“Convictions”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 3, Episode 2
Production episode 302
Original air date: November 13, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Garibaldi and Allan are dealing with Drazi pilgrims, who wish to visit the place where Dro’shalla appeared (really Kosh, but whatever). Ivanova calls Garibaldi away, leaving Allan to deal with the pilgrims. Ivanova reports that there have been anonymous messages left in CnC threatening chaos. It could be a crank, but Garibaldi promises to look into it.
An explosion in downbelow happens right when the “chaos” was promised. Garibaldi isn’t sure what caused the explosion at first, but he can’t rule out a bomb given everything that’s been happening on B5 lately…
Ivanova interviews Brother Theo, who leads a group of monks who wish to live on B5. They have rented accommodations in downbelow, and they intend to try to learn more about God by talking to the various aliens who come through B5. Ivanova is concerned, but Theo assures her that they won’t harass anyone and will only talk to those who wish to be talked to. They also will earn their keep, as their number include many programmers, scientists, and so on—plus they are also dedicated researchers.
Ivanova thinks they’re nuts for willingly settling down on the station, but Theo has an answer for every objection she raises, so she gives in.
It quickly becomes clear that it was a bomb explosion, and Garibaldi tasks Morishi, his bomb expert, with re-creating the events.
Lennier is in the waiting area, being tormented by a jerk in a porn ’stache and no concept of personal space and another guy who has fallen asleep on his arm. He gets rid of the former by telling him he has a fatal disease that is transmitted by touch, and the latter by the simple expedient of getting up.
As Lennier goes to greet Delenn, who is arriving alongside Mollari, there’s another explosion. Lennier tosses Mollari through a doorway right before a blast door closes—with Lennier on the wrong side of it.
Lennier is taken to medlab, with both Delenn and Mollari beside themselves with concern over his well-being. Garibaldi confirms that this bomb is of the same design as the one in downbelow. He doesn’t think it’s a terrorist attack—though he’s checking into known terrorist organizations—partly because these haven’t been high-value targets, though they have been somewhat crowded ones. Also, nobody’s taken credit or made demands.
The explosive is a commercially available one, so Garibaldi starts the work of tracing it. Ivanova notes the timing as being the same as the anonymous chaos warnings. Sheridan orders stricter security protocols across the station.
G’Kar carries on at great length to Garibaldi about how this must be the doing of the Centauri—and one decent piece of evidence in his ranting and raving is that a Centauri recently used an explosive to try to kill Sheridan. Garibaldi tries to blow him off, with only partial success. (Why Garibaldi doesn’t mention that Mollari was almost one victim of the bombing is unclear, as that’s one strong bit of evidence that it wasn’t a Centauri…)
Mollari carries on at great length to Sheridan and Ivanova about how this must be the doing of the Narn—and one decent piece of evidence in his ranting and raving is that such attacks have been happening with frequency on the Narn homeworld. Sheridan tries to blow him off, with only partial success.
Mollari then visits Lennier in medlab, babbling at him for some time. He takes a break to give Lennier a chance to talk, which is sadly met with expected silence.
A third bomb is found by Garibaldi’s people before it goes off, so nobody is hurt. These are not professional jobs, and Morishi has confirmed that the explosives all come from a batch that was stolen from an ice-mining company on Vega VII, and also used in explosions that happened on Proxima III. Sheridan orders a check on all ships that came from Proxima recently. Ivanova thinks that the bomber may be observing the effects of their labors, but when Sheridan orders Garibaldi to run a search on surveillance footage, the latter points out how time-consuming and difficult it would be. Ivanova, however, has the perfect people for the job…
Brother Theo promises to find anyone who is at all the bombing scenes. When Garibaldi calls this a nutty idea, Theo shushes him, and the monks get to work on the surveillance footage.
