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paint on the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles
1x08 And the Sky Full of Stars
I am really, hugely fond of this episode. While it is rather short on all my favourite aliens, I am a huge sucker for stories that take place largely inside people's minds. (Three guesses how much I love The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari, and the first two don't count.) What's even better is that, when given the right material, O'Hare is a decent actor. Apparently stories that take place largely inside people's minds is the right material.
The small scene between Franklin and Delenn is lovely. Franklin isn't one of my favourite characters, but he definitely has his moments; you have to like a guy who destroyed his notes on Minbari biology rather than have them be used for developing weapons during the War. I also love the idea of starship-hitchhiking; I know it comes back later when Franklin is dealing with his Issues and his whole life is cited as act after act of running away, but I like to think of young Stephen hitching rides one part to escape his father to three parts genuine joy for discovering new worlds.
I also like that he asks Delenn what she was doing during the War, only to be met with that enigmatic smile and "A topic for another day, perhaps." I wonder what Delenn was doing during the War. I know that her vote is responsible for starting it, that she regretted that decision made in anger, and that near the end she was also responsible for picking up Sinclair's ship and seeing how prophecy was coming along. In the middle, who knows! I assume it involved a lot of attempting to redress various damages.
Meanwhile, inside Sinclair's mind: it's very telling, isn't it, that his psyche dresses the scenery with a set of the station. (Easy money says Sheridan would manifest the good ole farm back home; I don't know where Ivanova or Garibaldi would place themselves, though.) We even get an explicit statement about it from Sinclair's interrogator: "Curious! We have the memories of your entire life to play around with. But your thoughts are rooted here, in this station. It means a lot to you, doesn't it?" And yes, it does; I don't think it's a wrench for Sinclair to give up Babylon 5 at the end of this season and relocate on Minbar, but I think he carries the idea of Babylon 5 around with him, and that's really cool.
Obviously from a storytelling viewpoint it's also suitably chilling and disorienting to have Sinclair wandering around an eerily empty station. Mm. I'm hugely fond, too, of those episodes when they use the dramatic stage lighting to good effect. This is one of them. All the scenes with the Grey Council are another. Yay for occasionally using the staginess to good effect!
Station break: Garibaldi's newspaper. The props on this show are excellent. For headlines, we've got, variously, Narns Settle Raghesh 3 Controversy (as seen back in the very first episode); Pros and Cons of Inter-species Mating in the op ed section (cracky foreshadowing ahoy!); and best of all, PSI CORPS IN ELECTION TANGLE: Did Psi Corps Violate Its Charter By Endorsing Vice President? which is of course the first warning shot for a seasons-long arc. The continuity and attention to detail delight me.
Mind you, it's also clear that not all the arcs were fully planned out by this point. The male Minbari in Delenn's room near the end of the episode tells Delenn that Sinclair must never know what happened, or they'll have to kill him, which -- I can handwave it by saying that of course even the Minbari themselves don't understand the full import of what they've learned by studying Sinclair, but it definitely points in a different direction than the one they went. It's fun to also watch the evolution of the show, and the things that changed.
Apparently Sinclair's full name is Jeffrey David Sinclair. I guess JMS is really, really fond of the name David. (I know that John Sheridan's father is also named David, but I am now going to pretend that, when he and Delenn had their son, they named him after Sinclair. Shut up.)
Probably my single favourite part of the episode, now that I know what's going on, is the bit where Sinclair, surrounded by the flashback Grey Council, demands, "What do you want?" and the question echoes until it becomes horrible. This is the first episode that is genuinely about the seasons-long arcs, and it's wonderful. Incidentally, later in the Sinclair-remembering sequence, he also asks "Who are you?" as you do; the fun thing is that he then throws back Delenn's hood, and says, with some horror, "I know who you are." It's sort of thematically excellent: having the answer to either of those questions isn't necessarily a good thing. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing; having the answer is just having additional knowledge, an articulation that didn't exist before. (I'm not quite sure what I'm on about yet; I do know that the whole Shadow War is probably going to make me wax annoyingly philosophical. Please bear with me.)
Something I'm finding really wonderful this time through is Sinclair and Delenn's relationship. I'm inexpressibly glad they didn't end up having a romance, because it would send their dynamic in a completely different direction; I like it much better as is. Because, as is, he's her ancestor and her spiritual guide, and while she doesn't know all of that yet, she knows he confirms a merging of souls, and she's there to make sure that's true; meanwhile, she has all the information while he has none, and she's one of the driving forces behind a significant number of the important events in his life. It's tasty and circular and just a bit completely screwed-up.
