“All Alone in the Night”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Mario DiLeo
Season 2, Episode 11
Production episode 211
Original air date: February 15, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn has been asked to appear before the Grey Council. They have picked a new leader, and Delenn is concerned with how the council will deal with her transformation. She’s left instructions for Lennier on what to do while she’s gone and also if she never comes back. However, Lennier surprises her by accompanying her to the council for moral support. Delenn is grateful for Lennier’s constant, unwavering support.
Ivanova reports that several ships have gone missing near the station. It doesn’t appear to be raiders—and it needs to be investigated. Sheridan volunteers himself to take a Starfury to check it out. Ivanova objects, but Sheridan hasn’t logged flight time in a while and he needs to in order to keep his certifications up. Ivanova relents, but insists on an escort.
A Narn ship is attacked by an unknown vessel. The ship is destroyed, and the Narn pilot, Ta’Lon, is able to eject his pod—which is then taken by the vessel.
As he’s preparing to fly off in his Starfury, Sheridan is informed by Ivanova that General Hague will be arriving early—which is the first Ivanova has heard that Hague was arriving at all. Sheridan insists (a) that it’s just an informal visit, nothing official, and (b) he’ll be back in plenty of time. Neither of those points will prove to be entirely true…
One of Sheridan’s escort pilots is Lieutenant Carlos Ramirez, who has a friendly argument with Garibaldi and Franklin about the upcoming baseball playoffs, with a wager laid down before Ramirez is called to the launch bay.
However, their search turns up bupkis—at least until they give up and head back to the jump gate. Suddenly, a ship appears and attacks. Two of the escort Starfuries are destroyed, while Sheridan’s and Ramirez’s are badly damaged. Sheridan himself ejects, the same way Ta’Lon did, and is also captured the same way. Ramirez is left alone in space in a damaged Starfury. Radiation leakage has already reached fatal levels, and his communication systems are down. His only option is to return to B5.
Delenn and Lennier arrive at the Grey Council’s mobile headquarters. Delenn is shocked to see that only Hedronn is present. He is there to pass on the council’s judgment: she has been stripped of her position in the council. (Yes, they had her fly all the way to the ship just to say she’s been fired. This meeting could’ve been an e-mail.) Delenn asks about her position as ambassador to B5, and Hedronn says they’re still debating. Delenn does have the right to speak before the council on that matter, which she invokes. Hedronn says he will summon the other eight, including the new leader.
Sheridan is captured and tortured by a bunch of devices that look like they belong in a dentist’s office, one of which may be the nozzle. After he is injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected, he is given a staff and an opponent: a Drazi. The Drazi is wearing some kind of control device on his head. Sheridan tries to reason with the Drazi, but that doesn’t work. The Drazi is then killed by Ta’Lon, who also has a control device on his head. At one point, Ta’Lon begs Sheridan to kill him, but Sheridan instead renders him unconscious.
Hague arrives on B5, greeted by Ivanova alone, as he specifically requested a lack of honor guard, which tracks with Sheridan’s line about it being an informal visit. Hague is concerned that Sheridan isn’t back yet, as is Ivanova. That concern blows up into worry when Ramirez returns to the station dying of radiation poisoning. He reports what happened before succumbing to the radiation. Hague calls in the EAS Agamemnon, Sheridan’s former command, to aid in the search.
Delenn is appalled to see that Neroon has replaced her on the council. This is an issue only insofar as the council has always been balanced: three members of each caste (Warrior, Religious, Worker). Delenn’s replacement should have also been of the Religious Caste, but now the Warrior Caste has four seats, with the Religious Caste only two. Neroon angrily points out that, if Delenn’s right about a great war coming upon us all, then the Warrior Caste will be relied upon to a significant degree. Neroon is also disgusted by her transformation. She is permitted to return to B5 as ambassador, mostly because it keeps her and her icky part-human self the hell out of Minbar. Delenn returns to B5 with Lennier, offering him a chance to leave her service and go back to his studies on Minbar where it’s safe. Lennier refuses and insists he will always stand by her side.
On the way back, Delenn receives a report on Sheridan’s kidnapping and recognizes his abductors: the Streib. They abduct members of a species to test them for possible invasion. They made the mistake of trying it on the Minbari once, and the Minbar remonstrated with them quite thoroughly. Delenn provides the coordinates for the Streb homeworld, and the Agamemnon, supported by some B5 Starfuries lead by Ivanova, heads there.
Ta’Lon wakes up long enough to tell Sheridan that he asked the captain to kill him because there is no escape. Then he passes out again. Sheridan does likewise a bit later, and has an odd dream that includes Ivanova with a raven, Garibaldi with a dove, Sheridan himself wearing a Psi Cop uniform, and Kosh talking directly to him, saying this is the first time his mind has been clear enough. When Sheridan asks why he’s here, Kosh replies that he’s always been here.
