“Divided Loyalties”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jesus Treviño
Season 2, Episode 19
Production episode 220
Original air date: October 11, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… On Mars, a fatally wounded human passes on a data crystal to a Ranger before he dies. It’s information that B5 apparently needs, because it isn’t safe.
Sheridan and Garibaldi have a clandestine meeting in the bathroom, waiting until it’s empty (and scanned for listening devices) before talking openly. Garibaldi thinks that Winters should be brought into the inner circle. Sheridan agrees.
Ivanova and Winters are sharing a meal, during which Winters mentions that she isn’t sure where she’s going to sleep tonight, as her quarters are being repaired. Ivanova offers crash space in her cabin.
The commander is then summoned to CnC, as there’s a ship coming through the jumpgate that isn’t scheduled or responding to communications. They tow it on board and discover only one person on board, who is unconscious. As she’s brought to medlab, Garibaldi recognizes her: Lyta Alexander, the first commercial telepath assigned to B5.
Garibaldi gives Sheridan a précis of the events of “The Gathering,” plus that Alexander (and the station’s first medical officer) were recalled to Earth after getting to see inside Kosh’s encounter suit.
When she regains consciousness, Alexander is squirrelly. She says one of B5’s senior personnel is a traitor. She meets with the senior staff and fills them in on what she’s been up to since she was recalled. EarthGov and the Psi Corps grilled her for two years before she escaped to Mars and joined an underground movement, working for them while trying to find a way to get into Vorlon space (at which she has thus far failed, as have every other non-Vorlon who’s tried). While on Mars, she learned of Control, an embedded personality inside a host body. The host is unaware of Control, and Control periodically acts while the host is asleep to commit evil acts of evil.
Alexander can activate Control, which will expose it, but that will also kill the host personality completely. Control is activated by a password that is sent telepathically into the double agent’s mind. There’s no scanning involved, just “saying” a word. She wants permission to do this to station personnel.
Sheridan says they have to discuss it, and Alexander is escorted to protective custody.
Ivanova outright refuses to let any telepath in her head in any way. Sheridan first needs to confirm Alexander’s story, which Garibaldi does. But that still doesn’t necessarily prove anything. The traitor Alexander heard about could have been Garibaldi’s deputy who shot him. Sheridan wants to sleep on it.
Garibaldi orders Allan to have Alexander moved to more comfortable quarters so she can get a good night’s sleep. Allan assigns it to two guards played by guest stars so they can be shot with impunity—they’re ambushed, with one guard killed and another wounded. Alexander escapes.
Sheridan is now much more willing to believe Alexander’s story. But she’s missing. Ivanova is still pissed, but Sheridan tries to talk her off the ledge, pointing out that their careers, and maybe their lives, are on the line here. Ivanova then confesses to Sheridan that she’s a latent telepath. Not even a P1, but she can block a scan. She’s gone to great lengths to keep this a secret, and if Alexander exposes that, she’s hosed.
Alexander contacts Delenn and uses her as a go-between. Eventually, they meet up again. The senior staff are given the password first, with Sheridan allowing Ivanova to put off her test for a bit while they test other personnel.
But nobody is Control. Finally, Ivanova relents, though on instinct she blocks Alexander’s first attempt. But Ivanova isn’t Control, either.
Winters happens to walk into the room at that moment, and Alexander shoots the password into her head, and suddenly Control takes over, furious that Alexander has outed her. She tries to shoot Alexander, but is stopped by Garibaldi, who immediately has her taken away.
The senior staff gather to worry about what will happen. They figure that Psi Corps will want the sleeper program kept on the QT, so they won’t reveal much that Control learned while manipulating Winters, but even with that mutually assured destruction, they’ve got problems.
Ivanova visits Control, who makes it clear that Winters is gone forever.
Alexander visits Kosh and reveals that—contrary to her earlier assertions—she remembers everything about her telepathic scan of Kosh, and has kept that secreted away in a corner of her mind. She asks to see Kosh’s true form, a request he grants immediately.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan has to decide if he’ll allow Alexander to probe his staff. The needs of keeping their resistance movement secret proves paramount, especially given the very real danger presented by Control.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova reveals her latent telepathy, allows herself to be scanned and outed to the senior staff and to Alexander as a latent telepath, and loses her new lover, all in one episode.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi decides to pretend to be Control initially when Alexander sends the password, a little practical joke that is appallingly inappropriate given that one of his deputies was just killed and another wounded when Alexander was ambushed by Control. But they were just guest stars, so I guess they don’t really matter all that much…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn uses the Earth newspaper Universe Today as a way of learning more about the human press (after she was ambushed by Cynthia Torqueman in “And Now for a Word”), of learning how humans view Minbari especially, plus sometimes she learns things from Universe Today that she should have been told (but wasn’t) by her government.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Psi Corps’ sleeper program gets outed. Control isn’t very happy about it.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Sheridan and Delenn have two adorable scenes together, one at the newspaper kiosk, one in hydroponics. The latter ends with Delenn affectionately putting her hand on his.
Meantime, apparently Ivanova and Winters are sleeping together now. But not any longer.
Welcome aboard. Three recurring regulars in this one, two of whom will be opening-credits regulars eventually. Back from “The Gathering” is Patricia Tallman as Alexander; she’ll return next season in “Passing Through Gethsemane” (and become an opening-credits regular in season four). Back from “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” are both Jeff Conaway as Allan and Ardwight Chamberlain as Kosh. Conaway will return in “The Fall of Night” (and become an opening-credits regular in season three), while Chamberlain will return in “Comes the Inquisitor.”
Trivial matters. This is the final appearance of Andrea Thompson as Winters, though she will remain in the opening credits for the rest of this season. The character will eventually be replaced by her predecessor, Patricia Tallman’s Alexander, who makes a return appearance in this episode. Cha cha cha.
Sheridan recalls the Kosh-induced dream he had in “All Alone in the Night,” specifically Ivanova half hidden in shadow asking if he knows who she is, which may have been a portent of this secret, especially since Ivanova specifically says she doesn’t know who she really is.
Allan is still wearing his Nightwatch armband that he started wearing in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.”
The kiosk allows you to print your copy of Universe Today only with the types of stories you want to read. It’s a feature that—like many science fictional predictions—seemed very futuristic in 1995 and seems quaintly retro now.
This episode kicks off the B5 tradition of holding the final four episodes of a season until right before the next season airs. “Confessions and Lamentations” aired in May of 1995, with this episode and its three subsequent ones airing in October and early November, with season three then debuting immediately after that. This sequence will be repeated in season three, and sort of in season four—the final four episodes of the fourth season were also held until the fall of 1997, but season five (which was on TNT instead of the discontinued PTEN) didn’t debut until January 1998.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I never told them—I never told anyone. I hid it all away in the smallest, tiniest corner of my mind. They could’ve killed me and they still wouldn’t have found it. Only at night, alone, would I open that small door in my mind where I kept the memory of you and listen to your voice. Listen to you sing me to sleep.”
—Alexander revealing to Kosh (and the viewer) the truth.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Go to hell.” The heights to which I loved this episode when it first aired is matched only by the depths to which I despise it in retrospect.
