The war to liberate Earth is over. But now what will happen to the Captain Sheridan and his rebellious colleagues? And after such a climax the previous episode, can this episode rise above just being denouement?
A-Plot: Having spent the last several episodes on rebellion, torture, and war, this episode focuses on the politics of the aftermath. Sheridan is grilled by Earthforce, and, eventually, by acting Earth president Luchenko, a sarcastic and hard-bitten practical politician in a very difficult situation, trying to keep things from spinning apart.
Luchenko has to deal with that to do about the hero of the hour who is also a mutineer and traitor to the Earth government.
“Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a conversation.”
LUCHENKO: Well, Captain, you caused quite a stir. Half of EarthForce wants to give you a kiss on the cheek and the Medal of Honor. The other half wants you taken out and shot. As a politician you learn how to compromise. Which by all rights means I should give you the Medal of Honor, then have you shot. […] You’ll tender your immediate resignation. I’ll see to it you retain your military pension with full honors, and I’ll guarantee amnesty for the officers and crew who served under you during the crisis. But I want you gone. The Joint Chiefs feel the same way.
SHERIDAN: And if I refuse?
LUCHENKO: You’ll be dishonorably discharged, court-martialed, and brought to trial. Same for Ivanova and the rest of your staff. And I’ll make sure the military tribunal is stacked with generals from the “shoot him” category. Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is a conversation. It isn’t. You have no other options. The bitch of it is, you probably did the right thing. But you did it the wrong way, the inconvenient way, and you have to pay the penalty for that. I know it stinks, but that’s the way it is.
(Beata Poźniak as Luchenko is one of the more odd castings for the show. Her Polish accent gives her a refreshingly non-Anglophone nature, with some odd intonation and rhythm to her speech that given it a verisimilitude. But while being pragmatic and ruthless, she also comes across as about twenty years too young to be even an interim, emergency president.)
Ultimately, Sheridan has the last laugh. He agrees to her terms, and she pulls together a widely broadcast press conference.
His widely broadcast resignation speech gets cleverly hijacked by the presence and machinations of Delenn, G’kar, and Londo, who announce the formation of a new Interstellar Alliance, whose worlds will continue to manage their own internal affairs, but who will act in mutual defense, all of it held together by the Rangers and the White Star fleet. (Which fleet then, rather provocatively, flies over EarthDome, to the consternation of everyone.)
Earth is offered a place in the Alliance, which causes some bristling (even among those who opposed Clark’s “Earth First” xenophobia). But the offer of tech goodies like artificial gravity are awfully tempting, if they care to negotiate with the Alliance president about their entry into the organization.
And who is that president? Ah. Turns out everyone had that surprise teed up: the Alliance has selected John Sheridan for that role …
So, all’s well, more or less, that ends well. Sheridan is the leader of a new galactic polity (which Earth, for the moment, decides to join), and is reunited with his father (who’d been apprehended by Clark’s security forces) as well. All seems like a happy ending, though …
LONDO: So, how does it feel to make history?
G’KAR: You cannot make history, you can only hope to survive it.
LONDO: G’Kar, you are a depressing person.
G’KAR: Thank you.
And what will the future bring? Well over a closing montage, Delenn gets her crack at the opening titles dialog in a montage at the end of the episode, and does a bang-up job:
It was the end of the Earth year 2261. and it was the dawn of a new age, for all of us. It was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. The next 20 years would see great changes, great joy, and great sorrow. The Telepath War … The Drakh War … The new Alliance would waver and crack, but in the end it would hold because what is built endures, and what is loved endures. And Babylon 5 … Babylon 5 endures.
B-Plot: The episode actually begins with this thread, the wrap-up of the Ivanova/Marcus doomed tragedy. Claudia Christian does (ironically) her best acting of the series, crushed with guilt and anger over Marcus sacrificing himself for her, and her unwillingness to acknowledge the love she felt toward him and knew he had for her.
The discussion with Franklin, conducted on the floor of Medlab, is gut-wrenching and excellent. At the end of the episode, ISN is announcing that Ivanova, promoted to full Captain, has been given command of a new Warlock-class cruiser.
C-Plot: The Mars Resistance has won its war, but Garibaldi is trying to find what happened to Lise. Turns out that she’s been absconded with by some thugs who figure out she’ll be a good ransom victim.
Alas, it doesn’t go at all well against a grimly dedicated Garibaldi, especially backed by a team of Rangers. Bam-boom, and Lise is back in Garibaldi’s arms again … and when she makes a pillow-talk suggestion that she needs his help running Edgars Industries, he doesn’t say no …
D-Plot: While Sheridan is being held in conference rooms, he gets a new visitor — Bester. The two banter aggressively back and forth, Bester glibly denying anything that might make him sound guilty, but the core of the confrontation is his eliciting from Sheridan whether his lover Carolyn was one of the teeps sacrificed to win the space battle last episode. “Because I have to tell you that, if that is the case, you will not leave this room alive.”
Sheridan does rather cruelly string him along a bit, making it clear that he vetted which teeps would be used — those with no family, those whose conditions were the most difficult. In the end, he admits that Bester’s lover was not one of the 30 of 100 used — not, he forcefully adds, as a favor to Bester.
