Episode 4.5: The Long Night

What a wonderful episode. Two main plots, both of them huge, and both of them excellent. Ivanova finally got a good scene after who knows how many episodes trapped in the background, plus we had Bryan Cranston! And I thought "Yay! Bryan Cranston's a Ranger, I hope he's going to stick around for a whi--nope, guess not." But they needed a stellar actor to make that part work, and he delivered. He brought so much gravity to that cameo they could use it to power the life support systems on their ships.

Let's start with Cranston and Sheridan et al: it turns out the Shadows have pulled out a planet-killing weapon of their own, though it seems bizarrely labor- and materials-intensive to actually use. Sheridan and the Secret Ranger Club freak out about it, realizing more than ever that they're basically stuck on the battlefield between two superpowers who've pulled off the kid gloves and started destroying everything in their paths. And this is all well and good, though my complaint from a couple of episodes ago still stands: ie, I still don't buy the Vorlon's sudden swerve into open war. I feel like they were building so carefully toward something else, and then it never happened. Kosh was trying for three years--arguably for hundreds of years--to set up and fulfill some kind of prophecy with Sinclair and Sheridan, and I feel like that whole thread got dropped instead of paid off. And that's disappointing, but: whatever. The new status quo, in which the younger races are babies on the football field trying not to get stepped on, isn't what I was sold but it's still pretty cool.

The Secret Ranger Club freakout is interspersed with Lennier trying to get a word in edgewise, and when he finally asserts himself he has good news: he's figured out where the Vorlons are going to strike next. And that gives Sheridan an awesomely terrible idea: he's going to lure the Shadows to the same place, and let the superpowers fight each other instead step on all the babies. This is made possible through the noble sacrifice of Captain Cranston, who is given a piece of fake intel and told "make sure the Shadows get this, and make sure they believe it's real," which is very explicitly an order to die. Cranston knows this, and accepts it, and it would have been so wonderful if we'd had him as our recurring Ranger instead of Marcus but at least he got to die like an awesome hero. The bait is taken, the trap is set, and I'm assuming next week will give us an absolutely epic space battle that I'll probably complain about because I'm a joyless cold and fights are boring.

Side note to this subplot: they're sending Ivanova to look for more Old Ones AGAIN. Even though this has never benefited anyone. On the other hand, we're only five episodes into a 22-episode season, so the Vorlons and the Shadows aren't going to go away next week, and there's still plenty of time for the Old Ones to actually matter. I guess I'm mostly just bothered that there doesn't seem to be a solid in-world reason for Sheridan or anyone else to assume that recruiting Old Ones to their cause will ever be useful--I mean, they got one group of them early in season 3, and they've NEVER come back or helped or joined a fight or done anything. Presumably because they're being saved for some big Old One Rumble late in Season 4, but that's another example of the outline peeking through the seams of the show. If we can tell what's going to happen not because the story is foreshadowing it, but because we know how story's work and "Trope Number Seven" is the only explanation for a plot hole, that's a bad sign.

But I will stop whining, because none of these complaints are directly related to this episode. This episode was great.

Moving on to the big doozy: Cartagia is dead! And the Narn homeworld is free! I loved Cartagia, and I'll be sad not to see him anymore, but I have to admit that he'd probably run his course: if he'd stuck around much longer he would have lost all his edge, and his threats would have become hollow. As it is, five episodes gave him just enough time to terrify everyone, ruin everything, and give Londo and Vir and G'Kar a perfect opportunity to overcome him and claim a big win. There were elements of this that we all saw coming--when Cartagia, for example, said that the pre-weakened chains looked weak, so he'd had them replaced, we all knew that G'Kar would break them anyway. And when Londo dropped the poison needle to wrestle with Cartagia, we all knew Vir would be the one to pick it up and use it. But even seeing those moments coming, I LOVED them. They were perfect. I pick a lot of nits on this blog but there was absolutely nothing in this entire half of the episode that I can complain about, because it walked a tricky line without ever stepping wrong, and it told an amazing story in the process. In fact, I'll call it now: the rest of the season is going to have to be pretty amazing to keep THE LONG NIGHT out of my top-five episode list when I do my end-of-season retrospective.

So Vir killed the Emperor, and freaked out about it, and there's a conversation later between him and Londo where Londo gives one of the most sympathetic performances of his entire run on the show. He's a bad person who's done a lot of bad things, and who technically saved the Narn but only because it was the only way to save the Centauri. But every now and then we get a glimpse of the real person inside the web of artifice, and every time we do it's heartbreaking. He knows exactly how ruined his life is, and how faded his glory is, and how futile any quest for redemption would be. But he's still fighting, and that's a kind of nobility in itself--the same kind, at the core of it, that we see from Captain Cranston. They're both going to die--and Londo admits in this episode that he knows he's going straight to Centauri Hell when he does--but doggonit they're going to make their deaths count for something.

So we end the episode with two big swords hanging over our heads: a massive Shadow/Vorlon battle, and the Vorlon cleansing of Centauri Prime. And, weirdly, both have been tagged as happening "in three days," though that can't possibly be true because there's only one (to our knowledge) Vorlon fleet. Plus I assume the show wouldn't put both of those events in the same episode, unless they happened at the same planet, which we know they are not. So...either the Centauri Prime thing never happens, or we know the Vorlons will win next week's battle. Or some third thing? I hope it's a third thing.