“Chrysalis”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 1, Episode 22
Production episode 112
Original air date: October 26, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… As the new year approaches, the B5 Council is meeting. The meeting mostly serves as an audience for a shouting match between Mollari and G’Kar. The Narn have an outpost in Quadrant 37, which Mollari says is in violation of the treaty between their worlds. But since the treaty was negotiated under duress, the Narn refuse to abide by it. When Mollari starts making threats, G’Kar leaves in a huff.
One of Garibaldi’s informants, Stephen Petrov, approaches him, bleeding badly. He says, “They’re going to kill him,” but dies before he can identify who “him” is.
Sakai is on the station, and after she and Sinclair watch ISN’s coverage of a goodwill tour being conducted by President Santiago and Vice President Clark, Sinclair rather awkwardly proposes to Sakai, and Sakai very enthusiastically says yes.
Mollari is lamenting his life, but then he’s contacted by Morden, who wants to meet. Mollari, still grateful for Morden getting him the Eye back, agrees. Morden says that his associates and he can help Mollari with Quadrant 37. Morden tells Mollari to inform his government that he will take care of the situation. They want no credit for what they do, as the point of the exercise is to improve Mollari’s position.
Lennier informs Delenn that Kosh said yes to, um, whatever it is she told him to ask the Vorlon. Delenn then goes to visit Kosh, where he allows her to see inside his encounter suit. She bids him farewell, saying this is the last time he will see her as she is now.
Garibaldi goes to downbelow to try to find out who killed Petrov, and he eventually finds a Lurker actually willing to talk to him. Petrov took a job loading cargo for a guy named Devereaux. Petrov actually looked at the cargo (which is generally a no-no, as asking questions means you don’t get more work), and it scared the bejabbers out of him. The chief takes Devereaux and two of his flunkies into custody. Devereaux does the usual tired boasting about how Garibaldi doesn’t know what he’s getting into and it’s way above his pay grade and various other clichés that Garibaldi is unimpressed by.
Sinclair visits G’Kar in his quarters and urges him to back off on Quadrant 37. G’Kar won’t, though he respects Sinclair’s warning that they’re all coming to a crossroads.
Sinclair and Sakai go to dinner at Fresh Air with Ivanova and Garibaldi and reveal that they’re getting married and they want the other two to be their maid of honor and best man, respectively. Both agree, and then they’re interrupted by Garibaldi being informed that Deveraux and his thugs have escaped custody. This irks Garibaldi, and he was already irked by the weapon Deveraux was carrying—a PPG without a serial number. Those are rare and only issued to special agents in EarthForce Security. So maybe it really is above his pay grade…
A handful of shadowy (ahem) ships arrive at Quadrant 37 and wipe out the Narn outpost and all the attendant vessels.
An ISN news piece reveals that Clark has departed from EarthForce 1 with the flu, and that he hopes to rejoin Santiago on Io. This will probably be important later.
Garibaldi and one of his security guards, Jack, go over some of Deveraux’s cargo that didn’t make it onto the ship that Petrov helped load, which was heading for Io. It’s equipment that can flood the Gold Channel frequency, completely jamming it.
Putting it all together, Garibaldi calls Sinclair and says they have to meet now, but he won’t say why over an unsecured link. He goes to leave the cargo bay and is confronted by Deveraux and his henchthugs. Deveraux reiterates that Garibaldi shouldn’t have stuck his nose in this, and then the security chief is shot in the back—by Jack.
Sinclair is beside himself with worry, as Garibaldi never showed up for the meeting he called, and no one can find him. Delenn approaches him, holding up the triluminary, which Sinclair last saw when he was the Minbari’s prisoner after the Battle of the Line. Sinclair confirms Delenn’s suspicions that he remembers more of his missing twenty-four hours than he’s let on, though he still has many gaps. Delenn offers to fill those gaps, but Sinclair has a missing security chief and can’t really talk to her right now. Delenn understands and says she’ll wait in her quarters, but she can only wait so long, as events have been set in motion.
Na’Toth reports the destruction of Quadrant 37 to G’Kar. The ambassador is at a loss as to who would be responsible. The Minbari would not conduct a sneak attack. Neither Earth nor the Vorlons have the motive. The Centauri lack the resolve. And no other known nation has the firepower.
Through sheer force of plot armor thanks to being in the opening credits, Garibaldi crawls to an elevator and collapses inside it, to be found by someone leaving a New Years Eve party. He’s brought to medlab right away. He manages to tell Sinclair that someone’s going to kill the president at the Io jump gate before lapsing into unconsciousness.
Sinclair immediately goes to CnC, but Ivanova informs him that all communications are jammed—even the Gold Channel. ISN is on one of the monitors, and they see EarthForce 1 blow up. (How a transmission of the ship blowing up is possible when all communications were jammed is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Mollari meets with Morden and is outraged. He was not expecting a massacre. However, Morden insists that all is well. “They’re only Narns.” And Mollari is now being spoken of as a hero in the halls of power on Centauri Prime.
Sinclair tries and fails to convince a senator that there was a specific plot against Santiago. The senator assures Sinclair that the findings are that it was an accident, and she finds it impossible to believe that a security chief on a remote outpost found a conspiracy that EarthForce Security missed.
Jack “finds” Devereaux and his dudebros, and reports that they died in a firefight with him. Curiously, Devereaux’s PPG is cold, but sometimes that happens. Sure. No problem. Nothing to see here.
Sinclair is watching the ISN feed of Clark being sworn in when Kosh approaches him, reminding him that he’s forgotten something. The light bulb goes off over Sinclair’s head and he high-tails it to Delenn’s quarters—
—but it’s too late. She’s inside a chrysalis. Lennier has no idea when she’ll come out of it, or what she’ll come out as.
