“Atonement”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Tony Dow
Season 4, Episode 9
Production episode 409
Original air date: February 24, 1997
It was the dawn of the third age… Allan is being fitted for an Army of Light uniform by some Minbari tailors. Allan is reluctant to accept it, partly because the tailors keep poking him with pins, mainly because he is convinced that Garibaldi’s resignation is a temporary situation and he’ll eventually come back to the job.
A Minbari cruiser arrives carrying Callenn, the head of Delenn’s clan. She asks for one more day before they head back to Minbar, which Callenn grants her. Delenn then summons Sheridan to her quarters, greeting him while wearing a slinky black dress. She points out that they haven’t had much time alone lately and so suggests a dinner date—and also to finally have their third night of her watching him sleep to see his true face, as they never did get that done, what with him going to Z’ha’dum and dying and being resurrected and stuff….
Sheridan—mostly focused on how hot Delenn looks in the dress—agrees to all that, though he says he doesn’t really see the value of watching him drooling with his face mashed into a pillow…
She also tells him that the next day she has to go to Minbar to take care of some things, and she’s not sure when she’ll be back.
Sheridan meets with Franklin and Cole. With Clark’s propaganda campaign going full bore, B5 is losing credibility. They need to make a move against Earth, so Sheridan wants to start coordinating with the Mars Resistance. Sheridan would prefer to go himself to make the connection, but he’s too recognizable, and also the most wanted person in the Earth Alliance. He’s sending Franklin, who’s part of the senior staff, which will lend credibility, but not a prominent member of same. Cole is going along as his bodyguard. They need to take a roundabout route so it’ll take a few weeks to get there.
Delenn watches Sheridan sleep, then goes toward the docking bay—only to be intercepted by Lennier, who insists on going with her. Delenn doesn’t want him to come along, as she fears that he’ll learn horrible things about her. But Lennier has pledged himself to her and won’t leave her side. So they go off to Minbar together.
On Minbar, Delenn’s clan meets, all wearing white robes. Callenn expresses the clan’s concerns: no Minbari has ever married an alien. This on top of her using the triluminary to make herself partly human. She committed both these actions without consulting the clan. She is therefore required to justify these decisions and abide by the clan’s final ruling, to which she agrees. She will also undergo the Dreaming, a process of seeing visions of one’s past that will reveal the truth behind their actions. Someone in the Dreaming can have a second to be a protector and guide, a job for which Lennier of course volunteers.
Delenn and Lennier both drink from a cup that apparently gives you shared hallucinations. They enter the Dreaming, and Delenn sees herself alongside Dukhat. She was a mere acolyte at this stage, and Delenn and Lennier see her being brought before the Grey Council, who have heard about humans from the Centauri. The Council believes that they should not contact the humans—the Worker Caste fears being weakened by more sources of food and artifacts, the Religious Caste fears alien beliefs being introduced to the Minbari, and the Warrior Caste don’t want anything to do with primitives. Dukhat disagrees, and asks Delenn to give a reason why they should make contact. Delenn says that the greatest enemy is the unknown, so doesn’t it behoove them to find out everything they can about humans?
Dukhat both congratulates and apologizes to her for putting her in that position, and for using her to make a point to the Grey Council. He then makes her his aide.
Jump to many years later, and Delenn is made a member of the Grey Council. When they bring the triluminary near her, it glows, which surprises everyone. Later Dukhat confirms that it doesn’t usually glow, and he starts to explain that he expected something like this and he chose Delenn for a reason. But before he can elaborate, there’s an alarm.
We see the first contact between human and Minbari. Dukhat fears that their approaching with gun ports open will be misinterpreted, but before he can give the order to close them, the human ships fire. Dukhat is killed in the ensuing conflagration, dying in Delenn’s arms while trying to tell her something. Morann, one of the Grey Council, approaches Delenn saying that the remaining eight members are deadlocked with regard to how to respond—four want to take vengeance for Dukhat’s death, four want to try a diplomatic solution. Overwhelmed by grief for her dead mentor, Delenn cries out to fight the humans and show no mercy. By the time Delenn comes to her senses and calms down, the war has taken on a life of its own and it can’t be stopped.
