“And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder”
Written by J. Michael Staczynski
Directed by Goran Gajic
Season 5, Episode 16
Production episode 517
Original air date: June 10, 1998
It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn is having trouble sleeping, given the gravity of what they’re facing. She’s staring at a candle. Sheridan gets up and resists getting dressed. At one point, he puts a slipper on, before he drops the other one. So I guess he doesn’t have to wait for the other shoe to drop! (Har har!)
The IA council meets, though Mollari and Vir are forbidden from entering the session by Allan and some security personnel. Medical evidence of Centauri weapons being used is presented by Franklin, followed by Garibaldi providing more evidence, both in the pattern of attacks and the button he found on his attacker on the Drazi homeworld. Also, one Centauri ship was allegedly attacked by the cargo raiders, but unlike all the others, it was a surplus ship, barely in service, and there was no loss of life or goods, which points to it being a decoy.
Franklin and Garibaldi stopped by Mollari’s quarters to drop off copies of their testimony. When G’Kar arrives at his door, Mollari assumes that he, too, will be testifying to what he saw while he was pretending to be Mollari’s bodyguard. However, G’Kar assures him that he wasn’t pretending, and he will not testify to what he saw while protecting Mollari. The prime minister thanks him for respecting his privacy, and then asks why he is there. G’Kar says the council is ready to let him and Vir in now.
Upon arrival, Mollari derides the evidence as circumstantial and not remotely definitive. However, there is one piece of evidence they haven’t shown yet, as they wanted Mollari present for it. Lennier then shows the recordings he made of the Centauri base and the Centauri attack on innocent Brakiri cargo ships. Mollari’s bombast deflates, and he quietly says he must speak to his government. Sheridan says that he’d better talk fast and tell them that the Centauri republic has committed acts of terrorism against the IA and will be blockaded until such time as an apology and reparations are forthcoming.
In private, Mollari is appalled. They’ve never fired on civilian targets, except in times of war, and the republic isn’t at war with anyone right now. Cholini contacts Mollari, having consulted with the Regent, and they are of the opinion that this is a frame job. Mollari points out that Lennier is an unimpeachable source, but Cholini agrees—that’s why whoever is responsible, probably the Narn, went to all this trouble to fake it, so that Lennier would believe it, and therefore the IA would believe it.
Mollari returns to the council chambers and shares the Centauri POV, withdraws the republic from the IA, and states that they do not recognize the authority of the blockade, and that any attempt to enforce that blockade will be considered an act of war. He is also departing B5 and returning to the homeworld. Sheridan threatens that he may never again be welcome on the station. Mollari instructs Vir to remain on the station, to relay messages to and from B5. G’Kar also goes along with Mollari—without informing him ahead of time—to once again be his bodyguard.
Allan goes to Garibaldi’s quarters to inform him that Sheridan is looking for him. It takes Allan all of four-and-a-half seconds to figure out that Garibaldi is drunk. Garibaldi tries to take the self-righteous route by reminding Allan that he’s had his own problems, but Allan takes precisely none of that, and so Garibaldi shifts gears to pathetic and asks for just a few days to get his shit together. Allan does give him that.
Garibaldi meets with Sheridan. The plan is to use the White Stars to back up the blockade ships. Garibaldi’s job is to coordinate the fleet and send them where they’re needed once the Centauri are sighted trying to run the blockade.
Mollari and G’Kar arrive on Centauri Prime and meet Cholini. Cholini isn’t thrilled to see G’Kar; Mollari isn’t thrilled to be informed that the Regent is unavailable to see him.
White Star 43 contacts Garibaldi on B5 to inform him of Centauri ships about to run the blockade. But he’s passed out again. So that ship goes alone to back up the IA ships. It turns into a brutal battle with huge losses on both sides.
Vir tries to get in touch with Mollari, but Cholini informs him that he’s indisposed. Franklin then arrives to get Vir to safety, as he’s not safe in Mollari’s quarters, or his own. En route, they’re jumped by Brakiri, but they manage to get away unscathed.
The council chambers are in chaos. Garibaldi is weakly trying to “figure out” what happened and why White Star 43 was on its own. The ambassadors are all pissed. Sheridan finally screams for everyone to shut up, makes a self-righteous speech about how nobody wanted peace or cooperation, they just want war, so war they shall have.
