Babylon 5 - I'm finally going to do it

That's a really interesting viewpoint to me as a non-Christian or non-anything, but I will say I regularly attend my parents' church when I'm home because I love singing in the choir, which to me is just another kind of spirituality.

It's kind of unique how B5 approached religion given JMS's well-documented stance on the subject...I feel like "Believers" isn't necessarily an anti-religion tale (other than being an anti-SO fundamentalist you won't take your kid to a a doctor tale, which has popped up recently in modern news,) and that eventually the show took it even further with the brilliant "Passing Through Gethsemane" in season 3.

I've recently been making an effort (IRL, not on TV ) to study a variety of major world religions, and as much as I love shows like (nu)BSG or Lost, Babylon 5 is still the only sci-fi show I know of that at least TRIES to address our modern religions. Lord () knows that never happened on TNG or the other Trek shows.

 

"Believers" was the episode of B5 that convinced me the show was worth watching. It gave us a Star Trek type moral dilemma, and then a real kick in the teeth when basically the worst possible solution comes to pass. I still think of it as one of B5's better hours, particularly since Franklin is easily the best acted of the human characters.

That really depends how you define address, doesn't it? "Believers", like all of those shows (and more) deals with a fictituous alien faith to make a point about a real human one (rather obviously, Jehovah's Witnesses and the like).

Star Trek's done this in pretty much every incarnation, as have both versions of BSG (the earlier one is notable in its favourable view of a quasi-Christian worldview), and so on.

As for real human religion in space opera... well, there's always Firefly. And egad, Voyager. Both take a real religion and then give it to main character, and then proceed to be real hazy about the specifics so they can fictionalize it.

And then there's "Bread and Circuses", a TOS episode that drops a bombshell - parallel planetary development is one thing, but parallel Christs? There's an issue unsurprisingly nobody ever touched again.

Bottom line, while B5's approach is certainly very interesting for a space opera it's not exactly out of the blue.

 

That's probably why I'm not as angry about Believers than I was before. Overall, B5 handled religion quite well and fairly. This one, speaking as someone who does go to church each week, just felt over the top I guess.

 

The whole point is that it was betrayal. Something that he couldn't rationalize by saying "well no one could have saved him anyway." It had to be, "I can easily save him, but I'm not going to because I deserve Delenn and not him." That's where his thoughts were.

Sinclair was pretty pissed at him about it.

He didn't remember the whole event until the Minbari made him remember with the Triluminary (it's in the first comic, In Darkness Find Me). It was if he found out before they were ready that the Grey Council was afraid of. To quote jms:

I figure she died on Earth Force One, since she said she was going to protect the President, and we see that didn't work out. Or she was distraught after Santiago's demise and left Earth Force.

 

If Kemmer died, it would have been nice to hear some sort of reaction from Garibaldi. As it stands, Survivors is an entirely throw-away episode for me. Garibaldi's alcoholism is already established, and better tackled in later episodes. And Garibaldi's relation to Kemmer is never mentioned outside of the confines of the episode. So what's the point?

 

I came up to the episode I really wanted to see again ever since I finished the series, Signs and Portants. Still an amazing episode, but I really wanted to pay attention to the inner details of it. Firstly, Morden's introduction to the series. It's great how he was handled. Goes to G'Kar first, and then Londo Last. Both got what they wanted, and both had to pay a high price for it. In a sense, the series was one big circle really, with Centauri attacking Narn, and then Narn ending better off. It's just really cool going back to this episode after you know how the series goes and realize, this was the one that pretty much set everything in motion. Introduce the Shadows, Londo going down a really dark path, and just everything that follows has this episode to thank for it. Heck, I would say if you don't want to see the entire first season, start with this one and then you only have 9 episodes left. Yeah we got an introduction to the characters in the episodes before, but this is the one that really sets everything in motion. Also loved Kosh's reaction to Morden.

As for Lady Ladira, her vision did come true, only in a different context. To whoever mentioned some month ago that the ship coming out of the station before it exploded was a nice touch (I think that was Jan), I just want to say I definitely agree. Again, kind of shows the circular motion this series went in.

Also, don't really want to talk about it (I'm trying to restrain myself from talking about every episode again even though watching the second time around is almost as important as the first time ), but I really liked the context of Londo from By Any Means Necessary to this one. BAMN was the last time we really saw fun Londo. We see it come out on occasion, but this one takes Londo down a much different path (A lot darker) and it just significantly changes the character and, much like everything else, sets everything in motion.

