A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

Isn't "The Face of the Enemy" next? That's my favorite episode of the season, and the series. Not to unreasonably raise expectations or anything...

 

Well there's running and then there's running. The idea of corporations running the world isn't so preposterous when you think of it in terms of influence and power. Who owns what, who can apply leverage to certain politicians etc.
It's not the same thing as a big monolithic evil shadow government putting nanites in toothpaste and using the brainwaves of household pets to do market surveys. It's just an extension of the simple fact that money=power and that a weak democratic government is easily manipulated the people that have more money than them.
The fact that Clark was able to do what he did shows that the megacorps aren't in control, at least not after the Morden and the Shadows got involved. Of course the upper echelons of IPX are mixed up in it on some level, most of the other corporations have apparantly been cut out of the inner circle.

Of course, it should be pointed out that just because Edgars believes it to be so, doesn't mean it's a fact. So take it with a grain of salt. The megacorps are a significant power in the EA, but they're not the only players, not by a long shot.

 

Same here. I'll say more about it when Ben watches it, but right now, I will say I loved the style in which this episode was filmed.

 

Well?? We're waiting...

Trivia about "The Exercise of Vital Powers"--At a convention one time, Andreas Kasulas (G'Kar) and Peter Jurasik (Londo) had played a joke on JMS where, knowing that JMS was nervous about public speaking, they conspired with the audience to not clap, not laugh at anything JMS did for about 10 minutes. JMS vowed revenge and after waiting several months, he put out the first draft of this script. In that draft, The stress of everything going on with his planet and people caused G'Kar to undergo a change...to female. He goes to Londo's quarters and forgives him. In bed. All six.

Everybody came to JMS and told him what a great joke it was but he replied that he didn't have time to write scripts that weren't going to be used. He even sent Andreas out for casts so that the prosthetics department could craft breasts for the new female G'Kar. Only after dragging it out for several days did JMS publish the true script.

Jan

 

It's a cliffhanger! I'll be back in September.














































Fine, I'll post it now. Apologies for the delay, it has been an odd few days, and when I finally write my post about the episode I find that the site has died! It's like the gods really want to stop me from harshly criticising this awful, tacky, derivative episode.















































The Face of the Enemy (****½)

Fantastic episode, utterly riveting. Only one thing held this back from a perfect score and that was Bester's "And now Mr Garibaldi, let me explain my brilliant plan to you in detail" scene. The scene was great in many respects, very enjoyable to watch and it does all fit together nicely, but it's one of those situations where the character is there explaining past events to the audience. Maybe it would have been less noticeable if I had been watching this season over the course of a few months, but I've been watching it over the course of a few weeks so he was rehashing material that was still fresh in my memory.

Otherwise this was an awesome episode. I loved the scene where Sheridan is captured, I thought it was a great portrayal of the disorientation he must have been feeling. It also reminds me of my first visit to a nightclub, except the people that beat me up were female. Meanwhile, Edgars plans to infect all the telepaths with a magic virus that will force them to do his bidding. I don't agree with Edgars' methods, obviously, but he does make a strong case for his point of view, he's just trying to protect the freedoms the Psi Corps are trying to deny to the mundanes.

Now everybody hates Garibaldi and Sheridan is in prison. And it all happened so fast. I can't wait to watch the next episode. (I already have watched the next episode while the site was down, but I'll leave that line in there for posterity.)

 

Well, to be fair you have been asking for exactly that for at least the last three pages, no?

As you say, the exposition is a little heavy when you watch it on DVD, but this show was made for weekly viewing and back then JMS wasn't comfortable with the idea of the now SoP of sticking a "previously on [Show Name Here]" recap before every episode. That's why you occasionally get the odd exposition dump to refresh the audience's memory.

What I did appreciate about how they handled Garibaldi's arc this season is that while he's defiantly had his brain messed with, it was still sort of "him" all the way up until the end. It's not as simple as "the Psi Corps made him go evil", they just loaded the dice in their favour a little...ok more than a little. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I'm glad they didn't undermine the drama of the betrayal when Bester released the "real" Garibaldi.

Trivia: The Psi Cop that Bester is seen talking to in the flashback was none other than Harlan Ellison, veteran sci-fi author and B5's conceptual consultant (no I'm not sure exactly what that means either.) He had previously shown up as the voice of "Sparky the Computer", that AI with the attitude that got switched on when they rebooted the station's computer back in season 3. He'll have another vocal cameo in Season 5; I'll be sure to point it out when you get there.

 

It's the same thing as "Creative Consultant" except the studios weren't keen on that credit at the time so Joe or Doug came up with "Conceptual." Basically, Harlan made comments where he felt he needed to, a la "that would make more sense if Sheridan liked oranges instead of lemons." "Let's see more male nudity in this episode" "Wouldn't it be cool if the Shadows had a planet killer?"

