“The Exercise of Vital Powers”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by John Lafia
Season 4, Episode 16
Production episode 416
Original air date: June 2, 1997
It was the dawn of the third age… The rebel fleet has moved on from liberating Proxima to liberating Beta Durani colony and the Mid-Range Military Base. In a personal log, we hear Garibaldi lamenting that Sheridan is really doing this. This concerns him sufficiently that he has gone against a long-ago-taken oath to never return to Mars.
He and Wade are in a transport tube, heading to Edgars’ Mars home. Wade insists that Garibaldi put on a blindfold, as Edgars values his privacy. Garibaldi thinks that’s absurd and that he’ll look silly. Along the way, they babble about various things, including Wade surprising Garibaldi with the revelation that he has a Masters Degree in English Literature.
On B5, Franklin is continuing his efforts to free the telepaths from Shadow influence, but nothing is working. Allan, who is there on other business, asks for an update. After Franklin tells him, and expresses his frustration, particularly with the fact that Sheridan has yet to tell him what, exactly, is the hurry. Alexander arrives, Allan having asked her there to scan the victim of an assault, who’s having trouble remembering his attacker and wishes some psionic assistance in doing so. While there, Alexander makes telepathic contact with Franklin’s patient, who gets up and walks toward her and doesn’t go crazy or try to destroy everything or reach out to control the equipment.
It only lasts a moment, and as soon as it’s over, Alexander buggers off. Franklin tracks her down, and she apologizes for messing up his experiment, but Franklin gleefully explains that this is the first progress he’s made in ages, and asks her to come back when she’s done with her current job. She reluctantly agrees.
On Mars, Garibaldi arrives at Edgars’ palatial home—Edgars apologizing for how small it is, saying his place on Earth is way bigger. But domed space is at a premium on Mars. However, because he owns businesses on Mars, Edgars has to live on the red planet for half the year to make use of the tax benefits.
Edgars wants to know why Garibaldi was so eager for a face-to-face right now, and Garibaldi explains that he’s concerned about Sheridan. Yes, Clark’s bad news, but Sheridan’s military attack will just tear Earth apart. Garibaldi also seems to think that Sheridan has designs to take over Earth himself. But Garibaldi absolutely does not want to turn him over to Clark. He’d rather Edgars do it. He’ll be seen as a hero, and that will be capital that will be useful to him.
Over the course of the next few days, Garibaldi and Edgars have several conversations. It’s clear that Edgars doesn’t trust Clark, and is especially concerned at how much power he’s given to Psi Corps. He makes it clear that the megacorps have really been running things, and they suspected that Clark had Santiago assassinated long before B5 released the footage proving it.
One of those conversations happens in the middle of the night, with Garibaldi forcibly taken from his bed and brought to a room with a telepath (Edgars wants him frazzled and out of sorts so he’s less likely to hide his thoughts). Edgars asks him several pointed questions, with the telepath showing with a nod whether or not Garibaldi is telling the truth. Garibaldi says he doesn’t trust telepaths.
On B5, Alexander is able to help Franklin find a way around the Shadow implants, though Alexander also has to stop the patient from killing himself. When Sheridan checks in with Ivanova, he transfers down to medlab, at which point Franklin demands to know what he needs the telepaths for so urgently. Sheridan only tells him in private on a secure coded channel—and does so off-camera, so we only see Franklin’s devastated reaction. He then asks if Alexander is available for a long-term gig that will involve travel to Mars.
On Mars, Edgars eventually reveals that he’s incredibly concerned about telepaths. Both he and Garibaldi agree that there will be a reckoning, and Edgars’ concern is that it won’t be a war in the military sense, but rather a war of information and privacy—or lack of same. Plus, Clark has given Psi Corps a great deal more power, and they won’t just give that up once Clark is out of power.
They also agree that Sheridan needs to be stopped. Edgars needs Sheridan off the table to that Clark will relax and lower his guard. He’ll read Garibaldi completely in on what he has planned once he knows for sure he can trust the erstwhile security chief. And his condition for gaining that trust: to turn Sheridan over to Clark. Garibaldi initially refuses, as Clark will kill him, but Edgars assures him that he’ll want to capture Sheridan and gain the propaganda value of having him as a prisoner.
Garibaldi then reveals how to capture Sheridan: through his father David. Edgars says that Clark’s been turning Earth upside down to find David to no avail, but Garibaldi knows how to do it. David suffers from a blood disease that requires a Centauri drug called tenasticin. Find a bogus prescription of that, and you’ll probably find David.
