“Z’ha’dum”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Adam Nimoy
Season 3, Episode 22
Production episode 322
Original air date: October 28, 1996
It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn provides a voiceover that discusses human and Minbari clichés about how the past is prologue (the Minbari one is that the past sometimes predicts the future, which is the same thing, though Delenn talks as if it’s a different aphorism when it really isn’t…). While that voiceover goes on, we rerun Anna walking in on her watching Sheridan sleep interspersed with flashbacks to Sheridan watching a letter from Anna to her sister, the Icarus going to Z’ha’dum, Sheridan questioning Morden about the Icarus, and Delenn explaining to Sheridan about the Icarus.
Cut to Sheridan, now awake and utterly devastated at the sight of Anna, who seems surprised that Sheridan thought her to be dead. “You mean she didn’t tell you?” she says, referring to Delenn, who quickly departs. Anna agrees to take whatever test he wants, and she’ll explain everything to him—but only if he returns to Z’ha’dum with her.
G’Kar shows Ivanova a fresh cache of weapons he has acquired from the Gaim: undetectable bombs that deliver a devastating yield, the equivalent of several hundred megatons.
Franklin gives Anna a detailed examination, and every test proves that she’s really-o-truly-o Anna Sheridan. Franklin releases her, but promises to do more tests. Sheridan confronts Delenn, asking if she knew that Anna was alive. She says she didn’t, but they just assumed that Anna was dead because they figured she wouldn’t work with the Shadows willingly. However, the conversation doesn’t make Sheridan feel much better, since she keeps talking in terms of manipulation: allowing him to know things, keeping things from him, and such. Sheridan angrily tells her how he has developed feelings for Delenn, which was incredibly hard for him, because he still wasn’t entirely over Anna’s death. And now he feels he can’t trust her. Delenn tells him that, no matter what else he may or not believe about her, he should believe this: she loves him.
Mollari is getting drunk and reveals to Vir why: he’s been promoted. Emperor Cartagia has elevated him to the royal court, where he is to advise on matters of planetary security. Vir thinks he should be thrilled, as it’s what he always wanted. Mollari agrees—it’s what he wanted decades ago. Now, though, it feels like a reason to keep him close because they’re more than a little frightened of him, thanks to his association with Morden and the Shadows.
A messenger (who has apparently been told by the director to look and act as much like Ed Wasser as possible) buys Mollari another drink and advises him very strongly to leave the station ASAP.
Franklin notices some minor scarring on the back of Anna’s neck that looks familiar—it turns out to be an exact match for the scarring on Carolyn Sanderson’s neck.
Sheridan confronts Anna, saying that he’ll accompany her to Z’ha’dum, but not until she tells him exactly what happened to the Icarus. She does so, explaining that the Shadows—which isn’t what she calls them or they call themselves, simply referring to them as “the aliens” and explaining that their name for themselves is ten thousand letters long—are doing important work, and she’s helping them. They just want Sheridan to come to Z’ha’dum to hear their side of the story. If he won’t come, she’ll just go back alone and he’ll never know the truth.
Anna explains that the Icarus was sent to Z’ha’dum because Interplanetary Expeditions put a tracker on the Shadow vessel they discovered on Mars. They awakened the Shadows, who were supposedly vulnerable, and so the crew helped them. But then most of the crew was killed in what Anna says was a terrible accident. Anna insists that Sheridan has been lied to by the Minbari and the Vorlons about what the Shadows are really about. The technology they have access to can improve humanity’s lot by quantum leaps. She also apologizes for being away so long—time works differently on Z’ha’dum. But if he comes back with her, it’ll all make sense, and he’ll finally know the truth.
Sheridan agrees to go—and then we pan over to Franklin’s report about the scarring…
Garibaldi reports to Sheridan a bit later, with the captain telling the security chief to process the crew of the White Star and give them all indenticards. It wasn’t something they’d bothered with, but Sheridan thinks it’s important to do so. He also has another instruction for Garibaldi that’s written down. Garibaldi is rather shocked, but Sheridan asks him for trust. He admits that when Sheridan first reported to this post they didn’t really know or trust each other, but Sheridan has come to rely on Garibaldi and he hopes that the reverse is true. Garibaldi agrees, and Sheridan says the next time they see each other they’ll talk about the weather.
Sheridan arms himself with two PPGs, one in its standard holster and one in a backup ankle holster. He sees Kosh in the mirror telling him again that if he goes to Z’ha’dum he’ll die. Nonplussed by this vision, Sheridan nonetheless records a time-delayed message for Delenn.
He and Anna head for the White Star. Encountering Garibaldi along the way, the latter mentions that they may get snow in New York, by way of telling Sheridan that he did what he was asked.
The Sheridans pootle off on the White Star. Anna expresses concern about him operating it alone, and apprehension about the Vorlon technology on board. Indeed, she fears that Vorlon technology even touching Z’ha’dum would do damage, so Sheridan assures her that they’ll take a shuttle down. (Apparently the shuttles are pure Minbari tech…) Sheridan is affable and friendly to Anna, but the minute she looks away, his face falls. That’s probably for a reason.
On B5, Franklin asks Ivanova about the captain leaving the station. Ivanova herself only just heard about it, and Franklin is confused, because he showed Sheridan the report…
The White Star shuttle lands on the surface. Anna leads Sheridan through the Icarus archeological site into a building that has an Earth-normal atmosphere and gravity; she also tells him to surrender his sidearm, which he does. Anna brings him into a room with two other folks: Morden and an older gentleman with a cane, who introduces himself as Justin. He claims to be one of the “them” who decide what length hemlines will be, what the borders are, when the workday is, and all the other stuff that, he says, happens transparently. (He meant opaquely; but then, those are things that actually are decided by regular people, generally politicians, so he’s talking completely out of his ass here.)
