“There All the Honor Lies”
Written by Peter David
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 2, Episode 14
Production episode 215
Original air date: April 26, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… There is a gift shop opening in the Zocalo. EarthDome thinks that selling B5 merchandise is a good way to add moolah to the budget. Ivanova—who hates the very notion, viewing it as unworthy of a station that’s supposed to stand for something—is rather surprised to be put in charge of the shop, but Sheridan gives her the job precisely because of her skepticism. The captain, meanwhile, goes off for his latest lesson with Kosh.
En route, someone bumps Sheridan and makes off with his link. Sheridan chases him, only to crash into a Minbari, who aggressively knocks him down. Sheridan sees a PPG on the deck next to him and grabs it, telling the Minbari to stand down. The Minbari cries, “Death first!” and makes a threatening move toward Sheridan, who fires, killing him. When Sheridan gets to his feet, he sees another Minbari who apparently saw the whole thing, but he runs away before Sheridan can question him.
There is, of course, an investigation, which involves both Garibaldi and Delenn. The person Sheridan shot was named Lavell, and he’s from a respected family. His death is a major incident, and Delenn has been asked to investigate independently of Garibaldi, which sounds like a recipe for disaster. Complicating matters is that, despite Sheridan insisting that Lavell was going for a weapon, Lavell was unarmed.
Garibaldi is cranky because he keeps stepping on Lennier every time he talks to someone—it’s a person Lennier has already talked to or is about to talk to. Franklin’s autopsy confirms that Lavell died of the PPG wound (duh), but there’s no evidence that supports or disproves Sheridan’s account of events. Garibaldi is very suspicious of the convenient PPG and also is sure that the link was stolen as a lure to get Sheridan to run into Lavell while chasing the thief.
Lennier finds the witness: Ashan, who is from the same clan as Lennier, says that Sheridan misheard Lavell. He said a phrase in Minbari that sounds similar to “Death first” in English, but which translates to “I surrender.” This complicates matters significantly. Sheridan insists that that’s not what Lavell said, but Delenn and Lennier are appalled at even the suggestion that a Minbari would lie. (Ashan also is only really willing to talk to Lennier, as he views Delenn as a freak.)
A lawyer named Guinevere Corey shows up on the station and announces that she’s Sheridan’s legal counsel. This has become a major diplomatic incident, and Corey was diverted to B5 on her way home to deal with this. Privately, Corey says that the evidence against Sheridan is weak, but it will probably have to go to trial to avoid making it look like a coverup. The problem is, even if he’s exonerated, he’ll probably have to resign.
Later, after Sheridan has an encouraging off-duty conversation with Ivanova, Kosh shows up at his quarters, reminding him that they had an appointment. Sheridan wants to put off the lesson, as he’s got bigger fish to fry, but Kosh insists.
They go to a particularly skeevy part of downbelow. Sheridan goes into a cubbyhole, only to find someone in a robe whose face is hidden. He puts a small dish in front of Sheridan, obviously asking for an offering. Sheridan has no cash on him, but he gives him his stat bar. Others in robes appear all around him and they start a slow, beautiful chant.
Vir takes a communiqué for Mollari, which turns out to be a notice that Vir is being recalled to Centauri Prime and being replaced. Now that Mollari’s star is rising, they want the ambassadorial aide to be someone who isn’t a joke. Vir got the assignment originally because nobody wanted it, and it was a fitting place for someone who didn’t fit in, as Vir never has successfully integrated anywhere. He drowns his sorrows (at one point spilling a drink on Winters). Mollari, however, isn’t willing to give up on Vir that easily. On his way out of the bar, however, he is distracted by some Centauri women, who are laughing at the Mollari action figure they got in the gift shop.
Allan has been following Ashan, at Garibaldi’s instructions. He sees Ashan meeting with someone, but before he can see who it is, Lennier renders Allan unconscious. Lennier confronts Ashan—the person he was meeting is the thief who stole Sheridan’s link. Ashan refuses to admit his complicity, and runs off.
Sheridan returns from downbelow, to find Mollari waiting in his office. The ambassador is royally pissed off about the action figure, which does not include all six of a Centauri male’s sexual organs. This is a major insult to Mollari, basically emasculating him. Sheridan unhesitatingly orders Ivanova to have all the Mollari action figures removed from the shop.
Before Mollari leaves, Sheridan mentions the frustrations with dealing with Minbari and their inability to lie. Mollari points out that Minbari can too lie, assuming it involves saving face.
Complicating matters is that Ashan has been summoned back to Minbar. He won’t be available to testify, so there’ll be no trial—and that just makes Sheridan’s position worse, as the uncertainty will dog his command, and probably force him to resign. Delenn, who has her own doubts about all of this thanks to the burial instructions she received regarding Lavell, agrees to help.
Lennier summons Ashan for final instructions, saying that he will claim responsibility for the attack on Sheridan. Ashan urges him not to, as it will dishonor the entire clan, but Lennier tartly points out that Ashan has already done that by lying about what happened. Ashan finally admits that the head of their clan orchestrated this—with Lavell willing to martyr himself to the cause—in order to get Sheridan Starkiller off B5. Lavell, it turns out, is also part of the same clan. When Delenn learned that, she realized that that was why Ashan might lie: to protect Lavell’s honor, and that of their clan.
To Ashan’s horror, Sheridan, Delenn, Garibaldi, and Corey were all eavesdropping on Ashan’s conversation with Lennier, in which he pretty much confessed. However, Sheridan is willing to compromise: if Ashan will admit that Sheridan acted in self-defense, he’s willing to keep Lavell’s clan affiliation a secret. The reason for the attack will never come out, thus keeping the clan from dishonor, and Sheridan is vindicated, thus allowing him to keep his position without a metaphorical cloud over his head.
Mollari tells a hungover Vir that he is keeping his post. Mollari spoke on Vir’s behalf to the homeworld—and also to Vir’s family, who were shocked to hear the ambassador wax rhapsodic about what a great aide Vir has been. Vir is pleased to keep his job, though less pleased when Mollari mentions that he invited Vir’s family to come to B5 for a month-long visit…
Ivanova shows Sheridan the latest bit of merchandise: Ba-bear-lon 5, a bear with Sheridan’s initials on it. Appalled by being made into a teddy bear, Sheridan angrily orders the entire gift shop shut down and boxed up. He tosses the bear out an airlock. (Keffer is sent to investigate an unidentified object floating near the station, but when he sees that it’s a teddy bear, he announces that he can’t find it, as he is not putting this in an official report…)
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Once again, Sheridan’s victory against the Black Star during the Earth-Minbari War comes back to bite him on the ass, as a Minbari clan risks clan-wide dishonor to get him off the station’s hierarchy.
He also gets to experience beauty through chanting, and spaces a teddy bear for no compellingly good reason.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova is grumpy about the whole concept of the gift shop, as she finds that unworthy of the station’s function, that they’re not some kind of “deep-space franchise,” a not-very-thinly-veiled dig at another science fiction series set on a space station, cough cough. She is also particularly freaked out by the full face masks of various species, both alien and human, that are available.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s investigation is unable to really go anywhere because Lennier is doing his own investigation on Delenn’s behalf and is having much more luck, mostly because Minbari will talk to him…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. A lot of Minbari still don’t like having Sheridan in charge of B5, it seems. Lennier also shows that he can be quite the badass when he needs to be.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Both Mollari and Vir got sent to B5 because it was a shitty useless posting, but now that Mollari has made it less shitty for himself, it becomes untenable for Vir until Mollari steps in. Of course, given how soul-crushing it’s been for Vir, it’s telling that he still views staying as better than going home to his family…
The Shadowy Vorlons. Part of Kosh’s lesson to Sheridan is to show him beauty through robed people chanting. It certainly is very pretty, and brings Sheridan some peace for about six seconds before the plot kicks back in…
Welcome aboard. Caitlin Brown returns to the show as Corey, a role that (unlike her first-season stint at Na’Toth) requires no latex or makeup. She’ll return as Na’Toth in “A Tragedy of Telepaths” in season five. Sean Gregory Sullivan plays Ashan.
And we’ve got recurring regulars Jeff Conaway as Allan and Ardwight Chamberlain as Kosh, both of whom were last in “Hunter, Prey,” and who both will return two episodes hence in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.”
Trivial matters. The episode’s title comes from Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Man”: “Honour and shame from no condition rise; / Act well your part, there all the honour lies.”
This is the second of two episodes written by New York Times best-selling author and award-winning comics writer Peter David, following “Soul Mates.” He’ll also write an episode of Crusade, as well as several B5 novels.
Kosh invited Sheridan to attend preparatory lessons in “Hunter, Prey.” Mollari knows that Minbari can lie to save face, because Lennier did so for that reason (saving face for both himself and Mollari) in “The Quality of Mercy.”
The teddy bear that Sheridan spaced at the episode’s conclusion has a whole story attached to it. After writing this episode’s script, David had a special bear made by the Vermont Teddy Bear Company: the very bear that Ivanova showed Sheridan at the climax of this episode. David sent it to show creator J. Michael Straczynski as a present. Straczynski, however, unbeknownst to David when he sent it, hates things that he deems “cute,” and swore revenge on David—not exactly the expected response to a present. And so the entire sequence where Ivanova shows Sheridan the bear—who has the same initials as Straczynski, as he gave his heroes on the show the same initials as himself—was written by Straczynski himself, including Sheridan spacing the bear. At the time, David was the co-creator (with B5 castmember Bill Mumy) of the Nickelodeon TV show Space Cases. In retaliation, in that show’s second episode, “Who Goes Where?” the characters find the exact same bear floating in space, prompting one character to plaintively ask the same question as many of the viewers of this B5 episode: “What kind of dope would toss a perfectly good Earth bear into space?” The bear turned out to be part of an evil plot by a race of aliens called the Straczyn. (For Straczynski’s side of the story, click here. For David’s, click here.)
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Another lesson?”
“Uh huh.”
“What was this one about?”
“Uh—beauty. In the dark.”
“Well, they must be working—you’re beginning to sound like a Vorlon.”
—Ivanova and Sheridan discussing the latter’s latest lesson with Kosh.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The last best hope for a quick buck.” There are three plots going on here, and while the A and C plots are both just fine, the B plot annoys the hell out of me on two different levels, ones that are exacerbated by the fact that scripter Peter David is a friend of mine, and I know some of the backstory of both of the things that annoy me. So let me get that out of the way so I can get to the good stuff. (If you want to skip my fulminating on the subject of the gift shop plot, just skip the next five or six paragraphs.)
The gift shop storyline is something that started out promising, but went right into the toilet, starting with Ivanova’s self-righteous nonsense about how this station stands for something and we shouldn’t sully ourselves with yucky commerce—never mind that stuff on the station costs money. Indeed, budget problems have come up more than once, and both Sinclair and Sheridan have had to play all kinds of silly games to make the money work. Ivanova herself has been at the forefront of one of the biggest budgetary issues, as seen in “By Any Means Necessary.”
So why the hell are she and Sheridan so grumpy on the subject of something that is a guaranteed profit-maker for the station? This will solve so many of their budget problems! Or it would if they didn’t get rid of it for no compellingly good reason.
I was on a panel with David at the I-Con convention back in 2017, and he said that one of the reasons why he wrote that portion of this particular script was anger and outrage when he heard Star Trek referred to as a “franchise.” He was angry at that notion, as he felt that it diminished Trek. Hence the “deep-space franchise” line here, taking a shot at Trek in general, and DS9 in particular. Speaking for myself, I don’t get that at all. Of course, I also refer to B5 as a franchise, which it kinda is…
Bad enough we have that ridiculousness, but then J. Michael Straczynski had to stick his nose into it by railing against the very notion of “cute” by taking the gift that David gave him and using it to have his main character space a teddy bear. Worse, doing it in a script that is only credited to the guy who gave him the gift, thus making both David (as the credited writer) and Sheridan (as the character doing it) look like heartless scuzzwads, because, seriously, who spaces a teddy bear? (The fact that your humble rewatcher may, in fact, sleep with a teddy bear that he has had since 1997 is completely irrelevant to his outrage, so stop looking at me like that.) Points to David for getting a hilarious revenge in Space Cases (see “Trivial matters” above for the whole schmear).
And what’s especially funny is that, for all the outrage expressed on the subject, a good chunk of the merchandise in the store was actual B5 merchandise that was available in stores. And others were props built for the store, at least one of which Straczynski was proudly saying he’d have in his office after the show ended. So yeah.
The only part of this wrongheaded piece of wrongheadedness that works is the bit with Mollari and the emasculated action figure, which was just hilarious.
As was the Mollari-Vir C plot, which is a nice bit of characterization for Vir, and a nice moment where Mollari appreciates what Vir does for him. While I didn’t directly put this in a “Looking ahead” entry, this is a low-key bit of foreshadowing of the importance of Vir to the future of the Centauri Republic, and his continued role as the conscience that Mollari can no longer afford to have.
The main plot, meanwhile, is some good stuff, picking up on the annoyance that lots of Minbari have with Sheridan’s appointment to run B5, as seen in “Points of Departure,” as well as the discomfort that many Minbari have with Delenn’s transformation, as particularly seen in “All Alone in the Night.”
There are a few issues. For all that it’s nice to see Caitlin Brown without all the Narn makeup on her face, Corey serves no obvious plot function—the danger to Sheridan’s command was already pretty clear. While it’s a funny line, Sheridan’s answer to Garibaldi’s query for a description of the Minbari witness (“He was bald with a bone on his head”) smacks a little too much of “all those people look alike,” which is not a good look for our hero. And while I agree with Sheridan and Kosh that the chants in the tiny crawlspace in downbelow were incredibly lovely, it felt sledgehammered into the storyline. Sheridan’s own problems in the episode meant that he really wasn’t given an opportunity to properly appreciate the gift Kosh gave him there, which did that scene a disservice.
Still, the plot showcases Sheridan, Delenn, and especially Lennier very well. Bill Mumy does particularly good work here, showcasing Lennier’s badassitude while retaining his inherent calmness, devotion, and loyalty, the latter both to his clan and to Delenn.
Next week: “And Now for a Word.”
