“The Long Night”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by John Lafia
Season 4, Episode 5
Production episode 405
Original air date: January 27, 1997
It was the dawn of the third age… Ivanova reports some rather brutal news to Sheridan: with the Vorlons attacking Shadow-influenced worlds, we’re now getting the inevitable response from the Shadows: they’re attacking Vorlon outposts.
On the Narn homeworld, Mollari meets with Vir and the other Centauri in on the regicidal conspiracy. A few of them take shots at the ambassador, pointing out that his and Refa’s plotting is what got them here in the first place. Mollari says that he’s sure he’ll pay for his crimes in due course—if not now, in the afterlife—but their focus now needs to be on taking out Cartagia before the Vorlons show up to destroy Centauri Prime.
On B5, Ivanova meets with Sheridan in the latter’s quarters. He wants her to revive her search for the First Ones, this time with Lorien along for the ride, which should make it all much easier. Sheridan also assures Ivanova that he’s proud of her and appreciates her.
On Narn, Mollari comes to the replica throne room, where Cartagia is being entertained by his court jester. At one point, Cartagia notices the jester mocking him directly, and everyone holds their breath until Cartagia laughs.
The emperor tells Mollari that he will bring him along when Centauri Prime burns, as every god needs a disciple. Mollari then goes to G’Kar, seeing that he has now had his eye plucked out. Mollari says that Cartagia will bring G’Kar to the throne room in chains. Mollari has arranged for the chains to be weakened, so G’Kar will be able to snap them and attack the emperor’s guard—but he’s not to attack the emperor, as a Narn killing the emperor will make it impossible for Narn to be freed after that. Mollari will use the distraction to whisk Cartagia away and then kill him in secret.
When Mollari returns to the throne room he hears weapons fire and then sees the corpse of the jester being carried away, with Cartagia lamenting at how subjective humor is.
Later, Vir meets with Mollari, having provided a syringe of a poison that will kill but leave no trace—but only if it’s injected directly into the heart. Then it will seem like a cardiac infarction.
They go to the throne room, where G’Kar is brought forth in chains. Cartagia comments to a crestfallen Mollari that he thought the Narn’s chains were a bit weak, so he had his people replace them. However, G’Kar is made of sterner stuff and breaks the chains anyhow. He takes on the Centauri guards with vicious abandon, as do the other Narns who were brought there to observe G’Kar’s downfall.
Mollari spirits Cartagia away. The emperor is livid, and backhands Mollari angrily, causing the syringe to go flying. Mollari is unable to even consider retrieving it, as Cartagia puts the ambassador in a headlock, angrily condemning him and everyone else. After tossing Mollari aside, he turns away—
—only to be stabbed in the chest with the syringe by Vir. Cartagia stumbles, says groggily, “I was to be a god, you understand?” Then he collapses, just as the guards enter. Mollari says that the emperor has collapsed, possibly due to his hearts, and to fetch a doctor right away.
A bit later, Mollari speaks before the assembled courtiers. The emperor has died of a cardiac event, no doubt stressed out by G’Kar’s attack. This is the second time in a row that an emperor has died when involved with the Narn, and it is an ill omen. The other nobles agree, and what’s more declare that Mollari should be prime minister, at least for the time being. Narn is left to their own devices—as one noble puts it, they have suffered enough—and they will return to Centauri Prime to get the Shadow vessels the hell off their world.
On B5, the council meets in the war room. Lennier reports that the Shadow vessels and Vorlon fleet are both doing hit-and-run strikes. White Star 14, commanded by a Ranger named Ericsson, calls in. They’re observing a Shadow Death Cloud in action. It sends a buttload of missiles down all the way to the planet’s core and detonates, destroying the planet from within.
Lennier says that the Vorlons are gathering in a sector that has only one inhabited planet: Coriana VI, which has six billion people. Sheridan tells Ericsson to stand by, as he’s about to receive some new orders.
On Narn, Mollari finds Vir completely drunk off his ass, the trauma of having killed someone being far too much for him to handle. Mollari says that Vir is a hero of the Republic, and sometimes heroes have to get their hands dirty. But he has a good heart, and that won’t change even with what has happened. Vir laments that he just wanted a good job, he didn’t want all this…
The Narn set off fireworks, celebrating the removal of the Centauri from their world.
