“And the Sky Full of Stars”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 106
Original air date: March 16, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A human boards B5 and goes to a cabin, where he meets up with another human, and they identify their target as Sinclair. So that’s ominous. They never get names in the script, but the credits identify them as “Knight One” and “Knight Two.”
A security guard named Benson is approached by several thuggish gentlemen who remind him rather forcibly of his gambling debts. Benson is then called into Sinclair’s office where the commander and Garibaldi interrogate him about those selfsame gambling debts. However, Benson insists that he hasn’t gone over the limits imposed on security personnel for gambling in the casinos. (Benson is lying, but he’s also covered his tracks decently.) He’s taken off active duty pending a full investigation.
In Medlab, Franklin conducts a physical of Delenn, thus giving him a baseline of a healthy Minbari. Franklin mentions his past as an itinerant doctor, trading passage on ships for serving as ship’s doctor so he could travel the galaxy. That ended when the Earth-Minbari War started, and Franklin scores points when Delenn asks what he did during the war, and he says he destroyed all his notes on Minbari physiology rather than turn them over to EarthGov for use in developing biogenic weapons to use against the Minbari.
When asked what she did during the war, Delenn doesn’t actually answer. This will probably be important later.
Our two Knights are putting a device together clandestinely. They still need a power source, which Benson provides in exchange for enough cash to pay off his gambling debts.
Sinclair has a nightmare about the Battle of the Line. He wakes up only to find that his computer terminal and his link aren’t working, and the station appears to be abandoned save for him—
—and Knight Two, at which point it becomes clear that this isn’t real and that Knight Two has ENTERED SINCLAIR’S BRAIN!
Delenn reports to Garibaldi that Sinclair never showed up for their meeting, nor did he answer calls. It quickly becomes clear that he’s missing, and Garibaldi starts up a search. The first thing he notices is that Sinclair’s link is in his quarters and Sinclair himself isn’t. He never goes anywhere without the link, so something bad has probably happened.
Knight Two tells Sinclair that this VR setup is still one wherein he can feel pain. To demonstrate both that that’s the truth specifically, and that he’s an asshole generally, he sends a shock of electricity through Sinclair, which really really hurts. Then he explains the point of the exercise: The Knights and the people they work for want to know what really happened at the Battle of the Line, as they don’t buy his “blacked out for 24 hours” story. Sinclair, however, doesn’t remember a damn thing after deciding to ram the Minbari dreadnought.
To add to the pathos, Knight Two brings up an image of Mitchell, Sinclair’s wingman, whom Sinclair watched die when he broke formation and got himself blown up.
Knight Two takes a break and discusses the situation with Knight One. The former suggests upping the psychotropics, as they’re on the clock, given that the station personnel are likely to notice that their commander is missing. The latter cautions that it may kill him. Knight Two follows the Evil Dude of Evil Handbook by saying, “So be it” in his posh British accent, which conveniently ignores the fact that this is an interrogation and you can’t get information out of a corpse.
Whatever. Garibaldi tells one of his people that it’s all hands on deck to find Sinclair, and the aide says he’s already doing that, even activated Benson. When Garibaldi questions that, the aide says that Benson’s bank account had plenty of cash in it, so he doesn’t appear to be in debt. But Garibaldi already checked that, and yesterday he was nearly broke. Turns out he got a huge deposit not long before Sinclair went missing. A clue!
Benson, meanwhile, is panicking, because the Knights failed to mention that they needed the power source to kidnap the station CO, which is information he feels he should have had before he made the deal. Knight One shoots him with a PPG, killing him, then dumping the body. However, the body is found outside the station, and Garibaldi orders the search focused on the areas proximate to the part of the station the body was floating near.
Once again, Knight Two ENTERS SINCLAIR’S BRAIN! He pushes, and Sinclair finds himself remembering being inside a circle of people in gray cloaks, hoods covering their faces. And one of them shoots Sinclair with an energy beam.
Sinclair has no idea who all those figures in gray are. Knight Two puts forth his theory: The Minbari were worried about losing the war, so they surrendered, and set up Sinclair as a fifth columnist, who is helping the Minbari lure humanity into a false sense of security as allies before striking.
However, Sinclair pokes multiple holes in that theory, because they were absolutely toast at the Battle of the Line. He has no idea why the Minbari surrendered, but there was no obvious tactical reason for it whatsoever.
But—remembering the last words of the assassin who tried to kill Kosh that Sinclair had a hole in his mind—Sinclair really tries to push through the mental block.
He finally recalls it all: His Starfury was captured and taken into the dreadnought before it could complete the kamikaze run. Sinclair was captured and tortured and then brought before a circle of gray-cloaked Minbari—one of whom, it turns out, was Delenn. The gray-suited folk are obviously the oft-mentioned Grey Council that Delenn has studiously avoided letting anyone know she was part of.
Sinclair also manages to break out of the VR prison and come back to reality. Knight Two is still in the machine, though, so Sinclair smashes it, which renders Knight Two unconscious. Sinclair is also able to knock Knight One out and take his PPG, then go stumbling around the station in a delirious state. Knight One follows, killing a security guard before she can report in her sighting of Sinclair. For his part, Sinclair is hallucinating members of the Grey Council all over the place.
Knight One and Sinclair get into a shootout at the Zocalo, and Garibaldi and his people join in. Knight One is shot and killed. Eventually, Delenn manages to talk Sinclair down long enough for him to pass out from exhaustion.
Sinclair recovers in Medlab. Knight Two is not so lucky, as he’s gone completely cluck-cluck-gibber-gibber-my-old-man’s-a-mushroom from the VR machine’s feedback when Sinclair smashed it while Knight Two had ENTERED SINCLAIR’S BRAIN! He remembers nothing about who he is, who Sinclair is, or what happened, aside from tiny snippets here and there.
Visiting Delenn in her quarters, Sinclair thanks her, and then lies and says he doesn’t remember anything of the experience of Knight Two ENTERING HIS BRAIN! After he leaves, another Minbari—presumably one of the Grey Council—makes it clear to Delenn that if Sinclair ever does remember, he needs to be killed. Meanwhile, Sinclair goes to his quarters and reports a log entry making it clear that he does remember everything and wants to know what the fuck is going on.
