“Passing Through Gethsemane”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Adam Nimoy
Season 3, Episode 4
Production episode 305
Original air date: November 27, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Sheridan is playing chess against Brother Theo, with Brother Edward and Ivanova spectating. Theo and Sheridan exchange thoughts on faith, with Theo finally winning the game, to Sheridan’s surprise. Edward shows off one of the figurines he makes and gives as gifts. Theo thinks he should sell them—if nothing else, the order could use the money—but Edward insists that the joy is in the making and the giving. He promises to give his current work to Sheridan when it’s finished.
Ivanova is summoned to Bay 13 because Kosh’s ship is arriving. But Kosh meets her in the bay to await the passenger on his ship: Alexander. After leaving B5 the last time, she hired a ship to take her to the Vorlon border. Days of no response led the shipmaster she hired to abandon the job, but he left her in an escape pod. The Vorlons finally grabbed her just before she would have died, and she’s been on the Vorlon homeworld since—until she came here at Kosh’s behest. She is, however, not allowed to say what she experienced there.
Franklin requests a complete physical, which he performs, and finds that she no longer has low iron content in her blood, which was a congenital condition, her enlarged appendix is now a normal-sized appendix, and her hiatal hernia is gone. Her blood is also super-oxygenated, which is not what you’d expect from someone who suffered oxygen deprivation recently. Alexander has no answers for Franklin.
Delenn meets with Garibaldi to discuss a security concern. Garibaldi is watching an ISN piece on a convicted murderer who has been sentenced to death of personality. Garibaldi explains to Delenn how that replaced the death penalty in the Earth Alliance.
Edward enters his quarters, only to find “DEATH WALKS AMONG YOU” written in blood on the bulkhead. He immediately calls Garibaldi, but by the time the security chief arrives, the words are gone. Garibaldi promises to send a forensic team.
As part of Theo’s order’s mission, Edward meets with Delenn and Lennier to discuss Minbari religion. At Delenn’s request, Edward tells the story of Jesus at the garden at Gethsemane right before he was arrested. That story in particular appeals to Edward because Jesus knew what was coming, knew that he would be betrayed by one of his followers (Judas) and arrested. But he stayed in the garden and met his fate, rather than try to run away. Edward has always wondered if he would have the courage to do the same in a similar situation.
Later, walking through a corridor, Edward bumps into a Centauri. Right after that, he starts hearing voices. Once again, he sees, “DEATH WALKS AMONG YOU” written in blood on a bulkhead. And then he sees images in his mind of a dead woman with a black rose in her mouth.
Edward does some digging—as does Sheridan, on Theo’s behalf, as Theo is worried about Edward. It soon becomes clear that Edward was once Charles Dexter, a.k.a. “The Black Rose Killer,” a serial murderer on an Earth colony who was sentenced to death of personality. The facility he was at after his mindwipe had a fire, and it was assumed that he died there. But he survived, and found his way to Theo’s order. His new personality was conditioned to serve humanity, after all.
Edward is beside himself, and refuses Theo’s offer of solace. However, Garibaldi’s investigation reveals that the voices Theo heard were piped through the station audio system, and that the words he saw on the bulkheads were made by a compound that looks like blood, and which disappears after a bit.
For his part, Edward is approached by a bunch of people, led by a man named Malcolm. They are from the families of Charles Dexter’s victims. Malcolm says he’s the only one willing to torture and kill Edward, and he proceeds to do so.
Figuring that the Centauri Edward bumped into is a telepath, they track him down pretty quickly. He says he was hired to do a job, and he did it, and refuses to answer anymore questions. So Garibaldi puts a bag over his head, and Alexander comes in and extracts the information from him telepathically: Edward is in Brown 42.
A security team goes there to find Edward being crucified. They cut him down, but he’s too far gone, and dies in Theo’s arms, though not before Theo grants him forgiveness.
Allan captures Malcolm, who immediately and gleefully confesses to his crime.
An indeterminate span of time later, Ivanova meets Alexander at Bay 13, the latter’s true movements having been concealed by the senior staff of B5 to keep her safe from Psi Corps. Ivanova informs Alexander that Malcolm pled guilty and was sentenced to death of personality.
Theo gives Sheridan the figurine that Edward was going to give him—it’s not finished, but Sheridan gladly takes it. The captain also meets the newest member of the order: Brother Malcolm. Edward’s killer is doing his service to humanity by being part of Theo’s order. Sheridan is obviously not happy about it, but grits his teeth and welcomes Malcolm.
In Kosh’s quarters, he faces Alexander. The helmet of his encounter suit has been removed, and beams of light are going from Alexander’s eyes and mouth into Kosh’s bright true form. Also Alexander now has gills on her neck, which were not there when Franklin examined her. That isn’t creepy at all…
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan says his faith is eclectic and open-minded. Theo says he’s rudderless, directionless, and cast adrift without a compass on an ocean of ecclesiastical possibilities. Which he says right before he puts Sheridan in checkmate.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova proposes a wager with Edward on the chess game between Theo and Sheridan, but Edward says that gambling’s a minor sin—if you’re gonna sin, go for one of the really big ones.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi provides exposition to Delenn and the viewer about how death of personality works, then he does a good job of investigating the weird stuff happening to Edward, though not fast enough to save the monk.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn explains Minbari faith, which centers on souls, and how the universe is made of them, and they sometimes inhabit a person.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari tries to bribe Alexander to get her to say what she experienced on the Vorlon homeworld. Alexander not only refuses but threatens to insert nightmares into Mollari’s head. The threat is less effective than Alexander intended, as having nightmares wouldn’t significantly change Mollari’s life all that much…
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Alexander is, strictly speaking, a rogue, though the senior staff doesn’t turn her in to Psi Corps because Psi Corps is a bunch of big stinkies, and besides, they can use Alexander to do all kinds of unethical things now!
