^ The Vorlons stood for order, and the Shadows were all about chaos. So that's why I view the former as good and the latter as evil. I'm funny that way.
They were both about manipulating others to do what they wanted. The Vorlons decided what they would or wouldn't 'allow' (remember how they murdered Deathwalker?), kidnapped and created telepaths from all of the entient races to use as weapons, kidnapped others to use as inquisitors/torturers. And, of course, played on the whole 'angelic being' thing so they could manipulate everybody through their religious beliefs. Order isn't intrinsically good. It's just tidy. Re: The apocalypse box...I seem to recall a theory that it's a prison of some sort. I don't recall why and I don't think it's something that came from JMS. It does seem to fit, though. Jan
It's better than the alternative. The thought of Gideon (or anyone else) actually being trapped in that thing is indeed quite creepy. As is the fact that its previous "owner" killed himself to get away from it...
I didn't make the connection until now, but I wonder if the box has any relationship to that entity in TLT? I recall when the DVD came out that my personal theory was that it was a fragment of some renegade Vorlon. An apocalypse box escapee perhaps? On the other hand, it's a big universe and we already know there are older and more mysterious things out there than just the Shadows and the Vorlons. Between Soul Hunters, that empathic-vampire thing in the sphere and the Thirdspace aliens there's plenty of mystery to go around. Is it? Perfect order leads to stagnation. As the Shadows put it, the Vorlons are frozen in time, an evolutionary dead-end. Of course perfect chaos is just as bad. It limits development since nothing can gain any real progress before the ant hills get knocked over again. I think it's very telling that although the Shadow's cycles of chaos had supposedly carried on for many thousands of years, the most advanced younger races were the Minbari & Centauri. The latter apparantly becoming a space faring race just after the last war (possibly even taking advantage of the aftermath) and the former being very new on the scene when it kicked off. Aside from marginal races like the Soul Hunters and the Drakh, no true (non-First One) interstellar power appears to have survived the wars that preceded the last one. Bottom line, either option is equally bad taken to their logical extremes. The trick is in finding the path between stagnation and self annihilation. The impression I was left with was that the box killed him. Not directly, of course, but it appeared to gave him just the right amount of information to get himself killed. It knows things and it lies. Indeed, my original idea was that it was a sci-fi reinterpretation of a Jinn or some other mythical type of mischievous and malevolent spirit.