“The Illusion of Truth”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Stephen Furst
Season 4, Episode 8
Production episode 408
Original air date: February 17, 1997
It was the dawn of the third age… Ivanova finds Sheridan alone in the war room, which isn’t really needed anymore, since the Shadow War is over. Sheridan is concerned about the likelihood of a war against President Clark. He’s also concerned about his father. They’d managed to stay in touch since breaking off from Earth, but he hasn’t heard anything from the old man in a while, and the last message he did get was that strangers were asking around town about him.
In customs, a new arrival named Dan Randall refuses to allow his luggage to be inspected. Allan forces the issue, only to discover that the luggage contains recording equipment and Randall is a reporter for ISN.
Franklin reports to Sheridan that they have to shuffle around the telepaths in the cryo units, as some of them are malfunctioning. Sheridan authorizes it, then visits Randall, who is currently in custody for traveling under false papers. Randall insists that, if he and his people had said who they really were, they’d have been turned away. But Sheridan says they have an open-door policy, and everyone’s allowed on the station—the equipment, though, is a different matter. ISN is a propaganda machine for Clark, and they won’t assist in that.
Randall puts his cards on the table: he’s here to do a piece on B5. Yes, it’s supposed to be a hit piece, but Randall wants to try to get some of the truth out there. He claims that he’s one of several ISN employees who are trying to work from within to at least get some truth out.
Garibaldi has started up a business as a finder: locating items that have gone missing in the chaos of the Shadow War. We see him with a client who is trying to convince him that a statue is a family heirloom with sentimental value, but Garibaldi knows full well that it’s a Drazi religious icon and that his client probably stowed some valuables in there before having to abandon his home and he wants the stuff back.
After they negotiate a new price and the client buggers off, Lennier joins Garibaldi to ask how he is doing and why he resigned. Garibaldi expresses mostly polite frustration at how many people are asking him that. Sheridan then interrupts, accompanied by Randall. Sheridan wants Lennier to show Randall and his cameras around the station. After Lennier goes off with the reporter, Sheridan and Garibaldi exchange awkward glances.
Lennier takes Randall around, answering questions about things like who pays for ship repairs. The floating camera also repeatedly baps Lennier on the head, to his annoyance. For reasons passing understanding, Lennier takes Randall to downbelow. While there, they encounter Franklin wheeling away a patient. The doctor also takes a call regarding cryo units.
Mollari complains to Sheridan about the temperature in his quarters. The ISN cameras capture that discussion.
Randall interviews Sheridan and Delenn, who are very obviously a couple, and they discuss that some. At one point, Randall asks if there are misgivings about their relationship, and Sheridan says nobody will be able to stop what they’ve begun.
Randall’s last interview is with Garibaldi, who resists at first, but eventually lets it all hang out, including his serious misgivings about Sheridan.
Some time later, Sheridan, Ivanova, and Delenn meet in Sheridan’s office to watch Randall’s report. ISN starts with some news, including that Earth has mostly taken back Mars, and also that a writer has confessed to the Senate’s committee investigating anti-Earth activities that he has worked against Earth’s interests, and he also names three other creative people whom he claims has done likewise. Said writer has very obviously been tortured and is speaking under duress.
We then start Randall’s report. Contrary to his assertions to Sheridan at the top of the episode, this is a pure hit piece, with footage reedited and interview questions changed to make B5 look as bad as possible. Using the footage of downbelow, Randall claims that all the civilian humans on B5 live like that, and that some are taken for experimentation. Using the footage of Lennier showing Randall around downbelow and Mollari rebuking Sheridan, Randall claims that the senior staff on B5 in general and Sheridan in particular are completely beholden to alien influence. An “expert,” Dr. William Indiri, claims that this is an example of Helsinki Syndrome (a misuse of Stockholm Syndrome, though it’s possible the syndrome’s name changes over the next couple centuries, though it can also be evidence that Indiri is incompetent).
Randall was also able to sneak into the cryo chambers and see that there are people there, whose names aren’t on any manifest for the station. Randall theorizes that these are where the humans are being taken for experimentation. (These are, of course, the telepaths that the Shadows modified.)
The conclusion of Randall’s report expresses sympathy for Sheridan’s apparent illness and hope that he can be rescued and healed away from alien influence.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! The one useful thing that comes out of Randall’s report is an offhand mention that Sheridan’s father is missing and the family farm has been burned to the ground, which gives Sheridan more information about his father’s fate than he had before Randall’s arrival.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi has a flashback to his imprisonment, one we haven’t seen before, where he’s tied to a chair and being told repeatedly, “You work for no one but us.”