Nothing’s the same anymore. We finally fill the hole in Sinclair’s mind, and find out that the Minbari surrendered after the Grey Council examined him. This explains why Delenn has befriended Sinclair in general, though the specific reasons for sparing him, for surrendering, and for Delenn staying close, remain a mystery.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi does pretty well in this one, catching on to Benson’s illegal behavior, and using the latter’s body as a guide to finding Sinclair.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. After being told several times that Delenn was on the Grey Council, we see her on it for realsies in Sinclair’s memory. Her no longer being on it seems now to be in order to keep an eye on Sinclair—who was, it should be pointed out, the Minbari’s choice to command B5.
Looking ahead. This is the first flashback to Sinclair’s lost 24 hours. It’s not the last.
Welcome aboard. Judson Scott and Christopher Neame play the two ill-fated interrogators, who are billed as “Knight One” and “Knight Two” for whatever reason. Jim Youngs plays the ill-fated Benson and Justin Williams plays Sinclair’s memory of the ill-fated Mitchell.
Also, Macaulay Bruton is back as Token Security Personnel With A Speaking Part So Garibaldi Has Someone To Talk To, last seen in “Mind War,” and now officially a recurring role. He’ll be back in “By Any Means Necessary.”
Trivial matters. The title of the episode derives from a line of Sinclair’s in “The Gathering” when he describes what he remembers of the Battle of the Line to Sykes: “The sky was full of stars—and every star an exploding ship.”
This episode finally fills in the “hole” in Sinclair’s mind that we first learned about in “The Gathering.”
Originally Walter Koenig was to play Knight Two, but he had to have surgery and couldn’t do it. J. Michael Straczynski wrote the part of Bester for him instead. (“Mind War” was filmed four episodes after this one.) They then offered the role of Knight Two to Patrick McGoohan (of, among many other things, Secret Agent and The Prisoner fame), but McGoohan was unavailable as well. So they cast Christopher Neame.
Footage from this episode will later be used in the prequel movie In the Beginning.
The newspaper Garibaldi reads, Universe Today, has some fun headlines, some of which are (or will be) relevant to a story. One headline reads, “Is There Something Living in Hyperspace?” which will be referenced in “A Distant Star” and answered in Crusade’s “The Well of Forever.” Homeguard, established last time in “The War Prayer,” is referenced, as one of their member is found guilty of attacking the Minbari embassy on Earth (possibly one of the coordinated attacks mentioned by Biggs in that episode, though it seems unlikely that the perp would be arrested, tried, and convicted that fast…). “Narns Settle Raghesh III Controversy,” which refers back to the incident in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” “Psi Corps in Election Tangle: Did Psi Corps Violate Its Charter by Endorsing Vice-President?” is a bit of foreshdadowing of both Vice-President Clark’s eventually-to-be-revealed dodginess and continues the notion, first put out by Ironehart in “Mind War,” that Psi Corps is trying to expand its influence over EarthGov. And then there’s “San Diego Still Considered Too Radioactive for Occupancy,” establishing that San Diego was nuked at some point between the present day and the time of the show; Straczynski lived in San Diego for seven yeas, and, to quote him: “it’s actually a great place, so I’m inclined to tweak it once in a while, just for funsies…”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I didn’t just see my death—I saw the death of the whole human race!”
“Then why did they surrender?”
“I don’t know! Maybe the universe blinked! Maybe God changed his mind! All I know is that we got a second chance!”
Sinclair and Knight Two discussing the end of the war.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Maybe we’re both still inside.” I have a lot to say about this episode, some of which is tangential and/or nitpicky, so let me lead with this: “And the Sky Full of Stars” is a fantastic episode, the best one of the season so far. I said in the “Soul Hunter” rewatch that an episode without G’Kar or Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about, and with this episode we have our first exception, as neither ambassador is missed this particular time ’round.
While I would love to live in the parallel universe where Patrick McGoohan played Knight Two, Christopher Neame is still good in the role: Somewhat over-the-top, but the part calls for that, and his deep, intense voice is used to good end. (Judson Scott not so much, but he’s always been pretty much entirely 80s-pretty-boy looks and no talent, and he keeps that sad streak going here.)
But writing this rewatch, I hit back on one of my greatest frustrations from watching this show three decades ago, as I went to the Lurker’s Guide web site (which I strongly recommend) and found this gem from J. Michael Straczynski from one of his online posts prior to the episode airing: “Absolutely unlike anything ever produced before for television.”
And, um, no. Just off the top of my head, I can think of two examples of this being done before on television—and, I might add, done better. One should be obvious given who his choice for Knight Two was prior to casting Neame: the final two episodes of The Prisoner (especially the penultimate episode “Once Upon a Time”). The other is Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Chain of Command, Part II,” which is superior mainly due to the much higher quality of acting on display. (This is not meant to disrespect Neame or Michael O’Hare, but we’re talking about Sir Patrick Stewart and David Warner here. They’re on a different level…)
And honestly there was no need for this level of hyperbole, because the episode is damn good. But being primed with being told it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before makes all the parts we have seen before stand out. In particular, the tired clichés in how Benson’s debt collectors, the Knights, and Delenn’s cohort at the end are all written.
In all three of those cases, the characters say that someone might have to be killed, which is to show that the characters in question are, at the very least, ruthless, and at the most, incredibly evil. But it also makes them, at best, stupid and at worst incompetent. First off, anyone who is collecting debts is not going to make a threat, the fulfillment of which will not result in the debt being paid. Compulsive gamblers are addicts, so they’re not going to be dissuaded by someone making an example of them (the usual reason for threatening violence given in fiction that portrays such). Debt collectors are in it to collect debts, not commit acts of violence. (Plus, killing a member of the security force of your mini-city in space will just draw attention to you that you do not want.)
Knight Two saying “so be it” when Knight One says Sinclair might die is equally ridiculous, because they’re trying to obtain information. (Much like Number Two was on The Prisoner, ahem ahem.) You can’t get information from a dead body, and, again, killing the commander of a major space station will just draw attention to you, which you don’t want on a covert mission.
