Episode 4.14: Moments of Transition
There is a moment early in this episode when someone tells Neroon that death is just another part of life for a member of the Warrior caste, and I thought, "well, there's no way Neroon is living through this episode now," and sure enough he dies in the climax. And kind of pointlessly, too, which sucks, but at least it was an awesome self-sacrifice. We'll miss you, Neroon. At least until I do my season 4 retrospective and you show up very near the top of my favorite characters list.
You see, the Religious caste is losing the war pretty badly to the Warrior caste, and I don't know what the Worker caste is doing but they're only in the show because of the Minbari obsession with 3's anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter? Anyway: Delenn decides to surrender, and Neroon reports to his boss Shakira (or something very similar) that the best place to do it will be in the Special Ancient Thingy, because it will be a nice way to pay homage to history and let everyone on the planet observe. I suspected at the end of the previous episode that Neroon was still secretly working with Delenn, but this is what clinched it: something big is definitely going down in that Special Ancient Thingy, and he is a part of it. What that thing turns out to be is that Delenn has found a loophole in the surrender process, thanks to an old Minbari custom from pre-Valen days. If the Warrior caste wants to take over the world, she says, then they are turning their backs on Valen and his ways, and if they're doing THAT then obviously they need to honor the pre-Valen rituals, which includes (out of NOWHERE) this wacky thing with a beam of starlight (?) that can burn you if you stand in it for too long. The idea, see, is that the prospective leaders of the people would all stand in the circle, and whichever one lasted the longest got to be in charge because that person is clearly willing to die for his or her people. Which made it slightly less than believable for me that the leader of the Warrior caste refused to go along with it--I have never met anyone more willing to die in someone else's place than a member of the military. That's literally their job. This was kind of redeemed when Shakira turns out to just be a coward, and Neroon proves himself another level of awesome by stepping into the starlight to save Delenn, but then he immediately shouts that while he was born a Warrior his heart is Religious, so no: there are no good members of the Warrior caste, and they are all cowards and monsters, and their one good guy is actually just a Religious caste guy in disguise.
Why is it necessary for Neroon to give this deathbed abdication of all ties to the Warrior caste? It's not. And it's dumb, and it's obvious, and it's lazy. But I haven't expected layered nuance from this show since season 2, so obvious and lazy it is: we don't get an intricate moral system, we just get a good guy faction and a bad guy faction. Plus an extra faction that we never hear from, because the show can't conceive of any point of view not already represented in the brute force dichotomy of Good vs Evil.
Whatever, man. At least Neroon, weirdness aside, got an appropriately awesome sendoff--I don't know WHY he had to die in that star beam instead of just stepping back out again, but he proved himself a hero, and his sacrifice was moving even if it was unnecessary. Plus we knew he was going to die ever since that early conversation, which made the act itself a lot easier to come to grips with.
Back on the station, the B plot follows Garibaldi and Lyta and Bester, with a couple of unwelcome appearances by Zach, who is becoming my least favorite character so quickly that I almost feel like I'm cheating on Marcus, which doesn't even make sense. Garibaldi is working for William Edgars, a rich Martian dude and/or the Charlie's Angels guy, who's trying to smuggle allegedly non-dangerous things onto the station. Lyta is not working for anybody, because even on B5 no one will hire a psychic who isn't approved by the Psi-Corps. Bester is, I suspect, also working for Edgars, because he scans Garibaldi's mind right after he hires Lyta and then Edgars calls and says "you hired Lyta, fire her or lose your job," so Lyta does, and Bester is the only one who gets what he wants: authority over Lyta, who signs up as a covert agent of the Psi-Corps in return for a pay stipend and a contract saying Bester gets her body when she dies. Whether or not Bester's interest in Lyta is tied to Bester's association with Edgars is still up in the air. I'm more than a little disappointed, because Lyta working with Garibaldi would be way more interesting than Lyta working for Bester, but here we are. Let's just hope that the Psi-Corps doesn't constantly degrade Lyta they way they always did with Talia.
And then right at the end the show remembers that Sheridan and Ivanova are also cast members, and the final scene is--in the same style as ATONEMENT--basically just the first scene of the next episode, which has nothing to do with this one. As a storytelling device this technique rubs me the wrong way, but again: this was one of the first serialized prime time shows, and it's still figuring out the language of long-form storytelling, and I suppose I can forgive it.