We also see Edgars and Wade looking in on three patients, who are obviously dying, their bodies covered in lesions. Edgars instructs Wade to put them down, as if they were sick pets, as they shouldn’t have to suffer anymore and they have all the information they need.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan is nervous because everything is going so well. Both Franklin and Garibaldi talk about how much he’s changed since returning from Z’ha’dum.
Ivanova is God. The episode opens with Ivanova’s “Voice of the Resistance” broadcast filling in the viewer on the rebel fleet’s progress. In addition, she reports to Sheridan that Clark sent two destroyers to take B5 but as soon as they arrived, they defected.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi makes it clear that he knows that Edgars is up to something more complicated and dangerous than he lets on, mostly by the very fact that he hired Garibaldi. If he just wanted to keep his shipments safe from his competitors, he’d buy a ship and keep it off the radar. He needed secrecy from everyone, which is why he hired Garibaldi.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. When Ivanova tells Sheridan that Delenn is finishing up her business on Minbar and will be returning to B5 soon, Sheridan gets this goofy grin on his face. It’s very adorable.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Alexander is able to telepathically help the Shadow-infested psis. Meantime, the poor telepath that Edgars hires to polygraph Garibaldi is “paid” by being shot and killed by Wade.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Alexander hears the sound of a Shadow vessel when she scans Franklin’s patient. Also, according to Edgars, the Shadows’ interest in Psi Corps is what prompted Clark to keep them close and make them a bigger part of his administration. Garibaldi doesn’t bother to explain the reasons to Edgars—that the Shadows are vulnerable to telepathy—probably because the Shadows aren’t really a factor anymore.
Looking ahead. Sheridan’s use for the Shadow-infested telepaths will finally be revealed in “Endgame.” Edgars’ full plan will be revealed next time in “The Face of the Enemy.”
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. The last question Edgars asks Garibaldi while in the room with the telepath is if he’s still in love with Lise. Garibaldi lies and says no. Later, Garibaldi and Lise have a fraught conversation in which it’s clear that Garibaldi still loves her and that she needs more than a declaration, especially since it’s clear that he’s married to the job first, and any relationship is secondary.
Welcome aboard. Back from “Conflicts of Interest” are Denise Gentile as Lise and Mark Schneider as Wade. Back from “Moments of Transition,” and actually appearing in front of the camera and credited for the first time, is the late great Efram Zimbalist Jr. as Edgars. All three will return next week in “The Face of the Enemy.” In addition, Shelley Robertson does excellent work with her facial expressions and actually gets credited despite having no dialogue as the telepath.
Trivial matters. The episode title derives from Aristotle’s description of happiness, which Edgars quotes: “The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
Edgars mentions times in history when the people of a nation let fascists take over, citing Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1939 (which actually happened, though it would’ve been more accurate to say Germany in 1933, which is when Hitler was elected chancellor), and also Russia again in 2013 and Iraq in 2025 (which didn’t happen), as well as France in 2112 (which still might). Edgars also makes reference to the Nazi party and the Communist party, as well as the “Jihad party,” which one assumes is supposed to be one in our future and the show’s past.
Garibaldi mentions that three times Mars tried to kill him. One would be when he and Sinclair trekked across the surface of Mars, mentioned in “Infection” and dramatized in the “Shadows Past and Present” storyline that ran through the fifth through eighth issues of DC’s B5 comic book by Tim DeHaas & John Ridgway.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Did you know this place was named after the god of war? Its rising foretold the death of kings, the collapse of empires. It was a very bad sign. Now there are two million people living here.”
“It’s still a bad sign.”
—Wade and Garibaldi discussing Mars.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Everybody lies.” As with “Conflicts of Interest,” we have Michael Garibaldi as a twenty-third-century Dashiell Hammett character, with his manly demands and his cynical voiceovers and his weepy scene with Lise and his macho posturing and his reluctant descent into betrayal.
And it’s actually kind of fun. Jerry Doyle in particular sells the character’s disgust at having to return to Mars. Denise Gentile is a little too melodramatic, but given the awful dialogue she’s stuck reading, there’s only so much she can do.
The episode is, however, owned by the mighty Efram Zimbalist Jr. Edgars has to deliver a lot of exposition, and the dialogue he has as written could very easily have devolved into didactic droning. But his silken voice and relaxed delivery absolutely sell it. It’s a magnificent performance.
