“Revelations”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 2, Episode 2
Production episode 202
Original air date: November 11, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A meeting of the B5 advisory council is a bit lacking in attendance: G’Kar is still missing and Delenn is still in a cocoon. After Mollari rants and raves on the subject, Sheridan adjourns until the next day in the hopes that one or both will show up.
G’Kar, it turns out, is part of a fleet that is being attacked by Shadow vessels on a planet out on the rim. The other ships provide cover fire and sacrifice themselves to allow him to reach the jumpgate for a return to B5.
Sheridan meets with Franklin, who says that Garibaldi remains in a coma, and has resisted all traditional treatments. Franklin asks Sheridan’s permission to use the Great Hit Point Rearranger he acquired from Dr. Rosen, and Sheridan agrees, though he’s concerned that Franklin intends to be the source of the life energy that will be transferred to Garibaldi.
Liz Sheridan visits the station, the first time brother and sister have seen each other in person in ages. As they catch up, we learn a bit of the captain’s backstory: he was married to Liz’s best friend, a xeno-archaeologist named Anna Sheridan, who was killed on a mission while serving on the vessel Icarus out on the rim. It’s been two years, but Sheridan still hasn’t gotten over her death, partly because he blames himself. He cancelled a planned vacation because of his duties, which led to her taking the Icarus job, and he also forgot to tell her he loved her the last time they talked. The guilt is eating him up.
Mollari meets with Morden to be reassured that no one outside the Centauri Republic will connect him to the attack on Quadrant 37. Morden assures him that that’s the case, while the Centauri government is all impressed with him, and also that if he wants another favor, he just has to ask—“just pick a target!” Morden also asks Mollari to inform him if he hears of anything odd happening out on the rim.
Na’Toth goes to G’Kar’s quarters and is surprised to find G’Kar in them. The ambassador reveals that he has learned that they face either a brand-new foe—or a very old one. The Book of G’Quan references a very old enemy that nearly wiped out the galaxy a thousand years ago, and G’Kar fears that they have returned.
Sheridan insists that he and Franklin take it in shifts to restore Garibaldi’s hit points—and that Sheridan take the first shift, as it were, since Franklin is needed to make sure the Great Hit Point Rearranger is working right. All goes well, and Garibaldi awakens. He is rather surprised to learn that, since he was last conscious, Santiago was assassinated, Sinclair was reassigned, Sheridan took over, and Delenn’s in a cocoon. Sheridan introduces himself, and Garibaldi regretfully says he doesn’t remember who shot him. (Jack, who did shoot him, is standing in the doorway ready to respond in case Garibaldi does remember, but then departs with a relieved look on his face.)
Lennier discovers that the chrysalis has broken open. He finds Delenn cowering in a corner, her body covered in lizard-like scales. Lennier contacts Franklin, who makes a house call to examine her (reassuring Lennier of his ability to maintain doctor-patient confidentiality).
G’Kar speaks to the advisory council, though neither Delenn nor Lennier are present. He tells of his exploration of the dead worlds on the rim, and found indications of a species secretly gathering their forces. G’Kar barely escaped with his life. The Narn government has sent a ship to a world called Z’ha’dum, where the ancient enemy spoken of in the Book of G’Quan is supposed to have come from.
After the meeting breaks, Mollari seeks out Morden and tells him of the Narn expedition to Z’ha’dum.
Garibaldi asks Winters to telepathically scan him. He knows that whatever she finds, or helps him remember, won’t be admissible in court, but Garibaldi doesn’t care, he just wants to know. Sure enough, Winters’ probe enables Garibaldi to remember everything he saw when he got shot—including a reflection of Jack standing behind him before he shot Garibaldi in the back.
Jack is quickly arrested, but his attitude while being interrogated is snotty and arrogant and completely unworried about consequences.
President Clark contacts Sheridan directly, expressing concern about Jack’s role in Santiago’s death and the possibility that Clark’s predecessor was assassinated. He requests that the prisoner and all evidence be transferred to EarthDome for a full investigation.
A Narn ship exits the jumpgate near Z’ha’dum and is blown to pieces by Shadows the nanosecond they transition to normal space.
Na’Toth informs G’Kar and the rest of the advisory council of the Narn ship’s destruction. It’s unclear how it was destroyed, since it happened so fast. It might have been an accident, but either way, the Narn aren’t willing to send another ship.
Lennier then brings Delenn in: she is now, apparently, a human/Minbari hybrid. For one thing, she has hair now…
Sheridan has dinner with Liz and the latter gives the former a data crystal with the last letter Anna sent to Liz. The letter makes it clear that Anna was going to cancel the vacation herself because of the Icarus gig, but Sheridan cancelled it before she could. This expiates a lot of Sheridan’s guilt, and he thanks his sister.
Garibaldi expresses concern over his interrogation of Jack, as the latter used the same gesture and comment used by Bester when he left. Now Garibaldi is worried that Psi Corps is influencing things, especially since they very controversially endorsed Clark in the last election.
G’Kar expresses concern to Na’Toth over what’s happening, quoting William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”
On a hunch, Ivanova checks the progress of the transport that was supposed to bring Jack to Earth—at one point, he was transferred to an unregistered ship, destination unknown. Attempts to contact Clark about this have gone unanswered. Sheridan and Ivanova are both seriously concerned about this.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! We find out that Sheridan’s wife died two years ago, and he still hasn’t completed his grieving process over it.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s natural paranoia proves useful, as she checks on the prison transport, and learns that the conspiracy is apparently real…
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is livid when he wakes up to find out that he failed to stop Santiago’s assassination. He is also snotty to Sheridan when introduced to him—to his credit, Sheridan is kind and polite back, and doesn’t even mention that he sacrificed some of his own hit points to help save him. (Though I’m betting Franklin told Garibaldi at some point…)
Nothing’s the same anymore. According to Delenn, sending Sinclair to Minbar was the first step toward building a bridge between Earth and Minbar…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. …and the second step was Delenn becoming a Minbari/human hybrid, er, somehow. Weirdly, she talks as if this was the plan all along, even though she repeatedly says she has no idea how she was supposed to come out of the chrysalis.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari is a fascinating mix of frightened and eager in his dealings with Morden—on one hand, he knows what Morden is giving him is powerful and dangerous; on the other hand, it’s really cool…
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar comes really really close to finding out the truth about the Shadows.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Winters’ scan enables Garibaldi to identify his shooter. They trust her enough for that, at least.
