Episode 4.8: The Illusion of Truth
There is a good way to do a news episode, but holy crap is this not it. Then again, season 2's AND NOW FOR A WORD was definitely not the right way either, so we're not dealing with a really great track record to begin with. The problem with AND NOW FOR A WORD was that we watched an exciting story unfold through an added layer of emotional remove, dampening the impact of everything that happened. The problem with THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH is that we see everything twice, with no twist or spin or interest to justify the gimmick. The news crew shows up, we know they're going to be evil, and then they are. The end. There is literally no arc to this story or to any character in it--it doesn't build to anything, it has no rising or falling action, and nobody achieves anything or even really tries to. You get to the end and think "Is that it?"
What was the point?
The point, I assume, was that they wanted to show that Earth's all-propaganda news outlet is doing its part to turn public opinion against Babylon 5. Which a) we already knew, and b) I just told you in one sentence. Why did we need a whole hour to get that message across? Perhaps the hour would be justified if there was a character story attached to it--if someone wanted something, and worked to get it, and then either achieved their goal or rejected it for something better or failed tragically. You know: the standard method of storytelling across the world and throughout human history. This episode has none of that, and it's one of the most painful examples yet of Babylon 5's focus on plot over character.
What feels most egregious about this episode is extravagant expenditure of time they don't have. In seasons 2 and 3 they handled this kind of plot point with a two-minute news story that the characters watch in the bar--drama drama drama, oh look we're on the news, wow that sucks now back to the drama. Their storytelling was efficient and effective. So why now, when season 4 is trying so hard to compress their two remaining years of story into the one year they think they have left, do they waste an entire episode belaboring one already-obvious point, to the exclusion of all else? Why rush through the Shadow War so horrifically only to flush this precious 45 minutes down the toilet? You only get 22 episodes to tell this story, guys, and the evidence of compression and deletion is painfully obvious in every one of them but this one. Which makes no sense, when even an unpaid intern in the editing room could have trimmed this whole thing down to five minutes max, and still gotten the same point across.
The only way this episode's existence makes sense to me is the theory that someone (I assume JMS) wanted to play with the news gimmick again, and decided that it would be neat to show everything that actually happened, and then show all the same stuff over again through the filter of a government propaganda engine. And in theory that's not a terrible idea--Rashomon-style storytelling, where we get different perspectives on the same event, is fun and fascinating when done correctly. My all-time favorite episode of The X-Files does this, in BAD BLOOD. And there is one scene here that reaches for that style of twisted reality, when Delenn and Sheridan's interview gets recut and respliced to make it look like they said things they didn't. But most of the news program is either rote rebroadcasts of scenes and conversations we've already watched, or all-new scenes (like the cryo chambers and Garibaldi's interview) that break the parity of the gimmick. If you're going to commit to this style, commit to it. The weird half-and-half thing was long and dull, not just because they repeated things, but because they repeated them for no emotional payoff. BAD BLOOD let us watch the characters react and grow; THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH was just a guest actor saying "Remember that scene from ten minutes ago? Here it is again."
Other notes:
---Apparently Garibaldi's "I'll find lost stuff" business is real? I admit that I did not see that coming. It's so weird.
---Londo saying "This is highly inappropriate," in a situation where neither he nor anyone else would use that word, was so obviously a setup for the twisted news version that it made me laugh out loud.
---I love how Ivanova talks about what a great and non-problem-causing security guy Zack is, and then it cuts to him being terrible at his job and causing problems. I don't know if that was supposed to be funny on purpose, but: Zack sucks, and I like it when the show acknowledges that. Even by accident.
---The show's inherent belief that all journalists are evil--and that of course we will all agree with this--feels like the teddy bear all over again: "OF COURSE the whole audience will hate the teddy bear and understand the unspoken subtext behind it's destruction. Everyone thinks exactly like me, right?" If Sheridan et al had an inherent distrust of corrupt journalists, that would make sense, but for everyone on the staff to automatically hate all of them just feels like writer attitudes creeping through the script again.
---The one and only new thing to come out of this episode is the idea that people now think the cryochambers are being used to turn humans into alien hybrids. Will that actually come into play down the line? Or will it just be the generic "B5 is too buddy-buddy with aliens" that we already knew everyone on Earth thought about them? I guess we'll see.
---Didn't Sheridan and Delenn get engaged in FALLING TOWARD APOTHEOSIS? So his "no comment" here isn't just an awkward "haha, we haven't really talked about that yet," it's a literal "no comment" because they're not ready to announce it? It's been so long for me that I don't know how I'm supposed to react, but wow he sure looked guilty of something when he said it.