When I first saw it in the fall of 1995, I thought it was such a wonderful twist and a nifty setup for future plots. I assumed, incredibly wrongly, that we’d be seeing Winters periodically as an antagonist using her inside knowledge about B5 to damage our heroes.
It wasn’t until later that I found out that Andrea Thompson was frustrated by her lack of much of a role for someone in the opening credits of a TV show, and was written out rather than give her a more flexible schedule so she could find other work instead of being on call regularly and hoping she might be in an episode.
Instead, the uppity woman was written out permanently. And if that sounds unfair, you’d be right if this was a lone event, but it isn’t. At roughly the same time, Stephen Furst got a co-starring role in a sitcom called Misery Loves Company, and his B5 schedule was adjusted to accommodate. (Not that it needed to be adjusted much, as the show only lasted eight episodes.) It’s hard not to draw conclusions when the man gets the accommodation and the woman gets unconvincingly written out.
And looking back at the episode from three decades on, it’s unconvincing as hell. We start with the out-of-nowhere revelation that Ivanova and Winters are sleeping together. The leap from “okay, maybe I don’t hate you as much as I hate other telepaths” to “sure, stay in my quarters, and you can sleep in my bed” is way too long and too far to be in any way convincing.
But, of course, there wasn’t time to develop the relationship, because Winters needed to be gotten rid of. Winters will never be seen again, and only referenced once or twice, but otherwise is completely disappeared.
Which, as I indicated above, takes the wind out of the sails of the whole thing. We get about ten minutes of shock and betrayal from the crew in the episode’s final act, and then that’s it. This huge game-changing character alteration is a total nothingburger for the remainder of the franchise’s duration. What started as a literal character assassination instead becomes a figurative one because an actor had the temerity to ask for the ability to work more.
Actually, two theoretically game-changing alterations are unconvincingly dropped here, as Winters’ telekinesis is allegedly a huge deal, though absolutely nothing has been done with it for the better part of two seasons. And now it never will.
Finally, at no point does anyone bring up the fact that Alexander commits murder in this episode. What’s more, it’s premeditated murder. Alexander says right up front that her sending the password into someone’s brain will make Control come to the fore, killing the host body’s personality completely. The ethics of this is completely glossed over and ignored. After all, we’ve got an actor to write out!
The episode has its merits. For all that having Garibaldi suggest bringing Winters into the inner circle in the episode in which she’ll be revealed to be a traitor is clumsy writing, I love that Sheridan and Garibaldi have important clandestine meetings in the bathroom. All the stuff with Ivanova’s latent telepathy is brilliantly done, full of pathos and anguish, fantastically played by Claudia Christian. And I’ve been a fan of Patricia Tallman since the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, and she does good work here.
And hey, I’d say Thompson got her revenge, as she wound up on NYPD Blue for four years, and a lot more people watched that show than B5…
Next week: “The Long, Twilight Struggle.”
“The kiosk allows you to print your copy of Universe Today only with the types of stories you want to read. It’s a feature that—like many science fictional predictions—seemed very futuristic in 1995 and seems quaintly retro now.”
The curating aspect is perhaps not so quaint.
Surprised that guy in the prologue didn’t get blood on the data crystal.
You’d think they at least would have had Lyta concealed in some fashion when the personnel were getting whammied.
Riffable moments
“This personality is then submerged so far in the subconscious that it won’t show up, even on a deep scan. But it’s always there. Watching. Listening. Spying.”
Downloading porn.
“It’s a part of the body. It’s…”
Hinder. Fanny. Patootie.
The “Universe Today” bit was already being rapidly OBE’d by the time the episode aired, as Strazynski should have known. The WWW was a thing (well, barely) by then, the writing was on the wall for the dead tree news, and the news media knew it, as Clay Shirky noted here:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable
Still, it wasn’t until last year I cancelled home delivery of my hometown paper because I finally had an iPad that could show the online “print edition” well enough for that to work.
Given that one method of execution is personality replacement, maybe Winters is just regarded in universe as a casualty of war? Still a poor way to treat the actor. And the story, for that matter.
It’s not borne out by the production order, but the relationship between Sheridan and Delenn feels like this episode should have come before last week’s. They’re still fairly formal with each other, addressing the other by title rather than the first name basis established last time. And that gentle hand touch shouldn’t have been so surprising after she collapsed in his arms in deep emotional pain.
I’m not saying Andrea Thompson didn’t get screwed over, but Vir was effectively written out of the show (we haven’t gotten there yet). But it was done in such a way that he was able to come back after Stephen Furst’s show bombed. It might have been possible to bring Talia back with a lot of handwaving about Ironheart doing something or other top protect the original personality. It wouldn’t have been very credible, though.
Delenn was in the throes of unbearable grief in the last episode, so it was more of a reaction than a conscious choice. Putting her hand on his was a conscious choice. And they’re only beginning their personal relationship, so it makes perfect sense to me they’d still be formal with each other in public.
I can only speculate, but like I said in my larger comment, I wonder if the difference is that Vir could come and go briefly and still carry forward his role in the story, where Talia would have (presumably) been as critical to the later story as Lyta was. I often wonder how much JMS explained where things were intended to go with the telepath storyline or if it fell on deaf ears, so to speak. Getting more screen time later is cold comfort when you want more work right “now”.
It didn’t even need that hand waving. Kosh had recorded Talia’s personality “For the future” in the Death Walker. Since JMS stated that he had moved the Control story from Takashima to Talia, I think that the recording was intended as a way to salvage her original personality after Control came forward. With Thompson being written out, it just became a dangling end.
I am divided when it comes to this episode. On the one hand, it’s a clever enough way to handle the exit of an important recurring character. In retrospect, should she have been given some accommodation? Perhaps so. If we go by the reasonable assumption that Talia’s character arc would have been fairly similar to Lyta’s in the third season, perhaps the concern was that she wouldn’t be available when needed? Who knows. I’m not really inclined to defend it; that falls to JMS, as the one who made the call.
Lyta does a very capable job of carrying forward the telepath storyline in the rest of the series, with a somewhat different means of giving her the power/ability set that Talia was (very) slowly developing, but I still wish we had gotten the full storyline with Talia. While it worked with Lyta in the end,
Beyond all that, the whole Control thing just doesn’t mesh well with what had been previously established. And if there was no intent to bring Thompson back (maybe there was, but she was never available, who knows?), why bother with the reminder that Kosh had the weird recording from way back in Season 1? I have no idea how quickly the decision was made to write out Talia, but it feels like JMS didn’t have the time to really think everything through to make it make sense. Instead, it kinda works in isolation but you have to ignore a bunch of things from earlier in the series.
I believe that most of the blame does fall on JMS, but I also know that he had to answer to Warner Brothers and they may have balked at whatever accommodations Thompson needed. As I said in another comment, Tallman didn’t continue as Lyta because she refused to sleep with the exec in charge of the regular cast. I do think JMS didn’t react well to Thompson wanting to be worked around and i don’t think they ever really clicked, so he probably didn’t care if she was gone forever. He managed to get Tallman back, with some sneaky use of casting contracts, and the story went where it was originally intended with Lyta being enhanced by her contact with Kosh in the Pilot.
