“Comes the Inquisitor”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 2, Episode 21
Production episode 221
Original air date: October 25, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… G’Kar is preaching to a mostly disinterested crowd in the Zocalo about the dangers of Centauri aggression, insisting that they will not stop their new expansion at the Narn homeworld. He is interrupted by a fellow Narn who says that there is an important matter to discuss with his fellow Narns on the station.
Kosh informs Delenn that he has summoned an inquisitor to question her, to determine whether or not she is acting for the right reasons. He also warns her that this will not be a shiny happy interrogation…
Delenn and Lennier explain to Sheridan what’s happening: The Vorlons believe that people who lead for the wrong reasons corrupt their purpose and lead to disaster. The inquisitor’s job is to make sure that Delenn is leading the Rangers for the reasons she’s supposed to be. The very dangerous nature of the interrogation concerns Sheridan greatly, but Delenn insists.
G’Kar meets with an arms dealer named Chase, wishing to purchase arms for the Narn rsesistance. G’Kar apparently sold weapons to him during Earth’s past wars, and he’s cranky about the fact that Chase is selling the same weapons back to him at a higher price. They haggle, which brings the price down a bit, but the weapons are still prohibitively expensive. Nonetheless, G’Kar agrees, making sure to threaten Chase on his way out the door not to double-cross the Narn.
A Vorlon ship arrives, surprising Ivanova and Corwin, since Kosh is still on the station, and he’s the only Vorlon who’s ever shown up to dock at the station. The ship contains a human—specifically a British gentleman in nineteenth-century clothing, complete with spiffy walking stick.
Sheridan introduces himself and questions the man, whose name is Sebastian. He was taken by the Vorlons from nineteenth-century London (Sebastian even gives his street address), and has been brought out of stasis in order to perform this inquisition, which he has done from time to time for the Vorlons.
Garibaldi confronts G’Kar about his meeting with Chase. G’Kar doesn’t bother prevaricating, wanting Garibaldi to cut to the chase. Garibaldi sympathizes with G’Kar’s cause, but he also makes it clear that there absolutely will not be any arms dealing on B5. The security chief then gives G’Kar a contact on another world who can facilitate the transfer of weapons; it’s someone who owes Garibaldi a favor. When G’Kar asks why, Garibaldi said it was because G’Kar was honest with him.
Sebastian starts questioning Delenn in Grey 19, which is sealed off from the rest of the station. Delenn is forced to wear a pair of manacles. They are not locked, and she can remove them any time, but if she removes them, she will have failed the test. Sebastian starts to question her, including asking who she is, but he doesn’t like any of her answers (which include “Delenn,” “the Minbari Ambassador to Babylon 5,” “a member of the religious caste,” and other obvious answers that Sebastian doesn’t think are adequate). He periodically uses his walking stick to send an electric charge through the manacles. He accuses her of arrogance, of assuming that she has a higher purpose, that the universe put her in place to do great things. Delenn does, at one point, admit to the possibility of being wrong, which impresses Sebastian enough to get him to stop questioning/torturing her for ten minutes.
Vir puts off the latest in a series of Centauri who desperately want an audience with Mollari, only to find himself sharing a transport tube with G’Kar. A very awkward conversation ensues as Vir tries to sympathize and empathize and apologize, and G’Kar is understandably completely uninterested in such from Vir.
Sebastian accuses Delenn of ego, of thinking she is more than she truly is. Delenn responds with accusations of her own, believing Sebastian to be what he claims Delenn is, which is why he’s been reduced to torturing others. This just leads to Sebastian turning the manacles on again.
There is a meeting of the Narn resistance, wherein G’Kar gives them the bad news about the high price of weapons. One Narn questions his leadership. They have heard nothing from the homeworld, and many have families there, and they’re concerned as to whether or not G’Kar would be even able to deliver the weapons to a homeworld on lockdown.
G’Kar promises to get the Narn who questions him a message from his family within a day. If he can’t, he’ll step aside. He then goes to Sheridan to take him up on his offer of assistance. After G’Kar leaves, Sheridan asks Garibaldi if this might be a job for the Rangers. Garibaldi isn’t sure they’re ready for field work in a war zone yet, but Sheridan thinks they have to start somewhere, and this is as good a way as any.
Lennier comes by Grey 19 to check on Delenn, and finds her barely conscious on the deck. Sebastian is taking a break. Delenn urges Lennier to go before Sebastian returns. She also laments her inability to answer Sebastian’s questions to the inquisitor’s satisfaction. Lennier leaves, but goes straight to Sheridan, saying that Delenn’s life is in danger.
Sheridan immediately charges in to save the day. However, Sebastian subdues him with surprising ease for a nineteenth-century dandy, and Sheridan winds up shackled to the wall for his trouble. Sebastian starts questioning and torturing Sheridan, until Delenn screams at him to stop. The test is for her, not him. Sebastian asks if she’ll give her life for his, even if it means dying alone, unmourned and unnoticed in a dark room. She says that if she falls, someone else will take up the cause. Her cause is life itself, and she will fight for it no matter what.
Suddenly, Sheridan is unbound and Delenn’s manacles come off. They’ve both passed. The test was truly for them both, to see if they were willing to die in obscurity to save another.