 

Ah, "As you know," the official opening phrase of Babylon 5.

 

I was asking for an explanation, not exposition.


Intersections in Real Time (*****)

When I saw the DVD menu I worried about this episode because all the images showed Sheridan's interrogation, so I feared that's all this episode would be. I don't have fond memories of Comes the Inquisitor and I thought that this episode was going to be similar in style to that one. Well, it was similar, but this episode was much better. By the end of the teaser I was sold that this episode might be good. Luckily for me, I was right.

This is the sort of thing I like to see, two men in a room together engaged in psychological warfare, never quite sure where it is all heading. I like the interrogator, at times he reminded me of René Aberjonois, I prefer him to Jack the Ripper because this guy rarely inflicts physical pain, he prefers to attack Sheridan's mind. And he made some good points about our perception of truth. For example, the things that he tried to get Sheridan to confess to were all true; Sheridan did conspire with aliens against the Earth government, he did steal Earth's property, he is responsible for the deaths of Earth Alliance officers. We all know why Sheridan did these things and we know that ultimately he is in the right, but he did perform those actions, and if he performed those actions why wont he sign the confession admitting as such? Because they'll kill him. Or will they? They might let him go so as to prove to the citizens of Earth that he is alive, that might be sensible. Who knows what EarthGov really intends to do with Sheridan? I don't.

I really enjoyed this episode even though it doesn't move the various plots along, that's actually one of this episode's strengths. Putting a b-story over this would have ruined the feeling that we're trapped in the room with Sheridan. I had feared there might have been a bit of a deus ex machina at the end as Ivanova rescues him somehow, luckily that didn't happen and instead Sheridan is put in another room to go through all of this again! I don't know what that means, but neither does Sheridan, we're both confused. Which is good. I think. What time is it anyway?

Scott Bakula: 60

 

It's actually my least favorite episode of the show.

See I think it is more of the same as Inquisitor ... Just worse. Guy just prattles on and on about some nonsensical garbage--more JMS overwrriting. And in his case he wasn't a very good actor. I fall asleep half way through. Actually, now I just skip it completely.

 

There was originally some other stuff not involving Sheridan filmed with this episode, but it was moved into the next episode when that one ran short by 8 minutes and this one ran long by 8 minutes.

 

Well you got both. Call it a bonus!

This is easily one of my favourite episodes, right up there with "Severed Dreams" and "Sleeping in Light". I do have something of a weakness for "contained" stories like this that strips away everything else and is just a few people sitting in a room talking, yet still managing to generate drama and compelling dialogue.
I think I've mentioned before how I can see this episode being easily adapted for the stage. Minimal set, a cast roster you can count on one hand, natural act breaks and engaging dialogue. It doesn't even need to be about "B5". Replace the word "alien" with "foreign" (yes, I know they mean the same thing) make the Drazi a normal human in a dishevelled "foreign" looking uniform and it could just as well be taking place on airstrip one, next door to room 101. Of course that last be shouldn't be too surprising given the number of Orwellian references the EA civil war arc.

 

Intersections is my favorite ep of the series. One of my favorite hours of television ever.

 

Supposedly, Intersections was originally intended to be the Season 4 finale before it was truncated. That would have been one heck of a cliffhanger.


I wonder what it says about Sheridan that he failed to have Garibaldi checked for telepathic tampering. The circumstances of his dissapearance and reappearance just scream "I've been brainwashed." Once he began acting strange it couldn't have been more obvious if he had a 50-foot-tall flashing neon "I'm brainwashed" sign strapped to his forehead. Yet Sheridan never has Lyta, the most powerful telepath in the galaxy, check him for signs of manipulation.

One one hand, it shows that he sticks to his ethics (unauthorized telepathic scans are wrong). On the other hand, if shows that he's prejudiced against telepathy (such screenings are a legitimate security measure when your enemies have such abilities, but he doesn't see it that way), that he's a really crappy friend (he let Garibaldi walk around brainwashed without helping him), and a total moron (how the hell did he miss the giant flashing neon brainwashed sign).

 

Room 17, probably not coincidentally, is Room 101 minus 84, and "Intersections" was the 84th episode of Babylon 5.

 

Damn, that's pretty oblique. I wonder how much of that was actually intentional on JMS's part. The former I can believe but the latter must almost certainly be a coincidence.

I was actually thinking of more direct references like the Ministry of Peace and a few others I may get into after GB has seen the season finale.

I can never remember if the season was intended to end with this episode or the previous one and season 5 would have begun with this one.

RE: Garibaldi - Keep in mind that when he was found, the assumption was the Shadows had nicked off with him with the intention of doing to him what they did to Anna. Franklin even specifically tests him with that in mind. The assumption must have been that they got to him before that happened. With Z'ha'dum freshly nuked, it'd be logical to assume it'd take their servants a while to relocate the CPU implanting facilities to a more secure site and that that's where they would have been transporting Michael before they intercepted.

As for having Lyta dig around, remember that in the absence of a court order, a scan can only be legally performed with the subject's permission. With no charge pressed by or against Garibaldi there would have been no justification to ordering one and one imagines part of his adjusted personality would make him even less disinclined to submit to a scan than normal (his inclination being pretty damn low at the best of times.) That aside, at no point did he display any behaviour recognised as drastically out of character to give reason to suspect his wetware had been messed with.

Zack certainly had his suspicions and even tried to convince Lyta to "poke around" to see if he was "alright upstairs", which she flatly rejected as a violation of due process, went against everything she'd been taught to say nothing of Michael's rights to privacy.
For Sheridan's part, he stated pretty openly to Delenn that he didn't understand Garibaldi's behaviour, but put it down to some failure on his part and was doubting his own competence in maintaining personal relationships and making personality judgements. With good reason too; remember how blind-sided he was what Franklin admitted his stim addiction? Or how long it took him to talk with his sister about Anna?

 

"Intersections" is a masterpiece.

 

You see, that's where the problem lies. In that case, Babylon 5 was no longer a part of the EA, so EA laws no longer applied to B5. The concepts of legal and illegal existed only as far as Sheridan allowed them to exist, and he certainly could have amended the rules where it was reasonable to do so. Given how incredibly effective psychic manipulation is, it should be a matter of standard policy to have key personnel tested for it, often.

When you join the military you give up a great deal of control over yourself and such routine scans are no different, in principle, from inoculating your troops against known biowarfare agents. It is well within the real of what if reasonable and necessary. The need to not get everyone killed by brainwashed spies, saboteurs, and bombers far outweighs any individuals privicy rights in this case.

It's not like it would be difficult for loyalist forces to smuggle a high level telepath or two onto the station hidden in a refugee ship. It only takes one to systematically turn the entire command staff into shinny happy loyalists who are ashamed of their rebellion.

But even if you dismiss the reasonableness of such prophylactic scans, there is another issue to consider. Any sane military commander would have ordered Garibaldi to have psychiatric counseling.

Mandatory counseling is mandatory, and is the policy of most modern military and police forces in such situation. Garibaldi was a POW. He wouldn't have had any recourse against talking to a shrink. And given that telepaths would naturally make bstter psychiatrists than mundanes, it makes sense to have military POWs see telepathic shrinks. This brings us back to the fact that Garibaldi should have been scanned for his own good, if not to make sure that he isn't a brainwashed spy then at the very least to treat him for PTSD. There is no way that a military force with access to telepathic PTSD treatment wouldn't make it mandatory, given how crippling it can be. Either way the truth would have come out.

However, the EA has laws against telepaths serving in Earthforce, a fact which would restrict the number of telepathic psychiatrists that military instillation have access to, which is merely a sign of anti-telepath prejudice in the EA, a prejudice that Sheridan seems to share, even if he isn't aware of it.

 

They broke away not because they thought it'd be a lark to throw the law book out the window, they did it because Clark and EarthGov violated the EA constitution. In that sense, B5 as a state sees itself as adhering to the established laws an ethics of the Alliance, it's the buggers in Earthdome who are making the rules up for themselves.

Also, there's a very good reason why telepaths aren't used in the way you suggest. Mundanes don't trust them and have a long history of trying to kill ones they suspect of playing silly buggers. The only thing that's kept them safe up until this point is Psi Corps. If there was even a hint of teeps actively and openly brainwashing public figures, they'd be hunted down and slaughtered and they know it. Also remember that a teep needs line of sight and even a mundane would feel such a deep and invasive scan. Plus there's the fat that a full reprogram takes time. Several hours of effort and concentration, even for a highly skilled P12. Which brings you to the next problem; access.
An important person is rarely unguarded or unwatched. A teep may be able to distract, divert or even neutralise a guard, maybe two if they're very good but they can't food a securcam and any mysterious malfunctions will quickly be investigated. Not enough time do do a full wipe and reprogram.
Finally, if even they pull it off, if even one high profile person's personality dose a 180 and starts acting like a Stepford Wife then the jig will most assuredly be up. If a whole bunch do it at once it'll be paranoia and lynchings in the street.

There's a very good reason why Edgars was prepared to do what he had planned. A government that gives that kind of power over to telepaths is signing it's own death warrant.

 

JMS has said both at various times. A couple of times, he said "Intersections" was supposed to be the season finale, but at least once (I think in one of the script books) he said that it would have been "Face of the Enemy". It's possible that he hadn't yet firmly decided which it would be at the time that he was forced to condense the Season 4 arc.

Of course, it's also possible that neither episode would have existed in quite its present form, and that some sort of hybrid would have been the season finale.