The last issue is less of one because we don’t know the truth behind why the Minbari surrendered, but once we do find out, the threat to kill Sinclair makes absolutely no sense, since the Minbari suddenly realized that killing humans would be bad. But we’ll get to that down the line…
One final nitpick: Garibaldi is reading a printed newspaper. This seemed a failure of imagination thirty years ago, and is something of a howler now when far more people in 2024 consume their news on a computer, tablet, or television, and the physical newspaper is dying a slow death. Heck, the original Star Trek understood that in the future people were more likely to be reading on an electronic medium than a paper one.
Okay, now that I’ve spent all this time on nonsense, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty—damn, this episode is good. For starters, it’s easily O’Hare’s best work to date, showing the character’s anger, confusion, and especially frustration. The missing time in his memory is something that’s gnawed at him for a decade, and this interrogation brings all those questions and annoyances to the fore. It’s a beautifully done set of sequences, culminating in some genuine revelations about Sinclair’s missing time. Of course, those revelations just prompt more questions, but it’s progress. I kind of wish Sinclair had confronted Delenn about it right away instead of holding off for a future episode, but we’ll find out soon enough.
And while I wasn’t all that thrilled with the “if he finds the truth, you must kill him” tag, I will say that Mira Furlan has done superb work in showing Delenn’s complexity and depth—and deviousness. There is a lot more to her than meets the eye, and Furlan expertly plays it without overdoing it or losing the character’s charisma and charm.
Next week: “Deathwalker.”
There is one niggling plot hole that isn’t really addressed. How did they pull off nabbing Sinclair without anyone noticing?
Among the articles in the paper Garibaldi is reading (tragically no sign of the traditional filler articles Building Code Under Fire or New Petition Against Tax Law):
Homeguard Leader Convicted: Jacob Lester Found Guilty in Attack on Minbari Embassy
Narns settle Raghesh 3 Controversy
E.A. President Promises Balanced Budget by 2260
Psi Corps in Election Tangle: Did Psi Corps Violate Its Charter by Endorsing Vice President?
San Diego Still Considered Too Radioactive for Occupancy
Special Section: Pros & Cons of Inter-Species Mating
Copyright Trial Continues in Bookzap Flap
The third one sure is dated. No one talks about balancing the budget anymore. The fourth one doesn’t make a lot of sense unless the president and vice president are elected separately.
As for the hardcopy newspapers, maybe they made a comeback once people realized that tablets and smartphones aren’t very good for swatting bugs.
Riffable moment: “Mitchell. What about about Mitchell?”
Joe Don Baker is unconvincing as a Dirty Harry-esque cowboy cop, and I stand by that assessment.
Another possibility for Psi Corps endorsing Clark is that they were urging Santiago to choose him as a running mate. Why he needed a new VP is a different question with some potentially sinister answers.
That last headline could be seen as prescient. This was nearly a decade before Google announced their book digitization project, leading to them being sued by the Author’s Guild for copyright violation. You could argue that it’s come around again with GLLMs.
The full headline reads, “Copyright Trial Continues in Bookzap Flap: Books Downloaded Directly into Brain: Who Owns Them?” Which is a strange question. If you pay for a print book, you own that physical copy of it, but the author owns the work itself. An e-book is more licensed than owned, but if the book is downloaded into your own brain, then I don’t see how the e-publisher could delete or modify it without your permission. Regardless, though, the customers’ ownership of individual copies of a book has no bearing on the author’s copyright, so I don’t see how that headline makes any sense.
I think it is an interesting question. Is a book downloaded into your brain like anything else you learn (in which case the author has no rights over it), or like any other copy of the book (in which case the author has copyright in it). What would the latter mean? Does this redraw the boundaries of copyright law such that authors of such books (or all books?) can stop you making derived works inside your own head, i.e. banning imagination?
This sounds ludicrous and crazy, but it’s exactly the sort of the thing the Psi Corps might whisper was something they could make so much easier to implement, and you know, Mr Clark, you could also use this to stop other things you might not like people to think about… just copyright them and it might even be legal! If only you can get this case past.
On rewatching season 1 it’s amazing how many Earth-related things could be seen as clandestine maneuvering with the goal of possibly helping out the future Clark regime. Most of these threads were never tugged on: they were just lurking there, adding atmosphere.
“I think it is an interesting question. Is a book downloaded into your brain like anything else you learn (in which case the author has no rights over it), or like any other copy of the book (in which case the author has copyright in it).”
No, that’s not how it works. We already download books into our brains by reading them. That has no bearing whatsoever on the author’s copyright. Memorizing a book does not make you its author. If you memorize a book word-for-word, type it out from memory, and try to sell it as your own, you’re violating their copyright, i.e. their exclusive right to sell copies of the book for profit. But that is a separate topic altogether from your ownership of your own individual copy of the book. The individual copy belongs to you, and anyone who takes it from you is stealing it. But the author still owns the contents of the book and the right to publish new copies of it.
So it makes exactly zero difference to the author’s copyright whether you buy a physical copy of the book and memorize it, or do the same thing faster by having it directly downloaded into your brain. Those are both just the consumer end of the process, distinct from the creator end. If you buy a specific make of car from Ford, you own that single car, but Ford still owns the design to that make of car. If you buy a box of Hostess Twinkies, you own those specific Twinkies, but Hostess still owns the recipe and manufacturing process for Twinkies and the right to sell them under that name. Two completely different things. Consumers are not producers.
“Does this redraw the boundaries of copyright law such that authors of such books (or all books?) can stop you making derived works inside your own head, i.e. banning imagination?”
Of course not, because that’s what people already do when they write fanfiction. They have the idea of the works in their head, or can open up the books or replay the videos for reference, and can create derivative works based on it. But they still don’t own the underlying property, so if they try to sell their fanfiction for profit, they’re infringing on the rights of the copyright owners. Copyright is about the right to sell the work, not to possess it. They’re two totally different things.
I mean, come on, the reason we write stories is that we want to fire people’s imaginations. They can imagine and conjecture all they want. They just can’t sell it for profit as if it were their own creation.