One other thing. The way Morden asked the question "What Do you Want" now and the reactions given by the other characters is downright scary.

 

It may have been me. I don't remember exactly how it went but I saw "Signs and Portents" and "Sleeping in Light" very close together when TNT was showing the first run of the fifth season and an episode per day of seasons 1 through 4. My reaction to seeing virtually the same scene spaced years apart had my jaw dropping.

JMS's psychology degree shows sometimes.

Jan

 

Again not entierly accurate; material from Ditillio's notes does crop up later on down the line, though mostly in terms of background and subtext. I suppose the more prominent examples are in Season 5 with 'Day of the Dead' that briefly touches on the Brakiri's "mystic" religions and the Hyach/Hyach-do episode (name escapes me) with the age dominated government and even the name of their deity comes right out of Ditillio's work. So while it wasn't a subject often visited, that material wasn't forgotten and served it's purpose behind the scenes as a background guide. The reason it was never really focused on is quite simply because the show wasn't about all of these individual cultures. From the end of season two, all the way through to the end of season four the arc really had to take centre stage, leaving little or no room for little stand-alone stories. But just because those cultures and their internal diversity weren't thoroughly explored doesn't mean it wasn't thought about.

Take the Drazi for example, similar to the Minbari they had several different modes of dress from the grey robed followers of Droshalla, to the more elaborate and colourful, uniform like costumes with the big red shoulder pads and the quilted tunics worn by some of the diplomats and merchants.

As far as Minbari architecture is concerned, the reason you'll find so much more variety where you are is because (among other things) you're not on Minbar.
This is a culture that prides itself on preserving their buildings with a deep respect for ancient traditions and styles. Hell, they even went to the trouble of maintaining Valen's residence EVERY SINGLE DAY for a thousand years, so when Sinclair moved in, it felt to him (ironically) as if Valen was still livign there.
In that kind of culture and especially in culturally important cities (Yedor being the capital & Tuzenor being Valen's "favourite city") you're not going to such much in the way of new development. Which in fact says allot about Minbari culture as a whole since they had effectively plateaued and sort of fallen in to a stagnant decline. In essence echoing the Vorlons with their fixation on order and sameness; "frozen in time" as the Shadows pointed out.

As for the Narn sure the wardrobe didn't vary much, but to be fair, this is a culture that had in the recent passed suffered genocide, oppression and a systematic striping away of their cultural identity that effectively forced every man woman and pouchling to unite and become fighters. So the Narn we see are a product of that and again, like the Centauri, most of the Narn we DID see were either leaders or military types. I think we only ever saw a handful of civilians, one Narn child and a grand total of five Narn females (two of which were Na'toth.)

As you say, it was because of a lack of money, not through a lack of will or imagination and as I pointed out, it was directly addressed in the script so it hardly counts as proof of a lack of cultural diversity.

All we saw of the Centauri was the ruling culture, the Royal Palace and the Capital's skyline. That's like visiting Washington DC and saying that all Americans wear suits & ties while living in white stone houses with bloody great white stone monuments and large rectangular ponds everywhere.
The scope of the show simply didn't have a lot of room for the full breadth of Centauri culture. Indeed, given how many distinct cultures were seen on B5, it's amazing we got even as little internal diversity as we did.

Over simplified perhaps, but what do you want? A four hour dissertation? These episodes only last 40 odd minutes so a character making a general observation about what strikes them most about human culture really has to get to the point. Anything more and you're going to send the audience to sleep.
As for all the aspects of human behaviour you listed, I don't recall Delenn saying that humans form conflict free and harmonious communities.

I find it interesting that of the many criticisms I've seen levelled at this episode over the years (it's not my favourite either, just to be clear) the perception that it has an "anti-religion" or "anti-fanatic" messages only seams to come from practicing religious types.

Maybe it's because I'm a devout agnostic (practices Tuesdays & Thursdays when the weather's nice) but my perception was that the show was partly about a lack or true respect for another's beliefs. Franklin decided that being a doctor gave him the moral authority to disregard one of their most fundamental beliefs because "he was right and they were wrong". Sure, from the outside it seams silly and superstitious to believe that minor surgery can take away a person's soul (even if you believe in it's existence in the first place) but to the Onteen it was very real.

