“Day of the Dead”
Written by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Doug Lefler
Season 5, Episode 8
Production episode 511
Original air date: March 11, 1998
It was the dawn of the third age… Rebo & Zooty arrive on the station to great fanfare and theatricality—including Zooty being inside Rebo’s luggage. Elsewhere, Sheridan, Garibaldi, and Lochley are discussing a Brakiri religious holiday that happens once every two hundred years, and is about to hit. Elsewhere, Mollari is speaking with a Brakiri merchant who wants to sell him a trinket for the holiday, which is the Day of the Dead.
Lennier shows up at Delenn’s quarters, to her pleasant surprise. He had some leave coming, and he wanted to observe the Day of the Dead. When Delenn informs him that Rebo & Zooty are on the station, he’s thrilled, as he also always wanted to see them in person.
Sheridan hosts a reception for Rebo & Zooty. Most of the audience loves their performance, with the notable exception of Lochley, who excuses herself as fast as she can. She meets with the Brakiri ambassador, who wants to buy the station for one night. They’ll give it back when it’s done, but it has to be a proper purchase and ownership, not just a rental. Lochley agrees, despite an interruption from G’Kar urging her not to do it, as he’s heard stories about past Days of the Dead. Lochley reminds him that the IA guarantees freedom of religion, as stated in the declaration of principles that he himself wrote.
The Brakiri ambassador explains to a very tired Garibaldi that a section of the station is now officially Brakiri territory, marked off with a line on the deck, and his quarters are part of it. Garibaldi, who just wants to sleep, stumbles into his quarters, barely paying attention to anything the ambassador said.
Sheridan and Delenn host Rebo & Zooty for dinner. Through his vocoder, Zooty tells a joke in Minbari, and Delenn laughs her ass off. Sheridan asks Rebo if he can talk to Zooty directly, but Rebo sadly says that he never breaks character, not even for Rebo. He’s only spoken one word to Rebo: “Why?”
An energy field has gone up on the line that divides the Brakiri part of the station from the rest. G’Kar interrupts Corwin trying to do a trick with a hat that he saw Rebo & Zooty do to inform him that he’s sleeping in CnC for the night, as he doesn’t wish to be part of the Day of the Dead.
Lochley, having found nothing available on TV except for Rebo & Zooty programs, is surprised to see emergency lights go on. All attempts to contact CnC fail. Then she sees a young girl named Zoe in her quarters. Zoe is Lochley’s best friend from her (very) misspent youth. Zoe’s death is a big reason why Lochley got her life in order and joined EarthForce. Zoe is very surprised to find Lochley grown up and in space. When Lochley asks if Zoe killed herself or it was an accidental overdose, Zoe says she doesn’t remember, but she does know that she’s really dead. Her urge to party with her is rejected by Lochley, as she doesn’t really drink anymore.
Mollari is surprised to see Adira appear in his cabin. He tells her that he avenged her death, killing the man responsible. (He doesn’t mention that he also killed the man who he was tricked into thinking was responsible.) But he says he’d give it all up to be with her again.
Garibaldi is awakened out of a sound sleep by the emergency lights and someone in his shower. He pulls the PPG he keeps under his pillow out, only to find Dodger in his shower. It takes Garibaldi a bit before he’s willing to accept her presence and lower the PPG. He fills her in on his life since they first met, including telling her all about Lise.
Lennier’s meditation is interrupted by the arrival of Morden, who declares that Delenn doesn’t love Lennier the way he loves her and that Lennier will betray the Rangers. Lennier insists that he knows the former and that the latter will never happen. Lennier attempts to leave his quarters, but his cabin is right on the edge of the border between the Brakiri part of the station and the rest, and the energy field knocks him out.
Corwin reports to Sheridan that a section of the station has seemingly disappeared, or at least gone completely quiet. Lochley is in that section, which is why Corwin contacted Sheridan. (Doesn’t Lochley have a first officer? Or, y’know, anyone else in the chain of command of the station???) Sheridan investigates and finds the energy field, which is completely impenetrable.
Lochley manages to figure out that the station (or at least the part she’s in) is hundreds of light-years from the Epsilon system. She contacts Garibaldi and asks him to contact the station, using Proxima III to boost the signal. Garibaldi manages it, then goes back to catching up with Dodger while Lochley reassures Sheridan that everyone’s fine.
Rebo & Zooty tell Sheridan and Delenn that they’re thinking of getting into politics, as they don’t feel like they’re accomplishing anything by being performers. Sheridan disagrees, pointing out that the right to laugh and the ability to laugh are far too important, much more so than anything a politician does.