On Centauri Prime, Cholini informs Mollari that the IA has officially declared war on the Centauri Republic. Cholini insists that G’Kar be imprisoned for the duration of the war, as he is on the IA advisory council and is therefore a security risk. Mollari refuses, as G’Kar is still his bodyguard. Mollari also confidently states that even Cholini wouldn’t be so churlish as to imprison the prime minister.
Cholini then imprisons the prime minster in the same cell as G’Kar.
Sheridan finds Delenn again staring at a candle. She says that the flame represents life, and that they’re all made up of the same molecules, each no better than the other. The flame of the candle is a reminder that life is precious, and when it’s extinguished, it’s gone forever.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan tries to blame the people in the council chambers (including, to be fair, himself) for being forced to go to war, which is entirely the wrong message to be delivering at that point. It’s the Centauri who caused this…
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is somehow able to convince Allan not to turn him in. This results in a war starting that might have been prevented if Garibaldi hadn’t been passed out when he was supposed to be on duty.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. G’Kar entrusts Delenn with the latest chapters of his book, asking that, should anything happen to him, she make sure the chapters get to the Narn homeworld. Delenn agrees, and tells G’Kar that he’s the finest writer she’s ever known.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Cholini is obviously the tool by which the Drakh are manipulating events, as he carefully keeps everyone in the dark and away from everyone else—and also comes up with the bullshit justifications for the evidence that the IA has gathered.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar basically forces himself on Mollari as his bodyguard, including getting the seat next to him on the transport so he can talk to him on the flight. When Delenn points out that Mollari hates talking to people on flights, G’Kar smiles and says he knows.
We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers seemingly can only talk to Garibaldi, and when they can’t reach him, they just go off on their own, apparently?
Welcome aboard. Thomas MacGreevy is back from “Darkness Ascending” as Cholini; he’ll return next time in “Movements of Fire and Shadow.” Kim Strauss and Jonathan Chapman make their final appearances on B5 as, respectively, the Drazi and Brakiri ambassadors, both last seen in “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Chapman will be back in the role on Crusade in “The Rules of the Game.”
Trivial matters. Lennier recorded a Centauri attack in “Darkness Ascending.” Garibaldi got a Centauri button off an attacker on the Drazi homeworld in “The Ragged Edge.”
Director Goran Gajic is the husband of Mira Furlan, who plays Delenn. The character of Aldous Gajic in “Grail” was named after him.
The conversation between Garibaldi and Allan about the dangers of addiction has resonances in the real lives of both actors, as both Jerry Doyle and Jeff Conaway dealt with substance abuse issues in their lives, and both actors’ deaths were due to health problems that were exacerbated by those issues. (Your humble rewatcher was a guest at a convention with Doyle in 2001 in Indianapolis. I was commuting to and from the convention, as the person I was dating at the time had family locally. Doyle and I, and several other guests, were in the bar, and upon learning I would be driving that evening, Doyle—who was pretty drunk—gave me a lengthy and impassioned lecture on the subject of drunk driving and that I should avoid it at all costs. It remains one of my more surreal convention memories…)
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Don’t worry, even one as arrogant as this would not take it upon himself to imprison his own prime minister.”
—Mollari describing Cholini right before Cholini imprisons his own prime minister.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Shut up.” This episode absolutely made me crazy.
I’ve been doing rewatches on this site since 2011, and for many of them, I’ve found myself altering my opinion about at least one of the main characters while doing so. With this one, it’s the realization that Michael Garibaldi absolutely sucks at his job. Well, okay, both his jobs. In his capacity as IA intelligence director, that incompetence exacerbated by his alcoholism, and his constantly being passed out during important moments has caused all manner of problems. Making it worse is that we finally get a member of station personnel who finds out—but it’s Allan, who owes Garibaldi for looking the other way about his own sordid past, so he lets him off the hook. With awful results.
Not that those results should ever have happened, as the whole setup makes no kind of sense. How is it even possible that the only method by which the Rangers had set up to get White Star assistance to the blockades was through Garibaldi? What if he’s in the bathroom when they call? Or if he’s doing one of the other eight billion things he might need to be doing as the head of intelligence for a massive interplanetary alliance? Or, and here’s a biggie, what if the crisis happened when he was legitimately asleep? Why don’t the White Stars have backup contacts? Like Lennier, who’s on B5 already. Or, and here’s a crazy idea, what about Delenn who’s supposed to be Ranger One, for crying out loud. Deploying the Rangers is kind of her job. So why is it suddenly entirely Garibaldi’s responsibility?