In the present, Lennier realizes that this is what Delenn was worried about him finding out. But he doesn’t condemn her or castigate her as she feared. Delenn now realizes she has spent the last ten years atoning for that moment of anguish that resulted in a brutal war that killed so many. She wonders if her engagement to Sheridan is part of that atonement—and even if it isn’t, will the clan see it that way and forbid her to marry him?
The Dreaming having ended, Delenn is instructed to meditate overnight and she will discuss it with the clan in the morning.
As she drifts off to sleep, Delenn realizes why the Dreaming showed her Dukhat’s death—he tried to tell her something before he died, but she has no memory of that, so stricken was she with grief. She and Lennier go back to the Dreaming, and when Callenn tries to stop her, she insists that he join her as well. The three of them see Dukhat’s death again, and hear what he actually said: that he picked her as his aide for a reason, because she is a child of Valen.
Delenn sends Lennier to retrieve a specific Grey Council record. Lennier returns with the record in question, saying that the guards resisted him at first, but, “I managed to… explain matters to them. They will recover in time.”
It is a genealogy record he has recovered, and it shows that Delenn is one of many Minbari who is descended from Valen. But they know now that Valen was also the human Jeffrey Sinclair—which means that all of his descendants have human DNA. The triluminary glowed in Delenn’s presence because it was designed to glow in the presence of Sinclair’s DNA.
Callenn admits that he already knew all this. But they must keep the secret of the Minbari’s lack of genetic purity. Delenn angrily says that, if she’s already impure, who gives a crap who she marries? Callenn, however, has a more elegant solution that will allow everyone to save face. In the time before Valen, when clan fought clan, there was a tradition that the two sides of a conflict would, after peace was achieved, would have a wedding between the two formerly warring clans. Delenn can couch her engagement to Sheridan in those terms, with her wedding a marriage between the formerly warring “clans” of humans and Minbari.
Delenn and Lennier return to B5 and a very relieved Sheridan. Delenn says only that her affairs are in order and does not specify why she went home.
We cut to Franklin and Cole in the uncomfortable-looking hold of some ship or other, working their way very very slowly to Mars. Cole is opening and closing his staff as a nervous habit, and after Franklin tells him to stop, he offers to sing instead, and then breaks into “Model of a Modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Franklin offers to try to find out what happened to Sheridan’s Dad, but Sheridan refuses. While they know the farm has burned down, Sheridan is fairly sure that they don’t actually have his father in custody, because if they did, they’d crow about it publicly. It’s safer if nobody inquires after him.
Ivanova is God. We first see Ivanova on her way to a Drazi religious festival. We next see her stumbling out of a transport tube, hair messed up, covered in glitter, and limping with a cane.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. When she’s made Dukhat’s aide, Delenn stands before him looking at the floor. Dukhat tells her to look up, which she says is disrespectful, but he says that if she constantly looks at the floor, she’ll be constantly bumping into things. It’s word-for-word the same as the exchange between Delenn and Lennier when the latter reported as her aide in “The Parliament of Dreams.”
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. Franklin gives G’Kar a prosthetic eye. G’Kar is tickled by the fact that he will still be able to see through it, even if it’s not actually in his head.
We live for the one, we die for the one. It shouldn’t really surprise anyone that Marcus Cole is a fan of Gilbert & Sullivan…
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Delenn is able to stay engaged to Sheridan. And there was much rejoicing.
Welcome aboard. German actor Reiner Schöne makes his first of two appearances as Dukhat; he’ll return to the role in In the Beginning. Robin Atkin Downes makes his first appearance on the show, as Morann, a role he’ll also return to in In the Beginning; Downes will have the recurring role of Byron in season five. Brian Carpenter plays Callenn.
Trivial matters. The disastrous Earth-Minbari first contact with Dukhat’s death being the catalyst of the war after the misunderstanding about the meaning of gun ports being open was established in “Legacies.” We saw the human side of it in David McIntyre’s flashbacks in “A Late Delivery from Avalon.”