G’Kar shows a message from the Narn’s wife and children. It’s as happy and optimistic as is possible for someone living under a violent military occupation. The Narn is grateful, and G’Kar’s place as leader of the Narn resistance is now quite secure.
In CnC, Ivanova informs Sheridan that the Vorlon ship is ready to depart. Sheridan asks her to look up information on an address in London from the nineteenth century. What they find is someone with the name of Sebastian, who disappeared without a trace on the 11th of November 1888. Sheridan then intercepts Sebastian before he can disembark, saying that a rather gruesome set of murders in London stopped just before Sebastian disappeared. Sebastian sadly explains that he was taken by the Vorlons, who showed him that what he believed to be a holy cause was anything but. He wishes Sheridan luck, and hopes that his cause will lead him to be remembered as a hero, not simply as “Jack.”
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan is less than happy about Delenn agreeing to be questioned by Sebastian, and immediately runs in to save her once Lennier tells him her life is in danger.
Ivanova is God. When asked for information about an address on nineteenth-century Earth, Ivanova informs Sheridan that it would take a while to find, meaning that search engines have somehow gotten less efficient over the next couple of centuries.
This is one of the many hilarious and endemic failures of imagination of many science fictional works, so I hesitate to ding this episode for it any more than any other, but there was a tendency to assume that a computer search would take as long as a search through a series of file cabinets would, because that was the more common point of reference. The truth is, Ivanova should have been able to call up the info Sheridan needed in half a second.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi does his job of keeping the station safe, by not having arms deals go on anywhere near B5, and also does the right thing by facilitating G’Kar’s ability to obtain those weapons by giving him an off-station transfer point.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. At no point in Delenn’s questioning does she engage in the simple tactic of saying she doesn’t have an ego, even though she’s accused of it repeatedly.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Vir tries very hard, while trapped with him in a transport tube, to apologize to G’Kar in a manner that won’t seem ridiculous. He fails, as G’Kar’s response is to cut his hand and cry out, “Dead!” every time a drop of blood escapes his veins.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar shows his cleverness, resourcefulness, gratitude, and ruthlessness in this episode in his dealings with his fellow Narn, with Vir, with Sheridan, with Garibaldi, and with Chase.
We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers are able to get a message from Narn to B5, which can’t have been easy. It appears to be their first major field mission, from the way Sheridan and Garibaldi discuss it, though we will learn of other missions in dialogue and in tie-in fiction.
The Shadowy Vorlons. The Vorlons apparently kidnapped a serial killer in 1888 and turned him into a torturer. Okay, then.
Looking ahead. Vir’s sympathy for the Narn victims will eventually express itself in a manner more practical than his failed attempt at an apology.
Welcome aboard. Wayne Alexander makes the first of many appearances in the franchise as Sebastian, and the only one of those roles where his face isn’t obscured by tons of alien makeup. He’ll go on to have the recurring role of Lorien, starting in “The Hour of the Wolf,” and will also appear in various episodes of both B5 and two of its spinoff movies as Narn, Drakh, Drazi, and an unidentified alien.
We’ve got recurring regulars Ardwight Chamberlain as the voice of Kosh (back from “Divided Loyalties,” next in “Matters of Honor”) and Joshua Cox as Corwin (back from “The Long, Twilight Struggle,” next in “The Fall of Night”).
Jack Kehler is suitably skeevy as Chase, and various Narn are played by three of the regular background “alien” actors Diane Adair, Kim Strauss, and Mark Hendrickson.
Trivial matters. This episode postulates that Sebastian is the serial killer nicknamed “Jack the Ripper,” who committed the never-solved murders of several prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888. The last of the five “Ripper” murders occurred on the 9th of November of that year (the victim was Mary Jane Kelly), and Sebastian was kidnapped by the Vorlons on the 11th of November, thus explaining why the killer was never found and also why he stopped.
Sheridan’s dialogue in the episode as originally aired refers to the murders as happening on the West End, which is a self-admitted screwup on the part of scripter J. Michael Straczynski. It was dubbed to “East End” in all subsequent airings, and also on home video and streaming versions, though, amusingly, the captions still say “West End.”
The never-published twelfth issue of DC’s Babylon 5 comic book by Tim DeHaas and John Ridgway would have established that the Ranger who got the message from the Narn homeworld was Marcus Cole, Jason Carter’s character who will join the cast in season three.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame—for one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know or see.”
—Sebastian, providing the theme of the episode.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Good luck to you in your holy cause, Captain Sheridan.” The G’Kar parts of this episode are fantastic. Andreas Katsulas is never not wonderful, and we see G’Kar in so many modes here: the grateful supplicant, dependent on the help of others for his cause when dealing with Garibaldi (the G’Kar-Garibaldi scene is a particular favorite, as neither character has the time or interest in bullshit) and with Sheridan; the proud spokesperson for his people, both in the Zocalo and with the other Narn; the bitter victim of conquest when speaking to Vir; and even a return to the ruthless bad guy of season one in his dealings with Chase, though he is more subdued (and scary) now than he was then.
As for the Delenn-Sebastian plot, in the moment, it’s compelling viewing. I loves me a good interrogation scene, and having two actors of the calibre of Wayne Alexander and Mira Furlan going at it is definitely worth watching.