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Randall also theorizes that Delenn’s transformation was done at Sheridan’s behest to make the notion of human/alien hybrids more palatable to humans.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari’s quarters are apparently having environmental issues, as he complains that it’s so cold that he fears his arms will turn to ice and fall off. Sheridan wry reply is that there are other limbs of Mollari’s that he’d rather see fall off…
Looking ahead. Garibaldi’s animus toward Sheridan will continue to be an issue over the next several episodes.
Welcome aboard. Jeff Griggs is perfectly skeevy as Randall and Henry Darrow is hilariously unimpressive as Indiri. Alison Higgins is back from “Ship of Tears” as the Clark-friendly ISN anchor; she’ll be back in “The Face of the Enemy.”
Trivial matters. This is the first of five episodes in the franchise directed by Stephen Furst. It was only his second time in the director’s chair. After co-writing and co-starring in the 1993 kids martial arts film Magic Kid, he returned to not only co-write and co-star in 1994’s Magic Kid II, he also directed the sequel. Furst continued to direct—his last project before his death in 2017 was to direct the science fiction web series Cozmo’s, which starred B5 co-star Claudia Christian, as well as Star Trek’sRobert Picardo, Ethan Phillips, and Aron Eisenberg.
The scene of Lee Parks naming fellow alien sympathizers (Adrian Mostel, Beth Trumbo, and Carleton Jarrico) is a tribute to four people who were blacklisted from working in Hollywood after being named during the hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s: Larry Parks, Zero Mostel, Dalton Trumbo, and Paul Jarrico.
The “This Year in History” segment on ISN (which really should be called “This Day in History,” but whatever) includes Yuri Gagarin’s successful orbiting of Earth in 1961, “North American” President Bill Clinton creating a Commission on the Future in 1999 (which didn’t happen), the foundation for a lunar colony being laid in 2018 (which really didn’t happen, heavy sigh), and the creation of the Psi Corps in 2161. Gagarin’s name was misspelled on the original broadcast, but that was fixed in reruns and on home video and streaming.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Commander, did you threaten to grab ahold of this man by the collar and throw him out an airlock?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I am shocked! Shocked and dismayed! I’d remind you that we are short on supplies here. We can’t afford to take perfectly good clothing and throw it out into space. Always take the jacket off first—I’ve told you that before. Sorry, she meant to say, ‘Stripped naked and thrown out an airlock.’ I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”
—Sheridan and Ivanova making it clear to Randall how unwanted he is.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Our job is to report the news, not to make it or guide it.” This is almost a great episode. It’s kept from greatness by a bunch of small things. It’s not enough to make this a bad episode, and it is in fact quite a good one, but I find myself frustrated, because it should’ve been so much more.
The first problem is a casting one. Jeff Griggs is just too dang sleazy to be in any way convincing as the embedded crusader he paints himself as in the early part of the episode. He’s very effective as a propagandist during the report that takes up the back half of the episode, but he’s so aggressively insincere early on that I find it impossible to credit that anybody on B5 took him seriously. (The show did a much better job of casting a similar role in “And Now for a Word.”)
The second is that our heroes are remarkably stupid here. I don’t mean in allowing Randall to do his interviews. Allowing him to do the report was absolutely the right thing to do. If Randall was lying and was really going to do a hatchet job, well, that was going to happen regardless of Sheridan and the gang’s level of cooperation. And if he was telling the truth about trying to get at the truth (ahem), then cooperating can only help.
No, it’s how they went about it, starting with having Lennier be his tour guide. If you’re trying to hedge against this turning into a propaganda piece for the isolationist anti-alien EarthGov, then don’t have a non-human be the guide to the station, and especially don’t do an interview sitting next to your Minbari girlfriend. Sheridan said to Ivanova before the broadcast that they were all careful to make simple declarative sentences that couldn’t be taken out of context, but that wasn’t even remotely true, starting with Sheridan and Delenn actually saying phrases like, “Anything that gets in the way disappears” (in the passive voice!) and “If they don’t understand we will make them understand” and my favorite, “There is no force in the galaxy that can stop what we have done here together. Nothing will be able to stop us.” I mean, for fuck’s sake, why not just wear a sign saying, “TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT PLEASE!”
On top of that, what possible reason would you have to let Randall get anywhere near downbelow? Even if Randall was sympathetic, there is no way, none, to make downbelow look good and about a billion ways to make it look awful, as we saw.
