Episode 1.16: Eyes
A great return to form for Babylon 5: a solid plot with strong political currents, a stellar performance from Claudia Christian, a scenery-chewing villain, and a pointless B-plot that’s impossible to care about. This is what I signed up for.
There’s so much to talk about here, but I don’t think it’s possible to start anywhere other than Gregory Martin, playing the Earth Force inquisitor Ari Ben Zayn. If you watched any TV in the early 90s you remember his face, looking like it was chiseled out of marble, and his voice, that sounds so overwhelmingly resonant it’s almost comical to see it coming from a real human and not a cartoon character. Martin was That Guy In that Thing for several years, appearing in everything from blockbusters like Murder She Wrote and Mad About You, to popular trifles like Empty Nest and Seaquest DSV. You might most easily recognize him from Chevy Chase’s “Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” where his hilariously dramatic voice was used as quick shorthand for “check out this yuppie moron, let’s use our powers of invisibility to make him look like an idiot.” Here he plays an overzealous officer of Internal Affairs, ostensibly investigating Babylon 5 for security leaks but really just waging a vendetta, backed by Psi-Corps supervillain Alfred Bester, against Sinclair. It turns out Ben Zayn was up for the Babylon 5 command but lost it to Sinclair, and uses the fact that Sinclair had Minbari backing as an excuse to come in and accuse him of treason. On one hand, this is pretty cool, and we’ve seen this reckoning coming for several episodes. On the other hand, the evidence against Sinclair is pretty impressive, and the only way to bungle the job of ousting him is to be an overzealous crazy person with a voice like a West End Snidely Whiplash, so guess how the episode turns out? I mean, they handle it well, and the writing and plotting are pretty spot on, but I’m a little disappointed that the threat against Sinclair’s command of the station gets scuttled so easily. I hope they come back to this in more detail in the future (and I assume they will, since there was no Minbari input on this plotline at all).
Oddly, while this begins like a Garibaldi episode and ends up being all about Sinclair, the emotional heart of it is Ivanova, who week after week proves herself to be the standout actor on the show. Garibaldi is affable, Sinclair is authoritative, and people like Londo and G’Kar get to really sink their teeth into some nasty political stereotypes, but Claudia Christian is the one who shows better command of her character, and better power and nuance in her acting, than anyone else. It’s honestly a bummer she didn’t have a scene with David Warner in the previous episode, because she’s the only one who could go toe to toe with him. It turns out that Ben Zayn brings a Psi-Corp telepath with him, intending to use him for illegal deep-mind loyalty scans of the various officers, and of course this triggers all of Ivanova’s issues with telepaths. One of the greatest parts of this episode, though, is that “Ivanova’s issues with telepaths” get explored with far more detail and understanding than you might expect—she hates Psi-Corps for what they did to her mother, but she also cherishes her memories of telepathically bonding with her mother, creating feelings that are layered and hard to fully parse, even for Ivanova. Don’t think that this complexity is going to take the edge off her anger, though: she yells at the telepath, she yells at Ben Zayn, she even yells at Sinclair, and by the end of the episode decides to take out her rage and frustration on an entire bar full of alien goons, trashing at least eight of them—by herself—without seeming to take so much as a punch in retaliation. It’s glorious.
The matter is eventually solved by the expected B5 trope of “Sinclair turns the regulations to his own ends,” combined with the pleasantly unexpected trope of “getting the Psi-Corps telepath on their side.” With the exception of Talia Winters, every telepath we’ve met has been shady, and the ones in uniform doubly so, so it’s fun to see this one portrayed as a pretty nice, normal guy. He wants to do his job, but he’s not on board for evil, and when Ben Zayn really starts to twirl his moustache you can watch the poor kid’s mental gears start to grind, torn between his duty and his sense of justice. He’s initially annoying, because we see him through Ivanova’s eyes, but he saves the day in the end, and his emotional arc is believable the entire time. Well done.