On B5, Sheridan convenes a meeting of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds. He needs their fleets to distract the Vorlon ships on other worlds. Meanwhile, the White Star fleet will head toward Coriana, as will Ivanova with the First Ones once she finds them.
He then reestablishes contact with Ericsson on White Star 14. He’s being sent information on a secret Vorlon base on Coriana VI—which is completely false. But he’s to take WS14 to a battle with the Shadows, and allow himself to be captured and destroyed, so the Shadows will believe the intel is legit. Reinforcements will be able to help him, and he should do what he can to cover their escape. Ericsson understands, says some final words to Delenn in Minbari, and then goes off for his suicide mission.
On Narn, the Centauri are gone, and the Narn are absolutely trashing the replica throne room. G’Kar thinks they’re being silly geese, more so because they want him to be their new leader. G’Kar says they didn’t get rid of one dictator to install another. He’s willing to be part of a new Kha’Ri, but he will not rule alone. It quickly becomes clear that he and the Narns on the homeworld are not remotely on the same page, and G’Kar wanders off, chortling like a lunatic.
On B5, Sheridan listens to the last transmissions of WS14 before they are destroyed by the Shadows. Delenn then tells him it’s time to join the fleet.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan is obviously reluctant to condemn an entire White Star crew to death, but it’s the only way to get the Shadows to Coriana.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova is only willing to hare off to find First Ones if Sheridan promises he won’t keep her out of the final big-ass battle. She’s had an aversion/fear of being left out of important things ever since her mother sent her to a friend’s house to play so she could commit suicide. Sheridan agrees.
The household god of frustration. Upon seeing the Shadow Death Cloud (which is the name of my next death metal band), Garibaldi is at a total loss as to how they’re supposed to deal with that.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Lennier is unfailingly polite, so he repeatedly lets himself be interrupted into the war room before finally getting the chance to tell everyone where the Vorlon fleet is gathering.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari’s plans to kill Cartagia manage to go completely awry in several ways and yet still succeed in the end, as Cartagia is dead from what appears to be natural causes, Mollari is prime minister, and Narn is free.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar tries to explain that the Narns didn’t free themselves, the Centauri imploded on themselves. The Narns respond that G’Kar hasn’t suffered the way they have, and G’Kar can only laugh.
We live for the one, we die for the one. To his credit, Ericsson doesn’t hesitate to accept the awful mission Sheridan gives him.
The Shadowy Vorlons. The Vorlons and Shadows are both playing whack-a-mole with the galaxy, taking out targets that are influenced by their enemies without any regard to collateral damage.
Looking ahead. Sheridan will fulfill his promise to Ivanova and make sure she joins the final battle—over the objection of Delenn—in the very next episode, “Into the Fire.”
Welcome aboard. Wortham Krimmer makes his final appearance as Cartagia. Ron Campbell returns from “The Summoning” as the Drazi ambassador, to return in “Rumors, Bargains, and Lies.” Carl Reggiardo and Mark Bramhall play two of the other Centauri conspirators, while Kim Strauss plays G’Lorn.
And then we have our Robert Knepper moment, as I totally forgot that Bryan Cranston was on B5, before either of his famous roles in Malcolm in the Middle or Breaking Bad, appearing in this episode as the ill-fated Ericsson.
Trivial matters. Ivanova previously searched for First Ones (and found some) in “Voices of Authority,” and again (without finding any, as she was sidetracked by the Killer Vorlon Fleet of Doom) in “The Summoning.” G’Kar’s eye was plucked out at the end of the previous episode, “Falling Toward Apotheosis.” The previous Centauri emperor, Turhan, died just before the Centauri went to war with the Narn in “The Coming of Shadows.”
As with Caligula in the “Hail Who?” episode of I, Claudius, Cartagia’s final words are of his divinity.
Sheridan mentions that, when he took command of B5, someone left an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem on his desk. Given that Sinclair, his predecessor as station commander, was established in “The Parliament of Dreams,” as a devotee of Tennyson, it was likely left there for Sheridan by Sinclair.