He wakes up to see that a door, which rises upward, is partly open. Grabbing his staff, he tries to lever it all the way up, or at least enough for him and Ta’Lon to escape the room. The ship shudders several times; at first, Sheridan thinks they’re transitioning to normal space, but then he realizes that they’re under attack—which they are, by the Agamemnon and the Starfuries. They make it to an escape pod and leave the ship, Sheridan sending out an SOS in Morse code, which Ivanova picks up, enabling them to be rescued.
They return to B5. Sheridan is disheartened that he lived while Ramirez died. (No mention is made of the other two pilots who also died.) He then meets with Hague—
—at which point, the other shoe drops. Sheridan angrily asks what took Hague so long to debrief him. Turns out both Hague and Sheridan are part of a group that is concerned about the creeping fascism on Earth. Sheridan says that his senior staff is loyal to Earth and can be read in. Hague agrees, and thinks that President Clark views Sheridan as a loyal soldier and won’t look too closely at him, which frees him to act. Sheridan then meets privately with Ivanova, Garibaldi, and Franklin and recruits them. They all agree.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan has been covertly working for Hague all these months, part of a group of military personnel who are concerned with the growing power of Psi Corps and the possible assassination of Santiago.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova spends most of the episode being frustrated—by Sheridan’s gung-ho attitude, by nobody telling her about Hague’s arrival, and by Sheridan’s disappearance—but she gets to save the day in the end, since she’s the one who detects Sheridan’s SOS.
The household god of frustration. Though it’s not mentioned specifically, Garibaldi’s discovery of the plot to assassinate President Santiago—and the inability of anyone to corroborate his findings, or even any interest in doing so—in “Chrysalis” and “Revelations” is likely why he so unhesitatingly joins Sheridan and Hague’s cabal.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s ouster from the Grey Council, a process started in “Babylon Squared,” is solidified here, thanks mainly to her making herself part-human, a metamorphosis nobody on the council seems particularly comfortable with.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Psi Corps’ growing influence is a major concern for Hague and his cabal. Also at one point in his weird-ass dream, Sheridan is wearing a Psi Cop’s uniform.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh goes full cryptic in this one, appearing in Sheridan’s dream, and possibly being responsible for it, with the comment in the dream that this is the first time Sheridan’s mind has been quiet enough for him to hear Kosh, plus Kosh repeats in person what he said in Sheridan’s dream.
Looking ahead. Sheridan’s dream is full of weird images and cryptic nonsense. The reference to the man in the middle is likely to be Justin, who we’ll meet in “Z’ha’dum,” though it could also be Lorien, who will recur starting in “The Hour of the Wolf.” Ivanova wearing black and half hidden in shadow is possibly referencing that she has a secret; that secret will be revealed in “Divided Loyalties.” There’s all kinds of potential symbolic meanings to Kosh’s “You have always been here line,” which is repeated by the real Kosh at the end of the episode, most of those meanings relating to Sheridan’s importance. (One could uncharitably call it an attempt at a retcon: “no no, Sheridan has always been the commander of the station; Jeff who?”)
Welcome aboard. Nick Corri plays Ramirez. Marshall Teague, last seen as Drake in “Infection,” debuts the recurring role of Ta’Lon; he’ll be back in “A Day in the Strife.”
Robin Sachs is back from “Points of Departure” as Hedronn; he’ll be back in that role (though named Coplann) in In the Beginning. John Vickery is back from “Legacies” as Neroon; he’ll be back in that role in “Grey 17 is Missing.” Both Sachs and Vickery will next appear in “The Fall of Night,” albeit in different roles.
Robert Foxworth makes his second and what turns out to be his final appearance as Hague, following “Points of Departure.” The role was intended to be recurring, but he was unavailable to appear in “Severed Dreams,” so the character was killed off-screen.
And finally, we have recurring regulars Joshua Cox as Corwin (last in “GROPOS,” next in “Acts of Sacrifice”) and Ardwight Chamberlain as Kosh (last in “The Coming of Shadows,” next in “Hunter, Prey”).
Trivial matters. Ta’Lon is not named in this episode, and is credited only as “Narn.” He’ll get the name when he returns in “A Day in the Strife” in season three.
The Streib are named after Whitley Streiber, author of Communion, his account of being abducted by aliens. The Streib look like the alien pictured on the cover of Communion, which is the now-iconic “gray” bald alien look with black eyes.
This is the second time we saw a “gray” alien on B5, the first being a gag bit in the station courtroom in “Grail.”
Ivanova and Sheridan mention that raiders haven’t been a problem lately, which dates back to “Signs and Portents.”