Overall, this is a very quiet, talky episode, the calm before the storm, and almost entirely setup. It sets a lot of important things in motion, many of which will pay off next time. On its own it just barely works, mainly due to the frank discussions about telepaths between Edgars and Garibaldi, which Doyle and Zimbalist Jr. make more compelling than they might be in the hands of lesser talents. Still and all, these discussions do a nice job explicating the ethical issues that would come up if a subset of humanity developed the ability to read minds.
Mention should also be made of Shelley Robertson, who has a superb gift for facial expressions, conveying quite a bit without saying a word as the telepath who serves as Garibaldi’s polygraph.
Next week: “The Face of the Enemy.”
I don’t know why it bugged me this time and not earlier, but the Martian gravity really annoyed me. Ignoring it was probably a better choice than the “everybody walk really floaty” thing they used for the station’s axial train. Obviously a TV show with a really tight budget can’t do a lot of fancy FX to make it look like everything’s going on in 1/3 G; maybe a better choice in that case would be to avoid settings significantly off from Earth normal.
Also, Garibaldi’s massive antipathy toward telepaths doesn’t quite jibe with his obvious interest in Talia Winters. I guess she just had a secret power that made her palatable to telepathophobes.
I’d suggest that they used artificial gravity, but I remembered Earth doesn’t have that technology yet.
I’ve found that low gravity is much harder to simulate on a soundstage than microgravity. Practically the only time I’ve seen it done well is the Moon sequences in For All Mankind, and they only do it in exterior scenes, due to the difficulty of pulling off wirework in interior sets with ceilings. In their Mars episodes, they just have people walk around normally, only occasionally doing low-gravity bits when something falls, say.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen it suggested that people in low gravity would probably walk fairly normally if they kept it slow; it would only become substantially different if they tried to walk quickly or run. The bouncy gait of astronauts on the Moon was as much about the rigidity of the spacesuits as the gravity. (Or so I’ve seen it claimed, though I’ve also seen it claimed that it’s the most efficient way to move in Lunar gravity.)
“Also, Garibaldi’s massive antipathy toward telepaths doesn’t quite jibe with his obvious interest in Talia Winters.”
Not necessarily, since his interest was mainly sexual. Misogynists still like to sleep with women, even if they don’t respect or like them as people.
Or his willingness to hire Lyta just a few episodes ago. But I think we’re supposed to assume that his general distrust of telepaths is being amped up by his programming.
Garibaldi is believably one of those people who hates “those people’ but makes exceptions for individuals he’s worked with and respects. But yes, right now he doesn’t trust anyone.
For whatever reason, no matter how many times I’ve rewatched the show, I always forget all of this was in the same episode. My brain wants to stretch out Garibaldi’s time on Mars at the Edgars compound over more time.
There’s a lot glossed over in the episode, presumably for time. The mention of Earthforce ships arriving at B5 and then switching sides would probably have been fleshed out into a bigger part of an episode, if things weren’t a little rushed. As it is, the mention is so short that I’ve seen some people claim that Clark never took another direct shot at B5 at all, citing it as a weakness in the plot. Maybe an example where JMS had to tell vs. show, losing a bit of impact in the process.
Meanwhile, there’s the subplot with Lyta. Here, I feel like we’re being shown something important about her power levels. In “Ship of Tears”, the Shadow-modified telepaths compulsively attacked when they saw the Psi Corps symbol. Here, though, we don’t see a violent reaction to Lyta wearing the badge. Instead, Lyta’s connection seems to turn off the Shadow programming entirely. It tracks with what we will see in the episodes to come, in terms of the escalation in her abilities. It’s almost like the only real limitation to her ability is her own concept of it; the more she considers something might be possible, she unlocks more.
I’ve sadly never been impressed with Denise Gentile as Lise. Granted, she’s almost always given terrible dialogue, but her delivery also doesn’t help.
I think the reason the telepath didn’t react to Lyta’s badge was because she’d already suppressed the implants before she woke him up. Carolyn had already awakened spontaneously before seeing Bester and reacting violently to his badge. It’s a different sequence of events, so it’s not similar enough to suggest that her power level has anything to do with it.
That Martian telepath? She has a name, you know: Constance. 😉 (and yes she is magnificent)
I felt that this was one of Richard Biggs’ better episodes. It suddenly struck me in the early scene when Lyta Alexander first awakens the telepath, just how difficult the choreography can get. There’s a bit of business where a nurse consulting with Dr Franklin notices the telepath, drops her tablet and Franklin turns around and sees him as well and the tempo and facial expressions are just spot on. Small thing, but it’s precision like this that sells it.
I can’t say that I much care for Garabaldi’s bookend monologues. Much as I love noir, it just doesn’t feel right to me. Maybe something in his delivery.