Copyright is about the right to duplicate the work. If only it were about the right to sell it — but UK courts at least long ago decided that even copies made for the purposes of normal operation are subject to copyright, which is the justification under which the more odious majority of computer software licenses attempt to control how the software is used, even though (excepting backups) nobody buying such things makes extra copies of them in order to use them. It’s loaded into memory, and that’s enough, that’s a copy, and copyright law applies, and oh look it’s the end user direcitng that copy to be made by, uh, trying to use the software they bought.
This is also the justification used for those horrible end-user license agreements containing ridiculous provisions that you are often deemed to have agreed to without ever having seen, merely by having bought a piece of software, and if you want to not agree to it all all you have to do is never use the software you bought! (Sometimes you have to physically destroy it. I’ve even read licenses, recently, that require physical proof of said destruction to be sent to the copyright holder, which must be fun when the thing wasn’t provided on physical media). What do you mean you think you should get your money back?
Yes, it’s all utter madness and about as ethical as your average seagoing pirate, but that’s what it’s like now. Just imagine that sort of maximalist craziness projected a few hundred years into the future. I can certainly imagine a future iteration of copyright law saying, oh, it was downloaded into your brain? Ah that taints it: we own anything else your brain produces! (A number of online messaging systems have tried to pull the same trick with everything their users type into them already. Without compensation, naturally, and with permission to do so buried in hundreds of pages of legalese nobody reads.)
This is, after all, not about today’s copyright law. It’s about tomorrow’s. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back, since creativity necessarily involves riffs on prior works. But it’s perfectly legitimate to say it wouldn’t.
But what you describe is a distortion of the copyright system that could apply to any kind of ownership of a copyrighted work. The implied point of the Universe Today headline is that brain downloading somehow affects ownership in a way that other forms of purchase do not, and that’s illogical, because there’s a fundamental difference between who owns a copy of a work and who owns the copyright to the work. Like I said, if you buy a paper copy of a book and memorize it word-for-word, then you’ve downloaded it into your brain, just the slow way. So logically, the same principle should apply. If copyright law were being warped the way you suggest, it would surely apply to all forms of book, not exclusively to direct brain downloads. So the idea that the technology of brain downloading is itself the thing that creates the copyright question just doesn’t add up.
Uhh…you seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that legislatures—-and fictional ones at that—-are bound by things like ‘feasibility’ or ‘reality’.
Could a law be passed to prohibit any sort of mental retention of works without the express written consent of the copyright holders? Yes. Would that stop it from happening? No. Could penalties be imposed for doing so? Well, maybe in a world with actual telepaths. Would such penalties be right? Completely separate ethical discussion.
(FWIW I suspect that this subthread probably thought more about the legal and ethical aspects of copyright law than did whoever created the prop!
)
“Uhh…you seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that legislatures—-and fictional ones at that—-are bound by things like ‘feasibility’ or ‘reality’.”
No, I’m not, because as I just explained, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about the inherent logic implicit in the newspaper headline itself and why it doesn’t hold together as written. What you’re saying here actually proves my point, because you’re positing that completely arbitrary and illogical laws would have to be passed to make it work, which is just another way of saying that the premise itself is not logical. If you have to tie yourself in knots to rationalize an idea in a story, that just proves it’s not a good idea to begin with.
This is a fictional universe in which the willingness of EarthGov to pass arbitrary and illogical laws will soon become a story point. The ridiculousness of the headline isn’t illogic, it is foreshadowing.
The only GLLM I’m turning up in a search is Green Lake Lutheran Ministries. Not sure how they’re relevant, unless you’re talking about a different GLLM,
Generative Large Language Model – the tech behind the products currently being marketed as “AI”. Started with scanning books and text, now updated to scanning images and video.
Or the vice-president could be one of the candidates running against Santiago. The headline about Psi Corp endorsing the Vice President would make sense. Wait!! Maybe the Psi Corp got wind at what the Vice President is planning to do (Spoiler alert!! i.e. assassinate Santiago and make it look like an accident) and jumped the gun a bit.
The whole bit about the vice president could have been an ongoing inquiry dating back to the primaries, if the system works similar to the US model, which in many ways it seems to be.
IIRC Santiago was the incumbent, and generally speaking presidents seeking a second term in the US system almost never get a primary challenge. On the occasions where such a thing happens, such challengers rarely crack into double digits.
True. So as someone else suggested, it might have been a question of Psi Corps (perhaps indirectly) pressuring Santiago to run his reelection campaign with a different VP for some reason. Perhaps there was an issue with his previous VP? Might have died, had a scandal, etc. It is interesting that this little detail is essentially left as an exercise for the viewer.
Or, y’know, the President and VP are two independently elected positions. This is not uncommon in states with vice-leadership positions of various sorts: the idea is that they can sometimes serve as counterbalances to each other. (In some states it’s *compulsory*, though in most of those it is in some way carved up by sect or caste and some of those have not exactly covered themselves with glory lately: e.g., Lebanon.)
The assumption by so many commenters here that the Earth Alliance’s political system and election system is exactly the same as the US’s historically and currently highly unusual and rather ramshackle system is something I find notable. There’s no evidence for that and quite a lot against it (for a start, if it was that highly US-influenced, wouldn’t more central organs of government be in the Americas? IIRC, Earthdome and more or less every organ we ever hear of is in Geneva, making it more likely to be a distant outgrowth of some transnational organization or other — probably not the UN, but Geneva is packed with them. They have a massive variety of weird governance systems, but the one thing none of them has is anything like the US’s. Almost nobody founded after the US was has anything like the US’s system, because the US’s system was an early attempt and it doesn’t really work that well. Not very many states have copied the UK, for much the same reason…)
Almost nobody founded after the US was has anything like the US’s system
Really? My impression is that most Latin American countries (as well as some African and Asian countries) have something like the US system, particularly in terms of elected presidents as head of state and head of government, and also in terms of VPs being chosen by the President or presidential candidate.
Tripartite separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judiciary is very common, as are bicameral legislatures.