According to J. Michael Straczynski’s online postings, his intention was to have Mollari kill Cartagia right up until he was writing the scene in question, at which point he realized that it had to be Vir who did it.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“The next few days will either mark the beginning of a new age or the death of everything we’ve worked for.”
—Sheridan’s rather blunt appraisal of his immediate future.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “An empty eye sees through to an empty heart.” One of the things I particularly admire about this episode is that J. Michael Straczynski recognized that the standard pacing of an episode wasn’t going to work here. So rather than intercut between the tragic setup of the Vorlon-Shadow showdown with the sacrifice of White Star 14 and the cathartic conclusion of Emperor Cartagia’s reign over the Centauri Republic, each part stands more or less on its own, with the latter taking up most of the first half of the episode, and the former taking up most of the rest.
And it works beautifully. We’ve spent the last four episodes being given ample evidence of how absolutely awful Cartagia is, aided by a magnificently sneering performance by Wortham Krimmer. And in case, we’ve forgotten, we see plenty of the epically mercurial emperor here, from his murder of the jester to his turning on Mollari right before Vir stabs him.
I love the story Straczynski told online at the time of how it wasn’t until he was in the midst of writing the scene that he realized that it had to be Vir who kills Cartagia. I’ve been there myself, being in the midst of writing something and realizing that it has to go a much different way than it did when I plotted it, and that’s a case where you have to listen to what the characters and the situation are telling you.
And it’s perfect. Honestly, Mollari doesn’t deserve to be the hero of the Republic who rids them of the monster on the throne. Vir, though, the one who has been Mollari’s conscience, the one who tried to rescue Narns who were oppressed by the Centauri, the one who has, on several occasions, told Morden to fuck off, is the one who is a much more appropriate person to strike the blow.
There’s another reason, which we see in the later scene when Vir is drunk off his ass: if there’s anyone whose soul will manage to remain unstained—or at least not too badly stained—by having to commit this awful-yet-necessary act, it’ll be Vir.
Way back in 2011 when I started writing regularly for this site with the Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch, I started the “Robert Knepper moment,” named after my shock when I got to the first-season episode “Haven” and saw Knepper in a mullet. I had no memory of Knepper—whom I remembered fondly from such places as Carnivale and Prison Break and Breakout Kings—being on TNG back in the day.
Of all the Knepper moments I’ve had in my various rewatches since, Bryan Cranston’s appearance is particularly powerful. I had no memory of Cranston being on B5 because he wasn’t yet Bryan Cranston in 1997, as it was three years before he was Malcolm’s father Hal and eleven years before he was Walter White, a.k.a. Heisenberg. And, honestly, I had no memory of his role, either, overshadowed as it was in my recollections of B5 by Cartagia’s ouster.
As a result, I was particularly taken with the quiet dignity with which Cranston played the role of the warrior going to his death, knowing that it’s in a worthy cause, knowing that it’s necessary. It’s an easy performance to overlook—as I did three decades ago—with the over-the-top happenings earlier in the episode, and I’m glad that my going “hey, that’s Bryan Cranston!” enabled me to truly appreciate his performance.
(Tellingly, Straczynski, when praising his performance online, merely refers to him as “the actor playing Ericsson.” After all, nobody on the internet in 1997 knew who Cranston was, either…)
Next week: “Into the Fire”
I remember a couple of decades ago Tuesday Morning Quarterback (Gregg Easterbrook, then at Slate, now on Substack) said the name “Vorlon” reminded him of a laundry detergent additive. “Now! With added Vorlon!”
I imagine the drummer for “Shadow Death Cloud” uses that detergent.
Despite not recognizing him, Cranston’s performance made me think that I should. He had Robert Knepper written all over him, as it were.
One of the best parts of writing is when the brilliant choice reveals itself in the process of writing.
I’m tempted to mutter about how quickly everything is moving but it probably is in line with how fast things move in the show (except when they need something to be far away).
I always look forward to this episode during each new rewatch. The culmination of the Cartagia arc was a shock during first run, and manages to feel even more perfect every time I watch it play out. And the performances are memorable, from Cartagia’s last gasps of madness with Londo before Vir steps in, Vir’s remorse, and G’Kar’s wise (and, at this point, unheeded) words to his people.