But watching it this time in particular, I found myself turned off by it because I was paying more attention to the words than the performances. It didn’t feel to me like Delenn was in any way refuting Sebastian’s accusations. And also, if Sebastian wants a straight answer, the best way to not get it is to torture your victim.
On top of that, Sebastian doesn’t even use the most obvious bullet in his interrogatory gun, to wit, Delenn’s transformation. Given that she underwent the transformation without reading her fellow Grey Council members on it, it can very easily be viewed as an act of hubris. One can see that as a red flag for the Vorlons—but Sebastian never even mentions it.
Then the ending happens, and it seems that the torture wasn’t a means of gaining information—which it wouldn’t be anyhow—but rather a way to get Sheridan to ride to her rescue so that he can torture both of them and see how they respond.
And then we have the utterly ridiculous notion that Sebastian is really Jack the Ripper, and sigh. I recall my reaction three decades ago being an eye-roll, which matches my response when I rewatched it last week. J. Michael Straczynski has said that it had to be Jack the Ripper because it needed to be a serial killer and the Whitechapel murderer was one who seemed to have a holy cause and whose fate is open-ended, thanks to never having been identified.
My response to that is, well, no, it doesn’t have to be anything. You’re the writer. You’re God. You can do as you please. While I do see some value in having a serial murderer being the inquisitor—especially with the questions it raises as to why the hell the Vorlons think using this jamoke is a good idea—I see a lot more value in having an actual interrogation going on instead of a constant game of torture while asking the same question over and over again. Especially since we never really get an answer from Delenn to that question, as it’s bigfooted in the story by Sheridan’s attempt to play knight in shining armor to rescue the damsel in distress.
Having said all that, the end point for the inquisition is very much a good one: making sure that your leaders are in it for the right reason. As Delenn says, her cause is life, and the important thing is to preserve life, and it doesn’t matter if she dies alone and unnoticed, because the cause is bigger than her.
If nothing else, the episode does introduce us to Alexander, who is absolutely brilliant as Sebastian, magnificently selling the character’s bitter regret about how his life turned out. Luckily, we’ll be seeing more of the actor…
Next week: “The Fall of Night.”
I’m sort of the reverse to Keith on the Delenn plot. I liked it better this time, but maybe that’s because I had very low expectations from not liking it before. The Jack the Ripper thing is still stupid, though, and the flaws are exactly as Keith outlines. You do have to wonder just how the Vorlon operated on Earth in the 19th century.
I’d forgotten the elevator scene, and was thinking that Katsulas had stolen it without saying a word. He barely even moved. Then he turned around and stole it again.
As Sebastian said, the Vorlons have been everywhere for a very long time. Stay tuned for next week…
Next week makes the question of how they operated in the 19th century even bigger. The 9th, sure. They probably used human proxies.
As soon as I saw Sebastian the whole episode, which I haven’t seen in decades, came back. Didn’t much care for the torture scenes, but the acting was excellent. One of the more memorable episodes of the season. It’s not unusual for me to remember bits of the plot from years ago, but in this case I remembered the visuals and scripting as well.
Star Trek also did a Jack the Ripper story, probably using Jack for the same reason. Most of the people watching have heard of him, so it saves on exposition.
Robert Bloch used Jack the Ripper in Star Trek: “Wolf in the Fold” because he had a longstanding interest in Jack the Ripper and had used him in his original fiction before. JMS said in his online comments that he considered multiple historical serial killer before settling on JtR:
“I looked at who this historical figure could be, but no one else fit into the area I wanted. It was a decision born of necessity, not whim. I needed someone far enough removed not to have any current victims’ families still alive; someone known to a worldwide population (anonymous wouldn’t have worked because why would Sheridan have known about him, why should we care, why should it resonate, and we’d spend time explaining what he did that would have meant cutting out other material in the episode); the other serial killers tend to have clear fates, whereas Jack vanished and is thus “available” to us; visually that period makes for a striking contrast to 2259.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/043.html
I couldn’t help but think about the proposed Babylon 5 reboot. Whoever will be cast as Delenn and G’kar will have some mighty big shoes to fill.
Also Londo.
I think the shot of the Vorlon ship exiting the jumpgate might be the shot from The Gathering being reused, seeing as how it’s coming out backwards flip-and-burn style.
Riffable moments
Sebastian: The truth? You’re not ready for the truth.
You can’t handle the truth!
Lennier: This is insane. What does he want?
Hey, never ask that question!
Sheridan: Go to Hell!
Sebastian: This is Hell, Captain, and you are its chief damned soul.
How do like them apples?
Or maybe it’s way ahead of its time because it anticipated the need of the search to wade through centuries worth of AI-generated nonsense!?!?!
Not buying that? Yeah, ok.
I will go with perhaps that information was not in local storage. That’s one of my big peeves. When things like starships have a ridiculous amount of info the plot needs on board.
Why wouldn’t they? Like I said before, a starship or a standalone extrasolar space station would logically need to be as autonomous as possible, in case it were out of swift communication range with Earth. It would need to have a completely self-contained life support system, food production, and power system, able to function for long periods without external contact, so it’s only logical to expect the same self-sufficiency in its information systems.