I suspect this is one of those instances where we will never know the entire truth of the matter. Both Thompson and JMS are going to portray the situation to favor their point of view. JMS says elsewhere that he was in charge of casting and hired Thompson; Tallman’s story suggests a different situation. And of course, the extent of the recasting between pilot and series seems to suggest there was executive interference. So who knows? This may be one of those situations where “understanding is a three-edged sword” applies.
There’s no disconnect whatsoever – JMS was not allowed to cast Tallman for a show in the first season, so he had to hire another actress, and cast Thompson
I agree that it was unfortunate that this was a write out for Talia, especially since we had the episode where Kosh used the Vicker to record her personality, which gave them a great way to have her come back as a villain and then have her actual personality restored.
I totally understood Thompson’s feeling that she was underused. I know JMS has said that he did intend to ramp up her role later in the series, but I wonder if that is true. His statements make it clear that he just didn’t click with Thompson as an actress. Thompson wasn’t treated well by JMS. He didn’t handle having an actor he didn’t really plan for well, see: Robert Rusler as Keffer. I will note that JMS only had limited say in casting because he wasn’t funding the show. He probably didn’t push hard to work around Thompson’s schedule, but Warner Brothers may also have made it really hard to do.
He also always wanted Pat Tallman to be the resident psychic. Tallman has since admitted that the reason she didn’t make the regular cast for the series was not the ubiquitous “scheduling conflicts” but because she refuse to sleep with the executive who had final say on who would get cast as a regular. That exec did not have say on guest stars allowing JMS to bring Tallman back. Later he was able to work her into the cast as a recurring, again because the executive didn’t control that and finally was able to rework her contract to sneak her into be a regular. Tallman leaving led to the Talia gets telekinesis because the storyline later needed a souped up psychic. Lyta had been set up to be that because of her connection to Kosh. Talia needed something to prove she was more, but it never played into the story.
I wonder what your source is on the executive having final say on casting. Tallman has indeed discussed the executive who harassed her and retaliated by getting her dropped from B5 S1, but I am unaware of anything so specific as identifying his position. My impression is that he was a WB executive with some degree of influence over B5, but does not appear anywhere in the production credits for the show and was not directly involved with things like casting decisions. He stepped in between the pilot and S1 stages to disrupt contract negotiations with Tallman’s agent, basically screwing her over on the deal, and then someone told JMS she was the problem.
More on my understanding of the situation in a separate post.
Back in the day I read that JMS had stated that he had “escape hatches” for pretty much every major character, to write them out of the show should it become necessary for any reason. The claim was that revealing Winters to be Control was always going to happen, but that she would eventually be restored through the use of the “recording” taken way back in the Season 1 episode “Deathwalker”.
Not sure how any of that holds up anymore, but I remember thinking that would have been a really interesting idea. To see Winters make occasional villainous appearances and really turn up the heat on our heroes. And then to eventually have her restored and be in a position to do the same to EarthGov and the Psycorp. There’s a part of me that thinks that would have been a lot more interesting than what we ended up with.
Yeah, and I vaguely think I remember him saying that Delenn was the one character he couldn’t make a trapdoor for. Which makes sense, since the uniqueness of her transformation put her in a place storywise where the character arc couldn’t be given to anyone else. And I think he said in situations like that, you don’t make a new character if the actor becomes unavailable, but instead recast the role.
Two thoughts about the relationship between Susan and Talia.
1. This aired well before it was “acceptable” to show a same sex relationship on television in the US, thus even the implication was a bit risky in some ways. Things were moving in a more open direction (this episode aired two years before the Ellen episode), but there’s nothing to say B5 could actually have successfully pulled it off if they’d tried. They couldn’t or didn’t want to be completely open about it and thus left it implied to give themselves plausible deniability (I suppose).
2. There is a major logic flaw in this episode. If Susan and Talia were lovers, and it definitely seems to imply that they were (e.g., when Talia reaches over in the bed and find Susan is not there, although to be fair sharing a bed doesn’t guarantee that they are lovers), Talia would have known Susan was a latent telepath. The skin-to-skin contact would almost certainly have ended up overriding Susan’s blocking ability (recall the earlier episode with Ironheart where Talia describes what happens when two telepaths make love). Thus we’re left with this situation in which they are…not actually lovers? But falling in love? (I don’t recall when, but there is an episode at some point later where Susan outright says she had fallen in love with Talia). Susan’s secret vs. her relationship with Talia is just a logic flaw that we’re not supposed to notice.
“(I don’t recall when, but there is an episode at some point later where Susan outright says she had fallen in love with Talia)”
That would be “Ceremonies of Light and Dark” in Season 3. Ivanova confesses to Delenn “I think I loved Talia,” while giving up her old uniform in a Minbari ceremony, right before Delenn presents the command staff with new uniforms.
JMS addressed point 2 in his Usenet comments: “Talia v 1.0 would not have violated Ivanova’s privacy during any kind of intimacy, as that would violate her profoundly; you can hold back, and Talia would have, and Ivanova would’ve sensed if she had tried it. The theory on telepaths making love is that they both willingly drop the blocks they normally keep in place.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/041.html
So the mental link between telepaths making love is a choice, not something that happens automatically. Since Talia didn’t know Susan was latent, she would have had no reason to lower her mental barriers. So it’s not a contradiction at all.
As one of the apparently few fans who actually really liked Talia Winters (or at least thinks that Andrea Thompson is a better actress that Patricia Tallman), I also hate this episode. Beyond the in-universe ethical issues that the episode glazes over, and the out-of-universe meanspiritedness towards an actress who’s looking for work, there’s also the way that this episode goes out of its way to establish a same-sex relationship between two opening credits regulars (something that would have been incredible on American television in 1995), only to immediate bury one half of it.
Nice to think that there’ll still be newspapers in the future, though (although the idea that B5 uses newsprint despite its tightly constrained mass budgets is pretty silly)
You can add me to the list of people who like Talia better. I like Lyta, but I don’t think she comes across as formidable as Talia.
Back in the day, I was in the other camp. I was happy to see Lyta come back. I thought Andrea Thompson’s performance style was too stiff and that Patricia Tallman did a better job of expressing emotion. On this rewatch it has become more obvious that Thompson just wasn’t given much to work with and she does nuance better than Tallman. But, for better or for worse, the show tends to favour bombastic staginess and I find that Tallman’s style fits that vibe.
Yes, I can understand that. I think the first rewatch I did a few years ago, I felt like Talia was a bit of a nothing character, but that’s a lot to do with the storylines for her as well. Lyta is more emotionally available. And I think Lyta fits in with the Season 2 onward cast probably more. Whereas Talia/Thompson is more in line with the Sinclair/O’Hare style.
You aren’t the only fan who really liked Talia Winters. I still hate the fact that the character disappears just when she’s actually starting to become really interesting.
“there’s also the way that this episode goes out of its way to establish a same-sex relationship between two opening credits regulars (something that would have been incredible on American television in 1995), only to immediate bury one half of it.”
To be fair, even doing that much was daring for 1995. It was the most they could’ve gotten away with, so I don’t hold it against them. It was baby steps like this one that helped push things toward greater openness a few years later.
