Episode 4.12: Conflicts of Interest

There was a time, back in Season 1 or 2, when I would have been delighted to have an episode about Private Investigator Garibaldi trying to smuggle some resistance members through the station in a plot to free Mars. That time was probably pretty soon after the initial reveal that Garibaldi had left behind a girlfriend on Mars, back when such a thing felt relevant and Garibaldi was still himself. But it's not relevant anymore, and Garibaldi is not himself, and forcing us to watch not one but two long flashbacks just to remind us of that time you set up this story is maybe a sign that you set it up too early. Or, more likely, that you delayed the payoff for too long, because this is not the real Garibaldi anymore, and he is not acting like himself in any way, and I find it very difficult to care about anything he does. We know he's been brainwashed--it is painfully, agonizingly clear that he is not making rational, character-based decisions--so just deal with that and move on. Forcing us to watch episode after episode of not-Garibaldi, and hoping we'll just pretend like it's real-Garibaldi, is starting to get on my nerves.

I suppose my biggest problem here is that I can't imagine WHAT the brainwash thing is building toward. If Garibaldi has been suborned in some way--if he's a sleeper agent, or just a plain-old brainwash victim--then why is THIS what they chose to do with him? It seems pretty clear it was the psi-corp that messed him up, so: does the psi-corps just really want someone to act like a cantankerous P.I. on Babylon 5? How does that help them? I thought their plan was to use him to destroy the station, but there is no possible plan to destroy the station that would require any of this behavior. In fact, I can't think of any good plan to accomplish anything that would a) be this convoluted, and b) actually succeed. My working theory at this point is that someone wants Garibaldi to infiltrate the anti-Earth resistance so that they can bring it down from within, but even so: it seems like there are some waaaaaaay simpler ways to do that, most notably brainwashing someone who's actually in the resistance, instead of going this far around the outside. Even the simplest explanation has way too many extra steps to be plausible. My ACTUAL working theory, looking at the show and not the story, is that the purpose of his brainwash is to add some drama to the series now that the war is over, but the drama it's adding is so artificial that it's far more frustrating than interesting.

(Several of you have told me that the payoff to this Garibaldi storyline is great, but at this point in the blog your assurances have only accurated predicted my reactions a tiny fraction of the time. So I don't actually have any confidence that it's going to work for me at all.)

Let me try to explain my issue here. The hook for this storyline was very clear: Garibaldi was kidnapped, brainwashed, and then "activated" by a secret message, Manchurian Candidate-style. And every couple of episodes (though notably not this one) hammers this point home with brief flashbacks to the brainwash process, in case we'd forgotten. This is all well and good, and in fact makes for a very compelling plot device--I was, if you go back and read, initially very excited to see where the brainwash thing would go. But since then none of the actual plots have been about the brainwash. We've had a lot of plots about Garibaldi driving away the people in his life--Sheridan, and Zach, and now his ex--but those plots are never presented in the context of the brainwashing. The villain--the source of the conflict--is not the brainwash but the shift in emotions and allegiance. And if there were no brainwash then yes, those plots would hit a little harder and carry some impressive emotional heft. But there IS a brainwash, and it is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for Garibaldi's behavior, which means that leaving it out of these storylines rings very false.

This is tricky to pull off, because Garibaldi is not (as far as we know) aware of the motives for his brainwashed actions, so he can't show regret, so it's understandably difficult to present the brainwash as the source of the conflict. If someone was sitting offscreen with a gun to Garibaldi's mom, telling him to do things or the old lady gets it, then Garibaldi could react to that--he could act against his own best interest, and betray his friends, just like he's doing now, but all the while he'd be gritting his teeth and feeling bad about the actions he's being forced to take. That would cast all of these "relationship falling apart" subplots in a meaningful and compelling light. But we're not getting any of that. Garibaldi's ongoing plot has a clear villain that is never treated like a villain; the problems caused by that villain are presented through action and dialogue as if they sprang from Garibaldi himself, which is not true, and that motivational disconnect ruins the whole thing for me. It's a story about Garibaldi being forced to act against his own nature, being presented as if it were a story about Garibaldi acting entirely within his nature, and every part of it feels wrong.

Just to make matters worse, the people we keep seeing him lose his friendship with are NOT THE PEOPLE THE SHOW KEEPS TRYING TO TELL US ARE HIS FRIENDS. How many times have I complained about the way this show tells us Garibaldi is good buddies with G'Kar or Londo or whoever, without ever showing us any actual buddy behavior? This is a prime, almost obligatory time for those alleged friendships to pop up and matter, but they don't; I think we've had one conversation between Garibaldi and G'Kar, and it was not about any of the current drama. If Garibaldi's acting all weird and everyone's noticing it, where are his supposedly good friends? Even the one friendship I believe, between Garibaldi and Franklin, is mostly absent; Franklin just got back from Mars, and Garibaldi's throwing his entire life away, but instead of getting concerned and checking in on him Franklin decides to wander through Ivanova's TV studio like he's got nothing better to do. And the relationships that the show keeps insisting on, like Garibaldi and Zach, are treated with such a disconnect from reality that I don't believe any of them: Zach shows up to take his military-issue gun, because Garibaldi is no longer a member of the military, and Garibaldi treats it like some kind of deep, personal insult. He even uses that as justification for actively working against the B5 security people: "How dare they take away the perks of the job that I gave up? I should be able to keep them forever just because I want them! SOME FRIENDS THEY TURNED OUT TO BE." And yes, Garibaldi likes to work outside the rules, but this is a case of such obvious violation, and he takes it so personally, that we're back to where we started with my whole big rant: I can believe a brainwashed Garibaldi acting stupidly, but that's not how the show is painting it, and it all feels wrong.

As for the actual episode...do you really want a recap at this point? A bunch of stuff happens, and it was honestly kind of cool, but it mostly involved people we've never seen before, or versions we've never seen before of people we thought we knew. So the plot is fine but the characters in it are cardboard cutouts, going through the motions of story without any real sense of connection. And that's been my major problem with this whole season: they have so much story to get through that they're just throwing it out as fast as they can, with no regard for the humanity under the surface. Everyone is acting like a notecard on the wall of a writer's room, and not like a believable person. Why is Garibaldi brainwashed? Because we need him to be brainwashed because of something that happens down the line. Why does he get so offended when Zach takes the gun? Because we need him to be offended because of something that happens down the line. Why does Franklin look at the TV studio instead of checking on his friend? Because we need to remind you about the studio so that we can use it down the line. All the pieces are in place for a big, epic story that nobody will care about, because we feel no connection to the people inside of it.

And that sucks, because I used to really like these characters, and I wish they'd start acting like characters again.