The episode title comes from the opening-credits monologue, as both Sinclair last season and Sheridan this season refer to the station as being all alone in the night.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“The Dodgers will never make it to the World Series. Hell, they’ll be lucky if they make it through the playoffs without embarrassing themselves.”
“Your diagnosis, Doctor?”
“Oh, the patient is confused, delusional, unable to separate his natural sense of loyalty for his home team from the reality that they stink, and they only got into the playoffs on a technicality.”
—Ramirez, Garibaldi, and Franklin talkin’ baseball.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The first obligation of a prisoner is to escape, right?” One of my personal frustrations with season two of B5 when it aired was the complete inability of J. Michael Straczynski and his writing staff to make Keffer in any way interesting. It would later come out that Keffer was put in at the insistence of the studio, as Warner Bros. wanted a “hotshot pilot” character, and Straczynski’s rather immature reaction to that was to not do anything interesting with him and then kill him off in a manner nobody could possibly care about. (We’ll get into that more when we hit “The Fall of Night.”)
Tempting as it is to view this as an inability on Straczynski’s part, we turn ourselves to Ramirez in this episode. It’s not much, but we learn more about Ramirez in one charming sixty-second scene in the Zocalo discussing baseball among him, Garibaldi, and Franklin than we do about Keffer across the six episodes he appears in.
This is how you do a redshirt death: establish who he is, make us actually like the guy, have him act selflessly and heroic, and then when he dies, it actually matters.
I have to add that this is also how you don’t do a redshirt death, as there were two other pilots who got blown to smithereens by the Streib, who don’t get the courtesy of names or billing or being mourned.
The Sheridan-is-kidnapped part of the plot is a serviceable riff on the bog-standard character-is-kidnapped plot that we’ve seen a gajillion times before. After creating no impression whatsoever as the big scary enhanced dude in “Infection,” Marshall Teague does a very nice job with Ta’Lon, establishing a nice rapport with Bruce Boxleitner’s Sheridan as they struggle to escape together.
The meat of this episode, though, is Delenn’s side of the plot, as it becomes clear that the gamble she took in transforming herself is not paying off the way she thought it would. The Grey Council has snipped off her metaphorical cufflinks and turned their back, not just on her, but on her entire caste, as the Religious Caste is weakened in the council in favor of the Warrior Caste. It’s also great to see both Robin Sachs and John Vickery return as their respective Minbari, as both actors are excellent as usual, their sharp voices magnificently filling the dimly lit council chamber. In particular, both do a wonderful job conveying the utter contempt they both feel for Delenn. In the end, she’s sent back to B5, but where her initial assignment to the station was a cover for her work with the council, now it’s an exile for a person who has fallen out of favor and whom the government wishes to be both out of sight and out of mind.
(This is an interesting reversal of the journey Mollari has gone on, as he was initially exiled to B5 to get him out of the way, but he has parlayed that into a position of power and authority in the Centauri Republic.)
And then we have the revelation at the end that Garibaldi isn’t the only one who saw Santiago’s death as something more than an accident. Hague and Sheridan are part of a group that is concerned about the direction Earth is heading. This isn’t much in this episode—just a tag at the very end to get the ball rolling—but it sets the tone for much of what will be happening on the station moving forward…
Next week: “Acts of Sacrifice.”
Can I just say that B5 is getting uncomfortably prophetic these days…
Yeah, it’s disconcerting to see how prescient JMS was 30 years ago.
That’s why I’m curious about the intended reboot and how he would approach B5’s narrative and themes now in the present climate.
It’s not prophecy, it’s learning from history and warning that it will repeat if we forget it. Unfortunately, people usually do forget it and then think it’s prophetic when the entirely predictable pattern repeats like we were warned it would all along.
damning indicment of western education if I’ve ever seen one.
Although you are right, the series comes very close the the bone in today’s world. Later this season we get Confessions and Lamentations, which felt tailored to some current situations. Other major themes seemed like a warning when B5 started and now seem prophetic.
JMS studied history and psychology and was well aware that “all this has happened before and will happen again” to refer to Battlestar Galactica, he just showed the run up to it.
I’m just frustrated that so many SF writers (including Kenneth Johnson with V as well as JMS with B5 and George Lucas with the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy) spent decades teaching us the warning signs of fascism over and over, only for it to fall on deaf ears.
I think it was more present in their generation’s minds, because they were born in the immediate years after WWII. The legacy of Hitler and others was still fairly recent. It mattered to them more.
To, say, Gen Z, it feels abstract and ancient history. And you’d think the last decade would have taught ’em,but oy…
Can’t wait for the next gen to carry on THAT tradition.
Years ago, somebody being interviewed for NPR remarked that it was no accident that the Predatory Lenders’ Recession had happened just as the last Americans who were old enough to have witnessed how the Great Depression happened were dying.
And now we’ve lost the generation that witnessed the rise of the last creepy dictator with creepy rich friends.