I suspect you have some mixed up version of the story – the conflict was around payment, it was told from different sides, Andra Thompson wanted more pay, the only way she would get more pay was for her to be in more episodes, by she was scheduled to appear only in half episodes a season. She asked for more, or more stable schedulem, JMS explained to her that the character she plays can’t appear in all episodes, she decided to exit the show. I’m yet to see her saying anywhere that she was prepared to return, maybe you mixed up her interview about her time on B5?
And the show prepared the return hatch for her – the crystal Kosh had recorded her original personality
I have been looking for a contemporary account that gives Thompson’s side of this. It appears that she gave an interview that was printed in Starlog #225, but I haven’t read that and I don’t know what it says. Is that what you are referring to as her interview?
Dang, I checked to see if #225 was one of the Starlog issues I still have, but I just missed it — I have #221 and #226. Archive-dot-org used to have scans of all the issues, but they were taken down a couple of years ago.
Thanks for checking. It seems there are some copies out there floating around in the collector’s market. If I got desperate enough, I suppose I could buy one. They aren’t that expensive. (The shipping charge is higher than the asking price on some of the ebay listings.)
I guess the fact that this was written as a way to eliminate a main cast member is why it’s structurally kind of clumsy. It pays lip service to how generating paranoia and mistrust is what Psi Corps wants, but it immediately negates that message by having Ivanova submit and having the mentally invasive loyalty test be necessary and correct, so it’s a mixed message at best.
The episode bent over backward to make us suspect that Ivanova was the sleeper agent, but it didn’t work as a misdirect, because she was consciously hiding something and we’d been told clearly that the sleeper wouldn’t know the other personality was even there. So anyone who was paying attention would know that it was a fakeout.
The attempt to pay off the Susan/Talia relationship is hampered by the restrictions on what a commercial TV show could get away with showing at the time. I don’t think it even registered with me the first time I saw this that Talia and Susan had slept together; I saw the scene of Talia waking up and feeling the empty side of the bed, but I don’t remember how I interpreted it. The thing is, they had to keep it ambiguous on purpose to avoid “offending” anyone, so it’s a romance story told without any overt signs of affection or warmth between the participants, all very cool and detached with a safe physical distance between them. So I didn’t register it as a romance back in ’95, since I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for the subtle hints like I did today.
The climax is awkward too. It’s just a coincidence that Talia happened to walk into the office at that moment, and there’s no explanation for why Lyta chooses to scan her when she’s not even a member of the command staff. Okay, maybe she instinctively mistrusted anyone wearing a Psi Corps badge, but it would’ve been nice to have that clarified.
The newspaper machine is a fun bit of retrofuturism. JMS predicted computerized, personalized news feeds, and he predicted ubiquitous recycling, but he didn’t predict digital readers.
“Finally, at no point does anyone bring up the fact that Alexander commits murder in this episode. What’s more, it’s premeditated murder. Alexander says right up front that her sending the password into someone’s brain will make Control come to the fore, killing the host body’s personality completely. The ethics of this is completely glossed over and ignored.”
For what it’s worth, “The Quality of Mercy” established that the death of personality isn’t legally defined as murder by the Earth Alliance. Although I disagreed with that emphatically at the time, and I still do.
Oh, and while we’re at it, Control-Talia committed murder too, of one of the guards, and attempted murder of the other. Yet she’s walking around free at the end instead of under arrest for murder and assault. What’s up with that?
“Oh, and while we’re at it, Control-Talia committed murder too, of one of the guards, and attempted murder of the other. Yet she’s walking around free at the end instead of under arrest for murder and assault. What’s up with that?”
This may have merited some discussion, but it’s probably a non-starter. We as viewers know it’s her, but in-universe what’s the evidence it was Talia-Control? Motive and opportunity, sure, but even by a preponderance of the evidence standard it could have been anybody else. We don’t really see any of the investigation into the shooting, but Garabaldi doesn’t report any evidence on who did it. Maybe somebody out there really hates redheads, had a grudge against one of the guards, or a million other reasons. I’m not sure they have enough to legally arrest her, but even if they do PsiCorps would come in as soon as Talia doesn’t check in, she lawyers up, she’s out anyway. They either had to kill her or let her go and none of them are willing to consider the (physical) murder option.
“The climax is awkward too. It’s just a coincidence that Talia happened to walk into the office at that moment”
This show runs on people fortuitously walking into the right room at the right time for the plot to move forward and also people not knowing things they should know so it can be explained to them. I didn’t really notice it on an initial viewing, but it’s really stood out in this rewatch, as I’ve mentioned in prior threads. It’s a shame, because most of them could be patched with some pretty simple rewrites. An artifact of rushed TV production, I guess.
The first thing Control did when it took over Talia’s body was to scream, “You blew my cover! You’re dead! Do you hear me? You’re dead! The Corps is Mother! The Corps is Father! You’re dead, Lyta Alexander! We’ll find you!” Not quite a confession, but enough to hold her on suspicion. They could search her residence and belongings for the weapon, and since it’s a plasma gun, it might leave some kind of chemical residue on her hand.
Under the “you can indict a ham sandwich” theory, sure, they probably could have screwed with her a bit by holding her and tossing her quarters. From a dramatic standpoint, a denouement where they’re holding her but then a lawyer springs her would drag the episode out.
From an in-universe standpoint, it’s just a pretty pointless stall tactic. We’ve seen that holding people is overseen by an independent ombudsman and they’re going to have to tell him something. Even assuming they try to persuade him of this true-but-far-fetched story, she just denies everything and right now they don’t really have anything to prove it.
As to her rant, any decent lawyer or Talia herself can explain it away. For starters getting it into evidence might be a problem because it’s hearsay (assuming they have that rule). But assuming they don’t or some exception applies: She’ll just say she was having a bad day, mad about Lyta over something from their academy days, and she’s sincerely sorry she engaged in hyperbole when she says, “you’re dead!” People lose their temper and issue not-really-death-threats every day, we’d need many more prisons if they were routinely jailed for it.
As for other undiscovered evidence like the gun itself or residue: PsiCorps surely taught the fake personalities how to get rid of the gun, to minimize/destroy evidence, and to get back so not even the waking personality knows anything is amiss. It obviously wouldn’t do for the sleeper to wake up with a gun they don’t remember in their quarters, after all. If the gun is still out there, it’s in some obscure hidey hole in the station where only Control can find it. I’m willing to spot them that even had Garabaldi done a more intensive search, he wouldn’t find anything.
As I already said, the death threat itself is not proof of guilt, but it’s probable cause. It’s enough to get a warrant to search for more solid evidence. And yes, of course any moderately intelligent murderer would try to destroy the evidence, but there are approximately fifty gajillion works of murder mystery fiction out there in which skilled detectives manage to find the one bit of evidence that the murderer failed to account for, because there’s always something they missed.
Besides, it’s a plasma gun. Plasma is really, really hot ionized gas. I’d imagine that firing it might cause at least mild heat damage to the epidermis, which couldn’t be washed off and would take time to heal. So they could at least prove that she fired a PPG at around that time, though whether they could confirm it was the same PPG that killed the guard is more uncertain.
