Episode 1.15: Grail
I’m of two minds on this episode: on one hand, it’s silly nonsense unconnected (I hope) to the larger arc of the series. On the other hand, Kosh gets one of the best lines in the series so far, and David Warner can act circles around pretty much everyone else in the world. I can watch him in anything, even (apparently) a low-rent Don Quixote about a space redneck and his pet tentacle monster.
There’s no A-plot/B-plot shenanigans in GRAIL, just multiple sides of the same story; Babylon 5 is at its best when it does this, and it was definitely the right choice here. A construction worker who helped build the station (and, it turns out, Babylons 1-4 as well) is in debt to a hayseed gangster played by Larry from Newhart; he has two thugs working for him, but sadly never identifies them as Darryl and Darryl. Larry wants his money ASAP, and demonstrates his seriousness by using a weird tentacle monster to suck out another debtor’s memory, leaving her catatonic. This is the fourth or fifth time he’s done this, so it becomes a problem for the whole station, and when Dr. Franklin realizes it’s a brain-sucker monster even Londo gets involved, because the brain-sucker comes from Centauri space. He demonstrates the true gravity of the situation by immediately locking himself in his quarters, while “get a load of this goof” music plays on the soundtrack. The show really wants us to understand that the brain-sucker is a Big Problem, but they also want us to laugh at Londo for being afraid of it. Holy crap do I hate the way this show treats the Centauri. Garibaldi does his thing (ie, carry out an interesting and competent investigation), Sinclair does his thing (ie, be in the right place at the right time to find the bad guys without Garibaldi’s help), and there’s a big shootout resulting in the death of Larry and the brain sucker, and then Jinxo the construction worker learns a valuable lesson about self-actualization and sails off into the sunset.
That would be an okay enough episode, I guess, but not a memorable one and certainly not up to par with Babylon 5’s best efforts. It’s very clearly a “something for the Trek fans” episode, which so far has filled at least half of Season 1, and which works so much worse on B5 than it would on Trek because the show is trying to be something it’s not. It’s not terrible, but it’s not part of B5’s core competency, and it’s obvious even now that the show is going to be incredible once it gets out of its own way (or, more likely, once the producers get out of the show’s way) and does what it’s good at it.
But! The episode is elevated immensely not by a B-plot but by a B-character: a guy who’s unrelated to everything going on, but who makes it all better because he’s participating in it anyway. This is David Warner, playing a guy named Aldous Gajic, who for some reason is searching for the Holy Grail in outer space. Yes, the literal Holy Grail—cup of Christ, Aurthurian legend, the whole nine yards. Why is her looking for it in space? “Because I’ve already looked everywhere on Earth,” is the hilarious, almost word-for-word explanation he gives. And it’s stupid, and everyone on the ship knows its stupid (except the Minbari, who consider him a holy man because he’s dedicated his life to “seeking,” which is apparently a thing in their culture), but it doesn’t matter how stupid it is because he’s played by David Warner. He goes around, and he talks to the various ambassadors, and he takes Jinxo the construction worker under his wing to teach him the ways of Pointlessly Searching For Imaginary Things, and the thing is: David Warner makes it work. He gives long speeches about his old life, and his lost family, and the way the search has given his life meaning, and it is riveting. He sells every ridiculous word of it. It’s almost bad how good his acting is, because he makes the people around him look like first-year community theater volunteers. And yes, that’s not a fair comparison, because most of his scenes are played against Jinxo, who is also a guest star. David Warner turns an asinine character into a noble figure, and when he dies in the final gunfight it is tragic and poignant. I don’t know how “Let’s do an episode about a guy asking aliens if they know where the Holy Grail is” ever got out of the writer’s room, but casting David Warner was a masterstroke. My only regret is that the character’s dead now so he won’t be coming back.
And honestly, I’m being a lot harsher on this episode than it deserves. It’s not bad, like I said, just silly, and a lot of that silliness comes from the writing not quite managing to sell the concept; one more pass on the script might have made it amazing, which I suppose is more support for JMS’s eventual decision to write all the episodes himself (GRAIL is one of the only ones written by somebody else). And yes, it includes a lot of B5’s classic logistical errors, like everyone other than Garibaldi doing Garibaldi’s job for him, but it also includes a lot of classic B5 touches that this show does better than anyone else. One of my favorite tropes on Babylon 5 is “someone takes a problem to each of the four ambassadors in turn, and they all handle it differently,” and GRAIL has a nice spin on that. Delenn treats him with over-the-top reverence, Londo tries to scam him out of some money and then loses interest when Vir Cotto ruins the con, and Kosh freaks out Jinxo so bad they end up running away. Sadly, G’Kar does not appear, because the universe is cruel.
