It seems like everyone and their mother has a major secret, we meet a different species of butt-heads, and everyone kinda sucks. Welcome my friends. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2262. The place: Babylon 5.
Spoilers ahead.
1. Doctor Humor Never Gets Old
I’m wasting an entire thought on the opening scene of Franklin and the Pak’Ma’Ra because I can and because it made me laugh. I’m a simple man. Characters drink strange juice. Things seem alright. Characters vomit. I bust a gut.
I honestly wasn’t expecting it. I thought maybe the Pak’Ma’Ra would drink the barium solution and turn blue or throw it away or something since, well, it’s a nasty concoction meant to help illuminate the inside of a body. Nope! Off-screen to on-screen vomit, startling Dr. Franklin and showing that maybe he could serve to tone down the zeal with which he’s gathering his data on alien species. It’s a bright spot in an otherwise dour episode and I just think it’s neat.
2. Romance At the Speed of Thought
I complained last time about Lyta and Byron’s romance and while I still haven’t changed my mind, I think “Secrets of the Soul” does a much better job of making it sweet and real, though not often at the same time. Byron remains an ass half the time and a deeply caring soul the other half – living up to his namesake, I suppose – and so my appreciation for the two together flip-flops quite often. Sometimes even within the same scene!
Take the one where Lyta is fully accepted into the group. At first Byron talks down to Lyta but then, upon realizing his tone and words are, well, hot garbo, he changes to make her feel comfortable and address her actual concerns and not what he thinks her concerns are. Everyone welcoming her is a touching moment, underscored by the instrumental use of “A Better Place,” the lovely song from the creepy to me scene a couple episodes ago.
Still, I think Lyta deserves better than Byron. Not Zach though. She deserves better than Zach who is double the asshole Byron is this week. Yeesh! And to think I was rooting for you last season dude.
At least they never had sex where they could brain blast every telepaths on the other side of a very see-through curtain. That was just weird. And third date material, come on Byron.
3. You’ve Heard of the Coneheads. Now Meet the Buttheads.
I cannot get over how much the Hyach’s design looks like a butt on the back of their heads. You see it too, right?
Good.
Anyway, they make for an interesting antagonist in the episode. Franklin notices anomalies in their medical history and when he presses for it, is shut down hard. Eventually he sleuths it out but is threatened with death by the young attaché Kirrin only to be stopped by Ambassador Tal. What was the big secret? They’re all dying because they Whoops Did a Genocide and turns out their genetics are unstable without the Hyachdo’s.
I did not see any part of this coming from the start. For one, I was expecting the medical secret to be, I dunno, a disease or something else like we had way back in Season 2 or simply an overly zealous culture of secrecy. For another, I would not have pegged the younger generation to be the ones who’ll go to any length to keep their shame hidden. It’s an odd combination, to be sure.
I don’t love the way this plot unfolds. It’s got a wonky structure to it, not helped by the fronting of a radicalized youngin without any examination of why Kirrin was so against the secret coming out. I wanted to know what made her think the elder’s decision was wrong beyond “it happened so long ago.”It’s kinda reductive, using a generational struggle as a shorthand, and then having the children be wrong.
Moreover, the episode initially hints at a strategic reason holding back info, which would have made for a much more interesting exploration of Franklin’s new role. Instead, it feels too cut-and-dry. It still works, just not as much as it could have.
Continued below4. Xenophobia…IN SPAAAACCCCEEEEE
I also felt like the A plot was a bit uneven. It’s an escalation of a few simmering tensions between the residents of down below and the telepaths living there. We all knew there would be violence but to see it so soon is surprising. One of the new telepaths, who is also a telekinetic, is attacked and nearly killed by a group looking for trouble. Byron tries to stop the telepaths from retaliating but isn’t able to hold back the tide of violence for long, in part because Zach has it out for him.
And it’s pretty scary shit, I’m not gonna lie. The group of telepaths make the guy think he’s on fire and he ends up dying from the fear. If the episode’s job was to make me afraid of a telepath’s power, then job well done. It would’ve been easy to have the group be perfect. It’s easy to root for “pure good;” it’s more real to root for a flawed group that is nevertheless oppressed.
Still, I am uneasy. The invocation of a minority group “rioting” and being shown to retaliate with scary, deadly force seems to play into a specific stereotype and to uphold pure non-violence as the only just way to live, flattening a more interesting discussion. You can see this in Byron’s approach to the asshole who assaults them vs Peter’s attempt to fight back vs the group of telepaths who injure 2 and kill a third of that group.
I think much of my reticence is because it’s been 25 years and this plot is very much informed by the attitudes of the late 90s. Neoliberalism, the end of history, and being in a “post-racial society” was the norm and thus it is reflected here. It’s also meant to serve a purpose: to make Byron no longer feel like B5 is living up to what he thinks it should be and to demonstrate the rising tensions in all classes of society.
It’s also there so that when Lyta drops a bombshell during tele-sex, that telepaths were manufactured by the Vorlons so they could fight in the War of the Shadows and not a quirk of genetics, Byron can make his final declaration that they need to find a land of their own. I’ll unpack that in a later episode, I bet.
It’s a lot! But I’m not done quite yet.
5. The Moral of Babylon
Despite all the words you see above, I struggled to write about this episode because at the end of it, I couldn’t help but feel like there was too much uncritical, paternalisic moralizing in this episode. Every character seemed to be acting as if they were the only one who knew what was right and that they could do no wrong.
Zach, Byron, Kirrin, and Franklin all get turns. Lyta has one scene early on when Zach was acting like a colossal asshat about telepaths but I actually thought that one worked rather well. The rest frustrated me.
Yes, the moralizing was all to different degrees and others were clearly framed as being in the wrong but it didn’t work for me. I was angry at Byron instead of sympathetic. I was confused by Franklin instead of being furious along with him. I was just plain pissed at Zach for being such a dick. It didn’t make for a fun watch nor was I asked to think hard about what everyone was discussing.
What compounds this is what people were moralizing about. Franklin was livid at the Hyach for lying about a genocide their ancestors committed while the telepaths as minority group metaphor was pulled thin. The first came across as too pat, too neat, a scream of righteous indignation without an acknowledgement of, well, all of humanity’s attempts to do what is functionally the same. I get what Straczynski is doing and I get where he’s coming from but it was lacking.
The second is fraught in hindsight for all the reasons I detailed earlier and because, much like the mutant metaphor, human telepaths HAVE powers which set them apart from other humans. Add in the manufactured nature of their powers reveal and using current shorthands for the ways minority groups writ large are treated in reality for how this minority group is treated fictionally becomes even more tenuous.
Continued belowAs plots within the universe, they work well and aren’t ear-numbingly preachy. However as stand-ins for the racism, xenophobia, and our inability to truly reckon with our horrific past Americans were and are experiencing, it’s too on the nose without actually being about the issues at hand for my liking. It’s not a huge misstep, though it is one more example of s5’s rougher nature as compared to s4.
That about does it for now. Join me again in a week for dead bodies galore, religious tensions, and everyone’s favorite comedians on the station where a great hand reached out of the stars.
This is Elias. Signing out.
Best Line of the Night:
Byron: “Do you know what you are?
Lyta: “What?”
Byron: “A BCFMO. A brightly colored fast moving object. You don’t just walk into a room. You blaze in and blaze out again like a comet.”