The B-plot, meanwhile, is about Garibaldi trying to build a motorcycle, and Delenn’s assistant Lennier helping. Lennier, almost purposefully genderless, is intrigued by the facoid that motorcycles were once seen as symbols of masculinity and rebellion, but a little B-plot doesn’t have time to follow that line of thought any farther, and it’s basically just “Lennier wants to give more help than Garibaldi wants to receive.” Lennier ends up finishing the entire thing without Garibaldi’s help, thus ruining the entire point of Garibaldi’s lifelong quest, but this only bothers Garibaldi for about five seconds (I’m not kidding—I timed it), and then they go joyriding around on it. Far more interesting than the story is the fact that Garibaldi’s obsession is a 1992 Ninja ZX, which, yes, was the fastest motorcycle in the world at the time this episode was written and filmed, but still seems like a weird choice. It’s not a bike with a ton of history behind it, and it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to predict that it was surpassed in speed barely a year later, in 1995. Why did the writers pick such a timely yet historically unremarkable motorcycle? Was it product placement from Kawasaki? Why not go earlier, for something groundbreaking, or later, for something inventive—why not make up the look and stats for a 2023 Kawasaki Cataclysm, or whatever? Maybe it was just a budget thing: the prop department didn’t have time to come up with something awesome, so they grabbed whatever the local dealer had on the lot. I don’t know; it seems weird.
And I haven’t even mentioned the dream sequence, which was appropriately spooky, or the lack of any alien ambassador, was which sad. But I will say this: the first time Ben Zayn meets Garibaldi he says “of course I know you: intimately,” and then offers him a drink. Garibaldi says he doesn’t drink, and NOBODY COMMENTS ON HIM IMMEDIATELY DISPROVING BEN ZAYN’S CLAIM TO KNOW HIM INTIMATELY. Like, right out of the gate, the first thing we see, is Ben Zayn being bad at his job. Did he actually know Garibaldi was trying to stay clean, and was tempting him? The episode never deals with it in any way. Was he just dumb? The episode never says. It’s so weird.
Whatever. This episode was great, and Ivanova is awesome. Let’s see what happens next.
There’s so much to talk about here, but I don’t think it’s possible to start anywhere other than Gregory Martin, playing the Earth Force inquisitor Ari Ben Zayn. If you watched any TV in the early 90s you remember his face, looking like it was chiseled out of marble, and his voice, that sounds so overwhelmingly resonant it’s almost comical to see it coming from a real human and not a cartoon character. Martin was That Guy In that Thing for several years, appearing in everything from blockbusters like Murder She Wrote and Mad About You, to popular trifles like Empty Nest and Seaquest DSV. You might most easily recognize him from Chevy Chase’s “Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” where his hilariously dramatic voice was used as quick shorthand for “check out this yuppie moron, let’s use our powers of invisibility to make him look like an idiot.” Here he plays an overzealous officer of Internal Affairs, ostensibly investigating Babylon 5 for security leaks but really just waging a vendetta, backed by Psi-Corps supervillain Alfred Bester, against Sinclair. It turns out Ben Zayn was up for the Babylon 5 command but lost it to Sinclair, and uses the fact that Sinclair had Minbari backing as an excuse to come in and accuse him of treason. On one hand, this is pretty cool, and we’ve seen this reckoning coming for several episodes. On the other hand, the evidence against Sinclair is pretty impressive, and the only way to bungle the job of ousting him is to be an overzealous crazy person with a voice like a West End Snidely Whiplash, so guess how the episode turns out? I mean, they handle it well, and the writing and plotting are pretty spot on, but I’m a little disappointed that the threat against Sinclair’s command of the station gets scuttled so easily. I hope they come back to this in more detail in the future (and I assume they will, since there was no Minbari input on this plotline at all).
