“In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by David J. Eagle
Season 2, Episode 16
Production episode 217
Original air date: May 10, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Garibaldi and Allan discuss the growing Narn refugee problem, as the station is running out of space to put them up. The healthy ones, at least, are being moved off-station as fast as possible, but the wounded are piling up in medlab.
Morden has a scheduled meeting with Mollari, but Vir comes in his stead, as Mollari is off-station. Vir makes his tremendous disdain for Morden very very very clear.
Garibaldi meets with Sheridan, interrupting his long-procrastinated going through of his wife Anna’s things. Sheridan agrees to intensify the criteria by which Narn refugees get to stay in medlab in order to deal with the overcrowding.
One of the things Sheridan has is the manifest of the Icarus crew. Garibaldi flips through it, and is rather shocked to see a familiar face: Morden. According to the records, he died with the Icarus, but Garibaldi has seen him on the station on several occasions. Sure enough, he’s on the station now. Sheridan wants to know how a dead person got through customs, and Garibaldi rightly points out that they can’t check every single person against every single database. If he’d done something requiring an investigation, that’d be one thing, but he hasn’t. Now, though, Sheridan wants him found.
Winters gets a visitor: Pierce Macabee, a representative of EarthGov who is holding a series of lectures, and wishes her to attend. This turns out to be an unveiling of a new initiative by the Clark Administration’s Ministry of Peace: Nightwatch. Both Winters and Allan are in the audience as Macabee describes Nightwatch. It’s a volunteer organization made up of civilians who will spend some time keeping an eye on things and promoting peace. For this service, members of Nightwatch will be paid fifty credits a week. Not enough to live on, but some useful extra money for some…
Ivanova has to order Franklin—who has been pushing himself and going without sleep and taking lots of stims—to get six hours’ sleep and then eat a proper meal.
Morden, having made his delivery to Mollari through Vir, tries to depart the station, but is detained by Allan. He’s put in an interrogation room where Sheridan starts to question him. Morden doesn’t wish to stay, but Sheridan refuses to allow him to leave or get legal counsel for one simple reason: he has no rights by virtue of being dead. According to EarthGov, he died on the Icarus, and Morden never informed anyone that he was still alive. Morden provides Sheridan with a bullshit story about how he woke up amnesiac with no idea what happened on the Icarus.
Garibaldi tells Sheridan that he’s going too far. Morden hasn’t committed a crime, and Sheridan has no justification for holding him against his will, and threatens to resign if Sheridan doesn’t let him go. Sheridan doesn’t let him go; Garibaldi resigns.
Sheridan orders Allan to find Winters. Vir then comes to Sheridan and says that Mollari wishes Morden to be released, as he has diplomatic immunity from the Centauri Republic. Sheridan lies to Vir and says that Morden is currently in protective custody, so diplomatic immunity doesn’t apply.
Ivanova tries to point out that Sheridan’s acting like an obsessed idiot. Sheridan’s response is to double down and say that nothing else matters but finding out what happened to his wife.
Winters refuses to scan Morden without his consent, as that’s hilariously illegal, even if Morden is legally dead. Sheridan has Allan escort Winters back to her quarters on a path that will allow her to pass by Morden, and she senses an incredible darkness around him that causes her to collapse. She’s taken to medlab, and when Sheridan tries to apologize, she slaps him, which is the very least he deserves.
Delenn and Kosh confront Sheridan, who is really wondering what the hell it is about this guy that everyone wants him freed. They tell him about the First Ones, who were among the first sentient life forms in the galaxy, and about the Shadows, who are returning. They have had to play it very close to the vest, though, because the Shadows are moving slowly, which gives them time to prepare. If the Shadows know that the Vorlons and Minbari know they’re coming, they’ll accelerate, which would be disastrous.
The Icarus went to Z’ha’dum and disturbed the Shadows. The crew was given a choice: serve the Shadows or be killed. Morden chose the former. Sheridan has to let him go, or the Shadows will strike. Morden is never alone, Delenn points out.