Valen was established as being a transformed and time-displaced Sinclair in “War Without End, Part 2.”
Delenn told Sheridan about the watch-the-dude-sleep-for-three-nights tradition among Minbari women considering a mate back in “Shadow Dancing.” Their second night of it was interrupted by Anna Sheridan at the end of that episode.
Ivanova made herself into “Green Leader” of the Drazi and settled their ancient conflict back in “The Geometry of Shadows,” which is probably why she got invited to their party and why she wore a green sash to it.
Jason Carter sang the first verse of “Model of a Modern Major-General” in one take, which ended with Richard Biggs screaming in agony. That take, and Biggs’ scream (and director Tony Dow saying “Cut!”) was played over the closing credits instead of the usual theme music.
This is the first time Mira Furlan has been in full Minbari makeup since the beginning of season two. She’ll be back in it for In the Beginning.
The movie Thirdspace takes place between the first two scenes of this episode, as it takes place after Allan started wearing the Army of Light uniform and after the Shadow War, but before B5 and Earth started formally fighting each other and before Franklin’s departure for Mars.
The echoes of all of our conversations. “When others do a foolish thing, you should tell them it is a foolish thing. They can still continue to do it, but at least the truth is where it needs to be.”
Dukhat imparting wisdom to Delenn and explaining why he had her speak before the Grey Council.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Marcus, this is the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot.” One of the great dichotomies of the character of Delenn is that she’s this sweet, compassionate, friendly person who fights for the light and rails against the darkness—so it’s very easy to forget how manipulative and capricious and self-centered she can be. The very plot of this episode is prompted by her doing things she shouldn’t have done because she thinks it will be good for her: becoming part-human and agreeing to marry a human, both things she should never have done without at least consulting her clan.
And we find out the rather brutal revelation that the war was entirely her fault. Well, okay it’s partly the fault of the captain of the Prometheus who fired the shot, but it’s entirely on Delenn that the Minbar went for, in her own words, no mercy instead of trying to talk it out.
A big reason why this episode works so well is the excellent casting of Reiner Schöne as Dukhat. After hearing several times about what a great leader Dukhat was, and how devastating his loss was, the casting of the role was crucial to making this episode work—and, for that matter, to make the entire Earth-Minbari War work as a plot point. Schöne absolutely knocks it out of the park, giving us a truly charismatic leader.
Much credit also goes to Mira Furlan, especially for her portrayal of Delenn as a very young acolyte. She convincingly gives us Delenn at three very different points in her life, and as usual inhabits the complexity of the character with verve and style.
Some nice character bits floating around the Minbari stuff, too. Allan finally getting an Army of Light uniform is a welcome change, especially given how ill-fitting the new regular security outfits are. Ivanova going on a Drazi bender is a cute followup to the events of “The Geometry of Shadows,” and Cole tormenting Franklin with Gilbert & Sullivan is epic.
Next week: “Racing Mars”
“Use a larger needle” and “They will recover in time”. Lennier has a solid sense of humor, and is a complete badass. Also head over heels for Delenn.
I’ve always quite liked this episode. Finally getting to see Dukhat, understanding more of how the Minbari side of the conflict became a “holy war”, and all the wonderful little character moments throughout. And I like how, even so much later in the story, we revisit the whole question of what the religious caste really understands. Was the whole “migration of souls” really just a misunderstanding of the effect that the inclusion of human DNA into the Minbari gene pool represented? And if so, what does it say about the religious caste, and Minbari society overall, that there was this prevalent feeling that the greater Minbari souls were no longer being reborn? It’s something I wish the series could have touched on again, especially given events in the fifth season.
I also have always been a fan of this episode for all those reasons. As for the DNA and the religious caste, I’m certain that JMS never wanted to have concrete answers to these kind of faith vs. science questions resolved, that this is an intentional ambiguity that has been a hallmark of the show going all the way back at least to episode 102, Soul Hunter.
One thing I’ve always liked is that we hear the religious caste’s reasons for surrender at the Battle of the Line, and it ultimately hinges on their interpretation of facts that we see have a completely different explanation. It all becomes this intriguing question of interpretation, rationalization, and deception.
