to get to the next bit, so yay.
I buythe Vorlons' heel turn. They are authoritarian law and order sorts, and have been working on the total victory by subtle means plan for a long time. The people who know them best have repeatedly advised against pushing theor time tables , to wait because this is not exactly the right time. And npw there is a setback. The keystone of their plan is dead, and and they feel rushed into it. Also their opponents are gaining ground, amd they have more of an all or nothing approach than the Shadows. They are more than happy to burn a few villages/civilizations to make it clear that it is a bad idea to resist their authority. While they are able to see this as bad on others, they can't in themselves.
ReplyDeleteIt is maybe morenhuman than it should be...