A-Plot: Sheridan is herding cats, trying to get a Declaration of Principles for the Interstellar Alliance written by G’Kar while the various IA members squabble over even the need for such a thing — seeing the IA as a way to get high tech sharing (to them) without necessarily making any sort of moral commitment beyond that mere pragmatism. The Drazi, in particular, resent being told what principles they should abide by.
Things get more heated when a planet under siege by raiders manage to get word out by Ranger of their plight.
The planet has evidently been being raided for years for crops and resources. When they tried to fight back, their cities and civilization were destroyed. The raiders are coming back one last time, and fear of genocide is in the air.
Sheridan realizes this is a first make-or-break challenge to the IA, if they really do stand for the principles he thinks they must. He makes plans to send the whole White Star fleet (since a single one got pretty trashed) to intercept the raiders. He notifies the Drazi ambassador, since the system is on the edge of Drazi space; the ambassador asks that they rendezvous with a Drazi fleet first, and then they can act together.
But some overheard thoughts by Byron (see “B-Plot”) reveals the truth …
Except the Drazi. What could go wrong?
B-Plot: B5 now has telepaths. Sort of. But nobody’s quite sure what to do with them. Garibaldi wants to use them for espionage for the Interstellar Alliance, since all the other races do. Sheridan’s hinky about that, knowing that a Telepath War is coming, but eventually agrees.
Alas, Garibaldi’s manipulative pragmatism and inherent mistrust of telepaths (recalling what Bester did to him) makes him an awful representative, and Byron (after a bit of exposition about how hard it is for teeps not to read minds, and what an imposition it is to be asked not to when mundanes are so constantly busy “shouting.”
Garibaldi punts over to Lyta Alexander, B5’s here-again/gone-again sometimes-resident TP, currently there as a commercial Psi Corps telepath. She’s had a crap day, including being inside that Ranger’s mind when he died (insert exposition here about how that sort of thing steals a little bit of any TP’s soul when it happens — and the Psi Corps legend that Bester did it waaaaaay too many times, trying to learn what there was beyond).
Byron’s happy to meet her — and even happier to try and recruit her to his cause, playing on her (not unwarranted) grievances of being the person that everyone else kind of ignores until they suddenly need a telepath, no matter how dangerous or awful the job. He stokes those flames, alternating between semi-abusive control behavior, and saying some not-very-nice things about mundanes, including a mocking reading from Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
(Literary Title Warning! And SF-Friendly Quotation!)
And then he notes how inhuman the “paragon of animals” has been to its own kind — and to teeps, which Byron considers a different class of being.
Ultimately he turns on the charm, lets Lyta know she’s welcome there, agrees to make a couple of his people available to the IA — and, as a favor, offers to Lyta what he read in the Drazi ambassador’s head.
Other Bits and Bobs: Just a reminder that, even in the far-flung future, computer systems will have crappy UI and everyone will still need spell-check.
By being forced to shift this over to Lyta Alexander, we lose some great drama — but it actually works kind of better. Lyta really is the telepath that gets pulled on-stage (by the command crew, and by JMS) only when there’s something awful she’s going to be asked to do. She’s perfect for Byron’s manipulation because so much of what he says is true.
Lyta is a weird case. She not only has some righteous resentment, but she’s also a person lost. She’s never fit in with the Psi Corps or with the B5 community. Even Kosh went and died on her. She literally has only been wheeled out in the show, and (by extension) the B5 leadership, only when it’s time to be used in some awful way.
cult group of friendly figures led by a romantic father figure to join.
Lochley is conspicuously absent from the episode, despite all the action going on at the station. JMS has explained that writing her into the new season, on top of everything else, esp. as he had to be writing the first few episodes before even casting Tracy Scoggins in the role, left it easier to have her just be offstage, working on stuff.
As noted above, Garibaldi is working hard to run IA’s covert intelligence. The problem is, it doesn’t quite feel right. He openly voices skepticism about Sheridan and the Alliance and all the “touch-feely,” but feels he owes a debt. He’s engaging with telepaths, despite having started off the series skeptical about them and only having had increasingly bad experiences with them. He doesn’t seem to have anything to do, despite having a corporate empire to run back on Mars. Garibaldi is a key part of B5, but he’s being stuffed into a plotline that doesn’t bear close examination.
