“By Any Means Necessary”
Written by Kathryn M. Drennan
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 12
Production episode 114
Original air date: May 11, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… B5 is having a traffic jam, as there are too many ships wanting to dock and not enough space, too few workers, and malfunctioning equipment. However, a Narn ship, the Tal’Quith, insists on docking immediately, as it has perishable cargo. Ivanova squeezes the Tal’Quith in, but a malfunction leads to another ship departing at the same time. The Tal’Quith captain panics, ignore’s Ivanova’s instructions, and there’s a big crash that kills one worker who is blown out into space, and badly injures two more, who are barely rescued by the dockworkers. Unfortunately, one of the people they rescue—Albert Delvientos, the brother of Eduardo Delvientos, one of the forepersons—is DOA.
The perishable cargo is a G’Quan Eth—a flower that is used in a sacred ritual to Narn who worship G’Quan, of whom G’Kar is one—and it was lost in the crash. G’Kar is pissed and demands reparations, but the head of the dockworkers’ union, Neeoma Connoly, refuses to accept blame, as they’re understaffed, the equipment malfunctions half the time, and they’ve had to work extra shifts without a break. Garibaldi bolsters her argument when he announces that the culprit were some chips that malfunctioned and blew out. The equipment is substandard, and it cost two people their lives.
G’Kar is distraught, as Na’Toth regretfully informs him that there’s no way a fresh G’Quan Eth can be sent in time for the ritual. However, there’s good news and bad news. The good is that there is one on the station. The bad is that Mollari owns it.

Sinclair speaks to Senator Hidoshi, who is of no help. The workers signed a contract, so they’re not entitled to any of the things Connoly says they need because that’s not in the contract. And going on strike is apparently illegal, so that isn’t an option. Hidoshi just tells Sinclair to deal with it.
The dockworkers all start calling in sick, with the sick-out being an obvious prelude to a strike. The “sick” workers are gathered in a loading bay to discuss strategy. Garibaldi shows up to escort Connoly to talk to Sinclair.
Sinclair passes on the senate’s complete lack of interest in helping, and also reminds Connoly that they could invoke the Rush Act. Connoly says she’ll call that bluff, as invoking that draconian law would turn public opinion squarely on the dockworkers’ side. And she won’t let her people continue to work in unsafe conditions.
Going back to Hidoshi, the senator offers to send a well-regarded negotiator, Orin Zento—and he’ll have the power to invoke the Rush Act if negotiations go badly.
G’Kar goes begging to Mollari, who enjoys watching G’Kar squirm. Mollari points out that the flower, when crushed, is a powerful narcotic that he enjoys. G’Kar is disgusted by that notion.
Mollari asks an absurdly high price for the G’Quan Eth, which G’Kar—reluctantly and bitching and moaning about it the entire time—goes off to gather. However, by the time he pulls the cash together, Mollari says he’s changed his mind, and he won’t sell it for any price. At this point the other shoe drops: Mollari has not forgiven the Narn in general or G’Kar in particular for the invasion of Ragesh III or the treatment of his nephew.

Zento arrives, but his “negotiating” consists of the same stonewalling Hidoshi did to Sinclair: there’s no money, you signed a contract, suck it up, or it’s the Rush Act for you. Tensions run high, and Sinclair declares a recess before the dockworkers string Zento up.
The next morning, Zento angrily informs Sinclair that the dockworkers have gone on strike, and also G’Kar demands an immediate meeting with Sinclair. The Narn ambassador explains the significance of the G’Quan Eth and how Mollari is putting the screws to him. Sinclair promises to talk to Mollari, but that’s the best he can offer.
The meeting with Zento and the dockworkers goes poorly as well, with Zento promising to have confirmation of the Rush Act within the hour and with Connoly not budging. Zento tells Sinclair to have security ready to make arrests as soon as word comes in from the senate.
Sinclair is ambushed in CnC by Mary Ann Cramer of ISN, who wants a quote about the strike, and by Mollari, who accuses G’Kar of stealing a statue from the Centauri temple, which G’Kar denies knowing anything about, even though everyone on the station knows he did it. Sinclair has Ivanova throw all three of them out.
Hidoshi then tells Sinclair that the Rush Act is now in effect, and the commander reluctantly tells Garibaldi to have his people head to the docks in riot gear.
He then takes Zento down to meet with Connoly and the rest, gets multiple confirmations from Zento that the Rush Act gives Sinclair latitude to end the strike by any means necessary, and then uses the following means to do so: diverting money from the military budget to meet the dockworkers’ demands, and also to grant amnesty to all the dockworkers for any illegal actions they took during the recent negotiations.
Zento is livid, as this is not the spirit of the law. But Sinclair is 100% within the letter of the law, which is all that matters. The dockworkers all happily go to work.

Sinclair meets with G’Kar and Mollari. He demands that G’Kar return the statue (G’Kar continues to deny knowing anything about it), but also orders Mollari to hand over the G’Quan Eth, as it’s a controlled substance. Mollari agrees and leaves. G’Kar is distraught, as the time for the ritual has passed; Mollari knows this, which is why he agreed to turn the flower over. The ritual must be performed when the sun rises above a particular mountain. Sinclair points out that the Narn homeworld is ten light-years away, so the light from the sunrise a decade ago is only just hitting the station. G’Kar is pleased, and goes off to prepare.
Hidoshi contacts Sinclair, and—with uncharacteristically genuine appreciation—congratulates him on his solution to the strike. He also warns Sinclair that he’s made some enemies with his actions: Zento, for one, and his friends in the senate for another. Sinclair is unconcerned, figuring they can get in line with all his other enemies.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair goes for the hat trick, solving three unsolvable problems with clever solutions: stopping the strike peacefully and benevolently, getting the G’Quan Eth back from Mollari, and coming up with a way for G’Kar to celebrate his religion.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s streak of kicking people out of CnC continues—in fact, it’s the second time she’s kicked Cramer out!