And that’s the problem with the episode: it stacks the deck, puts words in Sheridan and Delenn’s mouths in particular that are slightly awkward but necessary to make it easy for Randall to edit them into something that sounds awful.
Other parts of the report work much better. For example, the stuff with the cryochambers is something they couldn’t have predicted being a problem. (Hey look, Bester finds a way to screw with the crew again!) And Garibaldi’s anti-Sheridan tirade was also probably a big surprise to our heroes, and which is part of an ongoing issue that will continue throughout the next dozen episodes or so.
Director Stephen Furst deserves significant credit here, as the whole episode is beautifully lensed, from the foreshadowing still shots of bits the ISN cameras caught to the news report itself. It’s expertly filmed, and it’s not a surprise that Furst would come back to direct four more episodes.
Next week: “Atonement”
Yes, heavy sigh on no lunar colon yet but maybe someday! Agree with most of this but I think if they had not taken the reporter to down below that would have led to more questions “why didn’t they take me to this location?”. But yes should not have made it as easy for the hit job.
Didn’t remember this one at all and found it overall rather, well, ok. Not great, not bad, just very average.
OTOH, like so much of B5 these days, it’s just too damn relevant for a 30 year old show.
This is a real nothing of an episode. I agree with all the problems Keith points out, and it really doesn’t give us much new. Garibaldi’s hostility and the news about Sheridan’s parents could have been layered into a different story. Plus, we’ve essentially seen this before in “And Now for a Word.” With the shortened timeline due to the impending cancellation, this could easily have been dropped for something a bit meatier.
As an additional issue that just occurred to me, they must know something about this guy’s style. ISN is their only source for news from Earth, so most of the Terrans probably watch it occasionally, even if only for the sports scores. There had to be somebody trustworthy who knew about his reportorial style. Has his work in the past shown signs of reportorial honesty, or is he a propagandist? That should have been checked before giving him the run of the station.
Agreed. The episode’s biggest weakness in my book is not the Idiot Plot (although that is regrettable) it is the fact that it doesn’t accomplish anything. We do need some breathing room between the end of the Shadow War and the second half of the season, but even a low-plot episode could have provided some better character development.
I would have *much* preferred an episode actually following Garibaldi as the A plot at this point, for example.
This one always strikes me as one of those episodes where JMS really pushed to make his point vs. making sure everything made sense. While ISN would have managed to make anything look bad, Sheridan didn’t have to make it so damn easy for them. But JMS wanted to give a lesson on propaganda, one more blunt than “And Now For A word…”, and so Sheridan and others had to be idiots.
That said…damn, does this resonate with the current times. In previous rewatches, I saw a lot of parallels with Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, etc,, but now it really hits home, when it feels like every media outlet needs to be taken with a mountain of salt.
One thing I noticed this time around is how quickly Garibaldi starts criticizing Sheridan. For some reason, I always expect it to happen over a longer period of time. But this time around, it feels just a bit rushed. Granted, he’s clearly been working on his new business for a while, so some time has passed in the narrative. But it still feels like it comes a bit out of left field.
I saw parallels with CNN, MSNBC, etc.
I thought it was okay. Mostly, that’s on me. I generally don’t like any episodes that use this plot device of interviews, hidden cameras, etc. It’s the same with mockumentaries. I know I’m in the minority but I can’t stand them.
Bobby
No, I agree completely. I almost universally find them cringe.
Honestly, this script feels like JMS running on fumes and having to turn this story around too quickly to maintain the pace of production. It’s too clearly scripted backwards from the propagandistic edit to the original interviews. Understandable, as that’s much easier to do.
Given time, this should have focused on two elements: the relationship between Sheridan and Delenn, and the relationship between B5 and Earth. Ask questions about how the station can operate without support from Earth; get footage of a Minbari Warcruiser outside the station; ask lots of questions about the bonds between Sheridan and Delenn, and get Delenn to talk about how important it is to prevent another Earth-Minbari War.
Have Delenn talk some about the alliance in the Shadow War and her hopes that Earth and humanity can join that alliance and work together with aliens. Give her a big damn JMS speech about it. Axe the “supervillain” phrasing and have the two heartily talking about alliances and joining together to walk into the future, while underlining that what the Minbari almost did to humanity must never happen again. Hell, have Delenn talk about how the Minbari stopped the war when they realized humans and Minbari were one.
All of that plays equally well into the propagandistic narrative that the Minbari are going to forcibly convert humanity into more Minbari. Have Delenn produce a better answer to the “how should the widows of the War see your hybridity” by stressing how the two races have a hope of “joining to create a better tomorrow, a legacy of peace.”