The muscle with the MA in literature I adore, probably because I’m a (former) grunt with an MA in medieval studies. I felt seen. Second time that’s happened in this series actually, which is very rare for me.
I totally agree about the voiceovers. I was wondering why the show became Blade Runner all of a sudden.
“The rebel fleet has moved on from liberating Proxima to liberating Beta Durani colony…”
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. According to the show wiki, Proxima III is at Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to Sol System — which is what “Proxima” literally means. But there’s no such constellation as Duranus or whatever would have that genitive form, so “Beta Durani” would implicitly have to be some far more distant star system. Which makes no sense if the fleet’s ultimate destination is Earth.
Nice to see Zimbalist, and I was amused to hear him say he grew up in California, because some 6-7 years before this, he played Don Alejandro de la Vega in the first season of the Family Channel’s Zorro, which was set in the Pueblo de Los Angeles in early 19th century Alta California. (He was replaced in seasons 2-4 by Henry Darrow, who’d played Zorro himself in the 1981 animated series and a very short-lived 1983 sitcom.)
The storyline seems to be evolving in a weird way, though. We’ve been focusing on Sheridan vs. Clark, but now we have Edgars laying the seeds for the telepath conflict that will become prominent later on, and using Sheridan’s capture merely as a test of Garibaldi’s bona fides before bringing him in on the real anti-telepath strategy. It feels kind of all over the place.
Garibaldi’s opening narration reminded me less of Dashiel Hammett than of Apocalypse Now‘s opening lines. I was also reminded of the Blade Runner theatrical cut, since Garibaldi’s noirish narration was delivered kind of stiffly by Doyle.
I wonder how the line about Mars being named for the god of war is translated in Asian countries, whose names for Mars mean “Fire Star” instead.
The proximity thing can be easily explained by hyperspace routes not necessarily mapping neatly onto distances in normal space. Maybe there’s no safe route directly from Earth to Proxima.
I mean, it’s obvious that the real reason is that they couldn’t be bothered. But in a Watsonian sense it can be explained.
That’s reminiscent of slipstream drive in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, where slipstream conduit connections didn’t map onto normal space and a destination in another galaxy could be “closer” through slipstream than a neighboring star system. Still, I don’t think B5 ever asserted that that was the case with its version of hyperspace.
I think I’m one of the few people who liked the theatrical cut of Blade Runner.
This episode does feel like two or three episodes were squished together, but the acting is good enough that it works.
I think I’ve been reading KRAD rewatch articles for too long now – before I clicked on the rewatch I bet myself that the phrase “almost entirely setup” would appear somewhere in the review for this episode. Thanks Keith, I just won myself an extra hour of sleep tomorrow :-D
I found myself wondering why Franklin hadn’t tried using sleepers on the telepaths as a way to around the Shadow tech, especially after Lyta is able to suppress the reaction telepathically. It may not work if the implants aren’t tied in with telepathy, but it was the first thing I thought of and a throwaway line would have been nice.
I always referred to this episode as the big fat slice of infodump. No other episode in season 4 grinds the story to a halt the way this one does – technically, all in service of setting up next week’s “Face of the Enemy”. But nothing of substance actually happens here. I guess you can count Lyta’s connection to the frozen telepath as something, as well as Garibaldi’s final decision to sell out Sheridan by locating his father, but the way the episode keeps going back to William Edgars and these overlong “life lessons” scenes with Garibaldi make me think the episode was aiming for something else entirely.
The issues of cramming tons of plot into season 4 aside, fearful of not getting renewed as we all know, I have a different theory: “The Exercise of Vital Powers” was the first step in setting up the Telepath War, and I believe at one point JMS was going to put it onscreen. Not on season 5 though. From what I understand, the TNT deal that guaranteed both season 5 and Crusade also included a potential feature film that never got made. I believe that film would have covered the TW. Enough of Edgars’ worries about how things might proceed with the Psi Corps imply that was the case.
And as we know, Call to Arms and Crusade both take place in 2267 onwards, after the war’s already over, now including Daniel Dae Kim’s John Matheson character as the newest telepath bound by new rules following the events of that war.
Thankfully, as slow and methodical as this one is, Zimbalist makes every scene shine. Physically, he looks less intimidating than when he was just a mysterious voice in the Stellarcom, but Zimbalist still manages to convey power and authority, and also a sense of empathy during that telepath ward scene.