They chat over tea. Justin and Morden explain the full backstory of the universe. Way back in the early days, after most of the oldest races evolved beyond the galaxy, two stayed behind to guide the younger races. At first it was a friendly rivalry. The Vorlons acted as parents, guiding and instructing and making sure everyone is on the right track. The Shadows prefer to work through conflict—setting sides against each other, and gaining strength through victory. Or, as Sheridan acidly points out, dying, which Justin understates by saying is regrettable. Morden adds that all of humanity’s best developments came out of conflict—which is also demonstrably not true, though many developments did.
Justin says that Sheridan is a nexus point. He’s the one who’s built the coalition that is standing against the Shadows, so they need him to step back. They can’t just kill him—that would make him a martyr. But he can agree to help them instead of the Vorlons. To accentuate the point, they detail how the Vorlons have manipulated humanity, including creating telepaths specifically to combat the Shadows.
On B5, Corwin detects disturbances, and suddenly the station is surrounded by Shadow vessels. Ivanova orders fighters launched, but tells them not to engage until she gives the order. At first, they just sit there. Ivanova tries to contract Draal, but communications to the planet are jammed. Ivanova asks G’Kar if they can use the Gaim weapons, but (a) the Shadow vessels are too close and detonating them will also destroy the station, and (b) two of them are missing.
On Z’ha’dum, Sheridan makes it clear that he’s not going to play along—and he also knows that that isn’t really his wife. They were able to re-create her DNA, her voice, her body, but not her personality. He also mentions the telepaths they rescued, who have the exact same scarring on their necks that Anna has.
Justin admits that Anna’s personality was lost when she became a thrall to the Shadows, which happened when she made what Justin calls the wrong choice—which belatedly restores Sheridan’s faith in his wife, as he’s said all along that she never would’ve gone along with the Shadows. Justin explains that they removed her from the ship she was piloting when they realized who she was in relation to Sheridan and were hoping she would be able to convince him to play ball. A couple of Shadows then enter the room. Sheridan turns and fires his backup weapon at them.
On B5, Delenn plays the time-delayed message from Sheridan. He speculates that his going to Z’ha’dum after future-Delenn’s warning when he jumped forward in time might prevent that future from happening—which makes no sense, but neither does time travel, so whatever. He also tells Delenn that he loves her.
We see Sheridan, bloody and bruised, stumbling onto a balcony. There’s a glass dome above him and a deep abyss below. He enters commands into his link, and the White Star starts to plummet down toward the surface from orbit. Inside the ship’s cargo hold, the two Gaim devices that had gone missing arm themselves.
“Anna” comes out onto the balcony trying one last time to convince Sheridan to join them, saying that she can love him the way Anna did. Sheridan looks at her with great sadness and pain, then looks up to see the White Star careening through the atmosphere.
Kosh’s voice sounds in his mind, telling him to jump.
He jumps.
The White Star crashes through the dome. Anna screams as the devices detonate.
On B5, the Shadows all disappear. Corwin can’t raise Sheridan or the White Star. Ivanova seems sure that Sheridan is gone. Also one Starfury didn’t report back to B5 after the Shadows retreated: the one piloted by Garibaldi, whose Starfury we later see inside one of the Shadow vessels.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan goes through emotional hell, but ultimately sticks to the mission, as it were, at least in part because the Shadows don’t do such a hot job of re-creating Anna.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova does everything she can to defend the station, but luckily it doesn’t need much defending. It’s also possible that her latent telepathy is enough for her to sense Sheridan’s apparent death.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi puts the Gaim bombs on the White Star, setting up Sheridan’s final attack on Z’ha’dum. He also is apparently kidnapped by the Shadows in order to create extra suspense for season four…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Anna makes it sound like Delenn deliberately kept the fact that Anna was alive from Sheridan. Delenn has been manipulative enough that this is actually plausible, not helped by Delenn herself admitting that they assumed that Anna was dead, not so much that they knew for sure.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari has been promoted to the royal court, which is also by way of setting up his storyline in season four.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar gets to provide the weapons that Sheridan uses against the Shadows and do the final voiceover.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. According to Justin and Morden, the Vorlons specifically engineered telepathy in humans to make them better weapons against the Shadows.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Justin and Morden spell out the history, at least from their perspective, of how the Vorlons and Shadows have guided and manipulated younger races for the last several hundred millennia.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Although they’ve already smooched, this is the first time that Sheridan and Delenn tell each other that they love each other. Of course, Sheridan waits until he’s out the door on a suicide mission to say it…
Looking ahead. Sheridan’s fate, Garibaldi’s being missing, and Mollari’s new position on Centauri Prime will all be multiple-episode plotlines at the top of the following season.
Welcome aboard. Back from “Shadow Dancing” are Melissa Gilbert as Anna and Joshua Cox as Corwin. Back from “Interludes and Examinations” is Ed Wasser as Morden. Back from “Walkabout” is Ardwight Chamberlain as the voice of Kosh. Cox will return in “No Surrender, No Retreat.” Wasser and Chamberlain will return in “The Hour of the Wolf.”
Ron Campbell plays the Morden-ish messenger; he’ll be back several times in seasons four and five as the Drazi ambassador, starting in “The Summoning.”
And then we have our Robert Knepper moment, as I’d forgotten that longtime character actor Jeff Corey (whose roles range from Superman and the Mole Men to the original Star Trek’s “The Cloud Minders”) played Justin.