The Shadowy Vorlons. Kosh appears to be sucking life energy out of Alexander. Or, um, something. Looks nasty, whatever it is. Also the Vorlons apparently made Alexander better, faster, stronger. And gave her gills that appear and disappear as needed.
Looking ahead. Lennier provides some new details about Valen: that he is said to be a Minbari not born of Minbari and nobody knows where he came from. This will pay off in the “War Without End” two-parter later this season.
Welcome aboard. Having spent a large chunk of his career playing mass murderers like Luther Lee Boggs on The X-Files and Lon Suder on Star Trek: Voyager and Chucky in the various Chucky movies and TV shows, Brad Dourif plays completely against type here by playing a monk (checks notes) who, um, it turns out also is a mass murderer. Okay, then.
Back from “Convictions” is Louis Turenne as Theo; he’ll return in “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place.” Back from “Divided Loyalties” is Patricia Tallman as Alexander; she’ll return in “Walkabout.” Back from “Matters of Honor” is Ardwight Chamberlain as the voice of Kosh; he’ll return in “Dust to Dust.”
Robert Keith plays Malcolm and Mark Folger plays the Centauri telepath.
Trivial matters. The titular story about the garden at Gethsemane—the actual location of which is unknown—appears by name in two of the synoptic gospels of the Bible: Chapter 26 of the Book of Matthew and Chapter 14 of the Book of Mark. The Book of Luke makes reference instead to the Mount of Olives in Chapter 22, while the Book of John simply mentions a garden that is located across the Kidron Valley in Chapter 18. It is where Jesus sat and prayed with his followers right before he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot to the Roman soldiers, who arrested him.
This story was originally supposed to be done during the second season, but then a fan on one of the B5 online forums made a story suggestion very similar to the plot of this one. J. Michael Straczynski then had to, for legal reasons, shelve the idea. The poster in question eventually provided a notarized affidavit explaining the situation and promising not to sue or claim that Straczynski stole his idea. This is why so many online forums have strict rules about posting story ideas, and this script was very nearly scuttled because of it.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Theo? I’m afraid. Is there enough forgiveness for what I’ve done?”
“Always, Edward—always. Take my hand.”
—The beginning of Edward and Theo’s final conversation.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Now I know, Theo.” Hey look, it’s The Inevitable Brad Dourif Episode! Before he was Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings or Doc Cochran on Deadwood, Dourif made a career out of showing up on TV shows and movies as mass-murderers (including as the voice of the iconic killer doll Chucky for more than 35 years now).
Here, at least, he gets to show a bit of his range, as we don’t know he’s a mass-murderer until two-thirds of the way through the episode—and neither does he. In Brother Edward we get a serene, friendly monk, who creates an instant good impression in his banter with Ivanova, as well as in his generosity and kindness.
The typecasting only works against the episode insofar as it’s not really a surprise that a character played by Dourif is truly a nutjob, but still, that part of the story really works.
There are a lot of ethical questions that the episode doesn’t address as thoroughly as one might like. The death of personality is a fascinating concept, one that Sheridan and Garibaldi clearly don’t like. But the death penalty itself is a revolting concept, and while I’m not sure that this is an improvement, I’m not sure it isn’t, either. It’s something worth having a discussion about, and this episode sidesteps it for the most part. Malcolm’s incredibly complicated and difficult and expensive revenge against a person who doesn’t truly exist anymore is an extreme reaction. There’s a reason why crimes are tried by an impartial judge and jury, and not the victims of the crime.
It’s also really hard to take our heroes seriously as moral arbiters when they do what they did to that Centauri telepath. Whatever objections Garibaldi and Sheridan have to the death of personality ring hollow when they’re willing to use Alexander to commit a crime that’s not as bad as murder, but still pretty horrible. That poor Centauri was just doing a job. Yes, someone’s life was at stake, but does that end justify those means? Especially when you don’t even save the guy anyhow? The deck is stacked by Mark Folger playing the Centauri as kind of slimy, but that’s just a writer’s trick to make us not feel bad when Garibaldi puts a bag over his head. And it didn’t work on me. That telepath deserved better.
This is still a good episode, but I feel like it missed the mark on being a great one. Still, we get some phenomenal work by Dourif and by Louis Turenne (his gentle trash talking of Sheridan during the chess game is epic, as is his passion for and loyalty to his monks and his order).
And it’s also good to see Patricia Tallman back. That final scene is creepy as hell. I initially was annoyed that Franklin was so incompetent as to miss the gills on Alexander’s neck when he examined her, but I rewatched it and realized that, while her neck was covered for most of the episode, it was exposed in medlab, and there were no gills. So the Vorlons did even more to her than Franklin realized…
Next week: “Voices of Authority.”
I figured that Alexander was just being debriefed by Kosh in that last scene.
Memorable episode. I pretty much remembered all of it from the opening scene despite not having seen it in a quarter century.
Brad Dourif is good in anything. He was even good in Eyes of Laura Mars and Dune. And no one was good in Eyes of Laura Mars or Dune (okay, René Auberjonois was also pretty decent in Eyes of Laura Mars).
How the mind wipe was performed without any known Psi Corps telepath on the station is left to the imagination of the viewer
Riffable moments
[as the name Charlie is repeated]
Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown/He’s a clown, that Charlie Brown
[as they bring down the nearly dead Brother Edward]
Quick, move his spine around a lot!
Exorcist III was perhaps his finest performance.
You don’t need a teep to perform the mind-wipe just to audit it, as it were. And I’m sure they were able to bring in a commercial telepath when it was required by the court.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Unless he wastaken off-station, and then returned after he became part of Theo’s Order.
See JMS’s quote that I linked to in the adjacent reply branch to this one: “We established in “The Quality of Mercy” that the equipment to handle mindwipes is there on-station, locked away until mandated by a court.”
Besides, I presume Malcolm wasn’t specifically programmed to be a monk; rather, like Edward, he was given a personality predisposed to humility and service to society, as is typical of mindwiped convicts, and then Theo approached him and gave him the option of joining. At least, I’d prefer that to the implication that he was just programmed to be a monk and had no choice in the matter. So he would’ve had to be on the station during those couple of weeks before the tag scene, so that he could’ve interacted with the monks and chosen to join them.
Indeed, since mindwipe subjects are usually institutionalized in approved facilities and Edward was an exception due to being believed dead, I doubt Malcolm would’ve been allowed to return to join the monks if he’d been taken back to Earth for sentencing. It’s more likely an irregular arrangement that the monks were able to work out with the ombuds because they were already there on the station and willing to take responsibility for him.
Why do you say they don’t need a teep? It’s not something that can be performed using drugs alone or something like hypnosis since that wouldn’t wipe out the previous personality or be strong enough to implant a new one.
Word of god from JMS:
“We established in “The Quality of Mercy” that the equipment to handle mindwipes is there on-station, locked away until mandated by a court. A court assigned telepath is usually brought in to do a preliminary scan before it happens and to verify the wipe immediately afterward.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/048.html#JS
The dialogue to “Quality” includes the line “I’ll check the equipment to make sure it’s painless.” It’s a technological process. The telepaths just confirm that it worked, that the subject isn’t faking or something.
It feels odd to suggest that Brad Dourif may be underrated as an actor, but if he is, it’s probably because he’s so typecast. He probably really enjoyed getting to play someone so calm, kind and serene for a change. We associate him so strongly with creepy and twitchy, it’s easy to forget his first major role (Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was also a very gentle soul. Still really twitchy, but not a creep.
There was a lot of talk in the comments for “Divided Loyalties” about the way Lyta triggered Control so matter-of-factly. This episode makes clear that she’s utterly ruthless, and I think we see further examples down the line. The question is how much of that ruthlessness is part of her original nature and how much comes from her exposure to Kosh and other Vorlons.
It’s implied that her trip to the Vorlon homeworld occurred after Divided Loyalties. Perhaps it partially came from working with the Mars separatists.
She visited the Vorlon homeworld after “Divided Loyalties,” but she scanned Kosh all the way back in “The Gathering.” That scan seemed to have affected her a lot. It was the reason she wanted to go to the homeworld. Kosh may have seen something useful in her and tweaked her personality at that time.
Kosh really wasn’t in a position to scan and tweak her personality at that time (since he was dying), but I suppose he could have done so before she left.
Given what’s later established about Vorlons, it’s questionable whether Vorlons would even be susceptible to poison. For all we know, Kosh faked being poisoned so that he’d have an excuse to let Lyta scan him, in order to connect with her secretly.
I suppose he could have had the foreknowledge to do so based on upcoming events (time travel gives me a headache) but otherwise it seems like a byzantine excuse. I could also argue that a Shadow client gave the Minbari assassin a poison it knew could affect Vorlons, but that is also unjustified speculation.
What’s time travel got to do with it? We know that Kosh was interested in recruiting a human telepath to his cause — that’s why he hired the “Vicar” to probe Talia’s mind in season 1. And we know that Talia was substituted for the plot intended for Lyta. It’s not about foreknowledge, it’s about the agenda Kosh already had at the time, to seek connection with a telepath and feel them out for recruitment. Pretending to be poisoned gave him an excuse to do that, since a telepath would’ve had to be brought in to probe his mind. Any telepath would’ve done; at the time of “The Gathering,” it happened to be Lyta, and once Lyta was gone, Kosh tried again with Talia. Lyta’s return let him (and JMS) resume his original plans with her.
One disturbing thing that occurs to me is that if you can use “Death of Personality” to 100% successfully turn a criminal, even a serial killer, into a respectful, upstanding member of society, I think that the state would find a way to use it way more than the regular death penalty.
Also, given the importance of an individual accepting Christ in Christianity, I’m wondering what the theological status of someone who just has a constructed Christian persona installed in his brain would be.
Yes, it’s meant on the surface to sound better than the death penalty (as it is reversable should someone be established as wrongfully convicted), but it poses huge problems in practice.
it isn’t clear that life imprisonment is a reasonable option, either, at least not as practiced in many nations.
Of course, even “reversing” it is troublesome, because now you’re just murdering the new persona.
If that were what was actually going on, sure. But as I mentioned, this episode suggests there’s more continuity between the old and new personas than that, that it’s not really two different people but one person subjected to brainwashing and induced amnesia. At most, the two personalities are like those of a person with dissociative identity disorder, albeit consecutive rather than coexisting. Curing DID is not considered murder, since the different personas aren’t actually different people, just different facets of a single mind that convinces itself that they’re disconnected from each other.
Okay, but even so: if someone’s been given a constructed persona and living under it for years, gotten married, had kids, gotten a job, all in a way that the original persona would not have done, you’re still basically destroying a life if you restore the original persona. Should you expect their spouse to stay married to them? Their children to even recognize them?
And what if the new persona doesn’t want its memories restored? Are you not, then, effectively still punishing who they originally were?
I doubt the situation you describe would ever happen. JMS clarified how it works in his online comments: “In a government monitored situation (which this wasn’t, they thought he was dead), mindwipes are kept in servile positions, not allowed to achieve, as that would be a kind of reward. Those guys you see along the roadsides picking up trash and putting them in bright orange bags? Mindwipes.” So a mindwiped convict would presumably not be allowed to start a family or build a satisfying career.
Anyway, I suppose if someone’s conviction turned out to be mistaken and they were exonerated, they’d have the option of having their memories restored — but if they’ve been exonerated, then the state couldn’t force anything on them against their will. So if they were in a situation like Edward’s where the penal system had lost track of them and they’d built a fulfilling life, then nobody could compel them to give that up if they didn’t want to.
I’m a little disturbed by the idea that people who clean up trash are incapable of ending up falling in love or being fulfilled in their life and job.
JMS didn’t mean regular garbage collectors, he meant something more like inmates cleaning up along the freeways as a prison work detail. As he said, they’re kept in servile positions specifically to prevent them from achieving any fulfillment in their lives. They may not remember their crimes, but the state does and is holding them accountable. If they started to look too happy in their work or relationships, their handlers might reassign them somewhere else to nip it in the bud.
So ongoing continuous torture. This isn’t really sounding any better, JMS.
(recognizing you, Christopher, are just passing on his ideas)
“Torture” seems an overstatement. It sounds more like lifetime community service and probation.
Mind you, I think someone like Brother Edward would be content in almost any servile role.
After he’d wandered off and found religion, sure. But the original personality he would’ve had while institutionalized wouldn’t have had that spiritual peace yet, just a preprogrammed imperative to serve society. It probably wouldn’t have had the same meaning to him.
Of course, even prison inmates can find personal contentment in paying their debt, but that’s not what JMS was talking about. He just meant that mindwiped people aren’t normally allowed the opportunity to elevate their socioeconomic status above that of a menial laborer, or to get married and start a family.
An interstellar civilization could always use the Australia option — send lifers to establish colonies on uninhabited planets, so they can do some good for society in the long run while being decisively cut off from it, and the state doesn’t have to expend resources on their incarceration beyond the initial outlay of shipping them out there. Not exactly humane, but B5’s Earth doesn’t strike me as a society whose prison system would be especially humane either.
Just don’t leave them on Ceti Alpha V (or its equivalent). That could come back to haunt you.
That is one of the arguments Brother Edward makes to Brother Theo.
Actually, come to think of it, who comes up with the details of your new personality? Does the state get to pick your religion for you? Does it get to choose which party you vote for? There are just so many disturbing implications.
Yes, this is one of those ideas that gets darker and darker the deeper you look into it.
I’m pretty sure the scene with Lyta and Kosh is Kosh returning the piece of themself that was traveling in Lyta to the rest. We’ll find out later that the Vorlons can do that, and I’m pretty sure that Lyta mentions in a later season that part of what the Vorlons did to her was to allow her to more easily carry (a piece of? all of?) Kosh around.
This is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series, and although I acknowledge the problems KRAD identified, I still love it.
The “death of personality” seen here seems like a much more extensive version of what happened to Rutherford in Star Trek: Lower Decks.
I liked Delenn’s line saying “We are the Universe trying to understand itself.”
Joni Mitchell would do numbers on Minbar.
It’s a lift from Carl Sagan, isn’t it?
ETA: Ah, I see CLB has elaborated on this topic further down.
@krad:
The gills weren’t a Vorlon creation. In “The Gathering” G’Kar also has them on his neck while talking to the Minbari assassin posing as Lyta. The real Lyta probably had them implanted herself in order to travel freely in the alien sectors where the atmosphere would have been too toxic for oxygen breathing humans, without having to find cumbersome masks. Given she now works as Kosh’s aide – and Kosh spends a LOT of time on toxic atmosphere environments, mind you – it makes sense for her to adapt to the needs of the new job.
That doesn’t track. If she had them implanted willingly, it had to have happened after she left B5 in “Divided Loyalties,” because that episode ended with her wearing a mask in Kosh’s quarters, in which case, she would have mentioned it to Franklin as something she had done.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
seeing how she left somewhere in between brother edward dying and brother malcom coming in to have his brain wiped, maybe she left back to Vorlon space, got the gill implants, and than came back to Kosh to report, now with gills. I don’t see a reason for Franklin todo a full mandatory examination again after the gill implants.
The way I see it, the gills are a normal medical procedure that anyone can do in 2260 if they want to do trade with aliens on their turf. I don’t really see the point of Lyta bringing it up to Franklin. It’s not a radical life changing add-on. At best, you could argue that Franklin should have brought it up during the exam, but the focus was Lyta’s health and the way spending time with the Vorlons seemingly boosted her HP (as well as everyone theorizing any potential improvements to her P-5 telepathy).
For what it’s worth, the B5 wiki says that Lyta’s gills were implanted before she returned from Vorlon space, but it doesn’t cite a source other than this episode.
This is a good one, very Twilight Zone-y (as JMS intended by his own admission), and excellently directed by Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard. I liked the theatrical way that Edward’s flashback memory transitions were done with ramping the stage lighting up and down to wash out the screen rather than with a typical optical dissolve.
The discussion of Minbari religion was a nice scene, but Delenn’s “We are the universe trying to understand itself” is a paraphrase of a Carl Sagan line from Cosmos, which had a more secular meaning: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
I do wish there’d been some exploration of Garibaldi’s reaction to all this. It seems incongruous to do that whole scene with Delenn to establish that Garibaldi would prefer capital punishment to mind wiping, and then not even to address whether he’s reconsidered that after learning that Brother Edward, a guy he knew and liked, would never have existed if Garibaldi had gotten his way and he’d been executed instead. It’s nice that we got to see Sheridan wrestling with the ambiguity of the situation — struggling to forgive “Brother” Malcolm for his former personality’s murder of Edward, even though Sheridan had clearly forgiven Edward for what his former personality had done. But leaving out Garibaldi’s reaction seems like an oversight. Maybe we could’ve gotten some time devoted to that if JMS hadn’t used this episode to reintroduce Lyta, which is basically just setup for the future and feels tacked onto this story.
I have to admit, I don’t really see what people think is so great about Brad Dourif as an actor. I found his performance mediocre here. Maybe that’s because he’s not playing the kind of creepy/malevolent character he’s known for, but it just didn’t work well for me. (It also annoyed me that he pronounced “Gethsemane” as “Gasemmany.”)
…pronounced “Gethsemane” as “Gasemmany.”
It may be a regional pronunciation? FWIW, growing up in the US Southeast, I heard (and probably used) both pronunciations interchangeably. Didn’t strike my ear as unusual.
Yeah, Brad Dourif is a walking spoiler. However, I always enjoy seeing him, so I didn’t really mind.
The death-of-personality rears its ridiculous head again. Personally, I am sure it’s not an improvement over the death penalty, because you’re still executing someone. Whether you can replace their executed personality with another one is immaterial unless you’re running out of people for some reason, and there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of them in this universe. If anything, this episode makes it clear that it’s even worse than the death penalty, because the new person you’ve created has to suffer the consequences when it goes wrong.
At any rate, I thought this was a much better use of the monks. I hope we haven’t seen the last of them.
I expressed that same opinion emphatically in the thread for “The Quality of Mercy,” but this episode makes me reconsider it a bit. We saw here that the person’s original memory and personality aren’t irrevocably destroyed, because, as the Centauri telepath says, the brain has too many redundancies for that. If it’s possible for the wiped person to remember their past if the block is removed, then it’s still the same person. So it’s not executing one consciousness and replacing it with another, it’s altering the memories and identity of the same living consciousness. On some level, it’s still the same person even if they don’t remember it. Brother Edward certainly considered himself the same person as Charles Dexter.
To be clear, I still consider that cruel and unusual punishment, and a crude, brute-force substitute for genuine redemption and rehabilitation. But if nothing else, it’s maybe not quite as immoral as execution.
The show clearly wants us to reach our own conclusions; I’d argue there’s multiple pieces of evidence in this episode that Dexter isn’t entirely gone, given Edward’s comment about saving for the really big sins. What is clear is that, whoever dies at the end of the story, that man has repented his sins.
It’s curious how easy it might be to extend mercy and forgiveness to a dying Edward and how hard it is to extend that to the man he had been (or to Malcom). But even an “easier” solution like “fixing” a serial killer’s brain to keep them from killing again could easily be applied to, say, “fixing” someone to heterosexuality, or “fixing” them to love Dear Leader. The show isn’t supposing a good solution exists at all.
I’ve always been amused a bit by the line about saving for big sins. Assuming the monks are Cathollic (which is by no means definitive, so this may not apply), than gambling, per se, is not even a little sin. Gambling to excess (that is spending money you need for your own or family’s lives), cheating, obsession would be sins. But small bets for fun, lotteries, etc. are not.
I would submit that being reprogrammed to believe your actions were wrong is not legitimate repentance, just brainwashing. Although in this case, given that Edward was out of the penal system’s influence for something like 8 years and committed to the monkish life through his own free choice, I would call that more genuine redemption — were it not for the fact that Brother Malcolm’s brand-new personality seemed like a clone of Edward’s.
I’ve wondered for a long time why, when Sheridan was a prisoner in season 4, they bothered torturing him instead of just doing the “death of personality” thing to him.
I assume death of personality must come with a mindwipe, and IIRC they wanted Sheridan as a puppet, hence the need for breaking him down the “regular” way. Also, as the other comments said, the cruelty is the point.
Well, death of personality and mindwipe are two terms for the same thing. But in theory, I suppose you could erase someone’s personality and replace it with a programmed one that seemed like the same person but had different morals and ideology.
But JMS said online that there are certain established templates used for reprogramming mindwiped convicts’ personalities, so maybe they didn’t have a suitable template of Sheridan’s mind to base their puppet Sheridan on, so it was easier to use tried-and-true brainwashing techniques.
Yeah, that’s what I meant: since the process is done by a machine, it’s probably too crude to be able to slap on a new personality without damaging memories or making the new persona obviously “fake” compared to the old one. If it were that refined, the Psi Corps wouldn’t have to torture/brainwash that other character down the line either.
Just because the process usually relies on set templates doesn’t mean it couldn’t be used to tailor a personality more precisely, given the necessary data to construct one. I’m not saying the technology is incapable of it, just that it was easier to alter Sheridan’s existing personality than to erase it and construct a convincing but altered simulation of it from scratch. To do that, they’d probably need to have Sheridan in their clutches anyway to analyze his brain to the necessary level of detail.
Talia Winters complicates the question. Her sleeper personality was treated as a separate identity buried in her brain beneath the real one, but the brain doesn’t work like that. As I mentioned, dissociative identities aren’t really different people, but partitioned facets of the same person that aren’t consciously aware of each other’s actions (at least, not mutually or entirely). So installing the sleeper personality in Talia and making her unaware of its actions would have entailed some degree of subtle alteration of her existing psychology, in order to partition off that other piece of it and make her unaware of it.
So if they could modify Talia’s brain that subtly and precisely, they probably do have the technology (or the telepathic skill) to selectively reprogram Sheridan’s brain to make him loyal to the fascist regime while appearing outwardly to be the same man. So it basically just comes down to the cruelty being the point — they tortured him because fascists are bullies and abusers and it’s how they get their kicks.
The cruelty is the point.
To a fascist regime, torture is an end in itself, a way to assert dominance and indulge in cruelty. The death of personality is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be “humane,” so it wouldn’t serve those ends.
This episode aired before VOY’s “Cold Fire” and the other Suder episodes. I wasn’t watching X-Files when it first aired, and I never once bothered to watch any of the Chucky movies. Which is to say when I first watched “Passing through Gethsemane” in 1997 or so, I had no idea who Brad Dourif was. This was well before I even read LOTR or had any clue he would be playing Wormtongue in the Jackson trilogy for that matter. So I went into this episode cold. And was left speechless by the end.
When I watched TNG’s “Rascals” and “Timescape”, I certainly wasn’t thinking of Nimoy’s direction as I would the likes of Frakes or Bowman. His B5 work on the other hand? Just wow! Brutal and intense (as was the Nimoy-directed finale, Z’ha’Dum). That scene where Sheridan almost gets physical with Malcolm and has to be held back by Zack still feels raw after all these years. It’s up there with the best scenes of the show.
It’s such a human reaction. If you lose someone you care about to a violent situation, chances are you are going to have a lot of pent-up hatred that needs to be dealt with somehow. It’s an abhorrent reaction, but it’s part of who we are. At that moment, Sheridan was no different than Malcolm*, who let that hate and anger drive the rest of his life after his unfortunate loss. Which is why he doesn’t even know how to react when the mindwiped Malcolm becomes a new brother of the order. To me, it’s a near-perfect messy dramatic solution to a problem that’s unlikely to ever truly be resolved in real-life. Just a near-perfect episode in almost every aspect (I also adore Delenn and Lennier sharing their lore with Edward).
*on a side note, I wish JMS had come up with a different character name. Malcolm was also the name of Ivanova’s former boyfriend AKA the racist home guard stooge. It makes me think there is someone out there in real-life named Malcolm who really did something wrong to JMS.
Needless to say, I adored the brief time spent with Brother Edward and was crushed not only to find out who he was, but that he ended up willingly paying with his life for something he had no control over – something his past self did. To me, Edward was a gentleman through and through who let the fear and guilt drive him to do something he had every right to discover, and yet would prove to be his undoing. And then Theo granting him forgiveness in his final moments just kills me. It reminds me a bit of that one Buffy episode where Giles tells her that forgiveness is an act of compassion: it’s not done because people deserve it. It’s done because they need it.
The strength of character in Theo is just tremendous. He puts the emotions aside and gives sanctuary to this new person, who I hope never gets his memory back. Not only to be reminded of the irreparable damage he did to Edward, but also the loss he himself suffered. I don’t know if mindwipe is an ideal form of punishment (it could still be considered capital punishment, given it still wipes the original person away), but it’s a way of creating a new life, one who could forge a better path for themselves and others. It’s a tough place to be in, that’s for sure.
If anything, the Delenn/Garibaldi scene makes one thing clear: Garibaldi may be good at his day job, but his mind is not ready for the bigger picture and the fact that people are complicated and laws are specifically made to protect everyone. He just wants the bad guys to be blind and toothless. I’m glad he’s not in charge.
Regarding the use of Lyta on the plot. Yeah, it was dubious of Sheridan and company to use her to essentially violate the arrogant Centauri telepath like that. But I think JMS realized that. Because this trend of the B5 staff using Lyta as a puppet telepath to their advantage and interests would come to bite them back in later seasons.
Also, anyone who’s watching The Pitt (originally meant to be an ER sequel), check out older Brad Dourif himself who just shined in a two-minute scene that just aired last week, where he plays the father of Fiona Dourif’s doctor character. It’s brief, but memorable cameo where he puts the loser son-in-law in his place.
It makes me think there is someone out there in real-life named Malcolm who really did something wrong to JMS.
Still not as bad as David Drake’s lifelong animosity towards Charles Platt.
Or the way David Gerrold worked attacks on Gene Roddenberry’s lawyer Leonard Maizlish into virtually everything he wrote after Maizlish drove him away from Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s writing staff, naming loathsome characters or malevolent computer viruses or the like after him.
He also had “lawyer dung” be the ultimate epithet in one of the Star Wolf novels.
But did Gerrold ever name a character who was a pedophile after Maizlish (something Drake has done at least once with Platt)?
I don’t recall if he did. I was not proposing a competition.
Malcolm probably lives in San Diego.
Correction: Lon Suder was introduced in “Meld” and returned in the “Basics” 2-parter. “Cold Fire” was the episode where the crew ran into an Ocampa colony, and it aired two weeks before “Passing Through Gethsemane.”
And yes, JMS himself acknowledged that the Lyta mind-invasion scene was disturbing on purpose.
Speaking of names, I’m surprised the news reports referred to the serial killer as just Charles Dexter instead of Charles Edward Dexter or Charles Michael Dexter or something. People joke about how serial killers always seem to have three names, but I figure the media does that on purpose to differentiate them from other people with the same first and last names. (Although that didn’t help actor Mark Lindsay Chapman, who almost got cast to play John Lennon in a biopic but got rejected because his name reminded Yoko Ono of Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman.)
And so begins (or maybe continues) the long sequence of literally everyone using Lyta Alexander as a tool, without so much as a thank you.
I was a bit surprised to see that the haggard look with the darkening around her eyes appeared this early. I had thought that took longer to show up.
Does every TV show have to employ the surprise checkmate? I suppose resigning several moves before being checkmated isn’t dramatic enough, but a character who doesn’t see a checkmate in one (move) is a poor player.
I’m willing to accept it when they’re playing 3D chess on Star Trek because maybe the game is just so complicated that you can’t see that far in advance, but yeah
Or possibly practicing some “I know, you know, but I don’t have to admit it and will therefore have some fun distracting you with patter for as long as possible” gamesmanship.
Or, put another way, both sides knew the game was up, but weren’t quite ready to be done with it yet – hence Deep Philosophical Chat with a checkmate as punchline.
That wouldn’t explain Sheridan’s expression of surprise or his slightly petulant request that Brother Theo tell him where he learned that move. It seems more likely that Sheridan didn’t see it coming, which suggests he is not as good a chess player as he thinks he is.
It could’ve been fixed if Theo had just said “And I believe… mate in three,” and Sheridan had recognized that he wouldn’t be able to escape the trap. Two words could’ve made the difference.
As often happens, CLB beat me to my exact comment—in addition, Sheridan could make a couple of abortive movements to move a piece before realizing Theo is correct.
I’ll also add that I have a vague memory of reading about a grandmaster who missed a mate-in-one in a real game, so it can happen to the best (assuming I’m not making that up out of whole cloth).
It has happened. Vladimir Kramnik, World Champion at the time, famously blundered into a mate-in-one in a match against a computer.
Yeah, I think that’s the one I was remembering.
I had the benefit of not having heard of Brad Dourif when I first saw this episode, so I got the full force of the revelation when it came.
I suppose if you really want to pull the rug out from under the audience with someone like Dourif, you could present him as a standard psychopath and then it turns out he’s actually the sweetest guy you can imagine. They did that with Silas Weir Mitchell in Grimm.
Forgive the pedantry, but I’m not sure “mass murderer” is the correct term, and it doesn’t describe all of his roles prior to LOTR. “Mentally unhinged” might be more encompassing.
I dunno, I think throwing in that scene with Delenn and Garibaldi that served no narrative purpose other than to remind the audience that murderers were mindwiped was pretty much a giveaway in advance what the reason for Edward’s disturbing memories would turn out to be.
I checked, and the reference sources seem to agree that “mass murder” is usually used to refer to killing multiple people in a single event, like a school shooting or a terrorist bombing; and I tend to think it would also apply to something like a genocide. However, the Merriam-Webster dictionary lists multiple quotations of people using the term “mass murderer” to refer to serial killers, so I guess it’s ambiguous.
The garden of Gethsemane is opposite the old city of Jerusalem. I’ve been there. It holds olive trees which are in excess of 2000 years old.
I wonder if they still give olives?
The Death of Personality appears to have been lifted wholesale (along with Psi Cops) from Bester’s Demolished Man. JMS left the name in the tin.
The version in The Demolished Man is a slow process (taking something like a year IIRC), and stated to be horrifying for the person undergoing it because they remain fully conscious of what’s happening to them right up to the end.
Powell and Dr Jeems briefly discuss the process, comparing it to the death penalty, and seem to be arguing from a utilitarian standpoint: it’s preferable because once the personality’s been demolished and rebuilt you’ve got a talented individual whose skills can be of use to society, rather than a dead body.
I love this episode. I always look forward to it when I’m rewatching the series.
I don’t think the decision Sheridan and Garibaldi make with Lyta and the Centauri telepath is a flaw. I think it’s very intentional. Not just to start the process of the command staff treating Lyta pretty badly, but underscoring that they are far from perfect. And with so many questions around sins and accountability throughout the episode, it made sense to me.
Also, I’m not sure why, but I immediately came to the conclusion that the end of the episode was part of Kosh coming out of Lyta, which was later confirmed in future episodes.
Death of Personality: Doc Savage did the same thing to criminals he caught with his “Crime College.” Crooks had their memories erased, and were taught a trade as well as a revulsion to the idea of crime, turning them into worthwhile citizens. It’s presented as a more humane method of dealing with crooks instead of just killing them, like The Shadow or The Spider. But yeah, when you think about it for a second or two, it’s kind of icky.
Robert Silverberg also had the concept in his 1972 novel, THE SECOND TRIP. A serial rapist is condemned to have his personality overwritten by an artificial one, but an encounter with a telepath causes it to resurface. Then the two personalities battle it out for control of the body.
Imho, it was certainly one of the better episodes of B5. For one, the acting (esp. Dourif) was just so spot on. It’s interesting; I just had a thought about Theo. Turenne’s acting is, as usual, superb, but Theo himself kind of reminds me of a “kinder, gentler” Heinlein Individual – the mentor, like Jubal Harshaw.
While I completely agree that Sheridan would much rather have offed Brother Malcolm, I believe he saw Brother Theo’s point of view and, while not happy, was able to reconcile himself to shaking hands with the former vengeance killer. And it brings up an interesting point – is death of personality, even when it results in someone like Brother Edward (or Brother Malcolm, perhaps) wrong? And if so, do two wrongs then make a right? Or is it more “humane”? I think JMS left us hanging there purposefully.
A bad thing having a good result doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong (e.g. if a baby conceived through rape grows up to be a fine person, that doesn’t make the rape any less evil). The state artificially programming people to be selfless and saintly is still a grotesque violation of human rights. It parallels the classic definition of a utopia — not a society that’s genuinely ideal, but one that appears superficially idyllic but is founded on something corrupt or horrific. (After all, “utopia” literally means “no place.” Thomas More was punning on “eutopia,” “good place,” but saying such a perfect society couldn’t actually exist.)
Mindwiping may be a step up from execution on the moral ladder, but it’s a very small step. The monks’ acceptance of Brothers Edward and Malcolm is not an endorsement of what was done to them, just an attempt to help them heal from it.
I’ve been thinking about this and I’m not sure Malcolm deserved the Death of Personality. He acted because of what happened to his sister. Presumably, unless something similar happened to another relative, he would not be someone who would torture and kill again. This is something that could be dealt with via regular therapy and prison.
Charlie (pre-Edward) was a serial killer. Same with the man Garibaldi and Delenn discuss. I’m guessing these are people who are determined to be beyond treatment. I wouldn’t put Malcolm in that category.
JMS addressed the severity of Malcolm’s sentence in his online comments:
“I’d say there were extenuating circumstances here that made it more than just a simple murder (and not all murders get wiped, esp. in cases like second-degree or manslaughter). He’d stalked Edward for years; arranged to break the mindwipe; and engaged in slow, deliberate, methodical torture unto death. The degree of premeditation is staggering.”
In other words, the court evidently took all that as evidence that he was predisposed to torture or kill again, that he was not just a grieving brother but a predator in his own right using revenge for his sister as an excuse.
Malcom was hurt twice—once by an individual who took a family member—and again by those who robbed him of memory of family.
This mad me about as mad as the 1980s Twilight Zone episode where a spaceplane was shot down.
Being victimized is not a license to become a victimizer. Malcolm spent years stalking a man and planning his torture and murder, which he then carried out ruthlessly and without remorse. Like many abuse victims, he became as bad and as dangerous as his abuser. Even worse, his desire for revenge against Charles Dexter led him to torture and murder Brother Edward, who was to all intents and purposes a different, innocent man. Charles Dexter had already been punished, essentially executed, but Malcolm was so fanatically vengeful that he wouldn’t settle for that and had to destroy his body as well, which served no purpose except to sate Malcolm’s own desire to torment and destroy.
I agree that mindwiping is cruel and unusual punishment, but let’s not be disingenuous about Malcolm’s own choice to become a predator. It’s always possible for both sides in a conflict to be in the wrong.