I do agree with you that there’s a tendency to assume the Earth Alliance government must be just like the current US system, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
For that matter, the US president and vice president originally were elected separately — or rather, each elector voted for two candidates for president, and the second-place finisher became the VP. Once political parties emerged, that resulted in prez & VP being rivals and working against each other, so the 12th Amendment was passed in 1803 to overhaul the system so electors would vote for a president/VP pair.
I’ll grant that there are a lot of assumptions leaning towards a pseudo-US structure, but the dialogue in “Midnight on the Firing Line” suggests a connection. As Ivanova says, “I do not like Santiago. He has no chin, and his vice president has several.”
That suggests to me a combined ticket of some kind.
Good point: the language does suggest as much. (Though clearly their goals are not too aligned, given what happens later!)
There’s also just the fact that US writers tend to default to US political (and judicial) norms often enough that it’s a fair starting point where a work doesn’t go out of its way to make differences clear. (Because if a writer is using a different model or a home grown hobbyhorse, he or she is pretty likely to want to show that off.)
It’s a very rebuttable presumption. But it’s also probably the case much more often than not.
Though it’s more likely to cover broad strokes like the role of the VP or separation of powers than there being something like an electoral college or the Iowa caucuses.
I am highly amused that I got to do the ENTER [character’s] BRAIN! gag twice in five days…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is obviously easily amused…..
I guess I missed the joke since, to me, it makes some sense that having telepathy would lead to the development of technology to mimic it. Not nearly as safe or convenient, but an option.
No, the gag is describing the process as “ENTERING SINCLAIR’S BRAIN!” in all caps with an exclamation point. I first used it in the DS9 Rewatch of “Extreme Measures,” where O’Brien and Bashir ENTER SLOAN’S BRAIN, and then resurrected it when I reviewed Picard‘s “Monsters” and Tallinn ENTERED PICARD’S BRAIN, and again last week for Discovery‘s “Labyrinths” when we ENTER BURNHAM’S BRAIN!
Yes, I’m twelve…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Realizing that it’s a gag, Sinclair does say it’s a VR space, and so presumably not in his brain.
It’s enough in his brain that sudden disconnection causes awful brain damage. Would you use a VR system with that drawback?! I know I wouldn’t. Makes nausea seem really rather minor…
Was it just the disconnection, though? Sinclair disconnected himself abruptly and he came out fine. I thought it was more that Sinclair damaged Knight Two’s rig when he broke out and the neural feedback caused the damage.
Aside from that, though, yeah, this was evidently something more directly psychoactive than simply a VR headset.
Oh true — and if the tech is some sort of experimental thing being pushed by the malign forces behind all this stuff (i.e. Clark, Psi Corps, etc) then it makes even more sense that the Knights wouldn’t care — after all, if anyone’s going to be disconnecting themselves and putting the other guy at risk, it’s going to be them. And we already know they bizarrely don’t care if they kill their only information source during interrogation: a bit of brain damage is probably just fine!
They might think that the ability to leave the subject they’ve interrogated in a disordered mental state is more a feature than a bug. Covers their tracks without the inconvenience of disposing of a body.
The line was, “When you broke out of the cybernet, a feedback charge fried his memory.” It wasn’t the normal operation of the system; as we saw earlier, Knight Two was able to enter and leave the system repeatedly without harming Sinclair. But when Sinclair broke out, we saw K2 reviving and looking at Sinclair, but with light still beaming into his eye to show an active connection. Sinclair struck the VR unit, breaking it, and K2 screamed and convulsed while electricity discharged around him. So it was literally an electrical feedback that presumably caused brain damage.
Something I just realized about the spacesuit helmets is that the lights to illuminate the actors’ faces are on the outside of the helmet (unlike in Sean Connery’s Outland) so they wouldn’t actually generate glare the character couldn’t see through. Also, there are a lot fewer of them.
In all fairness it’s possible that while mass-circulation newspapers are not doing well, physical newspapers could find a niche as something like vinyl records: neither cutting edge nor up to date, but still deighted in by those enjoying some old fashioned sensory experiences (I’d imagine that opportunities to look up from the view screen would be especially treasured by those committed to long stretches of time in tin cans of various sizes somewhere in the vastness of Space).
Let me put it this way: a viewscreen can give you the news, but a newspaper subscription delivers you a little piece of Home when you’re far, far away.
Thing is, it’s popular enough that there are dispensers in public areas whose only purpose appears to be to dispense the things. (There’s no sign they’re general replicators, or that the B5 universe is at anything like that technological level, though honestly I do wonder where a lot of the stuff to run the station comes from. Probably the interior we hardly ever see more than a glimpse of, which has huge mysterious structures in it.)
And we have seen that Garabaldi likes old things .. the motorcycle episode and the cartoon episode.
This is the first episode where I’ve come away with the impression that Michael O’Hare can actually act, because he plays Sinclair brilliantly here. Also, it occurs to me that this is the first episode to show that there actually are answers to some of the mystery boxes set up in the pilot; it’s not going to be like Mulder’s sister, to cite an example from a series that came out at around the same time.
The mandatory “Is this reality? Or are we still in the simulation?” bit at the end felt a little trite, especially since the simulation never seemed particularly realistic, but overall, good episode.
Actually, it occurs to me that that line is a bit jarring, knowing that Michael O’Hare was starting to manifest symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia at that point.
I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to develop paranoid schizophrenia and go to work everyday where people dressed as strange aliens were walking around all around you.
I often wonder, rewatching this episode in more recent years, how hard this episode might have been on O’Hare.
No, it’s: Next Week: “DEATHWALKERRRRR!”
I’ve got friends I watched this with the first time around who still quote that particular intonation, especially for unrelated but similar words. “I just got a job as a dogwalker.” “DOGWALKERRRRR!”
Neame’s somewhat stagy delivery worked well in the context of the VR scenes, but the episode might have flowed even better had the director been able to get him to be more naturalistic in the ‘reality’ scenes. O’Hare did a better job of modulating his performance to help convey the real-life vs. VR distinction.
With this episode, it finally feels like the setup phase is done and the story is starting to move. It’s noteworthy that getting some answers to questions raised by previous episodes is only generating newer, bigger questions.