Sheridan talks with Allan, telling him about the bombing of Coventry during World War II. The British knew the attack was coming, because they’d cracked the Nazis’ code. But if they warned or evacuated Coventry, the Axis would know the code had been broken and they’d change it. So Prime Minister Churchill let Coventry be bombed. Allan says he’s glad he doesn’t have to make that kind of decision.
Sheridan adjusts the scanners in the interrogation room to see different frequencies, and briefly sees the Shadows on either side of Morden.
He lets Morden go. He gives Garibaldi his link and PPG back, saying that the security chief was right. Garibaldi happily returns to duty, saying that next time he should listen to Garibaldi. Sheridan says there won’t be a next time. Garibaldi also notes the Nightwatch armband that Allan is now wearing. Allan says it’s an extra fifty a week for doing what he already does anyhow.
Sheridan goes to Kosh and says that he wants to learn how to fight the Shadows, whatever it takes.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan does not cover himself in glory here, as he refuses to back off his obsessive need to find out what happened to his wife, and none of the entreaties made—by Ivanova, Garibaldi, Winters, Vir, and Morden himself—move him even a little bit, when truly any one of them should have gotten him to back off, which gives you an idea of how obsessed he really is. Even when Delenn and Kosh give him a very very good reason why he should let Morden go, he agonizes over it.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova goes full Jewish mother in this one, from her whupping Sheridan upside the head for being stupid to her making Franklin get some sleep and eat a good meal.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi pulls the “stop doing this stupid thing or I’ll resign” thing that TV characters always pull, which usually gets the boss to back off. However, the boss doesn’t back off and Garibaldi hands in his link and PPG.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. We finally find out what Delenn had Lennier ask Kosh back in “Chrysalis,” to which the answer was affirmative: “Have the Shadows returned to Z’ha’dum?”
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Vir has a crowning moment of awesome, as he has the absolute best answer to Morden’s perpetual “What do you want?” question. (See “The echoes of all of our conversations” below.)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. B5 is practically overrun by Narn refugees. Sheridan is forced to take crueler measures to see who qualifies for medical treatment simply because they don’t have enough space in medlab to treat everyone who’s injured.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Winters is asked to attend Macabee’s seminar on Nightwatch for no obvious reason. Just being near Morden causes her to sense the Shadows, who nearly overwhelm her.
The Shadowy Vorlons. We find out that the Vorlons are one of the First Ones, and the only ones that are still around. The Shadows are a malevolent force that the First Ones have beaten back in the past. And we finally get a good reason why Delenn and Kosh have been parsimonious with revelations about the coming of the Shadows—they can’t afford to let the Shadows know that they’re on to them.
Looking ahead. Vir’s answer to Morden’s question (again, see “The echoes of all of our conversations” below) will be called back to in “Into the Fire.”
Franklin’s proclivity for taking stims will continue to be a thing.
Kosh tells Sheridan that if he goes to Z’ha’dum, he will die; Sheridan will go to Z’ha’dum in the aptly titled “Z’ha’dum,” and while he will die there, he’ll only be mostly dead, not all dead…
Welcome aboard. We’ve got recurring regulars Jeff Conaway as Allan and Ardwight Chamberlain as Kosh, both back from “There All the Honor Lies,” both to return in “Divided Loyalties,” and Ed Wasser as Morden, back from “Revelations,” to return in “Matters of Honor.” We’ve also got Alex Hyde-White being spectacularly bureaucratically bland and reasonable-sounding as Macabee.
We also see a picture of Anna Sheridan, which is a picture of Beth Toussaint, who played her in “Revelations.” When the character next appears in season three, she’ll be played by Bruce Boxleitner’s then-wife Melissa Gilbert.
Trivial matters. We get a name—First Ones—for the ancient species discussed by G’Kar and Sakai in “Mind War.”
