Our Bester friend arrives on the station, there’s a wicked gnarly drug that makes telepaths, and G’Kar has a revelation about Londo and it’s not pretty. Welcome my friends. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2260. The name of the place is Babylon 5.
Spoilers ahead.
1. The Bester Laid Plans
Walter Koenig hasn’t missed a beat since his last appearance on Babylon 5. Every second he’s on screen is a joy even while I can’t stop my fingers from unconsciously flipping him off. There’s a perfect blend of smarmy and dangerous, not too charming that people don’t see through his bullshit but just disarming enough to get you to lower your defenses and not be able to do anything about it. It’s nice seeing the entire crew treat him as the threat he is from the get go, though. They’ve clearly learned from the past and, with the dire stakes of information leakage, need to keep things tight.
I wonder what Bester’s ultimate goal is. We have a vague idea that the Psi-corps wants power and control but how much and who with is a mystery. Well, maybe not a mystery but simply unspecified. It’s not important — Bester is power hungry and cutthroat, and that’s all we need — but it’d be nice to have specifics. Especially since it turns out the psi-corps is responsible for Dust’s existence in the first place.
2. Talia Flat
Speaking of morally fucked up things done by Bester, during his first conversation with the crew, he drops this bombshell with little fanfare.
YEAH. That’s brutal and I’m very glad it was never dramatised or, as yet, confirmed. It’s pretty unceremonious for Talia’s character but not inconsistent with the psi-corps’s M.O. as well as their continued, secret escalation of nastiness. Then again, perhaps it isn’t true. Bester is a master manipulator, as he shows time and again throughout the episode, and so it’s best to take anything he says to non-inner-circle-psi-corps members with a grain of kosher salt. He could have been trying to get a rise out of the crew and Ivanova even says as much.
Like a door-to-door salesman with his foot in the door whose skin sags ever so slightly, making you wonder whether it was ever really attached. Give him an inch, and he’ll take your face off.
3. The Vir of Our Discontent
I’m really glad Vir hasn’t been totally shuffled off the show unceremoniously. Yeah, I know with the benefit of hindsight and wikipedia and him being in the title sequence that this wouldn’t be the case but it could’ve been easy for him to be gone for half the season and they would’ve had a very credible reason for it. He back though, bringing his Vir-ness front and center.
Vir has grown a lot since his first appearance, both due to Straczynski growing as a writer, getting a better grasp on the characters, and from Vir himself maturing and changing. This is not the same bumbling, grovelling comic relief character from season 1. This is a conflicted and more self-assured attaché who, while still naive, chooses to see the positives in the world while all Londo can see is the negative for fear that, should he see anyone else as complex, he will be forced to confront his own considerable failures and compromises.
This is best exemplified by the twin conversations of Vir presenting his report on Minbar to Londo and, later, Londo telling him to not let anyone turn his position into a joke. Londo is a very prideful man and much of his life is driven by that pride. He turned to Morden because he wanted to prove he wasn’t a joke. He re-writes Vir’s report and twists every statement because he knows how the palace thinks, and how to manipulate reports to shine unfavorably on those that will, eventually, become their enemies.
Vir, on the other hand, sees the positives in the Minbari culture and how to build bridges rather than suspicion. He knows his position may be a joke, he was treated as such by Londo for the longest time, but he also knows how to make the most of it without letting his pride be wounded. What others think doesn’t matter as much as what he thinks of himself. Londo cannot think this way, partially because of his worldview and traditional mindset, but also because he hates himself. He hates who he was and who he has become.
Continued below4. The G’Kar of Wrath
G’kar is filled with rage. Justified rage but a rage that threatens to swallow everything else whole. I mean, here he is, bringing a Dust dealer onto the station just so he can potentially use it as a weapon of war. That’s dangerous and risky on its own but when G’Kar ends up taking it on his own? Oof, is he spooky. Just look at those eyes!
To move away from that for a second though, there’s a really solid bit of world building done in his conversation with Morgenstern. I don’t remember where but it was established early on that the Narn do not have any telepaths. Well, now we know the reason and it isn’t that the Narn aren’t capable but instead because the Centauri slaughtered them all. Anyone with a telepathic gene, gone. Wiped out.
It’s a chilling statement, made all the more tragic by G’Kar’s understated delivery of the information. It is too common to be a tragedy. It is merely another example of why his hatred burns so bright.
5. To a G’Quan Unknown
Yet G’Kar’s hatred is admonished. I have to wonder why because Londo’s rage is justified. His hatred and anger is valid for all the atrocities committed against his people. But it is not the anger that is being taken to task. In previous episodes, his anger has been rewarded and supported. But hatred is different. Hatred is wide and sweeping, with no room for nuance and the potential for justice. Hatred destroys everything: the one being hated and the one hating. Hatred says there is no price too high to pay to utterly and completely destroy the object of that hatred.
Even if that price is the entirety of the ones you wanted to protect.
G’Kar has to let go of his hatred, not his sense of righteousness nor his anger, though his anger is transformed and redirected. I do love how the reason this happens is because Kosh does something to his head and plants the image of G’Quan into his brain. I wonder how this is going to play out in future episodes. We’ll see, depending on how long time shifts between episodes, in a maximum of two months.
That about does it for now. Join me again in a week for space parasites, a possible new member to the light, and a title that makes me think of exothermic reactions so things are gonna get hot on the station that, in the year of the Shadow War, became something greater.
This is Elias. Signing out.
Best Line of the Night:
Londo: “And do they talk about me?”
Vir: “. . . . . . .Only behind closed doors.”