Na’Toth goes to G’Kar’s quarters only to find a prerecorded message set to play on her arrival: G’Kar has gone off to investigate what happened in Quadrant 37.
Mollari and Ivanova sit in medlab, keeping an eye on the comatose Garibaldi.
Lennier continues to watch over Delenn.
Sinclair laments to Sakai that everything is changing.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair blows his chance to get the whole skinny on the Battle of the Line due to the incredibly bad timing of Garibaldi getting shot. He also gets engaged to Sakai and tries to warn G’Kar that everything’s changing, all in what turns out to be his swan song as station commander.
Ivanova is God. Sakai asks Ivanova to be her maid of honor because she doesn’t know anybody on the station, and Ivanova is the highest ranking woman in the opening credits so, um, why not? I’m stunned she didn’t say, “Really? Me? Don’t you have any, y’know, friends?”
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi might want to consider improving his vetting process for hiring subordinates, as we’ve already had an inveterate gambler in “And the Sky Full of Stars,” and now this.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn gets to see under Kosh’s dress, as it were, and goes into a cocoon. It’s all part of some greater purpose.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… At one point, Morden says that all he wants in return from Mollari is to one day do a favor for him and his associates. That, for the record, is when Mollari should have said no and backed away.
We also learn that the Centauri currently have either forty-nine or fifty gods, depending on how you count Zoog. (For what it’s worth, Vir generally doesn’t count Zoog.)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn Regime is committed to expanding at all costs—even if it’s violation of a treaty. (They consider that treaty illegitimate anyhow.) They also believe that the Centauri Republic doesn’t have the stones to fight back, which is true in the abstract…
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh is in cahoots with Delenn on whatever it is she’s doing, and he allows her to see his true face.
Meanwhile, the Shadows make their first big appearance. Having previously destroyed a pirate ship few people would even miss, this time they wipe out an entire outpost and its support ships, a massacre on a truly appalling scale. Morden assures the Shadows that Mollari is definitely their man…
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. When Sinclair shows up at G’Kar’s quarters, Na’Toth says he’s very busy, but then three human women depart his bedroom, at which point Na’Toth dryly says that he’s free now. G’Kar then comes out wearing only a nightshirt. Wah-hey!
Welcome aboard. Julia Nickson makes her third and final appearance as Sakai, returning from “Mind War.” Maggie Egan returns as an ISN anchor from “Survivors”; she’ll be back in “GROPOS.”
Ed Wasser officially makes Morden recurring, returning from “Signs and Portents.” Macaulay Bruton is back as one of Garibaldi’s security guards from “By Any Means Necessary.” Ardwight Chamberlain is peculiarly uncredited as Kosh, who was last seen in “Grail.” Gary McGurk makes his first appearance as Clark. All four will return two episodes hence in “Revelations.”
Trivial matters. This is the final appearance by Michael O’Hare as an opening-credits regular. He’ll reappear in “The Coming of Shadows” as a guest star.
The story of Sinclair and Sakai following this episode is told in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan.
It’s also last appearance by Caitlin Brown as an opening-credits regular. The role of Na’Toth will switch to Mary Kay Adams in season two. Brown will return in a different role in season two’s “There All the Honor Lies,” and she’ll reprise the role of Na’Toth in season five’s “A Tragedy of Telepaths.”
Delenn shows Sinclair the triluminary, which Sinclair was established as having seen when he was a Minbari prisoner in “And the Sky Full of Stars.” Delenn was given the triluminary at the end of “Babylon Squared.”
In “TKO,” Smith warned Garibaldi to watch his back. His inability to follow that instruction proves his undoing here.
G’Kar quotes Gandalf when he tells Na’Toth, “Expect me when you see me,” which the wizard said to Frodo at the end of Chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is far from the last reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings we’ll see on this show…
The camera angles on the footage of Clark being sworn in were deliberate homages to the photography of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Alisa Beldon telepathically sensed the word chrysalis in Delenn’s mind in “Legacies,” and this episode pays that off.
This episode was held back by PTEN until the week before the second season debuted so that viewers wouldn’t have to wait an entire summer for the cliffhanger to be resolved. (Some airings of the episode also went out with a “To be continued…” card at the end, though that was not supposed to be there and was removed.) This became a fairly standard practice for B5, to save the final few episodes of a season for late summer/early fall right before the new season debuted.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“This is like being nibbled to death by, um—ah! What are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long beak, webbed feet, go ‘quack’?”
“Cats?”
“Cats! I’m being nibbled to death by cats!”
—Mollari and Vir failing their saving throw versus exobiology.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “You have forgotten something.” This is a fairly effective season finale, but it suffers from two problems, one actively while watching it and the other from rewatching it and knowing what will come next.
The problem watching it is that the episode desperately wants us to be affected by the assassination of President Santiago, and—for me, at least—it utterly fails to do so. I don’t know who Santiago is. The fact that he’s president is not, by itself, enough for me to give a damn. If we’d actually seen Santiago at any point, even if it was just news footage of a press conference or an interview or something, it would’ve helped. Hell, in “Survivors” Santiago was right there on the station. That was the perfect opportunity to see him, get to know him a little. It wouldn’t require much, just a few bits here and there to make him a person rather than an abstraction. As it is, his death is just a CGI explosion, and who cares? (Also I ask again: how could they see the ship exploding if all transmissions in the area were jammed?) Clark as his replacement is certainly sinister enough given that he left EarthForce 1 just before the explosion with a sudden flu, and he will eventually become quite the problematic president (though that has similar issues, which we’ll cover).