On the subject of reading the news on actual paper vs. an electronic device: there is an episode (I belive it’s Season 2) in which we see the characters get their new edition while recycling the paper of the old one – and getting an edition tailored to their individual tastes, as well. This reminds me of the current debate on reading paper books vs. using e-readers: there will always be people who prefer a paper medium even when more modern solutions are available, so I don’t find it strange that even in the future this trend might persist.
And let’s not forget that we saw, for example, Captain Picard reading from paper tomes more than once… ;-)
Keep in mind that the Minbari reminding Delenn to kill Sinclair makes sense when you remember that the Minbari isn’t a single monolithic entity. There are major ideological disparities between the Religious and Warrior castes, which the show opens up in later seasons. Delenn is religious. She would want to protect him and protect the Prophecy. But one can easily assume that the Warrior caste would want nothing more than to kill off Sinclair in order to protect the secret that could potentially unravel Minbari society as we know it, and as we learn later on.
Last week, there was a thread commenting on director Richard Compton’s seemingly disdain for B5 and sci-fi television in general and that it affected the quality of direction resulting in a lot of subpar performances. I think season 1 in general is still finding the right tone. And other than Jim Johnston this season, I’d argue that Janet Greek is the first B5 director to truly get what Straczynski is going for in the scripts (later seasons will bring aboard Mike Vejar, Jesús Treviño and David Eagle, who also nail their episodes almost every time). “And the Sky full of Stars” is an atmospheric, tense, visual delight of an episode thanks to her inspired work that also results in some superb performances, O’Hare’s in particular.
The flashbacks are some of the season’s most powerful moments. It does justice to Sinclair’s Battle of the Line confession to Carolyn during the pilot. And this one of the early instances where composer Christopher Franke shows just what he can do on the show. It adds a lot to the sequence.
I also loved the fact that a fighter pilot like Sinclair could have easily fallen into self-destructive behavior after such a traumatic event during that war, fueling a seething hatred for Minbari as a way to avoid dealing with those issues, but instead embarked on a nobler, far more fulfilling path. It’s a testament as to how well written and acted the character truly is. As much as I like Sheridan, I have to admit Sinclair is just as effective a protagonist in episodes like these.
Yes, Sinclair feels more complex than Sheridan because of his history, and some of the later speeches might have landed slightly differently coming from O’Hare than Boxleitner, as much as I like Sheridan too!
If not my favorite episode of the first season, it ranks right up there. It’s dense with details that either pay off existing questions or lay the groundwork for new ones, but it doesn’t feel like it’s playing games with the audience. It feels like a legit step forward.
It’s strong enough that the glaring moment when Delenn is reminded that Sinclair should be killed if he remembers more stands out like a sore thumb. I’ve never been able to make full sense of it, especially in the revised series arc.
SPOILERS FOR THE NEW VIEWER
The whole idea of what happened during the Battle of the Line was that the Grey Council got apparent evidence that Minbari souls were being reborn in Humans…and Sinclair was the rebirth of a particularly noteworthy soul. And since Minbari do not kill Minbari, they surrendered to prevent more loss. One of the subplots of the first season, ultimately, is that while the majority of the religious and worker caste members of the Council held this belief and demanded they surrender, at least some of the warrior caste thought it was all bullshit. By appearances, the Minbari who speaks to Delenn at the end of this episode is from the warrior caste.
So in a way, this implies that there is still a delicate balance among the Council. Just enough of the Council believes the religious caste’s interpretation, enough to drive the surrender, pushing for the funding of the Babylon Project, ensuring Sinclair is made commander of the station, etc. There is a vocal minority that still thinks it’s all nonsense and they should never have surrendered. These would be aligned with the Minbari who tried to frame Sinclair in “The Gathering”.
All that said, I can accept that parts of the warrior caste, even Council members, disagree with the religious interpretation. I can accept that some of them are angry enough that they want any excuse to kill the guy that, from their point of view, led them to an unwarranted surrender. It *almost* makes sense of the scene. Yes, Delenn (already shown to be something of a religious zealot) and her allies on the Council are implementing their policy, but apparently with caveats on the part of the dissenting minority. “OK, we’ll surrender, but the Humans can’t be allowed to know why or we stop playing along.”
It’s meant to represent the tension among the Minbari, but it doesn’t add up. Especially because ultimately the truth *is* revealed, and the threat from the warrior caste is never fulfilled, even when they eventually gain the controlling majority. So it’s all rather hollow posturing on the part of the warrior caste. Granted, we see later that posturing is something of a hobby with the warrior caste, but it just doesn’t make sense, even in the context of what we know is going on behind the scenes in the Council.
It also feels like that scene happens mere hours after the confrontation where Sinclair appears to remember something. So the warrior caste Minbari just happened to be there? Has he always been hiding out in Delenn’s closet, just in case? I feel like it’s meant to imply that this is another case in which the warrior caste is possibly working with the Knights, but that doesn’t quite add up, either.
Anyway, that one scene always bugs me, because no matter how many times I’ve rewatched the series, no matter how I try to reconcile it, it just doesn’t fit the rest of what we know.
The original plan was for the warrior caste to win the civil war and restart the war against Earth, ultimately destroying the station though. That’s what the sequences from Babylon Squared were originally meant to be, the Minbari and not the Shadows, being responsible for taking out the station. With Babylon 4 being pulled forward instead of backwards through time so that the war against the Shadows could continue even though B5 had fallen.
I’ve never heard this before. Where are you finding this original plan?
Well, it is sad that we didn’t get the Prisoner as a knight, but I think that is more than karmically balanced by Koenig NOT being a knight and becoming Bester. You might say it was the bester outcome.
I might, but I won’t.
This was pretty good, but it was undermined by Christopher Neame’s way-too-hammy acting. It’s also amusing in retrospect how much work the script had to do to explain virtual reality to 1994 audiences. “Look! We killed Garibaldi, but he’s fine, since it was an illusion! See? We did it again! And again! It’s NOT. REAL. Get it?”
Nobody’s mentioned the subtitle under “SPECIAL SECTION: Pros & Cons of Interpsecies Mating” headline, which says ” ‘Marsupials definitely have the right idea on child rearing,’ say some.” Which is the second time this series has suggested that interspecies reproduction is possible, as opposed to just sex, and again it seems to connect to the Narn, who are marsupials.