Here is also probably a good time to mention that I have considered feeling uncomfortable about the upcoming "white human dude becomes a great alien spiritual leader" thing (god knows in other contexts it pisses me right the hell off) but here I just ... can't do it. I think in part it's that, if Sinclair's doing Minbari appropriation, Delenn's doing human appropriation just as much. In part it's that it just reads as a lot more complicated than "white guy saves aliens;" I mean, Sinclair is practically incidental, and I have a weirdly easy time believing that he has a Minbari soul and just happened to live as a human for the first forty-odd years in order to appease temporal causality. But then, I'm a sucker for time travel, and also for destiny that gets articulated in a way that shows said destiny is both fixed and a choice a character makes. I'm probably going to talk about this a lot, because it's one of my bulletproof narrative kinks. Anyway, that's why I'm not bothered by Valen!Sinclair, but nor do I think it's an incorrect reaction to be bothered by it. I'm just blinded by my bulletproof narrative kinks.
Speaking of circularity, there is something satisfyingly circular about Sinclair's interrogator ending up with his own memory fried. It's awful and I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but there is a certain poetic justice to it.
Definitely no Bechdel-passing this round. Delenn remains awesome, though.
1x09 Deathwalker
Oh, bless, Narn have broods! Broods of pouchlings! I would snuggle the Narn, but I do not think they would take kindly to it.
I like the concept of a blood oath (shan'kar? I can't find it spelled anywhere, but I think that's roughly what they're saying). I like both that it's incredibly important and that there are some things which supersede it:
G'KAR. This is larger than shan'kar! It would give Narn the advantage it needs to expand the Regime and crush our enemies! You must make this sacrifice for the future of our people, as all Narn have sacrificed at one time or another.
NA'TOTH. I'll delay the shan'kar. But I will not abandon it!
G'KAR. You would not be Narn if you did.
Again, this is one of those times where G'Kar as he is later shines through, without yet being anywhere near what he'll become. He already has the idea of sacrifice deeply embedded, probably because that's how he grew up and what he knows: you must do whatever it takes for the good of Narn and its people. But at this point, his idea of sacrifice is not necessarily sacrifice of the self, but sacrifice of morals: Na'Toth should set aside her retribution and the Ka'Rhi should give asylum to a war criminal because the ends justify the means, and that is sacrifice. Perhaps relatedly, G'Kar mentions that he has many blood oaths of his own. I assume that after a certain stage of enlightenment, tradition and old vows would give way to his new mode of living, but now I think I want fic that treats on this issue specifically. Also I would love to know whether Narn blood oaths are ever plot-important after this.
Oh, bless, Lennier. He's an amateur anthropologist and historian, and he'll give you all the exposition you like for free, and be so earnest and charming while doing so that you don't even notice they've saddled Lennier with the exposition this week. S5 has tainted me a little for Lennier, so it's wonderful to come back to this and just want to draw sparkly hearts around him and possibly snuggle him a bit.
"Justice or immortality. An intriguing choice," Ivanova says, and Garibaldi wins my love forever with the instant response, "There is no choice," followed by a list of Jha'dur's atrocities. The show obviously wants you to side with Garibaldi, but I appreciate that there is debate; Babylon 5 isn't always (hardly ever, in fact) particularly subtle about the issues it raises, but I like that, at least a good deal of the time, it takes stances that make me very happy to know these particular fictional people.
Political orders aside, various of the Council's individual stances are interesting to watch. Lennier, of course, is horrified that Minbar must vote against giving Jha'dur a trial; G'Kar, as usual, is made entirely of machinations and changed his vote to no the instant Narn autonomy was at risk; and Londo, though he had to vote no because of Centauri culpability, is the first to get over his shock when the Vorlon ship blows up Jha'dur's. "All's well that ends well!" he declares with a smile, and I want to hug him or possibly shake him, because as usual he has morals and is not doing a damn thing about them. If only there as a Vorlon-ex-machina for every occasion! The Vorlon-ex-machina, incidentally, is not annoying if only because Kosh implacably says, "You are not ready for immortality;" this is the first overt parenting the Vorlons do.
Speaking of Vorlons, I love the B plot in this one, too. (I am beginning to detect a pattern.) Kosh is awesome at all times. "The hour of scampering" indeed! Consensus among my friends is that the hour of scampering is around 1pm, or roughly lunchtime. We couldn't decide when the hour of longing was, though. I think it's probably around three in the morning, but there was dissent in the ranks.
