Babylon 5: S01E01-2

[goblinpasswords]

Here’s the thing: Babylon 5 is just about my favorite thing in the whole universe.  It is one of my favorite TV shows. It’s one of my favorite stories in any medium. It contains several of my favorite fictional characters.  My mom showed it to me out of parental duty to make sure I saw probably the best scifi show ever aired, and I think she was right. I rewatch it at least once every two years, and more frequently for the last few years, yearly.  It’s some of my go to depression media: Even when I don’t care about anything else, I care about B5.

We’re under a quarantine, I’m recovering from major surgery, politics are dire, and it’s time to watch B5.

I’m going to be rewatching the series and sharing my thoughts about every episode!  I already do that when I rewatch B5, except I do it privately at friends, so now I’m making it public and better punctuated!  Some episodes will get more than others; I have more to say about some plots than others. You should probably be ready for spoilers for the entire series from the start, because one of my favorite things about B5 is that it builds, it suggests, it foreshadows, and I’m not going to be able to resist watching something in season one and going, “Wow, they already had the groundwork set for that shit in season four!”  But I’m not gonna explain the like entire plot of everything the moment it shows up.

Midnight on the Firing Line

How do I even start?  A plot synopsis, and then the individual things I think are most important.  I feel like I’ve got to give y’all some basis to start with, before I just get into screaming about my favorite characters.

Midnight on the Firing Line is about a Narn attack and occupation of a Centauri agricultural colony.  Ambassador G’kar of the Narn initially dismisses it as revenge for the Centauri occupation of the Narn homeworld.  The Centauri government declines to do anything, citing the colony as strategically unimportant and too far to mount a counterattack, so Londo takes it on himself to try to manipulate the League of Unaligned Worlds, the space UN, to take action against the Narn for him, but G’kar calls his bluff and reveals that, according to the Narn, the colony asked them for aid and this is all a big misunderstanding, and anyway, the colony used to belong to the Narn before the Centauri conquered them.  The Narn are definitely lying, but the Centauri choose not to act, the League dismisses charges, and Londo feels powerless. Londo tries to take a gun and attack G’kar, but is talked down by head of security, Garibaldi, because it would mean nothing but the certain death of those colonists.

Meanwhile, raiders in the sector are becoming more powerful and more daring in attacking ships, which the station is left to investigate.  B5 catches a raider ship and discovers that the Narn government has been selling weapons to raiders, because the Narn will sell to anybody.  Additionally, they find proof that Londo is completely right about the colony attack, and Sinclair blackmails G’kar: Take this to your homeworld and fix things, or I turn it over to the council.  The colony is freed.

A commercial telepath on the station, Talia Winters, has been trying to contact Susan Ivanova, second in command, but Ivanova avoids her.  Ivanova at the end of the episode explains her issue: Her mother was a telepath who, upon being discovered by PsyCorps, was drugged out of her powers until she eventually committed suicide.  Ivanova hates PsyCorps and everything Talia, as a member, represents.  

Earth’s presidential election is wrapping up, and Luis Santiago is elected president of Earth, which will be very relevant.

Who are our major players?

From the humans, we meet Jeffrey Sinclair, commander of B5 and reasonable, stoic, respectable authority figure, a man who fought in the Earth-Minbari War but holds nothing but respect for his former enemies.  We meet Garibaldi, head of security, fairly irreverent flirt, and Duck Dodgers fan. We meet Susan Ivanova, second in command, new to the station. And we meet Talia Winters, commercial telepath, even newer to the station, who Ivanova is avoiding at all costs.

For the aliens, we have Ambassador G’kar of the Narn, who grew up in slavery and under the Centauri occupation of his homeworld.  We have Londo Mollari, ambassador for the Centauri, aging nationalist and fierce patriot, and his attache, Vir, an awkward, unsure young man.  We have Delenn, ambassador for the Minbari, barely seen in this episode, but reasonable, pleading for people to reconsider violence. We have Kosh, the mysterious ambassador of the equally mysterious Vorlon.

We establish that the Minbari are honorable.  The Centauri are liars. The Narn are vicious.  God, what fun we’re gonna have exploring just how true those things are.

But okay here starts the fun stuff:

Londo and G’kar are my favorite characters, and a lot of everything I write is going to be about my feelings about them.  Londo establishes early on in this episode that his hatred of G’kar isn’t just political: It’s personal and spiritual. The Centauri have prophetic dreams about their deaths, and Londo has dreamed his entire life of being an old man, twenty years older than he is now, with his hands wrapped around a Narn’s neck as that Narn strangles him to death.  When he met G’kar, he recognized him from the dreams. Londo explains to Sinclair almost gleefully that he’s destined to die by G’kar’s hands, seems reassured and bolstered by the fact that their hatred isn’t just anything, but is predetermined by fate. I don’t hesitate to say they’re soulmates. They rotate around each other for the entire show like a binary star system or boxers in the ring.  

They are the emotional core of this show for me, and I think there is a pretty distinct difference in watching the show as someone who is watching for the Earth centric plots and someone watching for the Narn and Centauri plots.  I’m watching for the Narn and Centauri.

The show does interesting things with how the Narn and Centauri are played off each other.  The Narn (and G’kar) are very much the villains in this episode and really in a lot of season 1 interactions.  Not only did the Narn attack an unarmed civilian colony, the framing of the episode puts us on Londo’s side. Londo is one of the first characters we see, and we first see him having a funny, friendly interaction with someone.  We see him much more throughout the episode. G’kar is in other people’s scenes or in scenes that pit him against Londo, but Londo is the focus of most of his scenes. We even see Londo cry about what’s happening, he’s so stressed and at wit’s end for what to do.

And despite all that, G’kar tells the council the Narn act for, “Justice, not hatred.  We have no desire to start a war,” but Londo tells Sinclair, “If it’s the last thing I do, if it’s the last breath I take, there will be war.  This I swear to you, Commander. This I swear.” And that’s something that this show is going to come back to time and time again. G’kar wants revenge, but Londo wants a war.  G’kar’s revenge would be satisfied, he thinks, if his people had their land and resources back, and if the people who were responsible for their suffering died.  Londo wants a war, with new destruction, new bystanders. G’kar’s way more justified and way more reasonable in it than Londo has ever been, but the show is framed to make us like Londo and distrust G’kar in the start, and it’s going to do really interesting things with playing with them and reversing it as the show goes on.

Garibaldi’s a character I don’t actually like much on his own, but I love his friendship with Londo.  They have a friendly, joking conversation about the Centauri trying to take advantage of Earth on first contact, Londo plays at apologetic and offers to let Garibaldi slice open his wrists in recompense, Garbaldi “reminds” Londo that Centauri don’t have major arteries in their wrists.  They’re fun together, and it’s important to establish that people on the station do actually like Londo, at least some of them.

I have a lot of feelings about Talia and Susan, but that’s for later.

Soul Hunter

A new human character (Dr. Stephen Franklin, xenobiologist, new head of medical on station) arrives on a transport!  A disturbance at the jumpgate turns out to be a damaged, unidentified ship with an unconscious alien of unknown race on it.  Turns out, Delenn knows what he is: He’s a soul hunter, a species that collects the souls of dying important figure to preserve them from dissolving on death.  Delenn of the Minbari is especially distressed and angry at his presence, because the Minbari believe in reincarnation and that soul hunters are lessening the Minbari by trying to take their greatest souls out of the cycle.  Franklin, our new doctor, is a skeptic, which is something we will revisit. Turns out this soul hunter has gone rogue and is going around killing people instead of waiting for natural deaths, and another soul hunter turns up to deal with him, but not before the first one attempts (and fails) to kill Delenn.  The souls he’s stolen rise up and distract him, giving Sinclair time to stop him killing Delenn. Delenn steals the first one’s entire collection of crystalized souls and breaks them, apparently freeing the souls, if the souls are real.

Last episode really introduced Londo and G’kar, but this one introduces Delenn, who’s going to be another of our pillars of this show.  Look, humans are important too, but... aliens.

Delenn, honorable, arguing temperance and nonviolence to the Narn last episode, this episode sees an unconscious alien, recognizes his species, and immediately grabs the head of security’s blaster and tries to kill a guy.  I love her so much. Overall, she is vicious and perfectly willing to threaten harm or cause harm if it means doing the thing she thinks is right, and she’s not really willing to hear another person’s opinions on what is right.  She acts nice and apologizes to Sinclair for attempting to murder a guy, then goes back to threaten the guy verbally, which like, he’s stealing the souls of her people, but Delenn doesn’t fuck around and she doesn’t always tell the truth, and that’s important ot know about her.

This is the first time we see someone who doesn’t like the Minbari describe them, when the soul hunter says, “Minbari, pale, bloodless, look in their eyes and see nothing but mirrors.”  So this is a character we’re not supposed to trust, he’s an antagonist, but we’ve got the seed planted that the Minbari are two faced, are not so honorable as they want us to think.

We also find out that Delenn isn’t as honest as we think when the soul hunter calls her out:  “They called you Satai Delenn of the Grey Council. Curious... Curious. What is one of the great leaders of the Minbari doing here, playing ambassador?”  So Delenn is, or was, a member of the Grey Council, a position of leadership among the Minbari. This will be very significant! He also, while trying to take her soul, sees something she did and says, “You’d plan such a thing?  You’d do such a thing? Incredible!” and that is some delicious foreshadowing. The soul hunter tells Sinclair, “She is Satai! They’re using you!” and god my heart cannot take not immediately spilling every aspect of this plot.

This is also a good episode for establishing how spiritual we’re gonna get in here.  Last episode, we had prophetic dreams and telepaths, but here we’re getting into the nature of souls, of reincarnation, and we’re gonna keep coming back to topics like that over the course of the show.  We’re never going to have a really solid answer on the fundamental nature of this universe, but we’re going to respect the fact that the Minbari believe these things, and that it is a very real violation of their culture to prevent their souls from staying in the cycle.  It’s significant to them, whether or not the rules of the universe JMS wrote say it’s strictly true (and I think word of god is that it’s not true.)

Delenn is, like Londo, a very complicated character by the end of the show.  She’s got a lot of deeper similarities with Londo that I should save for later, really.  There’s a reason she’s the third pillar of the show for me. Right now, she’s a mystery, and she’s such a fun one to work out.

Also:

“You’re a pessimist.”
“I am Russian, doctor.  We understand these things.”

I love Ivanova.