Episode 4.7: Epiphanies

So. Here we are.

At the risk of overstating what I already made VERY clear, I hated the last episode. The end of the Shadow War was so mind-bogglingly disappointing that it has taken me three and a half months to get back to the series and the blog. I knew it would out me off the show for a while, but I wasn’t expecting it to be that long. And honestly, even today, three and a half months later, I’m only back grudgingly. I finished a huge manuscript revision two days ago, spent all day yesterday playing Overwatch, and today I’m still  too tired to do anything productive so here I am. Let’s give this show another shot.

But here’s the thing: as much as I felt betrayed by episode INTO THE FIRE (yes, betrayed), there are still a lot of things I love about BABYLON 5. Some of the characters are great. Some of the stories it tells are wonderful. And as badly as it can botch a reveal, it can turn around and hit the next reveal right out of the park, if not the whole county. The Season 2 finale remains one of my all-time favorite TV moments, and characters like G’Kar and Ivanova are worth coming back to. So I do want to watch more, I just need to overcome my recent distaste by remembering all the great things the show has done in the past. I mean, after all: if I can get over season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery (which was so bad I felt personally attacked) and enjoy season 2 (which so far has been pretty great), I can get over anything.

I’m going to try something a little different today, mostly because (as mentioned) I am exhausted. Instead of watching the whole thing and then going back to write about it, I’m going to write as I go along. That might be a terrible way to do this, resulting in a blog post that only makes sense if you watch the episode while reading, but we’ll see.

Episode 4.7: Epiphanies

Wow, I’d forgotten how muddy the CGI is on this show. There was such a huge improvement partway through the run, between seasons 2 and 3, I think, so I had it in my head that it was really good now. But yeah, “really good twenty-one years ago” is not “really good today,” and three months away from the show has apparently given me time to reacclimate back to modern standards for special effects.

What looked like the “The More You Know” rainbow logo is actually Starfuries doing fireworks! Yay, the war is over! 

I couldn’t get a good look at the woman pulling Franklin onto the dance floor, and got excited for a moment thinking it was Erica Gimpel—the singer from WALKABOUT who I thought was a really cool character—but it turns out it was Richard Biggs then-fiance, who got to be an extra in this episode. Good for her.

I can’t help but wonder where all of these decorations came from? I wondered that about the fireworks, too, but for some reason all the balloons and streamers are throwing me for a loop. I understand that a city that’s just been through a war didn’t expend every single resource, down to the balloons, in the pursuit of victory. But does that also hold true for a space station? This is such a dumb question to ask. It’s not weird that they’re having a party with balloons. I AM SO TIRED.

That is a really shaky boom camera on that zoom-in on Sheridan’s face. Seriously, go watch it. 

Then we cut to a planet, which I didn’t realize was Earth until we saw Bester’s face. How do you screw up an exterior shot of Earth?

Also: Bester’s assistant dude is Victor Lundin! The first klingon to ever appear on screen! Apparently Psi-Corps wants to shut down B5, which: obviously that won’t happen, because the show is named after it. But at this point in the show I can’t discount some other crazy thing happening, so I guess we’ll see if this results in some other insane thing happening, though I don’t know what that would be. The station already declared its independence from Earth. What else can happen to them? Also also: is this the time for brainwashed Garibaldi to go all sleeper cylon and try to kill somebody or plant a bomb? Because if Psi-corps is trying to destroy B5, and if they really have suborned Garibaldi like I think they have, this is obviously the time to use him, right? Even if the series has plans for him down the line, the Psi-Corps itself does not: if they succeed in destroying B5 they will never have use for Garibaldi again. This is all or nothing. I will be very interested (and potentially very disappointed) to see how this shakes out.

I want to slap this Centauri minister, but I tend to want to slap every Centauri I see, so that’s not out of place.

I thought Londo was the acting emperor, but now apparently they’re declaring Minister Cogsworth as regent until they choose a new emperor? The only way that makes sense is if Londo knows there’s an assassination plot and this is his way of flushing it out by dangling Cogsworth as bait.

G’Kar is back on the station! And Franklin asks him why he didn’t take over leadership of Homeworld when the Narns were freed, and he gives some weak excuse, but all I really want him to say is “This show works better when Londo and I are on the station, so we’re giving up obvious progressions of our professional careers to come back and be ambassadors again. We call it the Status Quo Initiative.” To be fair, G’Kar’s excuse is actually a wonderful line, but I don’t buy it as a reason for G’Kar to shirk what is clearly his responsibility.

Right on cue, the show gives us a flashback to Garibaldi’s brainwashing room, completely with spooky music and a very creepy face drawn on a foggy mirror. Who doesn’t put smiles on the faces they draw in foggy mirrors? SOCIOPATHS AND SLEEPER AGENTS, THAT’S WHO.