The parallels between Delenn and Lennier are so strong. I suspect that she was also in love with the person she was acting as aide for. That would give a greater foundation to her extreme grief and overreaction. However, she was probably able to keep her feelings at the removed and more chaste level that Lennier keeps telling himself he is.
It seems like descendants of Valen shouldn’t be quite as rare as they’re made out to be. They say that just about every person with Western European ancestry can claim descent from Charlemagne. Even assuming longer generations and smaller families for the Minbari, there ought to be at least a couple million of them by this time.
True, but the problem is, that refers to genealogical descendants rather than genetic descendants. It can take as little as 8-12 generations for the number of gene packets you inherit from a given ancestor to drop to zero. That’s only 3-4 centuries, maybe. Even if Minbari generations are longer, after a thousand years, the odds that any of Sinclair’s DNA would exist at detectable levels in any given descendant would be quite low.
Given that we have no information about Minbari DNA or what happened when Sinclair’s human DNA got rewritten, I’d say it’s all guesswork anyway. For that matter, we don’t even know how common clan intermarriage is amongst the Minbari: it’s possible their genetic diversity is more limited than that of human beings.
All we know for sure is that whatever the Triluminary is picking up, Delenn has it.
Reiner Schöne’s name was misspelled in the episode credits as “Reiner Shone.” At least it wasn’t “Rainer Shine.”
This was pretty good, but it smacks of small-universe syndrome, having everything that happened in the story revolve around the main characters. Delenn wasn’t just Dukhat’s protegee, she was the one who ordered the war, and she was a descendant of Valen who was actually Sinclair, and it’s all just so insular, these grand cosmic matters all revolving around a handful of people.
I also have mixed feelings about dialogue callbacks like the “aide who won’t look up” line. There can be a nice story resonance in reiterating a familiar line in a new context, but I think it makes characters seem less clever if the clever things they say turn out to have been just quotes of things other people said.
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Either our main cast are entangled in a bunch of important matters, or we have episodes which are focused around a guest performer instead of a main cast member. Those can be memorable or unbearable; on B5, the record leans towards unbearable. Grail and A Late Delivery from Avalon are two prominant examples, with guest writers often responsible for writing episodes focused around a guest performer as a focal point to the story.
It’s hard to see how this story gets told if Delenn isn’t so central to the Earth-Minbari War and she’s already been established as one of the Nine.
But you can be part of an important matter without being the single central figure or catalyst who set it all in motion. I mean, the story of Picard being assimilated by the Borg and coping with the aftermath is effective enough without the revelation that, say, the Borg Queen was actually his mother. That would’ve reduced it to contrived melodrama. You connect people to important problems by the way they respond to them, the way they solve them, the ways they’re changed by them. It’s not necessary to make them the ones who caused them in the first place. And it beggars coincidence if every important event in a series turns out to have been caused by one of the main characters who happened to come together in its primary setting.
“it makes characters seem less clever if the clever things they say turn out to have been just quotes of things other people said.”
Very true to life though.
…and very believable. (I’d say “human”, but she’s Minbari, so…[snerk])
Not a fan of small-universe either but i think B5 is supposed to be a closed loop with how sinclair learns all these things and then as valen sets it in motion to happen the way he needs. This rewatch has really made my view of B5 diminish having not watched it since it aired. The time travel stuff is rough and having read more in the the 20 plus years the homages and lifts from other peoples works are distracting. You have some great moments and some great acting at times but overall the issues are outweighing the positives to me.
Given that the original plan was to keep Sinclair for the whole show and have the time travel be into the future, the issues with the plot aren’t surprising; it’s amazing how well things got cobbled together.
“And we find out the rather brutal revelation that the war was entirely her fault.”
Well, it was partly the fault of everyone else who voted for the war as well.
Yes, but she was the deciding vote. It all swung on her decision.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I always roll my eyes in situations where, say, John McCain gets all the credit for preserving Obamacare when Collins, Murkowski, and every Democrat voted the same way he did.