I wish Andrea Thompson had been able to stay around, because foreshadowing is more fun when there's follow-through, and this B plot is entirely foreshadowing for Talia's truncated arc. Even so, there are interesting moments to pick out from it, as when Abbut tells her it's not good to reflect too much, and for a moment Talia is in a box of mirrors, wearing the black lace dress o' visions. I call it the black lace dress o' visions because it is the same concept, if not the same exact outfit, that Ivanova wears in Sheridan's Kosh-sent dream, and that Delenn wears when she's reading Tarot for Londo. I don't think there's any particular significance to that besides "it looks cool," but I like the idea that there is a sort of collective vision/dreamscape in this universe, and various characters all get to tap into it.
Wikipedia, that font of accuracy on all things, has this to say about the Talia-Kosh-Abbut plot: The exchange between Kosh and Abbut, monitored by Talia Winters, was to have significance in later seasons, after the events which led to Lyta Alexander activating the dormant artificial personality embedded in Talia by the Psi-Corps. The initial plan for the storyline was that Kosh would eventually restore Talia to her real personality using the data recorded by Abbut. I don't actually care whether this is true or not, although I cannot actually express with words how much this would've fixed my rage at the evil/dead lesbian trope. (It's like how Joss Whedon was totally going to bring back Tara! The intention is nice but the reality makes me want to spit nails.) That said, I do like that the above is offered anywhere as a possibility, and though I haven't yet looked, I hope there are a million Talia/Ivanova fix-it fics with that as the starting point.
No Bechdel-passing for this episode either. :( On the other hand, it was a great one for Sinclair'n'Garibaldi interaction. *waves little s1 shipper flag*
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I'm sure I say it too much, but Lennier is the most adorable thing in all the universe in the first season. So earnest about everything, and so very, very sweet. As much as I'm intrigued by his development in later seasons, seeing him again in first season makes me want to hustle him away back to his temple, or possibly just lock him up in a box somewhere for safekeeping and occasional snuggling.
...God, that sounded perfectly sane and not-creepy until I saw it on the screen. I can only say that it's late where I am.
I can't believe it never occurred to me, but you're right - that black-lace outfit really does show up on all the women in dreams. That's going to take some serious mental unpacking.
The hour of longing really does sound like a 3am kind of thing, though I rather assumed the hour of scampering would be slightly later. Maybe something like 4:30 in the afternoon.
And oh, dead/evil lesbians. I don't even want to think about it anymore.
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So the hour of scampering is a rush-hour thing more than a running-to-get-lunch thing? I would buy that.
I ... am not sure yet how I am going to talk about Talia's sendoff episode without descending into RAGE, but I will try. /o\
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One of the things I love about the Valen/Sinclair revelation later is that this means the Minbari belief in reincarnation is neither confirmed nor denied, any more than any other religous belief on this show; the triluminary reacted to Sinclair because he was actually Valen in the flesh, the one and only, which says nothing at all about where souls go when one dies.
Re: acting, I get the feeling that this is the point where JMS adjusted his concept for Sinclair to Michael O'Hare as an actor, since early Sinclair being more the action hero type, like Sheridan later, whereas from this episode onwards we have more emphasis on Sinclair as a man of thought.
Deathwalker: was weird for me as a Star Trek fan because Jha'dur is played by Saavik. Speaking of ST actors, fun trivia fact: Knight 2 in And the sky full of stars was the role JMS originally wrote for Walter Koenig, who then had a heart attack (they didn't shoot the episodes in the order they were broadcast) and thus couldn't play it. Which led not only to some last minute recasting but to a second role JMS wrote specifically for Walter Koenig, and I have to say, thank you, universe, because Bester is so much the better part (and gives Walter K. more to do in a single episode, acting-wise, than Chekov had in entire seasons of TOS and the movies).
Vorlon parenting: not only that, but Kosh's recording of Talia is a painful procedure. These are the guys who employ Jack the Ripper as an educational test method.
Narn blood oath: there is at least one more episode which brings it up, Sic Transit Vir.
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And mmm, circularity! For some reason I did assume that the Minbari belief about reincarnation was true in the B5 universe, but that's probably because it appeals to me. I like that it does remain a mystery after all.
I am so glad JMS gave the part of Bester to Walter Koenig! I am less glad he had a heart attack, of course, but silver lining &c.
These are the guys who employ Jack the Ripper as an educational test method.
You'd think I might have twigged to the Vorlons being Not All Right At All, Actually, when that happened. Heh.
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