Oddly, while this begins like a Garibaldi episode and ends up being all about Sinclair, the emotional heart of it is Ivanova, who week after week proves herself to be the standout actor on the show. Garibaldi is affable, Sinclair is authoritative, and people like Londo and G’Kar get to really sink their teeth into some nasty political stereotypes, but Claudia Christian is the one who shows better command of her character, and better power and nuance in her acting, than anyone else. It’s honestly a bummer she didn’t have a scene with David Warner in the previous episode, because she’s the only one who could go toe to toe with him. It turns out that Ben Zayn brings a Psi-Corp telepath with him, intending to use him for illegal deep-mind loyalty scans of the various officers, and of course this triggers all of Ivanova’s issues with telepaths. One of the greatest parts of this episode, though, is that “Ivanova’s issues with telepaths” get explored with far more detail and understanding than you might expect—she hates Psi-Corps for what they did to her mother, but she also cherishes her memories of telepathically bonding with her mother, creating feelings that are layered and hard to fully parse, even for Ivanova. Don’t think that this complexity is going to take the edge off her anger, though: she yells at the telepath, she yells at Ben Zayn, she even yells at Sinclair, and by the end of the episode decides to take out her rage and frustration on an entire bar full of alien goons, trashing at least eight of them—by herself—without seeming to take so much as a punch in retaliation. It’s glorious.
The matter is eventually solved by the expected B5 trope of “Sinclair turns the regulations to his own ends,” combined with the pleasantly unexpected trope of “getting the Psi-Corps telepath on their side.” With the exception of Talia Winters, every telepath we’ve met has been shady, and the ones in uniform doubly so, so it’s fun to see this one portrayed as a pretty nice, normal guy. He wants to do his job, but he’s not on board for evil, and when Ben Zayn really starts to twirl his moustache you can watch the poor kid’s mental gears start to grind, torn between his duty and his sense of justice. He’s initially annoying, because we see him through Ivanova’s eyes, but he saves the day in the end, and his emotional arc is believable the entire time. Well done.
The B-plot, meanwhile, is about Garibaldi trying to build a motorcycle, and Delenn’s assistant Lennier helping. Lennier, almost purposefully genderless, is intrigued by the facoid that motorcycles were once seen as symbols of masculinity and rebellion, but a little B-plot doesn’t have time to follow that line of thought any farther, and it’s basically just “Lennier wants to give more help than Garibaldi wants to receive.” Lennier ends up finishing the entire thing without Garibaldi’s help, thus ruining the entire point of Garibaldi’s lifelong quest, but this only bothers Garibaldi for about five seconds (I’m not kidding—I timed it), and then they go joyriding around on it. Far more interesting than the story is the fact that Garibaldi’s obsession is a 1992 Ninja ZX, which, yes, was the fastest motorcycle in the world at the time this episode was written and filmed, but still seems like a weird choice. It’s not a bike with a ton of history behind it, and it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to predict that it was surpassed in speed barely a year later, in 1995. Why did the writers pick such a timely yet historically unremarkable motorcycle? Was it product placement from Kawasaki? Why not go earlier, for something groundbreaking, or later, for something inventive—why not make up the look and stats for a 2023 Kawasaki Cataclysm, or whatever? Maybe it was just a budget thing: the prop department didn’t have time to come up with something awesome, so they grabbed whatever the local dealer had on the lot. I don’t know; it seems weird.
And I haven’t even mentioned the dream sequence, which was appropriately spooky, or the lack of any alien ambassador, was which sad. But I will say this: the first time Ben Zayn meets Garibaldi he says “of course I know you: intimately,” and then offers him a drink. Garibaldi says he doesn’t drink, and NOBODY COMMENTS ON HIM IMMEDIATELY DISPROVING BEN ZAYN’S CLAIM TO KNOW HIM INTIMATELY. Like, right out of the gate, the first thing we see, is Ben Zayn being bad at his job. Did he actually know Garibaldi was trying to stay clean, and was tempting him? The episode never deals with it in any way. Was he just dumb? The episode never says. It’s so weird.
Whatever. This episode was great, and Ivanova is awesome. Let’s see what happens next.
The motorcycle was an episode sponsor, so that’s where that came from. Bill Mumy was in a band, so when he’s chanting over the motorcycle, he’s actually humming his group’s song lyrics, and I guess he got in trouble with JMS for that.
ReplyDeleteLennier looking at those videos of motorcycles and repeating "sexual prowess and rebellion" with more enthusiasm than he looked at Londo's strippers in a previous episode was unexpected.
ReplyDelete