He gets a priority call, encoded and for his eyes only. I paused it to say: this has to be his activation phrase or whatever, right? It’ll play some weird music, or a funky gif, or a photo of Angela Lansbury dressed as the queen of diamonds, and boom: Garibaldi’s eyes will dilate and it’s sleeper agent time. Right? Let’s un-pause and see.

I WAS RIGHT! For the record, it was a funky gif.

Garibaldi resigning was not what I expected. I don’t know what the Psi-Corps plan is, but it suddenly seems way more convoluted than it needs to be. What can they possibly be planning that’s more effective, and more efficient, than having the head of security ruin things from the inside? Time will tell, but the answer had better be reeeeeeally good.

There’s a Disney Planet! Which isn’t as funny as Disney World being an actual world, but that’s more of a Futurama-style joke anyway. This is the best way to tell this joke in this situation.

Garibaldi is talking about “getting out,” and says that because of their mutiny from Earth Force they can’t go home again. Where is her planning to go, then? Everyone is acting as if there’s somewhere he can actually go to get away from it all, but for most people that’s B5. Where can he go that’s safer than here? Will he become a...I don’t know, a space trucker?

Franklin finally asks him what he plans to do, and Garibaldi’s answer is “I’ll find things people lost in the war,” which doesn’t make any sense to me as a job, let alone as a company. What kind of lost things? How much will people pay to get these things back? 

What I really love about Garibaldi’s excuses for leaving is that they don’t make any sense at all, and they don’t have to. He can leave if he wants. It’s kind of perfect. (Though as a Psi-Corps plan it still doesn’t hold any water.)

Wait, how does Londo know who Zack is? Zack’s own mother barely knows who Zack is. Also: Zack’s weird little “aw shucks” shuffle when Londo appears is not in any way the kind of reaction I would expect when an ambassador/emperor/war criminal shows up on the station. Were these two dating and I didn’t realize it? Why are they acting so strange?

WHY DOESN’T ANYONE ON THIS SHOW ACT LIKE A RECOGNIZABLE HUMAN BEING?

Londo’s speech about “I can only accommodate so many requests” is genuinely funny, which is rare for this show. Well done.

Zack’s follow-up line is not remotely funny, though it was clearly intended to be. Such is Babylon 5.

Bester walking in partway through Zack’s speech is funny again. 

G’Kar’s speech to Garibaldi is wonderful. “Looking for you and failing put me in the right place at the right time to save my people.” I continue to not buy the idea that G’Kar knew Garibaldi well enough to feel compelled to go look for him, but I can console myself with the head-canon that he was divinely inspired to do one thing in order to put him in the right place to do something else. On the other hand: Garibaldi’s throwaway line was heartbreaking: “thank you for going out to look for me. You’re the only one who did.” Will the show ever come to terms with how poorly it has treated Garibaldi during and after his disappearance? Is Garibaldi fully aware of his own bitterness, or is that just a random piece of dialogue? It says a lot about the detail in the show, and my own investment in it, that one line can have such an impact.

On the other other hand: when G’Kar says “you were the one thing outside my own people that I cared about to go looking for,” I STILL DON’T BELIEVE IT. You can’t just tell us that people have relationships they clearly don’t have, Babylon 5, we’re watching the same show you are. We know that G’Kar and Garibaldi do not have and never have had the kind of relationship they say they do. That is not how relationships work. Show don’t tell, B5. 

The command staff is convinced that something is wrong with Garibaldi—but not that he has PTSD from being lost, or that he’s bitter no one came to look for him, or any of the very plausible emotional reasons for Garibaldi to do what he did. They’re convinced that shady doings are afoot. Babylon 5 has a really common tendency toward this style of storytelling, where the characters lean right into the episode’s plot without pausing to act like people first. To be fair, a LOT of books and movies and TV shows do this, so it’s not just B5, but it really stands out here because most of the other shows that do this are bad, and I never think of B5 as bad despite doing all these things that bad shows do. B5 is the best bad show I’ve ever seen, and that’s so hard to wrap my head around.

Looks like Earth wasted no time in slapping down B5 for its mutiny the instant the war ended. To be fair, the only strange part of this is that B5 did not immediately reach out to Earth the instant the war ended to talk about patching up their broken relationship. B5 won the war, not by itself but certainly as the leader of a multi-faction fleet, and it should get some political cred for that, but it’s worth pointing out that Earth was not one of those factions, and they’ve been a mess since the beginning of the series. It doesn’t not surprise me at all that they would throw a hissy fit and start flexing their power without reaching out to B5 first. But it seems very strange that B5 did not reach out to them. Actually, I take that back: it would have been very smart to reach out to Earth, but there is no one on the station right now who has the political acumen to have actually done it. Sheridan is very overtly not a diplomat, and none of his command staff has those skills, either. Sinclair would have done it—he was very much the “Earth ambassador” on the station full of ambassadors—but Sheridan is a warrior, and he thinks like a warrior, so I do kind of believe that this took them by surprise. I think it’s dumb, but it’s dumb because a competent character made an in-character mistake, and that’s the right way to be dumb.