It haunts me, how one of the books I read as a child–adult books, but I was trying to understand how civilized, highly educated Germany could have allowed that–quoted some of the things public ranters were saying in the years before the full flowering of Nazi power. They made no sense. The book pointed out that they made absolutely no sense. They sounded crazy. Therefore, the author–who had been too young to witness their topic firsthand–pointed out, they had to have been urban legends. Not real.
You could hear the same sorts of things quoted in the news any old week this year.
When Ivanova contacts Sheridan about Hague’s visit, he switches on the monitor with a voice command. However, he manually hits a switch to turn it off.
Seems weird that they were able to attack the Streib ship without repercussions, since it’s strongly implied that it occurs at the Streib homeworld.
It’s established that Sheridan has been on B5 for six months. So why are the baseball playoffs apparently starting in the middle of July?
Riffable moments
Sheridan: Why are your doing this? Why are you torturing me?
My temperament’s wrong for the priesthood, and teaching suits me still less. (a no-prize to anyone who can figure out where that’s from)
Neroon: When I was inducted into this circle, I was finally told the reason we were ordered to surrender. I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep!
So I did both.
Lennier: The council is very wise.
Ass.
Most of Sheridan’s dream/vision is foreshadowing. I say most because, apparently, the scene with Garibaldi with the bird on his shoulder is because JMS thought it was funny for Jeffrey Doyle to have a bird on his shoulder
So why are the baseball playoffs apparently starting in the middle of July?
Hrmph. I blame those troublemaking Martian teams for screwing up the schedule, with their year that’s almost two real Earth years and their crazy day length. Boo-hoo!
It’s wrong, I tell you! It just ain’t baseball anymore!
I hope new President Clark shows his iron fist and makes baseball toss out all those namby-pamby calendar concessions. That’ll show ’em.
I don’t claim the no-prize, because I had to look it up, but I *knew* I recognized the line…
Oh, I absolutely claim this no-prize. That musical is my musical, for a variety of reasons. When we did that show in camp, I got to do the line, “Watch him suck up that gas/Oh my god!”
And your no-prize is a genuine couch from the AIP offices from which Roger Corman rooted through for the loose change he used to finance his movies on many occasions.
Seems weird that they were able to attack the Streib ship without repercussions, since it’s strongly implied that it occurs at the Streib homeworld.
The Streib appear to be a minor power that declared war on, essentially, everybody. Even the Narn and Centauri would be able to set aside their differences and agree these people need to be dealt with. My presumption is that a task force headed to the Strieb homeworld after this and made it so they’re not a space faring society any more.
It’s established that Sheridan has been on B5 for six months. So why are the baseball playoffs apparently starting in the middle of July?
Climate change?
Indeed. And that fits with them apparently leaving the Minbari alone after making the mistake of abducting one them. Bloody their noses a bit, and they’ll stay clear of you.
Quoth sitting_duck: “Seems weird that they were able to attack the Streib ship without repercussions, since it’s strongly implied that it occurs at the Streib homeworld.”
Straczynski himself answered this question, and I agree with his reasoning:
“The Streib saw an alliance between Earth and Minbar at that moment, which is the LAST thing they wanted to go up against. Also, you don’t go to war at the drop of a hat just because somebody sinks or shoots down one of your ships. This is one of the cliches in storytelling. And what the Streibs were doing was totally unjustifiable in any event. Do you gear up for the massive hassle of total war — supply lines, fleets, all the rest — because of this incident? Remember, the purpose of the ship was to find races weak enough for them to attack with impunity; they don’t want to go up against a force that can strike back.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/033.html
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Didn’t see this until after I posted the article: as of today, B5 is now available on Amazon Prime!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My first reaction to hearing the news was “Yay, no more commercials!,” until I remembered that Amazon is doing commercials now as well (and they don’t even have the good grace to give you a discount for watching them).
Amazon has an ad-supported tier and a pricier ad-free tier. Every time I watch something on Prime and the opening ads begin, there’s a button on my screen saying “Go Ad-Free.” I admit I’m sometimes tempted.
I’ve found the ads on Roku aren’t too bad, and there are usually fewer.
Yeah, but their ad-supported tier costs the same as their service did before they introduced ads, so instead of saying you can pay less for watching ads, they just want you to pay even more to make them go away.
I wish it was true in Europe also :)
It would be nice if the A-plot weren’t essentially filler. Apart from Sheridan’s dream (which could just as easily be ignored), the only stuff that matters is Delenn’s plot and the scenes at the end. It’s easy to forget how much thumb twiddling actually goes on until the show’s apparent cancellation shifts things into overdrive to get the story told.
I’ve always agreed with Bill Mumy about Lennier’s character arc, but this episode really lays the foundation for it. Sure, things could still have fallen out differently at the end, but you can see a line from here to there.