That’s not the only example of terminal incompetence on the part of our heroes. There is no reason, none, why Mollari and Vir should be excluded from the presentation of evidence. Yes, Franklin and Garibaldi also provided written transcripts of what they were testifying to, but these weren’t depositions, they were testimony, one in which questions could be asked. Excluding Mollari from the proceedings makes it suspect, and actually lends credence to Cholini’s accusations of this being a frame-up. It also cuts Mollari off from whatever follow-up questions or clarifications that might come out in the course of giving testimony, and denies Mollari the opportunity to make those queries.
Indeed, the entire decision to keep Mollari in the dark back in “The Ragged Edge” was an idiotic one, as it puts Mollari in an impossible position. He has no time to prepare an adequate defense—though he makes up for it in theatricality, bombastically and characteristically ripping the evidence to pieces and tossing it in the air in council chambers like confetti, a classic Londo Mollari moment—and no good argument to give Cholini. If he’d been in on the investigation from jump, he might have had more ammunition to hit Cholini with, beyond, “I trust Lennier,” which is, let’s face it, pretty weak. It probably still wouldn’t have worked anyhow, but at least Mollari would have been informed instead of being blindsided as he is here, leaving him with no idea who to trust—beyond G’Kar, anyhow, especially since G’Kar takes his bodyguarding sufficiently seriously that he refuses to testify against him. Which gives G’Kar the distinction of being the only person acting actively ethical in the whole damn episode…
Some of this could be considered a feature rather than a bug. After all, we knew (from Morden in “Into the Fire,” from Sheridan’s jump forward in the “War Without End” two-parter) that the Centauri would pay a price for Mollari’s turning on the Shadows. And the notion that the IA’s first year was wracked with storm and tempest, as it were, was foreshadowed in “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,” though that episode also saw Delenn having the last word and insisting that Sheridan was a good person. And maybe he was, but man has he been shitting the bed in his first few months in office…
Next week: “Movements of Fire and Shadow.”
Mollari and G’Kar are the standout characters of the series, followed (IMHO) by Vir and Lennier. At least of the characters who are there all the way through. This season is really suffering from the effects of whether or not it would happen and from Strazynski’s decision to do all the writing himself.
Agreed. Despite the writing problems, I remember this episode (and am reminded by the still shots above) for being really well shot, visually at least.
The whole collapse into war has really been an idiot plot. I don’t have a problem with the war itself happening or with us seeing points where the war could have been avoided. The problem is the way we get there.
All through the opener, I was concerned about what sort of director Gajic was going to be. Those sharp close-ups of Delenn felt a bit indulgent in a “look at my beautiful wife” sort of way. The shoe dropping was a horrible cliche, as was the candle guttering out just before the pre-credits commercial break. But after that, things settled down. And he seems just to like close-ups; there were some of other characters too. One or two camera angles felt very European, but on the whole the direction was decent.
Per JMS quoted on the Lurker’s Guide page for this episode, both the Delenn closeups and “the other shoe dropping” were all scripted. He’s very proud of it. (The script excerpt there doesn’t quite bear out the shoe dropping, but it’s close, and it is professed to be from the first draft. As always, you can choose how much you want to believe him.)
Link: Lurker’s Guide page for this episode.
Be fair, though — what director wouldn’t want to focus on Mira Furlan’s face as much as possible?
The whole Garibaldi business was nonsensical, yes. Even aside from the shoved-in-our-face contrivance of “You’re the only person who can prevent a war, whoops, you missed it,” I have to wonder at the lack of addiction counseling resources on Babylon 5. If Zack’s a recovering addict himself, why didn’t he even invite Garibaldi to a meeting? It takes support to overcome addicition, and “Yeah, I’ll cover up for you” doesn’t cut it.
Aside from that, though, I didn’t mind the Alliance members’ mistakes in handling the crisis, because it’s their first big crisis, and maybe their screwups were the writer’s intent. I also thought the dialogue writing had some excellent moments, and the direction was superb, about the best I remember seeing on this show.
I often wonder, when thinking about this period of the Alliance, whether they would have faltered so badly if the Drakh weren’t intentionally poking at them. Not reading in Londo from the start was an unforced error, as I’ve said before; in fact, when push comes to shove, he does exactly what they expect/fear in this episode when it’s far too late to accomplish anything, so what did they really avoid?
Sheridan also really just struggles to be president, because it’s not the kind of problem-solving he’s used to. Delenn would perhaps have been better in that position. But I do think that all the mistakes, errors in judgment, etc. are meant to be intentional, to show that it’s not always happily ever after when everyone says they are going to get along.