Trivial matters. The teaser includes several flashbacks, the first of which is a reshoot of the letter Anna wrote to her sister that was seen in “Revelations,” now with Melissa Gilbert instead of Beth Toussaint. Gilbert filmed the entire letter, and producer J. Michael Straczynski considered inserting it into future reruns and home video of “Revelations,” but decided that that wasn’t fair to Toussaint and so didn’t do it. Only a short bit of it is used here.
The other flashbacks in that teaser are all scenes from “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.” Later in this episode, Sheridan hears Kosh repeat the words he said in the earlier episode: “If you go to Z’ha’dum, you will die.”
Kosh’s threat to Sheridan in “Interludes and Examinations” that he would not be with Sheridan when he goes to Z’ha’dum proves to be not entirely the case…
The discovery of a Shadow vessel on Mars was previously revealed in “Messages from Earth.” This episode links it to the Icarus mission, as seen in “Revelations” and “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.”
When he jumped two decades into the future in the “War Without End” two-parter, before he jumped back to the present, Delenn warned Sheridan not to go to Z’ha’dum.
The B5 crew liberated several telepaths who’d been enslaved by the Shadows to run their ships in “Ship of Tears,” Carolyn Sanderson among them.
J. Michael Straczynski has said online that Justin is the “man in-between” that Kosh warned Sheridan about in the dream he sent him in “All Alone in the Night,” but he’s also said online that Sheridan himself is the man in-between, for reasons that will be clear at the top of season four. So who the hell knows…
The wedding photo of the Sheridans in the captain’s quarters is a photo from Bruce Boxleitner and Melissa Gilbert’s wedding.
This is the only one of Ron Campbell’s handful of roles in the franchise where he isn’t completely covered in alien makeup.
Straczynski wrote every single episode of this season (and will do so again for the next season). This is not the first time it’s happened—indeed, not the first time it’s happened on a science fiction show portraying a dark, cynical future, as Terry Nation wrote all thirteen episodes of the first season of Blakes 7. But it doesn’t happen very often…
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“The war we fight is not against powers and principalities—it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril, we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.”
—G’Kar’s verbal coda to the season.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Jump—now!” After all the buildup, it’s kind of hilarious that the promised journey Sheridan makes to Z’ha’dum results in four people sitting in a room having a chat over chamomile tea.
And so much of that chat is the purest horseshit. Justin’s claims that he’s with the “them” who dictate things like fashion and the time of the workday and such is just ridiculous and makes it impossible to take him seriously. (So is the fact that he uses “transparently” when he means “opaquely.”) And the whole notion that the only way to advance is via conflict is also nonsense, though that, at least, is a viewpoint coming from the nominal villains of the piece.
What makes the episode shine, though, are the various performances. While most of what he’s saying is nonsense, Jeff Corey does a good job with Justin, giving him a down-home mien that makes you feel like you’re hanging out with a favorite uncle. Ed Wasser is his usual fantastic self, and it’s amusing also seeing Ron Campbell do an Ed Wasser impersonation in his brief scene with Mollari and Vir. Mira Furlan magnificently sells Delenn’s anguish, as she realizes that she’s played her cards badly with Sheridan, not aided by the fact that she has (I’m sure completely unexpectedly when he first came to B5) fallen in love with the guy.
And then we have the married couple at the heart of the episode, and they’re the ones who really kick ass. Bruce Boxleitner expertly handles the emotional roller-coaster Sheridan goes on here, from his agonized expression at the beginning and the end, the first and last time he sees Anna in the episode, to the fraught conversations with Delenn to the determined conversations with Garibaldi, Franklin, and Anna when he’s bargaining with her, to the professionalism with which he carries himself once he goes on the mission. Throughout, we don’t know which way he’ll go, as we know from “Revelations” and especially from “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” that the subject of Anna is a raw wound that hasn’t completely healed.
Meanwhile, his then-wife gives a bravura performance. Melissa Gilbert pulls the same trick that Wasser has been pulling all along: her affect is just a little bit off. There’s that odd head-tilt, the almost-monotone, and especially the vacancy in the eyes. It’s clear that she’s cosplaying as a person with human emotions, and it’s obvious that Sheridan comes to that conclusion once he can get past his own emotional baggage on the subject.
Part of me is disappointed that this wasn’t Sheridan’s last appearance. I know that the notion of him going all Gandalf the White and coming back from Khazad-dum Z’ha’dum is important going forward, but I’m also just really tired of people going on suicide missions and not dying. Besides, Sheridan very obviously didn’t intend to come back from this trip, given that he went with two big-ass bombs in his cargo hold. Although one wonders what would’ve happened to his brilliant plan if the Shadows had, say, scanned him for a second PPG….
It’s a strong finale, I’ll give it that, but I remember being grateful for PTEN’s preference for airing the final episodes of a B5 season right before the new season started, so we only had to wait a week, as there was a lot left hanging here, even if there wasn’t a formal cliffhanger, and making viewers wait three months would’ve been cruel.
You, though, have to wait two weeks…
Next week: An overview of the third season.
I think the line makes sense if Justin meant to say ‘invisibly’ not ‘transparently.’
This is a banger of a season finale, dimmed only by the certainty that Sheridan was not really dead. You really only get one of those per era of television, and it got spent on Picard/Locutus in BoBW. You have to wait until the rise of the premiere HBO drama for characters that die and stay dead and thus to reset real suspense on that one.
This and next season’s premiere were also what drove home for me “Oh, he is not even trying to be subtle in ripping off Lord of the Rings…” Naming stuff Rangers and Z’ha’dum is an homage. This plot line transmutes it to outright theft. Not saying it doesn’t work, just that there’s no defense to the cease and desist letter from the Tolkien estate.