Overall: Good, but too much feels rushed. JMS was still scrambling to get the season going, writing solo and full-time while showrunning everything else, trying to restructure the season, dealing with actors who had departed and others who had returned, recreating his notes from his lost notebook, and generally going quietly nuts.
That said, there’s some appreciable and appreciated mingling between the A- and B-Plots here. The needs of the IA drive contact with the telepaths; telepaths (Lyta and Byron, in particular) in turn push forward the resolution of the raids and the signing of the Declaration of Principles. It’s neatly done, and shows a complexity in stories that JMS will lean into in this final season.
Most Dramatic Moment: The reading of the Declaration of Principles (at least the version that everyone signed).
The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn or Human or Centauri or Gaim or Minbari.It speaks in the language of hope. It speaks in the language of trust.
It speaks in the language of strength, and the language of compassion.
It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul.
But always it is the same voice.It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us.
And the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.
It is the small, still voice that says we are One.No matter the blood, no matter the skin,
No matter the world, no matter the star,
We are One.
No matter the pain, no matter the darkness,
No matter the loss, no matter the fear.
We are One.Here, gathered together in common cause
We agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another.Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us,
And each voice lost diminishes us.
We are the voice of the universe, the soul of creation,
The fire that will light the way to a better future.We are One.
This is, not surprisingly, a lengthy piece of text that fandom has spread to any number of places — wedding ceremonies, philosophical debates, and beyond. It’s a neat piece of writing, but maybe having actually been there at the Dawn of the Declaration of Principles, I seem to treat it a bit more skeptically than others do.
It’s also not surprising that various races might be a bit hinky about signing off on it. JMS has commented that the debates here are akin to those over the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but this document is even more abstract — the former is a petition of grievances (wrapped in the language of principle), the latter a governmental structure (later amended to include some principles/rights). I doubt you could have gotten the 13 new “states” to have signed such a E Pluribus Unum statement, let alone various races that until recently have been in all-against-all uneasy peace, at best.
Most Amusing Moment: Any time G’Kar is getting all Writerly, such as when he shooshes away the others because his Muse is speaking to him, at which point the show editors choose to put a certain credit on screen:
Honorable Mention to Sheridan demurring Delenn’s request he read the G’Kar’s Declaration of Principles to her, when his face makes it crystal clear he so wants her to ask him once more to do it. Sheridan is always willing to do a dramatic reading or speech.
Most Arc-ish Moment: The Declaration of Principles is quintessential JMS, and the core of his message in this show.
But it would be churlish to ignore Lyta as an arc. She’s been dragged in as needed — TP on the pilot ep, narc on Talia, escapee from the Psi Corps, punching bag for Bester and gill-recipient for Kosh and punching bag again for Ulkesh, desperate refugee back to the Psi Corps, tool for activating unliving telepaths … and always forgotten and out of mind from the core B5 crew when they didn’t need her for some desperate gamble.
People talk about Zack as being the archetypal “normal person” on B5, but I could easily argue Lyta in that role: the functionary who steps on at the whim of the protagonists, only to then be dismissed and ignored when victory arrives.
Poor Lyta. Things are about to get much worse.
Overall Rating: 3.5 of 5.0 — Entertaining with plenty of arc fodder, but vaguely annoying. The Declaration of Principles bit has good humor, but dramatically feels like it falls into place too easily. The telepath conflict has interesting drama, but hits too heavily. (Rating History)
Other Resources for this episode:
- Lurker’s Guide
- Babylon Project Wiki
- IMDb
- AV Club (covers eps 1-5 of the season)
- TV Tropes
- Sci-Fi Musings (home of the little videos in so many of these reviews I’ve done)
- Sundry Thoughts
- Cap-That (more images than you can imagine!)
Previous episode: 5×02 “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari”
Next episode: 5×04 “A View from the Gallery” … A tale of standard epic brouhaha on B5, as told by the janitorial staff. No, really …
Reposted on Pluspora.
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