Zoe finally admits to Lochley that yeah, she committed suicide. She just couldn’t handle it anymore. She also has a message for Sheridan from someone named Kosh. Then she disappears.
Adira post-coitally expresses her happiness at Mollari’s impending emperor-hood before she disappears. Morden urges Lennier to take his words seriously before he disappears. And Dodger gives Garibaldi a final kiss before she disappears.
The station returns to normal. Lochley reports what happened to Sheridan, who doesn’t entirely believe it. Neither does Lochley, truly, but she’s willing to accept that it’s a weird mystery, as nobody was actually hurt. She also shares Kosh’s message with a very confused Sheridan.
G’Kar apologizes to Lochley, as he sees that everyone who was in the Brakiri portion of the station seems more at peace than they were yesterday. He now wishes he’d stayed in his quarters.
Zooty whispers in Sheridan’s ear: “Because it tells me to.”
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan gets to give life advice to two of his favorite comedians and get one final weird-ass pronouncement from Kosh.
Never work with your ex. We get Lochley’s background, including that she was very wild in her youth, a state of affairs she did a 180 on after Zoe’s death.
She also doesn’t find Rebo & Zooty at all funny.
The household god of frustration. Somehow it’s not a surprise that Garibaldi sleeps with a weapon under his pillow. Also he’s able to rejigger the communications on the station. Because he’s just that awesome.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is skeptical about Rebo & Zooty right up until Zooty tells a joke in Minbar that cracks her up.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… The dead person Mollari most wants to speak to is the very first Centauri emperor—whom he has a portrait of in his quarters—as he has several bones to pick with him. Instead, he gets to see and sleep with Adira once more, which he probably enjoys more…
Also, while he previously stated he didn’t understand the appeal of Rebo & Zooty, now he apparently finds them hilarious.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar absolutely refuses to take part in the Day of the Dead, though why he chooses CnC to sleep in when there’s a whole station full of places to bunk down is left as an exercise for the viewer. He later regrets this decision.
We live for the one, we die for the one. Lennier’s Ranger training seems to be proceeding nicely.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh manages to have one last cryptic-ass statement from beyond the grave: “When the long night comes, return to the end of the beginning.”
Looking ahead. Morden’s prediction that Lennier will betray the Rangers will come to pass in “Objects at Rest.” Kosh’s instruction to Sheridan likely refers to what he will be doing in “Sleeping in Light.”
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Both Garibaldi and Mollari get second chances with women they either were or wanted to be intimate with. It’s not clear whether or not Garibaldi and Dodger actually had sex or just talked all night.
Also Lennier snarkily refers to Sheridan as “your partner” when asking Delenn how the president is doing.
Welcome aboard. Three dead characters come back for a final go-round: back from “Into the Fire” is Ed Wasser as Morden, back from “GROPOS” is Marie Marshall as Dodger, and back from “Born to the Purple” is Fabia Udenio as Adira. It is the final appearance of all three. In addition, Bridget Flanery plays Zoe.
Other recurring regulars who show up are Jonathan Chapman as the Brakiri ambassador, back from “Rumors, Bargains, and Lies,” next to appear in “A Tragedy of Telepaths”; and Joshua Cox as Corwin, back from “Strange Relations,” next to appear in “Movements of Fire and Shadow.”
In addition, the great Penn & Teller appear as Rebo & Zooty, with Harlan Ellison providing the voice of Zooty’s vocoder. Ellison previously voiced a weird subroutine in the ship’s computer in “Ceremonies of Light and Dark” and played a Psi Cop in “The Face of the Enemy.”
Trivial matters. This is the first episode not written by J. Michael Straczynski since “Knives” way back in season two. This is also the last episode of B5 not written by him.
This episode was originally intended to air later in the season, but it was moved around because of TNT’s airing schedule, which was affected by TNT’s airing of March Madness college basketball games. Officially, it takes place prior to “Learning Curve,” which, if nothing else, explains why Mollari and G’Kar are still on the station after they seemingly leave for Centauri Prime in “Strange Relations.”
Adira was killed (off-camera) in “Interludes and Examinations.” Mollari was tricked into thinking Refa did it, and took revenge on him in “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place.”
Rebo & Zooty were first mentioned in “Rumors, Bargains, and Lies.” This is their only onscreen appearance.
