“Signs and Portents”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 1, Episode 13
Production episode 116
Original air date: May 18, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A freighter being escorted to B5 by a Starfury is attacked by raiders, who destroy the Starfury and board the freighter before Sinclair can even order Delta Wing out to help. Sinclair meets with Ivanova and Garibaldi to try to figure out how to deal with the raiders. Despite cutting off their weapons supply, they’re still attacking with impunity and impossible to stop. Sinclair orders Delta Wing to be on standby, with Ivanova commanding.
After the meeting, Sinclair approaches Garibaldi and talks to him about what he went through under torture back during “And the Sky Full of Stars.” (Why he waited so long to look into it is left as an exercise for the viewer.) He asks Garibaldi to look into what he learned, see what he can dig up. He doesn’t expect much, but he needs to know more than he does now. Garibaldi agrees, and thanks Sinclair for trusting him with this.
A human named Morden arrives on the station. He informs the security guard who checks his papers that he’s been traveling on the rim, but is less than forthcoming with anything beyond that.
Mollari meets with a human trader named Reno, who has obtained The Eye, an immensely valuable Centauri artifact that has been lost for more than a century. The Centauri government, via Mollari, is paying a small fortune to get it back. Lord Kiro and Lady Ladira arrive soon thereafter; The Eye originally belonged to their house. Upon arrival, Ladira—who is a seer—has a vision of B5 being destroyed.
Kiro dismisses Ladira’s vision, as she’s been wrong before. When he was a kid, she predicted that he’d be killed by shadows, which is just silly. (This will probably be important later.) He also questions whether or not he should even give The Eye to the emperor, but instead keep it and try to claim the throne. The emperor hasn’t even been seen in public for over a year. Confidence is eroding in the Republic. Mollari thinks it would be a spectacularly bad idea, as Kiro won’t have sufficient support for a coup.
Morden goes to G’Kar’s quarters and asks him, “What do you want?” G’Kar dismisses him at first, eventually answering that he wants the Centauri utterly destroyed, and then amending that all that really matters to him is that the Narn homeworld is safe.
Next, Morden meets with Delenn, and asks her, “What do you want?” but she senses a darkness about Morden and a triangle appears on her forehead. She urgently kicks him out of her quarters, covering the triangle from Morden, and when he’s gone, she whispers, horrified: “They’re here.”
The freighter Achilles detects raiders approaching. Sinclair sends Ivanova with Delta Wing to engage them. A human—who’s been observing Kiro since he arrived—says that they’ve “taken the bait.”
Kosh returns to the station from wherever it is that he goes when he’s not on B5. Morden sees him, but goes out of his way to avoid him. Morden’s next stop is Mollari’s quarters. The Centauri ambassador is distracted and dismissive of Morden’s query of “What do you want?” but eventually he gives in and answers that he wants to see the Centauri Republic returned to its rightful place of glory in the galaxy, to go back to the way things were.
Kiro declares to Mollari that he’s ready to leave with The Eye. Along with Ladira and Mollari and his guards, they head to the dock, only to be ambushed by the human who was watching Kiro. He and his people take The Eye and also take the three Centauri hostage (after killing the guards).
Sinclair is confused by the attack on the Achilles, as it doesn’t match the pattern of the prior raids. When he reads the Achilles manifest, he realizes that there’s nothing there the raiders could possibly want, and he orders Delta Wing back to the station, as this is a diversion. He also orders Garibaldi to prepare Alpha Wing, while he goes to Kiro’s ship, which is one of the ones scheduled to depart at this particular time.
The commander arrives just in time to see the three Centauri being held hostage. The raider has a PPG right at Kiro’s head, and Sinclair lets him board with the one prisoner; Mollari and Ladira are released.
Sinclair returns to CnC and orders Alpha Wing to disable the Centauri ship and also orders the jump gate to be programmed to reject the Centauri ship’s codes. That should trap the raider.
However, a jump gate is generated within the system by a large ship, from which raider ships fly out. The raiders’ secret is now out: they have a mothership that can form its own gate, which is how they’re able to appear without warning.
A space battle ensues, with the raiders protecting the Centauri ship as it flies into the mothership. The raider support ships are quickly dispatched by a combination of Alpha Wing, Delta Wing, and the station’s own defenses, but it’s enough of a distraction for the mothership to open a gate and escape with Kiro, The Eye, and Kiro’s ship.
We quickly learn that Kiro was in on the whole thing. The intent was for the raiders to “kidnap” him and steal The Eye and then back him up on his coup attempt. The raiders, however, double cross him, as they have no interest in getting involved in politics, they just want lots of money. They intend to ransom both Kiro and The Eye to the Centauri government.