The trick still won’t work on a second watch: the later reworked context colors the initial lines. But it could be done more naturally and more tragically as well.
I can’t decide if Straczynski thought people would still be credulous enough to believe the obviously coerced testimony or if the scene is supposed to be an threat. As for B5 itself, I’m afraid it’ll soon be quaint to think that propagandists to actually go get footage to take out of context rather than creating it wholesale. It’s not like ISN has to particularly worry about Sheridan filing suit for defamation or that experts will announce they found discrepancies in the footage.
Propaganda like that isn’t about convincing people to genuinely believe what you’re saying; it’s about convincing them to be too scared and subservient to question your version of the truth. The essence of Big Lie propaganda is making the lies as grandiose and blatant as possible, because if people go along with it anyway, it proves you’ve compelled their submission to your will. You’re not courting their belief, you’re demanding their loyalty. If they’ve surrendered to your dominance, then they’ll believe anything you tell them, even if they know it’s a lie.
This one sits at an odd place. It’s so blatantly staged that it pales in comparison to season 2’s “And Now for a Word”. That one felt natural. Script-wise, this is a flawed one. Sheridan and Delenn’s interview is the clumsiest thing I’ve seen these two characters do. Even Homer Simpson on “Homer Badman” did a better job trying to clear his name. The only thing missing in this story is a scene of Dan Randall pretending onscreen he’s being assaulted by Sheridan and whisked away by aliens.
But at the same time, this actually aged better than it should have. The way the ISN broadcast successfully finds the story and builds upon it is surprisingly more effective nowadays, picking up on the frozen telepaths and making a case that wouldn’t feel out of place in today’s political climate, especially with conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, antivaccine lunatics and the like.
The real hit piece though was Michael Garibaldi’s 100% honest take on Sheridan. That’s the best part of the episode. His own paranoia is crucial in shaping the ISN story, devoid of deception.
The ISN story, however, is not foolproof. While I can excuse the Helsinki syndrome typo as a product of Indiri’s ineptitude, the same can’t be said about the Londo/Sheridan discussion. The idea of taking Londo’s room temperature complaint and putting it out of context is in itself pretty funny – and Jurasik sells every word of it. But ISN’s approach is to play back the scene without audio. Here’s the problem: anyone who’s trained in reading lips will know Londo isn’t telling Sheridan what ISN claims he is.
But again, media-savvy viewers like myself aren’t representative of the greater bunch. And for all we know, everyone bought the piece. Sadly, there are plenty of real-life examples out there.
That being said, this episode’s biggest problem is that it has no long-term impact on the arc. What exactly is the end goal for this ISN piece? There is no public outcry movement on Earth requesting another seize-and-recover the station by Earthforce. This, of course, is part of what Bester described last episode as Clark’s latest attempt at regaining B5 – a multi-pronged strategy divided into four groups: Psi Corps, Earthforce, Minipax and Nightwatch. We saw the Psi Corps mission last week with the Black Omega debacle. Presumably, this ISN piece was part of the Nightwatch mission. But again, it has no bearing on where the story ends up by season’s end (other than maybe an aspect we’ll revisit when we get to “Intersections in Real Time”). At best, it gives JMS the plot excuse he needed to put Ivanova doing the Voice of the Resistance broadcasts, which are basically his excuse to write some rousing speeches. But given season 4’s cramming loads of story in itself, I’m guessing other long-term threads had to be cut.
Direction-wise, Furst delivers a well paced, visually engrossing episode. Not only directing the Londo scene, but especially the Garibaldi interview. And I just adore the end shot, with a pissed-off Sheridan using his comlink to shut down the ISN transmission, and the episode as a whole.
“Devoid of deception?” I don’t know. Garibaldi’s obviously been brainwashed, probably by Psi Corps. So he’s probably been programmed to support Clark’s party line.
Programmed to support Clark’s party line? Whatever happened to Garibaldi, there was little tampering done with his base personality. He’s always had trust issues with Sheridan and everyone else. Yes, he overcame most of that over the past two years after a lot of pain and hard work, but the paranoia and lack of trust have always been at his core. When I say he’s acting devoid of deception, I’m saying that is true, from his point of view, and at this very moment. But since this delves into spoiler-ish territory, I’ll table it for now.
But without the brainwashing, he would probably have kept his doubts to himself out of loyalty to his friend and colleague and the principles that B5 stood for, rather than voicing them in the way that would hurt Sheridan and the station and help Clark the most. The deception is not consciously his, but that of the people who altered his personality to serve their ends, so that what he appears to be is deceptive. So his actions are not devoid of deception in the broader sense.