Rebo’s declaration at customs—that he has nothing to declare but his genius—is a riff on a quote by Victor Hugo, one that was later repeated by (and often misattributed as original to) Oscar Wilde. The Rebo & Zooty movie, Sons of the New Desert, is a tribute to Laurel & Hardy, who did a 1933 movie entitled Sons of the Desert. In that movie, Rebo has a line of dialogue insulting Zooty’s intelligence that is a riff on a line Edmund Blackadder had to his servant Baldrick in the Blackadder II episode “Head.”
Dodger’s declaration that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is something that your humble rewatcher first learned of in college ten years prior to this episode airing (from, if memory serves, an episode of A Prairie Home Companion)and I have loved tormenting people with this fact ever since. However, one of the poems Dodger quotes is actually Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “A Few Figs from Thistles.”
Morden seems to think that Sheridan is still dead after dying in “Z’ha’dum.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Now anyone can be emperor! I can be emperor, Vir can be emperor—if Vir can be emperor, a small Earth cat can be emperor!”
—Mollari, ranting.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Zooty-zoot-zoot-zoot!” I’ve been dreading this episode, wondering if I’d be able to watch it objectively given what has been revealed about its writer in recent times. I pretty much approach anything that Neil Gaiman—whom I used to consider a friendly acquaintance—is involved with cautiously and often wanting a shower afterward. I also—and this has been true of several fifth-season entries—had no specific memory of watching the episode in question the first time.
Let’s start with what’s good about it: Penn & Teller are never not wonderful, and they do a lovely job as the oft-mentioned Rebo & Zooty. I especially like the way they made Teller’s mute persona a plot point.
As for the actual Day of the Dead stuff, it’s a mixed bag. It’s great fun to see Marie Marshall back as Dodger, and it’s always nice to see Ed Wasser again. Learning that Lochley is a reformed party girl actually brings a lot of the character’s stiffness and by-the-book attitude into focus.
But a lot of it also is head-scratching, starting with why the heck Morden is visiting Lennier, of all people? Really, the only people Morden should be visiting are Mollari or Vir. Indeed, Morden visiting Vir would’ve been fabulous on so many levels! As a bonus, we’d be spared Lennier being a jealous twerp. Pretty much every portrayal of Lennier as moping after Delenn has been oogy at best, tiresome at worst, and this falls into the latter category. It winds up being a total waste of Wasser, who deserved a more interesting comeback.
I also can’t help but notice that Garibaldi and Mollari get, in essence, wet dreams made flesh, while Lochley is given a bad childhood memory made flesh. Though Lochley, at least, gets some closure out of it—not to mention some nice revelations about her character.
I will say that it’s nice to get a different voice. Straczynski’s strengths as a writer have always been more in plotting than scripting. Getting a different style for the first time in fifty-six episodes is welcome.
Still this, like so many fifth-season episodes, is not everything it could have, or indeed should have, been.
Next week: “In the Kingdom of the Blind.”
Moderators’ note: We understand that the allegations against Neil Gaiman inspire strong feelings and reactions, and the larger discussion surrounding the author may be triggering for some readers. We ask that you please keep the conversation on this rewatch focused on Babylon 5 and the episode currently under discussion. Thank you.
This is, I think the first 5th season episode I actually remembered. Written by Gaiman explains why.
I remembered finding Rebo and Zooty annoying and, yeah, still annoying. I thought Morden was wasted on Lennier, and that whole bit could have gone away. Morden and Vir though. Yeah. That would’ve been awesome.
The Garibaldi part has an interesting new reaction from me. I know a guy who used to sleep with a pistol under his pillow and one morning he heard a noise, woke up, and while pulling the pistol from under his pillow managed to shoot the his pinky clean off. So my reaction to Garibaldi here is that he’s lucky he didn’t shoot himself.
I’m going to sound stupid here, but how many encounters did Lennier actually have with Morden? I can’t see how it would be that many, especially compared to Londo and Vir, that Lennier would actually think about Morden during Day Of The Dead. While Londo, Garibaldi and Lockley actually brought back very special people in their lives, Lennier brought back someone that was barely an acquaintance. There wasn’t someone he was close with to think about, it was Morden. Doesn’t make senese.
I can’t recall that Lennier had any encounters with Morden. One of the fascinating and frustrating flaws of this episode is that the question of what if Lennier and Morden had had an encounter is interesting, and could be quite revealing of the characters of both. The episode then gives a surface-level answer in the first minute of their encounter that doesn’t advance either’s character in any way, and proceeds to do nothing more with them for the rest of the episode.