Franklin and Ivanova discuss religion, with Franklin revealing that he was raised a Foundationist, a comparatively new religion that sprung up around the time Earth made first contact with alien life. We’ll see this religion again on both B5 and Crusade.
The Ministry of Peace—which quite deliberately sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984—is abbreviated “Minipax,” which is a reasonable abbreviation, but which also sounds a bit more like “pacification” than “peace,” which is also probably deliberate.
We are told why Kosh stays in an encounter suit: if he didn’t, he’d be recognized by everyone. It’s not entirely clear what that means as yet…
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I want to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?”
—Vir’s answer to Morden’s query as to what he wants.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The Shadows were old when even the Ancients were young.” Even if the rest of the episode was dreadful—and it isn’t, this is a good, strong, powerful episode—it would be worth it for Vir’s answer to Morden’s perpetual query of what he wants. It was worth it the first time through, and it’s even more worth it on a rewatch. Just a fantastic moment for Stephen Furst and for Vir, whom you underestimate at your peril. (I particularly like the tone of pure glee Furst puts into Vir’s voice when he says “lifeless.”)
We also get to see a very ugly side of John Sheridan. His behavior in this episode is appalling, and it’s a good thing it ends well, because if he kept going the way he was going, Ivanova was going to be forced to find a way to get him brought up on charges. True, Sheridan’s loophole that Morden was listed as dead meant that he could legally keep Morden there for as long as he wanted. But ethically, it’s a spectacularly shitty thing to do, and bravo to Garibaldi for sticking to his guns and handing in his link and weapon. Threats are useless if you don’t follow through, and it would’ve been even cooler if Garibaldi had stayed resigned. (Honestly, the Garibaldi-Sheridan relationship was always a little off. Garibaldi was created to be Sinclair’s confidant and best friend, and the dynamic between Garibaldi and Sinclair’s replacement never quite gelled.)
And even with him finally doing the right thing, Sheridan does a lot of wrong things along the way, particularly his treatment of Winters. A pity there won’t be any followup to that…
Finally getting Morden’s backstory is also useful, especially since it ties into Sheridan’s wife’s death. Morden was already a powerful presence on the show, and this adds a fascinating new layer to it, one that has very direct meaning to our lead.
We also have the very low-key introduction to Nightwatch, which made my skin crawl the first time I heard it thirty years ago. “Spy on your neighbors! We’ll pay you!” There is no way to interpret that as anything other than icky. Points for casting the perpetually bland Alex Hyde-White, who brings just the right tone of reasonable bureaucratic dullness to the presentation, making it seem perfectly harmless.
Next week: “Knives.”
Such a great, great episode. Vir’s moment stands out above all the rest, but nearly everything works. One thing about Vir’s wave: I’ve seen it suggested that, given what we know about Centauri anatomy, it might be a rude gesture in their culture. Londo’s taunting wave at G’Kar when G’Kar learns that Londo has a G’Quan-eth plant lends some credence to the theory. We have seen a definite rude Centauri gesture from Londo where he taps his torso on either side with bunched fingers. I figure that’s the equivalent of crotch grab. “Yeah, I got yer (whatever) right here.”
Alex Hyde-White may be bland, but it’s the blandness of someone trying to sell you something really bad for you without letting you know just how bad it’s going to be. It’s a scene that makes me want to take a shower every time I see it. But I’ve realized how many of these seemingly bland bad guys on this show have that long, swept-back, not-quite-a-mullet hairstyle. American Psycho wouldn’t be made for a few more years, but it’s easy to picture Macabee or any of the others talking about the genius of Huey Lewis or their preference for Phil Collins era Genesis.
This is one of hte pitifully few B5 episodes that made an impression on me when I tried to watch the show and this is one of the even smaller number that made a GOOD impression on me (good enough I saw out the rest of S2, at least – it wasn’t qutie good enough to get me to watch s3!)
Vir’s speech to Morden is Just. That. Awesome.
And getting to see a lot of the individual hints come together was cool too.