Mollari departs Lennier’s bedside. He calls for a transport tube, but G’Kar is in it. He decides to wait for the next one—but then there’s an explosion, which sends a fireball down the corridor. With no choice, Mollari dives into the transport tube, which then becomes stuck. Mollari is rendered unconscious, finally awakening two hours later. Mollari is shocked that G’Kar has done nothing to try to escape, nor did he take advantage of Mollari’s unconscious state to kill him. G’Kar points out that the consequences for a Narn killing a Centauri is to kill 500 Narn, including the perpetrator’s family. So G’Kar can’t kill Mollari, but he can sit and watch the ambassador die slowly. Mollari thinks G’Kar is nuts and tries to cry for help. (At one point he cries, “Can anyone hear me?” and G’Kar gleefully says, “I can hear you!” just to torment him.)
Theo and his monks find one face that’s at every single bombing site. Garibaldi is able to match the face to a name: Robert Carlson, who was on a transport from Proxima and took a job with station engineering. Garibaldi assembles a tactical team, joined by Sheridan. Carlson, however, is prepared and sets off a small bomb to show he’s serious, and announces that he has a dead-man’s switch for a bomb that will destroy the whole station. He demands to speak alone to Sheridan, with the captain unarmed and without a link. Sheridan gets rid of his PPG, but hides his link down his pants and leaves the channel open.
Garibaldi has Morishi check the fusion reactor, since the explosives Carlson has been using aren’t enough by themselves to blow up the whole station, but if he attached it to the fusion reactor—which he’d have access to as an engineer—it would be very very bad.
Carlson is completely binky bonkers, seeing himself as an agent of chaos, which is his way of dealing with the fact that his life isn’t everything he wanted it to be. Morishi finds the bomb and has to separate it from the reactor. Sheridan tries to bargain with Carlson, but he wants a ship out of there and isn’t interested in negotiating. He forces Sheridan to sit at one point, which beeps the link down his pants. Carlson then goes really batshit and is about to activate the dead-man’s switch. Sheridan and Carlson fight over it, but eventually Carlson is able to drop it—
—and the bomb goes off harmlessly in space, because Morishi is good at his job.
Carlson whines that it’s not fair and Sheridan punches him in the face.
Lennier wakes up, to Delenn’s relief, and expresses concern that he saved Mollari’s life, given the damage Mollari has already done. He also evinces absolutely no enthusiasm for the likely kudo he’s to receive from the Centaurum.
Mollari and G’Kar are rescued, to the latter’s great disappointment.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! When Carlson asks if Sheridan is with Garibaldi, the latter says no at the same time that the former says yes, prompting a look of annoyance on the part of Garibaldi. Garibaldi is being a good security chief there, keeping the CO of the station safe; Sheridan, though, is the top-billed character in a TV show and therefore is morally obligated to put himself in danger…
Ivanova is God. Ivanova goes to great lengths to discourage Brother Theo and fails rather hilariously. But that also means she’s the first to realize how helpful he and his gaggle of monks can be in finding the bad guy…
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi comports himself quite well here, particularly during the hostage negotiation, when he figures out that the bomb must be on the fusion reactor and having Sheridan put the link down his pants.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Lennier commits the sin of lying to the asshole in the waiting area, and says he’ll do penance later. Of course, right after that, he saves Mollari’s life and winds up badly injured and in a coma, so one could say he did that penance right away…
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… I picked this particular title for this particular section based on the very light-bulb joke that circulated around the interwebs back in the day and that Mollari and Franklin both tell in this episode. (See Trivial matters.)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar takes tremendous glee in the notion of getting to watch Mollari die slowly in front of him, and is bitterly disappointed in their being rescued.
Welcome aboard. Louis Turenne returns in the new recurring role of Brother Theo, who will return in “Passing Through Gethsemane.” Turenne previously played Draal in the “A Voice in the Wilderness” two-parter, but that role was recast because of Turenne’s difficulty with the Minbari prosthetics, and he was given this role instead.
The hilariously named Patrick Kilpatrick plays Carlson. John C. Flinn—one of the show’s regular cinematographers and who also directed many episodes—plays the asshole who talks to Lennier. And this week’s Robert Knepper moment is the great Cary-Horiyuki Tagawa, who does a superlative job of playing Morishi as a lived-in character.