I’m not convinced that Randall’s adding the news about Sheridan’s father and home were offhand or accidental. My impression was that it was his way of passing desired information back to B5 (tying back to Sheridan and Ivanova’s conversation at the start of the episode).
He also slips in that the alien ships were damaged in the “recent war,” confirming for anybody who has head rumors about the Shadow War that there really recently was a big conflict, mentioned that Sheridan broke away for the stated reason of greater freedom and goes out of the way to repeatedly mention Sheridan is a war hero. It’s possible this really was the best he could do and that it’s just really hard to do good work within a captured institution.
No, Randall was clearly lying about being a sincere journalist trying to sneak through the truth, given how fully he participated in twisting it into a lie — and we can see his true agenda in the part where he slipped into the cryo lab.
The mention of Sheridan’s father wasn’t an attempt to help Sheridan by passing on info, but an attempt to hurt him by telling him his home had been burned down and his father was missing — implicitly, probably in the government’s clutches to be tortured. It was a direct message to Sheridan that his family was paying the price for his defiance.
Exactly. And this whole matter is directly discussed in the next episode.
I’m fully open to the notion that he was a snake from the start, but it seems strange to ding him for the cryo lab. What he reports before the conspiracy theory is accurate– he wasn’t supposed to know about the cryo lab, he found out about it by accident, he confirmed its existence by trespassing, there’s no record of the people in the cryo lab ever coming to Bab5 (which makes sense, since we know they came from a ship that was initially bound elsewhere) and then when asked point blank about it Frankin and by extension Sheridan flat out lied about it. All of his actions up to that point seem fine to me, it would be rather strange for a journalist not to follow up on this. True it gets spun into a conspiracy theory, but once he’s home with this explosive footage he may not have control over what’s put in the teleprompter for him to read.
Randall claimed to Sheridan that he was on their side, that he knew ISN was a propaganda outlet rather than legitimate journalism, and that he wanted to let B5 tell their side of the story so he could try to slip some part of the truth past the censors. That’s incompatible with him actively sneaking around and trying to expose secrets. Sure, if he were working for a legitimate news outlet seeking the objective truth, it would be valid for him to dig into a secret, but that’s not the case here. He claimed to be fully aware that his employers were propagandists actively seeking dirt they could use against B5. So the fact that he was willing to sneak around and dig up dirt in the first place proves that he was knowingly supporting ISN’s propagandistic agenda, looking for something to use against B5.
More simply, if he’d been honest, he would’ve asked Sheridan about the cryo tubes. Any legitimate journalist would have revealed what he discovered and offered Sheridan the chance to tell his side of the story. But he hid it and saved it to spring on the viewers as a gotcha against B5, giving Sheridan no opportunity to explain or respond. So hell no, his actions were not “fine.” He was fully complicit with ISN’s agenda all along, and lied through his teeth to trick Sheridan into permitting him to gather dirt for his hit piece.
Or, it’s a direct threat. Wouldn’t it be a shame if something tragic happened…
Sheridan hates to keep the teeps frozen like this. Franklin points out there are few other choices. Then,
Sheridan: “You know, you fight a war and everyone forgets the people that get caught in the middle.
Something tells me we’ll be dealing with this legacy the shadows left behind for a long, long time.”
While the second sentence is both a bland truism and also literally true, Sheridan seems awfully sincere about the first sentence.
Sheridan came to accept that despite their humanity,
Randall also theorizes that Delenn’s transformation was done at Sheridan’s behest to make the notion of human/alien hybrids more palatable to humans
It’s very funny that Delenn’s transformation freaks out humans at large, alienated her from her own people, and led to her final expulsion from the Grey Council (since they told her not to do it and she did it anyway). Meanwhile, I don’t think anybody ever mentions it in a positive way, for those humans who are working with her it’s always about what she says and does, not the transformation itself. The notion that the physical change would bring the two races together just really did not pan out at all and had several negative consequences.
Keeping in mind that there were two transformations, and the previous (or later, depending on your point of view) transformation went very well.
Oh, you mean Sinclair/Valen?
True enough, although I wonder whether her relationship with Sheridan would have developed the same way if she hadn’t undergone the transformation. Prophecy being somewhat slippery, one could certainly argue that this more personal bringing-together really was instrumental to their success.
