“Chrysalis”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 1, Episode 22
Production episode 112
Original air date: October 26, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… As the new year approaches, the B5 Council is meeting. The meeting mostly serves as an audience for a shouting match between Mollari and G’Kar. The Narn have an outpost in Quadrant 37, which Mollari says is in violation of the treaty between their worlds. But since the treaty was negotiated under duress, the Narn refuse to abide by it. When Mollari starts making threats, G’Kar leaves in a huff.
One of Garibaldi’s informants, Stephen Petrov, approaches him, bleeding badly. He says, “They’re going to kill him,” but dies before he can identify who “him” is.
Sakai is on the station, and after she and Sinclair watch ISN’s coverage of a goodwill tour being conducted by President Santiago and Vice President Clark, Sinclair rather awkwardly proposes to Sakai, and Sakai very enthusiastically says yes.
Mollari is lamenting his life, but then he’s contacted by Morden, who wants to meet. Mollari, still grateful for Morden getting him the Eye back, agrees. Morden says that his associates and he can help Mollari with Quadrant 37. Morden tells Mollari to inform his government that he will take care of the situation. They want no credit for what they do, as the point of the exercise is to improve Mollari’s position.
Lennier informs Delenn that Kosh said yes to, um, whatever it is she told him to ask the Vorlon. Delenn then goes to visit Kosh, where he allows her to see inside his encounter suit. She bids him farewell, saying this is the last time he will see her as she is now.
Garibaldi goes to downbelow to try to find out who killed Petrov, and he eventually finds a Lurker actually willing to talk to him. Petrov took a job loading cargo for a guy named Devereaux. Petrov actually looked at the cargo (which is generally a no-no, as asking questions means you don’t get more work), and it scared the bejabbers out of him. The chief takes Devereaux and two of his flunkies into custody. Devereaux does the usual tired boasting about how Garibaldi doesn’t know what he’s getting into and it’s way above his pay grade and various other clichés that Garibaldi is unimpressed by.
Sinclair visits G’Kar in his quarters and urges him to back off on Quadrant 37. G’Kar won’t, though he respects Sinclair’s warning that they’re all coming to a crossroads.
Sinclair and Sakai go to dinner at Fresh Air with Ivanova and Garibaldi and reveal that they’re getting married and they want the other two to be their maid of honor and best man, respectively. Both agree, and then they’re interrupted by Garibaldi being informed that Deveraux and his thugs have escaped custody. This irks Garibaldi, and he was already irked by the weapon Deveraux was carrying—a PPG without a serial number. Those are rare and only issued to special agents in EarthForce Security. So maybe it really is above his pay grade…
A handful of shadowy (ahem) ships arrive at Quadrant 37 and wipe out the Narn outpost and all the attendant vessels.
An ISN news piece reveals that Clark has departed from EarthForce 1 with the flu, and that he hopes to rejoin Santiago on Io. This will probably be important later.
Garibaldi and one of his security guards, Jack, go over some of Deveraux’s cargo that didn’t make it onto the ship that Petrov helped load, which was heading for Io. It’s equipment that can flood the Gold Channel frequency, completely jamming it.
Putting it all together, Garibaldi calls Sinclair and says they have to meet now, but he won’t say why over an unsecured link. He goes to leave the cargo bay and is confronted by Deveraux and his henchthugs. Deveraux reiterates that Garibaldi shouldn’t have stuck his nose in this, and then the security chief is shot in the back—by Jack.
Sinclair is beside himself with worry, as Garibaldi never showed up for the meeting he called, and no one can find him. Delenn approaches him, holding up the triluminary, which Sinclair last saw when he was the Minbari’s prisoner after the Battle of the Line. Sinclair confirms Delenn’s suspicions that he remembers more of his missing twenty-four hours than he’s let on, though he still has many gaps. Delenn offers to fill those gaps, but Sinclair has a missing security chief and can’t really talk to her right now. Delenn understands and says she’ll wait in her quarters, but she can only wait so long, as events have been set in motion.
Na’Toth reports the destruction of Quadrant 37 to G’Kar. The ambassador is at a loss as to who would be responsible. The Minbari would not conduct a sneak attack. Neither Earth nor the Vorlons have the motive. The Centauri lack the resolve. And no other known nation has the firepower.
Through sheer force of plot armor thanks to being in the opening credits, Garibaldi crawls to an elevator and collapses inside it, to be found by someone leaving a New Years Eve party. He’s brought to medlab right away. He manages to tell Sinclair that someone’s going to kill the president at the Io jump gate before lapsing into unconsciousness.
