“GROPOS”
Written by Larry DiTillio
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 2, Episode 10
Production episode 210
Original air date: February 8, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… A quiet night in CnC is interrupted, to Ivanova’s chagrin, by the unexpected arrival of the EAS Schwarzkopf, along with several support vessels, under the command of General Richard Franklin, the father of Dr. Franklin.
Sheridan rushes to apologetically and belatedly greet him, not having had any word of his arrival. However, that’s on purpose: His mission is classified, for the moment. Even the ground-pounders (or GROPOS) under his command don’t know the real mission. Right now, General Franklin needs accommodations for all 25,000 of his troops. Ivanova and Garibaldi struggle to fulfill that request: For starters, they put some folks in existing quarters, which we see when Keffer finds two strangers making themselves at home in his cabin.
General Franklin reads Sheridan, Ivanova, and Garibaldi—and only the three of them—in on his real mission. They’re off to Akdor to assist the local government in putting down a rebellion. EarthGov hasn’t officially announced that they’re assisting the government yet. They will do so right before the Schwarzkopf arrives. Part of why they’re stopping at B5 is because Sheridan has been to Akdor before; the general wants to go over the battle plan with the captain. The other reason why is that they’re providing upgrades to B5’s defenses.
Franklin père et fils are reunited, and it’s a bit on the tense side. There’s obviously a lot of resentment and spectacular lack of communication there. To prove it, when Ivanova brings some Marines to bunk down in medlab, Franklin throws a nutty. He and Ivanova talk about it both there and later off-duty in the Eclipse Café, where Franklin laments that his father always makes him incredibly angry. Ivanova—who has some experience with paternal difficulties—urges him to try to find a common ground with his old man, as you never know when the chances to do so will run out.
After Delenn expresses concern about the flipping great wodges of Marines stumbling about the station, a trio of them start to harass her. Led by PFC Kleist, they’re not thrilled with a Minbari trying to look human. Another PFC, Dodger, interpolates herself between Kleist and Delenn, and while the ambassador is able to depart thanks to Dodger’s interference, a brawl soon breaks out. Garibaldi is able to stop it, and convinces Sergeant Plug to drop the matter without charges.
Dodger thanks Garibaldi, and is stunned to realize that Kleist was picking on an ambassador. Garibaldi is called away, and Dodger admires his ass as he leaves.
General Franklin shares the battle plan—Operation: Sudden Death—with Sheridan, who advises the general that this is a terrible idea. The government is lying about the fortifications the rebels have, and the casualties will be way worse than they have been led to believe. However, EarthGov is insistent on establishing a presence in Akdor’s system. It’s proximate to both Narn and Centauri territory, and with a war heating up between those two, Earth needs to be ready for when their conflict spills out into the rest of the galaxy. Unfortunately, the price for having that presence is to put down the rebellion.
Dodger tracks down Garibaldi when he goes off duty and hits all over him. Encouraged by Welch, Garibaldi shows her around the station, eventually winding up at his quarters. However, Garibaldi puts the brakes on, as he tends to rush things, and that messes the relationships up. Dodger angrily points out that she’s a ground-pounder—she doesn’t have time for a relationship, she just wanted a roll in the proverbial hay. She leaves in a huff, with Garibaldi belatedly realizing that he’s seriously fucked things up.
The general goes to his son to apologize, and the pair of them kiss and make up, with General Franklin, not for the first time, urging him to actually contact his mother and sister every once in a while.
Garibaldi tracks down Dodger in the Zocalo to apologize, and she does likewise. Elsewhere in the bar, Keffer exchanges war stories with the two PFCs he’s now rooming with: Large and Yang. The former is a veteran, the latter a rookie. Keffer accidentally bumps Kleist, and soon a brawl breaks out. Garibaldi and his people try to break it up (and at one point, he and Dodger almost punch each other before they realize who the other is), but it doesn’t really end until General Franklin, Sheridan, and Plug show up and say they’re moving out.
As the GROPOS board the Schwarzkopf, Garibaldi and Dodger share a kiss before she embarks, while the Franklins get a goodbye.
Later, folks are watching ISN’s report on the mission. Franklin is relieved to see his father interviewed by the reporter on Akdor, meaning he survived. Welch gives Garibaldi the casualty report, and Kleist, Large, Yang, and Dodger are all on it—we then cut to their broken corpses on the ground at Akdor.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan proves a little too good at providing accurate intelligence to General Franklin, certainly more accurate than Akdor’s government manages, as Sheridan predicts that it’ll be impossible to put down the rebels without massive casualties, words that prove sadly prophetic.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova starts the episode talking about how much she enjoys the quiet, which is always a recipe for things to stop being quiet any second. You’d think she’d know better.
She also urges Franklin to be good to his father, so he doesn’t get the same regrets we saw her express in “TKO” at her father’s shiva.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi manages to fail at keeping order on the station with 25,000 Marines on board (not that anybody really could do that), and also fails at having a one-night stand.
His father served with General Franklin during the Dilgar War. The general was apparently impressed with Alfredo Garibaldi—not so much with his kid.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s transformation proves not to sit well with veterans of the Earth-Minbari War.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Dodger has designs on Garibaldi from the moment she sees him and his ass. Garibaldi’s baggage—his disastrous relationship with Lise Hampton, his obvious lack of any kind of chance to Winters—sadly gets in the way of his and Dodger’s nookie.
Welcome aboard. Marie Marshall makes the first of two appearances as Dodger; she’ll be back in season five’s “Day of the Dead.” The various other PFCs are played by Morgan Hunter, Ken Foree, and Art Chudabala, while Ryan Cutrona plays Plug.
We’ve also got a bunch of recurring regulars: Joshua Cox back from “A Spider in the Web” as Corwin, who’ll be back next time in “All Alone in the Night”; Maggie Egan back from “Chrysalis” as the ISN anchor, who’ll return in “Confessions and Lamentations”; and David L. Crowley back from “Soul Mates” in his final appearance as Welch.
However, the big guest is the late great Paul Winfield as General Franklin, adding B5 to a genre resumé that also included Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator, Mars Attacks!, Batman Beyond, Gargoyles, and the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok,” not to mention one of your humble rewatcher’s personal favorites, Presumed Innocent.
Trivial matters. The Schwarzkopf was named after General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who led U.S. forces during the Gulf War of the early 1990s. It’s possible that the ship was also named after Major General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., who, among other things, was in charge of the investigation into the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son in 1932.
Keffer tells Large and Yang about the time he faced down a Minbari squadron in “Points of Departure.” Ivanova mentions Connoly, the head of the dockworkers, seen in “By Any Means Necessary.” Garibaldi references his relationship with Lise Hampton, seen in the “A Voice in the Wilderness” two-parter and “Babylon Squared,” as well as his periodic attempts to flirt with Winters, seen most recently in “A Spider in the Web.”
While neither G’Kar nor Mollari appear in the episode, Delenn does mention that the two won’t even speak to each other, both anxious for the war the Narn declared in “The Coming of Shadows” to start in earnest.
The echoes of all of our conversations. “I’m a doctor, my duty is to heal.”
“Then heal humans! Stephen, I know you’re fascinated by these alien creatures, but they’re a threat to humanity—and they always will be. Help your own kind.”
“Life is life, whether it’s wrapped in skin, scales, or feathers. Now, if you respected these beings instead of constantly trying to murder them, you’d appreciate that.”
The Franklin family argument, also the classic soldier-vs.-scientist argument.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Leave it to the infantry to ruin a guy’s morning.” Last week, we got one of B5’s best episodes. This week we get, um, not that. “GROPOS” is a dreary collection of tiresome clichés masquerading as a script. It’s hard to say what’s more excruciating to watch, the stereotypical Marines doing stereotypical Marine things or the stereotypical father-son arguing-and-reconciliation scenes.
The only saving graces of this utter nonsense are the performances of Marie Marshall and Paul Winfield. Marshall gives Dodger a gleeful charm that is very compelling, and Winfield was never even really capable of giving a bad performance. Even so, neither is a particularly well-written character, and both suffer for that. Still, you can see why Garibaldi was interested in Dodger—and vice versa, truly—and you really just want to smack Garibaldi for screwing it up.
As for General Franklin, it was an interesting touch to have a Black character give the “why don’t you help your own kind” speech to his son, since that’s the sort of thing a White character might have said to his son the doctor who treated Black people. (Something we would see in real life a decade after this episode aired, when General Colin Powell, who was Black, used the exact same language to justify keeping LGBT people out of the military that was used prior to 1948 to justify keeping Black military personnel segregated.) Unfortunately, the script doesn’t really do anything with that after the first conversation between dad and kid, which is a blown opportunity to give the episode some life. Or at least something beyond the war-movie clichés.
The episode’s plot also strains credulity, as there’s just no way B5 would be able to accommodate 25,000 new arrivals without warning. It might have worked if General Franklin requested shore leave for his people, but to give them all bunks? That’s madness, and logistically completely unfeasible for the station to be able to provide.
Next week: “All Alone in the Night.”
So begins a minor stretch of meh episodes that won’t end until There All the Honor Lies.
“David L. Crowley back from “Soul Mates” in his final appearance as Welch.”
Welch the character makes a final appearance in IIRC the second volume of the Legions of Fire trilogy, where he comes to a bad end.
I suspect the production staff would have liked to have had R. Lee Ermey as Plug. But either he wasn’t available, they couldn’t afford him, or he simply made the S&P Boys uneasy.
I’m most familiar with Paul Winfield from his appearance in Darnation Lane, AKA the movie 20th Century Fox thought was going to be their big hit of 1977. While he avoided being the Black Guy Who Dies First in that one, it’s countered by how horrific his character’s death ends up being.
While the effects for the battle show their age, at least it’s not the worst CG flame effects I’ve ever seen.
As to why Garibaldi really got cold feet over getting intimate with Dodger, here’s this week’s Riffable Moment.
Garibaldi: One second, one second. Maybe we ought to slow down for a minute, okay?
Dodger: Did I miss something?
Garibaldi: No, no, it’s just…
I’m uncomfortable with Daffy watching us shag.
If Garibaldi had a problem with that, he wouldn’t have hung Daffy over his bed to begin with. (Also, Americans don’t generally say “shag,” at least not in this century.)
DiTillio says the original script had Ivanova coming into Garibaldi’s quarters the next day and finding a pair of Daffy Duck boxer shorts on the floor, with the “funny” exit line from Ivanova “Love the shorts.” So at least in the original script, Garibaldi seems very comfortable with Daffy watching.
At least we were spared that tag scene (which DiTillio describes as “delightfully funny”), which demonstrates pretty conclusively that JMS isn’t the only writer on this show whose sense of humor varied wildly in quality.
Sadly, it’s far too early in the show to deploy a better punch line exit in that same circumstances, like Ivanova looking at Garibaldi, looking at Daffy on the boxers, and asking “Woo hoo?”
He could always flip him around.
Yeah, this was pretty much a bunch of military-drama cliches transposed to space — complete with the pulpy writing of Sgt. Plug (they actually named him Plug??) calling them “space grunts” and “starbutts,” because of course people who live and work in space as a matter of everyday routine must constantly remind each other of the fact that they are in space. If anything, troops who are literally nicknamed “ground-pounders” would be the ones least likely to be assigned space-related epithets; you’d think they’d save it for ship personnel and pilots like Keffer, i.e. navy and air force equivalents. (While we’re at it, the large guy being named Large is really on-the-nose too. I wonder if DiTillio tossed in some placeholder character names and then forgot to change them.)
There was some decent stuff between the Franklins, as formulaic as it was, but it bothers me that they made General Franklin say such ugly racist things and then never addressed it afterward, treating it as if the only real issue is that Stephen was too hard on him and that it’s not an issue at all for a senior military officer in an interstellar fleet to consider nonhumans nothing more than vermin. The whole “we can disagree and still be friends” thing doesn’t wash when the disagreement is over people’s fundamental personhood and right to exist.
Also, I don’t agree that it’s interesting to give such racist rhetoric to a Black character, because it’s pretty much a cliche in SF/fantasy TV and movies that the characters who are most racist against aliens or mutants or cyborgs or fairy folk or whatever are usually played by actors of color — e.g. in Alien Nation, both the movie and the TV series pilot, the most virulently racist character toward the alien refugees was the Asian-American coroner, and in FOX’s The Gifted, the main federal agent hunting down mutants was Black. (There was also X-Men: The Last Stand casting Bill Duke as Bolivar Trask, but not much was done with the character there.)
I’m also curious about the rebellion on Akdor. Everyone cheered when the rebellion was put down, but why were they rebelling? Were they really the bad guys, or were they resisting an oppressive government that Earth backed for its own political and military convenience, like how the US backed brutal dictators such as the Shah of Iran because they were anti-communist? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were the latter, and that’s why it bugs me that the script isn’t even curious about the question.
And, of course, Admiral Cartwright or Star Wars Nu Canon Grand Admiral Rae Sloane.
I had an interesting theory about this that makes sense to me, though. Which is the fact that it’s an attempt to avoid misaimed fandom. When Bioshock: Infinite came out, the Tea Party (among other groups online) misappropriated quite a bit of the satirical imagery and racist rhetoric of the enemy faction involved. Similarly, we’ve had Warhammer 40K’s developers get very annoyed with fans who used their imagery for RL prejudice on 4Chan. Putting the racist anti-alien rhetoric in the mouths of POC prevents it from being adopted by RL bigots.
At least theoretically.
You guys make some interesting points. I’d never really thought about how prevalent it is, as a general trend. As with so many things, the larger pattern flags something miss-able on the small scale.
Is it possible it’s just lazy story-telling that has become cliche? I mean, if I’m trying to make the point that senseless hate is a never-ending cycle, the first thought I’d have is putting a current hate-ee in the hate-er role. A good writer is supposed to, y’know, go beyond the first thought though (one of many many reasons I’m not a writer).
There’s that old maxim about not assigning to malice what can be assigned to ignorance, after all. Although a part of me things that you guys are right to see something more meaningful. Fall 2024 is not the time for optimism about human nature…
Interesting thought, but the practice has been around in mass-media sci-fi long enough that I doubt that was the original reason. I suspect it had more to do with shying away from the appearance of overt criticism of white racists by making characters of color the anti-alien/mutant/whatever bigots. Or in some cases, there was probably no hidden agenda at all, just a recognition that a society that’s overcome one form of prejudice and included formerly excluded groups as equals will inevitably invent new forms of prejudice. For instance, there was a time when left-handed people were seen as perverted and in need of conversion-therapy “cures,” analogous to LGBTQ people in our generation; but today there are probably plenty of left-handed racists or homophobes. So it’s not unbelievable that it could happen; it just seems to be a common enough trend in fantasy/SF that you have to wonder.
“the large guy being named Large is really on-the-nose too”
When I was in the Army we had two guys in our outfit named “Smith”. Big Smitty was maybe 5 1/2 feet tall and maybe 150 pounds. Little Smitty was a bit over 6 feet tall and at least 200 pounds.
And of course Cpl Bailey was known as “Beetle”.
The script is fairly explicit that Earth doesn’t care at all about Akdor except as a strategic location. I think it is quite intentional that we have no way to judge the morality of the rebellion or of Earth’s decision to intervene to suppress it. The celebration amongst the general population is part of what Sheridan refers to as the “rattling of sabres”. I don’t think we are supposed to take that as a cue to assume that the Earth government is acting on the side of angels.
I think it is also significant that this episode was created in the period between Desert Storm and 9/11. I doubt it was an accident that this episode name-checks Gen. Schwarzkopf. At that time, popular cynicism about US involvement in the middle east was probably near its high-point. (People tend to forget that, because 9/11 changed political attitudes so quickly and so dramatically.) I think that cynicism is embedded in the script, although I would agree that it isn’t really overt and it plays differently in a different political context.
“I don’t think we are supposed to take that as a cue to assume that the Earth government is acting on the side of angels.”
No, of course not, but that’s the whole point — that the script’s lack of curiosity about the issue seems like an oversight. If people are going to fight and die in a war, what cause they’re fighting for should be relevant, and if the characters act as if it doesn’t matter, that’s something the script should call out and comment on, rather than simply agreeing with them that it doesn’t matter.
I’m saying my guess is that Larry Di Tillio thought he was commenting on that in the script. The absence of comment is the comment: it’s a cynical comment, but a comment nonetheless.
If so, that didn’t come across for me.
Fair enough. It is also possible that I’m reading something into it that isn’t really there. But I have always interpreted that absence as a deliberate choice.
“I wonder if DiTillio tossed in some placeholder character names and then forgot to change them.)”
Could be a holdover from from his days writing for Masters of the Universe.
There is a podcast about Babylon 5 called Grey Sector. They love the show and love to snark. They often point out that Larry D, as they call him, really sucks at naming characters. He tends to go the Simple Simon route of throwing in what would be obvious place holders and then just leaving them there.
When you write for something featuring characters with names like Man-E-Faces, Ram-Man, Clawful, and Stinkor, it’ll have a lasting effect.
First off, most writers are capable of adjusting their style to fit different contexts. Second, J. Michael Straczynski also wrote for He-Man, as did other notable writers such as Paul Dini, Marc Scott Zicree, and Michael Reaves. Are you saying they all had the same issue with character names?
I assumed when I watched it that the intervention would eventually tie into the increasing fascism of EarthGov, but no, apparently not; it’s just a disposable little war on a disposable little planet that doesn’t connect to anything.
(Honestly, the assumption of a lot of science fiction that Earth would immediately become an imperial power upon gaining access to FTL technology is a little weird, when you think about it. And, frankly, kind of indicative of how much of it is made in the US or Britain.)
I dunno… it didn’t take that long in the grand scheme of things for Europe to become an imperial power after it industrialized to compete with China’s wealth and resources, because it was comparatively poor and thus strongly motivated to catch up and get ahead of its rivals. China had been arguably the dominant power on the planet for a millennium or two, then this upstart peninsula to the West (with pretensions of being a whole continent in itself) comes along with its coal power and railroads and factories and takes over the planet in a measly couple of centuries.
That’s… not how history actually happened. “Europe” became an imperial power well before it industrialized (see: Spain and Portugal in the 16th Century). And they certainly weren’t “competing with China”; they barely knew China existed, and what China was and wasn’t doing was irrelevant until the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch actually got to East Asia. (And when they did, their primary interest was in trading with China.) The actual competition was primarily within Europe, and maybe secondarily with Middle Eastern powers like the Ottoman Empire.
A better analogy would probably be with Japan in the later 19th Century, which industrialized rapidly after being (somewhat forcibly) contacted by the US and European states, and went on an imperializing tear very soon after.
I have a bachelor’s degree with high honors in history, thank you, and you’re missing my point because you’re looking at it from a Eurocentric perspective, whereas I’m looking at it from the perspective of the rest of the world. (“What China was doing” was hardly “irrelevant” in the global scheme of things, because for most of the Common Era, China was a far more wealthy, powerful, and influential state than anything in Europe. The Ming Dynasty trading “Star Fleet” led by Zheng He consisted of vessels enormously larger and more advanced than anything European traders had at the time.) Yes, Europe had an empire, but industrialization allowed that empire to go global in a way it never had before. And industrialization was absolutely driven by economic competition with China. Faster transportation technologies were invented to allow easier travel and trade to obtain the wealth of the East, and factories were invented to churn out locally made porcelain and textiles to compete with imports from Asia.
I’ll agree that the Japan analogy works too, although not quite, because as you say, they were forced to catch up in self-defense. China had no interest in forcing anything on Europe, since they were the more prosperous society and had everything they needed at home. Others came to them seeking trade or political alliance, so they didn’t have to go elsewhere. That’s why China didn’t industrialize even though it had the knowledge and means to do so 700 years before Europe did. It didn’t need to become more wealthy than it already was or chase after more resources or territory than it already had. But Europe was much poorer by comparison and thus driven to pursue resources and territory aggressively, giving it an incentive to innovate new solutions — hence the Industrial Revolution.
And that’s the point here. In B5, Earth is a small, upstart power emerging into a galaxy dominated by old, stable civilizations like the Minbari and Centauri. It’s got more incentive than they do to strive hard to catch up to the competition, so it’s plausible that Earth would advance swiftly. You can see the same dynamic in Star Trek: Enterprise, which established that the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites were more established and prominent powers than Earth, but Earth advanced quickly and eventually surpassed them because it had an incentive to catch up.
It’s hardly pretension when you genuinely start throwing a whole continent of heft around, mon ami.
The whole of Europe is smaller than Siberia. The only thing that makes it a continent is ethnocentrism.
I know GROPOS is generally not on most fans’ lists of favorite episodes but, personally, I have always had a soft-spot for it. It isn’t a Hugo-worthy script. But all of the guest performers deliver good, compelling performances and the episode hits its emotional beats. I can’t agree that the Franklin father-son scenes are “excruciating” and Dodger is just a delight pretty much any time she’s on screen.
I agree that the plot doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny. Setting aside the logistics of adding 10% to the station’s population without warning, the cover story is absurd. Why would they need 25,000 marines at the colony at Io? (Io’s strategic value comes up later, but that is in respect of its proximity to Earth’s jump gate. They need ships to defend that, not ground troops.) But even if that made sense, in what universe would you stage an in-system troop transfer by first sending them multiple jumps away from that system for a few days?
“But even if that made sense, in what universe would you stage an in-system troop transfer by first sending them multiple jumps away from that system for a few days?”
The episode never said they came from Earth or anywhere in Sol System. I assumed they were returning to Sol from a posting in some other system.
We have never heard of any large Earth troop concentrations outside of Sol System, but sure I guess that is technically possible. But then wouldn’t the cover story just be that they were being rotated home?
Earth is an imperial power that’s already fought in two wars and has numerous colonies. It’s got a whole bunch of interstellar battleships and was able to build five Babylon stations in quick succession. I see no reason to think it wouldn’t have a large military presence outside of Sol System.
And what’s wrong with having a garrison on Io? Well, aside from the fact that it has a molten surface and is really deep in Jupiter’s radiation belts, making it one of the worst possible places in Solsys to put live human beings, but otherwise, surely it stands to reason that Earth would have defense bases in the outer system to guard against invasion, the same way the US has plenty of overseas military bases, early warning radars in the Arctic, and so forth.
It’s possible. But we haven’t seen any direct mention of large human populations outside of Sol System. We know there are some jump gates and colonies. Those could be trading posts, or they could be huge. It hasn’t been established either way.
But if the US needed to send a large contingent of marines to Hawaii for some reason, do you think they would be more likely to send them from Germany, or from San Diego? There certainly might be a reason to re-deploy troops in a logistically awkward way. It just calls out for some kind of explanation to me. Otherwise it looks weird. Usually one doesn’t want one’s cover story to look weird.
As I said, it just stands to reason that an interstellar power as major as Earthgov would have a significant military presence outside of Sol System. Nobody talks about Babylon 5 as if it’s unique as a posting for Earthforce personnel. We’ve seen a bunch of Earthforce starships going all over; if there are that many ships, it follows that there are support bases. What possible reason could there be to doubt it?
As for deploying things from Earth vs. elsewhere in space, the thing about Earth is that it’s got a lot of gravity you have to fight to get out into space, and then you’ve got to climb uphill against the Sun’s gravity well to get out to somewhere like Io. Since Earthforce doesn’t have artificial gravity, presumably it doesn’t have antigravity and thus its ships would need to expend fuel to get into space. It would actually take a lot less fuel to get to Io from anywhere else in the system than from the surface of Earth. And since ships going through jump gates don’t have to use much fuel, it would probably be more efficient to travel from some extrasolar base to Io than from Earth to Io (presuming that the extrasolar base was on a space station, asteroid, or small planet with less gravity than Earth).
Earth had colonies outside of Sol System. In Severed Dreams Proxima III, in the Proxima System and Orion Vii in the Orion System both broke from Earth and refused to instate martial law when Mars did. Having colonies in other systems means there probably was military presence there as well.
“Proxima” is no doubt Proxima Centauri, but “the Orion system” makes no sense, since Orion is a whole constellation. I guess it could be short for something like Pi-3 Orionis, one of the closest stars in the constellation, though it’s also called Tabit, so “the Tabit system” would make more sense as a name.
I think Orionis would get shortened to Orion not Tabit, for the same person people still argue that we have 9 planets (Not 8, 13, or 17, which are the most agreed upon numbers depending where you draw the line on the dwarf planets.)
The point is that it’s not just “Orionis,” because that’s the possessive of “Orion” and there are numerous Bayer designations that incorporate it — Betelgeuse is Alpha Orionis, Rigel is Beta Orionis, Bellatrix is Gamma Orionis, and so on all the way through the Greek alphabet and into dozens of numbers clear up to at least 75 Orionis. It makes no sense to use the name of the overall constellation as an identifier for a single star within it, for the same reason that it makes no sense to refer to a single city by the name of its state or country. You wouldn’t call Cincinnati just “Ohio.” You wouldn’t call Paris just “France.” So you wouldn’t call Tabit just “Orion.” That would be ridiculous.
Of course, the exact same complaint can be raised about “Centauri.”
As history tends to prove, naming has forever been the domain of fashion, inspiration and what looks suspiciously like mere whimsy (Even when it comes to something as important as naming whole continents – witness how the New World came to be named the ‘Americas’, for instance).
Also, never ever doubt the power of nicknames to obliterate all clarity.
Yeah, but I doubt that naming a single star system after a whole constellation would catch on in an interstellar society, because it’s too non-specific given that there are multiple stars in any constellation. It’s like calling Cincinnati “the Ohio city.” Which one??
Anyway, I’m looking at it more in terms of the writers’ lazy choice than any in-universe justification. I don’t respect it when writers obviously didn’t bother to do the bare minimum of research to avoid sounding ignorant.
I didn’t say it made sense, it’s just what the Wiki says. In any case it does support the idea that Earth has colonized beyond Sol and is a force to be called in and reckoned with.
Not directed at you. I was just making an observation about the series’s naming choices. I get tired of SF shows just making up nonsense names for star systems rather than doing a little basic research. I mean, space is really out there. It’s not a made-up fantasy land, it’s actually there, and we know stuff about it that can be looked up in books (and online, these days). It’s not that hard.
Although, granted, sometimes the writers of stories set in Earthly locations don’t bother to do their homework either. Even Shakespeare was guilty of that, e.g. giving Bohemia a coastline in The Winter’s Tale.
It also bears pointing out that when it comes to naming places, people have a naughty habit of rejecting one reality and substituting their own (Witness the future Charles II being handed a map of the Virginia region by John Smith and then gleefully scratching out the carefully gathered native place names to substitute names borrowed from his own family and friends: given he was a young teenager, this is almost exactly the reaction one might expect, but it’s still deeply representative of the human desire to leave their own mark on the world, technicalities be damned).
Or the notorious ocean front in Port Charles, Pennsylvania in General Hospital. Or In the movie Green Berets where John Wayne talks about the sun setting in the east, due to not having any idea about how Vietnam the country actually occupies the world. (He stands on the coast of Vietnam and intones about the sun setting, except Vietnam only has an east coast.)
Yeah, as a GH fan, I’m going to have to jump in:
“Port Charles, New York“, approximately where Rochester is.
To be fair, Main Line Pennsylvania represents in other ABC soaps: Llanview, Corinth, Pine Valley….
One of the few things that I do appreciate about this episode is how it shows that space is inevitably at an extreme premium on an enclosed environment like a space station–something that, say, Deep Space Nine never really made clear in the same way. That said, I agree that a sudden 10% increase in the station’s population really isn’t feasible; where would they get the food for them? Or the oxygen, for that matter?
I also genuinely like the scene where Delenn was getting hassled by marines (or, rather, it made me uncomfortable, because it kind of reminds me of transphobic harassment, but it was done in a very realistic way). Given that just half a season ago, the Grey Council was ready to make Delenn the next Dukhat, it occurs to me that these idiots came distressingly close to starting another Minbari holy war.
A short term population increase shouldn’t be a problem. If the environmental plant can’t handle that increase, they should start deporting lurkers by the boat load. There has to be a huge safety margin built in to keep maintenance or damage control from becoming near constant crises.
You’re right. Any decently designed system has a built-in cushion to handle temporary increases beyond its recommended maximum capacity. For instance, if an elevator is rated to carry 5 tons, it’s designed to handle 6-7 tons before it breaks, say.
Also, B5 doesn’t just have an environmental plant — it’s got that whole massive Bernal-sphere interior with trees and parkland, which is presumably the station’s main source of oxygen and plays a role in carbon dioxide scrubbing and waste reclamation (though those would need artificial assistance to handle the population load). That would have to be a self-sustaining ecosystem to be viable over the long term, and that means it would be able to withstand temporary stresses without collapsing.
Come to think of it, I’m surprised they didn’t just have the marines set up camp in the parkland. It would’ve meant less crowding in crew quarters, and would’ve given the marines something close to shore leave, a pleasant environment to ease their stress before the big battle. It would’ve been an inconvenience for the station’s residents, but no more so than all the quartering of troops in private residences and the infirmary.
Come to think of it, was it only Earthforce personnel who had to share quarters? If the station’s crew is 2500 people, and there were ten times that many soldiers who had to be billeted, then there would’ve had to be 11 people in a room, not 3-4. So even if every Earthforce officer had to quadruple up on quarters, that still leaves 15,000 more troops. How many hotel rooms does the station have for itinerant visitors? Would they have been enough? Did the diplomats and civilian residents have to share quarters too?
It would have meant rendering more parkland scenery. A lot more. I suspect they didn’t have the rendering-time budget, given that we hardly ever see B5’s huge interior even though it must be most of its livable space…
They didn’t have to show it; they could’ve just mentioned it in dialogue. I didn’t say all the marines had to be billeted there, just that it would’ve eased the crowding.
Oh, I see. Quite right. I was assuming that if they were billeted there, you’d have needed scenes set there too, but that’s an unjustified assumption.
Recalling Ivanova’s (I think?) Secret Coffee Plant, they seem really careful about their biosphere. That always seemed a bit extreme, but that may make a tent city a nonstarter. I would guess civilian contracted workers got roped in to the billeting.
The coffee thing was about the hydroponic garden being meant for growing fruits, vegetables, and grains rather than nonessentials. A hydroponic garden is a different thing entirely from open parkland. And yes, the idea would be that the limited resources of the garden should not be wasted on nonessentials, but as I said, any competently designed system has a cushion built in to its basic parameters. Even a finite capacity would be designed to be above the maximum normally demanded of it, so that the system can handle emergencies without instantly collapsing — which is why cars are designed to go faster than the speed limit and elevators are designed to carry more weight than the maximum they’re rated for. The reason for not wanting to divert resources to nonessentials is that it would shrink the size of the safety cushion, but there’s still room built in for the system to absorb a certain amount of waste or overexertion. That’s why Takashima and later Ivanova maintaining an unauthorized coffee plant didn’t cause an environmental crisis.
We know B5 has a quarter of a million people in residence. Presumably, it isn’t kept at 100% occupation rates, and we see other episodes where refugees pass through the station. So a 10% population increase would only be impossible if the station weren’t designed for at least a temporary increase of that size. A big deal, certainly an emergency, but for a few days, quite possible. We just don’t have the stats to know for sure.
It is possible that food and oxygen emergency supplies might have been necessary to accommodate such an increase. Given the fleet is also carrying weapon supplies for the station, it could easily have replacement supplies of food and oxygen. Frankly, the harder thing to believe isn’t that the station can accommodate 25,000 extra people, but that those light transport ships are carrying 5000 marines plus supplies each, especially if you remember that Earthforce lacks artificial gravity. Troop transport ships in WW 2 that carried 5000 soldiers ran 600 feet long and weighed over 12k tons, and that’s without needing oxygen; I suppose you could sleep more soldiers to a room if you had no gravity. Maybe the trip is fairly short, but you can see why General Franklin doesn’t want his soldiers on those transports for days when a rotating station is available instead.
Yeah the B5 tech manual claims that B5 can support up to 15,000 troops, plus a crew of 2,500. I don’t know where those numbers come from, but if one accepts them, then temporarily doubling or tripling the number of troops is roughly consistent with what we see (e.g. Keffer has 2 billets assigned to his quarters). It seems within the realm of the feasible.
I think the credibility-straining part for me is not the absolute numbers, but the idea that they could process that in a matter of hours without any pre-planning. Just getting that number of people on and off the station would be a major undertaking. It’s like the equivalent of 50 passenger liners (based on numbers I have seen elsewhere claiming that the Asimov class liners have a passenger complement of ~500) arriving simultaneously. Those ships are too large to dock directly, so you would have to get everyone in and out of shuttles as well.
Except that next episode we see that she’s badly out of favor with the Grey Council.
DiTillio provides details in his Script Book prologue that fill in details of stories already told about this episode:
Jerry Doyle complained constantly about how Londo got a sex scene early in S1 but Garibaldi had gotten zip. So DiTillio wrote in a sex scene with Dodger. They cast Marie Marshall for the role. Then Doyle found out about that. Marshall was an ex-girlfriend and Doyle was in a relationship with Andrea Thompson (Talia). DiTillio says Doyle came to his office and explained he thought Garibaldi wouldn’t jeopardize his relationship with Talia by sleeping with Dodger. DiTillio pointed out there was no relationship with Talia and the ending would hit harder if Garibaldi had “intimate moments with Dodger.” DiTillio said he wouldn’t rewrite. Doyle went to JMS. He told DiTillio it was his call, but Doyle kept at JMS until JMS folded and rewrote sections of the script. DiTillio says he hates the rewrites: Garibaldi “sounded like some lame high school kid, making dumb excuses to hide his sexual anxiety.” And the post-apology promise of a date when Dodger returns contradicts all that anyway.
Second, director Jim Johnston had a huge effects shot planned for the finale of the brawl on the station. The casino set’s “wheel of fortune” was going to explode and crash to the floor. They set up pyrotechnics for the shot, rolled cameras, and “out of the great wheel came not a massive explosion but a few sparkler-like pops and flashes that quickly went out as the wheel tilted forward an inch or so and then just hung there.” They had to junk the shot.
DiTillio clearly doesn’t see the episode as formulaic, partly because he has a different context: he’d talked with Richard Biggs about Biggs’ father (a colonel in Vietnam during that war) and the personal cost of that war on Biggs and the rest of the family (watching news reports worried Colonel Biggs had died). DiTillio went far enough to pull actual things Biggs’ father said to him and put them into General Franklin’s mouth.
Of course, a viewer who doesn’t know that isn’t going to find the dialogue unique or unexpected. Verisimilitude doesn’t always mean avoiding the conventional, but Coming of Shadows was going to be a tough act to follow even for a less generic-feeling story. It’s also clear DiTillio is concerned with deploying all the stuff he previously developed (especially for Ivanova’s family backstory) and the disconnection with the bigger JMS-driven story is palpable, even if the broad theme is on-point.
One big ol’ ball of cliches. The most egregious is probably the “opening credits character has a father who is a military hard-ass.” It seemed to happen a lot around the time this first aired. At least this one resolved a little differently; an actual conversation between the two about their issues with each other usually didn’t happen.
Since just about the only thing that happens in this episode that will matter in the long run is
I found myself slightly bothered by Dodger’s name. See, Garibaldi’s second favorite thing in the universe isn’t just Daffy, it’s Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century. The conjunction of names bugged me.
Bruce Boxleitner has oddly shaped ears. I kept staring at them every time he was in profile.
@krad: I think you meant Lise Hampton. Also, the “Darmok” link leads to the Wrath of Khan rewatch.
Fixed, thanks!
I agree, not one of the better episodes, although I do give them credit for showing the cost of the battle and showing the GROPOS we have come to know dead. It’s all cliche, but hardly the worst episode of B5. On a scale of one to ten it’s a meh.
I do respect that it had the guts to kill off all the speaking GROPO characters, except the sergeant. And of course, there’s a subtle commentary to the fact that all the grunts were killed but the general is perfectly fine.
In terms of timing at least, “GROPOS” is placed on the exact right spot in the season. General Franklin’s rationale for arming B5 with extra firepower makes perfect sense within the context of rising tensions and impending war between the Narn and the Centauri, and as Ivanova points out, they do now have enough firepower to take down a cruiser. And in true Chekhov’s gun fashion, those weapons will be put to use fairly soon….
But as a collection of small character stories, it’s certainly not the best episode out there. But I do find ways to enjoy it. My favorite approach is to treat this collection of military clichés as a comedy/farce/satire of sorts, not unlike Verhoeven’s take on Starship Troopers. I can almost enjoy a barking mouthpiece like Plug, who in one scene is threatening to rip the faces off the marines while on the other he’s quietly enjoying Dodger’s breaking from the line to kiss Garibaldi. A nice little nod to the fact that these are still human beings deep down.
But otherwise, this is probably the most dated episode of the season thanks to the marines. The overall plot about clamping down on some rebellion for some government’s sake feels both rushed and problematic. And even with Winfield giving a lot of depth to General Franklin, the story of father and son itself doesn’t add anything new to our Franklin we didn’t already know, though I do enjoy the moment where Franklin outright calls his father a murderer (even if indirectly), and we instantly feel his flash of regret. Winfield and Biggs play the emotional beats well. And I do enjoy the scene where Ivanova pleads to Stephen to make amends with his father – a nice callback to “TKO”, if anything.
And the Keffer story? I like it that he bonds with the two marines, but there really isn’t anything there at all. No arc. No backstory. Just a couple of scenes thrown together with barely anything resembling a story. Even DiTillio couldn’t find anything of note to do with Keffer.
Garibaldi thankfully gets rewarded with the Dodger story. Easily the best of the bunch. Some nice chemistry, and an overall healthy portrayal of a woman knowing what she wants and pursuing it with no external prejudice. And if I’m not mistaken, there was still a lot of backlash against women serving in the military in the 1990s – this episode came out years before movies like G.I. Jane and The General’s Daughter. Dodger was certainly a sign of at least some progressiveness in the B5 universe without being an overt soapbox about it (season 4 also mentions the Pope being female).
I dunno, my reaction to Dodger’s story was that it felt kind of backward that the only female marine in the group was also the only one defined as a romantic/sexual interest.
Dodger had a bad feeling about the mission she was going to be part of. It was being led by General Franklin. She knew something wasn’t right. You don’t bring out a famous general like General Franklin for a milk run, you bring him out if it’s something big. The whole thing comes off as her being desperate to feel something.
Yeah, but they could’ve given that plot to one of the male characters. They didn’t. They went with the default pattern that any female character’s plotline had to revolve around sex or relationships in some way.
A fair point. It was still 1994 after all. Even in X-Files, for all its efforts to paint Scully as a competent FBI agent/doctor not defined by a love interest, and they still couldn’t resist the temptation to do the inevitable Scully/Mulder shipping/pairing.
I remember trying to pitch a show a while back, and the first question that came up was: “Where is the love story?” And I didn’t have one. It wasn’t that kind of show. But they pointed out I needed something like that to even have a chance of getting it made.
Ew! That sounds just about as bad as the inverse case, Stargate, where nobody ever admitted that human beings could ever have relationships with each other, and when it happened you only knew because one of the characters inexplicably vanished from the show and was barely mentioned again.
We were told at the time that “MGM doesn’t do relationships”, which is kind of like saying “MGM doesn’t write about human beings.” I mean yes it’s taking place mostly inside the military so relationships are hardly going to be front-and-centre, but their absolute absence from every character’s arc, military or not, seemed wildly implausible to me.
This episode feels almost completely disconnected from everything else happening in the second season, despite referencing the war between the Narn and the Centauri. The closest it comes to touching on second-season themes is the scene with Delenn, which, as others have mentioned, also touches on some uncomfortable stereotypes.
But that scene, along with General Franklin’s comments about aliens, is an interesting reflection of the attitude President Clark is fostering within Earthforce. We’re told that Clark is slowly but surely replacing military brass with loyalists and what not, but we don’t really see it. This episode indirectly seems to underscore that point: General Franklin has exactly the attitude Clark would find useful, and some within the ranks feel very empowered to speak their mind.
A fellow fan and friend also likes to point out how the end of the episode shows us the difference in reaction between the command staff (happy to know General Franklin was successful and survived) and the “lower decks” (who find out their new friends were casualties). It makes me think that JMS totally missed the potential for Keffer to represent the “lower decks” more often.
The other reason why is that they’re providing upgrades to B5’s defenses.
This bit passes very quickly, but the incidental dialogue of “When they’re online, Babylon 5 will have enough firepower to take on a warship,” was also used in the trailer and always struck me as a bit strange. So before this Babylon 5 didn’t have enough firepower to take on a warship? If they were that defenseless before, that retroactively makes all the posturing in Legacies against Neroon’s Minbari cruiser kind of pointless, if Neroon decides to shoot they’re all dead anyway. I guess the guns before this were only rated to take out raiders and other light ships.
“…you can see why Garibaldi was interested in Dodger—and vice versa, truly—and you really just want to smack Garibaldi for screwing it up.”
I actually liked that scene. It was nice to see Garibaldi, a character I’m usually not very keen on, open up and say he’s kind of screwed up right now and isn’t ready to fall into bed with someone just because he can.
However, that’s probably the only scene I really enjoyed in this episode. What a waste of Paul Winfield (and I agree with Christopher L. Bennett that having the black guy be the racist is just one more of this episode’s genre cliches). I also had a hard time believing most of these people were actually privates (unless Earth is just drafting everyone under the age of 50 for some reason).
With Thanksgiving this Thursday, can you confirm that there will be a new rewatch next week?
Yup, the rewatch of “All Alone in the Night” should be next Monday on schedule. What I’m not 100% sure on is when the review of this week’s Lower Decks will show up on the site because of the holiday….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode definitely benefits from a viewer’s willingness to tolerate cliches and unimaginative storytelling. At least it wasn’t afflicted by B5’s usual issues with guest stars and they committed by killing off all the grunts. I recall this episode being invoked as evidence that B5 was more sophisticated than Star Trek since it eschewed the optimistic and happy ending.
“Killing off grunts” being something that Star Trek, famously, never does…
“I recall this episode being invoked as evidence that B5 was more sophisticated than Star Trek since it eschewed the optimistic and happy ending.”
I guess they forgot how many tragic endings TOS had, even aside from the folly of assuming that pessimism automatically makes something sophisticated. Even TNG had its share of episodes ending tragically or ambiguously, and of course DS9 went there often. And heck, stories condemning the horror and futility of war were right in Trek’s wheelhouse. So I guess the people saying those things were people who didn’t actually watch Trek. No one is so opinionated about a subject as the people who know the least about it.
One of the TOS episodes that affected me the most as a child was, ridiculously enough, Catspaw, just because of the ending.
well it seems i’m in the minority of this episode. I frigging love it. I think it gives Keffer one of his only good roles, I like the soliders, but most importantly, i love the very cliche but moving ending where: yeah. it’s war. people will die, from the likeable characters to the assholes to the love interests. eh guess everyone has different tastes.
Given some of the histrionics in this episode, it is also possible that the ship was named after Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, (1915-2006), the renowned operatic soprano best known for Wagnerian roles.
The ending was good, the rest was desperately MEH. :)
I also found it slightly alarming that it did not occur to anyone that when we have 25k random soldiers on the station, it MIGHT not be the best idea to have the minbari ambassador walk around without any kind of security…
that goes back to the fact that there just doesn’t seem to be any support staff besides the aides for ambassadors.
Which I can accept, but maybe it COULD have occured to Garibaldi or Sheridan that she might need at least one security person?
It would have been a better episode if the troop movement was connected to some sort of conflict from an ongoing story arc, and not just a clash mentioned once and forgotten.
Would it, though? I mean, what the marines were nominally fighting for was essentially irrelevant to the story. Indeed, that was kind of the point, that soldiers go where they’re ordered and fight and die the same regardless of the cause, and that it’s all ultimately just a meaningless meat grinder.
After all, this was a story about guest stars. Continuity is not automatically good; it’s just one tool in the kit. It’s only of value if it has an impact on the continuing characters’ story arcs and personal development. The show’s overall story arcs make no difference to Dodger or Kleist or Large or Yang or Plug or even General Franklin, so how would gratuitous continuity ties have improved a story about them in any significant way?
One item not listed in Paul Winfield’s genre resumé is the TV show The Charmings. I only mention it because Winfield as the magic mirror and Judy Parfitt as the wicked stepmother had such great chemistry that it was a shame they were not in a better TV show.
This is one of my favorite episodes. It might have something to do with the fact that I was a GROPO when I first joined the Army, before I reclassified as an aircraft mechanic
It affects nothing, but Plug is a sergeant major.