The reason Kosh freaks out Jinxo is part of the build toward my favorite moment of the episode: you see, Larry from Newhart keeps the brain-sucker-monster in a Vorlon encounter suit, as a way of tricking the rubes on the station into believing that he’s got the Vorlons on his side. When Sinclair tries to explain this to Kosh at the end of the episode, Kosh keeps asking why: Why is he using a Vorlon suit? Because he wants people to think you’re working together. Why? Because that’ll keep people scared. Why? Because the way you act makes everyone scared of you. Kosh pauses just a bit at that last one, then says “Good.” and walks away. It’s genuinely chilling. I love the way this show treats the Vorlons as mysterious, inscrutable spectres, and I love the way they go all in on it. We know virtually nothing about them, except that they’re powerful and they like to keep people intimidated, and every time they appear in an episode they only get more interesting. This is the kind of thing that Babylon 5 excels at: slow-rolling a deep mystery, keeping us intrigued and excited to learn more. I wish it could be done with David Warner still alive and not a lunatic, but at least we got him for one joyful episode. The memory of it will keep me warm on long nights.
Until a brain-sucker-monster steals the memory for a midnight snack.
Oh!I forgot to add that Ivanova, mostly forgotten in this episode, gets a wonderful moment at the end. Jinxo is convinced he is (as the name implies) jinxed, and that the station will be destroyed as soon as he leaves it. It's a dumb conceit in an episode full of dumb conceits, but it gives us a great bit at the end where his ship flies off into a gate and the command staff watch it nervously, waiting to see if their station blows up. It's honestly not nearly as funny as they obviously wanted it to be, and that's the director's fault, but when the the ship disappears and the station doesn't explode everyone laughs and says "No Boom," and Ivanova says "Today." It's perfect--it's her entire character boiled down into one word. Of course the show ruins it by hammering the point home for another 30 seconds in case you didn't get it--"no boom today, but it's coming! We're going to eventually get a boom!"--but for just that moment you can tell that they know their characters inside and out, and that they've communicated those characters to us brilliantly. Say what you will about this episode, the two best lines in it were pitch-perfect character moments at one word each, and that's impressive as hell.
There’s no A-plot/B-plot shenanigans in GRAIL, just multiple sides of the same story; Babylon 5 is at its best when it does this, and it was definitely the right choice here. A construction worker who helped build the station (and, it turns out, Babylons 1-4 as well) is in debt to a hayseed gangster played by Larry from Newhart; he has two thugs working for him, but sadly never identifies them as Darryl and Darryl. Larry wants his money ASAP, and demonstrates his seriousness by using a weird tentacle monster to suck out another debtor’s memory, leaving her catatonic. This is the fourth or fifth time he’s done this, so it becomes a problem for the whole station, and when Dr. Franklin realizes it’s a brain-sucker monster even Londo gets involved, because the brain-sucker comes from Centauri space. He demonstrates the true gravity of the situation by immediately locking himself in his quarters, while “get a load of this goof” music plays on the soundtrack. The show really wants us to understand that the brain-sucker is a Big Problem, but they also want us to laugh at Londo for being afraid of it. Holy crap do I hate the way this show treats the Centauri. Garibaldi does his thing (ie, carry out an interesting and competent investigation), Sinclair does his thing (ie, be in the right place at the right time to find the bad guys without Garibaldi’s help), and there’s a big shootout resulting in the death of Larry and the brain sucker, and then Jinxo the construction worker learns a valuable lesson about self-actualization and sails off into the sunset.
That would be an okay enough episode, I guess, but not a memorable one and certainly not up to par with Babylon 5’s best efforts. It’s very clearly a “something for the Trek fans” episode, which so far has filled at least half of Season 1, and which works so much worse on B5 than it would on Trek because the show is trying to be something it’s not. It’s not terrible, but it’s not part of B5’s core competency, and it’s obvious even now that the show is going to be incredible once it gets out of its own way (or, more likely, once the producers get out of the show’s way) and does what it’s good at it.
But! The episode is elevated immensely not by a B-plot but by a B-character: a guy who’s unrelated to everything going on, but who makes it all better because he’s participating in it anyway. This is David Warner, playing a guy named Aldous Gajic, who for some reason is searching for the Holy Grail in outer space. Yes, the literal Holy Grail—cup of Christ, Aurthurian legend, the whole nine yards. Why is her looking for it in space? “Because I’ve already looked everywhere on Earth,” is the hilarious, almost word-for-word explanation he gives. And it’s stupid, and everyone on the ship knows its stupid (except the Minbari, who consider him a holy man because he’s dedicated his life to “seeking,” which is apparently a thing in their culture), but it doesn’t matter how stupid it is because he’s played by David Warner. He goes around, and he talks to the various ambassadors, and he takes Jinxo the construction worker under his wing to teach him the ways of Pointlessly Searching For Imaginary Things, and the thing is: David Warner makes it work. He gives long speeches about his old life, and his lost family, and the way the search has given his life meaning, and it is riveting. He sells every ridiculous word of it. It’s almost bad how good his acting is, because he makes the people around him look like first-year community theater volunteers. And yes, that’s not a fair comparison, because most of his scenes are played against Jinxo, who is also a guest star. David Warner turns an asinine character into a noble figure, and when he dies in the final gunfight it is tragic and poignant. I don’t know how “Let’s do an episode about a guy asking aliens if they know where the Holy Grail is” ever got out of the writer’s room, but casting David Warner was a masterstroke. My only regret is that the character’s dead now so he won’t be coming back.