Lyta is the only person on the station who doesn’t immediately let anyone who rings her doorbell come straight into her room unidentified. Maybe because she just got out of an incredibly abusive relationship with a Vorlon brain-rapist? She seems like she’s recovering well, though, so that’s good. “Good” in this case being defined as “she bought some mugs and a vase but not any furniture to put them on, so on second thought there might still be some serious lingering trauma.

Lyta has become self aware! She knows she’s in a TV show that doesn’t know how human relationships work, and she’s starting to complain about it. Good on ya, Lyta. Though if this turns into a budding romance between her and Zack, I’m going to slap my computer screen in the face.

Oh, good! Instead of going toward romance, it went toward “people think you’re a freaky Vorlon slave-mutant. Which is a much better direction to go.

Apropos of nothing: as much as I dislike the new B5 command uniforms, I dislike Zack’s weird little security vest even more. It looks like he hunted a vinyl sofa and claimed its hide as a trophy.

DAMN IT, B5, YOU WENT FOR THE ROMANCE. Not that I can blame him—Lyta is a straight up hottie—but Zack is such an unlikable dweeb that I really don’t want to see him at all, let alone in a romantic subplot that will require me to suspend my disbelief enough to believe that people like spending time with him.

I’m not sure what I expected from Londo and G’Kar’s inevitable meeting, but it wasn’t really this. “You helped save my people, but I still hate you for attacking them in the first place” does actually make a lot of sense, though. 

Lyta said that Bester would think of her as a “blip,” which I interpreted to mean “an unimportant bit of noise on the radar,” but then Bester used the same word when he saw her in the meeting. So maybe it has a real meaning, as a slang term for “unsanctioned psyker?” Is this a thing they’ve used before on the show and I just forgot? That’s totally possible.

Why is Zack in this meeting? Is he the new Garibaldi? Will he get a new uniform?

Bester is such a delightful weasel.

“The president of Earth knows you’ll come after him sooner or later.” Really? That’s some paranoid president, because nothing in the show points toward B5 hankering to attack Earth.

Lyta gives Bester a psychic boot to the head, and it is awesome.

I love how Sheridan gives his word to help, and Bester immediately tells them the info they need in return. Most villains would have waited until they had their part of the deal, but Bester knows Sheridan and trusts him to keep his word; when Sheridan says they’ll take him to Z’ha’dum, it’s as good as done. That’s great characterization, and the fact that I fully believe it is a sign of consistent characterization. Well done, B5. The exchange makes both Sheridan and Bester look cooler than before.

Earth’s plan to frame B5 is a good one, though given that Bester was ordered to destroy B5 I don’t necessarily believe him. Except that in all four seasons of the show, Bester has never actually lied: he’s a rat, but he’s an honest rat. I’m dying to know what the game is, here.

“I was dumb enough to hire you, so I’m dumb enough to quit now” is the weirdest possible way for Garibaldi to justify to Zack that he’s leaving. 

“The reports of our disloyalty have been greatly exaggerated” is slightly disingenuous thing for an infamous mutineer to say. It’s not that they’re loyal to Earth, it’s that they’re still good people; the dialogue focuses on the wrong thing. But that’s beside the point—the point is that Bester’s tip was right, and Earth was trying to kill some of its own ships and blame B5, and Ivanova was able to stop them. Woot! Which means that maybe Bester is actually on the level here, because he still needs B5’s help to get to Z’ha’dum and save his wife/girlfriend/whatever she was? And meanwhile he’s screwing them over in a totally different, possibly Garibaldi-related way?

Bester can tell that Lyta has received some impressive new psychic prowess, and I assume he suspects Vorlon involvement. He uses the “The Corps is mother” argument to try to get her to share the details with him, which implies that either he buys the company line about Psi-Corps loyalty (which is totally possible) or he thinks that Lyta does (which is a lot less likely for anyone who knows anything about her). I assume it’s the former, because every other psychic on the show has been devotedly anti-Psi-Corps, and the story is more interesting if we have a true believer to balance it out. 