We already have the technology to store vast amounts of information far more compactly than anyone 30 years ago would’ve expected, and future developments might allow storing it even more compactly:
https://scienceblog.com/storing-the-contents-of-the-new-york-public-library-in-a-teaspoon-of-protein/
So I see no reason why a starship or station wouldn’t have all possible information aboard. It seems like simple common sense to me.
I have this idea that pre-Babylon 5 and pre-Trek that a cyberpunk era died hard…one ALIEN comic used that as an excuse as to why humans were always surprised at seeing Xenomorphs.
From my perspective—internet searches seem harder to me now, as opposed to when DOGPILE was promoted by Kim Kommando.
I work with Amazon Web Services, and in the past have worked with Microsoft’s Azure systems, and both have the concept/option of “offline” or “cold” storage. Which generally means it’s on tape.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of tapes rolling down the highway! Latency, however…
And, yes, people still use tape. Cheapest long term high capacity storage there is.
Babylon 4, sure. Babylon 5 is the cheap, last attempt station. I am unconvinced that it’s possible now, with Internet access, to find the names of everyone who lived at a particular stree address in London. Given the S1 attitude toward B5 funding, would they realy dump that information into the computer system on B5? Massive amounts of data on hydroponics, sure. A 19th century London street directory? Just because you have terabytes of storage doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost money to store information, much less select what information is to be stored. Unless someone thinks dumping the entire Internet onto a single computer is a good idea (or even possible).
Why are you arguing for a counterfactual? Sheridan explicitly asked Ivanova to check “our history files,” i.e. the station’s own internal records, for the information, and she succeeded in finding it. Whether the information should logically have been available is not in dispute; it is axiomatic that it was available. The only question is how long it would reasonably have taken Ivanova to narrow down her search to find it.
Also, “a single computer?” B5 is a 5-mile-long city in space with a quarter-million inhabitants. It’s surely got more than one computer. Given that it’s centuries in the future, its data storage capacity probably exceeds the entire current storage capacity of the planet Earth.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to read a cited source and discovered it was pulled down. Plus, just in the last few weeks, our Government decided to pull down tons of official information from the net and may be about to purge health and other data. I have no issue with the idea that it would take a long time to suss out who lived at an address 400 years earlier.
How about the fact that storage is never infinite, and information multiplies exponentially to fill the space available for it? I worked tech support at a hard drive company in the mid-90s, and saw firsthand both how drive capacity grew and how people kept finding new things to fill it with.
A London address’ resident 350 years ago is meaningless trivia to anyone on a space station many light years away from Earth – as it would be to 90%+ of Earth’s residents in 2258, along with the billions of different people living at billions of Earth addresses over the intervening years. There’s no way they’d waste station memory on a list like that; Ivanova would have had to send back to Earth for it.
This is the debut of “Who are you?” a.k.a. The Vorlon Question. Both the Vorlons and Shadows have sent emissaries to B5 to ask the key players their questions. For “the others” of course the question is “What do you want?” These two questions are central to JMS’s philosophy of the whole series.
Keith rightly questions why the Vorlons would choose a serial killer to torture their chosen ones. Is that something a good guy does? Are the Vorlons “good,” or how would you even define “good?”
At any rate, this was never really about an interrogation or the specific answers the subject gave. Like Private Joker said in Full Metal Jacket, “Sir, the private believes any answer he gives will be wrong and the Senior Drill Instructor will only beat him harder if he reverses himself, Sir!” It’s the process that breaks down a person and all their facades of self-belief to arrive at something true, then to be molded into something else that the authority in charge deems useful.
Let’ just say the question “Are the Vorlons good, or how would you define good?” is DEEPLY relevant later.
I’m not so sure about that. One of the things about easy internet searches is that it’s very quick for commonly accessed information that’s already digitized, but can be stymied by information that’s uncommon, in some kind of closed database, or simply does not exist in digital format. I’m guessing that even today it would require more than a Google search to determine the owner of a specific London property in 1888 and whether the owner of record resided there or leased the property to others. Such information, if it existed at all, would probably be in some academic database that might not be accessible to the general public. The search itself might take half a second, but figuring out that you need access to Professor Woolencoat’s database of late Victorian land use records at Cambridge University (or whatever) would probably take longer.
The other assumption is that the information was digitized at some point in a searchable manner rather than, say, scanned microfiche pages that can be pulled up. It might be quick to find a 1880 census or maybe a phone book (if such existed at the time), but extracting the information from those would certainly take time.
I tried a quick google search of the address given and the only reference that comes up is for this episode (and various Jack the Ripper pages). When I tried 10 Downing Street, the address came up with a Wikipedia page that contained a link to who lived there when, but again that would take extra searching to find the specific date in question (and a lot longer if you wanted to know, possibly, the name of a servant who worked there).
I agree. The hardest part is often figuring out where to look. What bugged me was that Sheridan asked Ivanova to do the search — why is that her job? Presumably the station has someone on its staff who’s an archivist or historian or records clerk, someone who specialized in research and would be better qualified to do the task than the station’s first officer. But of course, they would’ve had to hire another actor for that, and Claudia Christian was in the main titles, so it’s the usual TV contrivance of the command crew doing all the jobs that should be done by underlings.
She has Gold Channel access. Presumably not everyone on board can do remote searches of Earth databases on a secure channel.
Once more: Sheridan explicitly asked Ivanova to search “our history files.” There was no secure channel; she was looking it up in the station’s own database.