The Shadowy Vorlons. The Shadows make short work of G’Kar’s fleet, though when one is damaged, it very obviously screams.
Looking ahead. Mollari jokes that Morden’s associates should just wipe out the Narn homeworld while they’re at it. Morden very seriously says, “One thing at a time,” a comment that will prove prophetic.
We also see the planet of Z’ha’dum for the first time. It will not be the last.
Welcome aboard. Beverly Leech makes her one and only appearance as Liz. Beth Toussaint debuts the role of Anna, but the role will be played by Melissa Gilbert (at the time, Bruce Boxleitner’s real-life wife) when the character returns in season three.
Several recurring regulars appear: back from “Chrysalis” are Ed Wasser as Morden, Gary McGurk as Clark, and Macaulay Bruton as Jack; and back from “The Quality of Mercy” is David L. Crowley as Welch. It’s Bruton’s final appearance; Wasser will return in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum,” McGurk will be back in “Voices of Authority,” and Crowley will next be seen in the very next episode, “The Geometry of Shadows.”
Trivial matters. The Great Hit Point Rearranger was first seen in “The Quality of Mercy.” The Shadow attack on Quadrant 37 happened in “Chrysalis.” Psi Corps endorsing Clark was seen in a newspaper headline in “And the Sky Full of Stars.”
The original plan was for Delenn to present as male in season one and then transform into a woman in season two (which is why Delenn’s makeup was the way it was in “The Gathering”). This proved unworkable, mostly because all attempts to make Mira Furlan seem masculine were unconvincing.
Mary Kay Adams makes her debut as Na’Toth, taking over from Caitlin Brown, who declined to return in order to pursue more acting roles that didn’t hide her behind tons of prosthetics. (Unlike the other main cast, who signed up for five years, Brown was a last-minute replacement for Mary Woronov when she quit the role in the first season; Brown was therefore only signed on for one season.) Adams will only make one other appearance after this, despite being listed in the opening credits for the whole season.
Z’ha’dum is obviously a name influenced by Khazad-dum from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (B5 is rife with LotR references), though J. Michael Straczynski has unconvincingly denied this.
Jack’s “be seeing you” and okee-doke salute mirror Bester’s departing moment in “Mind War,” and both are references to The Prisoner.
Kosh appears during the council meetings, but has no dialogue.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Oh, God—I’m out of it for a few days, and the whole place goes to hell.”
—Garibaldi’s response upon waking up to many changes.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Weep for us all.” Having spent most of “Points of Departure” setting up the new post-Sinclair status quo, “Revelations” then addresses the task of catching some of the balls that were thrown in the air in “Chrysalis.”
The revelation of Delenn’s transformation is interesting, and certainly works nicely with what we learned last week, both about the shared souls between humans and Minbari and Lennier’s statement that humans and Minbari will need to come together to face the coming darkness.
But what’s weird is that apparently Delenn had no idea this was gonna happen, which really makes no sense, either in the moment or in light of what happens over the course of the show. The link between Earth and Minbar is crucial to one element of the story arc, so it just seems weird that Delenn becoming part-human wasn’t part of the plan all along. It doesn’t help that we have no idea what the other options were (beyond, apparently, “scaly lizard thingie”). It just feels like constructed suspense prior to the reveal.
I’m back and forth on Garibaldi being brought out of his coma by the Great Hit Point Rearranger from “The Quality of Mercy.” On the one hand, it’s good that the show doesn’t do the Star Trek thing of forgetting all about game-changing technology after it’s introduced. In fact, we’ll see the Great Hit Point Rearranger again. On the other hand, it’s incredibly deus ex machina. On the third hand, that it’s a deus ex machina is on the label, as it were. The gun was already on the mantelpiece…
My only issue with G’Kar’s storyline is that he apparently never at any point took any pictures or scans of the ships that attacked him and his fellows? I mean, seriously, why isn’t he showing the council the visual images that his ship surely must have taken of their foes? Aside from that, Andreas Katsulas lends his usual gravitas to the proceedings, making it clear that this is a threat to be reckoned with. And I’m a sucker for anyone who quotes one of my favorite poems in the world. (I’ve mined “The Second Coming” for story titles many times in my career…)
The resolution of Jack’s storyline is exactly as expected, but falls flat for me, mainly because of the complete lack of impression Gary McGurk provides as Clark. He doesn’t come across as a bland bureaucrat, he doesn’t come across as an insincere slimeball, he doesn’t come across as a charismatic leader. He, unfortunately, comes across as a 1990s Central Casting white dude who’s there to take up space and nothing else. Given how important Clark is to the overall storyline, they really needed to do a better job of casting the role.
And finally we get to learn more about our new lead, as Sheridan has a wife he’s still mourning after two years. Bruce Boxleitner plays Sheridan’s grief and guilt well, and I like how Beverly Leech plays Liz as the sibling who just wants to smack her brother upside the head.
After spending far too much of season one waiting for, um, revelations, it’s nice to see so many questions answered in one episode, even though it goes ahead and asks a few more, and does so in a compelling manner.
Next week: “The Geometry of Shadows.”
I think this is the first instance where we see a jumpgate with only three struts.
In previous instances when Delenn engaged in deception, it was through use of weasel words (since Minbari do not lie). But by stating that her transformation was done with the blessings of the Minbari government, she has told an outright lie.
Is it? She IS (at this point) on the Gray Council, so if she approved…
No, she isn’t. She’s quit the Council, as of “Babylon Squared” toward the end of season one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Did she quit, or did she accept that she might be kicked off the council if she continued with her plans? Also, since she got the triluminary from someone else on the council, she could claim she had at least some support.
If I’m not mistaken, the jumpgate at Z’ha’dum is the only jumpgate we see in the show with only three struts. I remember thinking of that as a visual shortcut for “Oh, we’re at Z’ha’dum again.”
The jumpgate seen in The Coming of Shadows also had only three struts.
SFX reuse, or do the shadows somehow shoot out one strut when they turn up? :)
No, it’s an original shot, we see the camera turn from the three-strutted jumpgate to the planet in Quadrant 14.
I’d assume the three-piece jumpgates are meant to be the constructs of a different civilization than the four-piece ones.
Yes, To Dream in the City of Sorrows goes into detail about the jumpgate network was created ad hoc over thousands of years, with some gates created by races who have long since vanished, and a few gates being so old that they have cautionary signs and they tend to creak (so to speak) when activated.
In recent animated movie The Road Home we see a Minbari jumpgate for – bizarrely – the very first time in the franchise. It has four prongs, but is a big, elaborate crystal construction.
The non-canon TTRPG suggest that there are only a couple of jumpgates leading into Vorlon space and the network just abruptly terminates there, with the inference that the Vorlons do not use jumpgates of their own.
Oh maybe — we do know the jumpgates are the product of a wide variety of civilizations (almost certainly from Vorlon original blueprints).
Here early, for a change.
Delenn’s response seems reasonable for aomeone who went into the chrysalis expecting to come out human but who definitely did not emerge as a human. Most likely, this procedure has happened exactly once before, and that involved what appears to have been a complete species transformation (so far as we know on-screen). Delenn may know what prophecy said was going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that when she comes out lizard-faced she isn’t going to panic and think something went horribly wrong.
As for Garibaldi’s coma: I think the phrase deus ex machina gets tossed around too often. It refers to the resolution of a climax through a specific kind of mechanism. Garibaldi leaving a coma isn’t a climax. The coma is a famous serial drama technique (soaps, for instance). No clear cause for this one. How is the story any better or worse if Garibaldi just arbitrarily comes out of the coma? Would that happenstance be a deus ex machina? What if Bones or Bashir show up and inject him with a hypo and he wakes up? Is the hypo the machina in that instance? This seems useful to remind us of the machine, tells us something about Franklin, Sheridan, and Garibaldi’s characters, and keeps Jerry Doyle from having to play “recovering” for several episodes.
Clark’s casting seems to have been for appearance more than anything else, although he’s a peripheral character by necessity: the show can’t readily recast him and he shouldn’t be showing up too frequently, so you preclude certain casting decisions. B5 has plenty of issues with recurring characters (witness Na’toth) although it also has some amazing ones. Clark here comes across as not charming or glib; it implies he’s not a charismatic politician and feeds into certain conspiracy theories. He’s a Nixon-type. Or a Dick Cheney -type. That might be intentional, but I agree the actor doesn’t make a good impression.
More specifically, a deus ex machina is a plot resolution that comes out of nowhere and isn’t set up in the story — basically what Chekhov’s Gun is an antidote to. Since the life machine was set up last season, its use is not a deus ex machina here, since the “ex machina” part isn’t meant literally (well, it was originally, but not in modern usage).
Then there’s the deus aspect, where the primary characters have little to no agency in the resolution. IIRC the deus ex machina in ancient Greek theater involved the gods descending from the heavens to clean up the mess made by those dipstick mortals.
Hmm, yeah, except that usually in Greek myth it was the gods who made the mess through their petty soap-opera antics and the mortals who were left scrambling to survive the consequences.
For a race with no hair that we know of, Delenn produced quite a crop on her first try. Good job!
“The Second Coming” is one of the most powerful 20thC English poems. I have no doubt it would speak to G’Kar. Among its gemlike lines of foreboding:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is also, for me, a strange bit of makeup in that her hair clearly flows under the bone crest like it’s a hairband! I’m not sure what they could have done without making the character look goofy or losing the Minbari elements of her appearance, maybe just short back and sides for the hair, and it’s something that I quickly forget about most of the time, but it still seems like they must have gone, oh well at some point in the process.
JMS’s handwave on Usenet was, “When Delenn’s structure changed, the epidermal layer on the head grew thinner; there is now a gap between the skin, and the bone which has grown out. Hair can be draped through it, or laid over it.”
But that doesn’t make a lot of sense — why would the bone crest only be connected to the skull at the temples instead of all the way around? Unless it’s more like some kind of horns that are looped back and fused together.
JMS is the master of confident-sounding fanwank (although is it fanwank when the creator is doing it): he works backwards from the conclusion they have – that Delenn’s air looks iffy in the first few episodes and they and Mira Furlan are just trying different things until they get to a look that’s good halfway through the season – and just comes up with something that sounds vaguely convincing, at least on USEnet in 1995 that maybe a few hundred people max are going to see.
I’m not sure Usenet’s reader base would have been that small. My father followed JMS’s Usenet comments, and I’m pretty sure at least one of my friends did too, so if I personally knew more than one person who followed them, it’s statistically very unlikely that the number of readers was that tiny. My impression at the time was that Usenet was pretty actively followed by genre fans.
Not to mention that JMS’s comments on Usenet would often have been reposted by other fan and news sources, and quoted in print magazines like Starlog and Cinefantastique that covered SF media.
We’ve seen at least two Minbari males with beards, Draal in “A Voice in the Wilderness” and Kalain last week in “Points of Departure.”
True. I was imprecise. How about “top of skull” hair?