Keith, the Minbari’s new leader isn’t one of the Grey Council members who appeared here; he leads it, but he stands apart from the Nine, going by the title the Chosen One. The current Chosen One’s name is Jenimer and he appeared in the opening arc of the DC Comics series, in which Sinclair was accused of attempting to assassinate him.
For all its arc significance, I can’t say this was a very good episode. The whole alien-abduction thing was random and incidental, and had quite a silly payoff with the series’s second use of the lame joke that “Gray aliens” actually exist in the B5 universe. It was also ridiculously coincidental that an escape pod just happened to open up invitingly while Sheridan and Ta’lon were nearby. I would think they were allowed to escape as a setup for something, except we’ll apparently never see the Streib again. So it’s just lazy writing.
Dr. Franklin fails science, part 1: Mars’s gravity is not “40 percent less than Earth normal,” it’s 38 percent of Earth normal, or 62 percent less.
Dr. Franklin fails science, part 2: Being exposed to radiation does not make a person radioactive, any more than having a light shined on you makes you glow in the dark. Being contaminated requires being brought into contact with radioactive material. Granted, the radiation was due to a leak in the fighter’s fusion reactor, but the only radioactive substance used in fusion is tritium, which is a weak beta radiation emitter and thus is not a hazard unless inhaled or ingested. Also, Ramirez was in a spacesuit, so there shouldn’t have been any contaminating material on his person.
I can’t agree with the praise of Ramirez’s part in the episode, because the cliche of establishing the main characters’ relationship with a guest character we’ve never seen before and then killing him off is just as hackneyed as the cliche of killing an anonymous redshirt. If JMS planned to kill off Keffer anyway, why not just make him the guy who died here? At least then it would be someone we knew, rather than someone we were just supposed to pretend we gave a damn about. (And I’m sorry, but trash talk between baseball fans doesn’t tell me anything about Ramirez as an individual, since it’s just a generic cultural cliche of guy talk.)
I read that Amazon Prime has started showing B5 again, though it’s still on Tubi and elsewhere. I decided to try it on Prime in hopes that there would be fewer commercials. There were actually more commercials (since I’m not on the pricier ad-free tier), but at least they came in the right places, rather than being clumsily cut in mid-act or just a second or two before or after the act break.
Neutron activation exists. But, if the neutron flux from the reactor was that high, they would presumably have other problems (like the ship itself, although I suppose we can assume that they disposed of it off-screen).
I don’t see the escape pod as a coincidence. The most reasonable interpretation is that the Streib Sheridan clobbered was heading right for it.
Yes, of course, but it’s still a coincidence that the one and only Streib he encountered was the one that happened to be headed for an escape pod.
I’m also not surprised they found an escape pod so easily.
Small escape pods can be a handy plot device, which we’ve seen for ages, even though it seems more practical to have larger lifeboats that each hold a bunch of people.
But IF you’re going to make a case for lots of little pods in a big ship (maybe it’s hard to move far inside the ship before it inevitably blows up), then you’d presumably want them placed all over the parts of the ship where people spend time.
So when somebody calls “abandon ship,” you’d expect lots of escape pod doors be open, obvious, and easy to reach without much searching by crew (or involuntary passengers).
I’m not sure “prisoners escape holding cell because the ship is under attack, and run across a crew member about to get into an escape pod” involves very much coincidence apart from the running into the crew member that close to the pod. We don’t really know how big the ship is, I suppose, and we’d have to know crew size.
Keffer’s actor would have been on a year-long contract to appear in B5. Killing his character early but still having to pay him doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Except Robert Rusler only actually appeared in 6 of the 22 episodes he was credited for as Keller, so they were already paying him for episodes he wasn’t in.
A Venture Bros reference and an Alice’s Restaurant reference in the same review? Joy.
:bows:
—KRAD
Sadly, Alice herself passed a couple of weeks ago.
Delenn getting kicked out of the Grey Council doesn’t hit very hard, because as far as we can tell she never does that job anyway. I actually wasn’t sure if after Babylon Squared she was still a member. I once again note that she could have made all this a lot easier on herself if she simply accepted leadership of the Minbari race.
But really, the Council is hardly being unreasonable here. She never shows up to work, if the calling of her heart is Babylon 5 then somebody else can handle her Grey Council duties. Nine is a good number because it for the most part prevents ties, her being absent leaves them with a suboptimal 8. In addition to being absentee, she doesn’t abide by Grey Council decisions when they’re made (stated outright here in dialogue they told her not to transform herself and she did it anyway). The entire function of the Grey Council is to come to consensus and then have their directives obeyed, so she’s actively thwarting both sides of that equation. I’d probably vote to expel her too and get a new, full-time member. Leaving her on Bab5 sounds good too, so long as she follows orders and actively wants the gig, she’s probably better than any other plausible candidate. Not sure I would have changed the composition from 3/3/3 to 4 warriors, but they must have gotten to at least five votes on that somehow. Presumably all three warriors thought it was a great idea and managed to peel off two votes from religious/worker.
