“Grail”
Written by Christy Marx
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 15
Production episode 109
Original air date: July 6, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn and Lennier interrupt a meal Sinclair and Garibaldi are having, expressing surprise that they’re not preparing to meet the honored guest. Sinclair has no idea what they’re talking about, but he plays along, telling Garibaldi to throw together an honor guard. It turns out the honored guest is Aldous Gajic, who is on a quest to find the Holy Grail. He is part of a long line of people who have sought the grail, though that particular society currently numbers one.
Gajic apologizes for not informing Sinclair of his arrival, but he didn’t think his arrival was of interest to anyone but himself and the ambassadors—his purpose in coming to B5 is to meet with the four non-human ambassadors to see if they have any knowledge of the grail.
He doesn’t say the quiet part out loud, which is that he figures that the humans on B5 would think of him as a crackpot, but the expressions on Sinclair and Garibaldi’s faces handle that pretty well.
Delenn expresses surprise at Sinclair’s skepticism regarding Gajic’s search. To the Minbari, such a true seeker is someone to be admired and respected.
In downbelow, an engineer nicknamed Jinxo is approached by a criminal named Deuce. He wants Jinxo’s help, or he wants the money Jinxo owes Deuce. To show that he means business, Deuce brings Jinxo to a woman named Mirriam Runningdear, who is scheduled to testify against Deuce. A tentacle appears from behind a crate, attaches itself to Runningdear’s forehead, and then her face goes blank. The tentacle retreats into a Vorlon encounter suit, and Deuce thanks Ambassador Kosh for the help.
Sinclair is summoned to medlab, where Runningdear has been taken. According to Franklin, she’s been completely mind-wiped. This is the third such instance of this happening in downbelow. Garibaldi is ripshit to discover that Runningdeer is the latest victim, as she was the only witness against Deuce.
We get a look at the court system on B5, specifically Ombuds Wellington’s court as he presides over a suit brought by a human against a Vree (a short gray alien with an outsized head and big black pupil-less eyes, ahem ahem) for kidnapping his ancestors.
Jinxo tries to pick Gajic’s pocket, and Garibaldi catches him, bringing him to Wellington’s court, dragging Gajic along as a witness. Wellington sentences Jinxo to be exiled from the station, pointing out that his skills as a zero-g engineer means he can get work anywhere. Jinxo, however, is adamant that he not leave the station. Gajic offers to take him into his custody. Wellington accepts that offer.
Garibaldi then has to explain to Wellington that the only witness against Deuce is no longer usable as a witness, forcing Wellington to dismiss the charges.
Jinxo joins Gajic in his cabin and explains why he can’t leave B5. He was an engineer on the first Babylon station—it wasn’t numbered at the time. It was sabotaged and destroyed right after Jinxo took leave. The company still had his contract, so he worked on the second station, and it too was sabotaged right when he took leave, as was Babylon 3. For Babylon 4, he was determined to take no leave whatsoever and see it all through—which he did, but then right when he left the completed station for his next job, B4 disappeared mysteriously. Jinxo is absolutely determined to never leave B5, firmly believing in his curse (which is also why he has the nickname Jinxo).
For his part, Gajic tells Jinxo how he came to be a grail-seeker. He’d been an accountant, but his wife and children were killed in an accident on Mars. He was grieving and despondent, then he met a dying man who was seeking the grail. Gajic took up his quest when he died.
Ivanova and Franklin have a theory as to what’s causing the mind-wipes: a Na’ka’leen Feeder, a creature from Centauri-controlled space that’s supposed to be under quarantine. Mollari confirms this, and is petrified at the thought of one loose on the station. He locks himself in his quarters.
Accompanied by Jinxo, Gajic visits Delenn, who regretfully says there has been nothing reported that they can find about the holy grail in Minbari space, but they promise to let him know if that changes.
Next they meet with Mollari, who has just finished yelling at a Centauri official for letting the Na’ka’leen quarantine lapse. Mollari tries to work an angle to extort money from Gajic for a search of Centauri records to find this grail, but Vir has been a little too efficient and already checked the records and not found anything.
