<i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Comes the Inquisitor”

“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.”