At the end of the day, complaints aside, this was still a good episode that I enjoyed, if only because it focused so heavily on Neroon and Bester and Lyta and Lennier. If it had had G'Kar in a prominent role as well that would have been all five of my favorite characters in the show right now.
You see, the Religious caste is losing the war pretty badly to the Warrior caste, and I don't know what the Worker caste is doing but they're only in the show because of the Minbari obsession with 3's anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter? Anyway: Delenn decides to surrender, and Neroon reports to his boss Shakira (or something very similar) that the best place to do it will be in the Special Ancient Thingy, because it will be a nice way to pay homage to history and let everyone on the planet observe. I suspected at the end of the previous episode that Neroon was still secretly working with Delenn, but this is what clinched it: something big is definitely going down in that Special Ancient Thingy, and he is a part of it. What that thing turns out to be is that Delenn has found a loophole in the surrender process, thanks to an old Minbari custom from pre-Valen days. If the Warrior caste wants to take over the world, she says, then they are turning their backs on Valen and his ways, and if they're doing THAT then obviously they need to honor the pre-Valen rituals, which includes (out of NOWHERE) this wacky thing with a beam of starlight (?) that can burn you if you stand in it for too long. The idea, see, is that the prospective leaders of the people would all stand in the circle, and whichever one lasted the longest got to be in charge because that person is clearly willing to die for his or her people. Which made it slightly less than believable for me that the leader of the Warrior caste refused to go along with it--I have never met anyone more willing to die in someone else's place than a member of the military. That's literally their job. This was kind of redeemed when Shakira turns out to just be a coward, and Neroon proves himself another level of awesome by stepping into the starlight to save Delenn, but then he immediately shouts that while he was born a Warrior his heart is Religious, so no: there are no good members of the Warrior caste, and they are all cowards and monsters, and their one good guy is actually just a Religious caste guy in disguise.
Why is it necessary for Neroon to give this deathbed abdication of all ties to the Warrior caste? It's not. And it's dumb, and it's obvious, and it's lazy. But I haven't expected layered nuance from this show since season 2, so obvious and lazy it is: we don't get an intricate moral system, we just get a good guy faction and a bad guy faction. Plus an extra faction that we never hear from, because the show can't conceive of any point of view not already represented in the brute force dichotomy of Good vs Evil.
Whatever, man. At least Neroon, weirdness aside, got an appropriately awesome sendoff--I don't know WHY he had to die in that star beam instead of just stepping back out again, but he proved himself a hero, and his sacrifice was moving even if it was unnecessary. Plus we knew he was going to die ever since that early conversation, which made the act itself a lot easier to come to grips with.
Back on the station, the B plot follows Garibaldi and Lyta and Bester, with a couple of unwelcome appearances by Zach, who is becoming my least favorite character so quickly that I almost feel like I'm cheating on Marcus, which doesn't even make sense. Garibaldi is working for William Edgars, a rich Martian dude and/or the Charlie's Angels guy, who's trying to smuggle allegedly non-dangerous things onto the station. Lyta is not working for anybody, because even on B5 no one will hire a psychic who isn't approved by the Psi-Corps. Bester is, I suspect, also working for Edgars, because he scans Garibaldi's mind right after he hires Lyta and then Edgars calls and says "you hired Lyta, fire her or lose your job," so Lyta does, and Bester is the only one who gets what he wants: authority over Lyta, who signs up as a covert agent of the Psi-Corps in return for a pay stipend and a contract saying Bester gets her body when she dies. Whether or not Bester's interest in Lyta is tied to Bester's association with Edgars is still up in the air. I'm more than a little disappointed, because Lyta working with Garibaldi would be way more interesting than Lyta working for Bester, but here we are. Let's just hope that the Psi-Corps doesn't constantly degrade Lyta they way they always did with Talia.
And then right at the end the show remembers that Sheridan and Ivanova are also cast members, and the final scene is--in the same style as ATONEMENT--basically just the first scene of the next episode, which has nothing to do with this one. As a storytelling device this technique rubs me the wrong way, but again: this was one of the first serialized prime time shows, and it's still figuring out the language of long-form storytelling, and I suppose I can forgive it.
At the end of the day, complaints aside, this was still a good episode that I enjoyed, if only because it focused so heavily on Neroon and Bester and Lyta and Lennier. If it had had G'Kar in a prominent role as well that would have been all five of my favorite characters in the show right now.
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