Bit I think it’s fair in this instance in large part because Delenn blames herself for this decision. I think she would have even if she’d been one of five votes for, but the drama is certainly heightened by having her be deciding vote.
I wouldn’t say that made it entirely her fault, though, since she was reacting to a chain of bad decisions made by other people — the Minbari’s decision to approach with gunports open due to their rather stupid assumption that other cultures would understand their conventions, and the human captain’s decision to launch a full-scale attack in response to that perceived threat rather than, I dunno, starting with taking evasive action and seeing if they actually fired or not. Not to mention the Council’s bad decision years earlier to avoid contacting the humans when they had the chance. In the grand scheme of things, the war happened because they didn’t listen to Delenn back then.
And those other eight councillors didn’t have to make the choices they made. Assuming three of the four pro-war votes were military caste, then whoever cast that fourth vote would’ve been religious or worker caste and would’ve split with either one or two of their other caste-mates respectively (since presumably there are only two religious-caste councillors besides Delenn). So it stands to reason that there was a chance that councillor could’ve chosen to vote against war, or that another religious or worker caste councillor could’ve chosen to vote for war, and then the decision would’ve been out of Delenn’s hands.
So it’s an effective dramatic conceit to make it look as though it was all Delenn’s responsibility, but realistically, she was only put in that position because of the decisions of the other councillors, which could have gone the other way. So it was as much their decision as hers. Hers only seemed decisive because it came last. But the fact that it was the last decision in the chain means that a lot of other people’s decisions were responsible for putting her in that position.
Delenn counseled against ignorance of the humans, but to no avail. You could even say,
Incuriosity Killed Dukhat
[headdesk] (and rimshot)
You win the thread!
This always bugged me about Congress, too. Tie-breaker nothing, “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided” is equivalent to “The Vice President of the United States shall have a Vote, and shall solely enjoy the privilege of a secret Ballot, except if the final count is really cloſe.”
Please help me understand the math. The Grey Council has 9 members, one of whom is the leader (Dukhat here, Delenn in earlier episodes). When Dukhat dies, shouldn’t that leave 8 active members? So how does Delenn break a tie? Was there an abstention? Was the entire Council not present on the ship?
It has 9 members, plus Dukhat. As JMS put it:
“There’s the One, and the Nine…when Dukhat was alive, there were 9 grey council members and him as the head of it, making ten. (Look at the picture and count the number of people.) 1 and 9.
Valen called together the Grey Council, formed the first one; until then the castes had been in constant competition. He wanted to operate outside of that a bit, so he made sure he was not one of the Nine. That tradition has continued.”
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/075.html#JS
They why was Delenn leader of the Grey Council yet still a member?
She wasn’t. Delenn was part of the Grey Council when the show started. One of the 3 Religious Caste members.
In Babylon Squared they invited her to be the new leader of the council and she declined because she wanted to stay on Babylon 5.
They then kicked her off the council entirely in All Alone in the Night. She broke the council in Severed Dreams and we’ll have more council shenanigans later this season.
I noticed how Sheridan swears Franklin and Marcus to secrecy about where they’re going– he trusts his people but why take chances? A reasonable precaution, I like it. Then why on Minbar does he tell Delenn about it in a public, crowded part of the station where anybody could have overheard it? Shades of Londo and Morden having incredibly confidential conversations in a public park. This show is so funny about information and secrecy sometimes.
Because handling it as “I have something else to tell you” and then cutting to his quarters or another set costs more money than handling everything as a single scene.
At some point, just take the expalantion as Lady Malory’s in The Great Muppet Caper: “It’s plot exposition; it has to go somewhere.”
Keith, Is it my imagination or are your analysis of the episodes (“The name of the place is Babylon 5″) getting shorter and shorter? This episode’s was only five paragraphs.