The houshold god of frustration. Garibaldi is baited by the dockworkers, who are angry at him for not supporting them, as he’s blue-collar like the rest of them. The security chief refuses to rise to the bait, though he also shows restraint when ordered to arrest the workers.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari takes great glee is tormenting G’Kar with the G’Quan Eth (I particularly love his jaunty wave to G’Kar just as the latter is informed that Mollari owns one of the flowers). At first it seems to be just one enemy tweaking another, but his litany about Ragesh III makes it clear that it runs deeper than that.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar’s religious beliefs, and devotion to G’Quan, is first seen here, and will continue to be an important part of his character going forward.
Looking ahead. At one point, G’Kar rants that he wants to strangle Mollari with his bare hands—which is how Mollari has already been established as foreseeing how the two of them meet their ends, strangling each other.
Welcome aboard. John Snyder returns, having previously played one of the two title characters in “Soul Hunter,” this time playing the human Zento. Katy Boyer plays Connoly, while José Rey makes the first of two appearances as Delvientos (he’ll be back in “And Now for a Word”). Aki Aleong is back from “Deathwalker” to make Hidoshi officially a recurring character; he’ll be back in “A Voice in the Wilderness, Part II.” And Patricia Healy returns from “Infection” for a second and final appearance as Cramer.
Trivial matters. This is the only script by Kathryn M. Drennan, who was the wife of show creator J. Michael Straczynski at the time. According to his online posts, Straczynski showed the opposite of favoritism, making her go through a much more grueling process than any other freelancer (which may be why this is her only script for the show). While she would not write again for the show, she did pen one of the B5 novels, To Dream in the City of Sorrows, one of the tie-in novels that was considered to be part of the overall continuity by Straczynski (which was not true of all of them).
While this Katy Boyer’s only appearance as Connoly, the character will be referenced again in her capacity as head of the dockworkers’ guild.
The Rush Act was a “tribute” to right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who often railed against unions.
Straczynski said online in 1994 of this episode: “The premise is one that ST [Star Trek] would never, EVER do.” Two years later, Deep Space Nine proved him wrong. (To be fair, I’m sure Straczynski meant that we’d never see this with the Federation, and he was right. “Bar Association” was about the Ferengi, not humans.)
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Fifty thousand commercial credits, in cash, in advance.”
“That’s an outrage!”
“Of course it’s an outrage! The question is: how important is your religious ceremony to you?”
—Mollari and G’Kar negotiating.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “There are no happily-ever-afters, just new battles.” It’s funny, I have absolutely no memory of watching this one the first time back in 1994, which is disheartening only insofar as I really really really like it a lot.
Indeed, it only has one flaw, and it’s one I saw coming in the guest list: John Snyder is completely not up to the task of playing a skilled negotiator. Snyder has a very limited range, and any time a role requires charisma (here and also Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Masterpiece Society”), he utterly fails.
But Snyder is the episode’s only real flaw. The conflict is one that’s familiar to viewers, reminding us why unions exist, and how governments continue to do everything they can to break and damage unions. Katy Boyer does excellent work as the plucky union rep, putting a human face on the dockworkers, though a big chunk of the credit should go to scripter Kathryn M. Drennan and actors José Rey and Claudia Christian, as the exhausted banter between Ivanova and Delvientos at the top of the episode sets the tone for the rest of it, showing that B5 is a machine that is not nearly as well-oiled as it should be, but at the very least the parts work.
The B-plot is guaranteed to be wonderful because it focuses on the heart and soul of B5: Mollari and G’Kar. Peter Jurasik beautifully plays Mollari’s playful tweaking, which modulates effectively into righteous anger when the real reason for his torments comes out. Meanwhile, the scripting finally catches up to Andreas Katsulas’ performance, as G’Kar’s religious devotion adds layers to the character, and the mess that his political situation makes of his religious observances is very compelling viewing.
But the rock star here is Michael O’Hare who, for the second time in three episodes, puts in a bravura performance, aided, once again, by a great script by Drennan. You feel his frustration and his exhaustion, which makes his actions in the climax all the more wonderful. I honestly think of this as the Loophole Episode, and it’s glorious.
One of the gags Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does in his Sherlock Holmes stories is have Holmes make a deduction about someone, the person is shocked, thinking Holmes must be psychic or something, and then Holmes explains the very rational reasoning, at which point the person is no longer shocked, and actually disappointed at how simple it was for Holmes to figure all that stuff out.
That’s the vibe I got from Sinclair’s three great solutions here: they’re all actually fairly obvious and reasonable, for all that they’re truly obscure and (at least by some characters’ lights) unreasonable. In particular, I love that his solution for both obtaining the G’Quan Eth and ending the strike are going for the letter of the law over the spirit, while his suggestion to G’Kar for how to perform the ceremony is the other way around.
The vague wording of the Rush Act also reminded me of the various laws that allow business to discriminate for “religious reasons.” I’m just waiting for someone to discriminate because of their belief in Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Satan and cite the law, which doesn’t actually say it’s only for Christians, even though that’s really what the lawmakers meant. Ditto the Rush Act—the titular phrase was meant to apply to violent solutions, but it doesn’t say that, and while sometimes in the spirit of the law is more important, the letter of the law is really the only part that’s enforceable…
Next Week: “Signs and Portents.”
I think this is a season one only gag and I’m liking it less in retrospect– it’s questionable enough that G’Kar/Londo would be able to waltz into the CnC, but apparently a civilian reporter can just walk in if she feels like it. Sinclair explicitly says they’re unauthorized personnel, so it’s not like they had some sort of pass. Shouldn’t there be a door guard keeping out people who aren’t authorized?
A detail I liked, though: I believe all or at least substantially all the portrayed dockworkers are human, unless I missed a rubber forehead in the background. Surely members of other alien races would be interested in this sort of work and the show isn’t shy about throwing in random aliens elsewhere, so it may be that Earth figures that since they paid for the station, the station is a jobs program for humans only. The human-centric elements of EarthGov apparently won that battle.
There may be long-term contracts at play, but it also seems like Babylon 5 just isn’t charging enough money. Raise the price for ships to dock there and charge even more to skip the queue, as the Narn ship wanted to do. Raising prices helps in two ways, as a revenue-raiser it can be used to fund improvements and if Babylon 5 becomes a less desirable place to offload cargo, then reduced traffic will also lighten the workload.