Lise on the other hand, it’s a reminder that Babylon 5’s tight budget often meant having to deal with lower-tier guest stars. For every Michael York, David Warner, John Vickery and Zimbalist, we got people like Gentile or Tristan Rogers, straight out of soap casting circles.
I like it that Franklin’s appalled reaction to Sheridan’s secret plan dovetails nicely into everyone’s perception of how Sheridan’s changed since coming back from Z’ha’dum. Garibaldi may be not himself right now, but his paranoid take on Sheridan’s current state isn’t without merit either.
I don’t remember if the TNT deal included option for a feature. I’ll see if I run across anything like that as I parse through the script book commentaries as we go through the rest of the rewatch. But my suspicion was always that either JMS intended to cover the Telepath War via flashback during Crusade (there are indications here and there that this was the case), or he simply couldn’t quite figure out how to tackle the story. I mean, he clearly had a fairly good idea of how it played out, from what we’ve seen in Crusade, but maybe directly telling the story wasn’t quite coming together for him.
It’s too bad, because it’s one of the glaring omissions in the franchise, since there is so much setup for it.
It’s even worse in the Bester novel trilogy, since the third book jumps past the Telepath War and tells a story about its aftermath, so it feels more like a tetralogy with a missing third volume.
Agreed, I always thought that was an unusual choice. That always felt like more evidence that JMS intended to tell that story somewhere else.
That much is self-evident, but it’s frustrating, leaving a yawning gap in the story like that because you hope to be able to tell it later. JMS, the man who often cited “No plan survives its encounter with the enemy” as a piece of writing advice, should have known better than to assume he’d get that opportunity. He should’ve told it when he had the chance, in the novel trilogy.
“But nothing of substance actually happens here.”
I don’t agree. To paraphrase a piece of writing advice from David Gerrold, the most important events in stories are not actions, they’re decisions. Stories are driven and characters are revealed by how they wrestle with decisions, what decisions they make, and how they deal with the consequences of their decisions. This episode was about Edgars deciding whether to trust Garibaldi, and about Garibaldi deciding whether to betray Sheridan. Those were certainly substantial decisions, on a plot level and a character level.
That opening voiceover was rough, but the rest of the Mars plot was enjoyable enough, thanks to Doyle and Zimbalist Jr., who I mostly recognize for his voice acting, though I also remember him as Remington Steele’s dad. Opening a third front in the conflict complicates matters, but at least it makes the Earth vs Babylon 5 plot feel like less of an anticlimax after the hasty resolution of the Shadow War.
I’m not really sure what was going on at Babylon 5 itself, since the show decided not to tell me, but hopefully we’ll find out soon. I’m not a huge fan of that kind of storytelling, where one episode promises a “BIG SHOCKING REVEAL” at a later date, since the reveal usually ends up being less satisfying than the speculation. I can only assume it has something to do with the Mars plot, since that’s where Franklin and Alexander are heading.
Around the same time period this episode aired, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. voiced the role of a mysterious Illuminati member on the animated show GARGOYLES. I must have seen the B5 first, because when the character appeared, I recognized, but couldn’t place, the voice at first, but then realized it was Zimbalist essentially playing the same character he had on B5. It helped that the animators drew the character to look like Zimbalist, so the character not only sounded, but looked like Edgars—which was trippy to encounter in an animated show!
He was also the voice of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels.
No, that was John Forsythe. Zimbalist was the voice of Alfred on Batman: The Animated Series and Dr. Octopus on Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Though his early claims to fame were as a lead actor in 77 Sunset Strip and The F.B.I. in the 1950s-60s.
JMS really likes the device of somebody stumbling into the right situation to make the plot work– so we had e.g. Talia walking in on a conversation that happened to be about her ex-husband and then Talia again not getting actively screened to be the sleeper agent, she just walked into the room for unrelated reasons. Here it happens again, Lyta is only in Medbay due to some completely irrelevant assault on an unceen character and just happens to make progress with the telepaths. I don’t really understand why that writing choice was made, surely it would have been better if Franklin asked the telepath to help out with the telepaths. The galaxy sure is lucky that guy got attacked, I guess.
Overall this is a good episode that, for me, is all the more effective for being quiet. But wow, the sets were even more distractingly low-budget theater than usual.
Funny you should mention that, I did have a chuckle over the medlab computer that’s pretty blatantly just a contemporary computer monitor with some tape slapped on. Not sure if it’s appeared in prior episodes and I just didn’t notice or if it was new here. But, yeah, you can tell how much money they don’t have
https://imgur.com/a/2IeOr7m
Yeah, Edgars apologizing for his Mars home being so small did kind of call attention to it.