Episode 1.20: Babylon Squared

Oh baby.

When I started this project and people started telling me about the best and worst of season 1, pretty much anyone who pointed out a favorite episode of the season pointed out this one. And I can see why: it’s spectacular. We get some political machinations with Delenn and the Grey Council, we get mysterious prophecies from two or three different angles, and we get a massive SF mystery that’s both answers some past questions and asks a bunch of new ones. It’s a compelling story on its own that’s also a part of a long, unfinished story, which is not only Babylon 5’s hallmark but a feat that a lot of modern binge-native shows can’t pull off at all. If the future of this series looks like BABYLON SQUARED, I’m going to be in heaven.

One of the weird mysteries of the series is the Babylon Curse: every previous station was destroyed, by war or by accident, but Babylon 4 pulled an SDF and just...disappeared. Nobody knows where it is. And It always seemed weird to me that people weren’t way more freaked out about it than they were, because that’s bonkers, but I think Garibaldi’s reaction is actually pretty representative: when the station shows up again he says “That can’t be real—stations don’t just vanish and then come back again for no reason.” This is a man who’s had years to come to terms with the empirically provable truth that a space station disappeared without a trace, and he hasn’t. He just ignores it. No one ever says “Well, it disappeared, why can’t it reappear?” The earlier event doesn’t make the later one any easier to deal with, because they’ve never fully reconciled the first one. This honestly seems kind of believable to me: don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, just move on.

But yes: B4 is back, and it turns out it’s been missing because of time travel shenanigans: to quote its commander, they’ve become “unmoored in time.” The people on it keep getting weird flashes of living memory, both forward and back, which is fun because it gives us a glimpse of a future when a station—probably B5 but maybe B4–is being invaded, and Sinclair is rushed to safety while Garibaldi says “This is the moment I was born for!” and goes bananas with a machine gun. I say that the flashforward might take place on B4 because it is super-duper obvious, the instant the mysterious “One” shows up in a space suit, that it’s Sinclair. See, there’s some kind of alien dude named Zathras, who I love dearly and can’t wait to see again, who showed up on B4 soon after it disappeared and claims that the ship is being pulled forward in time for use in a future war. Zathras’s job is to give a time-device to the One, and every drop of evidence points very clearly toward a future in which the galaxy is at war and Sinclair needs the station and pulls it forward. I was extra-delighted to get to the end of the episode and see that they actually confirmed this theory right then and there, by having the One take off his astronaut helmet to reveal an aged-up Sinclair. I’m glad they didn’t string that out and pretend like it was a mystery—confirming it now lets them move on to other mysteries, like what the war is and why they need the station and whether the person talking to Sinclair was actually Delenn. It sounded like Delenn, but they never showed her.

(Side note: images I’ve seen of future seasons, on DVD covers and such, show Delenn with hair. This feels like a spoiler, since the Minbari seem to have to body hair whatsoever. Did they hide Delenn in this future scene because they knew they were going to give her hair, or did they give her hair because they hid her in the scene and realized that they could? I assume we’ll get answers to these questions in the future, and I recognize that they’re not really questions I’m supposed to be asking right now. But: DVD covers, man. Anyway, don’t tell me if you know.)

Speaking of Delenn, she heads back to the Grey Council, where we get to watch a bunch of Minbari dudes try to take off their hoods without knocking their prosthetics off, and it’s a testament to the writing that this was not the highlight of the scene because it is hilarious. The first guy can barely get his hood off at all because of all the points and spikes on his head thing. Maybe hoods were a bad choice of clothing for the Minbari? Anyway: the actual storyline is super good. They want Delenn to be the new president, and she thinks about this for a bit but ultimately refuses, because she still feels tht her place is on Babylon 5, not only to help fulfill whatever prophecy sent her there in the first place but because she’s grown to love the Humans and feels inspired by them. So she says no, and they agree but they also kick her off the Grey Council, and then the guy I thought was Neroon but totally isn’t gives her a magical triangle called a Triluminary, which she seems to think is a pretty amazing gift even though SHE TOTALLY ALREADY HAS ONE. In the episode LEGACIES, in which she stole the dead Minbari general’s body and cremated him, she used a Triluminary to stun and/or mindwipe the guards. I thought this was weird, because this episode treats the Triluminary as some kind of super rare and special artifact, so I looked it up and it turns out LEGACIES was written and filmed after BABYLON SQUARED, and then they were aired out of order. Is there an official chronology that reverts the episodes to their previous order, or did they decide it doesn’t matter? Does Delenn have two Triluminaries? Does any of this even matter? Yes, because I’m not going to watch this without geeking all the way out over it. GET IT TOGETHER, ORIGINAL AIR DATES, YOU’RE RUINING MY BLOG.

There’s not much else to talk about, except that Zathras is one of my new favorite characters, and Ivanova’s reaction to “we almost got trapped forever on a nightmare ship unmoored from time” was “you damn well better take me there next time.” Ivanova is my other favorite character. G’Kar and Na’Toth used to be my favorite characters, but we’re now seven episodes in a row with no G’Kar, and I’m honestly getting worried about him. Has somebody checked on him? Is he just trapped in his quarters somewhere? Did someone pull him forward in time to episode 21 so he missed all the others? I’m assuming he’s back in 21–I’m hoping he’s back in 21. I don’t know how much more G’Kar-lessness I can take.

(Side note: my autocorrect had absolutely no idea what to do with the word “G’Kar-lessness.”)

We’re almost done with Season 1, and it feels like it’s building toward a bang. No boom today, but sooner or later: big boom.