Trivial matters. The terms of the Narn surrender, including that 500 Narns would be executed in retaliation for the murder of a Centauri by a Narn, were established in “The Long, Twilight Struggle.”
The fake disease Lennier claims to be dying of in order to get out of a conversation with an asshole is called Netter’s Syndrome, named after executive producer Douglas Netter.
The light bulb joke that Mollari and Franklin both tell is one that had been going around the B5 boards on the internet, and J. Michael Straczynski decided to include it as a tribute to the online fan base (which was in general massively supportive of the show).
Kosh appeared as Dro’shalla to the Drazi on the station when he rescued Sheridan from the Centauri bomb (which G’Kar also mentions to Garibaldi) in “The Fall of Night.”
While trapped in the transport tube, G’Kar sings the same song about fish that he sang in “The Parliament of Dreams.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Bastard!”
“Monster!”
“Fanatic!”
“Murderer!”
“You are insane!”
“And that is why we’ll win!”
“‘Go be the ambassador to Babylon 5,’ they say, ‘it will be an easy assignment.’ I hate my life.”
“So do I.”
“Shut up!”
—The final lines of the episode as Mollari and G’Kar do their best impersonation of a pair of twelve-year-olds.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I fear I have served the present by sacrificing the future.” Even back when the show first aired, this was always the “G’Kar and Mollari are stuck in an elevator” episode, and I honestly didn’t remember a damn thing about this one beyond that, not even that it was the debut of Brother Theo and his gaggle of monks.
And I do love Brother Theo and his gaggle of monks. This is a lovely update of what monks would be doing, combining the patience that would be required for, say, copying illuminated manuscripts with the desire for learning and knowledge that would mean a tropism for learning things like computer programming. Plus Louis Turenne brings a quiet dignity to the role that is extremely compelling. As is the way Claudia Christian plays Ivanova’s amused and frustrated resignation during her interview with Theo…
Speaking of amused and frustrated, we have Lennier dealing with the jerk in the waiting area. I was particularly amused to watch it because I distinctly recall an I-Con convention decades ago—though I no longer recall whether it was before or after this episode that it happened—in which Bill Mumy was pigeonholed by a fangoober who would not shut up and leave him alone. Poor Bill was trying very hard to extricate himself without being rude…
The primary plot of Carlson’s terror campaign works just fine. I like how well the procedural elements are handled. In particular, it’s nice to see Garibaldi be portrayed as competent at his job for a change. Patrick Kilpatrick plays a pretty standard psycho, though I have to confess that the plotline got less interesting once he was revealed. This is mainly because Carlson is so boring an antagonist, because he’s, well, a pretty standard psycho. You know he’s crazy because he periodically shouts his dialogue for no obvious reason. Oh, and he sweats a lot.
But, as usual, what makes the episode is the Mollari-G’Kar double act, in this case enhanced by Mollari’s scene in medlab with the unconscious Lennier. Peter Jurasik does a superlative job with Mollari’s stream-of-consciousness babble at the comatose Minbari. One of the show’s strengths has been allowing Mollari a certain complexity, as you can go from liking him and feeling sorry for him one moment to being reminded that he’s a fucking monster the next. That latter is handled nicely by his scenes with G’Kar in the transport tube. Andreas Katsulas modulates beautifully between giddy glee and furious anger, the latter particularly when he throws Mollari’s words from “The Long, Twilight Struggle” back in his face by way of explaining why G’Kar couldn’t kill Mollari even though he was at the Narn’s mercy.
Next week: “A Day in the Strife.”
More Dad Jokes of the Future!
When the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight told Sheridan that he had twenty seconds to come in, rather more than twenty seconds passed.
Riffable Moments
Londo: It would appear that we are on our own.
So, twenty questions?
Carlson: You know, back home I was no one. Nothing.
Hoo boy, one of these.
BAD IS GOOD, BABY!
—The Evil Midnight Blogger What Blogs at Midnight
As much as the bomber is fairly generic (I would have expected his motives to be more directly related to the current status quo of Earth politics or something), I like how elements of the plot carry forward from the end of the second season. The bombings come on the heels of the events in “The Fall of Night” and everything between Londo and G’Kar is informed by the end of the Narn-Centauri War. That elevator scene is definitely a highlight!