The Shadows blowing up Z’ha’dum is cool, but the best part of the scene in the ominous cut to not Bester but Lyta, right at the end of the scene. “We’re still stuck with each other,” Sheridan says to Bester, and the repeats (for what is now the third time this episode) the line “it’s an imperfect world.” And then instead of a reaction shot from Bester, we get an ominous shot of Lyta, sort-of smiling but also kind of sinister. I don’t know if that means anything, but I liked it a lot.

Okay: that thing in the cryolab is the best bit of Bester we’ve ever gotten. I think he was admitting to setting up the whole jump gate attack purely as a way of getting Sheridan to trust him, thought it might have also been a reference to the original thing that got Bester’s lady friend captured and injured in the first place; I doubt it, but I don’t remember the details of it well enough to know for sure. For now I’ll pretend like it was the former, because that’s such a wickedly Bester-ish thing to do, and I love it. And he sells the hell out of it, too. I love this kind of acting, where it’s sedate and small but powerfully emotional—it’s a sign that the power is clearly coming from “good” acting and not just “lots of” acting. So much of what we typically see rewarded in the Emmies and Oscars and such is “look how far they went for this!” Roger Ebert once said that you could replace “Best” with “Most” in the Oscar categories, and they would be more accurate: this person did the Most Acting, this person did the Most Editing, this person made the Most Costumes, etc. Not in the number of jobs they did, but in the highly visible, over-the-top nature of them. Bester’s performance here is understated and powerful, and that’s rare, and that makes it that much better.

Lyta got a table, but it looks like her mattress is still on the floor.

Oh oh oh! Sheridan is calling out Lyta for Z’ha’dum-related shenanigans! And yet...as this conversation goes on, they rush right past the “you betrayed us” part of the conversation to get to the “you’re way stronger than you let on” part, which frankly seems like the wrong part to focus on. This feels like yet another example of us watching the outline for a series, instead of an actual series. In the moment, in the room, “you betrayed us” is such a bigger and more important issue, overriding all others, so that’s where the focus should be; but down the line, in future episodes, Lyta being some kind of mega-psychic is the issue that’s going to come back, so that’s the one this episode focuses on. It doesn’t work. I want to watch people who act like people, not gears in an epic story. Sometimes—including in this episode—B5 gets that balance exactly right. More often, though, especially in the hyper-compressed season 4, the balance is completely backward.

Lyta has the worst poker face ever. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more obvious liar. 

So they do eventually get around to the betrayal, but only as an afterthought. "While we're on the subject of HOW you betrayed me, let's also mention the fact that you betrayed me. Cool, moving on." Also: Lyta is so bad at lying I kind of think she’s trying to look guilty on purpose. Hmmm. On the other hand, we now understand that creepy shot of her face when the planet blew up.

The pizza box Zack brings is covered with extra crap. And yes, a Future Pizza Box should obviously have something shiny on it—I’m not arguing that. How else would we know it’s from the future? But it’s not a cool shiny printing process, it’s an extra shiny thing stuck on the top. With a bunch of extra other things stuck on as well. Part of me is annoyed by this because it looks like the props department printed a sign that said “Future Pizza” on their office printer and then used a glue stick to put that and an AOL CD on a pizza box covered with yellow construction paper. A bigger part of me, though, is thinking about those balloons in the beginning, and the seemingly bottomless resources of an embattled, embargoed city floating in a can in the middle of space. In season 1 they talked about how even prison was impractical in space, because storage and air and resources were so valuable it was just mathematically better to execute people instead so they stop taking up so much room. And that was a cool detail that lent the show just a tinge of hard-SF credibility. Now all I can think about is how many lives could have been saved if they’d jettisoned their warehouse full of balloons and streamers and shiny pizza decals. There’s a totally infeasible level of waste on this station, and it’s never stood out to me before but it’s really starting to bother me now.

As concerned as Sheridan is about the ships leaving Z’ha’dum, why didn’t he try to contact them or follow them? 

We end with a brief scene of Centauri Regent Cogsworth waking up to discover that he’s been infected with the same kind of mind control neck-eyeball parasite that Londo had in that episode where they went to the future. So we still don’t know what they are, but now we know how they got to Centauri Prime. It’s a great way to end an episode. 

This is not a standout episode by any means; it had no real focus, and only the Bester plot felt like a story—everything else was just moving the pieces around on the board to get us from INTO THE FIRE to whatever the next big thing is. Very few of the characters acted or reacted the way you would expect, and there is far too much Zack Allen for anyone to comfortably handle. But there were still some beautiful moments, most of them with Bester or G’Kar, that make a lot of the problematic stuff a lot easier to deal with. 

Most importantly, it’s helped wash some of the bad taste out of my mouth from INTO THE FIRE. I’m not in love with this show the way I sometimes have been, but I can totally get back into writing these blog posts about it.