I can’t think of anything useful Morden would have to say to VIr, though. Vir actually IS grounded; Lennier, though, is lying to himself, and in this episode is called on it (and responds with denial). Why Modren would be the one showing up to try to snap Lennier out of his denial, though, is not clear. There is a certain irony, though, in having Modren speaking the truth for once, only to have his message rejected.
Mollari getting Mr Morden would have been more interesting but it’s also good that he had something nice happen before the impending terribleness.
This episode should end any suggestion of Babylon 5 being harder science fiction than Star Trek. Which is a neat bit of discourse to do away with.
This is another one of those episodes from the first half of the fifth season that I want to like more than I do.
While I usually enjoy Penn and Teller, I absolutely cannot stand them as Rebo and Zooty. I feel like Penn struggles with the dialogue, especially the scene about getting into politics. I get that Rebo and Zooty are supposed to be an acquired taste of sorts, but that whole subplot just doesn’t work for me.
One strange thing about this episode is that I always remember the encounters with the dead as being more substantial. Only the Lochley story seems to match what I remembered. I thought Londo had a more heartful discussion with Adira, that Garibaldi talked about Lise a lot more, and that Lennier and Morden traded barbs more often. So my overall feeling for the episode was one of missed opportunities. (And yes, Morden and Vir would have been far better, IMO.)
…I always remember the encounters with the dead as being more substantial.
Me too. Morden was wasted in that. If Lennier needed those two oracular revelations, surely another (dead) character could have relayed it. Morden was so checked out, he was literally reading the paper.
But it does show that while Lennier might tell himself he’s a seeker, he’s putting a lot more energy into brooding about a past and a present he can’t change.
Agreed. Neroon or Marcus showing up for Lennier would have been interesting, for example.
Marcus could have been a ghost of Jacob Marley, I suppose. But I think part of the point, to the extent there is one, is that Lennier doesn’t really have anyone who could successfully deliver the message that he’s on the wrong path.
Maybe the best thing I can say about this episode is that it makes my like Lochley a little more. Not learning about her troubled past, mind you, but rather her dislike of Rebo and Zooty.
Apart from “Sleeping in Light,” this may be the only S5 episode where I can say, “Oh, yeah. I know what happens in that one.” And 90% of that is Dodger showing up again.
Count me among those who think Morden would have been better paired with Vir (who we’ve barely seen this season). I suppose you could argue that his appearing to Lennier is supposed to hint at the shadows hanging over Lennier’s future, but it’s still a stretch.
I don’t think Vir needs either closure or prophetic warnings at this point. So, while I’m sure the actors could have delivered a good scene together, I don’t think it would have accomplished anything from a character perspective unless it was more on Morden’s side. Personally, I wouldn’t be that interested in humanizing Morden and I can see why Gaiman probably wouldn’t have wanted to redefine the character in a one-off script.
Agreed on the rest. I would add “A View from the Gallery” as another episode from season 5 that stuck in my memory, but this is the one that comes to mind unprompted. More Dodger is probably worth the price of admission alone.
On Rebo and Zooty, although intellectually I understand the commentary on the social function of humour, watching crowds laugh at something that subjectively isn’t funny at all is alienating. That’s the point, but it’s uncomfortable viewing.
On top of all the other problems with bringing Morden back, I was distracted by the fact that he had a different hairstyle. If these were memories of the dead, wouldn’t they look the way people remembered them? If they were actual ghosts of some kind, wouldn’t they look the way they did when they died? Do they have barbershops in the afterlife? Or did Lennier envision his hairstyle wrong because they never actually interacted before? But that just brings us back to why he visited Lennier in the first place.
though why he chooses CnC to sleep in when there’s a whole station full of places to bunk down is left as an exercise for the viewer
Honestly? No viewer exercise required here. The sight of G’Kar in his jammies trying to get some nap time, disrupting the night shift’s activities is an hilarious visual pun.
This is an interesting one. I first watched this back in 1999 with no knowledge of who Neil Gaiman was. Having obviously digested Sandman in the decades since, I can see some thematic metaphysical similarities. I can almost imagine a what-if scenario where Babylon 5 and the Sandman universe crossed paths, with Morpheus having some role in the event of the characters revisiting their dead loved ones.
TNT’s scheduling choices and the inconsistency of Londo and G’Kar’s itinerary aside, this episode is a welcome break from the meandering telepath drama – that alone is a major plus. Of course, it’s not perfect. It varies from character to character.