On the one hand, this episode is all too prescient, but on the other, if recent events have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t actually need to have any evidence whatsoever, no matter manipulatively edited, to lie under a dictatorship.
I could have sworn I remembered JMS admitting that “Helsinki syndrome” was a mistake on his part, but a quick Google search doesn’t pull up a reference—I may be conflating this with him admitting the East/West End of London mistake he made in the Jack the Ripper episode, which was (somewhat clumsily) overdubbed on the DVD and Blu-ray releases.
At any rate, I agree that it would have been much better if they had shown the broadcast team having to splice other sentences together to get the quotes, rather than just having the quotes handed to them on a silver platter.
I also could have sworn I read that JMS admitted to have accidentally picked up “Helsinki Syndrome” from Die Hard, but I can’t find that anywhere on the Lurker’s Guide. Whether Die Hard called it that instead of “Stockholm Syndrome” to make fun of the experts that local TV news digs up, or as a genuine mistake, I don’t know. As far as I’m aware, the pop-culture understanding of Stockholm Syndrome isn’t actually a thing that happens, but that’s never stopped pop psychology before.
Yeah, the story behind the episode that gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome” is interesting. As I understand it, the hostages were really more frustrated by the behaviour of the cops than they were particularly sympathetic to their captors, and there were arguably good reasons for that frustration.
It’s true that the interviewees could’ve been more careful to control what they said, but I can sort of buy it as a way of showing that it’s not as easy to avoid media distortion as one might think, that it’s hard to predict all the ways they can twist the facts. As for Lennier taking Randall to Downbelow, I think Sheridan’s idea was to show that they were being as transparent and honest as possible. Though that was a case of Sheridan being blinded by his own biases, because he’s used to seeing Minbari as an honorable people with an aversion to lying, and he forgot that people back home see them more as the ruthless enemy in a war from recent memory.
I’m surprised the propaganda piece didn’t work in a shot of Lennier head-butting the camera drone to show how “violent” he was.
I wish that Tubi’s stream would put the commercial breaks in the right places, because the episode was written to incorporate the commercials kind of cleverly. (Also, Tubi has annoyingly begun putting a thumbnail of the next episode over the end credits, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it without getting kicked out of the playback.)
What accent was Henry Darrow doing? I tend to associate his voice with a Spanish/Mexican accent, given his heritage and given that I first knew him from playing Zorro in two different early 1980s TV series, one animated and one live-action (and he later played Zorro’s father in the 1990s Disney Channel series). His accent as Dr. Indiri sounded more Eastern European, or maybe the stock Sigmund Freud-type accent associated with psychiatrists. As far as I can tell, though, the name Indiri is of African origin.
Henry Darrow played Zorro?
I remember him as Manolito in the High Chaparral.
Yes, Darrow starred in Filmation Associates’ animated The New Adventures of Zorro in 1981, and two years later in the very short-lived Disney-produced sitcom flop Zorro and Son, where he played an aging Don Diego reluctantly training his son to be the new Zorro — kind of foreshadowing the Antonio Banderas movies, although the premise of Zorro passing the mantle to his son goes back to the second Douglas Fairbanks silent movie. The makers of Zorro and Son tried and failed to get Guy Williams to reprise his role from Disney’s 1950s Zorro series (whose main title theme the sitcom reused), so Darrow was their second choice.
And, as I said, Darrow was Don Alejandro to Duncan Regehr’s Don Diego in seasons 2-4 the 1990 Disney Zorro series (replacing season 1’s Efrem Zimbalist Jr.).
I thought this one was pretty good. I agree that it “stacks the deck” by having Sheridan and Delenn in particular saying some rather silly things to a reporter, considering that they’re supposed to be the brains of this operation, but I don’t think they should have tried to hide how much of a role aliens play on Babylon 5. You don’t push back against Xenophobia by hiding how much foreigners contribute to your society. Like you say, the reporter was going to twist this anyway, especially with Garibaldi as their ace in the hole. BTW, I had no idea Stephen Furst was a director at all. I’m glad they gave him a shot and he obviously rose to the occasion.
Umm, how exactly did they hide the role aliens play on B5? They had Lennier conduct the tour, and Sheridan was open about his relationship with Delenn. Their whole goal was to be as open and truthful as possible in hopes of getting the truth out past the propaganda. The only thing they hid was the telepaths in cryo.
And this was not Stephen Furst’s directorial debut. He’d previously directed a movie called Magic Kid II (in which he also starred).
I didn’t say they did. I was disagreeing with KRAD’s notion that they should have done.
And the less said about Magic Kid II, the better :)