Sinclair immediately goes to CnC, but Ivanova informs him that all communications are jammed—even the Gold Channel. ISN is on one of the monitors, and they see EarthForce 1 blow up. (How a transmission of the ship blowing up is possible when all communications were jammed is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Mollari meets with Morden and is outraged. He was not expecting a massacre. However, Morden insists that all is well. “They’re only Narns.” And Mollari is now being spoken of as a hero in the halls of power on Centauri Prime.
Sinclair tries and fails to convince a senator that there was a specific plot against Santiago. The senator assures Sinclair that the findings are that it was an accident, and she finds it impossible to believe that a security chief on a remote outpost found a conspiracy that EarthForce Security missed.
Jack “finds” Devereaux and his dudebros, and reports that they died in a firefight with him. Curiously, Devereaux’s PPG is cold, but sometimes that happens. Sure. No problem. Nothing to see here.
Sinclair is watching the ISN feed of Clark being sworn in when Kosh approaches him, reminding him that he’s forgotten something. The light bulb goes off over Sinclair’s head and he high-tails it to Delenn’s quarters—
—but it’s too late. She’s inside a chrysalis. Lennier has no idea when she’ll come out of it, or what she’ll come out as.
Na’Toth goes to G’Kar’s quarters only to find a prerecorded message set to play on her arrival: G’Kar has gone off to investigate what happened in Quadrant 37.
Mollari and Ivanova sit in medlab, keeping an eye on the comatose Garibaldi.
Lennier continues to watch over Delenn.
Sinclair laments to Sakai that everything is changing.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair blows his chance to get the whole skinny on the Battle of the Line due to the incredibly bad timing of Garibaldi getting shot. He also gets engaged to Sakai and tries to warn G’Kar that everything’s changing, all in what turns out to be his swan song as station commander.
Ivanova is God. Sakai asks Ivanova to be her maid of honor because she doesn’t know anybody on the station, and Ivanova is the highest ranking woman in the opening credits so, um, why not? I’m stunned she didn’t say, “Really? Me? Don’t you have any, y’know, friends?”
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi might want to consider improving his vetting process for hiring subordinates, as we’ve already had an inveterate gambler in “And the Sky Full of Stars,” and now this.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn gets to see under Kosh’s dress, as it were, and goes into a cocoon. It’s all part of some greater purpose.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… At one point, Morden says that all he wants in return from Mollari is to one day do a favor for him and his associates. That, for the record, is when Mollari should have said no and backed away.
We also learn that the Centauri currently have either forty-nine or fifty gods, depending on how you count Zoog. (For what it’s worth, Vir generally doesn’t count Zoog.)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn Regime is committed to expanding at all costs—even if it’s violation of a treaty. (They consider that treaty illegitimate anyhow.) They also believe that the Centauri Republic doesn’t have the stones to fight back, which is true in the abstract…
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh is in cahoots with Delenn on whatever it is she’s doing, and he allows her to see his true face.
Meanwhile, the Shadows make their first big appearance. Having previously destroyed a pirate ship few people would even miss, this time they wipe out an entire outpost and its support ships, a massacre on a truly appalling scale. Morden assures the Shadows that Mollari is definitely their man…
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. When Sinclair shows up at G’Kar’s quarters, Na’Toth says he’s very busy, but then three human women depart his bedroom, at which point Na’Toth dryly says that he’s free now. G’Kar then comes out wearing only a nightshirt. Wah-hey!
Welcome aboard. Julia Nickson makes her third and final appearance as Sakai, returning from “Mind War.” Maggie Egan returns as an ISN anchor from “Survivors”; she’ll be back in “GROPOS.”
Ed Wasser officially makes Morden recurring, returning from “Signs and Portents.” Macaulay Bruton is back as one of Garibaldi’s security guards from “By Any Means Necessary.” Ardwight Chamberlain is peculiarly uncredited as Kosh, who was last seen in “Grail.” Gary McGurk makes his first appearance as Clark. All four will return two episodes hence in “Revelations.”
Trivial matters. This is the final appearance by Michael O’Hare as an opening-credits regular. He’ll reappear in “The Coming of Shadows” as a guest star.
The story of Sinclair and Sakai following this episode is told in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan.
It’s also last appearance by Caitlin Brown as an opening-credits regular. The role of Na’Toth will switch to Mary Kay Adams in season two. Brown will return in a different role in season two’s “There All the Honor Lies,” and she’ll reprise the role of Na’Toth in season five’s “A Tragedy of Telepaths.”
Delenn shows Sinclair the triluminary, which Sinclair was established as having seen when he was a Minbari prisoner in “And the Sky Full of Stars.” Delenn was given the triluminary at the end of “Babylon Squared.”