Lennier’s is obviously the weak link. While I don’t mind Morden’s presence and role in what they’re going for, this could have worked way better had they brought back Marcus, the one person who Lennier personally admitted his feelings for Delenn and the one person whose death personally haunted him. Of course, he would have to be 100% dead – and we’ll find out in the finale that wasn’t quite the case.
Lochley’s is the best one. While Zoe isn’t a particularly interesting character, Lochley’s newly established drinking history smartly introduces the reason why she has such a tense working relationship with Garibaldi, also setting up some of their better scenes later in the season.
Garibaldi and Dodger are middle of the road – I do like the banter and dialogue. Even with JMS presumably doing revisions, I assume Gaiman watched GROPOS as homework for this one. It brings back some of the old Garibaldi moments before Bester messed up his mind.
I adore Londo and Adira together again. Now there is a successful five-year working character arc, going all the way to “Born to the Purple”. Given where Londo has been and especially where he’s headed later in the season, he’s more than earned a moment of pure bliss and joy. Their chemistry remains palpable.
The Brakiri notion of buying part of the station and transporting it half a sector away is smartly played for laughs, while still giving us some fresh material that expands their limited lore. Worldbuilding at its core.
Rebo and Zooty wanting to get into politics? That did not age well. This is like the Simpsons predicting Trump’s rise to power. What I do like about their schtick isn’t their actual jokes, but the way the B5 characters have such strong reactions to them. It feels corny, but in a fun way.
“Lennier’s is obviously the weak link. While I don’t mind Morden’s presence and role in what they’re going for, this could have worked way better had they brought back Marcus, the one person who Lennier personally admitted his feelings for Delenn and the one person whose death personally haunted him. ”
I think the point of using Morden was to make it obvious that Lennier (who is lying to himself about about having accepted that he’s in control of his feelings for Delenn) because he doesn’t care for the messenger, is completely refusing to listen to the message and is thus dooming himself. That dynamic would be harder to pull off if Marcus was the message-bearer. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Morden to be the message bearer, as he never really had any connection at all with Lennier, either positive or negative, prior to his death.
It just occurred to me that Marcus could have been a very good message-bearer, since both he and Lennier joined the Rangers for the wrong reasons. In Marcus’s case, it was because he blamed himself for his brother’s death, and in Lennier’s it was because he couldn’t deal with his emotions about Delenn in a healthy way. But where Marcus threw himself wholeheartedly into becoming an exemplary Ranger, Lennier’s heart is quite obviously not in it. It would have been far more instructive (not to mention entertaining, given Marcus’s way with words and Lennier’s temple training) to watch Lennier dig himself in deeper as he rejects Marcus’s message, rather than the pointed ignoring of Morden that we got.
Except Marcus would first have to admit to himself that the joined for the wrong reasons. I can also see him ENCOURAGING Lennier to still pursue Delenn because he had that big romantic streak that would insist things could still work out.
I’d think that Ronald Reagan or Al Franken would be a better analogy. Although it was hard to tell if Rebo & Zooty were sincere about wanting to go into politics or just doing a schtick of some kind.
As for Lochley and Zoe, it sounded to me like they were using drugs, not drinking. It is possible to die of an alcohol overdose, I suppose, but I really don’t think that’s the “stuff” Zoe was talking about.
True, (re: Lochley), but she obviously didn’t do *just* alocohol; otherwise, I don’t think that Zoey would have stayed with her so strongly. She’d feel an amount of guilt for Zoey’s demise, even if Zoery took her own life.
Addictive personalities don’t always fixate on just one substance. And after Zoey’s death, being (and staying) sober (perhaps moreso than keeping away from other recreational drugs) was a standin for foreswearing ALL substance abuse.
I figured that R&Z talking about politics was a lovely subtle dig at politicians in general (all a bunch of not-so-funny comedians).
Except Reagan had a lot of political experience before he got into electoral politics.
But he still had to make that initial decision to get into politics. Rebo didn’t say they planned to run for office right off the bat, just to explore going into politics.
You’re right. It was a more drug-specific case of substance abuse. I feel the effect on Lochley is the same though. She represses her instinct to escape reality – whether it’s doing drugs or drinking – throwing herself at the job. And it’s the reason she’s so repelled by Garibaldi. She recognizes that he hasn’t managed to separate his worst instincts from his supposed professionalism.
