Episode 1.13: Signs and Portents

And now we’re really getting into it. I know this episode is important because the season arc is named after it, but it’s also telling a good story instead of just relying on importance to see it through. That’s always a good sign.

Babylon 5’s B-plots tend to be weak, as I’ve said before, or they tend to be strong and then end weak. This episode gives us not only a B-plot but a C-plot, one of which merges with the main story halfway through and one of which starts weak and then ends really strongly. All three plots work together to tell a good story and set some really big boulders rolling down the hill. Lets start with the A-plot, which sees Londo receiving a secret shipment from a secret criminal contact, which for some reason he chooses to do in public, in full view of everyone, while snarling loudly about the true nature and import of the shipment: it’s “The Eye,” which has great political power among his people. Even though everyone in the entire station appears to overhear this conversation, Londo and the writers pretend that it’s still a secret, and go to great lengths in all subsequent scenes to make sure that nobody knows they have it.

Londo’s friend/acquaintance/temporary ally Lord Kiro shows up, bringing for some reason his aunt Ladira, even though Kiro intends to betray everyone and Ladira will only complicate that. The real reason she comes along is that she’s psychic, and we need her to prophesy the destruction of the station. Kiro jokingly tells Londo not to worry about it, because sometimes her visions come true and sometimes they don’t: “On my first birthday she predicted that I’d be killed by shadows! Ha ha! Sounds ridiculous, right?” Dear reader, no one in all of storytelling history has been more clearly telegraphed to die than this idiot in this scene. Also: does Kiro have a pseudo-russian accent? I don’t remember one. Is he just from a different part of Centauri than Londo is? But then why does his aunt have an accent? Centauri culture continues to elude me.

Meanwhile in the B-plot, raiders keep attacking merchants and B5 keeps not being able to stop them, so they decide to send out a wing of starfighters to try to capture some and figure out what’s going on. In the early episodes Sinclair always went out with the fighters, but lately they’ve been having Ivanova do it, which is good because so far she’s had a painfully undefined role on the station and on the show; she’s basically just an air traffic controller, and sometimes acts like the First Officer but rarely ever gets treated like one. Now she’s the “Go out and shoot this problem” officer, like Garibaldi but in space, and it’s giving her a more active role. The next big raider attack turns out to be a decoy, because they’re just trying to get the raiders away from the station long enough to attack Lord Kiro and steal The Eye, and this kind of works except that a) Kiro’s actually working with the raiders, because he wants to use The Eye to become the new Centauri emperor, except that b) the raiders are no longer working with him, ha ha, take that Kiro, plus c) Sinclair figures out that the raider attack is a ruse and brings Ivanova back in time to almost stop the raiders from getting away. Ivanova and her fighters take out all the little raider ships, but the big ship gets away, and then suddenly a new jump gate opens and a mysterious ship we’ve never seen before flies out and blows them up. Wah wah. Next time maybe don’t make fun of your psychic aunt, Kiro. I don’t think the “shadows” that kill Kiro are the same as the ancient “treats us like ants” ship that Catherine Sakai ran into several episodes back, on Sigma-whatever-it-was, but maybe?

While all of this is going on, a weaselly guy that nobody likes is going from ambassador to ambassador, politely asking them what they want: he’s not offering to do anything, he just asks what they want. And for some reason they keep telling him, which made no sense to me though by the end I was starting to believe that maybe he had some kind of psychic power compelling them to talk to him. After an initial scene played purely for laughs, in which G’Kar and Londo snipe at each other in a goofy, slapsticky way, it gets deadly serious when G’Kar tells Weasel that he wants to see the Centauri pay for everything they’ve done to the Narn. He goes into significant detail, and it is not pretty. There’s some pathos in this when Londo tells Weasel of similar dreams of power, but doesn’t mention the Narn at all: G’Kar wants revenge, but Londo just wants a return to past glory. It reminded me of the college football rivarly between BYU and Laramie, which only Laramie knows about: as far as BYU is concerned, their rival is the U of U, and Laramie isn’t even on their radar. Somehow, knowing that the Centauri aren’t really concerned about the Narn makes the Narn seems that much more dangerous.

Delenn, meanwhile, also meets Weasel, but sprouts a triangle on her forehead (I’m not making that up) and refuses to talk to him. This is our first hint that Weasel is more dangerous and/or powerful than we thought, but the big kicker comes when he tries to talk to Kosh: there’s something about his face in this scene where he’s just waiting in the ahll for Kosh to walk by, that looked genuinely spooky instead of just weaselly. “Is this guy actually threatening?” I asked myself. “Is he actually important instead of annoying?” The answer is a resounding yes: we don’t actually see his encounter with Kosh, but we learn in the aftermath of the big space battle that one of the casualties was Kosh’s environmental suit—it was damaged, though he doesn’t tell anyone how. It’s a tiny line, thrown away by Garibaldi at the end of a long list of other damage, but in context of what we know about Vorlon, and what we saw in that hallway, the ramifications are HUGE. We don’t know what Weasel did to Kosh, but the fact that he could do anything and get away with it are honestly pretty terrifying.

In the end, Londo is pretty sure his career is over for losing the eye, but then Weasel shows up with it and hands it over, asking nothing in return and then disappearing. His last line is literally just a ghostly voiceover, in case we didn’t get the hint that he’s officially Creepy now. Londo asks and he can repay him, and Weasel says “We’ll find you,” and for some reason Londo doesn’t poop his pants. If someone handed me an undamagaged artifact from a ship that had already been blown up, giving me the power to make a run at the reins of the empire, and then disappeared into thin air and used a psychic voiceover to tell me they’re coming back for an undisclosed favor in the future, I would treat that with a lot more gravity than Londo seems to.

According to wikipedia, Weasel’s real name is Morden. It also says that he represents the Shadows, which we’d already figured out from context because a) Kiro was killed by “shadows” and b) the ship that killed Kiro is the only thing that could have retreived The Eye that Morden shows up with. So they’re obviously associated, and they’re obviously going to do something big in the future of the series—Delenn goes so far as to say “They’re here!” after her triangle shows up to warn her about Morden, so we know they’re a big deal.

Speaking of Delenn: the other big “revelation” in this episode is when Garibaldi, brought into Sinclair’s confidence about the time the Minbari kidnapped him, tells Sinclair that the Minbari are the ones who chose him to lead the station. Didn’t we already know that? Like, as early as THE GATHERING? Myabe it was just implied before, and is now made explicit, but it was weird to have that dropped like a bomb when it’s something we’ve already known for a while.

Anyway: great episode. I’m excited to see where all these plot threads go.