I also really liked the idea of Brother Theo and his order, though
I always think of the elevator scene and the scene with Vir and Lennier last week as coming much later.
As I understand it, JMS wrote the elevator scene with G’Kar seething with anger the whole way through. He came out of his office while it was being filmed and heard Katsulas’ laugh coming from the set. Apparently, it just wasn’t working (and scenes featuring Jurasik and Katsulas together rarely needed more than a few takes), and Katsulas came up with the idea of having G’Kar be giddy.
Kilpatrick’s performance is awfully cliched, but it was the style at the time. You couldn’t be a psycho on TV if you didn’t occasionally shout for no reason and move your head in weird jerks. Kilpatrick has had tons of work over the years, though he’s mostly a “that guy.” I guess it’s just what everybody involved thought they wanted.
(Also, it’s Cary-Hiroyuki, not Horiyuki.)
For the Vir/Lennier scene you might be thinking of the reprise of the earlier bar scene that comes late in season 5.
“A hell of a five years.”
“A hell of a life.”
“You win.”
I was definitely thinking of this one, with the “same time tomorrow” bit.
And I’ve just realized that might be a reference to the Looney Tunes cartoon with the sheepdog and the coyote who beat the tar out of each other and then clock off. Ralph and Sam?
Londo and G’Kar trapped in an elevator. This scene is simply delicious.
Bobby
Beyond the obvious delight of the Londo/G’kar elevator scenes, this one is also a great showcase for Lennier, even though, frankly, he probably should have just let Londo die. Still, I wish the mad bomber plot were more interesting.
When he wakes up, delivers the punchline to Franklin, then says “Heard it,” it’s not just funny but deeply revealing of his character. This episode is just generally providing great character scenes muddied over by the plot that ties most of them together.
There’s also some casual shots that took a lot of effort to pull off, including the hallway explosion and the scene with multiple decks visible.
I have a recollection that Kilpatrick was one of Boxleitner’s least favourite screen partners, due to covering him with spittle for the duration of their scenes.
I remain convinced that the hiding place of the link is a location that ST would never boldly go, and it’s still childishly amusing as a result.
Except it still makes more sense to put it in front rather than back.
I always inferred from his slightly pained expression that it was between his cheeks…
Now I’m wondering if JMS was inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing. It would have happened just before season 3 got the greenlight. Of course, Carlson is nowhere near as political or extremist as Timothy McVeigh. He’s just plain crazy, and I always get a laugh out of his bizarre shouting out of nowhere. Still, a bomber plot was a convenient story engine for everything else.
There are lots of little touches in this episode that I credit to Michael Vejar. One of my favorites is during the G’Kar/Garibaldi scene with G’Kar ranting about the Centauri being the bombing culprits. G’Kar is so in love with his voice and so caught up in his usual frenzy of rightful indignation that he’s talking and talking, and then suddenly Garibaldi is 20 steps ahead of him in the crowd with G’Kar way behind thus needing to catch up to him like a bumbling clown. G’Kar’s whole body language feels different. He’s no longer the imposing Ambassador, but the helpless bumbling citizen trying to get the officer’s attention and having to compete with every regular Joe in the corridor.
We finally get Brother Theo and the Monks (now that would be quite the name for a band). Some delightful banter with Susan, and I love the scene where they take charge of the surveillance process. A well-written and developed group of characters that continue the show’s religious aspect (which of course harks back to Sinclair’s memorable introduction of each religious representative in “Parliament”).
We have the genuinely affecting part of the episode with Londo comforting a comatose Lennier followed by the equally riveting elevator set piece. The way pre-explosion G’Kar goes from his steely quiet stare to the delighted teary-eyed jokester just loving every minute of their dire predicament. It’s one of the highlights of their entire relationship over the show”s run.