Is anybody else slightly uncomfortable with Lennier playing such an intimate role in Delenn’s little vision quest or whatever it’s called without telling her why? I mean, I’d be surprised if she doesn’t know, but still…
Anyway, this was a good one. Mira Furlan was wonderful as always, and it was nice to see her back in Minbari makeup. It really suits her angular features. The guy playing Dukhat was very good as well. I agree that his casting was something the show had to get right, and given its track record on that front, it wasn’t guaranteed. I know I recognize him, but for the life of me I can’t figure out from where. It certainly isn’t as Esoqq from Star Trek TNG’s Allegiance, buried as he was under so much makeup.
I disagree with the episode’s characterization that the war was Delenn’s fault, or at least it was no more her fault than anyone else’s who voted for war. There’s no such thing as a deciding vote.
What is there to be uncomfortable about? Lennier has been her loyal aide and companion for over three years now. He chose to be her supporter in this as he has done in all things. Why should there be any mystery there? And who else could possibly have done the job? There’s no other Minbari that she’s so close to, or that trusts and accepts her as much.
If someone were volunteering to play such a role for me, I’d like to know whether they’re doing it to satisfy their unrequited romantic feelings. The longer Lennier goes without telling Delenn what he’s already told the audience, the more uncomfortable I feel about all their scenes together.
I don’t see how that matters. He loves Delenn and is loyal to her. That’s true whether there’s a romantic component to that love or not. Love is not intrinsically a harmful or predatory thing, except when abused. I don’t see Lennier as the type to love in anything but a selfless way.
I didn’t say it was predatory, but I don’t think it’s healthy. This isn’t really my area, but I don’t think you can’t have a healthy relationship with someone if you’re not being honest about your feelings. I assume what the writer is going for is something along the lines of “Courtly Love,” but I’d feel a lot better if the show at least made clear that Delenn knew how Lennier felt and was okay with it.
I just don’t see how it’s relevant in this situation. What difference would it make to Lennier’s choice to stand by Delenn in the Dreaming, or his actions there? I mean, they said he was there to “guide and protect” her, but his actual role was totally passive. The only real reason he was there was to give Delenn someone to explain things to for the audience’s benefit.
I feel like we’re talking at cross purposes. Sure, this episode could have played out the same way if the writer hadn’t decided that Lennier was secretly in love with Delenn. But he did, and I think it paints their whole relationship in a different light that I can’t ignore.
I was wondering if Delenn ever got around to telling Sheridan , “By the way, nearly driving Humanity to extinction was my doing. Oops?”
JMS said when asked that she would never tell him, since it would ruin what they have to no purpose.
Actually that is tangentially one of the reasons I prefer Delenn/Sheridan over Delenn/Sinclair. She can hide the fact that she did something that would be really, really hard for him to forgive from Sheridan. Even if she did hide the facts of how the war started from Sinclair, he darned well knew she captured him, tortured him and then mind raped him to send him back. That never struck me as a solid basis for a good relationship. It’s kind of icky all in all.
After all that came before, any episode that manages to subvert and reinterpret everything we know about the Minbari – 4 seasons in, no less – deserves due compliment. We go into “Atonement” expecting the old Minbari prejudice against humans story yet again, and then we get the rug pulled out from under not once, but twice.
Going all the way back to season 1’s “Soul Hunter”, we finally get the complete picture of how Minbari souls became the very reason they ended the war, thanks to the show’s decision to anticipate the events of “War Without End”. It’s a welcome twist because we as viewers can already figure it out even before Delenn brings Sinclair’s name to the conversation. Of course Valen being a known quantity had to have repercussions.
Although by this point, TNT hadn’t yet picked up the show’s renewal, one can easily view this episode as a trial run for the upcoming Into the Beginning TV movie. Given they had to cram the Earth war, cut a lot of this year’s Minbari storyline and wrap the entire show by season’s end, I figure JMS already had the idea of somehow giving us a glimpse of the Earth/Minbari war in the back of his mind. By letting us spend some time in Delenn’s memories, seeing Dukhat for the first time was a treat and we got a preview of what was to come. Great casting for Dukhat for that matter. Such a unique and fresh take on the Minbari.
The other big shocking twist of course being Delenn being the tie-breaking vote. Obviously, one can’t place all the blame on her. But her standing over Dukhat’s body, her hands covered in blood, is the perfect example why you usually don’t let people make major decisions while overcome with grief and loss. It never ends well.