Other races kicked in some support, but B5 is human built, using human machinery. Other races could (and certainly will over time) learn it, It’s probably cheaper to bring in humans than to train and certify non human workers. Also, it is a union shop, so there probably is preferential hiring.
B5 is a quasi-military station run by Earth Gov, so the lack of other alien workers doesn’t bother me. The funding gets talked about later.
are there any aliens serving in the crew? to me it seems that the whole station is operated by humans / Earth. Or did i miss something?
The military personnel I understand– there’s potential security issues with having somebody on board who has allegiance to a foreign government and these are military positions staffed by military personnel, so of course Earth is going to pick its own military members. That’s a lot less true with the civilian baggage handlers. The choice was consciously made to make it a humans only guild.
it’s also blurry for me what the military should take care of and what should be taken care of civilians vs some sort of police force. e.g. customs and civilian law enforcement ideally shouldn’t be done by the military for instance.
As for now, B5 is completely under Earthforce jurisdiction and personnel. Later seasons, that changes to be a more inclusive cast. (Real world reason was probably a lot cheaper to have regular humans running everything than spend money on make-up for a background actor who’d be in the scene for 30 seconds that wasn’t plot important, especially for the first season of a show when sci-fi wasn’t that big at the time unless you had Next Generation in your title).
This is the episode where I decided I really liked Sinclair. I’d been a bit iffy on him up to this point, but I just love his solutions here.
Sinclair (and O’Hare) is cool. As a kid, he and the CGI were the main reasons why i watched at least some episodes, ambassadors were the smaller part of it – Now i appreciate Mollari and G’Kar more. :)
I loved Sinclair in this and also the ambassadors’ plot about the flower and religion.
But the strike – that was again such an old story with nothing new to add – and i don’t recall having this problem mentioned in earlier episodes and now it seems that the docks are barely operational and accidents can happen any day? And all the standard characters – angry dock workers, tough woman protecting them – i feel i saw this in many many tv series and movies already (i remember vaguely some Knight Rider episodes with similar plots), so that part did not work for me, only Sinclair’s solution saved it for me.
Also it needs a Rush Act and a smart trick to allow the station’s commanding officer to make decisions on where to invest from the budget? that’s probably realistic, but terrible. :D
Just in case you’re feeling lonely, I didn’t care for the A plot either. Were it not for the B plot, I would rank this down with Infection.
For me Sinclair’s solution using the Rush Act saved it a bit, but the flat, stereotypical characters for the strike were annoying and i’m really surprised that @krad didn’t call that out. :)
There is a mention in “Mind War” of Sinclair having to make budget cuts for the construction guild, so there was a bit of foreshadowing.
And it’s the senate that determines the station’s budget, so it’s no wonder the decisions weren’t being made effectively.
i understand that the senate decides on the overall budget, but Sinclair should at least be able to allocate certain parts of it from one area to another, no?
Not without approval, he can’t. Or without cover, like the Rush Act…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
thus my comment “that’s realistic, but terrible” :)
Yeah, it reminds me of the time when I worked for a public library that was a department of the local government, and we had to go to the city council for permission just to reallocate money from the DVD budget to buy books. I didn’t even blink at the thought that Sinclair couldn’t move money around without the special powers conveyed by the Rush Act.
yeah, wrong level of decisions is a standard in most corporates and government organizations as well. It’s realistic to not expect any improvements in the next 200 years.
What got me was Zento talking about how the “experts” back home had calculated the station had enough of a budget. I wanted someone to say to him, “We’re the ones actually working here! We’re the experts!”
Eduardo calls him on that – asking how much time his experts have spent in a loading dock. I think it’s fitting that he’s the one that does so.
This has always been one of my favorites from the first season. A satisfying story, good pacing, generally solid acting (except for John Snyder’s inability to convey even the slightest hint of “skilled negotiator” as opposed to “spittle-flecked political hatchet man”).
Mainly I recall being impressed at how this episode took a different approach, in both storyline and narrative structure, than was common in screen-based SF of the time. Written SF had certainly covered storylines where blue-collar aspects of various universes intersected with larger intrigues (Niven and Bradbury come to mind). But films like Star Wars and TV like Battlestar Galactica never really delved into those aspects of their worlds in any detail. And Star Trek really couldn’t go that way prior to DS9. Yes yes,
the CappadociansThe Cloud Minders, fine; that episode certainly addressed worker exploitation by elites, but the structure of TOS (and TNG) required contriving a straw-man society to do so.In contrast, the conditions on B5 that led to the dockworkers’ strike flowed directly from several elements of world building that has developed over previous episodes. I particularly liked how several key elements of that setup—e.g. Sinclair lamenting budget cuts he needed to make, or Garibaldi and Ivanova griping about understaffing and deferred maintenance—seemed in those prior episodes as merely bits of local color to enhance the world building. So the payoff in this episode felt very organic and suggested more interesting story arcs to come.
I assumed that Snyder’s performance was so over the top that obviously Zento was never intended to be any sort of negotiator: he’s someone you send in when you want to say you sent in a negotiator as an excuse to send in the troops to bust heads (and Sinclair and Hidoshi clearly both know this as soon as his name is mentioned: he has a reputation. No doubt Connolly knows it too.)
So, yes, Snyder has a limited range, unsuited to his ostensible role, but his ostensible role isn’t his actual role, and in his actual role as a snide layer-down-of-the-law that everyone hates as they’re forced to do what he says anyway (pour discourager les autres) he’s actually not that bad.
I don’t think those of us criticizing Snyder’s performance are claiming that he damaged the story or imbued Zento with something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was clear as soon as Sen. Hidoshi informed Sinclair that Zento was on his way that his arrival was a political ploy not a good-faith effort at negotiation.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Snyder gave us a really, really crappy acting job. The script made Connally a similarly flat character, but Boyer made her believable as a person; whereas Snyder was more a guy shouting lines to convey the necessary story points.
Outside of Kabuki and campy farce, even one-note villains are best served by performances with at least some nuance.
True enough. I’m just too used to ropy non-recurring actors in early B5 seasons I guess :P
I see what you did there. :)
I expect (for reasons I go into below) the direction and desire was for him to be a “spittle-flecked political hatchet man” episode made clear side it was on pretty early on …
Londo’s taunting “Yoo-hoo!” to G’Kar never, ever fails to make me crack up.
Huh. I should *really* have tried paying attention to the writers of earlier-season B5, as “To Dream In The City of Shadows” is one of my fave bits of tie-in fiction, well, ever.
But isn’t it called To Dream In The City of Sorrows? I think KRAD got the title wrong.
Updated!
Excellent episode, but I had the opposite opinion about the guest cast. I felt that Katy Boyer tried her best to rise to the material, but was the wrong person to play a character like Connolly, who should’ve been played by someone with more maturity and rough-edged gravitas, someone who could convey a blue-collar type who’d been around the block a bunch of times. And as for Zento coming off more as a melodrama villain than a credible negotiator, I think that was entirely the point — that the government deliberately sent someone who had no interest in finding common ground but was just there to assert authoritarian control and put the workers in their place. Snyder was definitely an overly broad actor, but in a way that fit the role.
Terrific G’Kar story too, adding a lot of texture and nuance. And I love it when someone used physics to resolve a problem — though it’s an implausibly convenient coincidence that Narn is at exactly the right distance that the delay in the ceremony is only 12 hours or so.
Sinclair said the Narn homeworld is 12.2 light years (in Earth years) from Babylon 5. B5 orbits Epsilon Eridani, and according to the Internet Stellar Database (which has a handy-dandy “Find all stars within X light years” function), the only star that’s 12.2 ly from Eps Eri is Luyten Palomar 771-095, a trinary red dwarf system. It’s conceivable such a system could have a habitable planet, but it would probably be tidally locked, perpetually keeping one face to its star, and thus would not have sunrises over Mount G’Quan or anywhere else. A better candidate would be 82 Eridani, a G6 main-sequence star that’s known to have at least three planets. It’s more like 12.5 ly from Eps Eri, but maybe Sinclair misspoke.
Nice to see Senator Hidoshi get a bit of nuance, but did they have to shoot him against a backdrop that made him look like a late-night talk show host delivering his monologue?
I agree, I really thought Katy Boyer was completely wrong for the part. Too young, too refined, for want of a better word. I didn’t find her believable as a union leader. There were some terrible casting decisions in season 1 as well as some genuinely poor acting.
I watched this episode recently, and I thought Sinclair said Narn was 10 light years from the station, not 12. Does that make it fit better?
He said it was 12.2 light years, or about 10 Narn light years. In other words, the Narn year is about 1.22 Earth years. It’s refreshing to see a work of TV science fiction acknowledge that different planets have different year lengths, that the Earth year and day are not the universal absolutes that too much SF assumes.
But the distance being exactly 10 Narn light years within 12 or so light-hours? In other words, about 10.001 light years instead of 10.124 or 9.913 or something? It’s a huge coincidence that it’s so close to a round number. It would’ve made more sense to say that the light would hit the station in about three weeks or something.
It’s a cheat, but it’s one that I don’t mind as a viewer. It allows the story to reach its resolution without introducing a time delay that could have continuity implications.
Not at all. The Babylon Project wiki makes conflicting claims about the chronology on different pages of the site, but the chronology used on the individual episode pages asserts that “By Any Means Necessary” is the only episode set during May 2258. So they could easily have said the tag scene was 2-3 weeks after the rest of the episode.
Changing the timing by several days would have other side effects because Londo could delay handing over the flower if he knew.
No, because the reason Londo handed over the flower was because the original deadline had already passed. We’re talking about Sinclair’s realization that G’Kar could sync with the lightspeed travel time instead, that it wasn’t too late after all.
I said “could have” not “would have”. According to JMS, he insisted this script be written on spec because he wanted to avoid any appearance of favorable treatment of his then-spouse. Ms. Drennan may not have had the benefit of knowing that she could add a three week delay.
Larry DiTillio, who apparently handled the revisions, could have made that change, but maybe the timeline wasn’t settled and they just didn’t want to deal with it.
In any case, it just doesn’t really bother me that much.
22 episodes in one calendar year translates to an average of two and a third weeks per episode. And the main events of this episode explicitly took only a couple of days. It wouldn’t have been remotely an imposition on the timeline to allocate an extra one or two weeks.
Besides, the final scene was isolated, unconnected to anything else. It could easily have been a flashforward. According to the wiki, the broadcast order isn’t chronological anyway; its chronology claims that the events of this episode come just after “Mind War” and before “Deathwalker.”
Glad someone else saw that the lack of negotiating ability on the “great negotiator” was a feature not a bug (at least in the minds of the writers of the episode)
Londo’s little wave reminded me somewhat of Vir’s wave to Mr. Morden. I have some thoughts about that, but it’ll wait until we get there.
Add me to those that didn’t like John Snyder’s performance. I do think he was supposed to be a political hatchet man meant to provoke a justification for cracking down. I just don’t think he was very good at it. Better than the guy playing Cutter last week, but still an awful lot of room for improvement.
I’m also noticing on this watch-through how musical Andreas Katsulas is. The fishies song, his chants here.
I really enjoy this episode. The A plot is good, but you can’t go wrong with putting G’Kar and Londo together.
Bobby
This was one of the other early episodes I could recall, though mainly only Sinclair cleverly ending the strike. Finding the loophole and staying within the letter of the law struck me then and now as being so clever!
It’s also clever that the title of the episode turns out to be the key to its solution.
Normally, the phrase “by any means necessary” has a so much menace under the surface. For me, that’s why it was a pleasant surprise to see it turned around like that.
I need to rewatch the episode again, but I think Sinclair needed that magic phrase “by any means necessary” in order to shift the budgeted funds. Without that he could not solve the problem before hand.
Yes, that’s the point — that it seemed like a menacing phrase, but surprisingly turned out to be Sinclair’s key to solving things.
Yes, exactly. It’s an ominous-sounding title, and it does represent the determination of the clashing factions in both plots, but then it gets inverted in such an effective way. I love titles with layers.
This is one of my favorite season one episodes. It was 100% supporting the unions, which didn’t happen in sci fi very often. I really liked Sinclair’s solutions to all of the problems. I also love the fleshing out of G’Kar’s character.
Offhand, I can’t think of a science fiction story that took an anti-union stance. But my memory’s not that great.
My memories may be cloudy as well, but IIR unions were seen as unneeded and unmentioned in most science fiction of the time. Yes, they were sympathetic to the working class personnel, but society as a whole had grown beyond the need for union protection, especially in Star Trek. Other, less evolved species The Ferengi, The Cloud Minders hadn’t reached that level of sophistication, but our hero races had handled all of that.
Quark’s bar staff went on strike one time in an episode of DS9 called ‘Bar Association’.
It’s not easy to write a story where the union workers would be the bad guys, unless you’d show that they are fighting for something ridiculous and unfair – which can happen in real life, but would be hard to make a good drama out of it. :D
The 1990’s were the most anti-union era I recall
And we are paying the price for that now.
The 1980s too, under Reagan. When air traffic controllers went on strike in 1981, he fired the ones that wouldn’t return to work, on the grounds that it was illegal for federal workers to strike. (That may well have been an influence on this episode.) It set a precedent that encouraged private companies to fire their strikers instead of negotiating, and it severely weakened the labor movement in the US. Reagan’s presidency was terrible for unions, even though he was a former union leader himself (of the Screen Actors Guild, twice).
Depends on what you end up watching. In my (admittedly unreliable) memories of the eighties, every union I saw on TV was either a mob front or some other form of corrupt.
Hm, yeah, that rings a bell, but was that the case in science fiction too?
Mostly police or lone crime fighter shows, I think. I kinda think there was an episode of Battlestar Galactica, maybe? Could have been a comic or novel tie in. I didn’t really see a lot of sci fi until I got my own VCR so I could record stuff while I was at work.
I admit, when I was young and naive, I had a low opinion of unions, because striking seemed like a bullying tactic, using force to get what you wanted, and requiring people to join a larger organization and follow its rules rather than being individuals rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t understand what I understand now, that unions are self-defense against exploitative management and that strikes are a last resort when management refuses to deal fairly. But I can understand how someone who believed the way I used to could perceive unions and strikers as the bad guys, or at least as overreacting unreasonably.
Unions are nessecary certainly and a good idea but joining should not be mandatory in my mind. Competition nessecary. But that is a political debate/discussion not appropriate for here.
Back then, the Ayn Rand types handed out those BS political test cards like Jack Chick tracts, and Pat Buchanan paleo-cons shown the door.
Here is the thing-
Unpleasant is not the same as unnecessary.
Maintaining a picket-line/border is unpleasant—but is necessary.
Disciplining a child, protests, having police, having regulations—having strong unions
There is no nice way to do any of these.
This site provides a whole list of stories dealing with unions of different kinds (sometimes just mentioned briefly) and whether the portrayal is positive, negative, or mixed. From skimming it, I get the impression negative portrayals dominated in the 1940s through 1960s; from the 1990s onward, the portrayals are mostly positive.
Which is curious, as unions were at the height of their influence during the 1950s.
Which might be why they attracted more criticism. One could argue that fiction, like journalism, has an obligation to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, or at least to scrutinize the powerful and warn of how that power could be abused, in hopes of keeping them honest.
It might also be why organized crime was so involved with unions — they sided with them when they were powerful enough to be worth siding with. But then, at least judging by the fiction of the era, it seems that organized crime was a major social problem in the ’30s-’50s, with influence in a lot of areas, not just labor.
Wow no journalism should be reporting truth. Scrutinize the powerful I agree with, but not the first at all. Fictions first duty is to entertain anything else is up to the creator to decide.
But reporting the truth is the best defense against the abuses of the powerful. When people want to gain power at the expense of others, they propagate lies that serve their power and silence truths that could undermine it. So a commitment to the truth is a commitment to scrutinizing the powerful and defending the oppressed. The truth is a level playing field, giving no one an unfair advantage, so it’s necessary to counteract those who seek to create or perpetuate an unfair advantage.
And fiction has always done more than passively entertain. Fiction shapes people’s values and worldviews, whether it’s intended to or not. I believe that gives the creators of fiction a responsibility.
Interesting list, but like CLB I am perplexed by the positive/mixed/negative assessments. The B5 dockworkers briefly became violent, yes, but only when provoked by security personnel initiating a forcible crackdown. That’s portraying workers negatively?
Intriguing list. I’d forgotten how many of the classic SF authors I grew up reading depicted labor negatively; that might have been the reason for my own negative view of it at the time. Although the frequent mention of labor corruption reminds me that there was a tendency in the past for organized crime to have close ties to labor, as with Jimmy Hoffa. If that corruption was rampant, it probably influenced the fiction of the day.
Also interesting to see how many SF authors (including one I know personally, Laura Resnick) have written about unions protecting sex workers’ rights and safety. I have one of those myself in my novel Only Superhuman, called the Federation of Erotic Entertainers and Labor, or FEEL.
The list isn’t entirely accurate; for instance, it claims that the union in For All Mankind season 4 is portrayed negatively, but it’s actually mixed, since the workers who organize the union clearly have legitimate grievances and are driven to their actions by intolerable circumstances.
This kind of supports my memory. I was only addressing how Sci Fi shows on television portrayed unions. I wasn’t reading that much at the time and since this is a discussion of TV show, I was going on those memories. The list shows very few portrayals of unions on Sci Fi TV series. There were 4 portrayals considered mixed, including By Any Means Necessary and Star Trek’s Bar Association, 4 Negative portrayals of unions and 3 Positive portrayals. Basically unions are pretty ignored in Sci Fi TV.
I had a brief phase where I really resented having to pay a third party in order to get a decent job. Thankfully I took a rather eye opening sociology class that delved into the history of early unionization efforts in the US..
I do not believe your memory is faulty, it seems to me that the needs of lower-decks worker types have generally been presented sympathetically in other stories on those infrequent occasions they have been in focus at all.
Might perceptions in this regard be colored by SF’s reputation as having a more libertarian, individualistic lean than do other genres? Against that backdrop, the explicit use of a union and its grievances to drive the A-plot might seem to be more of a left-leaning outlier than it actually is.
I mean even the most libertarian writers (Heinlein and Asimov also my favorite writers) never wrote anything anti-union – though what they wrote would have been significantly more nuanced than this. TV sci-fi especially in this area was certainly extremely pro-union – I mean star-trek was low key about its socialist anti capitalist stance but it was very obviously there if you knew how to look.
Libertarian? That *might* fit Heinlein, though it’s debatable, but Asimov was a lefty who thought libertarians selfish.
The site I mentioned above lists three Asimov stories that include unions, all described as negative portrayals (e.g., “Strikebreakers” [1957] — “Negative depiction – Strike threatens survival of colony.”). There are two stories by Heinlein, both rated as negative portrayals (e.g., “The Roads Must Roll” [1940]m as Keith Rose noted).
I do not remember the asimov story but listing it as a negative portrayal just because the union is threatening the colony is incorrect. This is one particular union not a symbol for all unions. Anymore can’t say as don’t remember the story. On the roads must roll – this was about interdependence and how no one group is all important the union was bad not for being a union but for forgetting this fact.
The only Heinein story involving a union I can think of is “The Roads Must Roll”. I’d call that an anti-union story. At best, the technician’s union is duped into facilitating Van Kleeck’s ambitions to seize personal power.
Still, the hero considered a previous strike justified–and did he not belong to the same union?
I remember seeing the listing for this one in the newspaper (TV listings in the newspaper were still a thing back then) and immediately wondering if settling a labor dispute “By Any Means Necessary” including acceding to their demands. So that resolution didn’t come as a big surprise to me.
Incidentally, it’s To Dream in the City of Sorrows, not Shadows.
Ah, I see you caught that error in the book title. I have mentioned it above too in reply to another commenter. Hope Keith fixes it some time.
Updated, thanks!
This is another episode that has made me genuinely like Sinclair. Sinclair is thinking on his feet the entire episode (and his desire to get off his feet is very sympathetic throughout), and he has clever and nuanced solutions to all the situations demanding his attention. Very well-acted by Michael O’Hare.
I also think Katy Boyer does an excellent turn as Connolly; she really feels like an overworked union boss trying to do the best she can for her workers.
Where there’s not-so-great performance is John Snyder as Zento. I disagree his over-the-top yelling and menace was the point, as he’s not particularly menacing.
The most effective political hatchetmen usually pretend they’re on your side with one hand, while threatening you with the other (“If we invoke the Rush Act and you’re imprisoned, how will that affect your family? Your future? I don’t want to invoke the Act, I know you don’t want that. So go back to work, keep building your life here on Babylon 5, and make everyone back home proud.” Yeesh. That made my skin crawl).
Snyder had no charisma either; Zento may as well have been twirling his mustache.
And any interaction between Londo and G’Kar has never not been delightful. With the added scars from the Ragesh III invasion and the treatment of Londo’s nephew, you can literally see the extra gleam in Londo’s eye as he pokes and pokes at G’Kar.
I love worldbuilding episodes like this.
“The most effective political hatchetmen usually pretend they’re on your side with one hand, while threatening you with the other”
You’re probably right, but that’s as much an issue with the script as the performance. Zento was written as quick to threaten, as someone who came in with the clear intention of shutting down the strike as firmly as possible and zero interest in any compromise. And really, that’s quite plausible to me given the attitude of the studios in last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood. They peremptorily refused to negotiate for months, deliberately dragging out the strike even though they could’ve resolved it in hours, because they were so determined to assert dominance over the strikers and break down their defiance that they were willing to lose millions of dollars in order to do it. Some studio execs explicitly said their goal was to drive the strikers to bankruptcy. They didn’t want to deal fairly, they wanted to bully their workers into total submission. And they made no secret of it. They said the quiet part out loud.
So Zento’s heavy-handedness makes perfect sense to me in the context of a story arc that’s showing the Earth government’s accelerating slide toward fascism. Yes, the performance could certainly have been better, but the writing had a deeper point to it.
I think having Zento come in all bluster is a mistake, but I can understand it from a script perspective. Unfortunately, Snyder doesn’t have the gravitas to pull it off. He comes across as a stuffed shirt, not a real threat. He seems like someone negotiating from a position of weakness, not strength, and I find it impossible to take him particularly seriously.
I think the role wanted somebody more cool and dispassionate who could effectively embody the machinery of fascism. This is the way things are. You have no choices. You will comply or be crushed. (Bruce Gray’s interrogator in Intersections in Real Time, for example.) Snyder’s Zento takes it personally. That seems wrong.
Maybe it’s a direction issue. But the rest of the episode is quite good and Jim Johnston did several others that I quite like as well. In any case, regardless of whose choice it was, for me Snyder’s performance is the weak point of an otherwise strong episode. It’s one of my favorites of this season.
When I did my rewatch of the series a couple of years ago, this is one of the episodes that made me go “I really wish they could have kept Sinclair”. I’m not entirely sure but I don’t think we see any O’Hare performance after this that isn’t at least good, and certainly nothing at the level of the first seven or eight episodes, which does make it feel like typical first season syndrome of people not being sure who the characters are on either side of the camera. With the obvious exceptions of Jurasik, Christian and Furlan who seemed to just nail their characters out of the gate.
Excellent episode. Really fleshing out G’Kar, and of course almost any interaction between him and Mollari is going to be good. The show is (finally) seeming to fire on all cylinders here, and the next episode is one that especially on rewatching is my favorite of the first season episodes.
Incidentally, one of Katy Boyer’s earlier roles was as one of the two main Bynars in Star Trek: TNG‘s “11001001.” She and Alexandra Johnson spoke in alternating sentence fragments throughout the episode.
I echo a lot of the thoughts that others have had on the episode.
I like Londo’s explicit mention of Ragesh III, especially coming into “Signs and Portents” next episode. This entire incident enflames the tensions between Londo and G’Kar, just in time for those tensions to be exploited.
I always enjoy this episode for O’Hare’s performance. He brings a lot of nuance to Sinclair’s trials from start to finish. Looking ahead, it seems to underscore a few things about Sinclair overall. We’ve seen his military background, we’ve seen him try to take a reasonable approach to honoring religious beliefs (like with G’Kar in this episode), and now we’ve seen his affinity for the working class. All three, of course, being aligned with the three castes of Minbari society. I always thought that to be very intentional.
I agree that this is O’Hare’s best performance, at least up to this point. He does a great job in this episode of conveying the discomfort and frustration of being notionally in charge but without any real ability to resolve the problems that face him. His fatigue becomes ever more palpable as the episode progresses. He shows more emotion than he usually does and his delivery seems to me to become more natural when he does so.
Riffable moment: “We all believe in something greater than ourselves. Even if it’s just the blind forces of chance.”
Or Crystal Light.
I could have sworn the dockworker who yells out for a strike was the show’s DP John C. Flynn III, who gets a few walk-on roles in the series, usually as an obnoxious jackass (the characters, not him personally). But it’s not listed in the episode’s end credits or on his IMDB profile. Anyone?
The issue of religious practices based on geographical locations in an age of space travel has some real world parallels. One of the more notable ones that comes to mind concerns how a Muslim astronaut would go about facing towards Mecca while conducting prayers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla#Outer_space
The lurker’s guide page for the episode quotes JMS saying that is the director, Jim Johnston.
Shouldn’t it be C&C for “command and control,” not “CnC”?
It’s a pretty common autocorrect since you can’t use the & in some cases like file names, or urls. That is why we see DnD a lot online as well.
“n” is a reasonably common abbreviation or variation of “and,” though I admit I prefer & in this context.
The B5 wiki says it’s C&C.
For a one-off episode that has so little connection to the greater arc, it’s impressive how much this one adds to the B5 universe. A welcome piece of worldbuilding that tells us a lot about the inner workings of the station. Whatever challenges happened behind the scenes, Drennan’s script really delivers.
If there is a scene I love to rewatch on the season 1 DVD is Ivanova’s countdown, loudly driving Londo. G’Kar and Cramer out of C&C. You never want to mess with her. This makes her the best first officer in any of the sci-fi shows I’ve watched. Riker and every other Trek XO? They don’t even come close (maaaaybe Kira). She’s not afraid to speak her mind to Sinclair/Sheridan when they’re in the wrong, but she’s also 100% in synch with them when the situation requires. When they mean business, she enforces the orders without blinking. Even G’Kar, who fought and killed Centauri tooth and nail during the occupation, is driven away like a puppy.
B5 is certainly a more possibly accurate prediction of the 23rd century. I can see labor disputes remaining an issue for the foreseeable future – I mean, we just saw what happened last year with the SAG/WGA shutdown, courtesy of greedy studio heads and dellusions of AI replacing natural talent.
Speaking of AI, I find it interesting that a place like B5, in the year 2258, hasn’t outsourced a lot of the docking/loading/unloading procedures to a more automated system, relying on plain old dockworkers instead. What little we see of “intelligent” tech in B5 is mainly the starfury systems and that one episode where Garibaldi deals with the cranky station AI voiced by Harlan Ellison – a one time thing that didn’t take off. There are a couple of reasons why I believe Straczynski took this approach:
And man, I love Sinclair’s solution to the problem. It’s a win-win situation. Even by taking out a slice of the military budget to cover the guild, it doesn’t cripple the station. Governments will always spend money on weapons if there’s a potential threat out there – and the station gets its weapons upgrade in the GROPOS episode next season.
I do wonder how Sheridan would have handled a similar situation. I think it would have taken him a little longer to recognize what needed to be done.
I wasn’t as crazy about this one. I approved of the message, but the negotiators both felt like caricatures, making the whole thing feel like a Saturday morning cartoon version of a labor dispute. I liked the B plot more, but I thought Sinclair came off as a bit patronizing explaining to G’kar how his own religion was supposed to work (plus it’s NOT the same light that hit the mountain). I do like his solution to both disputes, though. He hasn’t always seemed like the best person to be running B5, so it’s nice to see him doing some creative problem-solving instead of just playing an unlikely action hero.
Yes, it is the same light — light that’s been traveling through space for ten Narn years (12.2 Earth years). Indeed, in relativistic terms, simultaneity is defined based on lightspeed travel time, so if a beam of light shines past the edge of the mountain on Narn, travels through space for 12.2 years, and then is observed by G’Kar on Babylon 5, then a physicist would say he’s worshipping it at the same moment as the Narn on their homeworld 10 Narn years earlier. If he’d held the ceremony simultaneously with worshippers on Narn relative to how time would be measured over instantaneous hyperspace communication, then it would be different light, because it wouldn’t have been in sync with the lightspeed travel time.
But the sunlight that touched the mountain isn’t travelling anywhere, or at least there’s no reason to think that the light that’s reflected instead of absorbed will travel in the direction of a space station a dozen light-years away. Some other light that left that Narn star at the same time that light did might reach Babylon 5 years later, but it’s not the same light that touched the mountain.
G’Kar did not say “touched.” That was Sinclair’s phrasing. G’Kar’s line was, “You see, those who are able to perform the ritual in the first rays of sunlight that shines past the mountain, a magnificent sight.” Obviously, the light that shines past the mountain will continue traveling through space afterward. And of course, a “touch” can be glancing, like if someone’s shoulder brushes yours as they walk past.
Of course, it’s unlikely that there would actually be a straight line between Narn’s sun, Narn, and Babylon 5, so strictly speaking it would only be the sunlight emitted from the Narns’ primary star at the same moment as it was observed rising behind Mount G’Quan. In that sense, no, it wouldn’t be the “same” light, unless you define “shines past” very broadly. But as G’Kar goes on to explain, “those of us who can’t be there must still perform the ritual at the same moment.” So what matters for offworlders (or presumably those in different locations on the Narn homeworld) is simultaneity with the light touching the mountain, and Sinclair’s solution is simply to substitute relativistic simultaneity for absolute simultaneity.
Okay, actually that makes a lot of sense. I’m still annoyed by how he said it, but I’m not as annoyed.
Great episode. The G’Kar/Londo relationship is beginning to crackle with energy, Ivanova is showing her moxie, and Sinclair is showing that he is the kind of CO everyone wishes for. I thought the union storyline was great. A bit simplified, but I hate stories that assume humanity will outgrow the need for things like religion, unions, customs, traditions and folklore., etc. People are people, and will be even centuries from now.
I got a laugh from JMS answer to a Brit asked who Rush Limbaugh was (“Leading American proctologist. Trust me.”)
Next week, the first episode that made everyone jump up and go “Holy bleeping bleep, what the hell was that?!?!!?”
This episode was great, because it showed a very normal problem in both stories, very understandable behavior by all the parties, and a satisfying resolution, one that screwed the one jerk in the entire thing. JMS was right that Star Trek wouldn’t have shown this kind of story before, it wasn’t the kind of show they were doing…DS9 was a different ST show though, so it made sense for one to pop up there. Note that’s a bit more fodder for people who think DS9 ripped off B5.
Conspiracy theorists will latch onto anything. Rational people understand that different stories explore similar themes by chance all the time, because there are only so many recurring ideas and patterns, and because different writers in the same era will naturally explore similar themes that resonate with their audience’s interests and concerns.
We’ve already talked about how Peter David’s DS9 novel The Siege (no relation to the later episode) did the same premise as B5’s “Believers” a whole year earlier, but it would be silly to accuse David Gerrold of ripping off Peter David; they were both simply inspired by the same real-life news controversy around the same time. There were a few major strikes in the United States in the early ’90s, and of course there had been the WGA strike in Hollywood in 1988, so it’s no surprise that labor issues would’ve been on the minds of different shows’ writers at the same time.
One small detail I really liked about this episode: the conversation between G’Kar and Na’Toth about their beliefs. It’s an anti-planet-of-hats moment. Na’Toth’s father has a different religion from G’Kar while she and her mother have no faith at all. But Na’Toth clearly also has great respect for G’Kar’s beliefs, which all adds immensely to her character. It’s a small detail, but a great extra little piece of universe-building.
Another series from that era that did similarly well with alien religion was Alien Nation, Kenneth Johnson’s 1989 TV adaptation of the (vastly inferior) 1988 feature film. By the end of that show’s single season (not counting its later TV-movie revivals), the Tenctonese aliens had at least four distinct religions established, even though there were only a quarter-million of them on Earth.
To be fair about Jon Snyder in this one, I don’t think he is supposed to be a skilled negotiator in this episode. He’s a jerk, a bully, and rather pompous, and he clearly wanted the negotiations to fail so he can arrest the people for DARING to want to strike.
Senator Hidoshi said “He is our best labor negotiator,” but immediately followed it up with “He has stopped this kind of thing before in many of our stations.” Implicitly, Zento is the “best” negotiator as defined by management, i.e. the one most effective at quashing labor uprisings, rather than as it would be defined by an objective observer, i.e. someone skilled at finding a mutually beneficial resolution. So we were essentially told up front what to expect.
Anti-Union sentiment didn’t just come from Limbaugh.
Ironically Cesar Chavez knew borders and picket lines are the same damn thing—with libertarian type calling folks “knuckle draggers” and uncouth…the flip of todays convention.
Bill Clinton made the 90’s anti-union too—and now Justice Ruckus and his ilk have the Chevron defense in stone.
Not a good week for labor, friends.
This was not my favorite episode on first airing or now. As others have stated the management negotiator was purposely over the top and purposely portrayed to be evil incarnate. For a show that later was so good at being even handed and where the entire point became finding a third way, this episode was very not even handed. Humanity had just ended a war that should arguably have led to there complete destruction, high levels of spending on military infrastructure and milliary research are completely understandable. It is quite possible there simply wasn’t enough pie to go around.
Also on G’kars religion was it not at least heavily implied the only reason he cared was to cement power on the station? I may be wrong, rewatched this episode awhile ago. At least I thought the book with info on the shadows was not directly part of the religion, but some other handed down racial knowledge.
Also, did the show ever deal with the craziness of the centauri calling themselves a republic? What kind of republic has an emperor? I mean precedent for it given north Korea, China, but at least those get called out.
“Humanity had just ended a war that should arguably have led to there complete destruction, high levels of spending on military infrastructure and milliary research are completely understandable. It is quite possible there simply wasn’t enough pie to go around.”
Except the episode explicitly showed there was. Sinclair was able to find a way to reallocate the resources, but he wasn’t allowed to, because the politicians and “experts” back home were making the budget decisions for political reasons. Once the Rush Act gave him freedom to assign resources as he chose, the problem was solved overnight. As with most scarcity, the cause was not a genuine lack of resources, but the unfair distribution of them by powerful people motivated by political or economic self-interest.
Besides, the “pie” analogy is nonsensical because it presumes a zero-sum game. If the dockworkers don’t have sufficient personnel or resources to do their job, that hurts every other aspect of station life, because necessary shipments are delayed, urgent meetings are delayed, connections are missed, supplies may be lost or damaged, etc. Giving them more resources to do their jobs more efficiently and safely would benefit everyone.
I believe this was the first episode to delve into Narn religion in any detail, and G’Kar’s faith was presented here as quite genuine. At this point the Book of G’Quon is known only as scripture and the Shadows have not even been introduced yet.
The expectation that ‘republic’ can only properly apply to representative democracies is relatively recent—and historically inaccurate. The Romans’ term for their state was res publica, which literally translates to “public stuff” or “public thing”. But the Roman Republic was an oligarchic, aristocratic state for all of its history and continued to use the formalities of ‘republican’ governance for centuries after its senate formally made Augustus emperor.
Centauri society and government are clearly being patterned after the intrigues (and socioeconomic decline) of the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity, so it makes sense that they would describe themselves as a republic. After all, it would be unseemly for the Emperor or Centaurum to admit they were scheming to enrich themselves, much better to loudly proclaim that everything they do is for the good and glory of the Republic.