Episode 1.17: Legacies

First things first: Ivanova is going to develop telepathic powers, right? Like, they’re putting all the pieces into place to make it happen: her entire character arc revolves around the theme, and we just learned that psychic powers can run in families and develop late in life. I suppose it’s entirely possible that she won’t become a telepath--and please don't tell me, because I want to watch it for myself--but boy are they hinting pretty hard at it.

Anyway. One of the two plots this week is about a homeless girl named Alisa who manifests latent psychic powers and finds herself at the center of what’s basically a custody battle: Talia wants her to join the Psi-Corps, Ivanova wants the Psi-Corps to boil its own head, and Sinclair finds a loophole (this is his primary superpower) essentially allowing Alisa to, unlike Ivanova’s mom, choose her own path. As soon as word gets out she is immediately propositioned by two of the ambassadors as well: Na’Toth, who is silver-tongued and ruthless and rapidly becoming my favorite character, and Delenn, who is building a dining room centerpiece out of colored plastic shapes. Na-Toth’s offer for Alisa to join the Narn is a direct follow-up from G’Kar’s offer for Lyta (the telepath in THE GATHERING) to do the same, though it manages to one-up G’Kar’s very creepy sexual overtones by requiring nothing more than “blood and tissue. Twice a month should be sufficient.” Alisa is bizarrely fine with this, and only freaks out when she reads Na’Toth’s mind and finds it to be cold and alien and so terrifying she has to go lie down. I love you, N’Toth.

Side note: the Narn are obviously desperate to get a telepath, for the clearly-stated purpose of using their DNA to start breeding some psychics of their own. How have they not already done this? Like, a thousand times? If they’re so eager for something so powerful, why do they limit their efforts to polite requests once every seventeen episodes? As underhanded as the Narn are, I expected them to have a whole village full of mercenary and captive psychics by now; either they totally do, and they’re being super cagey about it, or they’re bad at their jobs. I want to believe the former, but I strongly suspect the latter.

Anyway: when Alisa goes to hear Delenn’s “come be the Minbari’s pet psychic” pitch, Delenn for some reason does this in person and leaves her mind wide open, despite the fact that she just stole and burned the super important dead body that the other half of the episode is practically starting a war over. Smooth move, Delenn. It turns out that the great Minbari general who almost won the war against Earth, and only stopped because the Grey Council ordered him to, has died, and his body is here on part of a multi-stop funeral tour visiting every Minbari population in the galaxy. Said tour is being overseen by a warrior-caste dude named Neroon, who has hands-down the best maybe-a-horn-thingy-but-also-maybe-a-hat that we’ve seen on a Minbari yet. He hates humans, and he hates Sinclair, and we eventually learn that he hates the Grey Council for ending a winnable war  and he hates the Minbari religious caste for telling them to end it. When the general’s body disappears Neroon takes out this hatred on everyone he sees, up to and including Delenn when she foolishly hangs out with a telepath and spills her big giant secret. It turns out the general (who’s name is Dukhat, pronounced exactly like Dukat from DS9, no doubt fueling the ongoing plagiarism conspiracy theories) was half warrior caste and half religious caste, and requested a religious cremation instead of a warrior parade, and that’s why Delenn stole the body—why she did it so quietly, though, I still can’t figure out. She very clearly has the authority to tell Neroon to lick her boots clean, and that’s basically what she does, so why didn’t she tell him earlier instead of going behind his back and almost starting a war? The show does not have a good answer to this, so just pretend like it was a good idea; that’s what Delenn does.

Eventually Alisa the Teenage Psychic chooses to live with the Minbari, probably excited about how easy it is to read giant, galaxy-altering secrets from their minds. There’s talk that she may become a vital link the communication chain between Human and Minbari, though I hope she does it from off-screen because she is quite possibly the weakest actor we’ve seen yet on this show, and that it saying a lot. If she comes back in the future, I hope it’s a season or two down the road when they can use “she’s all grown up now!” as a smoke screen to recast her.

Neroon, on the other hand, I would love to see back again, because he was a great actor and a great character with a cool maybe-it’s-like-a-giant-fingernail-thing on his head, plus he puts a face on the Minbari warrior caste, and we are definitely headed toward a showdown or a coup or a something between the two castes. That’s being foreshadowed even more strongly than Ivanova becoming a telepath.

That said, though, the development I most want to get out of some future episode is a clear delineation of how much authority Sinclair actually has. Practically half of the episodes so far are about him having his command stripped or threatened; it seems like everyone who comes to town, including people from enemy species, completely outrank him, and the show is very bad about showing us why. Some of it is actual rank, some of it is political, some of it is diplomatic, but none of it is explained well, and we're rarely aware of the actual stakes or ramifications. When Neroon makes ridiculous demands, and Sinclair lets himself get walked all over, I assume that some of this is because he has to and some is because he doesn't want to start an international incident, but I don't know which. Neroon, for example, demands that no human guards or security personnel be assigned to guard the general's body, or even the area where the body is being kept. And then the body goes missing, and it's all the humans' fault even though we were explicitly told that no humans were involved on any level. And Sinclair just lets Neroon rant and rave and threaten to blow up the station, and nobody ever says "listen, dude, you were in charge of guarding the body, and this is what happens when you don't let us help." Even more surprising, nobody ever says "You made a huge frigging deal about how we couldn't help guard the body and now the body is gone and that is really super suspicious," which seems like such an obvious angle that I have to assume it's just bad writing, because no amount of ambiguity in the station authority can account for such an obvious oversight. Still, though: stand up for yourself, Sinclair. And when you can't, please tell us why.