Love the blink-and-you-miss beat with Ivanova and the partying Drazi, and I could never get enough of Frank and Marcus paired together. It worked so well last season, it makes perfect sense to send them off on a Mars adventure, Gilbert and Sullivan included. I love the way the art department designed that scene – that’s clearly a zero gravity environment given how the crates are placed.
I’m not so sure that JMS was anticipating “War Without End” when he wrote “Soul Hunter”, though. “Soul Hunter” was written so early in season 1 that it seems more likely that JMS was still following the plan he had in mind when Sinclair was meant to stay for the entire series (and “Babylon Prime”), where Sinclair would not have gone back in time to become Valen. At least, that’s my read on it. YMMV, of course ;)
“The other big shocking twist of course being Delenn being the tie-breaking vote. Obviously, one can’t place all the blame on her. But her standing over Dukhat’s body, her hands covered in blood, is the perfect example why you usually don’t let people make major decisions while overcome with grief and loss. It never ends well.”
Good point. Fridge logic: What was the rush? Why did they have to make that decision right there and then? The question was, “Do we follow them back to their base and take revenge or do we wait, try to find out what happened?” Why couldn’t they have just sent a scout ship to trail them back to their base and gain intelligence before deciding whether, or how, to strike? That seems like basic good military practice. So the binary choice put on Delenn’s shoulders in that moment feels artificial.
You’re making an assumption about Earthforce’s next move that the Minbari can’t: they know nothing about humans, including the size or capability of their fleet. The most paranoid reading is that Earth launched a decapitation strike to be followed by a massive invasion: the Minbari might have as long as it takes for Earth’s generals to analyze the data from that initial strike, and no longer.
Sending a scout does nothing to disrupt such an attack.
Minbari are also established to be big into “terror” and “disproportionate response” as weapons: sending a scout is a sign of weakness.
That these two assessments—we should attack now before they can launch their massive attack on us, because they could be a huge threat; we should launch an counterattack of overwhelming force to prove their weakness to them—make mutually exclusive assumptions doesn’t change the fact that there’s plenty of history behind their deployment in tandem.
We see later how the military caste are a strong mix of arrogant ignorance and desire to “test themselves against a real foe” in a way that the Earth-Minbari War disapppoints them from beginning to end, while they happily sit out the Shadow War (because of course if a real test includes the possibility of defeat, that is not to be borne). Delenn’s thinking in the moment certainly doesn’t lend itself to saying “let’s think on it for a week” and the four voting for war would certainly press the urgency.
But the stark choice is “strike back immediately” or “wait to figure out what’s happened” and “what’s the rush” isn’t relevant to the vote. Four people voted “strike back immediately” and four voted “wait.” Sending a scout is a vote for “gather more information” and Delenn is too hurt and angry to take that choice.
One could certainly blame whoever proposed “strike back immediately” (or whoever voted to end discussion 5-3 if we assume Robert’s Rules of Order).
I’m not making an assumption, I’m saying they shouldn’t have made an assumption. As you say, it’s “the most paranoid reading,” which is an assumption by definition. And it’s never good military strategy to rush into an attack without advance intel. Sending a probe or scout first would’ve made a difference of only hours. What I’m saying is, they should’ve defaulted to gathering intel before making the critical decision of whether to go to war or not. Knowing your enemy is the first step in a war. (Come to think of it, maybe it was the military caste who voted to wait and see, because they presumably would’ve known how stupidly reckless it would’ve been to launch a war without doing a recce of the enemy first.)
Besides, if there had been a massive invasion right behind the first fleet, wouldn’t that have made it even more unwise to rush ahead blindly into what might be the teeth of a gigantic invasion force? Wouldn’t that, if anything, argue for withdrawing to protect the core worlds rather than stupidly rushing forward to tackle a completely unknown enemy?
Much though I love Delenn, this is why I can never quite get behind her relationship with Sheridan. If my fiancée was personally responsible for the attempted extermination of my entire species, I would damn well want to know about it.