I’m still impressed at the speed she appears to have grown it. Did she slow it down after her emergence? If not, her haircare discussion with Ivanova in an upcoming episode might have gone in a different direction.
In order to restructure her body so heavily, her metabolism had to be in serious overdrive. It kinda makes sense her hair might grow extremely fast.
I don’t, unfortunately, have a link, but there is a filk song “The Curlers of Delenn” sung to “The Colors of the Wind.” I think the filk artist was Tom Smith.
That’s amusing. There’s a B5 fan called Tom Smith who runs the peerless “B5 Scrolls” fansite and has spent some time rebuilding B5‘s CGI sequences in HD widescreen using the original models and scene files, to impressive results.
They’re not the same guy, so it’s amusing we have two Tom Smith B5 fans of note.
I found the link, to that and other filk by Tom Smith: https://tomsmith.bandcamp.com/track/min-barrette
Google vindicates you – you’re correct. And I also learned that Peter David plumbed the situation for a subplot in a novel I haven’t read (yet), because of course he did :-)
The term is scalp hair.
Because Straczynski came up with the notion of Minbari being hairless without reckoning with actors who refuse to shave their beards for a part. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The same happened in the Alien Nation TV series. The Newcomers were supposed to be completely hairless besides eyelashes, but some of the male guest actors had very hairy arms or chests.
Reminds me Freeform’s mermaid series Siren, which I’m rewatching. The second season has a group of mermaids (who are feral creatures in the water) come to land for a while, and all the women have long wild hair, but one of the men has a shaved head and the other has a neatly trimmed beard and short hair moussed up on top. How does an underwater hunter-gatherer get his hair like that????
The mermaids in Siren aren’t feral creatures; they’re a stone-age civilization with tools, language, and culture (they just lack fire because they live primarily underwater). Social grooming like head shaving and hair care are totally consistent with stone tools.
Okay, in theory, but how does a moussed hairstyle make sense underwater? He’s just come out of the ocean for the first time, he doesn’t yet speak English, and he has no ability to interact with human institutions except by following Ryn’s lead. So this is the way his hair looked fresh out of the ocean. It’s just implausibly coiffed.
Well, with all that water, clearly it was easy for them to rinse properly with the mousse (don’t ask where they got the mousse from, maybe they kidnapped a moose as it drank from a stream).
(But I mean look at actual aquatic mammals with hair. Sleek, oiled — the wonder isn’t the moussed-up men, it’s the wild-haired women. They should have looked more like otters, hair all over. Bit hard to find actresses with 100% hair coverage, but then it’s also hard to find actresses with tails…)
Oh wait there is another option to avoid catastrophic heat loss: blubber! But I’m not sure mermaids looking like walruses are really what anyone is looking for…
I was wondering more about the professional-grade short haircut and beard trim.
Also, the mermaids in aquatic form were covered in fishlike scales aside from their hairy scalps, so that they could be shown fully nude in the water on commercial TV. How they could be mammalian in their human form and a piscine/mammalian hybrid in the water has not been explained yet as far as I’ve gotten. The show treats them as a species that can be studied scientifically, but there are vague hints of something potentially more paranormal to them. (This will be my first time seeing the final season, which I haven’t reached yet.)
Sort of like Papa Smurf and Smurfette :-).
I find that B5, as a show, is usually at its best when it’s posing new intriguing questions. But it can be equally satisfying when we get an episode that actually answers them. “Revelations” does a lot of legwork providing the resolution to last season’s “Chrysalis” as well as setting up the new normal.
We already get a sample of that new normal get through the G’Kar storyline. There’s nothing more frustrating than a variation on “the boy who cried wolf” tale. Being the one person who’s seen the coming darkness and has no way to prove his case to his peers. For once, Londo has the upper hand without anyone realizing it. And it also puts G’Kar apart from the rest of the council, in a position where he has no leverage and no power, which is a position he’ll be in quite a lot in the coming episodes. In a way, this is a necesary step as the character is humbled over time. A sharp inverse turn from season 1 when G’Kar ruled the council with swagger and bluster.
It’s not just about answering questions. For every seeming progress the characters make in the episode, there is always some frustrating roadblock or twist that sends them back several spaces in the board. Londo warning Morden and throwing G’Kar’s plans was one. Jack being whisked away from a potential whistleblowing movement was the other. This was when I became convinced that Clark was up to no good. For my two cents, I thought the actor played insincere slimeball very well when he made his case to Sheridan, trying to justify Jack’s transfer.
If “Points of Departure” was our introduction to Sheridan the leader and military strategist with a taste for oranges and Abraham Lincoln quotes, this is our introduction to his vulnerable, emotionally wounded side of him. Also an essential step in the show. The recasting of Anna can feel jarring later on, but what matters here is that we buy Sheridan’s pain and guilt. Boxleitner delivers every scene beautifully. It’s been said that the show’s aliens feel better developed than the human characters. But I’d argue Sheridan’s story here, along with Ivanova’s own previous developments, mark a shifting point in this balance.
One thing I love about this episode is that while he’s coping with his guilt over Anna, we get to see the bright look in his eyes when he finally meets Delenn for the first time. It’s all we get, but it’s a major first step for what’s to come. I’m not getting into major
And being an ambassador, I tend to believe Delenn was putting on a show when she explained her use of the chrysalis to the council – the notion that she always knew she was meant to become this hybrid as a bridge between their species. No, she didn’t know what was going to happen. And she wasn’t going to share that uncertainty with anyone but Lennier. And we’ll see that self-assured facade of hers being challenged and broken later in the season.
“Sheridan insists that he and Franklin take it in shifts to restore Garibaldi’s hit points—and that Sheridan take the first shift, as it were, since Franklin is needed to make sure the Great Hit Point Rearranger is working right.”
Actually Sheridan wanted to do it all himself, and Franklin talked him into doing shifts and letting Franklin go first. I would’ve thought it’d make more sense for Sheridan to go first, but I assume Franklin taught Sheridan how to turn the machine off right after the scene cut away.
As much as I hate the idea of the life-force machine, this was a pretty effective way to make us like Sheridan, by showing he was willing to sacrifice a portion of his life force for someone he hadn’t even met yet.
This is a pretty effective episode overall with a lot happening, but it has its issues. For instance, Jack coming into Medlab and just lurking in the background with his hand on his holster, then leaving when Garibaldi said he didn’t know who shot him, would’ve looked incredibly damning to any Medlab personnel who happened to notice him. Lucky for him that background extras never pay attention. (Well, usually. I’m thinking of that moment in King Lear where Cornwall gouges Gloucester’s eyes out and some random servant of his protests his cruelty and stabs him to death for it.) It’s also awfully convenient that there happened to be a random highly reflective surface in the corridor where Garibaldi was shot.
Also, how was G’Kar able to visit so many long-abandoned, uninhabited star systems in the course of a few days? Without a hyperspace-capable capital ship, he would’ve had to use jump gates, and how could there be functional jump gates in so many systems that were abandoned in a great war a millennium ago? Even if they have some kind of self-repair capability, you’d think some would’ve been damaged or destroyed in the war.
It was nice to see Beverly Leech, whom I’ve liked ever since she was Kate Monday on Mathnet (and whose face kind of reminds me of the same unrequited-love-turned-best-friend from college that Fabiana Udenio also reminded me of). It’s too bad this was her only appearance. I don’t think her hair and makeup flattered her here, though.
I don’t think Delenn’s “What am I?” meant that she didn’t know she was going to become a human hybrid; after all, she called Franklin because she knew only a human doctor could help her rather than a Minbari one. It was more that she was surprised that it seemed to have gone wrong, because she wasn’t expecting the scale layer and didn’t know it was removable.
As for Clark’s actor being bland and unimpressive, I think that, in the context of current events, that makes him entirely credible as a wannabe fascist dictator. Charismatic villains are more common in fiction; real-life monsters are often personally dull and unappealing.
“(I’ve mined “The Second Coming” for story titles many times in my career…)”
Indeed, it’s because of that tendency of yours that Star Trek: Mere Anarchy Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again is my only published work whose title I didn’t come up with myself (although there are some where an editor nixed my first choice and had me suggest an alternative).
“how could there be functional jump gates in so many systems that were abandoned in a great war a millennium ago? Even if they have some kind of self-repair capability, you’d think some would’ve been damaged or destroyed in the war.”
According to the Babylon 5 wiki article on jumpgates (which has a fair amount of citations), destroying them during war is a big no-no, as destroying part of the network harms your side as much as the opposition in the long run. The only reason Sheridan used the one he did to perform the Bonehead Maneuver was to stop scavengers from looting the now-dead Markab homeworld.
Easily explained by instead asking: which uninhabited star systems could G’Kar have visited without having a ship with a jump drive? Only those with operating jump gates. That might not be a good sampling, but it’s superior to saying “I can’t get a ship with a jump drive so I guess I can’t investigate at all.” It’s clear the Z’ha’dum gate would be operational (for a bunch of reasons), and the Shadows are clearly active on other Rim worlds, as may be their servants, so presumably that’s where G’Kar was poking around.
The logistics of Narn fighter operation that far out are an interesting question, but the show never gives a clear sense of how far out is far out. We’re not in Star Wars “the Outer Rim is a day trip” territory bit it’s unclear if all of known space is a thousand light years across, either. JMS doesn’t much seem to care about establishing that stuff.
It is made clear later that the Shadows have client races that have been in hiding and rebuilding. They need to maintain the jump gates for their own use.
Maybe the question should be why nobody noticed the maintenance crews nobody was paying for.
The issue is not why the gates exist. The issue is why G’Kar would even believe he could visit a long-abandoned system if he didn’t have a jump-capable ship.
Unless… I guess it could be that he found a record of their old jump gate addresses and tested whether he could even connect to a gate at those coordinates. It could be that he tried a bunch of old addresses that were inactive, but some of the ones that should’ve been inaccessible proved to have working gates, which itself was evidence that they’d been resettled in secret.
Although “gate addresses” are more of a Stargate thing. I guess in B5 it’s more like following the map to a given freeway exit and seeing whether it’s open or closed.
“Easily explained by instead asking: which uninhabited star systems could G’Kar have visited without having a ship with a jump drive? Only those with operating jump gates.”
Yes, but that’s exactly the paradox. If they have operating jump gates, why are they presumed to have been abandoned for a thousand years? The very fact that G’Kar can reach them requires them to have working infrastructure, so it seems contradictory to say that they were believed to be lifeless ruins.
I’d also guess re: Delenn’s crisis, that even if you’re prepared for a fully body metamorphosis you might still have some doubts and fears (and perhaps even some regret) when you go through with it. It can be hard enough getting used to my reflection when I get a new pair of glasses, but there may be other shifts in physiognomy that might make you feel alien in your own body.
Jack coming into Medlab and just lurking in the background with his hand on his holster, then leaving when Garibaldi said he didn’t know who shot him, would’ve looked incredibly damning to any Medlab personnel who happened to notice him.
Also: What’s he going to do if Garabaldi does remember, shoot everybody in Medlab and make a run for it? Even when he’s “caught,” he should just deny everything and play dumb. Garabaldi was in a coma for days, was operated on with unknown alien technology, had his brain scanned by a telepath, and now claims he remembers seeing a reflection for a split-second. The attorney appointed to defend Jack could blow holes in this easily. By extension, the conspiracy to jailbreak him just makes things look suspicious for no reason.
The way the scene was shot and performed, I was briefly under the impression that Garibaldi did know who shot him, saw Jack threaten him, and kept quiet to make sure the guy didn’t start shooting people right then and there. I think that would have made a lot more sense (if it weren’t for the fact that he was shot in the back in the first place).
Interesting side note about Beth Toussaint’s casting: when Melissa Gilbert later replaced Beth Toussaint as Anna Sheridan, they reshot the on-monitor sequence from this episode and edited Gilbert in to repeat showings of this episode as Anna. Not sure which version is on the streaming or DVD (or soon, the Blu-Ray) versions.
Not quite. Rather, in “Z’ha’dum,” they showed this scene as a flashback and replaced the message there, cutting Gilbert’s performance together with the original “Revelations” footage of Sheridan. But though JMS mused in a DVD commentary about wanting to go back and replace it in “Revelations,” he never actually did.
Gilbert would get residuals for this episode if she were cut in, I assume, and maybe the credits would have to be redone; I don’t know about the other performer. My assumption is that it wasn’t as easy as a simple re-edit and thus couldn’t be justified.
They wouldn’t be able to do it. Toussaint’s agent would have thrown a fit, as her getting residuals from the repeat of the episode would be part of a standard contract.
If you do something like that, it needs to be something that doesn’t involve the residual situation: for example, IIRC they did replace Tigh’s wife in a photograph in an episode of BSG with the actually-cast actress (Kate Vernon) because that was a stock photo, not of an actress getting residuals.
You can also do it if you’re creating a whole new version of the episode or movie, like replacing Clive Revill (in a monkey mask) with Ian McDiarmid in The Empire Strikes Back.
Marjorie Eaton was the physical performer for the Emperor in TESB. Clive Revill only dubbed the voice. There was no “monkey mask”; rather, the eyes of a chimpanzee (an ape, not a monkey) were optically superimposed into the eye sockets of the Phil Tippett-designed mask that Eaton wore.
Season 2 starts off with a pair of rock-solid episodes. The two big cliffhangers from the first season are resolved, but not too much, and new questions grow out of those resolutions. Well, OK out of one of them. Garibaldi lives doesn’t exactly ask anything new.
Garibaldi’s first words to Sheridan were very him. Sheridan takes it well; he seems smart enough to recognize that the first thing out of someone’s mouth as they come out of a coma are going to be unfiltered and maybe rude. I agree that Franklin probably told Garibaldi about Sheridan helping out with the healing machine, and Ivanova probably also vouched for him. She’s likely the one person who isn’t Sinclair that he comes close to trusting. Though as I recall it still takes a while for him to come around.
IIRC, it’s not that she had no idea, it’s that she didn’t know for sure. Triluminary transforms Minbari into Valen’s species and vice versa, and while she is reasonably sure that said species is human, it’s still a thing that they only found out recently, and most of the knowledge about Triluminaries and Valen is based on religious myth and conjecture. E.g. does it work correctly on any random descendant of Valen?..
And the experience itself was probably quite traumatic either way.
Agreed. Prophecies are usually ambiguous enough that if they don’t come true the way people expect, the reason is that the words were misinterpreted. I’m thinking the prophecy was along the line of the greater souls will recede until they are discovered in an unexpected place and an unexpected race. The dark will arise again. In order to win against the dark, one of the Minbari will use the Triluminary and become a bridge between races and reunite the souls of the Minbari.
It doesn’t say what form this bridge will take, or even if it will have a physical form. It simply says someone will use the Trimluminary and in order to make the universe safe. I think the prophecy didn’t mention the whole “”the race you get in a massive war and are trying to totally wipe out is the one with the missing souls” part of the future, because then maybe the religious caste would have tried to stop the war. So everything is loosey goosey and can be taken in a lot of different ways. The fact that Delenn was one of the few who believed that NOW was the time speaks to the idea that not a lot of detail was given.
Then there are the hilariously misinterpreted prophecies, like the one with the Lydian king Croesus. You may recall how he consulted the Oracle of Delphi on whether or not he should attack the Persian king Cyrus the Great and was told that, if he did so, he would destroy a mighty empire. Genre Savviness not really being a thing back then, Croesus goes with the most favorable interpretation of this rather vague prophecy and assumes he’ll curbstomp those pants and Smurf hat wearing chumps. And as the Greek historian Herodotus remarked (in Book 1 Chapter 86 of his Histories), “Just as the oracle had foretold, he had indeed destroyed a mighty empire. His own!”
Also, watch out for Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane and a man not born of woman.
It was a small thing, but I really liked G’Kar praying for the other pilots as he went into the jumpgate. It reinforced a major part of his character in a very simple way.
Any time we see G’kar pray makes my heart drop, as clearly he does care for his people. He isn’t just a politician who says it, every time he prays, which is usually when he loses someone, he is deeply upset about their sacrafice and their loss.
I thought this was another good episode, though I agree that the guy playing the president was nowhere. I don’t know what kind of role he’s going to play in the show going forward, and you can’t really judge an actor’s talent by one brief video snippet, but I do hope he comes off better in future appearances. However, most of the other performances were pretty good, especially by the standards set in the first season by almost everybody who wasn’t playing an alien. Perhaps everyone’s just got a better handle on their parts by now. I’m still not sure about the new Na’toth, since she doesn’t really have the same presence as the old one, but there’s nothing you can do if an actor chooses to leave a show.
G’Kar seems like an almost entirely different character, and I approve of the change. I’m not saying he wasn’t amusing in the first season, but it was the brief moments of real sincerity he was given that stick out in my mind, so I’m really enjoying him now. On the other hand, Mollari seems to have gone back to being an idiot in his dealings with Morden after having been briefly horrified by the ramifications of his actions. Of course, it’s all in keeping with the character as he was introduced, so I’m not complaining, but I will certainly enjoy watching this eventually blow up in his face.
As for Delenn, I think the transformation really would have been more impactful if she’d played the whole of the first season in the makeup she had in “The Gathering,” which I found to be convincingly androgynous, even if the people making the show didn’t. However, like another comment said, I never got the impression that she was confused about what the end result of the process was supposed to be.
…I agree that the guy playing the president was nowhere
He does come across as bland and ineffectual. Maybe it’s just poor casting.
But I like to think JMS is hinting here that when boring functionaries perform villainy as blandly as any other bureaucratic task, it’s even more disturbing. (Arendt’s “banality of evil”)
Plus he wasn’t elected President, he was the VP. Recently, one of the topics of conversation is how little a VP affects the vote. We have had some pretty unmemorable or even bad VPs, in my lifetime. Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon were both crooks, Dan Quayle was a light weight. Gerald Ford (an anomaly) was picked partly because he was seen as being a light weight to make it harder for the Senate to vote to impeach Nixon. Mike Pence wasn’t exactly a rising star when he got the VP nod. I don’t have that much problem with the VICE President being a less than charismatic politician who could ,for whatever reason, pull a constituency that the President needed to appeal to. Santiago was fairly okay with having relations with other races, but Clarke could show that he leaned the other direction to get the xenophobes on board.
Reading between the lines, Clark is a hard-nosed anti-immigration isolationist whilst Santiago was a more liberal internationalist, suggesting either an outright coalition between two quite different parties (the UK Conservative-LibDem coalition government of 2010-15 comes to mind) or a very broad church party that needed two sides pulled together. Making Clark VP may have been a sop, considering that the VP has limited power in their own right, as long as your President doesn’t explode over Jupiter.
I was going to say “but that’s a US VP, and this is a VP of a different political entity”, but a) the creators were American b) the intended audience were largely American and c) thinking back, I can’t think of any effectual deputy PMs in the UK either.
Of course, we have the giant thumping monster that is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the two-cornered fight that was Blair and Brown makes it clear that they really do have enormous power, but…
At the same time (long after B5 was made), we also had Cheney in the US, a VP who had enormous power as well but hid most of it (helped by his literally hiding for a very long time after 9/11).
“As for Delenn, I think the transformation really would have been more impactful if she’d played the whole of the first season in the makeup she had in “The Gathering,” which I found to be convincingly androgynous, even if the people making the show didn’t.”
It wasn’t the makeup they had a problem with. As JMS explained it on Usenet: “The “male” voice, altered by computer-enhancement, just sounded REAL bogus; we couldn’t get it right, and I had to decide between dropping it, and doing something the people would rightly describe as lame all season, just for one big payoff. It was a tough call, but it had to be made.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/024.html
It’s worth noting this story is (along with more than a few of JMS’) a little bit questionable.
Based on the actual makeup designer (who also played the assassin in the pilot!), what really happened is that nobody bothered to tell Mira Furlan her character’s face and voice would be changed so substantially to make her appear male, or at least androgynous. They were first going to use “mechanical eyes” but decided that was too weird and changed them to thick black contact lenses, as well as changing her voice with a vocoder. And this was during the final makeup test before shooting was going to start.
Mira went ballistic, and because the Warner Brothers execs were on hand to view the makeup tests, she was able to directly (and forcefully) put her point across that she wanted to appear and hear recognisable to further her career options, and nobody had bothered to forewarn her the makeup requirements would be so extensive. The WB execs overruled JMS and agreed she would be a female-looking alien with human-coloured skin.
While that account sounds plausible in terms of Furlan’s motivations, I have my doubts about the rest. If you look at “The Gathering,” the only use of a female pronoun for Delenn is in an off-camera line of dialogue that could’ve been dubbed in after shooting, and Furlan’s performance as Delenn seems somewhat more “masculine” than it would be in the series. Also, if the decision was made before shooting, there should’ve been time to redesign the makeup, even just to leave off the cheek and chin appliances and let more of her face show. It makes no sense that they would’ve left the makeup unchanged in the pilot if they’d already decided to ditch it before filming began.
So it seems likely to me that if such a conversation occurred, it would have had to be after principal photography on “The Gathering,” not before, and the makeup artist misremembered the timing or was misquoted.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my comment that I was a bit confused about Garibaldi saying that the penalty for mutiny and treason was “spacing,” since I thought an earlier episode established that humans didn’t have the death penalty anymore (though getting your brain wiped feels like a distinction without a difference).
Actually that’s entirely consistent with “The Quality of Mercy,” where Ombuds Wellington said “Spacing’s only invoked under conditions of mutiny or treason.” They don’t have the death penalty for anything other than those.
Incidentally, Garibaldi was wrong or lying about the effects of being spaced. One would probably lose consciousness after 15-30 seconds and die within 2 minutes, not 5, and “your lungs turn inside-out, your eyeballs freeze, and your heart explodes” is quite an exaggeration. Evaporation/sublimation of moisture from the breath might cause some freezing around the nose and mouth, but that’s about it.
Garibaldi was exaggerating for the sake of intimidation, for all the good it did him.
As Eduardo said, Franklin will later describe spacing the same way in an interview, so it wasn’t meant to be exaggeration. It was just JMS not doing his homework and further belying his claim that B5 would be the most scientifically accurate show ever.
Sadly, it’s not just Garibaldi bluster, because Franklin says almost the exact same thing about the effects of spacing people later in the season during the ‘honest’ take scene in the episode “And Now for a Word”. JMS certainly got that wrong or at least embellished it a bit for dramatic effect. Still, it’s better than Yondu’s instant freezing space death in Guardians 2.
Yeah, it’s better than a lot of ridiculous portrayals of the effects of vacuum. The one I’ve always hated most was Outland, where people exploded like water balloons the instant they hit vacuum, which is a ridiculous misinterpretation of “explosive decompression.” See also Total Recall, with the faces bulging out from the low Martian air pressure. (I had a friend in college who didn’t understand what that was supposed to be and thought it was some kind of acidic atmosphere burning them.) One of the better portrayals I’ve seen, I think, was in Event Horizon, though it overestimated the length of time a person could stay conscious in vacuum.
But yeah, the most pervasive misconception is that people instantly freeze in vacuum, which is entirely backward. Vacuum is an insulator, which is why thermos bottles work. With no material to conduct or convect heat away from the body, the only mechanism for heat loss is radiation, the slowest one. Just as we lose heat faster in water than in air, because there’s a denser medium to carry more heat away, so we lose heat more slowly in vacuum. That’s why spacesuits need built-in cooling systems rather than heating systems.
I can forgive Total Recall and the bulging eyes for a couple of reasons: one is that the entire story might be taking place inside Quaid’s mind, meaning it’s all a product of his fears and not knowing how bodies react in a vaccum. Also, it’s a Paul Verhoeven movie, meaning we have to take any attempts of his at depicting a scientifically accurate future with a grain of salt, given his penchant for satire and comedy (Starship Troopers being the other big example).
Yes, I’m inclined to prefer the interpretation that the whole spy adventure in Total Recall is just a delusion. After all, an even bigger scientific error is the bit about Mars having a core of pure ice. A rocky crust over an icy core makes as much sense as a boulder floating atop a lake. The denser rock would’ve sunk to the center while the planet was still molten.
2001 does a pretty good job, imho, when Bowman has to board Discovery without his helmet.
There is a line from Arthur C Clarke somewhere, where he says he was not on set the day they shot that, and if he had been he would have advised Bowmans actor *not* to take a deep breath before entering hard vacuum.
Yeah. I winced in Star Trek TNG: “Disaster” when Dr. Crusher told Geordi to hold his breath before they were exposed to vacuum. That’s the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, since the pressure would rupture the alveoli. You’re supposed to hyperventilate to oxygenate your blood as much as possible, then exhale at the moment of exposure.
@ChristopherLBennett, I’m not going to lie, your mentioning of EVENT HORIZON as an example of relative scientific accuracy in Science Fiction tickled my sense of whimsy (Whether fairly or unfairly I could not say, since my knowledge of science is as modest as a nun wearing a burka* – I admit to thinking of it as an unofficial prequel to WARHAMMER 40,000 and we all know that 40K is a setting that really puts the Fantasy in Science Fiction).
Out of curiosity, may I please ask what you think of the ‘Haunted House IN SPACE!’ film? (No, not that one, the one with the Forces of Hell … no, not the one with Big Fragging Guns, the one with strong Gothic undertones … ummm … the one with Jolie Richardson!**).
*No, dear reader, nuns do not wear burkas (At least traditionally they wear wimples): this is a deliberately cartoonish mental image, not a hard-hitting documentary,
**I would have evoked the Mighty Laurence Fishburn, always my mental image of a Sci Fi Captain, but that might risk confusion with TJE
MATRIX.
I was speaking specifically of Event Horizon‘s portrayal of exposure to vacuum, not the film in general. However, though I’m not a horror fan, I liked the aspects of the film that align more with my interests. I feel it did a fairly good job depicting space plausibly. And I don’t mind its portrayal of a “hell dimension” that’s an alternate universe with different physical laws, because I’ve seen a similar concept in prose science fiction, specifically Greg Bear’s novella “The Way of All Ghosts” — the idea being that different physical laws would be unbearable and incomprehensible anyway so it would feel like hell. (Though realistically, even a slight change in the universe’s physical constants would make it impossible for us to exist at all.)
THE Maxtrix, dash it all!
The thing that really stuck out to me in this episode was when Mollari, talking to Morden, realized that he was getting in over his head…
My personal favorite is the precise moment in the Council chamber when G’Kar realizes that having alienated all of his potential allies was going to hurt everyone in the long run. I think of it as the point at which his character arc changes directions.
I took Deleen saying she didn’t expect this was more she didn’t expect the scaley transformation; she didn’t know the full process of it, as she didn’t seem to surprise by the hair
Season One was episodic television with hints of a long-term arc. With the first two episodes of Season Two, it feels like the show has shifted into a long-term story interspersed with episodic adventures.
Maybe, or maybe it’s just that there’s a lot to unpack from the end of season 1 before getting back to the episodic stuff. Deep Space Nine‘s second season began with a 3-part arc, its sixth with a 6-part arc, but they both returned to being more episodic after that (though still relatively serialized in the latter case).
Really, I think it’s pretty common for episodic series to have more continuity in the early episodes as they establish the status quo, before moving into the more episodic norm. So it’s premature to judge the full season by the first 2-3 episodes. Indeed, there’s sort of an unwritten rule that the second episode of a new show is approached as kind of a second pilot, re-establishing and reinforcing the basic premise, characters, and relationships, or setting up new characters, situations, and relationships that the pilot didn’t get around to.
Granted, this is a second season, but it’s a soft reboot in a lot of ways, so the “pilot” rule arguably applies.
One of the funniest B5 trivia I know is that when Jerry Doyle slams the cane down on the table in the interrogation table, the other end of the cane rose with some velocity directly into his groin (I don’t think it was in the filmed take, but an earlier on). The pain and irritation Doyle shows in the rest of the scene is therefore genuine and heartfelt (if that is the word).
The hazmat team at the start of the episode is apparently clearing up the wreckage of the Trigati, which is interesting (one wonders if Earthforce seized the debris of a Minbari Sharlin-class warcruiser for their own intelligence purposes, or if it was all returned to the Minbari government).
The new Narn G’Quan-class heavy cruiser was created because CGI director Ron Thornton had created the OG Narn warship (now retconned as the Ta’Loth-class assault cruiser) in about 5 minutes by “kludging together” two vaguely Star Destroyer-ish ships he’d invented whilst fooling around with Lightwave. He hated it and vowed to replace it with something better ASAP.