And honestly, I’m being a lot harsher on this episode than it deserves. It’s not bad, like I said, just silly, and a lot of that silliness comes from the writing not quite managing to sell the concept; one more pass on the script might have made it amazing, which I suppose is more support for JMS’s eventual decision to write all the episodes himself (GRAIL is one of the only ones written by somebody else). And yes, it includes a lot of B5’s classic logistical errors, like everyone other than Garibaldi doing Garibaldi’s job for him, but it also includes a lot of classic B5 touches that this show does better than anyone else. One of my favorite tropes on Babylon 5 is “someone takes a problem to each of the four ambassadors in turn, and they all handle it differently,” and GRAIL has a nice spin on that. Delenn treats him with over-the-top reverence, Londo tries to scam him out of some money and then loses interest when Vir Cotto ruins the con, and Kosh freaks out Jinxo so bad they end up running away. Sadly, G’Kar does not appear, because the universe is cruel.
The reason Kosh freaks out Jinxo is part of the build toward my favorite moment of the episode: you see, Larry from Newhart keeps the brain-sucker-monster in a Vorlon encounter suit, as a way of tricking the rubes on the station into believing that he’s got the Vorlons on his side. When Sinclair tries to explain this to Kosh at the end of the episode, Kosh keeps asking why: Why is he using a Vorlon suit? Because he wants people to think you’re working together. Why? Because that’ll keep people scared. Why? Because the way you act makes everyone scared of you. Kosh pauses just a bit at that last one, then says “Good.” and walks away. It’s genuinely chilling. I love the way this show treats the Vorlons as mysterious, inscrutable spectres, and I love the way they go all in on it. We know virtually nothing about them, except that they’re powerful and they like to keep people intimidated, and every time they appear in an episode they only get more interesting. This is the kind of thing that Babylon 5 excels at: slow-rolling a deep mystery, keeping us intrigued and excited to learn more. I wish it could be done with David Warner still alive and not a lunatic, but at least we got him for one joyful episode. The memory of it will keep me warm on long nights.
Until a brain-sucker-monster steals the memory for a midnight snack.
Oh!I forgot to add that Ivanova, mostly forgotten in this episode, gets a wonderful moment at the end. Jinxo is convinced he is (as the name implies) jinxed, and that the station will be destroyed as soon as he leaves it. It's a dumb conceit in an episode full of dumb conceits, but it gives us a great bit at the end where his ship flies off into a gate and the command staff watch it nervously, waiting to see if their station blows up. It's honestly not nearly as funny as they obviously wanted it to be, and that's the director's fault, but when the the ship disappears and the station doesn't explode everyone laughs and says "No Boom," and Ivanova says "Today." It's perfect--it's her entire character boiled down into one word. Of course the show ruins it by hammering the point home for another 30 seconds in case you didn't get it--"no boom today, but it's coming! We're going to eventually get a boom!"--but for just that moment you can tell that they know their characters inside and out, and that they've communicated those characters to us brilliantly. Say what you will about this episode, the two best lines in it were pitch-perfect character moments at one word each, and that's impressive as hell.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI had the last paragraph of the post down here in the comments, and decided I’d rather have it in the post. So I moved it.
DeleteI think my reaction was the opposite of yours... instead of Warner redeeming the episode, I disliked it all the more because it wasted David Warner. However, I did like two moments (now three, that you reminded me of Kosh's comment): "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow." (And pretend the rest of her rant doesn't exist).
ReplyDeleteThere's also a moment... again, comedic... with the court case about the human's great grandfather being abducted by the vree's great-grandfather.
All I can figure is that they were trying to make a more comedic episode (a la the occasional comedy X-Files or Star Trek episodes), and had to learn the hard way that it didn't work in a serialized format.
I forgot about the alien abduction court case! That was so awesome and so out of place. I think maybe half the writer's room was trying to make this a comedic episode, and the other half were trying to play it straight, and they did a ridiculous tonal mishmash. Which I think happens with most of their "funny" stuff, so maybe they need to tone it down a little.
DeleteI love the opening abduction scene. The judge was played by the director of photography, I think. And the very end when Garibaldi spooks Vir and Londo, and Londo locks Vir out – that was great.
ReplyDelete