The episode bent over backward to make us suspect that Ivanova was the sleeper agent
I never once got that impression. For two seasons, the show built upon the fact that Ivanova was the daughter of a telepath that suffered the worst from the Psi Corps. When she revealed to Sheridan she was a latent telepath, I thought the worst thing could happen was regular Talia somehow learns of Ivanova’s abilities and is duty-bound to report it to the Psi Corps no matter what her feelings for Ivanova are. I didn’t even think Ivanova could possibly be the sleeper agent. To me, the paranoia over the fact that the Psi Corps had someone on the inside silently gathering info for them was enough of a motivator that made Ivanova’s refusal over being targeted by a telepathic message more than justified.
“I didn’t even think Ivanova could possibly be the sleeper agent.”
Well, that’s my point. The episode tried to make us think that, by having Ivanova refuse to be scanned, by showing Talia finding Ivanova gone from bed just before the shooting happened, and by having Ivanova tell Sheridan “Some days I don’t even know who I am anymore.” It was aggressively telegraphed that we should be suspicious of her. But it wasn’t convincing, because we’d already been told that the sleeper wouldn’t know they were the sleeper.
Yes, have to agree with ChristopherLBennett, the show is definitely trying to fox us by giving us the heavy handed hints it’s Ivanova. Although anyone who has seen Murder She Wrote knows you should ignore the heavy handed hints.
Interesting comparison, since Straczynski was a producer on Murder, She Wrote for a couple of seasons before he did B5. It was his first live-action producing gig.
They probably could have gotten away with being more obvious about there being a relationship. LA Law had had an onscreen kiss and ongoing lesbian relationship for at least one season before going off the air at the end of 94. I think Dax kissing a woman on DS9 had already happened, too, but I’m not 100% sure. Of course, B5 didn’t have the support of being a highly successful, long-running major network show or part of a franchise with a highly loyal fan base. I can imagine WB being leery of the subject and applying pressure to avoid anything overt.
Come to think of it, you’re right. I may have been wrong to say that they did as much as they could. Now that I think about it, I think I felt even then that the episode had been way too timid about showing the relationship. But I could be selectively rewriting my memories, so I can’t be sure.
B5’s attempt at an onscreen healthy portrayal of a same-sex couple came first. DS9’s “Rejoined” first aired 2 weeks after B5’s “Divided Loyalties”. Plus, the B5 episode had already previously aired on the UK in July ’95. Not to mention this was written well before the DS9 writers even started planning season 4, which also had the studio’s well-known interference causing major changes with the inclusion of the Klingon arc.
Oh, and no indication that they are in relationship is funny, because I regularly see first reacions from women and some gay guys who say that there’s romance there from the first scene in the bar where Ivanova talks about her mother, and then people say that they are in a relationships in previous episodes where they have beverages at the cafe. Meanwhile straight dudes don’t see anything until this episode :D
And I didn’t even see it in this episode the first time around. I only heard about it after the fact. Even knowing it now, I can barely see it. Although I guess it makes sense, since neither Susan nor Talia is all that emotionally open or physically affectionate with others.
“Ivanova visits Control, who makes it clear that Winters is gone forever.”
At first I thought this was reckless, because it just gives Control a chance to scan her. But then I realized it doesn’t matter, if PsiCorps is interested in what a telepath can find by rooting around in a surface scan, they can always just send a telepath they won’t recognize in plainclothes and it wouldn’t be too hard to eventually get line of sight on the senior staff when they’re out and about. So they have to be careful to never even think about the conspiracy when they’re not in a secure location. I’m starting to understand why non-teeps are so paranoid about telepaths, having them as an enemy sounds like a nightmare.
Probably not a good idea to put them all in the same organisation, then.
Interesting take. I was so blindsided by Talia being the sleeper agent at the time, and it wasn’t until it was made public that the episode was deliberately written to take Thompson out that I even started considering the implications and how it was handled. In hindsight, it is not the only situation where JMS ended up doing something controversial with a female character’s long-term prospects on the show (without getting spoilery for now).
Still, “Divided Loyalties” is one I always enjoy rewatching especially because of the feeling of paranoia. The better Psi Corps episodes put the characters at odds with one another where trust becomes a rare commodity. It happens here big time. And with Sheridan and General Hague openly looking for ways to find evidence that Clark was involved in Santiago’s assassination, the feeling that it might all be exposed and jeopardized becomes borderline panic-inducing. First-time B5 director Jesús Treviño gets some standout performances from the entire cast, and his later B5 work would probably be the calling card that would give him a chance directing Voyager and DS9 episodes. And I love just how different Control feels from Talia. Thompson goes from a caring professional to a borderline sociopath and makes them both feel natural and lived-in.
One detail I adore is when Ivanova tells Lyta to go to hell. It’s not openly stated, but I get the impression Ivanova dropped her mental barriers just long enough for Lyta to accidentally get a glimpse of her past and what happened to her mother while sending the telepathic message, hence her saying “I’m sorry” to Susan, and her justified unfiltered response.
And hey, I’d say Thompson got her revenge, as she wound up on NYPD Blue for four years, and a lot more people watched that show than B5…
@krad: Going way off-topic, I know, but I still disagree. She barely had anything to do on NYPD Blue throughout those seasons, usually relegated to secondary casework alongside the more prominent Kim Delaney, while Smits, Schroder and Franz got all the attention, which is why she chose to leave the show to anchor CNN. Also, Blue had a poor track record with female characters. Ironically, Jill Kirkendall was the exception, being the only one who was as capable and unflappable as the male cops. When Thompson decided to leave, David Milch and the writers decided to have the one competent female cop of the precinct suddenly running drugs for her crooked ex-husband. Character assassination 101.
“And with Sheridan and General Hague openly looking for ways to frame Clark for Santiago’s assassination”
Huh? No, they’re looking for ways to prove that Clark actually was responsible for the assassination. Framing means fabricating evidence to pin a crime on someone innocent.
“And I love just how different Control feels from Talia. Thompson goes from a caring professional to a borderline sociopath and makes them both feel natural and lived-in.”
Funny, I felt her Control persona was much more soap-opera-y and broad, complete with a sexier hairstyle.
I rewrote that before you posted.
Evidently I cannot use my PC to post comments here; I tried three browsers and nothing worked. My comment transcribed:
I understand your response, Keith, and don’t criticize you for it. I just see the circumstances as more muddled.
On the casting issues, Tallman writes in Pleasure Thresholds that “icky suit,” an executive and college friend who helped her when she started but wanted to have an affair with her, walked in the room after the B5 team completed casting for the pilot when WB executives walked in before signing off on the cast. She was cast in the pilot. Tallman says she was offered scale ($1200 per episode) for the first season; JMS says he was told she demanded $10,000 per episode (she got $5k for the pilot). So someone, likely in the contract office, did Icky Suit a favor. JMS found out, wrangled her first a recurring and then a season contract, and Tallman ran across Icky Suit at a B5 holiday party and he asked her “how did you get back on this show?”
Tallman has a few words about this episode, saying that Thompson was welcoming, and told her “she wasn’t getting the storylines ahe really wanted and had other job possibilities, so she discussed things with Joe and decided to move on.”