I had the same reaction as Keith the first time I saw this one — it was so refreshing to hear a different authorial voice at last, to see an episode that didn’t just sound like multiple J. Michael Straczynskis talking to each other. Seeing it again, though, I find it rather weak. There are no real stakes and nobody does anything that has any impact on the resolution. There’s some fun problem-solving getting the comms working, but it has no payoff except Lochley telling Sheridan that the situation will resolve itself in an hour anyway. And the actual visitations are underwhelming, with only Lochley’s really telling us anything new (although I’m surprised Keith didn’t call out how awfully Tracy Scoggins performed Lochley’s initial shock at seeing Zoe). Lennier and Morden are a particularly random combination. Though it was nice to see the gorgeous Fabiana Udenio again, as pointless and indulgent as Adira’s return was otherwise.
There was also the annoying inconsistency on the distance to the Brakiri homeworld. It was initially said to be over 200 million light years away — which would be not only outside the Milky Way Galaxy, but outside the Virgo Supercluster altogether — then a million light years (which is at least within the Local Group), then finally a saner 27 light years. Wasn’t there any script editing? And then there’s G’Kar sleeping on the floor. Even if he had good reason for choosing C&C as his campsite — say, if he wanted to be on hand for a crisis — surely there’d be some kind of a break room nearby where the staff could get a brief rest midway through a long shift.
Even the Rebo & Zooty parts were underwhelming, little more than a glorified cameo. There was an attempt to say something about the importance of humor, but the scene just fizzled out without any real resolution, like the episode overall. And the payoff with Londo finding R&Z funny now only works if you remember the bit from years earlier about Londo not liking them; at least they should’ve reestablished his disdain for them here. (I also had no recollection of who Dodger was the first time I saw this, since she was just a one-shot guest from years before.)
The total lack of any explanation for the phenomenon bugged me too, but I guess it’s not too out of place in this universe that’s ambivalent about the reality of souls and features magical life-energy transfers and so forth.
In the Script Book, NG annotates Morden’s comment about 200 million light years away with “He’s exaggerating. In reality it was barely 30 million light years away.” NG has no comment on Lochley’s two comments, one of which is “it’s acting as if the rest of Babylon 5 were millions of light years away” to herself (and Zoe) and the other, to Sheridan, which is precise (two levels up and 27 light years away). That says the two obviously wrong numbers were deliberate on NG’s part and left in place by JMS.
Not justification, just context.
Okay, but they’re both so ridiculously huge that I have trouble buying them even as rhetorical exaggerations. At least the first one. I mean, people do say things like “It’s a million miles away,” which is four times the distance to the Moon, but “over 200 million” is too specific to feel like a metaphor.
Also, it doesn’t seem in character for either Morden or Lochley to use such extravagant exaggeration in those contexts. Morden is informing Lennier of the factual state of affairs, that the rest of the station is inaccessible, and Lochley is trying to diagnose a practical problem. And neither one strikes me as prone to such fanciful language. Wasn’t Morden’s whole deal that everything he said was strictly true, albeit selective of how much of the truth he revealed?
My script note here would have been that a light-year is already a huge, huge distance, so in both cases, just saying “light-years away” (or “parsecs away”) would have been enough to convey vast distance without the overindulgent millions. I mean, even if it was intended to be exaggeration on the characters’ part, it comes off to the viewer (or at least to me) as the kind of ignorance of basic astronomy that’s all too typical of TV sci-fi writers.
While this is one of the few fifth season episodes I remember as a distinct episode, on rewatching it for today I’m amazed at how little there is here for the length of the episode. The Rebo and Zooty bits felt even more insubstantial than I remembered, there wasn’t as much time spent figuring out what was going on as I remembered, Garibaldi hotwiring the comm system was perfunctory (and he can do that without leaving his quarters with a couple of wires, really?), and even the most substantial of the visits (Lochley and Zoe) only has a couple of scenes. I was looking forward to this episode (despite the writer), and now that I’ve watched it I’m left wondering where the actual episode was.
B5’s previous first officer, Susan Ivanova, started as Lt. Commander, which is Corwin’s rank. Clearly, he’s now first officer.
I think the point of the which dead person showed up had to do with trying to help the one they appeared to resolve an issue. Zoe showing up helped Lochley come to terms with her past (and remove some undeserved guilt). Adira helped Londo be able to accept becoming Emperor and, in some sense, apologize for indirectly causing her death. Garibaldi was able to commit to Lise (in absentia) by working through his feelings by talking to Dodger. Lennier needed to hear and accept that Delenn’s love for him is friendship, not romantic (which he rejects). He also rejects hearing what his feelings will drive him to do. Morden was probably not the best person to hear this from (since they had no relationship) but I can’t see him accepting it from Marcus (who he has all sorts of other guilt issues over) or anyone else.