Does “our” mean B5, or Earthforce?
Edit: got further down the comments and you have answered this to my satisfaction.
Or this is the kind of task the station commander doesn’t normally take care of themselves, and delegates to his first officer to track down the right person and get the information.
Yeah, I thought of that, but the scene was played as if Ivanova was running the search personally.
A no-prize explanation is that Ivanova was having a dull day and – instead of re-delegating the task as Sheridan may have expected – decided to do the research herself.
Also, I don’t think B5 has a local copy of the Internet at hand. They probably have to stablish a link to Earth to queue a high priority transfer of huge volumes of data every time they run out of local data.to shift through.
And then Ivanovna has to spend a huge amount of time closing ads typing Captchas and figuring out which entries are true and which ones are AIs hallucinating.
It’s also finding the relevant data IN the database.
I used to do lots of genealogical research and when it was all computerised it was meant to be a lot easier. It was but the the rubbish to accurate ratio went exponential. You spent just as much time trying to cross reference databases, correct for spelling mistakes, poor data entry etc. that you used to do going through paper lists.
The awkward moment between Vir and G’Kar is my favorite scene in this episode, partly because of how wonderful Katsulas is in it, but mostly because it’s the moment that marks Vir’s change from passive to active resistance (although we won’t learn about that for several more episodes).
The scene with Vir and G’Kar in elevator also foreshadows a certain other scene where G’Kar does grant foregiveness.
I haven’t been impressed by the directing in a B5 episode so far in this rewatch, but Mike Vejar did a great job here, very stylish and noirish and creepy. There were two excellent uses of wordlessness: the scene where Sheridan heard Sebastian’s footsteps and cane taps, and the first part of the elevator scene.
I’m very tired of fiction using torture scenes, but it helps that the episode seemed skeptical of the rightness of what Sebastian was doing. True, it ultimately seemed to get the intended results, but not because Delenn learned anything from it — rather, because she defied the bully and made it clear what she’d really stood for all along. Knowing what I know now about JMS’s horrific childhood, it occurred to me that Delenn’s lines telling Sebastian what she thought of him might have been what JMS would’ve wanted to say to his abusive father, though of course it’s not my place to assume that.
The G’Kar/Vir scene in the elevator was great, but I hate the theatrical trope of characters slicing their palms open with knives. It’s a common stage effect because it’s easy to fake and produces an amount of blood easy to see from the back rows of the theater, but it makes no anatomical sense, because it’s a serious injury that would render the hand effectively useless until it healed. If one needed to slash oneself to draw blood, the most sensible place to do it is the inside of the forearm, for the same reason that nurses usually draw blood from there.
Incidentally, when I tried to watch on Amazon Prime, it told me the show was no longer available without a trial subscription to Discovery+ or an outright purchase, so I had to watch on Tubi, which has more commercials. But it also said the show was “coming to Prime in 5 days,” so maybe it’s only temporary. Sometimes weird things happen with availability of streaming shows, like when they announced that they’d be taking down the first three seasons of The Expanse but then kept them after all. (I borrowed the whole second season from the library on DVD but never had to watch them, as it turned out.)
Yeah, I’ve been able to replay the footsteps and cane taps in my head whenever I think of this episode, any time over the last three decades. Masterful use of audio effects.
I don’t know if it helps, but I have been watching on The Roku Channel. It has limited, fairly short commercials but otherwise no complaints.
I think there are exactly two instances of palm cutting on B5, each time done by a Narn.
Maybe their anatomy is just different.
It’s the general practice in film/TV that annoys me. It made sense in the days of live theater, but on camera, where you can get close enough to show someone just pricking their finger, it’s a useless atavism. It just calls attention to the artifice.
I agree, Christopher. That always drives me crazy. Its always portrayed as something simple and trivial, if painful. And then the character goes about without the slightest problem of a gash in one of their prime manipulators.
Charmed and Supernatural are two of the biggest offenders (Sam and Dean’s palms must be crisscrossed with scars), but B5 is certainly a notable member of the club.
“There all the Honor Lies” earlier in the season gave us a glimpse of the magic that can happen when you pair Michael Vejar’s direction with John Flinn’s cinematography and a well written scene, especially that memorable Sheridan sequence where he learns Kosh’s “lesson”. “Comes the Inquisitor” takes us into yet another secluded area of the station and gives us the most visually interesting stage play yet. With Wayne Alexander’s chilling portrayal of “Sebastian”, we get quite the visual ride.
I do agree with the sentiment that the character didn’t necessarily need to be Jack himself. One can see why JMS chose him, if only to make that one final gotcha twist at the very end just before the credits. Nevertheless, Alexander makes such an impact in the role I can overlook the motivations for using the character. Plus, he’s a way better version of the character than the snickering clown we got back in Star Trek TOS (“Wolf in the Fold”). Sebastian has more character layers than that.
I also agree that not bringing up Delenn’s transformation was a bit of a missed opportunity. But we also don’t know how much information Sebastian is supplied by the Vorlons when he is given these inquisitor assignments. He’s periodically thawed out every now and then, which means he might not know about Delenn’s fall from the Grey Council. It’s not a perfect confrontation, but it gets us to that powerful Delenn statement. It gives us a final resolution to the character after a season having to deal with the consequences of her Chrysalis transformation, never belonging in either world. Challenging her role in the coming war was a necessary step in order to position her in the coming seasons.
And then there is the G’Kar elevator scene. In a show with some iconic elevator scenes, this may just be the most heart-wrenching one. The way Katsulas’ voice trembles and changes in each of the ‘dead’ line readings. And Furst is almost as good, trying to balance Vir’s guilt, reluctance and awkwardness. Another scene I’m always prone to rewatch every now and then. You can tell G’Kar’s pain and that he is aware of Vir’s position. He wouldn’t have treated Londo or any other Centauri to that act of self-flaggelation. You can see in his red eyes just how much it all hurts, and that in a possible distant future away from the immediate pain he would have given Vir the respect and appreciation for his attempt at seeking amends. Just brutal.
This is one of the many hilarious and endemic failures of imagination of many science fictional works, so I hesitate to ding this episode for it any more than any other, but there was a tendency to assume that a computer search would take as long as a search through a series of file cabinets would, because that was the more common point of reference. The truth is, Ivanova should have been able to call up the info Sheridan needed in half a second.
Given how worse Google has become as a search engine over the past 10 years, I’m not so sure future web searches would necessarily become easier, and I can see a situation where Jack the Ripper records would become harder to retrieve. Granted, it’s not as if JMS predicted that, but a lot can happen in 250 years. And we don’t know if B5’s computer is so able to access Earth-based ancient information in a split-second. This is a station that was built on a much tigher budget compared to its past iterations.
Quoth Eduardo: “I also agree that not bringing up Delenn’s transformation was a bit of a missed opportunity. But we also don’t know how much information Sebastian is supplied by the Vorlons when he is given these inquisitor assignments. He’s periodically thawed out every now and then, which means he might not know about Delenn’s fall from the Grey Council.”
That only makes sense if the Vorlons are shoddy at prep work, which flies in the face of pretty much everything we know about the Vorlons — which, to be fair, ain’t much, but they’re obviously good at long-term planning and are meticulous. They absolutely would not have sent someone to talk to Delenn who didn’t have every piece of useful information.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Not necessarily shoddy, just cryptic and leaving out useful information. I always go back to “Deathwalker” as the prime example of Vorlons asking someone to do a job for them without telling them the specifics of what’s required of the person, in that case Talia.
(which of course may have been intentional to satisfy some some Talia-specific project of theirs, but that’s the most specific the show’s been about what Vorlons do in your average day)
Sheridan specifically asked, “Ivanova, how extensive are our history files?” So the intent was explicitly that the records were there in the station database. Which makes sense — you’d want a facility like that to be self-sufficient, able to access any necessary information whether interstellar communication is available or not (the same reason the Enterprise‘s library computer is presumed to store all recorded knowledge). And data storage is cheap and compact — if anything, writers 30 years ago greatly underestimated how easy it would be to store vast amounts of memory in a compact form.
I’d forgotten that particular line. So it was an in-house station library. Which – the contrivance of having Ivanova herself do the search aside – doesn’t mean it couldn’t still take long to find the Jack the Ripper history file. For the sake of the last-minute twist at the very end, I’m assuming the library is spread across mainframes that might be cumbersome to access due to a faulty search engine – again I point to Google having lost a lot of efficiency with its search results over the past decade. Plus, that episode where Garibaldi accidentally activates the station’s spiteful AI voiced by Harlan Ellison implies a lot of B5’s inner systems were haphazardly put together.
It could just be that Ivanova’s line “This could take a while” means simply that she’d need time to figure out where to look, since as I mentioned, a station first officer isn’t necessarily trained in archival research. All the more reason Sheridan should’ve asked someone else.
For those interested, the post about JMS’ choice of Jack the Ripper can be found here:
https://jmsnews.com/messages/message?id=15378
I linked to Straczynski’s explanation in the very article you’re commenting on. (Though my link is to the Lurker’s Guide.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think you have the purpose behind the torture scenes wrong. Sebastian isn’t looking for information, he’s testing character. Will Delenn be willing to sacrifice her belief in her own destiny in order to save Sheridan. Intellectually it is easy to say yes, but how do you actually put it to the test? How do you confront someone with the reality of possible sacrifice? I can say that I hope I would help rescue people from a burning building, but until confronted with the reality, it is just hope or lip service to my own ego. It’s also encapsulated in the Trolley Problem, deciding if you can sacrifice one life to save 100 others.
Sebastian is inflicting increasing amounts of pain in order to see just how far Delenn will take her conceit and stops once he realizes that “who she is” is someone who will sacrifice herself to save another.
It also says a lot about the Vorlons in that they are willing to sacrifice others for their goals and have no moral compunction about what tools they use to get their way.
I would have been a lot happier if in Season 3 this had been followed up on as a bit of foreshadowing:
It also says a lot about the Vorlons in that they are willing to sacrifice others for their goals and have no moral compunction about what tools they use to get their way.
Instead we get a season and a half with everyone who ought to know better keeping their fingers in their ears and humming “la la la, can’t hear you”.
I think this also helps explain why the Vorlons sent an Inquisitor. While Kosh may have been satisfied with Delenn, he had to convince the others that she’s the right person.
I’d forgotten so much was in this episode; I remembered G’Kar asking for help and the Rangers delivering, but not that this was the arms-running scene with Garibaldi, or the elevator scene with Vir. Both of them excellent.
But the episode as a whole is a very quiet one. Just two people talking to each other, alone, in a deserted storage area, in the dark. It all rests on the performances of Mira Furlan and Wayne Alexander. And that was a very good place for it to rest.
I loved the Sebastian/Delenn/Sheridan scenes – and not just in the moment. The objections seem frankly silly to me. Why didn’t Sebastian just ask for answers? Because words are easy. Proving you mean them is hard.
It’s easy to be glib and say it’s not about your ego. It’s another thing to push and push until you snap out, reflexively:
“Then the world is wrong!”
“And Delenn is right? Or perhaps it is the world that is right, and Delenn that is wrong. Have you ever considered that? Have you?!?”
And then admit, quietly and emotionally shaken, that yes, sometimes, you have. That’s no glib statement. That is truth, from the heart, and both of them knew it. Sebastian is just as shaken as Delenn is.
And that brings us to the other purpose for the inquisition. When Sebastian asks “Who are you?”, he’s not looking for information. He’s forcing her to look at herself. As I mentioned in “And Now for a Word,” she went into her transformation confident and certain of herself, only to have the pillars of her support knocked out from under her one by one. She went into quarantine in “Confessions and Lamentations” because her religious faith was one of the few certainties left to her, a rock to stand on. Now Sebastian goes back to that, making her re-examine her faith in prophecy, what it means, what her place in it is. What her purpose is.
“This is my cause!” she screams at the end. “Life! One life or a billion, it’s all the same!” She has been re-forged. “This body is only a shell. You cannot touch me. You cannot harm me. I am not afraid.” And she is not. She is ready for the fight to come.
And if you question the Vorlons’ methods in this, that they should bring back an infamous serial killer, once self-righteous and certain in his moral rectitude, only to have that certitude ripped away? Why yes, it would make one wonder, wouldn’t it? See you next week!
I can’t help but compare this episode to the one from near the end of Season 4 that focuses on an interrogation (you know the one) and how, despite the many positive aspects of this episode, the later one’s interrogation is far more interesting. Less melodrama, more sinister realism. Amusingly neither interrogator is really interested in getting useful information, but rather in breaking down the subject. As much as we all love Wayne Alexander, I wonder if it would’ve been even more effective to have Sebastian act more like the interrogator in that later episode.
To be fair, torture is generally vastly more effective at breaking people than at getting useful information.
And in this case, breaking down, the person shows the inquisitor the answer to the Vorlon’s perpetual question: “Who are you?” There is no artifice in either Delenn’s or Sheridan’s actions at the end of the session, as they are both too worn down to be capable of it. What the inquisitor sees is who they truly are.
That is the narrative conceit, yes. The objection to that is that it doesn’t reflect real people’s actual reactions to torture. It doesn’t reveal their true selves; it just causes them to do whatever is necessary to end the torture.
As a rule, you’re right, but this situation was different, because Delenn could have taken off the bracelets and ended her ordeal at any moment. She chose to endure the pain for as long as it took. And that was part of what Sebastian was testing — whether she had the strength, commitment, and humility to sacrifice herself rather than putting herself first. I still think it’s a cruel way of testing that, but it’s a different dynamic from your usual torture scene, because she endured it voluntarily. It’s more like one of those sequences where a hero persists through arduous, painful training to become strong enough to defeat a foe or to prove their determination not to give up.
Sure, she’s being tested with a Gom Jabbar. But it is still testing the wrong thing: capacity to endure pain is not necessarily correlated with purity of motive or leadership ability. But since the real purpose is at least partly to test Sheridan’s reaction, I suppose it does have to hurt enough to cause him to react.
I like the episode just fine as a story. I wouldn’t recommend the methodology as a means of actually learning anything useful about the subject(s) in the real world.
I’m not saying what Sebastian did was right, I’m just saying that it’s a different situation from the kind of torture scenario you describe. She didn’t have to tell the torturer what he wanted to hear to end the torture, because she could’ve voluntarily ended the torture simply by taking the bracelets off and walking out the door. That makes it a fundamentally different dynamic. Pointing out a difference is not advocacy or value judgment; it is merely clarifying the facts so that one can analyze the situation accurately.
Also, she didn’t know what the torturer wanted to hear. All her attempts in answering the question failed.
You’re missing the point. Sebastian’s “Who are you?” was not an attempt to learn something Delenn knew, but a means of showing her how much she didn’t know about herself, forcing her to look past her assumptions and pat definitions about herself and really think about who she was on a deeper level. The fact that she couldn’t answer the question was the point he was teaching her — that it wasn’t enough to define herself by her job title or what others called her, that she had to look beyond those superficial labels and take a good look at herself. Delenn did answer the question at the end, showing who she was through her actions and choices rather than through any label.
Wayne Alexander is a fine actor, but his performance didn’t really work for me here. He and Mira Furlan were both acting their heart out throughout the interrogation scenes, but their performances were so tonally different that it felt like I was trying to watch two different television shows at the same time. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if the dialogue went anywhere that wasn’t totally obvious. I also worry that the revelation that the Vorlons have been coming to Earth and abducting people for centuries will be one of those things that won’t actually go anywhere.
I loved the rest of the episode, though.
I feel like there’s way too much pop culture mystification of Jack the Ripper, a guy who was almost certainly just another boring misogynist asshole in real life, just like most serial killers. That said, I did like the performances.
Well said. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper’ is a good antidote to that!
https://www.amazon.com/Five-Untold-Lives-Killed-Ripper/dp/1328663817
“Sheridan’s dialogue in the episode as originally aired refers to the murders as happening on the West End”
Sheridan just confused him with The Phantom of the Operetta, a serial killer who targeted music hall performers at about the same time. But since his murders weren’t quite as lurid as Jack’s, the press gave him much less coverage and he fell into obscurity.
@krad, while search engines would have grown more potent over the long years, it’s also worth noting that Earth’s knowledge base has also grown immeasurably – not least since it’s had to assimilate knowledge of and from across the many species in it’s vicinity – so it’s hardly inconceivable that (Especially on a station millions of miles from Earth, with a focus on dealings with other species and not on Earthly scholarship) it might be rather tricky to seek out something as fantastically obscure as the history of a single house and it’s tenant.
Also, the fact that Delenn pointedly does NOT claim she lacks all ego is entirely to her credit – would you believe someone who tried to tell you they had not one single trace of ego? (I certainly would not).
There are people who have very little ego. Probably not none, but much less than the average person. Delenn is not one of those people.
Yes, this exactly. Delenn has enough self-awareness to know she has PLENTY of ego, it’s why she believes she’s a key part of her cause. Getting to what the cause IS of course, is the real point.
I’m not sure Sebastian’s interrogation was the real way to get there, but I guess JMS needed the Vorlons’ way of finding suitable leaders among younger races to be both disturbing and wildly different from the Shadows’ approach with Morden, which starts kinder and even gives people their wishes, but also ends far worse.
I adore the G’Kar subplot in this episode. It follows up well on his speech from the previous episode. And that elevator scene has been stuck in my memory since it first aired. By this point, G’Kar had become such a well-rounded character that all of his actions seemed consistent for him.
While I acknowledge the flaws in the main plot, one thing I like about it is that it seems to resolve some long-standing questions about Delenn. There was always a certain zealotry to her choices and actions in the first season; in the second season, she was even questioning her own sureness in fulfilling prophecy. Kosh might have been favorable towards her (and Sheridan, for that matter), but the Vorlons as a whole seem to want a certain type of leader for their goals. (This episode says a lot about the Vorlons that lines up pretty well with what we learn about them in the seasons to come.)
The EmperorUlkesh is not as forgiving as I am.”JMS has always said that he likes to hide things in plain sight.
Can’t really disagree with most of the opinions: G’Kar segment very good, Jack the Ripper not so much. I can’t really see what the Jack the Ripper revelation is supposed to give us, it’s a bit of a hat on a hat and seems more in place because JMS loves the Twilight Zone and/or Alan Moore (I think From Hell would have come out around now). Especially as he doesn’t seek to ground any of the Sebastian stuff in anything we know about the Ripper, and are we supposed to think the Vorlon experience redeems him? That seems an odd idea for the story to point to, so it just seems to be there to invoke surprise.
But then I began to think, what if this was always in the plan back from when Sinclair would have been in this episode and I feel like that might have leant it more strength? If the Sheridan and Delenn start a relationship subplot was Sinclair and Delenn start a relationship subplot, then the interrogation of Delenn could have dealt with Sinclair’s torture by the Minbari and Delenn being the cause of it. It would have sought to expiate Delenn’s guilt and any expectable anger on Sinclair’s part by having him overcome that to help her during her own torture. As it stands, even with nice speeches, it’s hard to see why Sebastian judges her worthy. It also then works as a parallel, Delenn’s actions pale in comparison to the cruelty of Sebastian and Sinclair’s anger is shifted to Sebastian. But that’s just hypothesis! And it still doesn’t really mean it had to be Jack the Ripper.
And thinking about it, it might also run parallel then with G’Kar/Vir, with G’Kar unable to accept Vir’s apologies, while Sinclair would accept Delenn’s so that a full blown romance in Season 3, which Catherine by this point lost at Z’ha’dum could take place.
Any way just a thought!
Certainly not the most compelling torture/interrogation scene I’ve watched. Chain of Command Part 2 holds thatbspot.
As am thinking about it, in the end Delenn did die “…alone, unmourned and unnoticed in a dark room..” of very old age.
I disagree a bit with your assertion that Delenn could have said, “I have no ego.” (which she eventually does, anyway, when Sebastian asks her (and Sheridan) the right question. Any denial would have been viewed as an admission she does – a very LARGE and overweening one, and a disqualification.
Ber that as it may; I was so enamored by Alexander’s portrayal, that I did somethuing I’d never done before, nor since. I wrote a fan letter. Got a very nice pic back (signed as “Sebastian” and thanking me for writing him); I still have it floating around here, somewhere. I was further supported in my admriation for his skills when he returned in, err, several other roles later on. Magnificent actor!
And here I thought Kolchak or Kirk had done in Jack :)
He’s a Joker figure here I suppose.
The whole Jack the Ripper thing is dumb, but it does serve as foreshadowing that the Vorlons are not exactly the good guys.