Without knowing the details of those discussions, the contract language Thompson had and the specific changes she wanted, it’s impossible to know if this situation was comparable with Furst’s. Christian did depart after contract issues, too, though I think the details of that are clearer now.
One plausible scenario to me is that JMS found out how Tallman had been screwed over (we know he knew prior to this episode), knew he couldn’t justify two telepath characters as regulars, and set about replacing Thompson with Tallman (who he preferred). Maybe he did that systematically by cutting back on her storyline, or maybe he just opted not to fight for or accommodate her. That seems in line with how JMS might operate, not just out of outrage for Icky Suit, but over being lied to about Tallman. I don’t know how to parse that ethically. Obviously, direct action to make Thompson miserable is beyond the pale; not accommodating a request, depending on what it was, is more ethicall complex and if he’s undercutting Icky Suit I’m unsure it’s misogynistic; I can certainly understand why JMS wouldn’t discuss Tallman’s situation with Thompson.
JMS doesn’t really have low-key feuds; I’m unaware of any with Thompson. Maybe I missed something. I’m not prepared to condemn the handling of Thompson’s situation if she isn’t upset about it herself.
As for murder, well, maybe. We know the series established how Talia’s orginal personality could be recovered. Lyta wouldn’t know that was possible, though. The show doesn’t further explore that point, but B5 doesn’t do much of the “it’s streaming so we assume you saw this” and summarizing Talia’s position every time she recurs seems like a big investment in time. Lyta picks up so many obvious functions from Talia it’s hard to say how you keep both characters. If JMS and Thompson came to an amicable agreement about her departure, I don’t see why the show would be obliged to bring her back, or she be obliged to return.
The episode blames PsiCorps for Talia’s death, not Lyta. I don’t see that as unreasonable.
There was a blooper from this episode shown a number of years ago at Shore Leave. When Garibaldi identifies Lyta, Richard Biggs ad libs a Franklin line “Who be Lyta?” because of course Biggs wasn’t in “The Gathering”.
This is a second hand rumor from a cast relative, but in addition to Thompson wanting a more flexible schedule the relationship between her and Jerry Doyle was going from bad to disaster at the time. Doyle, not being an experienced actor and never working with an ex before, was being very unprofessional about it. Combine that with Thompson’s schedule issue and Garibaldi being a bigger part got Thompson the harsh write out.
This is very much an episode that works the first time you watch it and is hopelessly clumsy on the rewatch. Which considering how little syndicated television was written for rewatch is slightly, but not very, forgivable.
It would have been nice to have Ivanova and Winters be a bigger subplot coming into this. Going from Winters takes off her brooch in Ivanova quarters at the end of one episode, a big stretch or nothing, and a confirmation of sexual relationship here. That might have upped the impact a little. Although it was good that they acknowledged the relationship later instead of sweeping it under the rug.
“Which considering how little syndicated television was written for rewatch is slightly, but not very, forgivable.”
That doesn’t follow. The syndication business itself was largely predicated on the understanding that audiences would watch reruns of shows they’d already seen, because such reruns were the bread and butter of syndication for decades before first-run syndication for scripted fiction came along in the ’80s (pioneered in animation by He-Man and in live action by Star Trek: TNG). First-run syndicated seasons were generally 22-26 episodes for live action, 65 episodes (13 weeks’ worth, 5 days a week) for animation, so it was a given that the episodes would be rerun at least once between seasons or in the midseason holiday breaks. And if a show was created for first-run syndication, it was with the expectation that it would eventually be syndicated as reruns a few years down the road, the same as network shows.
For a weekly network series any given episode might air 3 times and then go into a syndicated rotation if the series made it to 5 seasons (100 episodes).
For a weekly born syndicated series any given episode is likely to air 2 or 3 times total in the initial series and might live if the total series was sold as a package later, but that was a gamble because very few would reach the 100 episode mark.
You might be having a bit of survivorship bias around the series that made it long enough to reach the hoped for but not planned for mark. For every Xena there are two Knight Rider reboots that sunk in season one never to be seen again or a Superforce that got a few seasons, but didn’t hit the magic number. (The number of syndicated fantasy and science fiction shows from the ’80s and ’90s that vanished without being sold to cable or UHF packages is insane. I mean what is the last time anyone thought about My Secret Identity.)
Honestly a syndicated show having an episode air 2 or 3 times in the initial year was a gamble with channels dropping programming or pre-empting. I remember channels that would move reruns of a syndicated show to a different time slot, possibly to catch different views or just to give a better slot to something airing for the first time.
All TV is a gamble. You have it backward; a longer run was probably more likely in a syndicated show, if only because the stations that purchased a syndicated season were obligated to air the entire season (including at least one rerun per episode), whereas networks could cancel shows midseason and leave episode unaired. There were many network shows that got pulled prematurely, with the remaining episodes never airing until they were rebroadcast on cable years later.
And the 100-episode thing didn’t really apply to first-run syndicated shows. There was no threshold number of episodes that had to be reached before they were “ready” for syndication, since they were syndicated from the beginning. I recall a number of one-season syndicated shows that got rerun on cable years later, such as RoboCop: The Series. So no, there’s no survivorship bias. (For that matter, the 100-episode “rule” was never really a strict rule. Two of the most popular syndicated series of all time were Star Trek, with 79 episodes, and Gilligan’s Island, with 98 episodes.)
Also, I’m pretty sure that Showtime’s The Outer Limits and Stargate SG-1 were released in syndication after their first seasons, with the syndicated airing running a year behind the Showtime airings. The first full SG-1 episode I watched was a syndicated rerun of the season 2 episode “One False Step,” and though I hadn’t been watching before, I’d been aware of the show’s presence in syndication for some time before then.
You realize that your argument supports the idea of not writing for rewatch. Specifically because it is selling the show to a different market where the assumption is there will be different viewers. You even illustrate that logic with your Stargate example.
If the reruns keep some kind of baseline numbers they will stay on the air in that market, but it really doesn’t matter if those viewers are rewatching episodes they’ve seen or seeing it for the first time.
There was no reason to write episodes with an expectation that the same viewer would watch it multiple times until full season DVD releases became a noticeable revue stream. (VHS was good for selling special episodes or miniseries, but with a standard season taking up 10-12 tapes it wasn’t much of a market.) You could write with the audience of cultist who tape the episodes to VHS and rewatch them in mind but that was a much smaller slice of the pie.
I don’t consider this an argument, just a clarification of fact. Reruns used to be taken for granted as a normal part of television, whether network or syndicated. It’s not limited to other markets; with seasons being no more than half a year long, any episode would be rerun at least once by its original broadcaster. This was the everyday norm for me growing up, so I find it startling that you believe that any show back then was not expected to be rewatched.
“There was no reason to write episodes with an expectation that the same viewer would watch it multiple times until full season DVD releases became a noticeable revue stream.”
Wow, that is just startlingly untrue. Many of the shows I grew up watching and becoming a fan of, most notably Star Trek, were shows that had been cancelled before my time but were kept alive in syndicated reruns. Star Trek did not become a hit show until syndicated reruns, when the 79 episodes were repeated over and over and over again in daytime syndication. Long before there were any home video releases, we rewatched episodes so often that we memorized them. I rewatched syndicated reruns of Trek so many times that I could identify any random episode in seconds by its opening shot. And there were countless other shows that I rewatched over and over in syndication — Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk, Columbo, Macmillan and Wife, etc. Even with shows that I did watch in first run, I later rewatched them again and again in syndication.
We didn’t need VHS or DVD sets to rewatch episodes, because any successful show would be in syndicated reruns somewhere. The only advantages of home video were, one, that the episodes were uncut and commercial-free; two, that shorter-lived shows whose reruns hadn’t been syndicated could be brought back from obscurity; and three, that we could watch an episode whenever we chose rather than being subject to the vagaries of TV stations’ schedules. Those are probably factors in why home video eventually displaced syndicated reruns as the primary avenue for rewatching. But you’re falling prey to a common fallacy: assuming that the current preferred way of doing something was the first and only way of doing it, rather than an improvement on the way it was done before.
I think there’s a difference between catching a rerun and watching in general in the pre-DVD era, and rewatching the way it’s done today. Most shows were watched by most people in first run, and catching the occasional rerun over summer vacation. Then 5 years later it would show up on one of the independent stations and, if popular, live there for a long time. Here in the DC area “Star Trek” and “Batman” were in repeats on channel 20 for a decade or so and channel 5 had “MASH” (and I think “Gilligan’s Island”) for over a decade. So eventually you would see the whole series in syndication there. But the original “Battlestar Galactica” never got syndicated around here, and I can’t think of any other SFF shows that were in syndication before the 90’s when cable really took off. Heck, “Miami Vice” never got syndicated (that I was aware of) until it showed up on, I think, Cozi (a side channel in the HD OTA stream, which now carries “Emergency”) for one run a few years ago. Another side-channel, Comet, carries SG-1 and X Files, and may still have BtVS.
The first show I bought the DVD collection for was B5, so long ago that when this rewatch started none of the DVDs would play, and then the BtVS DVDs. Videotaped both those shows while they ran (Miami Vice was the first one I did that for) because they often aired when I was doing other things, so some of the better episodes I rewatched multiple times.
Serialized storytelling in TV with a reasonable degree of continuity is an artifact of the VHS and later eras because it’s now possible to go back and rewatch an episode to get the context. And B5 was one of the first shows (well, other than the soaps) that I was aware of that really did that.
There were always serialized shows with continuity — soap operas, as you mention, were the main ones. And they weren’t rerun, because they never stopped doing new episodes. In the early ’80s, Hill Street Blues pioneered ongoing, serialized story arcs in crime drama. And a lot of children’s shows had ongoing continuity. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle showed multiple short segments in every half-hour, but the main Rocky & Bullwinkle segments were lengthy multi-part serials that could run for weeks. Again, just because serialization was different then doesn’t mean it didn’t exist at all. People keep mistaking refinements for innovations because they don’t remember the way things were done before.
If you interpret “written for the rewatch” in the modern sense of seeing how an episode fits into a larger continuity, that’s true enough in that most primetime dramas were episodic, or else were serialized in the soap-opera manner of a continuing open-ended storyline, rather than the season-arc model that Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered. But I don’t think that’s the meaning conveyed by tarbis‘s original assertion: “This is very much an episode that works the first time you watch it and is hopelessly clumsy on the rewatch. Which considering how little syndicated television was written for rewatch is slightly, but not very, forgivable.” That implies that individual episodes were written with the assumption that they wouldn’t be rewatched at all, and that is completely untrue.
“But the original “Battlestar Galactica” never got syndicated around here, and I can’t think of any other SFF shows that were in syndication before the 90’s when cable really took off.”
Galactica didn’t run long enough to be syndicated normally, but its many 2-part episodes and the 3-part pilot were repackaged as TV movies, and some of its hourlong episodes were paired off and syndicated as TV movies, as was done with numerous shows too short-lived for full syndication, e.g. the ’70s Spider-Man, the Planet of the Apes TV series, and The Master, whose repackaged TV movies were shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as the Master Ninja movies.
It’s true that most SFTV shows back then didn’t last more than a season or two and thus were lost for a long time. But there were some shows that ran long enough for syndicated reruns, like the bionic shows, Adventures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Incredible Hulk. Space: 1999 was syndicated to begin with, so it could be found in reruns for a while. (I recall a late-70s “Showcase” block on my local channel that showed it back-to-back with Star Trek reruns. One day, the schedulers had a bit of fun and scheduled the two shows’ respective episodes called “The Immunity Syndrome” back-to-back.)
And of course, the makers of every show hoped it would have a long life in rerun syndication, because no show makes a profit in its original run. The profit came mainly from selling syndication packages, just as the profit today comes mainly from DVD and streaming sales. So every show was made with the hope that it would be rewatched.
I think we’re having a disconnect between the idea of “rewatch” and “rerun.”
Rewatch is the same viewer watching the same episode multiple times.
Rerun is the same episode being aired regardless of viewer.
Every show producer wanted to have syndicated reruns.
It didn’t matter to the producer if any of those reruns were also rewatches.
Shows could plan to make money on reruns.
Shows could not plan to make money on rewatches unless they had a home release.
Your argument appears to spring from the idea that every rerun is also a rewatch. Which is not how the episodes were designed or written. Fans of a particular show might rewatch a show when it entered syndicated reruns, but a programmer could not assume that everyone watching a rerun was also experiencing a rewatch.
“Rewatch is the same viewer watching the same episode multiple times.
Rerun is the same episode being aired regardless of viewer.”
From the viewer’s perspective, that’s a meaningless distinction. I and my contemporaries were able to watch the same episode multiple times because they were rerun over and over for viewers in general.
“It didn’t matter to the producer if any of those reruns were also rewatches.
What does that even mean???? If you’re watching a rerun, it’s a rewatch. Even if you didn’t see the show in its original run, it’s bound to come around again in rerun syndication, so it’ll be a rewatch the second time you see it, and every time thereafter. At least for me, it was normal to watch the same episodes over and over, with Star Trek, with Gilligan, with M*A*S*H, with Columbo, with countless others. My father and I had a running joke (or at least a stock phrase) about recognizing a rerun and saying “It’s this one.” Because we’d seen them all before, often many times.
“Fans of a particular show might rewatch a show when it entered syndicated reruns, but a programmer could not assume that everyone watching a rerun was also experiencing a rewatch.”
But that’s just as true today. Not everyone who buys a DVD set of an old show or discovers it on streaming was a viewer in its first run. The whole point of such rereleases is to make a show available to new audiences, because the core fanbase is never large enough on its own to make a show successful.
Besides, what does it matter whether all viewers are rewatching, as long as some of them are? It never makes sense to assume the audience is monolithic, or to cater to only one part of it. Smart creators design their shows to work for more than one audience at a time, e.g. to be able to be appreciated either as individual episodes or as a unified whole. You’re talking about it like a zero-sum choice, which is not how any rational creator would approach it, since you can’t maximize your audience (and thus your profit potential) if you deliberately exclude all but one segment of it.
What it means is that you aren’t understanding what I’m saying or you’re being purposefully obtuse. So I’m going to try again before writing this off.
A rewatch is a viewer experience. (To watch an episode you personally have seen before.)
A rerun is a programming decision. (To air an episode that has been broadcast before.)
A rerun can be a rewatch or it could not be depending on the viewer.
If your first time seeing an episode is during a rerun of the show it is not a rewatch. Because YOU THE VIEWER have never watched it before. By definition you CANNOT rewatch something you have never watched before. That’s what the prefix means. To repeat an action performed or attempted previously.
The entirety of the difference is from the viewer’s perspective.
A new viewer is going to have a different experience from someone rewatching regardless of if it is an episode from last week or something that first aired 20 years ago.
Also you seem to be forgetting that rewatches are not what a producer should be focusing on if they want to stay on the air. You need first run numbers which by definition CAN NOT be a rewatch for anyone. If you don’t get those numbers then you better be real damn cheap when selling the reruns.
Are DVD (or other physical media) sales still material money makers, now?
Even with all the difficulties Andrea Thompson experienced working on B5, it was probably still better than when she was in Nightmare Weekend.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091631
I hate this episode so much. Not just the heavy-handed and mean spirited contrivance of a way to write Talia off the show, or dangling a relationship between Ivanova and Talia in front of the viewer just in time to snatch it away, but also that most of the characters don’t even seem to take the premise of the episode seriously except as a vehicle to get rid of Talia. Lyta comes in and tells them that she will have to kill the original personality to reveal Control, and nobody even… prepares for that. When Lyta tests Sheridan, Garibaldi, even Ivanova, does anyone make any preparation for what to do if in case one of the senior staff members of the station is irrevocably, yet foreseeably, turned evil? They don’t. Nobody says “if it’s me, I want you to shoot me immediately rather than let Control assume command of the station”; there’s no “let’s put you in a holding cell just to be safe before Lyta tests you”; nobody even seems to contemplate the fact, when Lyta is about to test them, that this might be their last moment alive. The episode doesn’t take seriously the possibility that it might be anyone but Talia, so none of the characters do either.
Background (literally) trivia– I’ve always been intrigued by the bright poster in Ivanova’s quarters that we glimpse at about 19:00. I had too much time to kill during a recent rewatch, so I looked it up. Here’s description from an old online poster store:
“This rousing early Perestroika era poster was created in 1986, when the Soviets launched Mir, the first permanent space station. It shows a Soviet star rising through space with details in the points of the star. The lower points highlight advances in agriculture and industry, the upper points the latest achievements in space. The star itself is an allusion to the ruby glass star that adorns the Spassky tower of the Kremlin, known by all Russians.” –from International Poster Gallery’s on-line exhibition: The Posters of Perestroika 1985 – 1991
Let’s see if I can post a URL to the full image:
https://www.internationalposter.com/product/follow-the-path-of-development-and-progress/
poster’s text –> google translate:
КУРСОМ СОЗИДАНИЯ КУРСОМ УСКОРЕНИЯ
COURSE CREATIONS COURSE ACCELERATIONS
I tried it in the DeepL online translator, which purports to be more accurate than Google, and it gave “On a course of creation, on a course of acceleration” (I’m interpolating the punctuation). I think that makes more sense.
Revisiting this character juggling that was driven by behind the scenes circumstances, it will be interesting to see, if and when the reported reboot proceeds, whether JMS will stick with the original story plan (Lyta as the consistent B5 resident telepath, Takashima as Control, no Talia), go with a refined version of what happened here (have both Lyta and Talia characters, but less clunky switching), or perhaps a third, unknown path. Regardless, it certainly seems like one key area for improvement/added value, assuming the goal isn’t to reboot the show 1 for 1.
I doubt any writer would faithfully adapt their original plan from 30 years earlier, since we’re always thinking of ways to improve our ideas as we go. That’s how any individual work gets written, through a series of successive drafts that revise and hone the original rough idea, and most any writer given the chance will make further changes if the work is reprinted or remade.
In some respects, JMS might want to do things he wanted to do the first time but couldn’t, but in other respects, he’s had three decades to hone his craft, evolve as a person, observe the world changing around him, and think of new ideas about his characters and setting that didn’t occur to him the first time around. So there’s no way he’d simply try to replicate his original story outline from when he was three decades younger and less experienced. That was the product of the writer he was then, and he’s a different person now writing in a different era, with different audience expectations, different tools, a different world to comment on, etc. Not to mention that, no matter what plan he starts out with, it won’t be any more immune from alteration in response to real-world circumstances than the original plan was. It was JMS’s own book on screenwriting that taught me the phrase “No plan survives its first encounter with the enemy.”
It would be much easier for JMS to create parts of his vision today. He wanted Delenn to go from male to female. Today we have trans actors that could handle that storyline in ways that weren’t available in the 90s. We have trans actors who would be able to do the change of sex in a realistic way. The sound technology is better, so if he wanted to deepen the voice of the actor, he could and get good quality sound. The biggest problem would be by casting an out trans actor, you give away the secret of what Delenn is trying to do. It might well be better if the Minbari were simply all androgynous, at least in season one, so casting a non-binary actor wouldn’t telegraph where the story is going. The Talia/Susan relationship could be shown on screen and developed. Since JMS said he intended Talia to be Control once Takashima was written out the emergence Control would be far more impactful if we had seen a Talia/Susan romance.
None of this is workable in a reboot, because everyone will either give the old series a look, which is not a bad thing, or they will do a quick Google search to see how the storyline played out in the first version. In order to have actual twists and turns, you need a new slant on his story of encroaching fascism and the younger races being the proxies in a proxy war.
I really doubt his goal for a reboot is just to get a do-over on the original story. Not because the audience would know what happened in the original; surprise is not the exclusive emotion that fiction is meant to evoke. He wouldn’t just rehash it because that wouldn’t be an interesting challenge for a writer, and because he’s had three decades for his perspective and priorities to evolve. There’s little point in doing a reboot unless you do something entirely fresh with the concept.
After all, B5 was groundbreaking in its day, doing things that SFTV in America hadn’t done before. Now that the more serialized, season-arc model B5 pioneered is routine for TV, it would be kind of an anticlimax to try to do it the same way again. I’d imagine JMS would want to find a new way of telling the story, something that would feel innovative to today’s audiences.
I thought (and I was not the only one) who thought it was pretty hokey to write out Thompson that way (though I never was all that impressed with her acting, so I wasn’t sorry to see her go).
I think that what should have been a “Phew! We just dodged a bullet!” moment with “Control” didn’t turn out that way. Iwas kind of disappointed with this episode, even with the (partially unbelievable) hint at the Ivanova/Winter relationship, which I did like (the relationship, that is).
But events here in this ep set up a lot of the action going forward.
Yet another episode that’s streamed out of order (or at least in a different order) on Tubi.
If they were going to kill off Winters, I think it would have been better if they didn’t even bother referencing the relationship only ever hinted at between her and Ivanova. As it is, it’s just one more reason to see the episode as unfortunate. After I watched this, I did a little googling to see how fans thought about the relationship, and I was shocked to see how many people seemed to think it was well-written.
By the way, I choose to believe Delenn was only pretending not to understand the word “butt.”
The fact that this was a episode with a woman-woman couple got overridden by it happening with one partner dying almost immediately is another element.