I think it makes a certain amount of sense from a purely scientific standpoint. The most common transparent substance we encounter is air. It’s so common we often don’t think about it or remember that it is transparent, kind of like the proverbial fish and water. We see trees moving but can’t see the wind that is exerting force on them (or kelp fronds/currents if you’re a fish). It’s somewhat counter-intuitive that in a political sense “transparency” has come to mean that you can see what’s happening, which is usually a product of opaque or translucent substances.
No, when we say that an organization like a government or business is operating transparently, it means that we can see inside, that it’s not hiding its activities behind opaque walls, so to speak. More basically, the difference between “invisible” and “transparent,” etymologically speaking, is that the former means that something can’t be seen, while the latter means that other things can be seen through it. The point isn’t that we can’t see air or water or glass, the point is that we can see what they contain.
Also, it’s not a recent usage. The use of “transparent” to mean frank and open is attested by the late 1500s. https://www.etymonline.com/word/transparent
I agree that Justin probably just used the wrong word there. I find it interesting, though, that things that are transparent don’t cast visible shadows. Perhaps just a coincidence, but a convenient one in my view.
Edited to correct the spelling of Z’ha’dum, exhibit number a billion in the trend of sci fi writers adding apostrophes to things to make them “alien.”
Right, those silly alien names with apostrophes, like O’Brien and D’Artagnan and Hawai’i and t’ai-chi ch’uan.
I resemble that remark!
I disagree that “The past is prologue” is synonymous with “the past is also sometimes the future.” The saying is from The Tempest: “…what’s past is prologue, what to come / In your and my discharge.” Antonio meant that prior events had given them an opportunity, like the prologue of a play setting the stage, and what they did with that opportunity was now up to them. More generally, the saying is used to mean that the past lays the groundwork for the present, that the present grows out of the past, rather than simply repeating it.
G’Kar’s nukes were such a blatant Chekhov’s Gun that I’m surprised he didn’t get them from Bester.
“(Apparently the shuttles are pure Minbari tech…)” No, I think they used the same Earth shuttle they used to get from B5 to the White Star. Certainly the landing gear looked like part of an Earth aircraft.
Does anyone else have The Simpsons‘ “We Do” song running through their heads after Justin’s “Who decides this and that” spiel?
I don’t think the Shadows re-created Anna. It’s physically the same person, but her original personality was gone, like a “death of personality” execution. I guess they tried to re-create her personality, but it’s still physically her, not a clone.
I agree that Sheridan’s reasoning for going to Z’ha’dum made no sense. If Future Delenn was so urgently warning him not to go, that implies that he did go in the original timeline and she was trying to change it.
As for Terry Nation, yes, he’s credited for writing every episode of Blake’s 7‘s first season, but I gather that in a lot of cases, he just wrote outlines and Chris Boucher wrote the scripts. There are plenty of other British shows that have only a single writer or pair of writers, like Rob Grant & Doug Naylor writing all of Red Dwarf‘s first 6 seasons.
By the way, one thing’s bugged me all along about the opening titles’ narration for season 3 — Ivanova saying that B5 failed as our last, best hope for peace, but then became something greater, our last, best hope for victory. Victory is greater than peace? I think that’s backward. A victory is a single event, a peace is an ongoing status quo. A victory is meaningless if it doesn’t lead to peace.
The bombs are a big Chekov’s Gun (and yes, let me join the admiration for that line), but B5 is a show where occasionally the gun is shown on the mantle in one episode and fired in a different one.
I’m embarrassed it took me a good me a good 15 seconds to get the joke, but that was a great one :-D
> Victory is greater than peace?
Someone else asked that of jms way back. He cited the British/Germany parallel drawn in the show at the end of S2, that peace isn’t always attainable, and that surrender can be worse.
“Peace is a byproduct of victory against those who do not want peace.” Was his line
How well that comes across though.. *shrug*
I think that phrase is actually very topical to our time period, given how many powers are saying that the conflicts could stop and everybody could have “peace” as long as their opponents surrender unconditionally and agree to all of their requests.
But actual peace is not something that can be achieved once and you’re done: it exists on a flimsy balance and requires constant work between the interested parties, willing to do what’s best for everyone involved on all sides
The Babylon stations were built with the dream of achieving that sort of peace throughout the galaxy, but that dream was shattered the moment each party walked away from the table and started working only towards their own interest: Earth fell to a dictatorship, the Corps are planning a coup, the Centauri have crushed the Narn under their boot, and the Vorlons* and the Shadows have been artificially creating conflict for millennia.
At that point, once you’ve ascertained that one or more of the sides in play aren’t interested in ever sitting down and negotiate a “peace” where they don’t come out as the sole victor, your only options left are to surrender or strike back harder, and that’s what B5 has to do now: defeat the Shadow/Vorlon conflict once and for all or fall. Only after that it will be possible to bring everyone left at the table and actually start the slow work of trying to achieve a lasting peace – which, as we’ve seen in the flash forwards, and as we’ll see in the various finales, is not something we’ll ever actually achieve, only something we’ll keep striving forward to.
( * Yes, the Vorlons may claim that they’ve tried to create order, not conflict, but imposing order through force and manipulation falls under the same false definition of peace as above)
But I reiterate: victory is only a means to an end. I think that elevating victory as an end in itself, instead of a means to the end of peace, is the mentality of warmongers, tyrants, and bullies, people who think that dominating others is the only thing that matters. Victory is only a good thing if that victory is in the service of peace; otherwise it’s just a tool of perpetual war or subjugation.
So it may be true that you can’t preserve peace without victory, but victory without peace (actual peace, not the “peace” of submission to tyranny) is not a victory at all. Therefore, victory is not greater than peace.