However, a ship that looks like a giant spider appears out of nowhere and destroys the ship.
Mollari is forlorn, as the loss of The Eye is likely to end his career. So he’s rather shocked when Morden shows up with a (slightly beaten-up) box containing The Eye and presents it to him. Mollari wishes to thank him, but Morden buggers off before the ambassador can even buy him a drink. However, Morden assures him that he’ll be in touch…
Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair learns from Garibaldi’s investigation that the Minbari were the first to sign onto the Babylon Project, but that they had a say in who commanded the station. Sinclair was their only choice, and wouldn’t participate unless Sinclair got the job. In light of what happened at the Battle of the Line, this just raises more questions for both Sinclair and the viewer…
Ivanova is God. Ivanova struggles to wake up every morning, because—she explains to Sinclair—she has a hard time waking up when it’s dark. Sinclair points out that it’s always dark in space, to which Ivanova agrees in the most Russian manner possible….
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn last had that triangle on her head when serving on the Grey Council and interrogating Sinclair at the Battle of the Line. It’s not (yet) clear why it appeared in front of Morden.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… According to Kiro, the emperor hasn’t been seen in public in a year, and the prime minister is pretty much acting without any guidance from the monarch. The people are losing faith in the government, which is why Kiro thinks a coup is a good idea…
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. At one point, G’Kar and Mollari are both waiting for a tube. They’re both standing on either side of a human, who very quickly regrets being between the two of them, as they trade insults. It gets so bad that the tube comes, the beleaguered human gets on, and G’Kar and Mollari are too busy insulting each other to notice. Once they realize they’ve missed the tube, they each stomp off in different directions.
The Shadowy Vorlons. We get our first look at the Shadows, who are only indirectly identified as such, as Ladira’s prophecy regarding Kiro—told to him when he was a small child—was that he would be killed by Shadows. Morden is their emissary, and both Kosh and Delenn want nothing to do with him.
Looking ahead. The relationship Morden forms with Mollari in this episode will be a very important one moving forward.
In addition, Ladira sees the station being destroyed. Ladira’s prophecy—which we only hear in this episode—will be seen in “Babylon Squared” and again in “War Without End, Part I,” which sees the station destroyed during a major conflagration. In the end, the station will, rather anticlimactically, be destroyed deliberately after being decommissioned and evacuated in “Sleeping in Light.”
Welcome aboard. Gerritt Graham plays Kiro, Fredi Olster plays Ladira, and Whip Hubley plays the head raider. We get recurring regular Ardwight Chamberlain back from “Believers” as the voice of Kosh; he’ll return in “Grail.” Robert Silver makes the first of two appearances as Reno; he’ll be back in “Hunter, Prey” next season.
We get two new recurring regulars, who have pretty low-key introductions. Joshua Cox debuts the role of Corwin (identified here only as “Dome Tech #1,” he won’t be named until season three); he’ll be back in “Legacies.” And the biggie is Ed Wasser, debuting the role of Morden. Wasser previously played a CnC officer in “The Gathering,” and he’s only listed as a minor guest star deep in the closing credits. He won’t be promoted to top-of-Act-1 guest listing until “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” in season two. We’ll see him next in “Chrysalis” at the end of the season.
Trivial matters. The title of this episode is also the general title for the season. The original working title for the episode was “Raiding Party.”
B5 cut off the raiders’ supply of heavy weapons in “Midnight on the Firing Line.”
When Ivanova awakens at the top of the episode, the computer gives the date as Wednesday August 3, 2258. However, the 3rd of August in 2258 will be a Tuesday…
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“We create the future—with our words, our deeds, and with our beliefs. This is a possible future, Commander, and it is my hope that you may yet avoid it.”
—Ladira giving Sinclair (and the producers) an out for her vision of the station being destroyed.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I want it all back the way it was!” This is an episode that closes out one plotline—the raiders who’ve been a problem for the entire thirteen episodes of the season so far—and sets up a ton more. Well, okay, maybe not a ton, but a few at the very least.
It also continues a plotline that has been hanging way longer than it should have. Seriously, Sinclair should’ve gone to Garibaldi with his problem pretty much the nanosecond after Christopher Neame’s brain-damaged Knight was taken away in handcuffs back in “And the Sky Full of Stars,” not five episodes later. (Following production order doesn’t help, as this was produced a full ten episodes after “And the Sky…”) The lack of urgency on Sinclair’s part is just weird. It’s the sort of thing you expect from television, especially of the era, but it’s something that particularly stands out in a rewatch. (Though I do recall asking the same “what took him so damn long???” question thirty years ago, too…)
We also find out how the raiders have been so awesome, and we get more hints as to the state of Centauri politics. There’ve been hints about the latter up until this point, the biggest being Mollari’s lament in “The Gathering” about how far the Republic had fallen, but also in “Midnight on the Firing Line” when it was clear that the Centauri didn’t have the wherewithal to defend a colony that had been invaded. In Gerritt Graham’s Kiro, we see the discontent amongst the aristocracy. (And also the arrogant stupidity, as it probably never occurred to Kiro that the raiders would double cross him, even though that was a blindingly obvious outcome.)
And we get the danger of overplotting your future when you’re producing a TV show, as Straczynski had to keep rejiggering the notion of the station being blown up, to the point where it was abandoned, but still kept it anyhow, sort of. More on that when we reach “Babylon Squared” and then “War Without End” and then “Sleeping in Light.”
But the episode is truly made by a fantastic performance by Ed Wasser as Morden. Wasser brings a delightfully bland emptiness to the role. It’s obvious from the moment we see him that he’s completely faking what little emotion he’s showing. He’s there to do what he’s been told, and he goes about it in a very matter-of-fact way.
The question he asks is so simple and yet so complicated. Because it’s not the easiest thing to express—as G’Kar proves with his word salad of vengeful utterances and empty platitudes. Mollari, though, speaks from the heart when he answers, and it results in a Faustian bargain that he doesn’t even realize he’s made.
Next week: “TKO.”
The line, “You can kiss my pouch!” always provokes at least a titter.
Riffable moment #1:
“What do you want?”
“To suck the marrow from their bones and grind their skulls to powder.”
“What do you want?”
“To tear down their cities, blacken their sky, sow their ground with salt. To completely, utterly erase them.”
“And then what?”
And then I’m going to Disneyworld!
Riffable moment #2:
“Babylon will fall. This place will be destroyed! Fire, death, pain.”
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
One of the items listed in an event schedule on display is a Rolling Stones farewell concert. Presumably not those Rolling Stones, but you never know.
The best part of the You can kiss my pouch” is Londo’s gesture to his sides, like how we would flip someone off.
Won’t Keith Richards, at least, still be around?
Well yes, but even he would probably have gotten bored with the Rolling Stones after the first two centuries!
I don’t know if spoiler tags are really warranted, but…
For a take on the alternate timeline(s) in which Lady Ladira’s prophecy plays out, see the recent animated film Babylon 5: The Road Home.
The original plan was that the Minbari warrior caste, having won that civil war would’ve restarted their war against Earth and it was them and not the Shadows that took the station out.
Where did you get this information? Is the original outline available online somewhere?
I liked this episode a lot, lot of things happening, working well with story arcs, acting was OK, the visual effects for the space battle were fine also, overall i had no complaints when i was watching it – making it one of the best episodes so far for me.
No mention of Kosh and Morden’s confrontation? “Leave this place. They are not for you. Go. Leave. Now!” And the shadows darken and sparks fly. And Kosh somehow has damage to his encounter suit. So either Morden is much more physically powerful than he seems… or, as it happens, Morden is never alone.
Also, Delenn is not just playing with Legos in her quarters when Morden stops by… she’s beginning to assemble the chrysalis device.
I’m always a little disappointed by the first ~30 minutes or so of this one. Most of the A-plot is kinda pedestrian, not helped at all by the indifferent performances provided by Graham and Hubley.
The introduction of Morden, though, is fantastic. Ed Wasser equals Walter Koenig’s feat earlier in the season of providing depth and intrigue to an important recurring character from his very first scene.
But what really makes the episode for me is the way the appearance of the Shadow vessel is handled, just perfectly providing several levels of “holy crap WTF?!” in just a few seconds of screen time.
A really enjoyable episode that really starts one of the main story arcs of the show. Ed Wasser is superb as Morden, he’s creepy and determined and he gets what he came for.
I know the general consensus is that the deal was made with Londo because his vision would cause the most turmoil in the galaxy. I have also believed that G’Kar’s real wish being that his people be safe, is what made what he wanted not what the Shadows can give.
I had the feeling that when I watched this that he wasn’t looking for a singular person to make a deal with, but rather looking to cause as much trouble and dissent as possible. Morden probably would have loved to double deal with both Londo and G’Kar because it would just accelerate the hostilities between the two races even more.
It was a mistake on his part to approach Delenn, but she is so preoccupied preparing for the Chrysalis that she never seems to report or follow-up on his appearance. I’m currently halfway into season 2 and only G’Kar has really pushed on anything about the Shadows.
I always thought it was chosen because it aligned with the philosophy more. I mean one of the many ways to interpret the shadows is far right US capitalism where you are completely alone and must fight for anything. Vorl8ns would be extreme Russian communism where everything is frozen and stagnant. Wanting simply to keep the homeworld safe, not expand grow, does not align with the shadow philosophy.
On this episode, loved it. Thought the battle scenes were amazing, the characters fun, and the acting solid.
The fun thing about rewatches is that one starts to ponder questions that one hasn’t previously considered, like: what would have happened if Morden had turned up a little earlier, with a G’Quan Eth, instead of the Eye?
That said, on this watch I tripped on why Morden wouldn’t have been instructed to avoid Delenn entirely. Or, in the alternative, why her reaction was not a give-away that she recognized who Morden was working for, which seems a bit at odds with some future plots that turn on trying to avoid giving away who knows what.
He didn’t know she was in the Grey Council. An ordinary Minbari ambassador (which is what Delenn wants everyone to think she is) would have no particular knowledge of the Vorlon-Shadow war 1000 years ago, or be alerted against a polite fellow asking innocuous questions. And actually even if she did, just because the Minbari were Team Vorlon back then doesn’t mean they would all be now.
Seeing the status of the grey council now, certain memebers wouldn’t mind joining the shadows if it was a chance to get revenge on the humans.
I’m sure the Shadows would be interested to test whether the Minbari could be swayed. I just think they could have been a bit more cautious in their approach.
On the other hand, if Delenn didn’t know, there wouldn’t be anyone who could eventually explain to Sheridan et al what was going on. So I guess from a narrative perspective, it’s a necessary compromise.
The space fight is neat but like such scenes it makes no sense. Do we know if the SFX people were just off doing their own thing again?
I’m surprised we actually saw the Shadow ship considering how long it will be until anyone survives meeting one. Might have been better just to show their purple beam weapon?
Definitely not! Rule of cool combined with sudden shock — the Shadow ship’s appearance is perfect just as it is, IMHO. (Even the fact that you can barely make it out — it leaves you wanting to see it again…)
Good point. It loses effect when the viewer knows exactly what they’re looking at.
There’s a longstanding joke that B5 is a show about people having important conversations in elevators. To this point, that really hasn’t been the case. Talia and Garibaldi had a couple of unimportant conversations in an elevator, and she and Sinclair had a fairly important conversation in a train (in “Mind War” IRRC). We finally have one here, though it may not look like it without hindsight.
Ivanova has a Russian eagle painted on both her helmet and her Star Fury. It’s a nice character touch and makes the world seem lived in, but I don’t think anybody else has anything similar in the entire run of the show.
It’s been said before, but Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas have amazing chemistry. Whether it’s humor or something serious, every scene with them playing off each other crackles.
Ed Wasser is great as Morden, but he probably could have done a pretty good job as the negotiator/hatchet-man last week. He’d have carried it off better than Snyder did.
IIRC at some point Garibaldi had Daffy Duck on his Starfury.
Incorrect, there are a number of Starfury customizations that we’ll see over the course of the series. There’s one particularly artistic one that stood out that JMS even had a name for, I think it was of a woman… though what the name of that Starfury was escapes me.
“(Why he waited so long to look into it is left as an exercise for the viewer.)”
He said he’d been looking into it on his own, but had exhausted his leads and was turning to Garibaldi. I guess he didn’t want to bring a friend in on pursuing potentially risky questions until he ran out of other options.
This is an episode that has more impact in retrospect than in a first-time view when you don’t know what it’s setting up. Morden’s debut is effective in a low-key way, and there are a number of portents, to be sure. But the raider storyline hasn’t been interesting at all, and the actor playing the lead raider is down to this show’s usual low standards for guest casting. And basing so much of the story on the premise of psychic precognition as a concrete reality is corny as hell, especially with Ladira chewing the scenery and fainting melodramatically from her vision.
My favorite part was the poor guy stuck in between Londo and G’Kar at the elevator. Kudos to the actor playing that wordless role (I’m guessing it was Garry Kluger, who was billed as “Man,” but it’s hard to be sure).
She then goes on to say at the end that the future is always changing and she sure hopes Sinclair can avoid it. Which makes her pretty useless as a prophet; I too can predict what might happen. If it doesn’t, then it was just a “possible” future and you avoided it, congratulations.
Also: On a rewatch, the show wasn’t careful at all about characters having sensitive conversations in private. Londo and Reno do the handoff in a public bar instead of his quarters, and Londo openly discusses how the Centauri Republic will just say they found it back home. I sure hope the bartender doesn’t tell anybody!
Come to think of it, I understand why Reno wanted the eye to pass through the station, but I’m not sure why the Centauri Government did. Just do the hand-off in deep space somewhere and avoid going through Babylon 5 customs, prying eyes/ears, theft, etc. The usage of Babylon 5 as a setting wasn’t well-justified in this case, IMO.
This continues to be a problem. The number of times in season 2 that Sheridan et al have critical and borderline treasonous conversations in his office, which doesn’t have a door, is quite remarkable. I mean yes it’s probably relatively hard for just anyone to get onto the level his office is even on, but you know who could? People with clearance to be there, like the people he was plotting against. (Occasionally they remember and have meetings in his quarters or random dark pipe-filled station corners, but only occasionally.)
We’ll get to those future episodes when we get there, but I came to this rewatch late and noticed in the pilot they also openly talked about the active criminal investigation on transport tubes and the like. I thought it was early installment weirdness, but it appears to just be part of the DNA of the show. I’d be curious to know just why that’s the case; they have a set for Londo’s quarters, they used it this very episode. But they intentionally decided to use the bar set instead and even have a few extras in the background– absent them, maybe I could tell myself this is a private bar in the back of the Centauri embassy or something. I get that some production things are just cost compromises, but this seems like they actively spent more money to make the episode a tiny bit worse.
Also, geez, I didn’t realize Sinclair/Sheridan’s office outright lacks a door. Pretty big security oversight, since they sometimes get transmissions from Earth that are classified. Not everybody who has clearance to be in the area has clearance or the need to know that the captain does.
Sometimes they get away with the open door by showing security officers at it or around the corner because they respond pretty quickly. and you can assume they are loyal to Garibaldi.but than there’s the problem of certain security officers being moles and the Nightwatch.
I had forgotten how dull most of this episode was, and how easily the various characters answered Morden’s question – I remembered all that as being the episode’s primary focus, and it really wasn’t. It certainly is still the most interesting part, though.
For as good as Jurasik and Katsulas usually are, the argument in front of the elevator is dumb and far too cutsey with its ending of both Londo and G’Kar saying the exact same thing in exasperation at the exact same time. This is a scene meant to convey how much they hate each other, and it’s played as a vadueville sketch?
Something not the episode’s fault that distracted me: the subtitles on the complete series blu-ray set misidentify Londo as “Vir” (who is not even in this episode) repeatedly.
“This is a scene meant to convey how much they hate each other, and it’s played as a vadueville sketch?”
That’s why it works. We’ve already seen their hatred established more seriously. Doing it this way re-establishes it but takes a fresh approach to it.
This episode would have been solid if it only put the capstone on the whole Raider issue. But it introduces so much more.
The big one is Morden and the Shadows. That alone adds another massive layer of intrigue to the series that was, up to this point, missing. And we learn some important things about them here, in terms of who already knows about them: the Minbari and the Vorlons.
I find it interesting that Delenn is already working on the device in her quarters. I had misremembered that she didn’t start that until after the fateful meeting with Morden. But she is already working on it at this point, which matches up with the hints in “Soul Hunter” that she was already intent on fulfilling that aspect of Minbari religious prophecy.
Speaking of prophecy, Ladira’s vision would have originally been much more on point. I thought the revisionism that came with the changes at the end of the first season worked well enough.
Fun fact: Straczynski later uses “Signs and Portents” as a Sheridan line (season 3’s “Shadow Dancing”).
While the Raiders never quite come together as a serious threat, I do give the episode serious props for the well executed battle strategy – the way Sinclair and Ivanova pin the Raiders down, stripping them of their fighter defenses. I always enjoy B5’s military tactics.
But the real star here is Mr. Morden. I didn’t even realize Ed Wasser was the CnC tech until I finally saw “The Gathering” special edition on VHS, years later. Kudos to Stracynski and the casting director for realizing he could play someone that unique. Every single interaction he has is a delight to watch.
And the way he brings out the worst in Londo?
“MORDEN: What do you want?”
“LONDO: I want it all back. The way that it was“.
Such a simple question, and such a damning loaded answer. It says so much about people’s fears of being left behind, becoming museum trinkets as he once put it.
It also speaks volumes to the way so many people support right-wing movements nowadays. People who were once at the top of the food chain and now feel underrepresented. People so consumed by resentment that they can’t even see their actions have consequences beyond their small inner lives. Back then, I never would have figured for the casino buffoon to become what he became. All because of that one scene (brilliantly directed by Janet Greek).
Personally, I don’t see Sinclair as being slow to respond. He’s always been calm and methodical on how he approaches problems. As @Christopher pointed out, he exhausted other venues before going to him. Let’s not forget there was also the run-in with the Minbari assassin and the “Hole in your mind” comment a year before. Now, if Sheridan had been this slow to respond, I would see the problem.
As for Ladira’s prophecy, Lord Kiro points out she’s been wrong before (even if her Kiro prophecy is dead accurate). I don’t think there’s any indication that the station was ever meant or destined to be tragically blown up by enemy forces in the normal timeline. For one, it would mean the end of the show. It reminds me a bit of Bashir/O’Brien’s Alamo allusions on the later seasons of DS9. A bit of misidirection – the Alamo allusons implying that DS9 would end with the station overrun by Dominion forces and all of them dead.
Yes. I was thinking that Londo is what some populist politicians in the US would be if they were as smart as they think they are.
And more self-aware, especially in the later seasons when Londo realizes just what he’s done.
So the vision in this episode was originally meant to align with that concept. And when watching “Babylon Squared”, one can see how the pieces fit that original intent as well. All of those plans changed, of course, after the first season.
Without going into the details, that all obviously fell through the minute the O’Hare situation came up.
It’s never quite clear to me when JMS decided to fully abandon the original outline. Because by all accounts, the O’Hare situation came up somewhere in the middle of the first season. And yet, the majority of the first season, if not all of it, aligns more with the original outline than how things ultimately panned out. This episode, for instance, but also “Babylon Squared”. I don’t think the eventual revision that led to “WWE” came into play until much later, possibly as late as his planning stages for the third season.
That all said, I actually really like the way the final version played out. You can see the seams, but it works for me.
He never “abandoned” the original outline; he revised it as needed to fit changing circumstances, multiple times over the run of the series. Ideas that were part of the original plan got reworked and applied in different ways with different characters. He had a set of key story points he intended to include, but he was always aware of the need to be flexible about how he got to them.
Well, yes, of course. Perhaps a poor choice of words. It might have been better to say that it’s not entirely clear when he chose to revise that part of the story.
I don’t see why it had to fall through, though.
You may already be aware of that original plan, but it wasn’t clear from your comment, so just wanted to clarify just in case.
Indeed. Hence the ceremony which doubles as a marriage ceremony in The Parliament of Dreams, which originally was, well, a marriage ceremony. Consent? The Minbari have never been too big on that…
Love to see B5 staying in the conversation. First series with episodes that build on each other rather than all 1-off’s. Changed the industry forever. We’re all still lobbying Warners to do a proper remake, with such an enormous built in fan base it’s a home run. Thank you for writing this!
Babylon 5 having a serialised structure is what makes a remake pointless. You can always remake “MacGyver” or whatever and make new individual episodes, but why tell the Babylon 5 story all over again?
The same reason to tell any story over again — to find a fresh way of doing it. Of course a remake isn’t pointless; JMS is already working on one, so clearly he has an idea for how to do it.
After all, the series we got diverged heavily from JMS’s original plan due to the vagaries of cast changes, studio pressure, and the whole cancellation/renewal mess, so it’s something of a hodgepodge. So of course there’s a different way to tell its basic story, any number of possible ways. And JMS is decades older and has no doubt had plenty of new ideas since then, so it wouldn’t be “telling it all over again,” it would be approaching the basic premise in a new way, adding things to it that weren’t there before. That’s why you remake anything.
And it’s absurd to say that being serialized makes something impossible to remake. Dark Shadows was a soap opera, and it got a remake series, albeit a short-lived one. Space Battleship Yamato was serialized, and it got a remake that was better than the original (at least in the first season) — starting out as a near-verbatim retelling with much better animation, but diverging more and more as it went and adding new characters and new dimensions to the story.
It is not the first series with episodes that build on each other. Not even close.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Indeed not, but it was perhaps the first to have them build toward specific long-term targets and endpoints planned out in advance, a “novel for television” approach, rather than developing continuity open-endedly.
As with most things in television history, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were ahead of their time. The fourth and fifth seasons of I Love Lucy are continuous stories about the gang going to Hollywood and then Europe. There’s no grand dramatic arc with a climactic episode, but episodes do build off each other and there’s a clear order in which they should be watched.
I have to correct myself, because I just mentioned a show in an above comment that proves that B5 was not the first show to have season arcs planned out in advance. The 1974-9 anime Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers) had seasons that were full serialized arcs, and that’s long been a common pattern in Japanese TV shows, though I think it’s more widespread in the 21st century than it was in the 20th (at least where their live-action superhero series like Ultraman and Kamen Rider are concerned). So it may have been a novel approach in American TV, but it wasn’t unprecedented. Also, SBY’s season arcs were planned out individually, rather than there being a whole multi-year plan. I think B5 was a pioneer in that regard.
And, of course, Crusade was not vastly different in premise from Yamato.
(They even had their own Wave Motion Gun!)
The thing I found interesting rewatching this episode is how there seems to be a subtle telepathic influence on everyone Morden questions. They all start off unwilling to answer or participate, but some switch seems to be thrown (G’kar turns back as he’s walking through the door, Londo just before entering the turbolift) that starts them talking, and each time Morden asks again, the more extreme and emotional their answers become.
I wonder if this is what set off Delenn’s forehead triangle as well.
Everyone answers Morden honestly, even if they don’t want to or seem to have no reason to. In Morden veritas.
Delenn doesn’t answer. Only Londo and G’Kar do and each has said more or less similar things to others before. I don’t think there is any kind of compulsion at work. They’re just both under some stress and Morden gives them an opportunity to vent.
Yeah, it’s not like either ambassador has made any secret of their agendas. It’s not that they were reluctant to reveal the truth, just that it seemed like a pointless and silly conversation to them. But asking the question repeatedly tempted them to answer, and they gave into the temptation, because the desire to express their resentments and yearnings is never far below the surface. It’s because they want these things so strongly that they answered the question.
Which was probably the point. The Shadows wanted someone they could easily manipulate and use, someone so blinded by ambition and bitterness that he’d do anything if they offered him what he wanted. So they didn’t press or manipulate, they just had their agent ask a simple question with no pressure, and see who was driven enough to grab the bait. G’Kar almost qualified, but ultimately his wish for his own people’s safety was stronger, which meant there were lines he wouldn’t cross.
A friend is watching the show for the first time and without the context of the later seasons this episode really isn’t a standout. He liked it, but didn’t see it as being important. Morden didn’t make much of an impression on him. Just another one off character in a side plot.
He knows about this rewatch but he’s not reading it to avoid spoilers.
That’s odd. I showed the first season to a friend a few years after, and this episode, Morden, and the WTF moment of the Shadow ship screamed at him that this was a big plot point.
Delenn’s and Kosh’s reactions, and the off-hand mention that Kosh’s encounter suit was mysteriously damaged, are the biggest hints that this is more than just a one-off. And the fact that the episode share the season title, although the season titles weren’t evident on broadcast. But, yes, it is a slow reveal. The Shadow vessel that takes out the raider ship is obviously powerful, but on a cold watch without context it doesn’t say much other than that there is somebody out there that the Minbari and Vorlons know about and are concerned about.
I didn’t really care all that much about the raider plot. Perhaps I just haven’t been paying close enough attention but I had no idea these people were supposed to have been a big part of the last dozen episodes. They just seemed like generic space pirates to me. Their leader certainly didn’t come off as a serious threat. Cool looking ship though. As for the whole Morden thing, I take it he’s a harbinger of these shadows, whatever they are (Kosh obviously knows) and I’m interested in seeing where this goes, though the ending makes Mollari look like more of an idiot than I’d taken him to be thus far.
It’s a problem kind of inherent in using “raiders” or “pirates” or whatever as a menace. They don’t really register because they don’t have anybody representing them and don’t have a sympathetic motivation. I didn’t really realize we were meant to understand that all the raider attacks were the same group until the end of this episode, which seems to indicate an end to the threat. Come to think of it, Sinclair and crew seem to only know this because the script says so; it’s not like the raiders are issuing unique callsigns and broadcasting their identities. For all they know, there’s five different groups of raiders engaged in piracy and knocking out one group doesn’t really change anything. Buuuuuuuuuuuuut raiders are a lame threat and this show has places to go, so let’s just forget about the whole thing.
Mollari is not as self-aware as he needs to be. Not yet, anyway.
Mollari, G’kar, and Vir have great arcs through the series.
“I had no idea these people were supposed to have been a big part of the last dozen episodes.”
They weren’t, really. They only really figured in “Midnight on the Firing Line” and “Believers” before this.
But that’s enough to make them the most-frequently recurring threat in the first half of the season.
Still, more could’ve been done to establish them as a notable group, instead of just nameless, faceless, forgettable “raiders.” The lack of worldbuilding made it easy to overlook them as an organized threat, as opposed to just some random crooks here and there.
The worldbuilding is just starting to get going, as you might expect from the episode title. The REAL recurring threat starts now.
Of course, but it’s still kind of lazy to leave the raiders so undeveloped because of it. There’s no sense in saying “This part of the work can be done slapdash because it’s not as important as others.” Every part of the work should be made as good as it can be. If the raiders were meant to be the red-herring bad guys before the real bad guys showed up, that’s all the more reason to make them seem like they actually count for something — or at least to make them interesting enough to engage the audience so they’ll stick around until the good stuff.
Too many series lose viewers because they think it’s okay to save the good stuff for later installments, so the opening installments aren’t interesting enough to hold an audience. It’s always a good idea to make the beginning of your story as strong as it can be, since you can’t expect the audience to stick around for the later stuff if they’re bored by the early stuff.
Probably a coincidence. But the Shadow ships and the neogi Deathspiders from Spelljammer bear a passing resemblance.
https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/Deathspider
I see very little resemblance beyond both being vaguely spiderlike. That’s not coincidence, it’s just drawing on the same conceptual antecedents. Evil spaceships designed to look like spiders or insects are a pretty common thing in fiction, because people find such things scary. (Though there have been good-guy insect-themed ships, like Red Dwarf‘s Starbug and the Firefly-class Serenity. But they don’t have the spindly leg/antenna/pincery bits used in the scarier designs.)
And the Fieseler Storch! Oh wait you said fictional. (They called it a stork, but to me that undercarriage always looked terribly arachnoid, even if it didn’t have eight wheels…)
I think the Shadow vessels look more like sea urchins than spiders anyway.
This didn’t appear to be a big episode when it first aired, but the introduction of Morden and the Shadows was huge. I like the way things sneak up on you in B5.
I have read that Joshua Cox started as an extra, but was so dedicated to the show that they created the role of LT Corwin for him.
This didn’t appear to be a big episode
It’s hard for me to remember how I felt when I first saw this episode, but I recall feeling the opposite. The title of the episode, Morden pinky swearing that he’ll find Londo again, the confrontation with Kosh, Delenn’s “They’re here” are all telegraphing pretty hard that this guy is important/bad news. Coupled with his early remark about being out in deep space for a while, they come pretty close to outright telling us, “Those spider ship guys are a major threat, you’ll be seeing more of them.” And sure enough…
The brief exposition dump about the Raider fighters comes across as awkward in its placement. It might have been better to have had it shortly after the Raider mothership launched its fighters.
Ladira’s vision of the destruction of Babylon 5 sort of brings to mind the story of 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!” *sad trombone motif*
Thinking about the things to come, and how the vorlon and the new enemy are set up here as clearly knowing each other and not liking each other, I realized something. The whole reason for the containment suit to hide so people will not recoginze them. But Morden clearly recognizes Kosh, but is surprised to see him there. you would think, what with them coming back, they would realize their old enemy had a ambassador on the station, since clearly Morden set up meetings to meet all of the ambassadors, including Delenn, so clearly Morden would look at a list of ambassadors and see the word Vorlon there. Is the Vorlon their real name for their species or another disguise to keep themselves hidden?
Since Morden had been arranging to see the other ambassadors, maybe he’d noted that Kosh was away from the station? He might not have known when he’d be back.
My reading of the first scene with Kosh and Morden is that the latter was concerned by the former’s appearance in that corridor, at that moment, and simply wished to avoid a confrontation. Perhaps Morden scheduled his meetings during a period when Kosh’s public schedule indicated he would be off-station? It would make sense that Morden would seek to complete all his meetings before any direct contact with Kosh, knowing the latter would attempt to interfere.
No, I think he was trying to avoid Kosh altogether, period. In the second scene, Morden seemed to find Kosh’s appearance unexpected; he was heading somewhere when Kosh emerged from the lift right in front of him, so he couldn’t avoid a confrontation. My impression was that Kosh tracked him down and cornered him.
That was the episode that won me over to this series back then. For the first time there were, well, signs and portents that something bigger and more significant was going on than the petty conflicts on Babylon 5, more significant even than the mystery of Sinclair’s role in the Minbari War. I’m surprised that Keith didn’t mention one of the key scenes in this episode: The confrontation between Kosh and Morden. It shows us that Kosh and Morden know each other and that Morden is as powerful as Kosh (more precisely: the shadows that accompany Morden, but we don’t know that at this point). I remember how creepy I thought the casual reference to Kosh’s countersuit being damaged when I first watched this episode.
Who does Kosh mean when he tells Morden: “Leave this place. They are not for you”? Who are “they”? All the inhabitants of B5? Probably not, because since Morden has already spoken to the three ambassadors, this request would come too late. I think “they” are the humans. There’s no other way to understand why Morden talks to the representatives of the Minbari, Narn and Centauri, but not to any representatives of Earth. So I think Morden was probably on his way to Sinclair to ask him the “What do you want?” question when Kosh intercepted him and fended him off. Which is a sign that humans have a special role to play in things to come.