In this instance there was no "right" course of action. The kid was doomed and unless Franklin was prepared to resort to kidnapping there's no way he could have lived.
Like it or not, nobody has the right to tell another culture what they can and can't believe. It's been tried many times before and it rarely ends well.

Though I agree it's not a very strong episode, it does at least shed some light on why he's struggled with alcoholism and it's connection with his chequered history of being bounced from one job to another.

As for Kemmer; I doubt she was on Earthforce One at Io. We saw her travelling ahead to arrange and oversee security arrangements, it's not as if she was the President's personal bodyguard.
Still, personally I'd peg her as the Nightwatch type so she could have spent a chunk of the Clark years oppressing Marsies and arresting news reporters...Or I suppose she could have gone the complete opposite direction and ended up arrested for disloyal thought crimes or defected to the resistance. Either way the Earth Alliance is a big place, plenty of cracks to fall through.

 

We still disagree on the last point (a little), but you make some strong points. For one, I didn't realize Ditillio's information cropped up on the series well after he JMS had let him go. And although I started to come around to your point of thinking, it's definitely worth emphasizing how little we saw of each of the cultures on the series. The Washington, DC example is a good one, although its worth pointing out that, contrary to its depiction in popular media, DC has a lot more diversity than fancy architecture and suits and ties.

Still, nice post.

 

As I said, the scope of the show simply didn't have room to explore each and every culture in detail because that's not what it was about. The different races were essentially a backdrop for the main plot.

As for DC, yes I'm sure it's just as diverse as any major city but you'd never know that if all you did was hang out in the white house and occasionally peek out the curtains (with or without pastels) and that's more or less the equivalent of what we got to see of Centauri Prime.
Still, in defence of Centauri diversity, I think it's only fair to point out that there were several distinct accents (though that was in fairness, mostly down the the actors) and Centauri religion was a pantheon that has grown over time. Which probably means that each of those gods (fifty if you don't count Zoog) was probably a deity of a "smaller" religion that got incorporated and assimilated into a pantheon as the Republic took control of the different areas of the planet and whatever cultures happened to be there.

 

Joe was aware that the other races weren't explored in great detail so he added some more to the fifth season because of that:

 

Yup and what we got was 'Learning Curve' two episodes on Zhabar (Drazi Homeworld), that one with the Hyach-do and a pak'ma'ra throwing up a barium compound.

 

He did say "just a tad."

 

That wasn't a criticism.

 

I saw Grail again today. When I originally saw this one, I didn't know what to think because it just felt kinda "there." It wasn't a great episode, but there were some things to like. I just looked at the Lurkers guide and they were talking about the feeder being the first CGI alien. Not too bad. At least it looked alien, which was a plus. I did find some things interesting though. For one, the Worker Caste sure got disrespected until about midway through season 4 ha? I mean even Delenn said at this point there were two castes (To which I ask the question, if that were the case, how was the gray council devided) and while it's a continuity glitch that was pretty much retconned, it's interesting to see this one after watching Season 4 (I think it was Moments of Transition) and what happened to shake up the Minbari. Also found the inferences to Sinclair's search for the truth as to what happened to him good as well.

Still, nothing really earth shattering, but I wouldn't say it's the worst of the season.

 

As I understand it, the director had gotten word that he was going to be let go after this episode and so the actors were pretty much left to their own devices. (this was probably mentioned a while back, too.)

A while back, when JMS had his 'garage sale' a small statue of the Nakaleen Feeder was one of the items. I *so* wanted that! Sadly, every B5 item he sold was way beyond my means. But the Feeder...it was so ugly it was beautiful!

Jan

 

Londo's reaction whenever the Feeder is brought up is priceless

 

I'm almost done with Season 1, again. I can't wait till I get to Chrysalis again. That was such a great finale. Anyway, some comments on two episodes:

Legacies - Man Ivanova was repetitive (This I mentioned originally) through this time. Did like seeing Neroon's first episode again, after knowing what happens to him. Really liked the consistency of his character.

A Voice in the Wilderness - I wish more was done with Draal and the Great Machine. Did Londo ever pay up on his debt to Delenn? Still a great episode.

 

I just saw Lost Tales for the second time ever... and while I guess it isn't as horrible as I remembered, it still commits the cardinal sin of being slow, boring, and lifeless.

 

It was actually the other way around. Delenn owed Londo a debt. She paid up when Londo asked her to support sending Vir to Minbar as an ambassador.