I don’t have anything to support this, but I’ve imagined that JMS, having cranked out a season of these, and getting down to doing it again, was beat.
Going from a season’s worth of
S2:”The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace..”
to
S3:”The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed…”
sounds portentous and parallel enough when spoken out loud, even though contrasting victory as superior to peace has some logical challenges (as we’re pointing out).
But I imagine it sounded dramatic enough, and it was only one little thing on JMS’s to-write list. Sometimes you write timeless gems; sometimes you don’t.
I suspect Ivanova’s point is merely that they need to adopt the mentality of fighters, which is important for this specific conflict because it is going to be a Civil War against their own government and soldiers. Thus they need to achieve victory before peace and that may not be an attitude that comes naturally against Earth soldiers (Shadow allies or not).
Even so, I think calling it “something greater” is a bad choice of words, because it sounds like a value judgment, not merely an assessment of immediate need. I would’ve preferred something like, say, “it became something more critical.”
Yeah, that. To sum up more concisely what I was trying to say (and what I think JMS was trying to say) is that B5 wanted to be the Space United Nations, failed, and then transformed itself into the Castle of Lions. It’s not saying that victory as an abstract concept is always greater than peace, it’s saying that in that moment, after diplomacy and all political negotiations have failed, the hope of victory against an overwhelming enemy was a greater symbol to the people than a vague hope of peace.
The fact that we’re here discussing it, though, is admittedly proof that he could have worded it better and more clearly.
You’re correct about Anna. Her physical body was inserted into one of the Shadow vessels, as we’ve seen before, and Justin pretty much says that they pulled her out and did their best to restore her mind when they realized who she was (and how she could be used to manipulate Sheridan).
And that’s why you always backup before a major change.
Yeah, Chekhov’s Bombs are pretty freaking obvious, but there’s at least a mostly successful if brief diversion. When the Shadows show up around the station, it’s easy to assume the bombs will be used to fight them off. Until G’Kar pours cold water on the idea.
I love this episode. Sure, the whole philosophy of the Shadows doesn’t hold up, but then, when we hear some of the justifications of the Vorlons, they don’t entirely hold up either. They’ve convinced themselves of their rightness to the point of entrenchment. (Something we still all too often in the real world.) It’s been said that a significant portion of fans actually thought the Shadows had a good point, though I only recall running into that sporadically over the years. I wonder if this is the same portion of fans convinced that B5 is a right-wing series.
(Apparently the Shadows’ philosophy is based somewhat on the German philosopher Hegel. I’m not familiar but I find that interesting.)
Anyway, this is one of my favorite season finales. While it’s true that we don’t expect Sheridan’s death to stick, we are left wondering how he is going to survive. (And from a certain point of view, he doesn’t.) Anna is played brilliantly, as she is just off enough to be unsettling in nearly every scene. The idea that Delenn lied about Anna is plausible because we *know* Delenn has played games in the past. Some of the racism against Minbari is based upon how they parse the truth. It sets up the tragedy of the final act beautifully.
Hegel notably was used by Caesar in New Vegas to justify himself as well. He’s a bit like Nietzsche in that his reputation has been hurt heavily by the kind of people who absolutely did not understand their philosophy.
But yes, the Shadows are an interesting case of Social Darwinism if it’s actually sincere. Which it never is. The people who believe in survival of the fittest and constant conflict but actually are not trying to use it to justify everyone else being under their thumb (or at least they think that). Sort of like the Sith were depicted as actively courting their apprentice coming after them. The Shadows want you to be aggressive warmongers and conquerors because that makes you stronger but also the people fighting against you and they’ll arm them too.
I hate it that that philosophy is called “Social Darwinism,” because it’s twisting what Darwinian theory really says. Survival of the fittest (which is Herbert Spencer’s phrase, not Darwin’s) doesn’t mean a fight to the death, it means that the most adaptive survival strategy for a particular set of conditions will prevail, and often the fittest strategy is cooperation or passive camouflage or running away. Humans’ survival strategy has always been cooperation and community, so it’s really twisting it to say that “Social Darwinism” means people should fight to dominate each other.
Also, a large part of the reason for the Creationist movement in the United States is that people like William Jennings Bryan mistook evolutionary theory for the ways European Social Darwinists twisted it to justify the kinds of eugenics and anti-Semitic movements that would eventually lead to the Nazis. They assumed the science was the same as the political ideology that had co-opted and twisted its language, so they turned against the science.
Cruel people often have a talent for finding ways to justify their behavior: that’s proof of how advantageous cooperation and community really are, that many people least invested in them have to fake that they are because they can’t really survive if they cast off society.
In show context, it’s unclear either the Vorlons or the Shadows are fundamentally cruel (abusive and self-justifying, sure), but it’s clear enough that the Shadow philosophy driven by getting what you want is an invitation to violent conflict. A Vorlon peace, OTOH, would be one governed by strict obedience to (Vorlon) authority.
JMS is on record saying that he thinks you need to answer “who are you” before “what do you want” to avoid all sorts of bad consequences, which isn’t taking sides between Vorlons and Shadows but does put Justin in a bad spot to make a coherent pitch for Shadow philosophy. As already noted, the Shadow aversion to “who are you” makes them pretty elusive in terms of world-view.
I could imagine an alternative situation where the Vorlons set up fascist dictatorships and the Shadows represent rebellion against authority and putting your own interests before that of a corrupt and venal state: breaking up monopolistic corporations and protecting the interests of the otherwise disempowered is a long way from ambushing refugee ships, but they exist on a; identifiable spectrum.
If they really believed in survival of the fittest, they wouldn’t be adding their overwhelming forces to the fight. The Centauri couldn’t have taken on and won against the Narn, without Shadow ships.
It’s “survival of those who best express our philosophy”: the Shadows deliberately have their thumb on the scales.
They’d probably justify it as a correction for the Vorlon interference, but it’s clearly devolved into a “pre-emptively balancing the scales” situation.
A great season-ender. I was on the edge of my seat. It’s the little details that stand out. The scene before Sheridan jumps where Anna slowly walks toward him, shadows in her wake, just screams menace. An excellent performance from Gilbert all around.
“If you go to Z’ha’dum, you will die.”
As advertising slogans go, I’d put it up there with “Soylent Green is People!”
I find myself wondering just how many ships the Shadows left on Mars, and why. There’s the one talked about here that triggered the IPX expedition, but there’s also the one in the episode where they take the White Star out to stop EarthGov from putting someone into another.
In the scene with Justin, Sheridan keeps hammering him with “Who are you,” which is the Vorlons’ question. Justin is extremely evasive on the matter. Not there was any question about it, but it’s a subtle indication of which way Sheridan is going to go.
This is the second season finale in a row with Sheridan in free fall at some point.
“This is the second season finale in a row with Sheridan in free fall at some point.”
Second of three, if you count “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.” <rimshot>
I’ll show myself out…
I always understood it to be the same Shadow vessel. The one that Kirkish saw getting unburied was the same one that they put the tracker in, IIRC.
How they put the tracker into the Shadow vessel is an interesting question, though.
The vessel was dormant at the time, wasn’t it? Anna also said they cut out pieces of it for study.
And the Shadow vessel the White Star destroyed was on Ganymede, not Mars.
I wasn’t sure if Demetrios was referring to the one destroyed by the White Star or the one uncovered and “rescued” in the flashbacks with Kirkish in the same episode, since he mentioned Mars.
Ganymede, of course. That’s why they wound up deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Still, it does imply a strong Shadow presence in the solar system in the distant past, which means both sides were meddling in Earth’s development.
Anna being ship-Anna is woven into the *Passing of the Technomages* tie in novels, which also ties heavily into this episode. (wonder why the Shadows dont just shoot down the White Star? A wizard did it.) The conditioning of being a ship is compared directly to the mind wipes prisoners are subjected to. The only reason she’s semi coherent here is with lots of retraining in being human, and a promise that they’d stick her back in.
G’kars closing speech will forever be seared into my brain the same way (you dropped a bit of one line). I will never not hear those words.
One reason is they want Sheridan to trust them, and shooting down his ride while it’s in comm range doesn’t really work in that direction. If they destroy his base and allies on B5, a single White Star isn’t going to do much of a difference in the conflict anyway.
Another concurrent reason may be the fear that “Vorlon technology even touching Z’ha’dum would do damage”, assuming Anna wasn’t lying about that: destroying the White Star in orbit carries the risk of Vorlon tech debris reaching the ground. If Sheridan tries to escape, they can always shoot the ship down when it’s further away from the planet.
And of course the ooc reason is that Sheridan needs the
EaglesWhite Star to bomb Z’ha’dum, so it’s protected by impenetrable plot armor. :)I think Radhil meant, why didn’t the Shadows shoot down the White Star while it was diving toward the city? Surely they had aerial defenses. Apparently the reason why is explained in the Technomage novel trilogy.
Ah, I misread that phrase completely. My bad.
One thing “Z’ha’dum” irrevocably does is to completely change the tone of Babylon 5 from here on out. The last two seasons are completely colored by the specter of death and finality. It’s an essential part of the story, but I can’t help but feel a bit depressed that the show becomes this somber final lap. Since this treads into spoiler territory, I’ll delve into it further when we get to “Falling Toward Apotheosis”.
As a season finale, it’s probably the highest, possibly second only to the series finale, “Sleeping in Light”. There is not a moment wasted here. Everything matters. And just like Londo’s clever deception in the recent “And the Rock Cried out, no Hiding Place”, this episode is another superbly plotted one where Sheridan keeps his cards to himself, with only Garibaldi knowing in advance the outcome. Sheridan the strategist is at play here, not missing one beat, staying ten steps ahead of everyone else.
The more I rewatch this one, the more I’m taken aback by the “Anna Sheridan” we get here. More terrifying than the actual Shadows flanking her as she reaches out one last time before Sheridan takes the leap. From what I understand in the Justin conversation, what killed Anna’s humanity was being placed inside the Shadow vessel. That warped her mind beyond repair – which actually makes Bester’s hopes for getting Carolyn back sadly misplaced.
The horde of Shadows surrounding B5 also drives home a major point: the station had some serious welcome plot armor throughout its run. Had the Shadows decided to wipe it out, it wouldn’t even have been a contest. Sheridan being a potential martyr the Shadows didn’t want was a clever way to keep things as they were for this long. The one thing I adore about the Justin scene is that he starts as the mellow salesman, but little by little the cracks start to show. When it becomes clear that Sheridan knows they changed Anna, Justin drops the act and becomes the authoritarian uncle demanding respect just before the Shadows try to flank Sheridan from outside the door. That’s the one moment where the Shadows and Vorlons find something in common.
Sheridan’s goodbye message to Delenn is just heartbreaking, as is her anguished reaction. And JMS gives us that masterful G’Kar ending narration for the season beautifully married to the sight of a nuked out Z’ha’dum. A perfect visual representation of the future being born out of pain. It’s so good that JMS even appropriated the term “Moments of Transition” as a title for a pivotal season 4 episode.
I always thought that the Telepaths in Ship Of Tears were on the way to wherever the Shadows were when the White Star rescued them. Yes, she integrated herself into the systems of med-bay, but I assumed that was a lot less harmful than being plugged into a Shadow vessel.
I don’t think they ever deborged them, at least I know they never mentioned it in the show, maybe a novel, though? We probably would have found out in Crusade, which beats Firefly for Best show destroyed by a clueless network by a photo finish, but I digress.
That’s right! I mixed things up, completely forgetting those telepaths hadn’t been merged with Shadow vessels (presumably). And no, they were never restored to their former selves, at least not in the show. I don’t know if Crusade would have addressed that though. Maybe they would have, but Crusade takes place after the Telepath War that happens post-B5 season 5. Whether the borgified telepaths would have played a part on that event is unknown.
Telepaths of sufficient power may jam this tech because they can reach whatever is left of the original person, and it’s implied that completing a connection with Shadow organic tech involves some degree of overwriting. The interface tech from Ship of Tears clearly overrides but does not erase the person. Someone not already hooked into a Shadow vessel might still be retrievable.
Of course, it might take an extremely powerful telepath to pull it off. Bester seems willing to accept hope.
Like all “B5” episodes (hell, like all television) this one has its rough edges but it still took my breath away, especially the climax. Anyone who has lost a significant other, for any reason, can empathize with the emotional turmoil Sheridan must have been feeling regardless that he had someone else in his life now and however he may have come to terms with his wife’s death. Grief is a tricky, sometimes insidious thing and it can rear its head long after one has thought they’d processed it. The fact that Anna is “off” only adds to the effect. She’s like the chilling version of an ex one might have a nightmare of years after the fact; for all purposes repulsive yet that doesn’t stop the pain. In fact it makes it worse. The person you loved and grieved over is back but as a monster that wants to steal your soul.
As for the dialogue about war and conflict advancing civilization, no, it doesn’t hold water but I kind of enjoyed the “Third Man ” echoes. Also, a certain sociopathic billionaire just recently tried to sell us that snake oil again so some people apparently really do buy inro it. Regardless, when the Shadow crept into the room the hair practically stood up on the back of my neck.
There are also some nice performances here. Melissa Gilbert has never been better and is genuinely creepy by the end as she screams. Jeff Corey is simply terrific and horrifying by virtue of underselling his performance with just a hint of manipulative menace. It’s a solid piece of work and a nice career bookend to his equally unsettling work in the classic “Outer Limits” epidode, ‘O.B.IT.’ The fact that Corey was once a blacklisted actor during the McCarthy era gives added value to his casting here.
I personally loved when this show risked ridiculousness by going full operatic at times. It didn’t always work but when it did it was thrilling. Sometimes I just need that big swing for the fences in my genre television.
You beat me to the Third Man reference. It would be really interesting to have Morden deliver that same soliloquy.
The music that plays as Anna approaches John on the cliff overlooking the city on Z’ha’dum is one of my favorite pieces of music Franke wrote for all of B5.
As a point of interest, it’s approximately the same music used when Garibaldi witnesses the alternate timeline fall of B5 in “War Without End, Pt. 1”.
It’s also harmonically related to the Requiem for the Line, which was used in the Season 3 opening & closing credits, as well as Sinclair’s flashbacks to the Line in “And the Sky Full of Stars” and elsewhere. Absolutely love that music. And in the same scene but earlier when Sheridan gets his first view of the Shadow capital there’s a wicked electric guitar lick that I love.
I was really struck that they didn’t even try to use a telepath on Anna. She offered to submit to any test. Okay, great, we’d like to scan you to confirm who you are and, while we’re at it, what you’ve been up to. The alliance is openly recruiting telepaths, Delenn can summon Minbari telepaths seemingly at will, and they just deployed a bunch of them last week. So why not at least try it? Make Anna contrive an excuse or have it not work on her or something.
I wondered that too. I think a telepath would’ve seen through her instantly. Sheridan was so insistent about trying every conceivable test, so why not that one?
Kudos to Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam for directing this excellent episode!
“J. Michael Straczynski has said online that Justin is the “man in-between” that Kosh warned Sheridan about in the dream he sent him in “All Alone in the Night,” but he’s also said online that Sheridan himself is the man in-between, for reasons that will be clear at the top of season four. So who the hell knows…”
I think both interpretations can be true simultaneously (although I favor the first one).
“Part of me is disappointed that this wasn’t Sheridan’s last appearance. I know that the notion of him going all Gandalf the White and coming back from
Khazad-dumZ’ha’dum is important going forward, but I’m also just really tired of people going on suicide missions and not dying.”I’ve sometimes wondered if Morden’s speech claiming that all of humanity’s greatest accomplishments came about due to conflict was supposed to be a nod to Orson Welles’ monologue from the 1949 movie The Third Man…
Boxleitner does give a terrific performance here, right from the start, and it’s always nice to see Melissa Gilbert, but I wish she weren’t so obviously not really Anna from the moment she opened her mouth. To say Anna’s “affect is just a little bit off” is a major understatement.
I agree that Sheridan sacrificing himself to nuke the Shadows would’ve been a pretty ballsy way to end the season. I wondered at first if that’s what had happened, but there wouldn’t have been any reason for him to jump from the ledge if that were the case, so it’s not really a spoiler to read that it wasn’t.
The “jump” scene had a trope that always bugs me — a character is told urgently “You have to act now!” and then they just stand there staring dramatically for 20-30 seconds before acting. Just once I’d like to see them be too late because they hesitated.
Just pretend that time is dilating so that the show can visually communicate across multiple shots what would actually be a rapid internal process. When a book does it (by having a character make a split-second decision but extending it across 30 seconds of text), we generally accept it because it isn’t “happening in real time.”
Couldn’t agree more. There’s about 20 seconds between the “Jump now!” and the actual jumping, and it feels muuuuch longer. The weird thing is, I don’t see why they couldn’t wait until right before Sheridan jumps to play Kosh’s warning.
As someone who gets antsy at heights I can totally understand that a gut reaction to “jump” while standing on an abyss that has no visible bottom could cause a 20 second freeze while the animal brain goes WTF! Then the rational mind takes over and you jump.
Yes, perhaps, but the point is that if it had really been so urgent to “jump now,” that 20-second hesitation should have been fatal, and it’s a contrivance of the writing and directing that it wasn’t. If you’re going to present something as urgent, then it’s a copout if hesitation has no effect.
Or, you could say that Kosh, who is very old and has known humanity for millennia and has been with Sheridan the whole time since Kosh’s death (“I have always been here.”) could have chosen any moment to give his “Jump” command, but accounted for the fact that he knew Sheridan would naturally hesitate.
Anyway, the trope generally is pretty annoying. Here’s another example of the “time-dilation” of the medium that Narsham described above, from the same universe. In the final book of the Centauri Prime trilogy Legions of Fire, when we again see the scene of Londo and G’Kar strangling each other, the internal thoughts of the two principals in that scene that probably only took 30-60 seconds in real time are stretched across like 5 written pages in the book.
I’ve always loved Justin’s introductory speech because it ties in so well to the philosophy of the show. We’ve known for a long time that the Vorlons ask ‘Who are you?’ and the Shadows ask ‘What do you want?’. Well it makes complete sense that when a Shadow agent is asked the Vorlon question, it almost terrifies them. Yes, Justin’s answer is complete nonsense, and that is 100% deliberate. And even then, Justin answers Sheridan’s question with his own questions ‘Who decides this? Who decides that?’, and then Sheridan responds and Justin’s reponse to not to give his own response, but affirms Sheridan’s response that allows him to answer the initial question without answering it at all. I imagine it would be something similar if you asked someone like Sebastian ‘What do you want?’
One of the things I used to discuss in my Dungeons and Dragons games (bear with me) was the inherent hypocrisy of evil and what about character that was sincere in his absurd beliefs. In real life, virtually everyone who claims to believe in a superior being or survival of the fittest are only interested in those ideals as long as they benefited them. One conversation was inspired by Louise Simonson’s Apocalypse, which was a bit less of a ridiculous caricature than he’d later become.
The Shadows were an obvious comparison for me because they sincerely believe they are teachers and find fulfillment in helping other races but they want to teach the most violent destructive idea possible (that no longer works with post-nuclear weapons), that war and conflict are a civilizing motivational force. That greed is good. Empire building is awesome. The kinds of beliefs that are pretty common all across the world.
The thing is they’re absolutely hypocrites about this because they’re just GIVING AWAY weapons and super-tech to the Mimbari and Earth. Earth isn’t earning any of this, they’re becoming client states of the Shadows. But it’s not a secret master plan of the Shadows, the Shadows are actually blind to their own hypocrisy in this from their own perspective. They’ve bought into their own lies and fully believe this is a mission of civilizing the primitives and uplifting them versus any actual self-interest.
It’s similar with the Vorlons who absolutely believe they’re teaching peace, love, and enlightenment while being violent genocidal bigots.
It’s two very different perspectives on colonialism attitudes with neither really wanting what other races have but both wanting to dominate the other galaxy’s cultures and primarily viewing the other as rivals.
I seem to be in the minority in that I have never been all that enthusiastic about Melissa Gilbert’s performance. Personally I find her affect to be more than “just a little bit off”. I find it gratingly robotic and it makes the first Act less pleasant to watch for me than it otherwise would be.
But I don’t want to overstate that. She does a decent job; I just don’t particularly enjoy watching her in that role. And the rest of the performances in this episode, from both the cast and the guests, are solid. The emotional payload of the episode is delivered effectively. I still find the balcony scene riveting, and G’Kar’s coda is pretty much perfectly delivered.
It says something that, after all this time, I still come out of this season-ender wanting to hit play on the next episode.
Good old Sheridan. He never goes anywhere without a backup PPG, and more importantly, a backup nuke (or two).
The only things I didn’t like about the episode was the jarring tone of the little tea party, and the probability that we would find that Sheridan was only “mostly dead” when the new season began.
Keith mentions “a couple of Shadows enter the room” but doesn’t note they were flanking Morden. Sheridan takes out the Shadows on each side of Morden but not Morden himself.
I remember the scene well. We were watching the episode at a friend’s house, there were 6 or 8 of us total if I recall. First time through (live broadcast) we were instructed not to comment other than a laugh or gasp. Then we immediately watched it again on videotape. When Sheridan fired, the entire room immediately burst out with “I shot the Shadows” to the tune of “I Shot the Sheriff”.
Half the room immediately continued with, “but I didn’t shoot the middleman”. At which point we all collapsed on the floor laughing.
One of my favorite memories!
One of the things I love about B5 is that it nicely mixed drama, action, and humor. The humor in particular helped with what was a times pretty dark plots and character arcs, That made this episode stand out as one in which there was virtually no humor that I remember. The story moved along in an intense, relentless fashion, and much as I like the occasional humor it really worked *not* to have it this episode. This episode did a nice job of pushing the Shadow story to the next level as we finally got to find out why they were doing what they were. As someone happily married I was touched by Sheridan’s pain as he realized that Anna had *not* really come back to him. Oh and as some have commented, Sheridan does indeed like using nukes against tough foes, as against the Minbari ship years ago, here at Z’ha’dum and later in S4 in a battle I will not spoil here. The episode kept my attention every minute!