What gives you the idea that she “doesn’t show up for work”? There have been plenty of instances where Delenn has been off-station — explicitly in “Dearhwalker” and “The Quality of Mercy” — and it was clear from Hedronn’s role as a minister in “Points of Departure” that councilors have “day jobs” besides being in the council. Hell, in this very episode, eight of the nine councilors weren’t even on the ship — they had to be summoned so Delenn could plead her case. So I don’t accept that part of your premise.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Hmmm, I never thought of it that way and appreciate the perspective. In “Points of Departure”, I thought the point was the guy who said he was with the Ministry of Culture wasn’t ACTUALLY with the Ministry of Culture, much like spies have been using that kind of cover since time immemorial. The Babylon 5 wiki, at least, agrees with me and says he was simply “in the guise of being a low-level worker in the Ministry of Culture.”
Likewise, when it’s said in this episode that the Grey Council would be convened, I didn’t take that to mean they were spread across the cosmos and Delenn had to wait for everybody to travel there. I thought the point was that they lived on the ship most of the time. In “Babylon Squared,” Delenn says if she accepts leadership she’s on the ship for the rest of her life (“I will never leave it again/I will live out my days and my nights there,”), so I thought other members had similar, heavy time commitments unless they were on assignment. But looking back at the transcript, the text is ambiguous on whether the rest of the council was on the ship (“I will convene the Nine. When we are ready, you will be summoned,”) and in theory they could have been “convened” from anywhere.
Now that you mention it, I realize maybe the Council is less intense than I was giving it credit for. Maybe it’s only a 24/7/life gig for the leader and for everybody else its a part time job, letting them juggle other responsibilities and have a real life. We don’t see the council very much, so anything’s possible.
Both sides of this make a lot of sense, now that I see it all laid out!
Here’s one more possible factor to consider: we hear about Delenn’s insubordination, and Neroon is pretty eager to discredit her, but I don’t think anyone ever complains about her being ABSENT. (Unless my memory is faulty).
Come to think of it, the Grey Council’s structure makes a bit more sense if you picture like this:
-The leader is always on the ship, always ready when needed
-The three councilors from each caste (originally) spread into the hierarchies of those castes, keeping abreast of the on-going affairs.
-(heavily suppositional) The council members’ identities are supposed to be at least nominally secret, so that they can see the REAL goings-on when out in the world
-The Council meets in emergencies and on a regular schedule to vote on issues of the day
The “meet-when-needed” part has plenty of precedent; there’s a bit of correlation with the recent discussion of how the US used to work, in pre-industrial times, with regard to recess appoints.
The secret identity thing is pure fan-wanking, I admit, but it would explain the hidden faces, the general aura of secrecy around the Grey Council. And a gradual break-down of that secrecy would be another way Minbari culture is failing. The members were supposed to be working as just a cultural ministry representative (Hedronn) or low-ranking flag officer (Neroon) and gathering information for the Council votes. But as they become known, they’re no longer those lower ranks, except in name only.
Meh….probably makes no sense and reads too much into things! But what’s the point of being the type of nerd who still talks about B5 30 years later, if you don’t let your mind wander now and again?
My mental model for this was always a hybrid of Diocletian and his mobile court hybridized crossed with the ancien French three estates (which were also Warrior/Religious/Worker). Basically, with the “fact” that the leader is always there, I figured the general idea was that the Grey Council or at least a quorum thereof was always on the ship. If you need a decision from the Grey Council, they’re immediately available. If the Grey Council is needed at a hotspot, the ship just goes there. If there’s a firefight the regular army can’t win, then the Grey Council and its assorted ships ride to the rescue. If the Grey Council needs to see someone, generally that person will come to them rather than their being a fixed capital city. Etc. By extension, I always thought Delenn’s second job and long absence was an anomaly, not the ordinary course of business.
But, reading the other comments in this thread and taking a quick look at the transcripts of the episodes that actually has the Grey Council in them, I realize now this is a lot of assumptions on my part. It’s pretty vague what they’re actually up to, how much they do and it could just be a bunch of weekend warriors who use the ship when it’s convenient.
The Three Estates is an interesting tie-in. Now that you mention it, that seems a likely partial inspiration.
We see multiple members of the Grey Council off the ship, so it’s just the leader who lives there full-time.
Except in the comic book, where we first met the leader of the Grey Council, he was on Minbar.
I assume the ship is to the Grey Council as the Capitol is to the US Congress. It’s where the members do their day-to-day work, but they often travel elsewhere on various kinds of business.
