Episode 4.9: Atonement
This was an episode of a television show. It had characters, and those characters were in locations, and they said lines of dialogue. Approximately one of those lines, at best, will matter in the future:
The rest of the episode that isn't those two lines is filled with stuff and things, but it's all much of a muchness. Delenn reveals a detail about herself that doesn't matter, and will probably never come up again: it turns out that she is the one, in the midst of crushing heartbreak and clearly not thinking straight, who gave the deciding order to declare war on the humans. Oh noes! I don't care, and Lennier cares even less--he literally insults her for thinking that this mattered in any way. In the Lurker's Guide, JMS is kind of hilariously dismissive of the idea that Sheridan will ever find out about it; his exact words are "It's over...what would be the point?" So he's either lying to throw us off the trail or this is exactly as unimportant as it looks.
Even better is the fact that she never does any kind of atonement for it, which is presumably what the episode title was referring to, and that makes so little sense I had to sit down and feel my chair just to remind myself that effect still follows cause.
Delenn ALSO discovers that she is a direct genetic descendant of Valen, ie Sinclair, which--again!--doesn't actually change anything. The Minbari have some human blood? Okay. Does that mean that they'll think or act differently from now on? No. Will anyone make different decisions because of this knowledge? No. The episode cares so little about this revelation, in fact, that it immediately drops it in favor of a random scene of Franklin and Marcus sitting in a transport freighter. It's 100% unrelated to anything else in the episode, and is either an unnecessary prologue to the next episode or the weirdest storytelling quirk this show has ever done.
I was excited when ATONEMENT started, because it looked like the kind of episode that would be self-contained enough to have an actual story, and I suppose it technically did but I just didn't care about it. That's two episodes in a row now that have done virtually nothing to advance the plot of the series, which I absolutely do not understand in what was allegedly a tightly-compressed season. I'm guessing that Delenn's dual revelations were planned from the beginning, and even though they don't really matter anymore and could have been cut for time, JMS wanted to close those loops anyway and spent this episode doing it. Good: done.
Can we please have an actual story now?
- G'Kar gets a new bionic eye, and learns that he can take it out and still see through it, like Aughra from THE DARK CRYSTAL. I predict this will be used exactly one time for meaningful effect, and a handful of other times--all off-screen--as jokes.
The rest of the episode that isn't those two lines is filled with stuff and things, but it's all much of a muchness. Delenn reveals a detail about herself that doesn't matter, and will probably never come up again: it turns out that she is the one, in the midst of crushing heartbreak and clearly not thinking straight, who gave the deciding order to declare war on the humans. Oh noes! I don't care, and Lennier cares even less--he literally insults her for thinking that this mattered in any way. In the Lurker's Guide, JMS is kind of hilariously dismissive of the idea that Sheridan will ever find out about it; his exact words are "It's over...what would be the point?" So he's either lying to throw us off the trail or this is exactly as unimportant as it looks.
Even better is the fact that she never does any kind of atonement for it, which is presumably what the episode title was referring to, and that makes so little sense I had to sit down and feel my chair just to remind myself that effect still follows cause.
Delenn ALSO discovers that she is a direct genetic descendant of Valen, ie Sinclair, which--again!--doesn't actually change anything. The Minbari have some human blood? Okay. Does that mean that they'll think or act differently from now on? No. Will anyone make different decisions because of this knowledge? No. The episode cares so little about this revelation, in fact, that it immediately drops it in favor of a random scene of Franklin and Marcus sitting in a transport freighter. It's 100% unrelated to anything else in the episode, and is either an unnecessary prologue to the next episode or the weirdest storytelling quirk this show has ever done.
I was excited when ATONEMENT started, because it looked like the kind of episode that would be self-contained enough to have an actual story, and I suppose it technically did but I just didn't care about it. That's two episodes in a row now that have done virtually nothing to advance the plot of the series, which I absolutely do not understand in what was allegedly a tightly-compressed season. I'm guessing that Delenn's dual revelations were planned from the beginning, and even though they don't really matter anymore and could have been cut for time, JMS wanted to close those loops anyway and spent this episode doing it. Good: done.
Can we please have an actual story now?
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