“Meditations on the Abyss”
Written by J. Michael Staczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 5, Episode 15
Production episode 516
Original air date: June 3, 1998
It was the dawn of the third age… Garibaldi has a nightmare that sees him walking through a trashed Zocalo and everyone is dead. Franklin blames him before he dies. Then he discovers that he himself, carrying a big fucking gun, is responsible for the carnage. He then “wakes up” in his cabin to see Alexander with glowy white eyes saying she’s experimenting with her fancy Vorlon-enhanced telepathy. Then he wakes up for real (or does he????) and is surprised by a visit from Lise. Once he gets past the confusion and annoyance of his nightmare—which he doesn’t tell Lise about—they fall into bed together.
Lennier covertly contacts Delenn from Maria. He’s detected a coded Centauri signal exactly 20 hours prior to every cargo ship attack. He’s working on decoding it. As they talk about how this is still a secret only between the two of them that even Sheridan doesn’t know about, Sheridan walks toward the open doorway, and then hides in the corridor, overhearing the rest of the communication. Delenn conveniently walks out of the office in a manner that prevents her from seeing her husband lurking right on the other side of the doorway.
Alexander is trying to convince a business person to employ some of Byron’s gaggle of rogue telepaths, the sweetener being that they can have as many telepaths as they want on each ship—Psi Corps only allows one telepath per ship. And in exchange, all they ask is to borrow a ship to find a homeworld. But that would violate their contracts with Psi Corps, so the business person has to decline. He suggests she find someone who doesn’t have contracts with Psi Corps.
Mollari is confused and annoyed, as the Royal Court is asking for information on trade deals with other IA worlds—which they don’t normally do—and important appointments for practical governmental matters with the Drazi and Gaim ambassadors have been cancelled.
Lise goes to prep some breakfast while Garibaldi is in the shower, and she discovers an open and half-empty bottle of booze. She confronts Garibaldi, who gets all defensive, insists he’s a different person now, and that Bester’s mindfucking him has left him feeling out of control, but he insists that he’s in control of this. Lise insists that he not drink as long as she’s there, and he agrees, pouring the booze into the sink.
On Maria, Lennier and Montoya discuss his attempts to decode the Centauri signals. (Huh. Coulda sworn this was a secret covert mission…) Montoya also announces that they’ve been recalled to B5 by Sheridan.
For his part, Sheridan confronts Delenn about her sending Lennier on this covert mission without telling her, but then Delenn short-circuits his high dudgeon by capitulating, saying he’s right, but also saying that she did it because if he knew about it, he’d have forbidden it, because Delenn and Lennier are friends. But Lennier is also the best person for the job.
Montoya then contacts Sheridan to inform him that Lennier absconded with a fighter and is now missing.
In the stolen fighter, Lennier records a log entry outlining his plan to trace the signal. He then goes into a meditative state to preserve his air supply.
On B5, Alexander goes to G’Kar’s quarters and revisits the transaction G’Kar requested of her way back in “The Gathering”: she’ll provide the genetics sequences of a whole mess of telepaths for the Narns to try to develop their own telepaths, in exchange for a few bottom-end ships to find a homeworld and total secrecy. G’Kar points out that the need for telepaths is less urgent with the Shadows no longer being a factor, but he will bring it to the Kha’Ri.
Garibaldi and Lise have a romantic dinner at Fresh Air. Garibaldi comments that he hasn’t eaten here since Sinclair and Sakai told him and Ivanova of their engagement—shortly after that, Garibaldi was shot in the back and when he woke up, Sinclair was reassigned. He also orders coffee to drink, which the server assumes is for dessert, not as part of the meal, which proves that the server is spectacularly incompetent (I’ve ordered coffee with my meal many many times, and never did the server bat an eyelash). Garibaldi then sneaks off to pour booze into the coffee under the guise of bringing it to the kitchen to complain about its poor quality.
Montoya contacts Sheridan and informs him and Delenn that they’re now past the point where Lennier’s air supply should have run out. However, Lennier has encountered a Centauri vessel and is able to tether himself to it while in stealth mode, also siphoning off some of its air supply. He sadly has to watch helplessly as the ship goes into hyperspace and then comes out and blows up a Brakiri ship, but he does record the whole thing. He disconnects when the attack is over, hiding as a piece of debris. Once the Centauri ship jumps to hyperspace, he sends out a distress call.
On B5, Mollari gets a call from Minister Cholini, saying that the Centauri are being framed for being responsible for the attacks on the cargo ships.
G’Kar tells Alexander that the Narns will go for the deal, but only if the telepaths psionically eavesdrop on other ambassadors from time to time. Alexander says that’s a deal-breaker and starts to leave, but G’Kar says that that was a test—if she’d agreed to that stipulation, the deal would’ve been off. They do, in fact, have a deal.
Montoya informs Sheridan and Delenn that Lennier is safe and sound and has irrefutable evidence of the Centauri’s responsibility for the raids. Delenn is hugely relieved and moves into the corridor so she can cry in peace. Mollari sees her, and Delenn hugs him, to his surprise.
Lennier arrives on the station and hands over the evidence, then goes to take a desperately needed nap. Sheridan calls a meeting for all the ambassadors except for Mollari. Vir informs Mollari of this, and Garibaldi also goes to Lise and tells her to leave the station immediately, as it looks like they’re about to go to war with the Centauri.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan is justifiably pissed at Delenn for keeping him in the dark, but she gets him to apologize for being pissed in fairly short order, because she is way better at manipulating people than he is.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is still drinking and still lying about it, even to the woman he loves. He hasn’t yet told Sheridan and the others that he plans to move back to Mars to help Lise run Edgars Industries, as he promised Lise he’d do, and he also has decided that he should never eat at Fresh Air because something bad always happens after he does so.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is able to justify her keeping Sheridan in the dark, but at the cost of fear and grief over the possibility of Lennier being dead.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Apparently, his experiences over the past few years have caused Mollari to lose all interest in casino gambling. This leaves him with no idea what to do with leisure time…
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar and Alexander get to replay their conversation from “The Gathering,” but this time it’s about 75% less sleazy, especially since G’Kar actually behaves honorably and nobly this time.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Psi Corps regs are apparently that only one telepath can be assigned to a post. (This also explains why Alexander and Winters were both the only telepaths officially detached to B5.) It takes Alexander a surprisingly long time to think of approaching non-humans with her proposal, since Psi Corps would cut off any human avenue.
We live for the one, we die for the one. Lennier gets the evidence they need to prove the Centauri are behind the raids. Because he’s just that awesome.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Alexander reminds G’Kar of the fact that sexual congress was part of the deal when he first proposed it five years earlier, and she makes a lewd comment about her high sexual threshold to torment G’Kar in one of those scenes that was so obviously written by a man….
Welcome aboard. Thomas MacGreevy commences the recurring role of Minister Cholini; he’ll be back next time in “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder.” Richard Yniguez concludes the recurring role of Montoya (who is criminally underused in this one), back from “Meditations on the Abyss.” Denise Gentile continues the recurring role of Lise, back from “Rising Star,” to return in “Wheel of Fire.”
Wesley Mask plays the snotty Fresh Air server who annoys Garibaldi and Edmund Shaff plays the business person who disappoints Alexander.
Trivial matters. Garibaldi, had dinner with Sinclair, Sakai, and Ivanova at Fresh Air right before he got shot in “Chrysalis.” He says that he hasn’t eaten there since, though we did see him order takeout pizza from there at the end of “Meditations on the Abyss.” He may only be referring to eating in the restaurant—or he may not remember ordering the pizza, as he was really drunk when he ordered it…
Garibaldi also comments that the other three people at that dinner are all gone. Sinclair was reassigned between “Chrysalis” and “Points of Departure,” and he buggered back to the past to become Valen in “War Without End, Part 2.” Ivanova was promoted to ship captain and left the station in “Rising Star.” Sakai has not been seen onscreen since “Chrysalis”; Garibaldi mentions that she disappeared “over a year ago,” but that disappearance happened two-and-a-half years prior to this episode, as chronicled in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn Drennan.
G’Kar proposed Alexander sharing her genetic sequence with the Narn so they could breed telepaths—and also proposed mating with her—in “The Gathering.” Apparently, the pair of them hadn’t had a real one-on-one conversation since then until this episode.
Delenn sent Lennier on a covert mission to find evidence of who is responsible for the raids last time in “Meditations on the Abyss.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I want you to get out of this part of the space and back home just as fast as you can. Because barring an act of God—and since I don’t believe in God, that kinda narrows the odds a bit—by this time tomorrow, we’re gonna be at war with the Centauri.”
—Garibaldi urging Lise to leave, the final line of dialogue of the episode.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I have been working up a good mad all day, and I am not about to let you undercut it by agreeing with me!” There were some comments in last week’s rewatch that talked about how absolutely horrid Delenn was to Lennier, using his infatuation with her to manipulate him. I didn’t get into it in the comments there, though I thought about it, but I actually want to talk about it here, because this episode also is a good showcase for Delenn’s ability to manipulate people and events.
Which is not only strong, but has been part of her character from jump. It’s easy to forget because Mira Furlan has that 50,000-megawatt smile and she and Sheridan have their incredibly adorable chemistry, but Delenn is incredibly manipulative and has a superlative capacity for cruelty. We were reminded in this episode of what G’Kar was doing in “The Gathering” with Alexander, and it’s worth reminding everyone what else G’Kar did in that episode: approach Delenn about an alliance, but the moment G’Kar mentioned the Grey Council, Delenn nearly killed him in a particularly painful manner. She spent most of the first season manipulating Sinclair, she circumvented the wishes of the Grey Council whenever it pleased her, she’s barreled forward with her own plans whether or not they made sense.
Delenn is not a nice person. These last two episodes, in which she has played both Lennier and Sheridan like a two-dollar banjo, demonstrate that rather impressively.
Anyhow, this is a strong episode that moves things forward nicely—and, for a change, speedily. Lennier finally gets the proof that the Centauri are responsible, while the Centauri have already got their plausible deniability plan going. And the IA proves themselves to not be handling this at all well, as excluding Mollari from the meeting—especially since they’re fairly sure he has no knowledge of it—is not a great idea. But then, we had pundits spending ten minutes in “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” talking about how the IA shit the bed in their first year, and while their evidence was the botching of the Byron thing, this qualifies, too…
It’s nice to see Garibaldi’s falling off the wagon (not getting on it as I stupidly said last week, sorry about that) is finally being dealt with directly. Denise Gentile hasn’t impressed me overmuch as Lise, though the scripting for her hasn’t done her any favors. However, she nailed this episode, especially the way her body language completely changes when she finds the half-empty booze bottle. Lise was there the last time Garibaldi left the wagon behind, and she knows more than anyone currently on the station how bad this can get.
(Garibaldi also mentions at one point that he’s a war hero, and what the what? His primary role in the recent war was as Benedict Arnold, not as George Washington…)
Finally, this episode is another reminder that Lennier is a total badass. Bill Mumy plays him with enough low-key modesty to mute the badassery, but that just makes it all the more effective when the badassery comes out to play.
Next week: “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder.”
Delenn’s conversation with Sheridan always bugs me because she is specifically undercutting his very reasonable emotions because she finds them inconvenient to deal with. And it also serves to circumvent a discussion that might get into touchy territory regarding Lennier. JMS claims that it was based on yet another personal experience, almost word for word, but I don’t think it’s as “cute” as he does.
Anyway, I agree that it’s a huge mistake to leave Londo out of these discussions. They should have included him from the very start. At the very least, he might have helped to figure out how to manage the situation while the full truth was discovered. It might not have changed things overly much in the end, but for all his previous mistakes, I think he had earned that much.
If only Lyta had considered talking to G’Kar about a deal back when Byron was alive. Things might have ended differently. Turning to the Narn was such an obvious solution that Lyta seems a bit foolish for not having thought of it immediately.
Garibaldi did rescue Sheridan from torture and imprisonment on Mars, getting stabbed for his trouble, but given that he was the one who betrayed Sheridan in the first place we may not want to count that even though he was under psionic manipulation. As for more genuine acts that would count towards being a “war hero,” he did 1) lead combat that repelled a boarding party in Severed Dreams, 2) led the team that attempted to evict Kosh 2 (Ulkesh) during which their breathing masks were compromised, and 3) he led a raid that took over a bunker on Mars from which Lyta launched the psi attack that activated the frozen teeps that disabled the Earth fleet around Mars.
It really has come home to me on this rewatch just how manipulative Delenn is. As Keith points out, Mira Furlan makes it really easy to overlook, as does Delenn when she has the opportunity to be playful. It’s not something I’ve ever considered before, and I may have to reassess what I think about the character.
“Delenn conveniently walks out of the office in a manner that prevents her from seeing her husband lurking right on the other side of the doorway.”
Given that it took several seconds before Sheridan came back into view, I think the idea was that he retreated a little way down the hall and wasn’t directly visible. Still, it drives home how absurd it is to design the captain’s/president’s office with no door.
And yes, the waiter practically acting like a booze pusher was highly contrived. Surely restaurants get non-drinking patrons all the time (we know there are Muslims on the station, for example). I also found it contrived that Garibaldi, who’s recovered from alcoholism twice now, apparently doesn’t remember that addiction is a biochemical or neurological process that isn’t subject to willpower or strength of character. His talk about wanting to be in control is hard to square with letting himself fall under the control of his addiction. Okay, maybe he’s in denial, but it seems like the kind of denial of someone who’s never been through recovery before.
I was kind of hoping we’d get a fun subplot about Londo finding something novel to do with his free time. I guess we’re past the point in the season where we can just have a character-driven subplot that doesn’t drive the arc.