The Lurker’s Guide page contains JMS’s discussion of why the line about the station’s gravity attracting a corpse thrown outside is good science. The station’s mass is comparable to that of an asteroid or small moonlet, so it would have a very slight actual gravity (as opposed to the artificial centrifugal “gravity” felt within the interior frame of reference of its rotating sections), but enough to keep an object jettisoned slowly from getting very far. Anything landing on the hull of a rotating section would get flung off, but there are a lot of non-rotating sections; those maintenance bots Garibaldi mentioned might have to do regular cleanings of the outer hull.
But that’s cancelled out by the bad science of the scene claiming that “depressurization” would somehow mangle an unprotected body in space. There would be swelling, burst capillaries, bruising, maybe some bleeding from the eyes and such, but it wouldn’t be as bad as implied here, and certainly not as extreme as the ridiculous portrayals in Total Recall and Outland.
Anyway, calling the bad guys “Knight One” and “Knight Two” makes it feel like a Dr. Seuss book to me.
Don’t discount the other motive, which is that killing Jerry Doyle’s character on screen is fun. JMS is certainly not shy about such pettiness at times.
it might also be considered a kind of foreshadowing.
I barely remember anything about Crusade, so I’ve always assumed the “something living in hyperspace” stuff was a tease for the Shadows, and specifically Kefler’s arc in S2.
except keffler was forced on to the show because the studio wanted a pilot character. So that whole subplot woudn’t relaly have existed at this point to be foreshadowed i think
There were several cases where JMS assigned a planned story arc to a different character than he originally intended. The same thing could’ve happened with Keffer — when told to create a pilot character, he plugged the character into a storyline he’d intended for someone else. (Although maybe not, since the show wiki reminds me that the “regular” character only appeared six times and JMS always intended to kill him off.)
Yep, I always understood that to be the intent as well.
“Christopher Neame is still good in the role: Somewhat over-the-top, but the part calls for that, and his deep, intense voice is used to good end.”
Somewhat over-the-top is de rigueur for this show, so it didn’t really bother me.
I agree that this was a pretty good episode, probably the best so far, and I also agree that it’s been done better. It’s definitely O’Hare’s most impressive performance to date, and Mira Furlan continues to be terrific. Also, though the VR equipment looked kind of ridiculous, I really liked the design of the Minbari ships. I’m not sure if this is the first time they’ve shown up or not, but I thought they looked neat.
They showed up very briefly in _The Gathering_, for about a second. Almost all the ship designs in B5 are good, except, alas, for the most important one of all, the hard-to-grasp tangled strangled goose mess we will see much later on.
Hmm agree that the things you find wrong with it are nit picky – I took it as the knights believed that he was a fifth columnist and it was the higher ups who wanted the info first. Believing he was a fifth columnist likely they wanted to kill him and were only not doing so because of orders – so if he dies by “accident” oh well so sad.
As for the debt collectors – eh I don’t think any of them think enough to go hmm killing him isn’t going to make anyone else think twice before not paying and do more to pay me. But I believe the death penalty deters crime so YMMV. At least making the person in debt THINK they are going to kill them if they don’t pay can be useful as a motivating factor. Also have to factor in the need to stay “strong” and not loose “face” in underworld circles. Reputation as strong and ruthless almost as if not more important than fact in those groups.
Also – point needs to be made that in the delirium sequence Sinclair thought he was still back on the Minbari ship and that he was escaping. First the way he sold this man. Possibly he was able to do this so well because of the mental issues he was starting to have (so sad he seems not to have gotten the treatment he needed) but man did he sell this. I believed he thought he was back in the war and was generally worried he was going to shoot Delin EVEN in rewatching it – when I know good and well he wasn’t going to – and this being pre game of thrones certainly should have known it wasn’t going to happen originally.
I also think it shows the power of the relationship that Delin has developed with the Captain that it wasn’t a human who was able to convince him the war was over but a Minbari the enemy during that war and someone he thought he was escaping from.
It would be like someone who escaped from a Veit Cong prison camp during the Vietnam war having a flash back and thinking he was back in the vietnam war but being talked down by a Vietnamese person he had developed a close friendship with after the war. Amazing stuff.
Watching this with my dad he wasn’t all that in to it until we got to this episode – after this episode he looked at me and said “you are right this is a good show”.
There is nothing in the episode to support the notion that the Knights wanted to kill him and only didn’t because of orders.
As for your theories on debt collectors, they are unsupported by reality. Loan sharks only kill people who owe them money in fiction, but it’s a trope I’m particularly frustrated by. (Also, the notion that the death penalty is a deterrent has been disproven pretty throughly by multiple studies.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
hmm ok I don’t know loan sharks so certainly not sure – I would say the hatred and surity the knights show about his guilt give the support for wanting to kill him but not doing so because of orders. *shrug*
This is a really good episode. O’Hare finally shows some acting chops and really delivers. Plus, we get some answers to questions, which provide more questions. Also, having little bits of information in the newspapers is fun.
Next up Deathwalker. which I really like.
Hearing that Patrick McGoohan was the second choice for Knight Two really makes me wish Leo McKern was third. Having Number Two as Knight Two just works.
Honestly, I feel that a big theatrical actor was the wrong way to go for this character. I think it would’ve been better if he’d been more clinical and businesslike, even sympathetic as he began to recognize that Sinclair wanted to uncover the truth and shifted it more to encouraging him than threatening him. Of the candidates, Walter Koenig would probably have been the best choice, but then we wouldn’t have gotten Bester.
I think JMS learned that lesson by the time he did “Intersections in Real Time,” where the interrogator was very banal and soft-spoken, IIRC.
Anyway, if Judson Scott was Knight One, why did he seem subordinate to Neame’s Knight Two? Or maybe those aren’t their in-story titles. Maybe they’re equal Knights within whatever group and the script just numbers them for convenience. Except it would seem they were numbered in order of which one arrived at the station first.
For a nice example of the “sympathetic” torturer/interrogator, check out Kurt Fuller’s guest appearance on the short-lived series “Brain Dead.”