And, according to the script annotations, G’Kar was in CnC to make a STATEMENT.
For some inexplicable reason I always misremember Gaiman writing the Jack the Ripper episode instead of this one, the details of which I have zero recollection. I’d cut the cord by the time the fifth season aired and didn’t see it for well over a decade until I’d picked up all of the DVD box sets. I hated it so much, largely because of the preponderance of the telepath storyline, that I donated that season to my library and haven’t watched an episode from it since. For me the show ends with the fourth season and I’m content with that.
I tried to find Rebo and Zooty charming, assuming JMS was indulging childhood nostalgia for old comedy duos like Abbott and Costello, but it never clicked. Partly because I found young Penn and Teller especially grating (they’re far more endearing these days having grown out of their cockiness) but mostly because JMS and here, Gaiman, had no knack for evoking the requisite schticky quality essential to pull it off. Everything about them falls flat.
A few years earlier Rob Reiner had created a very short-lived television series called Morton & Hayes about a fictional mid-century comedy duo that was far more in the ballpark. There really weren’t any comedy duos left bythis point in time and JMS must have wanted to use performers with some name recognition so we got this but having one half of the duo a silent partner robs the conceit of any of the necessary broad banter to pull it off.
This entire season felt like a needless postscript, like giving a final performance of a show that had already been canceled. I can’t imagine JMS had the time, energy and heart left in him to give the show a proper encore season and I’m sympathetic but the whole thing is just too pitiful and annoying to bother with.
Rebo and Zooty are a direct Laurel and Hardy reference (their movie is named after an L&C film), so a very different dynamic from Abbott and Costello.
In my opinion the entirety of S5 stands in opposition to S4’s presentation of Sheridan, as if JMS registered that S4 makes Sheridan too central and too good and opts to complicate that by showing him as a middling politician in S5 making a series of well-intentioned mistakes. 501 directly acknowledges Great Man theory and verbalizes JMS’ response but S5 tries to show us.
Given the lower budget, the show could never pivot towards B5 West Wing, so the task may have been impractical to begin with; anyone who thinks S4 is the best season of the show is going to be profoundly unhappy. Personally, I think the actual chain of Objects in Motion/At Rest/Sleeping in Light sticks the landing and am sympathetic to the rest of the season; S4 is more of an anomaly for the series than 5 and the shift from “overfull episodes” to “filler episodes” plays much worse in an era where a season is 8 streaming episodes and filler no longer exists. B5, as broadcast TV, is paced like broadcast TV, and that tempo is somewhat foreign now.
I think “Sleeping in Light” at least is worth bothering with!
In addition to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” I once heard that every Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of the theme to “Gilligan’s Island,” but you’d never hear anyone on another TV series say that.
Common meter and ballad meter are a gift.
Also, a good way to check whether a limerick has the correct meter is to sing it to the Popeye theme.
“why the heck Morden is visiting Lennier, of all people? ” I always had a wild notion (with nothing to back it up, I admit) that Gaiman intended for Marcus to be Lennier’s visitor, but was advised by Straczynski not to do that, because it was going to turn out that Marcus wasn’t actually dead.
It does feel like an actor-availability swap situation.
Interesting (and wildly off the arc!) ep. I, too, have decidely mixed feelings about the writer (we refuse to finish watching “Good Omens”, even though David Tenant, especially, is great). Penn and Teller fit right in with the weirdness of this episode (I hear that Penn, in particular, was NOT keen on doing the Rebo and Zooty schtick…). It WAS strange that Morden would visit Lennier, but at least he was put to good use in doing some Lennier-oriented foreshadowing.
Frnakly, I enoyed the episode as a little fluff, but it was also one of only the two times I was impressed by Scoggins. When she gave us her password phrase, she nailed it – “Zoey’s dead”. It looked as if she *really* meant it , and the emotion was still raw. The other (not as good as this one) was her dust-up with Garibaldi about addiction.
IMHO, of course.
I loved Rebo and Zooty. They were one of the many little details that made the B5 universe feel real and lived in. And Penn and Teller brought them to life beautifully.
The rest of the episode left me cold, as the Day of the Dead thing just didn’t work for me.