Deuce’s people try to jump Jinxo, but Gajic fights them off. Then they meet with Kosh, but at the sight of him, Jinxo panics, having seen him mind-wipe Runningdear. Deuce’s people again jump them, and this time they capture Gajic, though Jinxo escapes.
Wellington has also been kidnapped. Jinxo, in a panic, explains to Sinclair that Deuce is in cahoots with Kosh to mind-wipe people. Jinxo brings Sinclair to downbelow, where Wellington is about to have his mind eaten by the Na’ka’leen. However, Gajic is able to keep the Feeder at bay, er, somehow. A firefight ensues when Sinclair and Garibaldi arrive, with the Feeder exposed as not being Kosh and Wellington saved, but with Gajic being shot and killed saving Jinxo’s life.
Gajic’s body is sent back to Earth, seen off by Sinclair and Delenn, and also Jinxo, who plans to continue the grail search—and also insists on being called by his real name of Thomas Jordan now.
At CnC, Sinclair, Ivanova, and Garibaldi watch Jordan’s ship leave, reassuring them that the curse is nonsense, as the station—for the first time—does not explode or disappear when Jordan leaves.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Delenn says that Sinclair is also a true seeker like Gajic. She doesn’t specify in what way, though his ongoing search to fill the hole in his mind (“The Gathering,” “And the Sky Full of Stars,” “Signs and Portents”) might qualify. Which, given that Delenn is in charge of making sure he doesn’t succeed in that quest, makes it kind of hilarious that she’s the one who brought it up.
Ivanova is God. When Sinclair and Garibaldi express relief that there’s no boom when Jinxo departs the station, it’s up to Ivanova to, as she puts it, have perspective, and point out that even if there’s no boom today, there’s always a boom tomorrow…
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi desperately wants to do a complete purge of downbelow. Sinclair refuses to allow it, as most of the people there are just down-on-their-luck people with nowhere to go. Garibaldi is not impressed by this argument…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. We get the first mention of different Minbari castes, with Delenn and Lennier explaining that the Minbari Federation consists of the Religious Caste and the Warrior Caste. (The Worker Caste will be established later, and the fact that the workers aren’t mentioned by a pair of politicians is, well, not surprising…)
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Not a great day for Mollari, as he finds out that the latest symptom of the fading Centauri Republic is letting the quarantine on a dangerous creature lapse, and then Vir screws up his attempt to extort a ton of money out of Gajic.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh’s response when told that Deuce disguised the Feeder as him is, “Why?” When Sinclair reminds him that nobody knows hardly anything about Kosh, making this kind of deception easy to pull off, Kosh’s response is, “Good.”
Looking ahead. Jinxo’s description of the disappearance of Babylon 4 will be seen in “Babylon Squared.”
Welcome aboard. Tom Booker plays Jinxo. The great character actor William Sanderson makes the first of two appearances as Deuce; he’ll be back in the movie Thirdspace. Jim Norton makes the first of two appearances as Wellington; he’ll be back in “The Quality of Mercy,” and he’ll also appear as other characters in “Confessions and Lamentations” and “Dust to Dust.” Linda Lodge plays Runningdear, while recurring regular Ardwight Chamberlain is back from “Signs and Portents” as Kosh; he’ll return at season’s end in “Chrysalis.”
But the big guest is the late great David Warner, one of the finest character actors, as Gajic. Known in genre circles for his roles in Star Trek (The Final Frontier, The Undiscovered Country, The Next Generation’s “Chain of Command”), Tron (which also featured fellow B5 folk Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik), Doctor Who (“Cold War”), Batman: The Animated Series (where he voiced Ra’s al-Ghul), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (in which he danced incredibly badly…), and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (where he played Superman’s father Jor-El), among many others. He passed away in 2022.
Trivial matters. Writer Christy Marx named Gajic after Mira Furlan’s husband, Goran Gajic. Gajic will later direct the fifth-season episode “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder.”
This is the only time the term “cycle” as a unit of time is used. It was the original plan for a time unit on the station, but by the time they decided against it, this episode was already in the can.
The Feeder is the show’s first completely CGI alien.
The transport Jinxo takes off the station is the Marie Celeste, which is the name of a ship found adrift with the crew (and a lifeboat) missing in 1872. This is rather like a ship deciding to name itself the Titanic, but whatever…
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I’d say you have the wrong nickname. They should have called you ‘Lucky’.”
“How do you figure?”
“To have escaped the worst each time—that’s a blessing. You’re a very lucky man. Perhaps, each time, you were exactly where you were meant to be.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“We never do.”
—Gajic giving Jinxo some perspective.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “No boom today, boom tomorrow—there’s always a boom tomorrow.” So many times in this rewatch, I have seen some truly horrific guest casting ruin, or at least damage, an episode. It is, therefore, a genuine pleasure to watch “Grail” and see greats David Warner and William Sanderson ply their trade magnificently. Plus there are strong turns here by Tom Booker and Jim Norton.
What they’re acting in is a nifty little science fiction story by Christy Marx (who, full disclosure, is a friend of your humble rewatcher) that plays the what-if game in a fun way, to wit, if you’re trying to find something, and you’ve looked all over the Earth, and you have space travel and contact with other species, why not look elsewhere? After all, if God is supposed to infinite, why shouldn’t the chalice used by his kid at a millennia-old seder wind up somewhere other than Earth?
I also found the concept of Jinxo to be charming, both that the notion of his curse had grown roots to the point that everyone seemed to believe it to an extent, but also that it proved to be nonsense when he finally did leave in the end.
It’s a little disappointing that we didn’t see G’Kar’s reaction to the grail quest, but that’s mostly because an episode with Andreas Katsulas is better than one without him. Mollari’s attempt to get some extra gamblin’ money out of Gajic is amusing and in character, ditto Vir’s circumventing that with his ultra-efficiency.
The Deuce part of the plot is mostly fine, especially his using Kosh’s mysteriousness for his own purposes. It’s good to see the court system on the station (and the guy suing a Gray Alien for kidnapping his ancestors was cute), but the storyline lost me when Deuce kidnapped Wellington for no compellingly good reason. Seriously, what purpose did that serve? The ombuds had already let him go! And mind-wiping a station official is going to get you way more attention from Garibaldi and the gang than random nobodies in downbelow…
Finally, I love that Delenn commands sufficient respect that Sinclair drops everything and throws together an honor guard just on her say-so—even if it is for a crackpot…
Next week: “Eyes.”
This is a good episode and so is A Late Delivery from Avalon, but it’s weird that the show has two episodes about quixotic figures on Arthurian quests.
Testament to the staying power of the Arthurian Legend! :)
Yeah, I always wondered about that. (Also, my favorite David Warner role has to be as the bad guy in Time Bandits).
The Evil One!
The line about parrots and slugs is classic
Ardwight Chamberlain is back from “Signs and Portents” for his final first-season appearance as Kosh; he’ll return in season two’s “The Coming of Shadows.”
I’m 98.46% sure he’s in “Chrysalis”, where he tells Sinclair, “And so it begins,” and, “You have forgotten something.”
Warner also appeared in my favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol as Bob Cratchit.
The use of cycles is inconsistant with the previous episode. In “TKO”, it appeared to be synonymous with a day. Here, it seems more akin to an hour or maybe a half-hour. We really don’t get a good sense of how much time passes in this episode
Zimmerman (the Omsbud who never gets the weird cases Wellington always seems to get stuck with) might be the Omsbud in “Dust to Dust” who sentences G’Kar for assaulting Londo while high on Dust. Though that character is never explicitly named.
“Come on, laugh, everyone else does,” is an all too appropriate phrase to use in life.
Apparently, he wasn’t credited in “Chrysalis,” so that appearance wasn’t listed in the B5 wiki. My mistake. Will fix.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The ombudsman releasing Jinxo to Gaijic because the script says so makes even less sense than kidnapping the ombuds. But whatever, David Warner makes it worthwhile to just go with it and watch him inhabit the character wonderfully.
And of course the episode is worth it for several scenes by Mollari and Ivanova, naturally.
While I appreciate how Delenn is developed in general, in most of her scenes in this episode her delivery seemed more ponderous than usual, as if the script was a couple pages short and they needed to pad it out to make time.
Tom Booker looks and sounds like he could be a moonlighting Greg Maddux. Whenever I watch this episode I keep expecting Jinxo to try distracting someone with a back-door tailing fastball…
To get to Babylon 5, you have to go through Atlanta
Gajic was the victim in that particular inept crime, yet bears no animosity towards the perpetrator. So while perhaps a bit irregular, it hardly makes less sense than Wellington’s kidnapping (which you would thick would be counterproductive for Deuce).
Yeah, I figure Aldous basically just said he wasn’t going to press charges, in which case Thomas would be released anyway. Remanding him into Aldous’s custody seemed to have less legal justification, but Wellington is called an “ombuds,” and an ombudsman (presumably they figured the gendered part of the title would be dropped in the future) is not a judge but a public advocate and mediator, sort of the government equivalent of a customer service department — someone the people can appeal to for solutions to their problems. So an ombuds might be able to recommend more creative solutions than a judge following the letter of the law.
“Ombuds” as a gender neutral title is in current use today. Not sure how common it was 30 years ago, but it was probably around.
The Ombuds on B5 seem to be something of a hybrid. They can play a mediation role, but they do seem to have the power to make legally binding rulings including on criminal matters (e.g. Dust to Dust), which ombuds usually don’t. The various wikis describe them as being appointed by and part of the EA judiciary, although I don’t know how authoritative that is. I think it is more accurate to view them as judges with fairly broad discretion.
Maybe the shorter form was already around. I’m pretty sure that, while I may have heard the term “ombudsman” before this episode came out, I had no idea what it meant.
And I kind of like the idea of a mediator with enforcement power rather than a conventional judge. I mean, this is a multispecies station, so it makes sense to have an official whose job is to find solutions and mediate conflicts in a flexible way, taking the different legal and cultural norms of various cultures into account, rather than someone who’s enforcing a single set of laws.
Yeah, the only context I’d ever heard “ombudsman” in before seeing this episode was someone on the staff of a newspaper (which we know they still have, in recyclable transparent form, in 2285!) – “someone who handles complaints and attempts to find mutually satisfactory solutions.” (https://www.newsombudsmen.org/about-ono/) – so a pretty good choice for a different but still relatable term
There are quite a lot of them in the UK for various quasi-governmental purposes. It’s a rare term but not that rare. “Ombuds”, on the other hand, I assumed was a B5-unique coinage (and not a bad one).
The JMS commentary on the Lurker’s Guide page for this episode includes a note that the first court scene (with the abduction claim) was added because the initial script ran a bit short. It’s possible that wasn’t enough. I also feel like some of Londo’s scenes are drawn out longer than they needed to be.
I always loved this little inside joke about the Vree, the gray aliens: we see their ships in various shots in later episodes – they are flying saucers.
Which points to another general aspect of B5 that is too often missing from other dramas: the use of occasional bits of outright funny in what otherwise is supposed to be a serious show. Either writers are mostly incapable of doing both, or the funny bits get expunged for being out of character. To me, their inclusion is one of the distinguishing marks of a great TV show.
One of my favorite roles for Warner is as the Evil Genius in Time Bandits, about as far from Galicia as you can get.
To compare it with Star Trek – TNG and DS9 did well as well in this regards I think.
For me, David Warner is Evil and always will be.
I can’t add or argue anything from the post, i had very similar feelings about the episode. :)
Ah only that the CGI alien was of course not great, but still less annoying than the train ride a few episodes before. :D
Nobody ever went wrong casting David Warner in anytning. Whether it’s a Klingon, a Cardassian, Jack the Ripper or a Grail seeker, he always delivers!
That aside, I think “Grail” loses a few points for two reasons:
One other thing I’m not a fan of is that misdirecting teaser before the credits. Trying to imply Kosh is a mind sucking assassin feels like a cheap trick. We already know the Vorlons have little to no interest in the affairs of lower life forms, and only intervene when something truly earth-shattering might happen such as the Deathwalker incident.
But giving credit where it’s due, I always laugh during the scene where they interrogate Kosh and he replies with “Good”.
The concept itself is certainly intriguing. It’s not a stretch to see that Grail believers would assume that the cup of Christ (or whatever else the Grail might represent) could be located beyond the confines of our little world. And the show wisely never attempts to answer the mystery. The title may be “Grail”, but the object isn’t the real story. As Delenn points out, Gajic’s unwavering commitment more than justifies the mission. And his willingness to take Jinxo under his wing makes some memorable scenes (even if Warner is carrying them all by himself). It’s a nice bit of worldbuilding, even if has little connection to the greater arc.
I recently found out that Christy Marx was the co-creator of a young adult sci-fi action series I used to watch as a kid in the 90s: Hypernauts. Co-created with B5 VFX wizard Ron Thornton, using the same hardware and assets from B5. It was even co-produced by the B5 brass, Douglas Netter and John Copeland.
I never thought of that as misdirection, except for the characters in the show. The reasons are as you state.
I dunno; the Kosh fakeout may seem silly in retrospect, but at this point, we knew little enough about Kosh that it was conceivable that his aloof act was a cover for something more predatory. Or that he may have had some arcane reason for making a petty Downbelow hoodlum believe he was an ally.
Although I wonder if maybe they decided to do the Kosh fakeout because it was cheaper to reuse the existing encounter suit prop/costume than to build some other enclosure for the feeder.
It always seemed to me that it wasn’t the same prop. It looks like a replica of Kosh’s suit, not an exact duplicate. Which suggests to me that it might have been built separately. But maybe it’s just that they lit it differently and the vents (or whatever those tube things are) aren’t moving the way they do when Kosh is in the suit.
Anyway, that plus the weird emphasis that Deuce uses when he says (something like) Isn’t that right… Ambassador Kosh? seemed like give-aways that this was not really Kosh at all, even before the real explanation is introduced. Even on first viewing, it never seemed plausible to me that Kosh would be doing mindwipes for some petty thug in Downbelow.
It seemed to me the main difference was that the lighting wasn’t turned on. Or who knows? Maybe they had a rough-draft suit they’d built and replaced with the final one, and they recycled it here.
And we didn’t have to wholly believe it was actually Kosh; it just had to raise questions that made us curious about the answers. Is it Kosh? If so, how does that make sense? If not, what is it instead, and how and why did Deuce carry off the deception? (Although the episode never really answered that last question.)
Given how tight the budget usually was, I think that’s the case. Then again, they did spend some money to make that CGI creature and the big shootout set piece at the end.
All the more reason to economize on other things.
I admit I’m only meh on this episode. David Warner is his typical great self. The other actors are fine and the plot is okay. It just doesn’t catch me.
I have heard a couple of interviews with Tom Booker. Apparently, he originally auditioned for Vir. After they cast Stephen Furst as Vir they kept Booker in mind and eventually decided he would be good in this role. He was interviewed on a B5 reaction channel and talked about how, at the time, he was truly a starving actor and he really appreciated that he was fed on set. It’s here for those who are interested.
This is a nice little story, and a David Warner appearance is always cool, but some things undermine it for me. I thought Booker was extremely weak as Thomas, and “Jinxo” is a ridiculous, clumsy character name, even as an insulting nickname. I also don’t understand what people see in William Sanderson. I find his voice a monotonous drone with no expressiveness. It was fine for Larry in Newhart, but not for much of anything else. Not to mention that it doesn’t interest me much when B5 does these mundane stories about totally non-SF things like a gangster/smuggler threatening someone for information.
Also, the depiction of Holy Grail mythology is rather fanciful. Aldous claims people have been searching for the Grail for millennia, but the literature of Grail quests really only goes back to the 12th century as an amalgam of several earlier traditions:
https://reactormag.com/the-religious-relics-of-indiana-jones-and-the-last-crusade/
That’s barely over one millennium before B5’s time. Okay, I can buy that Aldous believes that, since lots of latter-day beliefs are mistakenly assumed by their adherents to be far more ancient than they actually are, but come on, if the Grail dates from the Crucifixion, that caps its age at about 2.227 millennia tops at the time of this episode, and one would expect at least a few centuries to pass in order for it to become lost and people to start looking for it. So it’s hard to buy that even Aldous could believe people have been searching for millennia, plural.
I also have mixed feelings about the “Gray Alien” lawsuit gag. It’s a cute bit, but it annoyed me at the time, since there were a lot of people back then (and maybe still, I dunno) who believed that UFO-abduction nonsense was real, and I didn’t like seeing it given credence.
Incidentally, Jim Norton (Ombuds Wellington) played a holographic Albert Einstein in two Star Trek: TNG episodes.
Is it possible (quoth he, knowingly stretching the matter) that “for millennia” could refer to analogs of the Grail from other and maybe even extraterrestrial cultures? Dreams of worldwide (or universal) renewal (the definition of the Grail’s meaning given here) have certainly been around for millennia, and maybe he is counting those as “Grails” for which sentient beings have long sought…?
Aldous’s exact words were “My order has searched for millennia.” He wasn’t talking about people in general, but specifically claiming his own organization was that old, or has had that specific goal for that long. That’s the thing I have trouble believing.
Aren’t there ties to a Holy Grail type object in Gilgamesh? I haven’t read it, but thought that was one of the sources. And that could take the dating back a couple millenia.
Sure, and you can reconstruct such ties in retrospect, seeing how cultural references have passed down from one work to another. That does not make it remotely plausible that a single continuous organization has been “searching” for it nonstop that entire time. I mean, part of the reason such mythical and literary resonances occur is because the origins of an idea are obscured by history, only vaguely remembered and reinvented in a new form. That seems incompatible with the idea of an organized search process continuing without interruption for that entire time.
The most likely interpretation, of course, is that Aldous is a member of a much, much younger organization that inaccurately claims to have been in existence for far longer. But his statement is still ridiculous and the episode seemed to be presenting it at face value, without anyone pointing out the obvious absurdity of it.
Eh, maybe it’s timey-wimey ;)
In light of both last week’s and this week’s episodes, let me offer a somewhat different take on them, and possibly others. A core set of questions in B5 are: “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” In TKO, the A story is the second question and the B story is the second question. The same could be said of Gajic and Jinxoe, respectively. So perhaps one way to judge episodes that by themselves are meh (or worse), is to ask how well they help to build that overall theme across the five seasons.
The main issue with Grail is that the focal characters are both guest stars and never appear or matter again. That’s only half-true in TKO. And TKO is focused on Garibaldi and Ivanova; in Grail, Delenn gets some development but we’re mainly learning about the episode’s own characters.
There’s nothing wrong with a story focusing on guest stars, as long as it’s a good story. It used to be the norm in TV that most shows tried to be as anthology-like as possible (since before home video there was no guarantee you’d get to see every episode, so it was important that each one could stand entirely on its own) and tended to revolve around the regulars helping the guest stars of the week deal with their problems, since the lead characters had to remain pretty much unchanging while the guest characters could have entire arcs. Sure, B5 helped usher in an era of greater continuity, but that doesn’t mean standalone stories focusing on guest stars are wrong in any way.
Besides, the episode did subtly contribute to the greater arc by refocusing on the mystery of what happened to Babylon 4, adding more detail that will become relevant later on. Couching that in an endearing standalone character story was more entertaining than the clumsy infodump between Sinclair and Talia in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” We also got more insight into Minbari culture, the differing agendas of the religious and military castes, which will definitely become important later.
I like the fact that the show spends some time looking at how life in the station (and more generally) operates for people who aren’t main characters. Grail isn’t necessarily the best example of this, but I like seeing a piece of the station’s legal system.
Conventions have changed and TV story-telling tends to be a lot more concentrated now with 8 episode seasons instead of 22. But in a longer season, I think it makes a lot of sense to shift the perspective around from time to time.
The episode is a bit thin. It could have made room for a B story. But I like it fine for what it is. For a guest-heavy episode, at least it delivers reasonably good guest performances. David Warner is great, Jim Norton is also quite good, and Tom Booker is fine as far as I’m concerned. William Sanderson seems miscast to me, but he does his thing consistently at least.
I dunno… those are two of the questions a writer routinely asks in creating characters and their arcs, so I think most stories would fit that theme.
I agree that these are routine questions for any character. But how core those questions are to a character/plot line can vary a lot. I am just suggesting that how central to a given plot line and how well they are carried off should be one filter for judging all B5 episodes, given that they are supposed to be the central themes of the entire show.
the storyline lost me when Deuce kidnapped Wellington for no compellingly good reason. Seriously, what purpose did that serve?
Yeah, some weird script glitches in this one. In addition to that: Deuce is just not is a very good criminal, such that it’s hard to believe he’s lasted this long– openly threatening one of his marks in court, abducting a judge willing to play fair and let him go on a technicality, and even having an overly complicated, theatrical plan to feed people to a feeder (what happens if nobody’s crossed him this week? Why not just shoot people who cross you rather than risk getting pinched on a quarantine charge? Just HOW BAD/CORRUPT is station customs if Deuce was able to sneak this creature in?).
Supposedly Garabaldi saw the ombud’s quarters and there’s signs of a struggle, but he was abducted from the hallway. Then Sinclair is supposed to lead Garabaldi to the abductees (via Jinxo) but seemingly arrives there first. This plot didn’t quite gel. The Delenn stuff was wonderful, but alas we only get a bit of it at the start and end.
Garibaldi desperately wants to do a complete purge of downbelow. Sinclair refuses to allow it, as most of the people there are just down-on-their-luck people with nowhere to go.
Sinclair specifically says they can’t afford fare off the station. Gotta say, Babylon 5 should consider the time-honored tradition of simply paying bus fares for the homeless to be somewhere else and bar them from coming back for some amount of years. Wherever they go, they won’t represent the potential diplomatic and security risks that they do on Bab5. They might also consider simply doing a weapons sweep; it’s been repeatedly stated there’s a no weapons policy and it’s so strict it even applies to knives. They’ll catch at least some of Deuce’s men that way and can give them a choice between flipping or going down. Deuce feels like a threat they should be able to handle with some elbow grease, just a contrivance to create conflict for this episode.
Always one of my favourite one-off episodes, because of David Warnerand because I’m enchanted by the idea that the Minbari religious caste will recognise any eccentric rando as a holy man if he genuinely has faith in his quest
I always enjoyed this one because of David Warner’s performance and I just love the world building of the Omnibuds and how the judicial systems works here. It’s a good showing. and to Kevin saying he wished we could see G’kar’s reaction to the quest, well at least we do get to see his reaction to the next quester that comes to Babylon 5.
Who’s Kevin?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
woops, my bad keith
It’s got David Warner in it, so it’s impossible not to like it at least some. William Sanderson also does his usual good job, though I feel like he was wasted on this role. He’d have made a nice recurring villain; maybe a PsiCop, though he does better playing outsiders, or the leader of the raiders, if they’d done more with that plot. (I have to confess a small part of me wanted him to say, “This is my thug Daryl and this is my other thug Daryl.”)
But I’m not really sold on Tom Booker, at least early on. He just doesn’t carry off nervous and frightened. Once Aldous starts to bring him out of his shell, he does fine.
Interestingly, after a long string of sub-par guest actors, we’ve had back to back episodes with multiple really good guests.
There have been several comments questioning looking for the grail off Earth or pointing out that it’s only been about a thousand years (hmmmm) since the grail legend came into being. Aldous makes it clear that he’s not looking specifically for the Cup of Christ. He ties the grail directly to the Celtic myth of the cauldron of resurrection, which would push the date back as early as the 6th or 7th century BCE, and there are probably older myths that are similar.
Sure, the Grail myth evolved from earlier myths, as myths do, but that doesn’t mean there’s been a single specific organization searching for it for that entire time. That’s my point — that the specific tradition of the Grail a quest object sought by pilgrims didn’t seem to coalesce until about the 12th century, and before that it was just various unrelated myths from different cultures.
I mean, if we’re talking about a group seeking some long-lost object from the mythic past, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t have started their search while it was still new. However old the item is, the group seeking it would presumably be centuries younger at least.
That isn’t a problem if you assume the grail seekers are a bunch of eccentric conspiracy theorists who aren’t deterred by mere facts. I mean, Freemasons claim their order was founded in the time of King Solomon, and they’re far less eccentric than Gajic.
Yes, I already mentioned that it’s not uncommon for groups to claim their traditions are immensely older than they actually are. But the presentation of it in the episode treated it as if it could be taken at face value, since Aldous was portrayed as a wise, empathetic character rather than a crackpot. I just would’ve liked to see the episode show more literacy about the history of the Grail legend, rather than just tossing out a few highly questionable lines and then basically dropping the whole subject it was named after.
I love Arthuriana, but I found the idea of a grail hunter existing in this timeframe a bit hard to swallow. Like you say, Christopher, Aldous is portrayed as a wise man, but I can’t quite square that with him seriously seeking the Grail, if he’s using the version from chivalric romances and isn’t acknowledging it’s a variation on older myths.
And at this stage in a series, it’s hard not to know that the showrunners aren’t going to make Arthurian legend part of the ongoing story (which clearly it’s there in the subtext of the show just not so much in the actual text).
I think the point is that Aldous knows the Grail is just a MacGuffin. He needed a spiritual quest. This one presented itself. The point is the path, not the end of it, or even whether there is an end.
I thought of that, but then it seems odd that he’d ask the alien ambassadors for help checking their records. It’s one thing to pursue a quest yourself when you know there isn’t really anything to find, but roping in others to waste their time on something you know will be a wild goose chase is just rude. Aldous doesn’t strike me as the type who’d use other people that way unless he sincerely believed there was a chance they might find something.
Then again, there are a number of unexamined questions that undermine the credibility of the episode. I mean, what exactly did he ask the ambassadors to search for? How did he define the Grail to them? How did he convey a specific enough set of parameters that they were able to determine conclusively that they’d never encountered anything like it? I mean, if it’s just “some kind of ancient cup or bowl reputed to have mystical properties,” I’d think that, if anything, he’d get a bunch of false positives, since every culture would have cups and bowls, and we know the Centauri, Narn, and Minbari all have religious traditions. It would’ve been more realistic if, instead of the ambassadors saying they’d found nothing, they had instead given him too many leads for any one to stand out as particularly promising.
I dunno… I remember seeing TV specials in my youth about expeditions trying to find Noah’s Ark, including at least one who claimed to have found it. And then there are all those people hunting for the Loch Ness Monster, a supposedly “ancient” legend that actually originated in 1933. (People often cite one isolated carving from thousands of years ago as “proof” that the legend is that old, but without any other intervening examples, it’s surely just a coincidence.) It’s possible that new pseudoscientific theories about the Grail might crop up in the future. Maybe even contact with other species could spark a reactionary interest in ancient human lore. Or aliens themselves might formulate eccentric new readings of human lore based on incomplete understanding of the culture and history, and humans might latch onto those novel beliefs.
So I can certainly believe that Grail-hunting cultists could exist in the future. As for Aldous, just because he was kind and spiritually wise doesn’t mean he was well-educated. And even smart people can convince themselves of irrational things, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle embracing spiritualism.
I sat down to this knowing the name of the episode and fully expected to see
I confess that I checked out early on the first time I tried to watch this one. Between the brain sucker, the alien abduction lawsuit, Jinxo, and the search for the holy grail, it seemed even cornier than usual (though admittedly the 100 degree heat might have had something to do with my inability to pay attention). However, I decided to give it another go last night and was pleasantly surprised. The incredibly basic crime plot wasn’t particularly interesting, but the grail plot was a lot better than I expected it to be, thanks in no small part to David Warner (RIP) who gave Aldous a quiet dignity which was all the more poignant given the ridiculousness of his quest. And I like how seriously Delenn took him. It felt very in line with what I’ve seen from her people so far. And Jinxo didn’t end up being quite as cringe as I thought he’d be given the actor’s performance early on.
Keith:” After all, if God is supposed to infinite, why shouldn’t the chalice used by his kid at a millennia-old seder wind up somewhere other than Earth?”
And that works even better if one employs the Grail mythology that Wolfram von Eschenbach uses in his PARZIVAL, where the Grail is the LAPIS EXILLIS, the celestial stone that the neutral Angels brought to Earth during the War in Heaven…
I still like the suggestion I saw online that if Gajic had got to ask Kosh about the grail, the exchange would have gone:
Kosh: “We already have one.”
Gajic: “Can I see it?”
Kosh: “No.” [Closes door]
Agree: Kosh is too dignified to comment on one’s parentage or to fart in one’s general direction.
A nice little episode, with lots of nice touches. I think there was no boom because this time, Jinxo left with a purpose. Everyone needs a dream to follow.