I know what it’s to lose someone only to find then lose her a second time. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even you, as much as I might want to.
Bester and Sheridan
We then get some more angry banter between the two about the killing of Edgars, the theft of the teep plague, and Bester’s intentionally unconvincing denial of anything to do with same. Sheridan suggests that any attempt by the telepaths to suborn Earth’s government, or to start a Telepath War will be unsuccessful, because, well, he’ll be watching … and Michael Garibaldi is out there, waiting for a chance to get his revenge.
I don’t know exactly how he plans to settle the score, but I’m sure it’ll be creative, colorful and extremely unpleasant.
Walter Koenig gives us a great Bester (as usual), layering his mustache-twirling with real emotion over his lover and learning she’s still alive and “safe”. His character is a villain that everyone loves to hate (because he makes no effort to ingratiate himself), but who is clearly a hero in his own story and whose ruthlessness in the cause of his own people is as admirable as it is scary.
Hey, Londo! You’re going to be Emperor! Isn’t that great?
Other Bits and Bobs: Londo gets news that he’s been selected to become the next Emperor. He’s less than thrilled about that, an interesting change from where he was back at the beginning of the series.
There’s a marvelous, if brief, interlude between Delenn and Lennier, where basically he brings up the subject of unrequited love and she basically chooses (she can’t be that dense, can she?) not to see that he is desperately in love with her … even as she heads off to rescue, promote, and marry Sheridan. Poor Lennier …
Meanwhile: The irony of the Ivanova plot is, of course, that after the filming of this ep (and the next one), two things happened.
First, WB and TNT reached a deal for a fifth season of B5, letting Joe finish his five-year arc after he’d already yanked the guts out to fit the key elements he wanted to cover. That left Joe with a pastiche of Alliance, Drakh, and Telepaths to fit together.
Aloha, Ivanova
Second, contract renegotiation shenanigans with Claudia Christian led to Ivanova not coming back for that final season, thus truncating her arc (where her abortive love with Marcus, her command of B5, and her latent telepathy would have all played a huge role in the whole Byron/telepath arc of S5) and further hobbling that season.
That meant one small change to this episode — in the original TV script, Ivanova is offered command of a new experimental cruiser, but has not committed; once she was out of the picture, the newscast voice-over was changed before airing to have her actually taking command and leaving B5.
But beyond the Ivanova drama, these developments also meant that JMS had to take what he’d shot as the final episode of S4 (and the series), reassign it to be the series finale at the end of S5, and rush into production a new S4 conclusion episode …
Overall: As the core of the episode, and a wrap-up of the immediate action, this episode does its work admirably. But the pressures of time and budget show too plainly. The regal sets of EarthDome feel as cramped as the whipsaw plotting. Too much happens driven by people giving long speeches at podiums, or speaking to cameras. The presence of the three star ambassadors at Sheridan’s resignation press event, let alone the savvy Luchenko letting them get up and talk unrehearsed and unvetted, feels contrived to let the Big Announcement be made. Whether it’s writing, direction, or editing, the episode passes by in a chaotic rush, desperately trying to close out plotlines in a satisfying fashion.
It all works, but more with the force of the past four years of plot behind it to drive us through the awkward bits, than because of its artful composition.
Ivanova and Franklin
Most Dramatic Moment: Poor Mira Furlan — this episode should have been her big moment, as Delenn’s plans (with Sheridan) for the Interstellar Alliance come to fruition, and she gets a big monologue at the end.
Instead, it goes to Claudia Christian’s Ivanova, sitting forlorn on the floor of MedLab with Franklin, weeping over and railing against how her life has come to this.
Most Amusing Moment: The twists and turns of this episode make for a lot of light moments amidst the dialog and banter. Garibaldi has a number of wise cracks. Londo chortles with glee when he learns what Delenn has in mind. Luchenko gets some wry, Russian zingers on Sheridan, and Bester’s humor is always dry and tasty. Sheridan get to smirk when the White Stars boom-crash overhead (and, again, when the general who was busting his ass earlier has to now refer to him as “Mister President”).
That all said, it’s hard to point to a single laugh-out-loud moment in the episode. As a whole, the humor is there to leaven the drama, as opposed to standing out. It’s the wrap-up of the story, with enough bittersweet to it to need smiles, not out-and-out jollity. Unless it’s a final skeevy chuckle that the known sex fiend G’Kar has surreptitiously planted his cybernetic eye in Sheridan and Delenn’s wedding suite …
Most Arc-ish Moment: The transition of John Sheridan to President of the Interstellar Alliance represents both a logical and epic transition of the character’s role, and the next step in the evolution of the galactic social order: the creation of a new polity that will, it is dreamed, advance both humanity and the rest of the races around it. It can be seen as a direct successor of events going on at the very beginning of Season 1, and will be a big part of where we end up going in Season 5.
Honorable mention to the Sheridan/Bester scene, which, to a smaller degree, both ties up loose ends from the past, and points toward what lies in the future.
Overall Rating: 4.1 of 5.0 — stunning emotions in places, a wrap-up of loose ends, but way, way too rushed and speech-heavy. (Rating History).
Might want to check these sort of things out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDl_sJ16KxE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ulJ00_rd8
Thanks, Tom.