The other problem with rewatching this is that this is supposed to be the big thing where everything changes and gets upended—but it doesn’t, entirely. Yes, Delenn’s in a cocoon, but she’s going to come out as the same person, but with hair. Yes, Garibaldi’s been shot and is in a coma, but he’s going to recover completely.
There are only really two big changes, and one of them doesn’t count because it doesn’t kick in until the top of season two: the departure of Sinclair, replaced by Sheridan. It’s not even entirely clear that Sinclair’s departure was known when this episode was written. (The reasons behind Michael O’Hare’s departure were not revealed until after the actor’s death.)
However, then we have the one significant change, and that’s one that truly will matter. As is often the case when discussing the best thing about a B5 episode, it involves the Centauri and Narn in general and Mollari and G’Kar in particular. Mollari’s Faustian deal with Morden and G’Kar’s continued righteous fury and patriotism come to a rather vicious head. Up to this point, the relationship between the two characters has seemed simplistic. Mollari is the washed-up diplomat on a shitty assignment for a failing republic, G’Kar is the mustache-twirling villain determined to do everything he can to improve the Narn Regime’s standing in the galaxy. Their rivalry has been played for laughs (e.g., “By Any Means Necessary”) almost as often as it’s been serious.
The performances of Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas have elevated that to some degree, as have bits and pieces of script, but this is the episode where the picture starts to get more complex. Mollari’s arc will continue to darken, while G’Kar will come into focus as a tragic, noble figure, which you would not predict from the preening bad guy we first met in “The Gathering.” And it all starts here, with Mollari allowing himself to be sucked into Morden’s plot and G’Kar realizing that his people are in trouble. This conflict will be the heart of the rest of the series, truly.
Despite how much I’ve ragged on the episode, it is, as I said at the top of this segment, an effective finale. The pacing is superb as we bounce from plotline to plotline, and Janet Greek does a superlative job with the visuals, especially at the episode’s close. The shots of Sinclair and Sakai sitting apprehensively on the couch of Sinclair’s quarters, and the closeup of Lennier crying by candlelight as he stands watch over Delenn’s cocoon are beautifully composed and framed, images that stick in the brain. (Greek is the second most prolific director in the franchise, as she will in the end direct 14 episodes of B5 and Crusade, second only to Michael Vejar’s 18.) In addition, Garibaldi’s being shot in the back is magnificently filmed. And J. Michael Stracyznski’s script is tight and focused and keeps things moving very well, making you eager to know what happens next. Which we’ll get to in a couple weeks…
Next week: An overview of the first season.
Like so many season-ending cliffhangers, this is really the first half of a two-parter. Unlike those other examples, it won’t be resolved in the first episode of the new season. I suppose that’s occasioned by the need to introduce a new commander, so the resolution of Delenn’s and Garibaldi’s issues gets pushed back. In any case, it makes the start of Season 2 a little awkward.
Speaking of awkward, Clark’s departure from the president’s ship can’t help but look suspicious. But it shouldn’t have ever come up. In the US, the president and vice president may appear at the same function, but they never, ever travel together. That way, if something happens to one transport, the other is still there to fulfill their office. I can’t imagine that would be any different just because they’re traveling out to Jupiter.
Word of warning to first time watchers: If you want to see the revelation of Delenn without a spoiler, close your eyes during the opening credits for the first two episodes. Some sources use the credits from later in the season which show her in her new form. It wasn’t that way on first broadcast, and not all sources do it now, but the risk is there.
It’s the DVD that messed things up, by copy/pasting the same opening credits on every episode.
The original broadcasts were never spoilery, and the HBO Max release corrected that by placing Delenn’s pre-Chrysalis appearance in the opening credits for the first couple of episodes (it also corrected to account for later mid-season promotions from both Ivanova and Warren Keffer).
JMS said in his online commentary that he decided to spread out the aftermath over the first 5 episodes of season 2, since there was no way to cram it all into just one episode. Though Deep Space Nine did similar things twice — the first-season finale had a 3-part sequel at the start of season 2, and the season 5 cliffhanger led into a 6-part arc at the start of season 6.
JMS also addressed why Santiago and Clark traveled together:
Oddly enough, the news channel voice over says the VP was sworn in on Earth Force Two.
Of couse, at that point, it would make sense, since Clark begged off of EF1 for “having the flu”. Of course, since EF1 is no more, EF2 would BECOME Ef1, but…
Don’t confuse us with facts! (grin)
In real life, Air Force One is the call sign of any USAF aircraft carrying the president, and Air Force Two is the call sign of any USAF aircraft carrying the vice president. The call signs go with the officials, not the vehicles. So assuming Earthforce does things the same way, then whatever spacecraft Clark boarded to return to Earth would have been Earthforce Two until the moment he took the oath of office, at which point it would have presumably been redesignated Earthforce One.
I’m no expert on presidential security, but I think JMS was wrong to say that Air Force One travels alone (even nominally). It’s always accompanied by several cargo planes that bring, among other things, the armored presidential limousine, a.k.a. The Beast, its decoys, other vehicles and entourage, plus fighter escorts when traveling overseas.
Plenty of governments do things differently to the US government, so there is no particular reason to expect the EA government to do things the same way. We may reasonably expect that EF1 would be carrying the President, and that is all we need to understand the episode.
During Petrov’s death scene, one of the people there looks to be the Abbai ambassador from The War Prayer and Deathwalker. Her actress doesn’t appear to be listed, though.
Anyone recall what the deal with Zoog is? Perhaps it’s akin to how Hestia got displaced by Dionysus.