I think the idea was better than the execution. I mean, the original intent of Reebo & Zooty was to convey that humor is subjective and that what’s funny to people centuries from now would be incomprehensible to us. But ultimately R&Z ended up just being a riff on Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges and Penn & Teller, with a joke cribbed from Blackadder, and it was just too commonplace to convey the idea. It would’ve been better if they’d been left unseen and only been referenced with occasional bizarre non sequiturs, leaving the rest to our imagination.
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that it’s kind of appropriative or ethnocentric to use the term “Day of the Dead,” the name of a major Mexican holiday, for an exotic alien custom, without ever mentioning that humans have a similar holiday.
I think the idea was better than the execution.
I agree 100% with your Reebo and Zooty analysis. I was about to write something similar, but you did it more concisely.
Of course “the idea was better than the execution” applies to other things in B5 (and much of the outside world, too)
A late thought on this episode that I had while trying to fall asleep last night. The encounter between Lochley and Zoey may originally have been intended to be between Ivanova and her mother. Susan clearly needed some form of closure from her mother’s suicide, and it would have carried a lot more emotional weight for long-time viewers. Plus, Ivanova is a better choice for a conduit for a message from Kosh.
For all that we like to play the game of “how did things get screwed up by un-cancelling season five?”, based on quotes from JMS on the Lurker’s Guide page for the episode this story was pretty much entirely Gaiman, with only minor input from JMS. Whatever the balance, it definitely says something about the episode that we can all think of pairings that would have worked better.
(Link quarantined to its own line because of the abysmal comment formatting.)
Lurker’s Guide page for Day of the Dead
It’s worth considering that for a guest-driven episode like this, the choices of character pairings may have come down to actor availability as much as anything else. For instance, I can imagine that a scene between Garibaldi and the ghost of William Edgars might have been more interesting than a hookup with some one-shot guest star I hardly remembered, but Efram Zimbalist Jr. might not have been available that week.
Although in that case, instead of doing old home week for familiar faces, it might have been better if more of the visiting ghosts had been new characters that could reveal new insights into the protagonists’ pasts, like with Lochley’s visitation. Or maybe characters that have been mentioned but never seen, like Frank Kemmer, Garibaldi’s old friend whose murder catalyzed Garibaldi’s descent into alcoholism. Maybe Lennier could have been visited by a parent or an early mentor.
My memory from looking at the published script years ago is that Gaiman didn’t write Morden’s message from Kosh: he wrote in the script “Give me a sign”, to which JMS obligingly providing one. Also, when the cast was interviewed about how it was like working with Penn and Teller, Boxleitner (somewhat sheepishly, as I recall) admitted they weren’t really his favorite magicians, while Furlan gushed about how great working with them was.
I’ve always remembered this episode, but it was never a favorite. I had no idea when first watching that it was written by an outsider to the series, let alone a “name” writer like Gaiman. I was bothered that it was an essentially supernatural story with no explanation for why these things would happen in a nominally science-fictional world. Sure, lots of strange quasi-supernatural things happens in Babylon 5, but they usually have some kind of explanation, or some implication that there is an explanation that we’re not directly told–for example, the Minbari religious caste declaration that Minbari souls are being reborn in human bodies, which I found really strange when I first heard it, can be explained as a metaphor for detecting the presence of Valen’s DNA in humans. Bu there’s also no EVIDENCE presented that souls are actually being reborn, just a device that glows in the presence of someone related to Valen. It’s simply a belief, which the Minbari act on, just as people act on lots of unproven religious beliefs.
But “Day of the Dead” asks us to believe that, just to satisfy the tenets of a Brakiri religious holiday, people return from the dead, and the places where this happens, and everything and everyone in them, are instantly transported light years to Brakiri space. It’s a wild, memorable idea, to be sure, but it makes no sense within the established boundaries of Babylon 5’s storytelling.
I didn’t mind that there was no explanation to the Day of the Dead, sometimes a mistery is fine and i definitely don’t consider it supernatural in my head, just that we don’t know how and what happened exactly
Kosh’s message came via Lochley, via Zoe, not Morden. I don’t think Kosh and Morden were exactly on speaking terms given that Morden directed his assassination, or that Morden would actually pass that message on.
That said, JMS did say that Gaiman didn’t write the line. Per the Lurker’s Guide, “[Gaiman] asked what [the message] would be, and I gave him that, knowing that I’d been looking for a way to slip that in as early as season 4.”
The ONLY thing I liked about the episode is that we got to know a bit more about Lochley and it made her less hateable.