Episode 1.14: TKO

Um.

So the first thing you need to know before I start this reaction post is that I loved—and I may be one of the only people in the world who loved—the Battlestar Galactica boxing episode. Yes, they were running for their lives, and yes they had better things to do, but slowing down for one episode to do a big “get it all out there” character episode was great. They tied up some character arcs and advanced a few others, and I thought it worked really well. TKO is Babylon 5’s boxing episode, and it does not work well at all.

It’s hard to say which is the A-plot and which is the B, because they both get more or less equal time, but the episode is named after the boxing story so I’ll call that the A. In a neat break with B5 tradition, then, this means that the B-plot is the good one, while the A-plot is a mess. And one of the reasons the B is so good is the same reason the BSG boxing episode was so good: because it is firmly grounded in a character we know and like, and we get to watch her come to terms with a major event in her life. The story begins with a Rabbi arriving on the station, and since I’m still so steeped in the bizarre, areligious world of Star Trek it was a pleasant surprise to just see a guy in a suit and a yarmulke—Ivanova, it turns out, is Jewish, and not some weird form of Space Jewish but actually really Jewish. This is refreshing on an SF show, and I dug it. Her father died back in BORN TO THE PURPLE, and she still hasn’t done anything about it or, we learn, even told Commander Sinclair. This is shocking to Sinclair because he apparently considers them to be very close friends, even though we’ve never seen Sinclair and Ivanova interact socially or even jovially. He feeds her the same line he gave Garibaldi a few episodes ago—“I couldn’t run this station without you,” which I suppose is what Sinclair thinks friendship is, so whatever. They’re friends now. Sinclair gives her time off to sit Shiva, which she doesn’t want to do because she still hates her father for all kinds of childhood trauma, but by the end of the episode she comes around and realizes she needs to forgive her father and mourn him and move on. The entire storyline is closely-observed and well-acted and rings emotionally true, culminating in a short but powerful Shiva. We get to know Ivanova better, she gets to know herself better, and it’s a great story.

Then we’ve got this stupid boxing story.

Both the A and the B plots are steeped in culture and tradition and respect: they’re not just about doing something, they’re about doing something the Right Way. The problem with the A-plot is that the Right Way is an over-the-top stereotype of asian martial arts mysticism, projected onto a poorly-defined culture that is referred to as “Alien” in the same way that your racist uncle thinks Africa is a country. I keep calling this a boxing episode, but really it’s a sport/tradition/something called Mutai, because if you’re going to make up an alien martial art there’s no reason to work any harder than changing a few letters in Muay Thai and calling it a day. Mutai is overseen by the Muta-Do, who is such a ridiculous stereotype of an old chinese kung fu master that he even has the accent, despite being an alien. Mutai is alternately depicted as a vicious blood sport and a deeply honorable ceremony, which fits so well with the history of Western culture simultaneously demonizing and deifying Asian culture that I’d almost think it was on purpose, if the writing was a little more self aware. Rest assured that it is not. A human boxer, framed for cheating back on Earth, has come to Babylon 5 to make a name for himself as the first human to compete in the Mutai, and he does, and then he goes home. That’s the story. Allegedly he learns about respect along the way, but only in the thinnest possible terms. And he’s not even a main character, and we are never given any reason to care about him, so yeah. That’s it.

The boxer in question is named Walker Smith, and he’s an old buddy of Garibaldi’s, which means that once again, as with SURVIVORS, we have an episode that’s kind of about Garibaldi but doesn’t actually involve him growing, changing, or learning anything. The Ivanova story focused on someone we liked, and continued an arc we were already familiar with; the boxing story is about some rando who shows up, calls a bunch of aliens some racist epithets (“Snakehead” was the main one, directed at the Muta-Do), and then punches a bunch of guys in the face for ten minutes. And to their credit, at least they gave us a real fight: none of the early Mutai scenes look anywhere near as vicious and deadly as Garibaldi keeps claiming they are, but the final fight against the champion is every bit as brutal as you could ask for. Compare this to Star Trek Voyager’s pit-fighting episode, which even went so far as to hire Dwayne The Rock Johnson to be their scary alien bruiser, and yet never managed to feel dangerous or visceral. TKO, at the very least, gets that part right. But it’s the only part they get right, and at the end of the day this was a pointless detour away from a fascinating five-season plot to spend an entire episode on a story that doesn’t matter about a character we don’t care about. Good plan, Babylon 5. It’s like reading a good book where one of the chapters was randomly replaced with an unrelated short story, and also that story is racist. And just to rub some salt in the wound, the one hint at a character arc that we’ve seen Garibaldi demonstrate in the past—a plunge back into alcoholism—is completely erased now, as he sits in a bar and cheerfully drinks water while Smith downs a pint of Space Beer. I mean, good for Garibaldi for staying clean and everything, but sooner or later this show needs to give him something meaningful to do because he’s starting to get boring.

I’m glad I watched this episode, because the Ivanova stuff is great. But boy howdy that boxing stuff was a disaster. Let’s hope we get back to the real Babylon 5 in the next episode.