Huh. Then I guess Delenn was just being a bit dramatic when, in Bab Squared, she claimed that if she accepted leadership, she would never leave the great hall again. Or this is a condition unique to her and she figured that if she accepted leadership she would go full tilt and treat it as the entirety of her existence.
Or the comic is inconsistent with the show, which would not be unprecedented.
Some details of the comic conflicted with the timing of events in early season 2, but its events are referenced in the canonical novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows, which confirms that the Chosen One resides in a palace outside Minbar’s capital city Yedor.
The way I see it, Keffer couldn’t be used for this story since he already had his run-in with the Shadows in “A Distant Star”, meaning he had an ongoing function in the Shadow arc, which would come to fruition.
And it’s for the best. I didn’t think much of Ramirez as a one-time character, but he got the job done. As far as redshirt deaths go, this is one of the better ones, almost up there with DS9’s “The Ship”, I’d say. One of my favorite moments in B5 season 2 is actually that very Sheridan/Franklin scene where Sheridan learns about Ramirez’s death, and the way he reacts:
SHERIDAN: He was just a kid. It’s not fair.
FRANKLIN: No, it’s not. Death never is.
It hits a lot harder than the actual death scene where Franklin is in full histrionic mode. A nice moment of empathy mixed with sorrow, regret and the big inescapable truth of the B5 universe: everything ends.
I do agree that the escape pod placement felt a bit convenient, but I’ll accept it since the Streib were busy enough with the attack. While the alien abduction plot is nothing new, I like it that it placed Sheridan in a situation where he absolutely refused to resort to violence or kill, except the bare minimum to survive. Also, Ta’Lon. A great introduction, and I’m glad JMS decided to bring him back.
Even after all these years, I’m still trying to grasp the meaning of the Kosh vision. I adore the symbolism and the use of the main characters in these cryptic warning signs. The man in between could certainly be either Justin or Lorien. But I guess the biggest point of this sequence was to reorient the B5 mythology around Sheridan, and do away with Sinclair’s original purpose. For better and worse, Sheridan is destined to be a major player in what’s to come, and this was a nice, if somewhat obtuse (Lynchian?) way of introducing the puzzle and the pieces.
It’s funny. I recall being as outraged as Delenn when she learned Neroon was the one replacing her. While the Warrior Caste gaining a controlling interest in the Grey Council is certainly cause for worry, I was blind to the damning implications that the Religious Caste had that much influence in the council to begin with. At that point in my life, I hadn’t realized how dangerous it was mixing religion with politics. I stood by Delenn’s outrage because she was a main character, but in retrospect, I’m almost glad the Religious Caste lost some pull within the Council.
That aside, this is one effective story. I feel really sorry for her moving forth with the prophecy and being shunned for having the courage to take it to the next level. And I always appreciate Lennier’s devotion to her, no matter her standing within the Minbari. This is the point where it was crystal clear just how much he loved her.
Yes, agreed on the Kosh vision. I’ve jumped a few episodes ahead of the rewatch and we see quite a lot of “Sinclair who?” as the narrative pushes Sheridan into the centre of everything. It’s one of the things that doesn’t quite feel earned, as Sheridan is good at everything and has few faults, where Sinclair was having to earn things and beat issues that I’m not sure Sheridan encounters on screen. And yet, what else could JMS do?
Sheridan is definitely better positioned as a clear-cut hero than Sinclair ever was. But I don’t agree he’s devoid of faults either. Without spoiling what’s to come, there are enough things that happen down the line that paint Sheridan in a flawed light. He makes more than a few bad decisions, sometimes out of good intentions, and sometimes out of pure blindness or just simply ego. He also lets fear cloud his judgement a few times.
No I agree he does have faults, just saying that at this point in the series, we haven’t really seen any of these flaws on any significant level, except in nuance through things like the rent increase, which makes it feel like things are too easy for him right now, versus Sinclair having to overcome PTSD and issues of identity. And I can understand the necessity of that from advancement of the larger plots, JMS needs to quickly establish why Sheridan would end up at the centre of everything, so he can’t make a lot of mistakes right now, otherwise why would people (and the audience) accept him in that position.
It’s not so much that I’m intending to criticise in a negative way, I like Bruce a lot, just a more in hindsight sense of what is going on in the real world impacting on how the story plays out.
Interesting that people kept saying that “yeah, the first season is not that great, but THEN it becomes awesome”. So far, I don’t see this fulfilled, besides that there’s at least a story arc for the series, the episodes are not really impressive. This whole abduction was lame and the set / decoration of the room with the curtains? OMG, that was a disaster. Ramirez’s death was not such a big deal, just because he had ONE chat in this episode with the others, i did not start to care about him as i never saw him before.