What was the point?
The point, I assume, was that they wanted to show that Earth's all-propaganda news outlet is doing its part to turn public opinion against Babylon 5. Which a) we already knew, and b) I just told you in one sentence. Why did we need a whole hour to get that message across? Perhaps the hour would be justified if there was a character story attached to it--if someone wanted something, and worked to get it, and then either achieved their goal or rejected it for something better or failed tragically. You know: the standard method of storytelling across the world and throughout human history. This episode has none of that, and it's one of the most painful examples yet of Babylon 5's focus on plot over character.
What feels most egregious about this episode is extravagant expenditure of time they don't have. In seasons 2 and 3 they handled this kind of plot point with a two-minute news story that the characters watch in the bar--drama drama drama, oh look we're on the news, wow that sucks now back to the drama. Their storytelling was efficient and effective. So why now, when season 4 is trying so hard to compress their two remaining years of story into the one year they think they have left, do they waste an entire episode belaboring one already-obvious point, to the exclusion of all else? Why rush through the Shadow War so horrifically only to flush this precious 45 minutes down the toilet? You only get 22 episodes to tell this story, guys, and the evidence of compression and deletion is painfully obvious in every one of them but this one. Which makes no sense, when even an unpaid intern in the editing room could have trimmed this whole thing down to five minutes max, and still gotten the same point across.
The only way this episode's existence makes sense to me is the theory that someone (I assume JMS) wanted to play with the news gimmick again, and decided that it would be neat to show everything that actually happened, and then show all the same stuff over again through the filter of a government propaganda engine. And in theory that's not a terrible idea--Rashomon-style storytelling, where we get different perspectives on the same event, is fun and fascinating when done correctly. My all-time favorite episode of The X-Files does this, in BAD BLOOD. And there is one scene here that reaches for that style of twisted reality, when Delenn and Sheridan's interview gets recut and respliced to make it look like they said things they didn't. But most of the news program is either rote rebroadcasts of scenes and conversations we've already watched, or all-new scenes (like the cryo chambers and Garibaldi's interview) that break the parity of the gimmick. If you're going to commit to this style, commit to it. The weird half-and-half thing was long and dull, not just because they repeated things, but because they repeated them for no emotional payoff. BAD BLOOD let us watch the characters react and grow; THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH was just a guest actor saying "Remember that scene from ten minutes ago? Here it is again."
Other notes:
---Apparently Garibaldi's "I'll find lost stuff" business is real? I admit that I did not see that coming. It's so weird.
---Londo saying "This is highly inappropriate," in a situation where neither he nor anyone else would use that word, was so obviously a setup for the twisted news version that it made me laugh out loud.
---I love how Ivanova talks about what a great and non-problem-causing security guy Zack is, and then it cuts to him being terrible at his job and causing problems. I don't know if that was supposed to be funny on purpose, but: Zack sucks, and I like it when the show acknowledges that. Even by accident.
---The show's inherent belief that all journalists are evil--and that of course we will all agree with this--feels like the teddy bear all over again: "OF COURSE the whole audience will hate the teddy bear and understand the unspoken subtext behind it's destruction. Everyone thinks exactly like me, right?" If Sheridan et al had an inherent distrust of corrupt journalists, that would make sense, but for everyone on the staff to automatically hate all of them just feels like writer attitudes creeping through the script again.
---The one and only new thing to come out of this episode is the idea that people now think the cryochambers are being used to turn humans into alien hybrids. Will that actually come into play down the line? Or will it just be the generic "B5 is too buddy-buddy with aliens" that we already knew everyone on Earth thought about them? I guess we'll see.
---Didn't Sheridan and Delenn get engaged in FALLING TOWARD APOTHEOSIS? So his "no comment" here isn't just an awkward "haha, we haven't really talked about that yet," it's a literal "no comment" because they're not ready to announce it? It's been so long for me that I don't know how I'm supposed to react, but wow he sure looked guilty of something when he said it.
As an interesting side-note, in the era of "fake news" and on the cusp of "deepfake" technology, the deceptive editing in this episode seems almost quaint.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. I suppose this episode would have very different 25 years ago.
DeleteIt's worth noting that not all journalists were reviled. The ones who kept broadcasting until literally forced to stop at gunpoint were definitely cast as heroes.
ReplyDeleteYeah, they did show in one of the episodes that they didn't exactly do it willingly and had their station run over by military
Delete