Season 3 is usually remembered for its big serialized push, but in retrospect, it starts off slowly, with these episodic one/offs like “Convictions” and “Gethsemane” that don’t really add much to the bigger arcs, but help to cement the lore and the characters in big ways. Of course, Lennier saving Londo has immediate repercussions we’ll be seeing next week.
There’s also the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which happened the very day that “The Gathering” aired in New York City markets, taking out the WTC antenna and causing a lot of New Yorker to miss it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t know if “inspired” is the right word. But JMS’ comments about the episode included references to McVeigh, among others, so clearly he was at least aware that a comparison could be made.
The episode is from 1995; I’m sure that that McVeigh and the Unabomber would have been top of mind in his treatment of terrorism.
Well, of course, as we all know, Centauri do not kill Centauri.
In terms of actual deaths on screen, I expect humans killing humans is in the lead, but I’d wager Centauri on Centauri violence is top three (plus they fire on the station).
Yeah, I didn’t understand this parenthetical either. As this is a rewatch, surely the author is aware of the existence of “And The Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place”, even if it hasn’t happened yet?
G’Kar himself is probably the person with the strongest motive to kill Mollari, but #2-10 on that list are probably all Centauri.
IIRC Garibaldi does bring up that point, to which G’Kar counters by claiming that shows how committed they are.
This episode was really well-directed by Michael Vejar. Very stylish and edgy with lots of unnerving close-ups.
I doubt that setting off a conventional explosive attached to a fusion reactor would cause a fusion explosion like they feared. It’s extremely hard to make fusion happen, and even harder to make the reaction run away explosively, which is why the trigger for a fusion bomb is a smaller fission bomb. I think it’s far more likely that blowing up part of the fusion reactor would’ve just crippled it and left the station without main power. Although that would be pretty catastrophic in itself, eventually.
I admit, when I saw Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa show up as a security guy, my first thought was “He’ll turn out to be secretly behind the bombings,” since he tended to get typecast as bad guys. Getting cast as just an ordinary guy was atypical for him. As for “Morishi,” it’s another one of this show’s pseudo-Japanese names that are extremely rare if they exist at all. There are lots of names that are close to it, like Morishita, Morishiro, Morishima, Morishige, and even Morishin, but I can’t find any Morishi.
The monk thing was a clever idea in its way, but JMS underestimated how good facial recognition software could get in the future (or, as we call it now, the present).
“This episode was really well-directed by Michael Vejar. Very stylish and edgy with lots of unnerving close-ups.”
I was struck by the direction. A number of closeups and unusually tight two-shots were definitely claustrophobic and unsettling. They add to the feeling of growing paranoia from being trapped in a tin can along with an invisible mystery bomber with no apparent motivation — among a quarter-million people. That tin can feels thinner and more fragile by the minute.
There are a number of showy, visually dramatic episodes and shots in B5. But I don’t often notice subtle direction. Maybe it’s just me, but I found it to be really effective.
On the one hand, it’s nice to see Tagawa-san get a chance to be one of the heroes: on the other hand, they couldn’t have cast him as Space James Bond or something making equally good use of that slightly-diabolical charisma of his?
Ah well, maybe he’ll get the chance to be someone Big in STAR TREK? (Perhaps a Romulan proconsul or someone equally Caesarian?).
Tagawa’s already been in Star Trek. One of his earliest TV roles was as the “Mandarin bailiff” of Judge Q’s court in the “Post-Atomic Horror” sequence in TNG: “Encounter at Farpoint.”
Facial recognition software was the first thing I thought of. Heck, I have a computer in my pocket that can do a pretty good job of that, and my desktop could probably grind through all the relevant surveillance video in half an hour.
A few years ago I did a comparison of a Cray XM-P supercomputer vs an android tablet. The tablet cost something like 1/1000 the Cray, had more memory, and a faster processor.
To be fair, the episode acknowledged that computer facial recognition did exist — once the monks identified Carlson’s recurring presence, they had the computer compare his face against station records to identify him — but assumed that it would never be as good as the human brain at recognizing partial faces from different angles, lighting conditions, etc. Which does have some merit, since there are ways to fool computer facial recognition that might not fool human eyes. But the tech gets better all the time, and it’s already probably better today than JMS assumed it would be over 200 years from now.