That lurker portrayed by Gianin Loffler who tips off Garibaldi about Devereaux probably won’t be showing up again.
A couple of riffable moments:
[As delenn places triforce holder]
Don’t sneeze. dooooon’t sneeze.
“You have forgotten something.”
Dear Gawd, I didn’t close the fridge all the way!
JMS explained Zoog: “Ah, yes…that one wasn’t an emperor, that was Zoog, which was really just a household god, primarily associated with one noble family, that somewhat imposed Zoog where possible, forced the religious establishment to recognize the temple they’d built to Zoog…it was strictly an act of vanity on their part, to create a god, and elevate a household god, which never really carries much weight, to something greater, adding to the general pantheon.”
I don’t think you are supposed to care about Santiago as a person. I think the intent was very much to keep the Earth politics in the background. You know there are there, and there’re some hints of what’s going on, but you mostly ignore them, and then, oops, fascists are taking over.
Santiago was a MacGuffin. What matters to the audience is that the characters care about him. When the crew and the ISN reporter reacted to his assassination, I was reminded of the famous footage of Walter Cronkite reporting on JFK’s death. Even Ivanova was shaken, which helps convey the impact.
It does, particularly since Ivanova made the statement, during the elections, that she wasn’t going to vote for Santiago. IIRC, she said he looked too shifty.
JFK’s assassination was a major flashpoint in American society because JFK was a charismatic and beloved president. B5 didn’t do the work to make Santiago the equivalent of JFK, and matching footage doesn’t cut it.
Also, the more I think about it, the more I hate likening Clark to LBJ. Calling an equivalence between the guy who signed the Civil Right Act and the guy who will usher the Earth Alliance into fascism is just yucky.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
More of a Spiro Agnew then? (Or, if we want to equate ‘President Duce’ with a VP who actually got to sit the Big Chair – and quite probably slander a Tennessee man in the process – more of an Andrew Johnson than an LBJ).
Are the stakes low in TNG’s Best of Both Worlds, when the Borg are going straight to Earth, because the show hasn’t actually been set on Earth, so why do we care? Just because some of the main characters are from there?
I mean, I understand the criticism somewhat, but only somewhat. I don’t see how a single scene with Santiago visiting the station changes the equation. “I missed that episode, so I don’t care about the Earth President being assassinated?”
I agree that comparing Clark to LBJ is a massive disservice to LBJ, who made a ton of mistakes, but also did a ton of good and who did NOT assassinate his predecessor to gain power.
I pretty much agree, but the irony is just too great to ignore. Whether JMS pulled that off later on is up for debate.
Except in Macbird. (For the record, the playwright of that piece didn’t really believe that LBJ had a hand in Kennedy’s death. It’s just that the plot wouldn’t work otherwise.)
I’m just saying that they didn’t have to show Santiago himself to make us care; they just had to show that the established characters cared about him, so that we’d empathize with their sense of loss. Granted, though, the show didn’t do enough to establish that.
And I suspect likening Clark to LBJ was deliberate misdirection, because we weren’t supposed to realize yet that Clark was the bad guy.
…except, by this episode, we’ve seen enough of JMS’ misdierctions and teasers to feel that *something ain’t right here!”
We absolutely were supposed to see Clark as a bad guy. He left EF1 with the flu right before it went boom (an obvious red flag), and his speech had several elements that were similar to Nightwatch’s propaganda, with all the focus on home stuff.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
At the time, I couldn’t say for sure that Clark was necessarily the bad apple. Sure, a vice-president having a convenient flu sounds suspicious, but I hadn’t pegged him as a suspect yet. It’s when we get to
At this stage, I think we could say that we were given clues that raised suspicions about Clark, but it was still ambiguous.
…which I think also fails in light of our modern cynicism. Or maybe not. I didn’t watch the show until the 2000s, but to me Clark’s complicity was blazingly obvious. Did anyone who watched in ’94 not think Clark was behind it?
I was watching then (and reading the SFRT threads on GEnie as well) and I think everyone there was like, oh, Clark’s our bad guy as soon as it aired. It was meant to be obvious.
Hmm, I don’t remember whether I suspected Clark, or whether my father (who was a bigger B5 fan than I was) did. My kneejerk response would’ve been “No, I didn’t suspect him,” but I can’t recall for sure.
“(How a transmission of the ship blowing up is possible when all communications were jammed is left as an exercise for the viewer.)”
They explicitly said that only government and military channels were jammed. Sinclair was telling his people to try to get the message through on civilian channels or notify ISN in hopes that they could broadcast a warning.
This is a noteworthy episode, but it has a problem that was all too common with TV shows around this era, when you had mostly episodic shows with a degree of continuity, and when season-finale cliffhangers had caught on thanks to Dallas and Star Trek: TNG. Namely, a lot of shows that had multiple plot and character arcs developing over time felt the need to bring all of them to a crisis point at the same time in the season finale, which felt very awkward and artificial. The degree of coincidence is made even worse here by having everything come to a head on New Year’s Day in Earth’s Gregorian calendar (though Trek did the same thing, sort of, by always having the cliffhangers fall at the end of a stardate “year”).
The first issue of DC’s B5 comic book series, which was written by JMS, takes place between this episode and the next, while issues 2-4, plotted by JMS, take place between the second and third episodes of season 2. The first two 4-part stories within the comic are considered canonical, and IIRC, the events of issue 1 are alluded to in To Dream in the City of Sorrows.
“They explicitly said that only government and military channels were jammed. ”
If I had been running the Presidents security detail, that would have made me more suspicious than any desperate radioed warning ever could…
They explicitly said that only government and military channels were jammed. Sinclair was telling his people to try to get the message through on civilian channels or notify ISN in hopes that they could broadcast a warning.
Right that.
It’s obvious here and on Facebook that more people were affected by Santiago’s death than I was. I guess I’m just a cynic…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
You’re a New York City man, that may be taken as written.
But definitely not alone! I remember on first watch recognising it was significant (I’d started watching again with Babylon Squared) but had no real connection to the event for the same reasons. Was Santiago a good president? A weak president? A jolly president? We never knew.
And was he elected earlier, or RE-elected? I don’t remember. I just remember that Ivanova thought him shifty.
Santiago won re-election to his second term in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” It’s unclear whether Clark was his VP in his first term.
A fandom wiki tells me he was reelected after running against Marie Crane, who Ivanova supported, due to the whole chin theory.
Should the shock of seeing the president assassinated be proportional to whether we like the president as an individual? An attack on the office is an attack on the system, on the principle of the peaceful transition of power. The personality or policies of an individual president should be irrelevant. If you don’t like a president, you vote them out. An assassination should be equally shocking whether the president was beloved, hated, or nondescript.
I think on a moral level, no, and if I lived in that world I daresay I’d have feelings. But on an individual level watching an entertainment, some of that is going to be based on whether we have an attachment. If a character hasn’t been fleshed out, the mechanics of the story are a bit more obvious so we (or at least krad and I) don’t. Plus I’m from the UK and from a poor background, so my relationship to politicians has always been more cynical!
As I said before, though, it’s the MacGuffin principle: the key to making the audience care about something is to make it important to the characters the audience cares about. If the B5 crew is devastated by the assassination, then we care that they care, because we care about their feelings (in theory, anyway).
By analogy, in “A Voice in the Wilderness,” we didn’t know Garibaldi’s ex-girlfriend Lise any more than we knew President Santiago, but if the story made us care about Garibaldi still carrying a torch for Lise, then that’s all we needed.
I was going to say that I wondered if it made a difference whether you were old enough to have experienced a presidential assassination firsthand, but then I remembered that there’s never been one in the US in my lifetime, since the last one was Kennedy (though I was around for the near-miss with Reagan). I guess the Kennedy assassination resonated so much in American culture for decades thereafter that I still felt the impact. And this episode was definitely trying to evoke those feelings.
Santiago was literally a position title. He’s there to be killed and had no personality whatsoever, no emotional ties. We’re only meant to “care” in that we know that his VP was willing to assassinate him, and that means someone very bad is now in power.
Yes, that’s my position. The plot mechanics are very mechanical in this, so as a viewer I can only go, okay this is to push the plot on.
Yes. But you’re our cynic, and we love your reviews even if we don’t always love you. <3
I’m stunned she didn’t say, “Really? Me? Don’t you have any, y’know, friends?
Catherine not having friends has already been established, it’s part of why she decided she wanted to give her and Sinclair another try. And for all his own issues since the Battle of the Line, he did make a home on B5, at least as of then. So the idea that she would sort of be “marrying in” to the B5 family, and was therefore asking Ivanova to be maid of honor, isn’t as bonkers as it seems.
The problem watching it is that the episode desperately wants us to be affected by the assassination of President Santiago, and—for me, at least—it utterly fails to do so.
I have to wonder whether watching with jaded 2020s eyes hurts the ability to affect. The degree to which Babylon 5 was a show in and of, and about, the Nineties can’t be overstated; it was smack between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the
Forever WarWar on Terror. I think there is a degree to which “the leader of the Human race has just been killed and we know it was a conspiracy from within” hits differently before 9/11 and all it spawned (including 20+ years of “Bush did 9/11”).Yeah, Sakai tells Ivanova that the reason she’s asking her is because she doesn’t really know anybody else on the station. Whether that bodes well for a future married life based there… turns out not to matter.
No, because I had the same problem 30 years ago. I was completely unmoved by the death of Santiago because he wasn’t anyone of importance to me.
Mind you, the destruction of Quadrant 37 did affect me, but mainly because I could see the impact it had on G’Kar and Mollari. Not that I knew or cared about anyone there, but Mollari and G’Kar were significantly more interesting characters than any of the humans at this point, which may also have had something to do with it. I think Straczynski was counting on how it affected the humans, but alas, the humans are the least interesting regulars on B5…………………….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think I find the Shadow attacks against the Narn so moving and tragic because they’re flat-out massacres each and every time. There’s no doubt as to the outcome, and the one time I believe the Narn manage to significantly damage a Shadow vessel it still makes no difference. I don’t care how thuggish the Narn may have been to that point; they didn’t deserve that. It would definitely lessen the impact for me if it was in any way a fair fight.
I think there’s something to the difference between “the death of Santiago” and “the assassination of the leader of the Human government.”
Good point. The importance of the presidency is meant to reside with the office itself, not with any one individual who holds it — which is exactly the principle that fascists like Clark and you-know-who seek to destroy by seizing personal power. The act of using violence to remove one president or install another is in itself a profoundly disturbing thing, or should be, regardless of what you feel about the individuals involved.
Maybe that’s why Santiago was such a cipher — because we were supposed to care about the attack on the office and on the system, not on the man.
I wasn’t invested enough in the fictional Earth Alliance to care about the office. Nor was I invested enough in the human characters, who were almost entirely wooden ciphers or tiresome cliches (or both) at this point, to feel their pain, as it were.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ivanova might have been upset by the assassination, but she wasn’t impressed by the future President or his running mate during the election.
“Santiago has no chin, and his vice president has several. This, to me, is not a good combination.”
As I’ve been saying, whether one personally approves of a president should have precisely zero relevance to how one feels about the assassination of a president. They’re two completely different conversations, or certainly should be.
Hmm, I guess I can’t disagree. I always felt the “human” cast members were blander than the “alien” ones, at least until Boxleitner came aboard.
Speaking of which, I was struck by how bad Richard Biggs was here, with the throwaway, cavalier, uncaring way that Franklin announces to Garibaldi that his informant died on the table. Good grief, even Frank Burns could muster more of a show of sympathy about losing a patient.
That jumped out at me on this watch as well. It seemed odd and out of character.
Out of character on paper, maybe, but consistent with Biggs’s generally mediocre acting in the first half of the season (this was shot about midway through). A lot of the time, it seemed he wasn’t taking the part seriously and just phoned it in. Although it was never quite this bad before.
In production order, yes, which probably explains it. In broadcast order, this comes after a better performance in The Quality of Mercy. I watched them back-to-back on this re-watch and the difference stood out.
The entire “Nibbled to Death by Cats” bit’s still one of my all-time favorite Londo moments.
To this day, if I get exasperated, I sometimes break out the preceding line “I think I will stick my head in the station’s fusion reactor. It would be quicker. And I suspect, after a while I might even come to enjoy it!
Those who have never seen B5, of course, have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, LOL.
Do you do the accent?
Oh, and one more thing:
Also I ask again: how could they see the ship exploding if all transmissions in the area were jammed?
If all of B5’s transmissions were being jammed, that would be at B5’s end; given B5 security was infiltrated, a blackout of outgoing comms from B5 at that moment makes sense. That wouldn’t stop them from seeing the transmissions from ISN.
And then, jamming the Gold Channels at Earth Force One‘s end would be cutting the direct and secure emergency line. ISN could still transmit, but that doesn’t mean there would be a good line for a military commander to communicate something like that to the president.
Basically, I think there’s a bit of overloaded wording on words like “jam,” “transmission,” and the like.
I agree and disagree. You are right, the changes to B5 itself are not that big, What has changed is the political landscape on earth, something that will BECOME important. As for why Sinclair says everything has changed, I’ll hand wave that there hasn’t been an assassination of a major political figure in quite a while, possibly since the war with the Minbari. Even if Santiago isn’t JFK in charisma, the death of a President does shake up a country/planet. Plus, Sinclair is military, the top of the chain of command has just changed, so from his POV everything has, in fact, changed or at least has the potential to change.
No matter how many times I re-watch B5, it still reserves some surprising insights, and in this case it happened with the meeting between Londo and Morden: as Londo reaches the garden where the meeting takes place, we see that it’s shaped as something of a maze, and it dawned on me that this might be a visual representation of what the future holds in store for Londo, enmeshed and trapped into something he’s ultimately unable to control, stepping onto a path where he can’t see a clear way out of….
Incidentally, why was jamming equipment meant to be used at Io being shipped through Babylon 5 anyway? And if the equipment was already in place at Io and being used, why were there duplicates of that equipment in B5’s cargo bay, and why were they already conveniently preset so that Garibaldi could read the location and target info from them? It falls apart when you think about it.
It’s mentioned in dialogue that a crate was left behind by accident, but that’s another contrivance and there’s no reason to have the equipment already set to the right frequency– for that matter they may have wanted to obfuscate the interface so it’s not obvious at a glance what it’s REALLY doing.
But now that I type this out, I’m thinking there’s no real reason for them to need jamming equipment in the first place? Seemingly, it’s only role is to prevent the station from warning EF1 of the plot, but obviously they didn’t know in advance B5 would learn of the plot and try to do so in the first place. Jamming the signals just makes it more suspicious, they should have planted the bomb and left the channels clear. Seems like this subplot exists solely to justify Garabaldi’s existence.
Okay, a crate was left behind, but why were they shipping it through B5 in the first place? If the plot originated with Clark and others in the government, couldn’t the whole thing have been carried out within the bounds of the Sol System, without needing to involve shipments from parsecs away? And out of all the various Earth stations and outposts in the galaxy, why did it just happen to be Babylon 5 that had the accident?
As for why the jamming was needed, the reporter said they picked up an emergency signal a few moments before the explosion happened, suggesting that the people on the ship had some advance warning of whatever caused the destruction. She also said the president was 10 minutes late to start his speech, implying that something went down on EF1 more than 10 minutes before it blew up. Maybe the conspirators had to take control of the ship and rig it to explode, or something, and they had to keep a signal from getting out before then. But that would mean they were suicide bombers, so I don’t know.
The shipping through Babylon 5 thing troubles me less– the whole point is that they’re centrally located. Maybe whoever makes the best jamming devices is based in an alien world or even somewhere else in Earth Alliance. Or maybe the conspirators figure that aliens are less likely to connect the dots on what the equipment is for or have any loyalty to Santiago. IIRC, the rifle that killed JFK was made in Italy, but Italy had nothing to do with it; they simply happened to manufacture an excellent rifle.
And I gotta say, that recounting of events sorta justifies the jammers (assuming we have suicide bombers that took over the ship, but not quickly enough to prevent a transmission, or something) but makes the Senator’s skepticism that this was an assassination seem even more dense. So there’s an emergency transmission, a delay to scheduled events, signals were jammed, and the ship blew to some previously unknown defect? That sure is a kooky series of coincidences. It happens so fast that on a first viewing I didn’t notice any of this stuff, but I don’t think JMS had a coherent notion of exactly how the assassination plot went down, leading to a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really add up in retrospect.
I assumed the senator was in on the conspiracy.
Yeah, quite possibly. Sorry, my edit window slipped away, but upon further examination the jammers still don’t make sense. They’re explicitly tuned to jam only the EF1 frequency, which is how Garabaldi determines that the target is the President. So, sure, EF1 normally transmits on whatever frequency presumably to avoid other traffic and the like. If they discover their signal is jammed, they can always switch frequencies– just like Bab5 does to try to raise ISN. So the suicide bombers could somehow prevent them from transmitting on every frequency except the default one, that one they needed to jam. Not to flog a dead Zarg, but really leaning towards the idea that there’s not a coherent answer to uncover.
They’re explicitly tuned to jam only the EF1 frequency, which is how Garabaldi determines that the target is the President.
Not true. They were set to block the Gold Channel, not specifically EF1.
Per Garabaldi they’re set to jam, “1-0-1-0-1-0-5. That’s the gold channel frequencv for Earthforce One”
I never get over the fact that this was filmed in the middle of the season. It’s a credit to the cast and director Janet Greek that it never feels like such. It feels final. Sinclair’s depressed “Nothing is the same anymore” line sums up exactly how I felt when I first watched this way back then – and could never imagine this was the last we’d see of Sinclair as the protagonist of B5. At that point, you didn’t have a lot of shows that would portray such a radical change in the status quo with little to no warning.
While I agree Santiago’s death is the least visually and dramatically effective of the events here, I’d argue it more or less does fair in placing the Earthforce characters on shaky ground and emotionally distraught. You feel like you’ve been thrown in the middle of a terrorist attack of sorts, to use some sort of analogy. And in terms of coping with being subject to a changing political system, I’d say it does the job a lot better than what X-Files did at that point with the trust no one shenanigans.
But everything else hits hard, Garibaldi’s fate especially. When I first watched this, and he slipped into a coma, I was positive he was a goner. The one character who deserved to climb out of the pitfalls of his life, and the one character who happened to have firsthand account that something dreadful as unfolding behind the scenes. A much more personal and affecting casualty than Santiago (also worth noting, I first watched this before “Quality of Mercy”, so I didn’t even consider the alien healing device). And it may be cliché, but I tense up every time I see the scene as he stumbles wounded trying to get help in the middle of new year’s eve! It’s a reminder that bad things happen even during worldwide celebrations where everyone is supposed to be happy and cheering.
What makes the Londo/G’Kar/Morden side of the story so effective is that Londo is still wracked with surprise, shock, and especially guilt after the Shadows raze Quadrant 37 to dust. Even after doing the deal with the devil, he retains moments of clarity and empathy that make Londo such a complicated character. A side of him that’s reinforced as he keeps an eye over Garibaldi. And the way Morden just casually quotes numbers of dead Narns just chills me every time (just like the primal screaming of the Shadow ships as they raze the base – I adore that sound effect, and it fits with Franke’s music like nothing else).
And if there is one thing B5 always excelled at was those final moments in every season. Lennier’s tearful expression as he keeps vigil for Delenn is one of the most heartbreaking moments in the show’s run. Silent moments beautifully carried by Franke’s score. Moments that sum up the themes of the season and that really deliver the emotional beats. A brilliant way to end a season, and one that JMS will find new ways to achieve in subsequent ones. Also to borrow a bit more from Tolkien, to me these finales always felt like reading “The Scouring of the Shire”. You can’t go back home and find it looking the same way you once knew. That’s what episodes like “Chrysalis”, “Fall of Night”, “Z’ha’dum” and especially the series finale, “Sleeping in Light”, feel like.
“At that point, you didn’t have a lot of shows that would portray such a radical change in the status quo with little to no warning.”
Mmm, you did, but usually in response to cast departures and the like, e.g. when M*A*S*H wrote out McLean Stevenson in an episode that was as shocking and game-changing to 1970s audiences as this was to 1990s audiences. Sometimes a show was retooled massively to try to latch onto a trend, as when the ’60s detective drama Burke’s Law was retooled into Amos Burke, Secret Agent to capitalize on the spy craze. Or sometimes it would be done in an effort to salvage a show struggling in the ratings, like when Sherwood Schwartz retooled his astronauts-in-caveman-times sitcom It’s About Time by inverting the premise and bringing the cast forward to the present for the final 12 episodes.
What was unusual about B5 is that such major changes to the premise were built into it from the start and done for narrative reasons, rather than merely being responses to external factors. Although B5 did have to make story changes for more conventional reasons too, like the really big cast change coming up next week.
It’s exactly because of the narrative reasons that it felt novel at the time. Especially as we dive deeper into season 2.
Parts of this finale are really effective, namely the parts with Mollari and G’kar (I’d throw in Delenn’s story if there were anything to it other than vague hints, but Furlan at least does her best to make them sound portentous). Mollari still comes off like a bit of an idiot in his dealings with Morden, but at least this time he seems to realize he’s doing something stupid, even if he doesn’t realize just how stupid until the death toll comes in. Meanwhile, G’kar (mostly) gets to be a serious character for what feels like only the second time this season. I look forward to watching how these characters develop going forward. But nothing else landed for me, and I can’t make up my mind as to whether it’s the fault of all the actors not named Jurasik, Katsulas, Furlan, or Christian, or if it’s the fault of the dialogue they’re being given to perform. It’s probably a bit of both.
Mollari is lamenting his life, but then he’s contacted by Morden, who wants to meet.
… in the public park. This is another occasion where characters meet in public when they absolutely shouldn’t. At one point, Morden even shushes the conversation because somebody else comes close and he doesn’t want to be overheard discussing what they’re up to. Londo has quarters, tell Vir to get lost and just meet there. It feels like JMS was thinking of similar scenes from espionage and similar stories where these public meets make more sense, for want of a better place to go. In this context, it’s way less risky for Morden to simply call on Londo. Nobody’s going to notice a nondescript civilian doing so; we saw somebody do the same in “Grail” and “Believers.” In the unlikely event anybody asks, just say he’s another person who wanted a favor from the Centauri Republic and Londo said no.
Morden generally travels with several of his “associates” in attendance. It would be harder for them to remain unobserved in a closed room, especially since Londo likes to pace while talking.
Thinking about Americas Moscow embassy, I can see why Morden might think that an Ambassadors residence built by the Earth Alliance might not be the best place to discuss something you wanted to keep secret from people in the Earth Alliance.
Some walls are more likely than others to be listening to you.
I think JMS wanted the symbolism of Londo meeting Morden in a hedge maze, where the path ahead is obscure and there are many false turns and traps. It’s also just more visually interesting to get the ambassadors out of their quarters from time to time.
That may be what was going through his head and as we’ll see a lot of the more momentous scenes occur in public or semi-public. It creates pretty shots, but IMO it can break immersion because the characters just shouldn’t be doing this. It creates the irony that the conversations have trivial conversations in secure areas and momentous, secretive conversations in public. I’m not worried about intentional surveillance so much as just being accidently overheard by somebody– a gossip or journalist could be on the other side of the hedge just out for a stroll, after all.
Also, every embassy and embassy residence is going to be under surveillance of some sort. Especially those for the major powers. B5 probably doesn’t have the personnel to follow every ambassador around, and I don’t think the sort of panopticon that we are approaching today (with cameras everywhere and “ai” getting good enough to track people in real time) was really thought of 25 years ago.
I’d be more worried about them being accidentally overheard than actively surveilled by having these highly confidential conversations in a public park. B5 never really gets into this, but presumably Londo and the rest routinely countersweep their own sensitive areas for bugs. From a balance of harms perspective, in Londo’s shoes I absolutely would take the meeting in my quarters rather than risk being overheard in public. But as CLB says, the way they actually did it is more visually interesting.
A Bernal sphere like B5’s interior already is a potential panopticon, since the central axis looks straight down on every “outdoor” part of it. That would’ve been easily understood even then just by looking at the shape of the place. But presumably Earth Alliance law protects the right to privacy, or the governments demanded the right to private conversations as part of the agreement to operate the station. So it would be technically possible to surveil everyone in the central sphere, but they choose not to.
ONe thing i enjoyed about this episode is the character Jack. He’s not just some no face security guard we have never seen before, he had been in previous episodes, and more importantly, those episodes were ones that involved the earthforce conspiracy stuff. So his betrayal was well planned by the showrunners, though if this betrayal was originally was supposed to be for Takahashi, we don’t really know.
Yes, JMS said he intended Takashima (not Takahashi) to be the culprit:
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/022.html
“Originally, it was Laurel Takashima who would have betrayed those around her, as this character did. When Laurel was transferred, I had a choice: keep that arc for her replacement (Ivanova), or give this part of it to someone else. Now, knowing how the folks here on the nets and elsewhere think, and knowing that they knew about the Laurel- possible-traitor thread, I figured that everyone would assume that Ivanova would get that part. (And, sure enough, a lot of people did.) This became a wonderfully convenient blind behind which to build the *real* plant.
And thus far, *nobody’s* seen it coming. He was right there in clear view, we used him many times (also in “By Any Means Necessary,” for instance), and nobody ever paid him the slightest attention.
It is, in a way, the classic magician’s trick of misdirection: you try to get everyone to look at your hand so they won’t look at the huge elephant being wheeled up onto the stage in plain sight.”
I remember him in Mind War and And the Sky Full of Stars, but not By Any Means Necessary. Where was he in that one?
Is he in the melee with the Guild? I don’t remember either.
I don’t know if anyone here reads newspaper comics anymore, but the guy who does Candorville is apparently doing a B5 Rewatch too.
https://comicskingdom.com/candorville/2024-09-11
(I’d link directly to his site, but it’s down….)
A point of interest I don’t think anyone has brought up yet. Giuseppe Garibaldi at one point in his career led an organization known as the Redshirts. Meanwhile, Michael Garibaldi leads an organization of Redshirts. Is there anything indicating that this was deliberate on the part of JMS?
Another note. IIRC Clark’s excuse for leaving Earthforce 1 was having a generic viral infection rather than the flu specifically.
As a final thought, I wonder if Londo used the, “An agreement made under duress is no agreement at all,” line when he sent in the request for his divorces.
That’s a huge reach. Honestly, I don’t think the “redshirts” meme for Star Trek security guards was anywhere near as pervasive in the 1990s as it’s become in the Twitter era. I don’t recall hearing the term used that much back then. It’s always been silly anyway, since TOS used red for engineering and services as well as security. (Heck, even the two historians we saw in TOS/TAS, McGivers in “Space Seed” and Erickson in “Yesteryear,” were in red even though science blue would’ve made more sense.) Plus, of course, the TNG-era shows inverted the uses of red and gold, so at the time B5 was on the air, a Starfleet “redshirt” would have been in command or operations.
Google Ngram search shows that the lower-case term “redshirt” was used about 4 times more frequently in the mid-’90s as it was used in the late ’60s, but then underwent a sharp rise starting around 2000, unsurprisingly peaking after John Scalzi’s novel Redshirts came out in 2012.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=redshirt&year_start=1966&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
Of course, there’s no way to be sure how much of that is in reference to the Trek term, since the word has other uses.