In “TKO,” Smith warned Garibaldi to watch his back. His inability to follow that instruction proves his undoing here.
G’Kar quotes Gandalf when he tells Na’Toth, “Expect me when you see me,” which the wizard said to Frodo at the end of Chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is far from the last reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings we’ll see on this show…
The camera angles on the footage of Clark being sworn in were deliberate homages to the photography of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Alisa Beldon telepathically sensed the word chrysalis in Delenn’s mind in “Legacies,” and this episode pays that off.
This episode was held back by PTEN until the week before the second season debuted so that viewers wouldn’t have to wait an entire summer for the cliffhanger to be resolved. (Some airings of the episode also went out with a “To be continued…” card at the end, though that was not supposed to be there and was removed.) This became a fairly standard practice for B5, to save the final few episodes of a season for late summer/early fall right before the new season debuted.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“This is like being nibbled to death by, um—ah! What are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long beak, webbed feet, go ‘quack’?”
“Cats?”
“Cats! I’m being nibbled to death by cats!”
—Mollari and Vir failing their saving throw versus exobiology.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “You have forgotten something.” This is a fairly effective season finale, but it suffers from two problems, one actively while watching it and the other from rewatching it and knowing what will come next.
The problem watching it is that the episode desperately wants us to be affected by the assassination of President Santiago, and—for me, at least—it utterly fails to do so. I don’t know who Santiago is. The fact that he’s president is not, by itself, enough for me to give a damn. If we’d actually seen Santiago at any point, even if it was just news footage of a press conference or an interview or something, it would’ve helped. Hell, in “Survivors” Santiago was right there on the station. That was the perfect opportunity to see him, get to know him a little. It wouldn’t require much, just a few bits here and there to make him a person rather than an abstraction. As it is, his death is just a CGI explosion, and who cares? (Also I ask again: how could they see the ship exploding if all transmissions in the area were jammed?) Clark as his replacement is certainly sinister enough given that he left EarthForce 1 just before the explosion with a sudden flu, and he will eventually become quite the problematic president (though that has similar issues, which we’ll cover).
The other problem with rewatching this is that this is supposed to be the big thing where everything changes and gets upended—but it doesn’t, entirely. Yes, Delenn’s in a cocoon, but she’s going to come out as the same person, but with hair. Yes, Garibaldi’s been shot and is in a coma, but he’s going to recover completely.
There are only really two big changes, and one of them doesn’t count because it doesn’t kick in until the top of season two: the departure of Sinclair, replaced by Sheridan. It’s not even entirely clear that Sinclair’s departure was known when this episode was written. (The reasons behind Michael O’Hare’s departure were not revealed until after the actor’s death.)
However, then we have the one significant change, and that’s one that truly will matter. As is often the case when discussing the best thing about a B5 episode, it involves the Centauri and Narn in general and Mollari and G’Kar in particular. Mollari’s Faustian deal with Morden and G’Kar’s continued righteous fury and patriotism come to a rather vicious head. Up to this point, the relationship between the two characters has seemed simplistic. Mollari is the washed-up diplomat on a shitty assignment for a failing republic, G’Kar is the mustache-twirling villain determined to do everything he can to improve the Narn Regime’s standing in the galaxy. Their rivalry has been played for laughs (e.g., “By Any Means Necessary”) almost as often as it’s been serious.
The performances of Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas have elevated that to some degree, as have bits and pieces of script, but this is the episode where the picture starts to get more complex. Mollari’s arc will continue to darken, while G’Kar will come into focus as a tragic, noble figure, which you would not predict from the preening bad guy we first met in “The Gathering.” And it all starts here, with Mollari allowing himself to be sucked into Morden’s plot and G’Kar realizing that his people are in trouble. This conflict will be the heart of the rest of the series, truly.
Despite how much I’ve ragged on the episode, it is, as I said at the top of this segment, an effective finale. The pacing is superb as we bounce from plotline to plotline, and Janet Greek does a superlative job with the visuals, especially at the episode’s close. The shots of Sinclair and Sakai sitting apprehensively on the couch of Sinclair’s quarters, and the closeup of Lennier crying by candlelight as he stands watch over Delenn’s cocoon are beautifully composed and framed, images that stick in the brain. (Greek is the second most prolific director in the franchise, as she will in the end direct 14 episodes of B5 and Crusade, second only to Michael Vejar’s 18.) In addition, Garibaldi’s being shot in the back is magnificently filmed. And J. Michael Stracyznski’s script is tight and focused and keeps things moving very well, making you eager to know what happens next. Which we’ll get to in a couple weeks…
Next week: An overview of the first season.