The one scene that always gets me in this episode is when Franklin plays Action Hero to get Vir to safety. Sorry, but he is the last person who should have been assigned to that task! I mean, Lennier is right there…
I rank Sheridan’s council rant among the show’s finest moments. He’s not being incoherent when he’s blaming the other IA members. Yes, he should be blaming the Centauri, but from his point of view Sheridan is venting four years of frustration during that scene. Let’s not forget he never wanted to be a politician to begin with, let alone dealing with petty squabbles between other races. His rant to Ivanova in “A Distant Star” made that clear, and that was his fourth episode as a captain. The endless League disputes over these years have done their job – settling the petty squabbles, dealing with the ramifications of the Narn/Centauri war, trying to get their support in the Shadow War (having to rely on a Vorlon show of force to achieve it), and then trying to get their support in the Earth Civil War and forming the IA. That’s a lot of work and stress. Sheridan’s impatience and resentment were bound to burst forth. And I was as gobsmacked as any of those people when Sheridan almost lost it with his shouting. Barely controlled fury and anger. Easily one of Boxleitner’s best moments as Sheridan.
I find interesting the way Goran shoots and edits that scene (I assume that as showrunner, JMS let him have more of a say in the final cut, the way he likely would to Vejar), because the way he keeps cutting from one Sheridan angle to the other between each line break really sticks out. Very unusual visual language for the show.
Though, as great as the episode looks and plays, Garibaldi’s plot role does kind of derail the credibility a bit, mainly because you can see it’s a blatant writing trick to ignite the confusion. Garibaldi’s off the wagon status certainly made him a liability from the start, but not having backup options to coordinate the Rangers was exactly that, an intentional omission. I understand Zack wanting to protect Garibaldi’s privacy in his fragile moment, and it does make sense a former user would make the wrong choice. But the rangers and Delenn not having a better system illuminates the seams of JMS’s plotting.
I have less issues with Londo being kept out of the loop during the early council depositions. It’s obviously for dramatic effect, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work. Peter Jurasik playing Londo’s appalled reactions to not only being shunned by his former friends and colleagues, but also the way he reacts to finding out he was being lied to by his own people and put in an impossible position make for some truly harrowing scenes.
The same can be said for the smaller stuff, like Franklin putting his life on the line for Vir’s sake, and G’Kar’s continued devotion and commitment to protecting Londo. I also adore Delenn’s assessment of G’Kar’s work.
Garibaldi’s role aside, this is an episode I’ll always revisit. Seeing these characters breaking apart after years sticking together is heartbreaking, and the promise of another impending war does bring back some of the sparkle of show’s middle seasons.
It was either in a talk by JMS or in his autobiography that in season 5 it was becoming obvious that Jeff Conway was slipping in his sobriety and that Jerry Doyle’s drinking was getting worse as well. JMS said that he forefronted the addiction storyline in order to have Conway SAY what both he and Doyle needed to hear in a final, although obviously vain, attempt to get them to see where they were headed. It didn’t work, but I do admire JMS for trying, while making it a logical story to tell this season.
We got some really good scenes out of this episode even if the supporting structure doesn’t really work. Very on brand for B5.
I’m going to incorporate my comment on observations about the show’s morality from Darkness Ascending by reference, since it seems just as appropriate here.
Lots of excellent scenes in this one. For me, this was a very effective episode the first time I watched it, and I still like it. That said, on this rewatch, I can definitely see the strings. JMS knew there had to be a war that tested the nascent Alliance, he had already plotted that the Centauri would be cut off and attacked by Sheridan and allies in War Without End, and he had set up Garibaldi and his drinking problem as a result of Bester and the PsiCorps. All well and good. Sheridan’s unsuitability for the presidency, Garibaldi’s alcoholism, the Alliance members still struggling to be (and against being) actual allies, and the remnant Shadow forces sowing destruction all should lead naturally to what’s happening here, and, on an emotional level, they do (at least for me). But this time around thinking about it more logically, there is a generous helping of TV drama logic informing how it actually plays out, and some missing connective tissue that would have helped it along. Sometimes watching B5 feels like JMS is telling a grand make-believe story with all his action figures, and he has all these cool story beats, but it gets a little muddy and disjointed in between those beats. (I don’t mean that as pejoratively as it sounds, but I couldn’t think of a better way of wording it.)
Also, Moderator, it looks like this post isn’t part of the B5 Rewatch Column.
Should be fixed and showing up in the index–thanks!