That said, I think that’s at least part of my issue with B5. That it takes until the middle of season 2 before things start to come together and that there really aren’t enough strong episodes leading up to it to make the teases worthwhile. It should be noted that I was watching B5 new in about 2005/6, via DVDs so I actually could binge watch – I don’t know if that really emphasised how uneven the episodes were, perhaps?
Either way, I didn’t go beyond S2, but I am very glad I got this episode before I quit!
This-this is when Babylon 5 came into its own.
If you stopped before Season 3 you definitely missed out! Seasons 3 and 4 are by far the strongest, with nearly every episode packing a punch.
That was what I was told about s2. That it was so much better than s1. And I was told that about s1 – that it was so different and better than DS9. And when neither of those things proved to be true, I didn’t really want to risk s3 and get yet another disappointment when there were other things I could watch that I’d enjoy more.
I have since seen a few episodes from both s3-5 and they’ve confirmed that me and B5 just don’t connect.
That said, I am enjoying Keith’s reviews and I probably will (at some point) seek out some of the stronger episodes and see if just watching the highlight reel works any better for me!
I think my favorite tid bit from this episode is from when Talia slaps Sheridan. Apparently, Andrea Thompson was a bit too in to the scene and actually hauled off and wacked Bruce Boxleitner. The look on his face afterward is, apparently, not all acting.
If I was the actress, I’d be into it too. Talia rarely has any agency, I believe all or nearly all of her plots revolve around somebody using her for their own ends and bad things happen to her. Might have felt good to let out that frustration.
The comment about Coventry is a myth. See the Wikipedia page for summary of what actually happened. (British Intelligence knew Coventry was one of a number of potential targets but not the date. Understanding of X-Gerat was incomplete at that time so the navigation beams were mis-interpreted on the night of the raid)
Yes a good episode that moves the plot forward.
The most recent book I’ve read about Coventry, “The Blitzed City” (2015) by Karen Farrington, reported that much of the intelligence about Operation Moonlight Sonata came from interrogations of downed Luftwaffe crews, not decrypts, and that the information that Coventry was the likeliest target arrived less than 24 hours before the attack. The decision to withhold the information was to avoid a sudden mass evacuation, which would have hopelessly clogged the roads and left thousands stranded in the open when the bombing started.
RV Jones wrote a lot about the Battle of Beams (and he led the UK side!). Yes X-Gerat’s functioning was mostly worked out from downed crews and a plane or two. Intercepts only really helped get the coordinates sent to the beam transmitters. Useful to determine candidate targets – but not when.
This is a big arc episode and all, but I have some issues with it. For one thing, it’s not at all clear to me why Sheridan just immediately jumps to harassing Morden like a murder suspect without even considering the possibility that his story might be true. I mean, we know Morden’s lying, but what in-story reason does Sheridan have to think that? It just seems like an unmotivated overreaction, even given his personal stake in things. Without some reason for doubting Morden’s honesty, some specific, provable hole in Morden’s story, Sheridan’s extreme “I refuse to believe you unless you confirm my preconceptions” attitude seems arbitrary and makes him look downright evil.
Also, aside from the Coventry story being a myth (as mentioned in previous comments), it seems downright egomaniacal for Sheridan to compare sacrificing his own peace of mind about the fate of his wife to sacrificing hundreds of innocent lives. I mean, get over yourself, man. The only negatives here are to yourself, just one guy.
I also find the chronology of Delenn’s galactic backstory a little suspect, the huge jump from a billion years ago to a million to 10,000 as if they were all equally long ago rather than orders of magnitude apart. That’s a common failing in fiction writing about ancient history, a failure to appreciate the vast difference in scale and treat everything in the past as if it happened close together.
Alex Hyde-White is an actor I’ve seen here and there in a variety of odd contexts. He played a younger version of Sean Connery from the neck down in the opening flashback of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and he was Reed Richards in the cancelled Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie. He had minor roles in a few episodes of season 2 of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which co-starred his father, the perennially charming Wilfrid Hyde-White.
Morden never bothered to get in touch with IPX or Earth Gov to tell them what happen. He basically tells Sheridan by time he got better there was no point in coming forward. Instead he’s going about his business like nothing happened while the families of the Icharus crew have to wonder what happened to them. I think that’s what pissed Sheridan off so much, On top of that Morden acted like smug asshole the whole time.
Sheridan knows exposing Morden would tip off the Shadows and put both sides into open confect with each other. He knows the Army of Light isn’t ready for open warfare with the Shadows yet.
Except if Morden’s story had been true, he wouldn’t have known what happened any more than anyone else did, because he would’ve had no memory of the incident. So he could’ve kept silent because he couldn’t offer anything to the families except a painful reminder. It just bugs me that Sheridan never even seemed to consider the possibility that Morden might be telling the truth, and there was no good reason why he should be so certain.
I mean, at the very least, from his point of view, it would probably have been smarter to play good cop than bad cop. Fiction writers love to write interrogators bullying and threatening suspects, if not outright torturing them, but in reality, that’s a terrible technique for gaining information. You get better results by building a rapport and getting the subject to trust you. Not that it would’ve worked with Morden, of course, but in general terms, Sheridan’s approach was all wrong. I mean, what if he had just been a survivor who kept quiet about it, rather than a willing agent of dark forces? The best way to draw him out in that case would’ve been to take a more sympathetic approach.
Even if we accept Sheridan having a hobby of tracking black ops plots, that doesn’t make him a master interrogator. And I don’t think he fully believes the “everyone collaborated or was killed” claim Delenn makes, so he might be abandoning other survivors (maybe even his wife) by letting Morden go. The Coventry comparison isn’t very apt though, even if it were accurate.
i do fully understand “I want answers from this guy” and that Morden’s attitude and responses don’t seem to match his story. “Amnesia” but he’s smugly confident that a frankly off-the-rails station commander isn’t going to mess with him? The lie might he plausible if Morden tried for trauma or fear or subservience or anything but the attitude he takes.
I think this is a great episode, but it’s nagging at me a bit that if Sinclair hadn’t been reassigned then the whole episode would fall apart, Sinclair having no relation to the events that befell the Icarus, and it makes me wonder what the original plan might have been in this regard. It would have been a shame to lose this.
Is this the first time we see Sheridan’s dark side emerge? I’ve heard early in the series he received some flak for being Captain Happy-Go-Lucky, but the minute he learns about Morden we see a much darker side of him, one that will be in evidence off and on throughout the rest of the series.
I also don’t really like the setup. As mentioned in the recap, Sheridan is randomly going through Anna’s stuff, which for some reason includes photos of the strangers she was working with, Garabaldi decides to look at a few for no real reason, then Morden’s is randomly one of the first to pop up. None of this really makes sense, it’s just a series of things that happens to launch the plot. Would have vastly preferred if he did something to trigger Garabaldi to check into him, or even if a particularly alert guard noticed at customs that he was a dead man, then you can do basically the same story.
I can accept that Anna’s things would have included info about the mission including a crew manifest, but it does seem awfully lucky that Garibaldi just happens to see a picture of Morden and just happens to remember seeing him on the station, given that I don’t think we’ve ever seen the two of them interact. It’s hard for me to imagine Morden triggering Garibaldi as he’s just too slippery a character to do something that clumsy, though perhaps if Londo had actually requested diplomatic immunity for Morden in the past…something easy to grant without a full background check…that might have worked.
I realized long ago that the majority of stories are driven by coincidence in some way or other, such as the coincidence of the characters who deal with a crisis just happening to have the knowledge or skills necessary to solve it, or a wandering protagonist just happening to arrive at a location at the exact time that a local problem comes to a crisis point they can help resolve, rather than after it’s too late. It’s the anthropic principle of fiction: If the coincidence doesn’t happen, the story doesn’t happen, therefore it’s inevitable that the coincidence will happen in the story.
I don’t think this is that great a coincidence, though. Garibaldi probably comes to Sheridan’s office every day, perhaps several times a day, so it’s not that improbable that he’d show up while Sheridan was finally sorting through Anna’s things, a process that could easily have taken hours when he could work it in between his duties. So there’s a good chance the manifest screen would’ve been up whenever Garibaldi happened to come into the office that day. And he looked through a number of crew manifest photos before hitting on Morden’s; we didn’t see how many. Only six seconds passed before he mentioned it and they went by at about two per second, but that could be a bit of narrative compression.
As for Morden, he’s a frequent visitor to the station, implicitly on more occasions than we’ve seen onscreen, so it’s not unreasonable that Garibaldi would’ve seen him coming and going or hanging around the station on multiple occasions, often enough that he came to know his face. He could probably recognize a lot of the station’s recurring visitors in the same way, since it’s his job to pay attention to people. I mean, in Morden’s first scene in the episode, he was sitting right there in the Zocalo, and there were station personnel wandering past in the background. It’s possible that Garibaldi walked by him just a few minutes before going to Sheridan’s office. (I rewatched the scene to see if Garibaldi did walk by in the background, but he didn’t while Vir was there. He could’ve gone by earlier while Morden was waiting, though.)
Granting that some contrivances are necessary to make a story work– such as Sheridan having a connection to Anna/Icarus/Shadows in the first place– at least IMO stories generally work better if the authors at least try to minimize them and make the ones they need as organic as possible, rather than knocking the audience out of the story as they try to justify them. In addition to the alternative routes above, even just making it so the new security-orientated EarthGov rolled out software that does a better job of detecting when the IdentiCard of a dead man is used. That’s something organic to the story and a security hole that, logically, any government would want to patch. Heck, I’d be curious to know if that gambit would work even today. I have my doubts.
It’s not one to one, but Sinclair’s fiancee Catherine also worked for IPX and was being sent to strange places to look for ancient tech, The Shadows were awakened. before season one, so she wouldn’t have been on the Icarus, but certainly she could have been missing and presumed dead with some sort of connection to Morden and Zahadum. Then Sinclair would have had the background story for this episode. I Know JMS has said that Catherine couldn’t have the same story as Anna Sheridan, but I think it could have been massaged enough to fit. Plus, they were implying a romantic connection between Sinclair and Delenn in season one, so having a long term girlfriend/fiancee/maybe wife would be an obstacle that needed moved out of the way.
Note, one of the reasons I prefer Sheridan to Sinclair is the fact that Delenn not only captured Sinclair, she tortured him and he remembers that. I can’t make that into a romantic connection and not feel a little icky about it. Sheridan doesn’t have that baggage.
I suppose things could be reshuffled such that the Icarus mission, with Sakai aboard, occurred either late in S1 or early in S2, depending on whether or not Sinclair is still around…sadly, Sakai only seemed to have a meaningful role as his on-again, off-again, rather than standing on her own. I’m less sure of how Morden could have also been involved at that point, unless he was established and the Icarus mission took place even earlier (since it has to pre-date “Signs and Portents” to make much sense).
Ah…you introduce Sakai much earlier, with Morden as her partner or such, and they both go on the Icarus expedition and only Morden returns…
I kind of agree and disagree on the Sinclair-Delenn vibe. I can’t remember what JMS had to say in terms of whether they were intended to become a couple, but if they were, then introducing Sakai seems to needlessly throw a wrench into that plan. Agreed that Sinclair getting into a relationship with his former torturer and watcher would have been a bit weird. On the flip side, getting into a relationship with the man who arranged for your world’s flagship to be destroyed is also a bit weird, but at least it’s less directly personal.
Mind you, the Black Star issue mostly involves the Warrior Caste being a bunch of big babies, essentially whining, “Moooooom, he cheated!”
To be fair, faking a distress call to lure an enemy into a trap is a war crime in real life. See 12.6 and 12.7 here, as well as footnote 2 on pp. 508-9: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1572&context=ils
It’s not just deceptive, it’s dangerous, because if faking distress calls is fair game, then combatants might start ignoring genuine distress calls and more lives would be lost. Distress calls need to be sacrosanct for everyone’s benefit. So if you ask me, what Sheridan did was despicable and the Minbari are not wrong to condemn him for it. He may have considered it an unavoidable necessity with the survival of humanity at stake, but it was undeniably an immoral act.
How do you feel about “in the Beginning” portraying it as a situation where Sheridan and his crew didn’t necessarily have any other viable option?
I haven’t seen that movie in decades. (Keith, will you be covering the movies after the series, or in release order relative to the series?) As I said, even if he did think he had no other option, it’s still a war crime and it’s not wrong to call it out as such, any more than it would be wrong to call out what Churchill did to Coventry if that had really happened. It sets a horrible precedent and should not be casually excused.
while true it’s despicable, it is stated that the Minbari were also tracking down ships with distress calls and than destroying them, which is also a war crime.
Fair point.
I haven’t decided where I’m going to do the movies yet. Luckily, I don’t have to make that decision yet, either.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Production/airing order makes the most sense.
Oh, I see. The first movies (besides the pilot) weren’t released until season 5. I thought they came out sooner.
It’s definitely interesting re-watching Delenn and Kosh brief Sheridan on the history of the “First” Shadow War.
That’s still one of my favorite of JMS’ long-term storytelling bait-and-switches.
After a year and a half of buildup, he seemingly flips his cards over here and reveals what the hell’s going on: an ancient Space Opera conflict between good and evil reignited in the Present Day.
And then another year and a half later, he flips those same cards over again by revealing everything Delenn just told was, unknowingly, all lies (or at least Vorlon propaganda).
Do we ever get a sense of if or when Delenn knew that the Shadow ships had organic CPUs? She and Kosh are very explicit that those who would not serve were killed, though we know that Sheridan will discover the nature of the Shadow ships in “Ship of Tears”. If Delenn knew and withheld the knowledge that Anna might still be alive if not exactly herself, then that was a heck of an omission.
This is the basis for the big argument Sheridan has with Delenn in “Z’ha’dum.'” Delenn insists that she didn’t know Anna was alive, but implies that Anna could have been altered.
“John, you must believe me, I didn’t know she was alive. We assumed that she had died with the rest of the crew of the Icarus, that only Morden had survived.”
“And had you known, would you have told me?”
“That would depend. It would depend on what she had become. Z’ha’dum is the homeworld of the Shadows. No one leaves there the same as they arrived.”
-courtesy of The Lurker’s Guide
In his Patreon commentary on YouTube, JMS also calls special attention to Delenn’s response to Sheridan’s question about whether there could be other Icarus survivors.
She doesn’t actually answer his question.
The moment Sheridan mentions Morden knows Anna’s ultimate fate, Delenn immediately and deftly re-directs the subject back to the original topic of Morden’s release.
Delenn has plenty of morally ambiguous moments to choose from in her life, but it could probably be argued that this is her most personal morally ambiguous moment.
If there is one thing that really stands out in this pivotal episode is the very messy confrontation between Sheridan and Garibaldi (a major source of conflict which JMS will follow through later in the show). You know there is trust and respect between them, but every time they go at each other’s throats, the show as a whole improves by an awful lot. This is one of the biggest reasons Sheridan is an improvement over Sinclair. Maybe I could see an alternate version of the show where Sinclair remains the protagonist and you could credibly see their relationship breaking down over situations like this one. But Garibaldi always felt indebted to Sinclair for getting the B5 job, which is why I don’t believe he would challenge his CO’s abhorrent command decisions the same way. This is their best scene in season 2. It’s up there with the best Londo/G’Kar confrontations.
When I first watched this, I was so inside Sheridan’s mindset that I wanted him to get answers over what happened with Anna, no matter what. Only rewatching it over and over that I realized just how f-ed up Sheridan’s actions and behavior truly were. What he did to Talia? He got off easy with that slap. And then Delenn finally breaks through with that one crucial revelation: Morden is never alone. Sheridan realizes he stumbled into a galactic game of chess where every small move could spell disaster and he is nowhere near ready to make one.
Between the Sheridan/Morden story, Franklin’s becoming more and more affected by the job (a truly great little character side-note to the episode, setting up the upcoming “Confessions and Lamentations”), plus the introduction of the Nightwatch, this episode plays out like a glimpse into season 3 in every aspect (and also happens to be the first of many, many B5 episodes directed by David Eagle). There is a raw intensity throughout and a feeling that everything is slowly coming apart. The Nightwatch thread has unfortunately aged too well. Spying on your neighbors is the first warning sign of fascism, and we’re sadly seeing them all over again in reality.
It occurs to me that there’s a continuity error in this episode. We’re told that Sheridan has to let Morden go so as not to tip off the Shadows that the good guys know they’re coming. But back in Season 1, I think in the first episode with Morden, Kosh and Morden’s… companions? overseers? whatever they are had a fight. At least it’s strongly implied. Kosh and Morden run into each other, then later we’re told that Kosh’s encounter suit needed serious repairs. The Shadows have to know that Kosh knows they’re back.
Yes and no.
Right. Didn’t Delenn actually say that the Shadows are afraid of an alliance of powers standing against them, rather than any single one?
“The Ministry of Peace—which quite deliberately sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984—is abbreviated Minipax, which is a reasonable abbreviation, but which also sounds a bit more like pacification than peace”
Well pax is the Latin word for peace, as in Pax Romana. Though the Romans were capable of being quite brutal in how they kept the peace.
“It would’ve been even cooler if Garibaldi had stayed resigned.”
That’ll happen eventually.
I had the pleasure of informing Ed Wasser that there’s a station on the London Underground called Morden.
As soon as Sheridan was given the warning, I knew that was a Chekhov’s Gun.
Same goes for Kosh. I suspected he (she?) would look reminicent of something…[redacted]
Lorien refers to Kosh as “it”.
This episode also features one of my favorite B5 bloopers.
https://youtu.be/mL0SjsVw3cY?si=dw0xGMTxFS_YF4BK&t=76
There was a lot of plot movement in this episode, as the story arc came to the fore. But while plot moves characters in fiction, it shouldn’t look that way–characters should feel like they are doing what they do because of their personalities, not hitting marks imposed on them from outside. There was a good bit of that happening in the episode.
This was one of Vir’s finest moments, and one of the show’s finest moments, too. JMS loves to create expectations, and then upend them. And here, we begin to see that the outwardly timid Vir is one of the bravest of them all.
Easily the best thing about this episode was Vir’s little monologue. When I watched it the first time, I thought Furst should have toned it down a bit, but after backing up and watching it again, I think he played it just right. After all, this is Vir we’re talking about. I love the second little wave, too, just to make sure Morden knew he had no fill-in-the-blanks to give.
As for the rest of it, I thought it was kind of a mixed bag. I enjoyed the lore dump about the First Ones and the Shadows, but it did feel a bit comic-booky. Plus, if Kosh is in hiding, they’re not being terribly inconspicuous about it. I did like Sheridan going bananas over finding out the that Morden apparently survived the disaster that killed his wife, but I think it went a bit too far for there to be zero consequences. What is this, Star Trek?
This is the first time I recognized Jeff Conaway, even though he’s apparently been on the show for a while, which doesn’t speak well of my powers of observation.
Just as an FYI:
“Ministry of Peace” doesn’t sound like something out of 1984. It is something out of 1984.
In fact, “Minipax” is the Newspeak name for that organization in the book.
Thank you for that. It’s been a few decades since I read it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido