“A Spider in the Web”
Written by Lawrence G. DiTillio
Directed by Kevin G. Cremin
Season 2, Episode 6
Production episode 206
Original air date: December 7, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… The CEO of FutureCorp, Taro Isogi, is having a meeting on B5 with Amanda Carter, a representative of the Mars Provisional Government, to discuss FutureCorp expanding to Mars. This would help Mars be more independent in a way that wouldn’t involve bloodshed. Winters—who is an old friend of Isogi’s—is hired to monitor the meetings telepathically.
This meeting concerns the senate, apparently: Senator Elise Voudreau all but orders Sheridan to spy on the meeting, as the senate is convinced that FutureCorp is planning to finance a Mars armed rebellion. Sheridan sticks to his metaphorical guns on the subject: he doesn’t have any jurisdiction over civilian negotiations, and the whole point of B5 is that it’s neutral territory. Voudreau insists he at least keep an eye on things.
Under the nuclear wasteland that used to be San Diego, a mysterious unseen person starts an operation on B5, which leads to a cargo container opening and a hand appearing from inside it. The hand belongs to a person who seeks out Isogi and kills him in front of Winters, saying, “Free Mars!” before using a cybernetic hand to send a crapton of electricity through Isogi.
When interviewed by Sheridan and Garibaldi afterward, Winters says that she sensed no emotion from the killer, indeed only saw a single image of a ship being fired on in space in his mind. The assassin hacks a communications station and speaks with the mysterious Control, who orders him to eliminate Winters, as she’s a witness.
Sheridan informs a stunned Carter of Isogi’s death; she promises to do whatever she can to aid in the investigation, as she respected Isogi and states that he was Mars’ best hope for a peaceful future.
Garibaldi doesn’t see how Free Mars could get their hands on so sophisticated and expensive a piece of tech as the murder weapon—what’s more, he’s not sure how that weapon got smuggled onto the station.
The assassin kills Winters’ security escort, but before he can kill her, Winters again probes his mind, and it becomes clear that it’s the assassin himself in a small space ship being blown up. The assassin is, to say the least, confused, and stumbles off. Winters later tells Sheridan that she distinctly saw the moment of his death—neat trick, given that he’s obviously alive. However, the assassin left some DNA behind, and Garibaldi identifies him as Abel Horn—deceased. He was indeed a leader of Free Mars, but he was supposedly killed when his ship was fired upon by the EAS Pournelle.
For his part, a now-very-confused Horn goes to Carter’s rented quarters. They’re old friends—Carter, it turns out, has a past with Free Mars that she would prefer to keep buried—and Horn starts having seizures and begging Carter to bring Winters here, as she would have the answers he needs.
After settling Winters in her quarters, Garibaldi meets with Sheridan, who reveals a secret project—one of several that Sheridan has taken an interest in over the years—called Project: Lazarus. It was from twenty years earlier, an attempt to take the recently deceased and “resurrect” them with cybernetic implants to turn them into, in essence, zombie soldiers. He thinks this might be what happened to Horn after the Pournelle fired on him.
Horn falls asleep, and Carter contacts Winters, who agrees to meet with her. (Carter doesn’t mention Horn at all.) Even as Garibaldi gives permission for Winters to meet with Carter, Sheridan starts a specialized scan to try to find Horn.
Winters is escorted by Zack Allan and some other security guards, but they stay in the corridor while she goes in. (Why her escort doesn’t secure the room she’s entering is left as an exercise for the viewer.) As soon as the door closes, Horn jumps her, having already rendered Carter unconscious. At his rather insistent and violent request, Winters scans Horn, and not only sees his being “killed” by the Pournelle, but also his being operated on by two surgeons, supervised by a Psi Cop.
Sheridan tracks Horn to Carter’s quarters. Allan and the rest of the detail go in, soon followed by Sheridan and Garibaldi. However, Horn has Winters as a hostage, and they all have to put their PPGs down. Horn picks up one weapon and fires badly, forcing Sheridan to fire his PPG. His cybernetic implants then explode, which they all run away fast from, barely escaping damage. Of Horn’s corpse, there’s no sign.
While Carter is being treated in medlab, she admits to being former Free Mars, back when they were just a political organization. Once they modulated into being terrorists, she quit. Sheridan agrees to keep Carter’s past out of the public record, on the condition that she continue negotiating with FutureCorp.
Winters doesn’t tell Sheridan or Garibaldi about the Psi Cop she saw in Horn’s mind, just that he was operated on. When she checks the records, she sees that that particular Psi Cop is listed as deceased. But when we cut back to San Diego, we see that the person running this op is that very same Psi Cop.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan tells Ivanova the story of his first contact with the Tikar, when he was captain of the Agamemnon.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova surprises Sheridan by saying that Winters is trustworthy, but also cautions that she is fiercely loyal to the Psi Corps. The rest of the episode bears this out, as Winters is helpful in the general investigation, but hides Psi Corps’ involvement.
The household god of frustration. One of Garibaldi’s people is killed. At no point does Garibaldi comment on this or even seem to be concerned about the loss of one of his people. But hey, he didn’t have a speaking part, so obviously not that important…
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Psi Corps figured out how to make Project: Lazaurs work. Previous iterations had the original personality dominating the cybernetic implants, but Psi Corps was able to have the subjects’ minds focus entirely upon the moment of their death, thus allowing the implants free rein to do their thing.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Garibaldi acts like his usual aggressive creepy self toward Winters, who very politely tells him to fuck off and die, after which he’s a lot nicer to her. Gawrsh. (Making this all even more meta is that Jerry Doyle and Andrea Thompson were married from 1995 to 1997.)
Welcome aboard. Michael Beck gets billing as a special guest star for some reason as Horn. He’ll be back on Crusade’s “The Well of Forever” as Mr. Jones. Much cooler are the appearances by two greats: Adrienne Barbeau as Carter and Jessica Walter as Voudreau.
Eternal character actor James Shigeta plays Isogi and Annie Grindlay plays the mysterious Psi Cop.
In addition, this is the debut of Jeff Conaway as Allan; Conaway will appear in seven more second-season episodes (the next being “The Coming of Shadows”) before being elevated to opening-credits regular in season three. Joshua Cox also appears in his recurring role of Corwin, back from “A Distant Star.”
Trivial matters. This is the only appearance of Bureau 13. After the episode was aired, the producers learned of the role-playing game of the same name. Rather than cause confusion in the marketplace, the organization was dropped, though the mysterious “Control” that is working on behalf of the Bureau on B5 will be seen again, in a way that is contradictory to this episode, as we’ll see when we get that far in “Divided Loyalties.”
J. Michael Straczynski lived in San Diego for many years and has a lot of affection for the city, which is apparently why he decided that in his future history, it was nuked. (Given that San Diego hosts a large naval base, that it would be a target of military action is pretty plausible.)
Isogi mentions that Carter’s great-grandfather John piloted the first colony ship to Mars. This is a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, the protagonist of A Princess of Mars and its various sequels.
The Pournelle is likely named after veteran science fiction author Jerry Pournelle.
Scripter Lawrence G. DiTillio has said that he assumes that Knight One and Knight Two from “And the Sky Full of Stars” also worked for Bureau 13.
The storyline in the fifth through eighth issues of DC’s Babylon 5 comic book by Tim DeHaas & John Ridgway, entitled “Shadows Past and Present,” take place in the general vicinity of this storyline.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Mr. Garibaldi, Taro Isogi was like a father to me. I loved him as a client and as a mentor and as a friend, and now he’s dead. You’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood for your usual badinage.”
“You’re right—it’s a bad time for you, I’m being a yutz.”
“Apology accepted.”
“Could you at least tell me what ‘badinage’ means?”
—Winters smacking Garibaldi down, Garibaldi apologizing and then breaking the tension.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “These are volatile times.” This is a perfectly decent little episode, one that promises lots of nifty possibilities in the future, not all of which are entirely picked up on. For one thing, this is the only time we’ll see Carter or Voudreau, which is majorly disappointing, as both Adrienne Barbeau and Jessica Walter are fabulous. In particular, it feels like the late great Walter is wasted in a role that consists entirely of one conversation over a viewscreen. If you’re gonna hire Lucille Bluth, you should give her a way meatier part than that! Ah, well…
In addition, Sheridan’s habit of digging up weird-ass black-ops projects seems like just a very weird hobby, but we’ll also see that pay off before too long as well.
Once again, we have Winters as part of a story where things happen to other people and she has to react to it. Winters herself remains a complete cipher. Andrea Thompson is doing the best she can, but the character is pretty much just an empty container into which the plot is poured every time she appears, which may be why the actor decided not to continue in the role. (More on that later this season.)
The biggest flaw in the episode is, alas, the guest casting of Horn, as Michael Beck is a throwback to the first season’s array of bland-ass guest stars. Still, it’s, as I said, a perfectly decent episode, one that reminds us how dire things are back on Earth, while continuing the background element of Mars’ independence, one the show will continue to return to.
Next week: “Soul Mates.”