On the one hand, I agree that the bluster does not make a lot of sense for an interrogation. On the other hand, “Intersections” is one of my favorite episodes and I’m glad not to have a “lite” version of it this early in the arc. It would have diminished the impact for “Intersections” to be retreading ground already covered.
In style, I see this one as closer to “Comes the Inquisitor” except that one, perhaps wisely, forgoes the VR silliness and just leans in to the theatricality.
I thought it made sense that the Knights weren’t very good interrogators. They’re militia members, after all, not professionals: they came across as obsessed cranks because they *were* obsessed cranks. Meanwhile, in Inquisitor we have a dedicated fanatic who’s been doing this for centuries and is simultaneously secure in his power over his interrogatees *and* knows he actually has no power in real life, while in Intersections we have a professional monster doing the job he’s good at. All are well-depicted given their different positions, I’d say.
Even so, I’m not sure the best way to convey “obsessed crank” is to overact like a cartoon villain. I still think it called for a subtler performance, or at least a more naturalistic one.
My comprehension of the theory goes that Knight Two thinks the Minbari were concerned that the conquest of Earth would be more costly than they were willing to accept.
It’s a good episode, and it’s nice to finally get some solid performances out of the top-billed actors. (OK, due to Hollywood weirdness, I believe “With” as Katsulas and Jurasik are billed actually ranks higher than “Co-starring” and is more on par with “Starring” just not primary characters. I digress.)
A couple weeks ago, Keith was talking about better uses for David McCallum than his role in “Infection.” Knight Two would have been a good role for him.
As others have said, this is a tough watch knowing what happened with O’Hare’s mental health. I don’t think he had started manifesting symptoms yet, but you have to wonder if this episode had some small part in his breakdown.
Yes, last billing preceded by “With” or “And” (and followed by “as Character” in cases where that isn’t done routinely, as it is here) is considered prestige placement second only to top billing. There’s a logic to it; the human mind remembers the first and last items in a list more easily than the ones in the middle, and putting a special notation on the credit also makes it stand out more.
I think it’s best not to try to speculate about O’Hare’s psychological state in relation to this episode or any other episode. That’s a highly sensitive personal matter that we’re not qualified or entitled to judge. And it’s a huge mistake to assume that anything we see an actor do in a staged performance reveals anything whatsoever about their personal lives or feelings. Acting is a job, a task performed under other people’s instructions. It’s a job that creates the illusion of knowing someone personally, but it is just an illusion constructed collectively by multiple people. Yes, sometimes actors bring aspects of themselves to a role, yet sometimes they bury themselves completely and portray characters who are nothing like them.
The music playing during the Battle of the Line sequences, composed by Christopher Franke, is known as the “Requiem for the Line,” and it’s probably my favorite bit of music he composed for the show. We’ll hear this theme again when we return to the Battle of the Line, and most notably as the main credits theme for Season 3.
And, by the way, when JMS re-edited The Gathering pilot for broadcast on TNT several years later, in the scene when Sinclair is describing the battle to Carolyn Sykes, they superimposed some of the fighter-pilot dialogue that was recorded for this episode, along with (I think) some of the Requiem musical theme. Just a nice continuity touch to show that Sinclair frequently re-experienced the trauma he had on the Line.
It’s a nice episode indeed (and i said from the beginning that O’Hare is a decent actor, so now I can say: I told you so :D ), but HOW ON EARTH DO THEY JUST KIDNAP THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF A SPACE STATION WITHOUT ANYONE NOTICING??????? this was driving me nuts. sorry, rant over. Everything else worked well for me in the episode.
Sinclair’s abduction here, like Malcom Biggs’s belief he could safely get off the station in The War Prayer, make sense after later episodes in season 1 & 2 make clear how much xenophobic groups like Home Guard had infiltrated EarthForce and EarthGov.
I think both of those story points can feel like plot holes here because both dialogue within, as well as the ending of, The War Prayer implied that Home Guard and others were fringy, disconnected groups that were being dealt with, rather than the first indications of coordinated efforts by Clark and Psi Corps. A couple lines of dialogue could have made those more clear without giving away the later twists in that regard.
Yeah, i believe that but within this story as it was told, this was a serious problem. And yeah, totally agree, even just acknowledging in dialogue that this is a serious security breach could have solved it.
If it makes you feel better, that particular discrepancy bugs me too. So at least you know you’re not alone.
it does, thank you. :)
Seeing as how next Monday will be Memorial Day, will Reactor be posting any articles at that time? If not, will the next Babylon 5 Rewatch article be posted the day after or the next Monday?
I was just coming here to post about this: we will be skipping the B5 Rewatch next week, as I have a wedding to go to this weekend, and I’m also behind on some other deadlines. We’ll pick up with “Deathwalker” on 3 June.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks for letting us know. Enjoy!
A solid episode, where the overarching plot began to make itself known. And we began to learn more about Garibaldi, who became one of my favorite characters.
“(Judson Scott not so much, but he’s always been pretty much entirely 80s-pretty-boy looks and no talent, and he keeps that sad streak going here.)”
So I’m guessing we won’t be seeing a “The Phoenix” Rewatch here any time soon?
*ducks*
This is my second time watching the series, so it’s my first time getting to smile at the little foreshadowy bits. In this case, CRYPTIC SPOILERS AHEAD Sinclair’s echoing “What do you want?” to the Grey Council.
Don’t forget, “Who are you?”
My impression from rewatching a lot of Babylon 5 a number of years ago was that JMS deliberately put in paper newspapers just because it went against the grain of what people expected in a futuristic science fiction show. Especially since STAR TREK was so screen-oriented (in TNG, Federation people read paper books as a hobby, not for practical purposes), I assumed he decided that people in his future were not willing to give up print newspapers.
Also, my somewhat fuzzy memory is that Sinclair’s interrogator was willing to kill him because he thought Sinclair was an evil traitor who had betrayed all of humanity, so if he didn’t confess, he might as well die.
Perhaps, but given trends in the thirty years since, it’s a classic case of mis-anticipation. (See also the “Vicar” in next week’s episode, not to mention Star Trek‘s handheld communicators……)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido