“Strange Relations”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by John C. Flinn III
Season 5, Episode 6
Production episode 507
Original air date: February 25, 1998
It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn speaks to Lochley on the subject of her past relationship with Sheridan. Specifics are not mentioned, but Lochley asks Delenn to keep this revelation secret, to which she agrees. Garibaldi, however, overhears the conversation.
Allan informs Mollari that the ship that is taking him to Centauri Prime is coming through the jumpgate. Allan is surprised at how down-in-the-mouth Mollari is about his impending emperor-hood. One of the erstwhile ambassador’s regrets is that he’ll probably never return to B5, except maybe for an official function or two.
Unfortunately, there’s an accident in the docking port involving a ship that doesn’t give control to CnC and crashing into the dock wall. Ships are stuck waiting outside the station until repairs are made, including the Centauri ship and a Psi Corps vessel.
Franklin walks in on Alexander purloining medical supplies for the telepath colony. It’s all stuff Franklin can spare, and so he lets her take it on the condition that next time she ask first. Franklin is then approached by Delenn and G’Kar to research and collate medical information on all the IA species, which Franklin jumps at the chance to do.
Alexander takes the supplies to a grateful Byron. When she urges Byron himself to take some of the vitamins, and also get some rest, he tries and fails to distract her with a stupid parable. Then all the telepaths get squirrelly, because they sense the presence of Psi Corps bloodhounds.
A guard comes into the security office looking for Allan, but only finds Garibaldi, who is also waiting for Allan. Reluctantly, the guard gives Garibaldi the message: Bester is on board.
Garibaldi immediately storms to the captain’s office to find Lochley and Bester having a pleasant conversation over tea. Before Garibaldi can beat the shit out of Bester, Lochley has him arrested.
Sheridan is not thrilled at Bester’s arrival nor at Garibaldi’s being detained, but Lochley stands by her actions. Psi Corps has every right to be here, by dint of the very sovereignty the IA promised all its member worlds. Sheridan reluctantly agrees but also makes it clear that Byron’s gaggle has been granted asylum, and instructs Lochley not to let Bester take them.
The Centauri ship is on a schedule and can’t wait for the dock to be fixed to pick up Mollari. Corwin says he’ll pass on their regrets to the future emperor.
Then, as soon as the Centauri ship sends a signal to the jumpgate, it explodes.
Allan’s people investigate, and discover that the bomb was tied to the navigation system—specifically to go off when the ship was heading back to Centauri Prime. This indicates that the target of whoever planted it was someone who was bound for Centauri Prime on that ship from B5. The most obvious target would be Mollari.
Alexander manages to block Bester and his bloodhounds (totally the name of my next band) physically, telepathically, and telekinetically. Bester suspects that she can’t do that forever or against a larger group of people, but he retreats for the time being. Alexander then urges Byron to scatter his people about the station.
Lochley confronts Garibaldi in detention. She explains why she was so chummy with Bester: he stopped a rogue telepath who was murdering people on a base she commanded. She doesn’t trust him or Psi Corps, either, but she is grateful to him and, again, he has a right to be there.
Garibaldi finally admits that he is suspicious of her because he doesn’t know why Sheridan chose her, especially since she seemed to be on the other side of the civil war. Lochley finally explains it while the cameras are rolling: she and Sheridan were married for about seven-and-a-half seconds after EarthForce training. They split amicably. Sheridan wanted the symbol of someone on the other side of the civil war, but also wanted someone he could trust.
Garibaldi then asks to be let out, and Lochley refuses for the moment. Then Allan contacts her, saying Bester has started rounding up the telepaths.
Alexander is frustrated by the telepaths being rounded up, while Lochley is frustrated by Bester doing everything by the book and therefore giving her no in to keep the telepaths on the station.
Byron insists on allowing himself to be captured, as he doesn’t want to abandon his people, even though Alexander offers to protect him.
Franklin informs Lochley of the new task the IA wants him to perform, which means he’ll need to reduce his time in medlab. Lochley approves, saying Hobbs can pick up the slack. His mention of quarantine procedures gives the captain an idea. She informs Bester, pseudo-reluctantly, that due to quarantine regulations, the telepaths need to stay on B5 for another 60 days. After that, Bester can have them. Bester is not at all happy about this, but accedes, provided Lochley puts this all in writing.
Delenn and G’Kar discuss the assassination attempt on Mollari, and they agree that Mollari will need a bodyguard on Centauri Prime—someone they can trust. To G’Kar’s horror, Delenn suggests G’Kar himself be that bodyguard. To his greater horror, he realizes that he’s the right person for the job. To Mollari’s even greater horror, he agrees to it, agreeing that the symbolism is entertaining. They head off to another transport—this one presumably bomb-free—and argue over the seating arrangements.
Corwin commends Lochley on her handling of the telepaths. Belatedly, Lochley remembers that she hasn’t freed Garibaldi yet…
Alexander joins the telepaths in a singalong that isn’t at all creepy and cult-like, taking care to remove her Psi Corps badge before doing so.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan very obviously really really hates that he can’t just kick Bester off the station.
Never work with your ex. Lochley actually follows the rules and is pretty much the only grownup in the story.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi gets thrown in jail for being a doofus. And deserves it.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn comes up with the hilariously brilliant idea of G’Kar being Mollari’s bodyguard, which is completely hilariously brilliant.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari’s not even emperor yet, and he’s already had an assassination attempt. You have to admire the efficiency.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. After spending pretty much his entire time on the station wanting Mollari dead, G’Kar is now tasked with keeping him alive. Like I said, hilariously brilliant.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron’s telepaths are fugitives from Earth, which means Earth gets to arrest them by the terms of their membership in the IA. Sheridan probably should’ve checked to make sure they weren’t fugitives before granting them asylum…
Looking ahead. Bester hints at Byron’s rather nasty past, which will be revealed before too long.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Sheridan and Lochley were married. They split up when they realized that they both wanted to be in control too much.
Welcome aboard. It’s recurring regular theatre! Back from “Rising Star” is Walter Koenig as Bester; he’ll return in “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Back from “A View from the Gallery” are Robin Atkin Downes as Byron and Joshua Cox as Corwin. Down will return next time in “Secrets of the Soul,” while Cox will be back in “Day of the Dead.”
Trivial matters. The details of what Bester did to Garibaldi were spelled out in “The Face of the Enemy.”
Though they are not seen, both Connoly, the head of the dockworkers union whom we saw in “By Any Means Necessary,” and Hobbs, the deputy chief medical officer who ran medlab while Franklin was on walkabout, whom we saw in “Interludes and Examinations” and “Walkabout,” are mentioned as still doing their jobs.
J. Michael Straczynski wrote the song the telepaths sing at the end.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I have an obligation to be courteous.”
“And I have an obligation to shove his face through a bulkhead.”
“Your hobbies are your concern, Mr. Garibaldi.”
—Lochley and Garibaldi discussing Bester.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I’m caught in a web of my own good intentions.” This should be a much better episode than it is, and while two of the reasons why it isn’t are ones I’ve mentioned before since we started in on season five—the severe limitations of Robin Atkin Downes and Tracy Scoggins—they’re far from the only ones.
Let’s start with this: two entire ships are blown to pieces and the only manner in which either of these are discussed are (a) how it affects the traffic on the station because of the dock damage, and (b) what it means for Mollari’s safety going forward. The fact that two shipsful of people are dead never once is even mentioned. The deaths of dozens of people is an abstraction at best, and it’s revolting.
Next is the out-of-left-field revelation that Lochley and Sheridan were married. First off, there was no kind of indication or hint previously, even in scenes with just the two of them. Secondly, Sheridan supposedly chose Lochley because she’s a symbol of unity, a person on Clark’s side of the civil war working with Sheridan. Except she’s moved heaven and earth to keep the fact that she was on Clark’s side a secret for the past several episodes (and who can blame her, as Clark was a fucking war criminal), so not really that effective a symbol now, is it?
The moment where the fifth season lost me completely the first time I watched the show twenty-six years ago was the end of this episode, when Alexander joins the cringey singalong. I swear, I remembered them actually singing “Kumbaya,” which they obviously didn’t sing, but it was in the same vein and was just awful. Given what eventually happened with these telepaths, having them come across as creepy kinda works, but the execution of the scene was, well, not great.
Ditto the latest in a series of Lochley-Garibaldi dialogues that just fall flat thanks to Scoggins’ inability to convey human emotion.
As usual, it’s left to Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik to provide the episode’s only watchable moments, though even their scenes are muted and not all that, especially since they’re overshadowed by the total lack of concern for the shipful of people who died on the Centauri transport. Even Walter Koenig’s magnificently slimy Bester can’t salvage this.
Next week: “Secrets of the Soul.”
This one always frustrates the hell out of me.
I really don’t think the jurisdiction questions are handled well at all. Just where are the lines drawn? I would think that if Byron and his people explicitly asked for asylum (was that word ever actually used?) from the IA, then it would be similar to when G’Kar requested asylum in the second season. Yes, he was a fugitive from the Centauri perspective, but he was protected as long as he was on B5. Surely there was a similar way to set things up to prevent Bester from taking the colony into custody? It feels like there are a lot of options on the table that Sheridan just ignores because they would be politically inconvenient.
(I mean, if it has to come from a member world vs. the IA itself, surely Delenn could ask the Grey Council to sponsor them? It’s not like they are likely to deny her such a request.)
It’s possible I’m just not getting (or fully accepting) the scenario that JMS has set up here. Is this supposed to be a subtle hint that Byron chose to be on B5 (vs. literally anywhere else in the IA) because it would lead to just such a confrontation, and his martyr complex desires exactly this sort of scenario?
Speaking of Byron, I have to hand it to RAD in this episode. I wouldn’t think that it would be possible to have exactly one expression during every single scene he’s in, but he manages to pull it off. I don’t think he actually emoted once the entire episode. And to be clear, I was actually hoping my memory was wrong and that I could give him some credit this time around. But alas. (Oh, and the telepath scenes and Byron’s interactions with Lyta especially were supposed to come across as culty. They were intentionally based on JMS’ own experience with a cult earlier in life.)
As for the whole marriage debacle. when this episode first aired, I was waiting for someone, anyone to mention that this would technically give Sheridan a wife from each of the three Minbari castes: warrior, worker, religious. Surely that was JMS’ intention, right? But I have never seen a comment from JMS remarking that this was what he had in mind. Instead, just some vague “this was the easiest way to establish trust between them” nonsense. I mean, I can think of several different ways to accomplish the same thing without this silliness?
Meanwhile, this is a very bad look for Garibaldi. Surely, no matter how much Lochley wanted to keep it a secret, this would have been public information? I’m fairly sure that right now, I can look up this sort of information for free (or, at best, a nominal fee). This guy is supposed to be the head of IA Covert Intelligence! Surely he has access to basic information such as this. For that matter, he went through the details of Sheridan’s file previously. Surely Sheridan’s marital status came up during that search? JMS really didn’t think that one through.
But hey, Bester at least has some good scenes. I think the evolution of Franklin’s role makes sense. And there’s always the Londo and G’Kar scenes that bring a bit of value.
Downes did change his facial expression once: when he and Bester were in the room together, he had a pouty face on.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That has a lot to speak for it, considering Byron’s actions so far. He certainly does have that martyr complex (as well as a god complex. Two in one; how efficient!)
The jurisdiction question confused me as well. If Babylon 5 is now being treated as independent, and Lochley is just administering it on the IA’s behalf, why does she have to turn its residents over to Earth? Shouldn’t there at least have been some sort of extradition hearing?
Because B5 isn’t independent, it’s the temporary capital of the Interstellar Alliance, of which Earth is a member. So it’s not two separate governments, it’s more like, say, the European Union vs. one of its member nations.
Okay, but it’s not like the EU has its own little city state. In “No Compromises,” the station is said to be independent of Earth now. Either it is or it isn’t.
It’s independent of Earth, but Earth isn’t independent of it. As a member of the Alliance, Earth has the same rights as any other member world, presumably including the right to have its laws honored.
On Earth, sure. But the idea that law enforcement from one member world could show up on another member world and demand it turn over some of its residents without so much as a hearing sounds like a recipe for a doomed alliance. It was only three episodes ago that they were struggling to get everyone on board with a shared set of principles, let alone extradition agreements.
If someone commits a crime in Pennsylvania and flees to Washington, DC, the Pennsylvania police would have the right to request that the DC police arrest and extradite them. If someone commits a felony and flees across state lines, the police can follow and arrest them, at least during the immediate pursuit. It’s not turning over residents, it’s turning over fugitives who’ve fled there to authorities from the jurisdiction where they committed their crimes. When has that ever not been permitted?
And that person would have the right to an extradition hearing.
No doubt, but that’s not the point I was addressing. It’s not two sovereign nations, it’s a member of the alliance and the temporary capital of the same alliance. Presumably Earth has the same rights vis-a-vis the IA government as any other member world, however illogically those rights seem to be depicted.
Crossing state lines within the US is not the same as crossing an international border. Extradition treaties between sovereign states are complex, if they exist at all. In their absence, extra-territorial law enforcement is generally not a simple thing. From a legal perspective, there is no comprehensive international equivalent to the fresh pursuit doctrine. Some countries, including the US, have tried to advance that argument in some cases, but it is not generally recognized. Instead, the authorities of the one state would normally have to make a diplomatic request to the other state for its authorities to arrest the fugitives and turn them over.
The terms of the IA treaty might require mutual consent for direct extra-territorial enforcement against the citizens of member states, but that would be unusual and would get messy pretty quickly. But I think the explanation here is more simple. Based on Sheridan’s conversation with Lockley in No Compromises, the IA seems to have recognized Earth’s legal jurisdiction over B5, at least on a temporary basis.
Of course this does raise the question of why Sheridan thought he had any authority to grant asylum to Byron’s cult in the first place. The ISA maybe could have tried to force Earth to change its laws about telepaths in the same way that it forced Earth to recognize the independence claims of the colonies. But it didn’t. So Sheridan was just making a promise he had no right or ability to enforce, and he must have known that.
Naturally it would differ from one alliance/federation to another, but I don’t see what’s so shocking about an alliance cooperating with one of its own member states about extraditing people who committed crimes in that member’s territory, or why it would require that member state to have jurisdiction. It seems like nobody would want to join an alliance if they knew the alliance would not honor their right to enforce their laws.
The conflict comes when those laws are different. The IA has expressly recognized the sovereignty of its members. So, to take a specific example, if Earth says that telepaths have to be effectively slaves to PsiCorps (or go on sleepers), but Minbar says that slavery is illegal, the premise of the IA as it was set out at the end of S4 is that each member’s laws are effective within its own territory. That does not mean that they have to honour each other’s laws within their own territories, because that is logically impossible when those laws come into conflict. The recognition of sovereignty means that the IA specifically can’t prohibit Minbar from saying that it does not recognize the authority of the PsiCops to take custody of a fugitive telepath in Minbari territory, if that would conflict with Minbari law.
In the real world, extradition is much easier when the laws of the two countries align. But that isn’t always the case, of course. There can be, and frequently are, cases where conduct that is illegal on one country is legal (and possibly even protected under constitutional or human rights laws) in another. Where the crime was committed may factor into that analysis, but isn’t necessarily the only relevant question.
So, no, it’s not shocking and it happens regularly. But it’s also not usually as simple as a blanket permission for extraordinary rendition. It is usually subject to legal processes that are supposed to balance the competing interests of state sovereignty and mutual cooperation, while giving some consideration of the human and civil rights of the accused.
Okay, that’s fair, but my point is about defining the relationship between Earth and the IA. It’s not that B5 is controlled by Earth, it’s that Earth is a member of the IA and B5 is its temporary capital. Even if the details don’t make sense, I presume that was the intention, that Earth had rights as a member of the Alliance.
Tracy Scoggins is actually a little better in this episode than she has been. Maybe that’s because Lochley unwinds a tiny bit here. BUT Jerry Doyle still acts rings around her in the scene where she tells us about her brief marriage to Sheridan. And Doyle is, at best, a mid-range TV actor.
Corwin needs a uniform of some kind. OK, he doesn’t want to rejoin EarthForce for whatever reason, but there must be an IA uniform or a B5 uniform or something. He looks like he’s showing up for work in his civvies.
The whole uniform thing is as confusing as the jurisdictional questions. If Zach reports to Lochley, why does he wear an Army of Light uniform? Similarly, Franklin. Or anyone else who reports to Lochley. Wouldn’t that mean they are back under EarthForce commission?
I assume the Army of Light uniforms are now Interstellar Alliance uniforms. I guess Lochley’s command of an IA station is kind of like Ben Sisko’s command of a Bajoran-owned station — sort of a subcontractor deal, outside military personnel administering the station in partnership with the owners’ military.
I agree that the Army of Light uniforms have become de facto part of the IA. But it was established in the first episode of the season that the station is not legally under the IA’s direct authority, at least not yet. They intend to buy it, but that wasn’t supposed to happen for a year and nothing suggests that timeline has changed.
My guess is that the command staff who were subject to the settlement that Sheridan made when he surrendered to the new Earth government have been discharged from EarthForce. Franklin could be running the medlab as a civillian. It was never obvious why he needed a military rank anyway. Zack and Corwin are harder to explain, since they now act as if they are part of the Earth chain of command, not part of the IA. (Although in Zack’s case, maybe he just doesn’t want to give up a jacket that fits.)
Some of this ambiguity is probably intentional. It is clearly part of the story that the IA is improvising and making mistakes as it does so. It also makes sense that the new Earth government is probably a bit disorganized and uncertain of its own status as well. But I do wish that Caitlin Brown would come back as Guinevere Corey and remind them all that laws and legal professionals are things that exist.
It might simply be that season 5 didn’t have the budget for new uniforms.
Or, in light of what I just typed above, forget that simile. Since Earth is a member of the IA, I suppose an IA military station could theoretically be commanded by an officer of any member nation’s military.
Can Garibaldi be finally fired? he’s obviously completely incompetent to do his job from any possible angles.
And I still am trying to understand why a group of such extremely suspicious cult and their even more suspicious leader would be helped so much by either Sheridan or Lochley. Or even Alexander for that matter. what the hell does she see in Byron?
On the positive side, besides the ones mentioned in the post, I liked Lochley’s solution of postponing the problem by 60 days.
The ending with the singing and the candles – i will try to erase that from my memory.
The problem with Garibaldi is that he was set up as the noir PI/hot headed cop archetype, the sort of character who will do anything to solve the case even if it breaks the rules. He’s got the alcoholism, the history of messy personal relationships, the quick temper, the fondness for fedoras… However, this sort of character is generally set up as operating against authority structures. He’s defying police chief or politicians or organized crime who squash the investigation and want things covered up. When this sort of character *is* the authority he end up being volatile, untrustworthy and a serious liability.
Also, from a military perspective, he’s not currently fit for duty. He was psychically brainwashed into betraying his colleagues and friends, and then shoved straight back into a position of significant authority. He needs some serious therapy, someone competent to make sure that he’s not hiding any other psychic time bombs, then probably light duty somewhere other than B5, which keeps triggering him.
yup, exactly.
Since B5’s free streaming license on Roku and elsewhere has apparently expired, I had to buy season 5 on Prime, which is okay, because it’s nearly cancelled out by the coupon I got for my tax prep this year. Also, I get it in HD without commercials, so that’s good. Maybe it’s because it’s HD that I never noticed until now how beautiful Patricia Tallman’s hair color is. I love that kind of coppery hair that shifts with the light.
I thought this was an okay episode, and I still don’t really see what Keith’s problem is with Tracy Scoggins’s acting, which didn’t seem any worse to me than, say, Richard Biggs’s or Joshua Cox’s. I mean, it’s not like mediocre acting among human main characters is anything new in B5. But it did have some plot issues. There’s the question of asylum that CriticalMyth pointed out in the first comment, and the casual treatment of the exploded ships — not just in story terms, but the sudden cut to the Centauri transport blowing up didn’t really feel connected to what came before, so it was a moment before I realized it was meant to be a continuation of the same scene. (Was it stock footage?) Also, I’m not convinced that they couldn’t do anything about Bester. Couldn’t Garibaldi file charges against Bester for assault and kidnapping? Even if he couldn’t prove his case, at least he could file the complaint, which could’ve given the Alliance cause to arrest Bester or at least bar him from the station.
While it’s true that Sheridan’s marriage to Lochley should’ve been easier to discover in his files (or his social media history, not that JMS anticipated such things), it doesn’t bother me that they showed no sign of having a history, since it was made clear here that it was a brief, long-ago thing that they’ve both put behind them. We’ve only seen them interacting in their respective professional capacities, and it kind of makes sense that they’d want to keep things as professional as possible and act as if their past never happened.
I’m curious about something. It’s been mentioned that the telepaths other than Byron don’t talk because the show couldn’t afford more speaking parts, but here we get a group of them singing. Are the rules different for singing than for dialogue? Or was the song performed by hired singers in the studio with the extras just lip-syncing? (Voice-only work evidently pays considerably less than on-camera speaking parts, although I think that’s grossly unfair to vocal performers.)
Disclaimer: my understanding of how the various pay issues work is based solely on listening to comments on The Delta Flyers and general osmosis from living in the LA area. I don’t have any direct experience.
I believe that having background actors mouth the words combined with a short recording session from actual singers would be much cheaper than hiring singers to appear on stage. What I’m less clear on is if the background actors would be allowed to mouth the words at all, or without an adjustment to their pay. It might also be the case that the background actors would have an adjustment for only that one day that they sang, so they’d still be cheaper overall.
I did turn up the current SAG-AFTRA television rate sheet, but it’s not entirely helpful without knowing the restrictions on certain types of performer.
My impression is that actors only get paid above extra rates if they deliver scripted dialogue. If they’re muttering barely audible improv dialogue in a crowd scene, it doesn’t count, so presumably lip-syncing lyrics wouldn’t count either.
You would think a credible allegation of assault against the Alliance’s head of intelligence would be enough to get him kicked off of their station. It’s not like he’s the only guy the Psi Corps could send to Babylon 5.
I still don’t see a major problem with Tracy Scoggins. I thought she was fine, here.
As for the episode itself, I agree that Kasulas and Jurasik provide the best moments, but I also have to hand it to Walter Koenig, who ramps up Bester’s creepiness, which is no mean feat, given how intentionally creepy Bester already was (as opposed to Robin Atkin Downes’ Byron, whose creepiness is apparently unintentional). That smile he gives Garibaldi sent shivers down my spine. Honestly, after I’ve finished with this show, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at Chekov the same way again.
The rest of it didn’t really do anything for me. The revelation that Sheridan and Lochley were briefly married decades earlier doesn’t feel like it merits all the buildup it got. Admittedly, I’d already had that reveal spoiled for me, but I can’t imagine being any more shocked by it if I hadn’t known in advance, not that I think their scenes together in any way foreshadowed it. It just doesn’t feel like a very big deal. At least it’s out of the way, now.
To be fair to Lochley, if I had someone like Garibaldi grilling me every day, asking me where my loyalties are, I would probably keep my ideology close to the vest too. At this point, he’s so affected by Bester’s violation of him that he’s completely unhinged. And badgering folks over their ideology is very much up the Nightwatch’s alley. And it’s pretty rare to see any divorced couple on TV being this friendly and professional. For that alone, I have no problem with Sheridan’s and Lochley’s shared past.
As creepy as the telepath singing at the end is, I actually buy Lyta’s changing allegiance. Even if she hadn’t been given the Byron romance angle (which would have been Ivanova’s story, had Claudia not left), Lyta has been treated so shabbily by the non-telepath human population since the Shadow War that it’s easy to see her arc. Even without the romance subplot, she’s only a few steps away from fully engaging the Psi Corps in open war for the rights and freedom of telepaths. She’s ready for real change.
The real flaw is the jurisdiction situation. Sheridan founded the alliance and somehow didn’t read the lines of the treaty that gave the Psi Corps legal rights over escaped telepaths? Yes, he has a long history of hating politics and diplomacy, but this is what he signed up for. Really poorly thought out.
And to put it in perspective, it also makes Sheridan even more foolish given his whole reasoning for embracing Byron’s people into the station was so they’d have some form of defense in the event of a telepath war (clearly not even thinking about the fact that these people had already fled from somewhere else and wanted little to do with violence).
The character work was mostly fine in this episode. it’s the plotting that really dragged it down. The Londo side of things was mainly to set up the upcoming “In the Kingdom of the Blind”. As was Franklin’s newfound job setting up next week’s A-plot, completely unrelated to either Byron or the Centauri.
And talk about a loaded character setup when Bester hints at Byron’s supposed nasty past. We’ll get to it when we get to “Phoenix Rising”, but it’s really not what it’s cracked up to be.
Oh, one more plot hole I forgot to mention: Sheridan and Lochley had that big conversation about how she’d kick Bester’s team off the station if they did anything even slightly outside the rules, and later when she’s talking to Zack, she specifically says that roughing somebody up would count as breaking station regulations and giving her the excuse she needs. But then Lochley sees Byron — a self-professed pacifist — covered in bruises after his arrest, and she doesn’t react to it in the slightest. Two scenes setting up how she was supposed to react to this exact situation, followed by a complete lack of payoff. Why even make him up as beaten if it had no relevance to the scene?
That’s a big one for sure. Ignoring the later developments, Byron’s status at this point absolutely warrants protection from the station. If the intent here was to show her straddling the ethical line between protecting the telepaths and respecting Bester’s legal jurisdiction, she obviously failed to remain neutral the minute she overlooked the injuries.
Granted, the scene was mostly staged with Byron turned away from Lochley so she couldn’t see his bruises, but I’m pretty sure she got a clear look at his face toward the end of the scene, and didn’t react at all. Which is another way in which they seemed to be deliberately setting up a payoff that then didn’t happen.
I know Keith will probably hate me for bringing this up, but something that both Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine had was in their last seasons was contract issues that resulted in the replacement of a popular white woman with dark hair with another white woman with dark hair.
And on several points, I think it worked on DS9. Nicole deBoer was not only shorter and had short hair, but her character’s Ezri was vastly different from Terry Farrell’s Jadzia. In her first episodes, Ezri was very inexperienced, as she was never planning being joined in the first place, and it showed and deBoer played it well. Despite some poor writing (“Afterimage” and “Prodigal Daughter”), I think deBoer was able to fit both herself and Eziri into the very big shoes she had to fill.
But it is clear that most of us don’t feel the same with Tracy Scoggins. Part of it has to do with the writing as I agree with someone who said in a previous Rewatch that JMS was facing burnout from doing it all the writing from the past three seasons. That Lochley was Sheridan’s first wife (and not Anna) is something right out of a daytime soap opera and not well done. (And this from someone who watches General Hospital.) Part of it has to do with Scoggins being a near look-alike for Claudia Christian, making it very clear how much of a replacement she really is. And lastly, and as how often this is being said, has to do with Scoggins’ acting abilities.
Just my two cents on the same thing working on one show, but not so much on the other.
:laughs: I do not hate you for bringing it up, Gary. It is one of those really weird coincidences, though, that both shows had an unplanned replacement of one of their female leads in their final seasons, though I agree that deBoer was a much more successful replacement for Farrell than Scoggins was for Christian.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Part of it has to do with Scoggins being a near look-alike for Claudia Christian”
I think that’s a major overstatement. They’re similar types, but I’d never mistake one for the other, any more than I’d mistake Mira Furlan for either of them.
I’m trying to visualize Robin Atkin Downes and Claudia Christian together in any scenes and. Well. He would be so obviously incapable of working at the same level.
Byron and Ivanova as a couple? What a terrible miscasting that would’ve been.
I watched B5 when it first aired, and I thought the problem with Byron was that actor was too similar to the guy who played Marcus Cole, and suffered in comparison.
However, I had a chance to re-watch the series this last year, and I am now of the opinion that, as an actor, the guy just sucked.
To bounce off this and wiredog’s comment above, I wonder if Byron being an inexplicably clean, vaguely infuriating, long-haired pretty boy was because he was originally supposed to be Ivanova’s rebound after Marcus died.
Short answer: yes. JMS admits as much in the script book commentary for “No Compromises”. He was supposed to be very similar looking to Marcus by design.
It does make me laugh that Sheridan’s three wives, Anna, Lochley, and Delenn, are basically worker caste, military caste, and religious caste.