I find the whole concept of Theo & The Monks “applying” to live on the station and seemingly needing Ivanova’s approval a bit strange. Also, her claim that “[j]ust about everyone who lives here works here. Dockers, shop owners, environmental specialists, that sort of thing,” is nearly impossible to take at face value. As we’ve seen and will see many more times, the station is infested with predators and drifters– three of them tried to rob Delenn, Lennier, and Marcus just last week. The criminal element is something she might have wanted to bring up to them, unless they’re also the type of monks who know self-defense, their listening tour is a great way to get robbed and murdered. If people need permission to live on the station, then why are they letting petty criminals and drifters stay instead of deporting them? If people don’t need permission to live on the station, then what is Theo even doing? I think this is a one-off thing and when future groups want to move to the station, they just do it.
The Monks are an official religious organization made up of lots and lots of people who eat, drink and breathe air. If they are going to live for decades on the station sharing its limited resources, they are going to need Ivanova’s approval (even more so given their intent on studying other races that also need approval). It’s as simple as that. Don’t forget what happened in “GROPOS” from last season with officers sharing quarters with ground pounders. Space is limited. B5 can only support about 250K people.
Lurkers are simply individuals who tried building a life on the station and ended up poor and homeless.
And they’re not letting criminals and drifters stay on the station. But deporting is not an option either. Last season’s ISN episode (and a few others) specified that many would want to go back home, but don’t have the money to book passage – and Earth isn’t willing to cover the cost of transferring them back either. It’s an unsolvable problem.
There must be something in my reply that the automod doesn’t like, because it won’t post. TLDR: It’s just like real life, some in the down below are indeed just broke. In context, a shuttle ticket to a place easier to live on than a space station is the best bet for them, using a space station as a shelter is completely illogical, like having a homeless shelter on an aircraft carrier. Others are outright criminals and should be dealt with harshly. Regardless, though, if they don’t help the poor and they don’t deal with the criminals, then any “permission” the monks need is purely theoretical.
It is clearly possible for large numbers of people to live in Downbelow without any kind of formal permission. It would probably be harder for a large group to move in at once without attracting some attention, but they probably could have managed it.
But Brother Theo doesn’t want to evade the law. It probably wouldn’t even occur to him to try. The guy has Lawful alignment written all over him. He’s asking for permission because he thinks it is the proper thing to do, whether or not he really needs to. That’s part of why Ivanova doesn’t know how to respond. It’s not a request people normally make.
I still don’t buy the conceit that there’s a homeless population on the station. The whole thing is an artificial structure with artificial life support that must be budgeted and supplied to accommodate a population at least as large as the total number of people on the station, so they’re already essentially paying to keep all their residents alive, fed, and breathing, and literally to keep a roof over their heads, because the whole structure is artificial. So the premise that the station can’t afford to support them or send them home is nonsensical. It’s already paying for their upkeep.
Then again, real-life homelessness is just as nonsensical, since it’s been proven that it costs less for a city to give homeless people free housing and job support than it does to deal with the legal and medical consequences of unaddressed homelessness.
But we’d have to raise taxes to pay for that housing and job support… and asking our precious job creators to pay taxes will hurt their feelings… and then they’ll all go off to sulk in Galt’s Gulch, leaving us to our own devices… and it gets better the more I say it.
That’s just the point, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes. As I said, it costs less to provide those services than it does to prosecute and incarcerate people for homelessness-related crimes, deal with the medical problems and lost productivity that result from homelessness, and install anti-homeless design features in public parks, bus stops, etc. If anything, taxes would be lower if society just solved the problem instead of deliberately perpetuating it. (Also, homeless people who are given housing and job support tend to find gainful employment within a year, whereupon they would start paying taxes, which would ease the burden on everyone else.)
This was brought up in last week’s Daredevil episode, in fact — that the city spent several times as much on incarcerating Matt Murdock’s client for stealing food than it would’ve had to spend on simply feeding him.
-INSERT VICTOR HUGO QUOTE HERE-