As for Delenn – has she been doing anything in the Council since the war ended? Not sure if it’s a big change that she won’t be there anymore.
she has been doing things in the council, as there are several times in the series where she is off the station, most likely doing council business but that is also the council’s point: her heart is clearly not to the council and the big change is WHO they put in to replace her.
Babylon 5 For the First Time (podcast and YouTube) agreed that the first half of this season isn’t that impressive. The last 6 episodes of the season are really strong and from there on, it just gets better. Warning, The next episode has a scene that hasn’t aged well at all.
I have a feeling i know what you mean, but I find the scene absolutely hilarious if only because of the way Susan handles things.
Personally I adore the scene and think it is really funny. It still makes me laugh. I have just seen way too many complaints about it to not be aware that there will be negatives opinions.
If that’s the scene being referred to, I don’t think “hasn’t aged well” is a fair assessment, because it wasn’t meant to be any more acceptable at the time than we would see it today. The whole point of the subplot, IIRC, was that the demand was offensive by human standards.
I agree, however I have seen so many people be offended by it and say it ruins the episode. I personally think it’s funny and have defended it to many people
The Delenn stuff was great. Mira Furlan always puts in a good performance, but she’s especially enjoyable to watch when the show actually gives her some dramatic material to work with. The rest of the episode was just alright. I did like the bonkers design of the alien vessel, but the realization of the aliens themselves left a lot to be desired. A show that generally does such a good job with makeup should have made more of an effort than just slapping what looked like a Halloween mask on a glorified extra. The alien in “Grail” looked more convincing, and he was just a gag character.
Yeah… the ship was so bizarre and alien-looking that it was a letdown for its occupants to be such cheesy humanoids.
These days they’d probably be full CGI. And probably still look pretty bad.
This is one of a small handful of episodes that I saw, at least in part, when B5 first ran.
I was 8 when the pilot aired, and I remember watching it because, hey, space sci-fi was kinda my thing. I enjoyed it, but then didn’t see any more of the show for awhile. Then, somehow, I saw part of this episode. The main scene I remember from back then is Sheridan being captured and I remember being confused, because Sheridan is clearly NOT Sinclair and I’d only seen the pilot.
I would later see part of an episode with Bester in it (the 2 we’ve covered so far in this rewatch do not feature rhe scene I remember from that viewing) based on the time frame, potentially one in Season 4?
At any rate, it’s nice to finally have context for one of the random episodes I saw.
Sheridan knows they died, he was there when it happened.
While it’s reasonable to want to see all three red-shirts established, how do you do that without dialogue. If you give them dialogue, that costs money. Which two speaking characters can be cut from this episode to allow the other pilots to be characterized briefly?
You could solve the problem by just sending Sheridan with one wingman, But then someone doing an Internet rewatch of your show will complain that you sent the station commander into a dangerous situation with only one other fighter and that’s unreasonable.
The sad part about Ramirez dying as far as Franklin was concerned is that the Dodgers lost their first playoff game due to being stymied by the constant unintentional bunting by the Martian team. Once they adjusted, the Dodgers won that series 4-1.
Poor keffler, his very first appearance shows that he does have a significant other, but Ramieriz is already the more interesting character because he has a favorite baseball team and that Franklin probably will owe him money.
We don’t know that he has a significant other. That could just as easily have been a holographic sex toy or an ex he’s mooning over. They couldn’t even be arsed to let us know that much……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Pretty sure he referred to it as a letter from home in dialogue.
Yes, he did. “It’s getting so a man can’t even enjoy a letter from home anymore.”
Aahhhh…a Thanksgiving reference that can’t be beat.
Unless Neroon was seen jumping up and down saying “Kill. KILL. KILL!!!”
Let me check my 27 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and get back to you.
The rest of the Grey Council came in and sat down, with the seeing eye dogs, who sat down.
Neroon looked at the seeing eye dogs. And the 27 8X10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and he began to cry.
(Do the Minbari have the concept of Blind Justice?)
Re: Vickery…he always was an interesting character (even when he was the “big Bad Minbari” tussling with Sinclair in S1. What he did as Neroon was superb; a well-rounded character, and his motivations were obvious and believable.
He was delightfully nasty as Mr Wells, too, but that character was far more one-dimensional than Neroon’s. I’d say Vickery and Wayne Alexander are my favorite non-main cast members in the entire series.
Your assessment of Garibaldi’s reasons for joining seems to match what I had always figured. He’s suspicious of everything (and we see that play out – BIG TIME – later on, but that story is for another day).
There was a LOT in this episode, and it’s hard to decide which was the “A” plot and which was the “B”.
This may have been the first episode of B5 I ever saw, when it was on daily syndication on TNT, and a lot of it had me completely lost. But within a half dozen episodes I was completely hooked, and relatively well up to speed, which shows how well the show was constructed.