It’s hard to follow that up with something of equal measure, but JMS really tries with the Ericsson plot thread. Cranston made enough of an impression back in the day that, for a while, I would see Cranston and think “Oh, right, the Ranger from ‘The Long Night’!” Sheridan is perhaps a bit more awkward than I would expect at this point, but it does a nice job of showing that he’s fundamentally the same guy he was before his experience on Z’Ha’Dum.
A hell of a lot happens, but the episode somehow manages to feel almost as transitional as the last one. Most of that probably stems from knowing what’s coming, some of it may be an effect of the accelerated pacing due to the expected premature end of the show.
I think it might be because my expectation would be to spend some time with Sheridan wrestling with sending someone out to die. He’s used to sending people out, knowing that some of them aren’t coming back. That’s part and parcel of military command. But there’s a long way between, “You aren’t likely to survive,” and “You have to die.”
And we get just a little more of G’Kar as Narn Jesus. The yoke he’s wearing is reminiscent of Jesus carrying the cross, complete with someone helping him briefly with his burden.
I would have preferred if Sheridan followed Star Trek traditions (and IMHO much more powerful leadership style) by asking the captain if he would volunteer for the suicidal mission. Yes, it’s used more often, and often the volunteers survive (though Lower Decks in TNG was a very refreshing episode from that perspective), but it’s used because of reasons. it just works better with people if it’s their choice.
but then i realised that I anyway don’t think very high of Sheridan’s leadership style, so it fits the pattern.
“I would have preferred if Sheridan followed Star Trek traditions (and IMHO much more powerful leadership style) by asking the captain if he would volunteer for the suicidal mission.”
I imagine Sheridan would have preferred that too. Reason enough for JMS to eliminate that as an option. He can hardly have wanted to make this easy for his character.
Re: Ericsson NOT being “asked”..,he knew, as did Sheridan, that “We live for the One. We die for the One” is not just an aphorism.
Yeah; Sheridan was “awkward”. Who wouldn’t be in a situation like that?
Except asking for a volunteer wouldn’t have worked in this case. Ericsson was the captain on the scene, the only one in a position to do the necessary task. There was no time to get someone else to do it. So it was Ericsson or nobody, and there was too much at stake for it to be nobody.
Yes, it made sense in the context, though he could have asked, if he knew that Ericsson would not say no. :)
Huh – I really set the political symbolism of this show in the 80s, but I bet there is an interesting interpretation of setting it in the time of Christ with the shadows and the Vorons both symbolizing Rome. Question – are we to the point yet where we can discuss overall series symbolism or would that still be too spoilery?
If they both symbolize Rome, Vorlons=Bread and Shadows=Circuses.
It’s a 30-year-old show. The statute of limitations on spoilers has long past.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
But we still hide our spoilers here. (grin)
Bryan Cranston was a journeyman actor for quite a long time before he broke out, including voiceover work. A few years before this episode, he even voiced a couple of monsters in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which is presumably why the 2017 Power Rangers reboot movie cast him as Zordon.
This is a hell of an episode with possibly the best writing and acting I’ve seen on B5, in scenes like Ivanova’s story about her mother and Vir coping with his guilt. Just really firing on all cylinders. And I have to wonder, before JMS realized Vir should kill Cartagia, what did he have outlined in place of Vir’s guilt scene? Londo probably wouldn’t have wrestled with it a fraction as much.
I do have a few quibbles, though. For one thing, I feel JMS has too much of a tendency to stereotype the Narns as tending to kneejerk violence and revenge, as seen here. I find it hard to believe G’Kar would be the only Narn who’d understand that it made more sense to prioritize rebuilding and recovering over seeking vengeance. Having the only other Narn voice in the episode be so blinded by vengeance just seems to feed the stereotype.
Also, the script made such a point of how Centauri have two hearts, but then Londo told Vir that he had a good heart, singular. JMS should’ve picked one.
And I’m not sure about the logistics of the whole “plant a secret document in the White Star’s computer so the Shadows can find it after they defeat the ship” plan. I mean, usually space battles in this series end with the losing ship being blown up. So would the computer even survive for the Shadows to extract information from? Maybe the idea was that the Shadows took the ship intact and enslaved its crew or whatever, but that wasn’t made clear, nor do I recall if there’s precedent for that being something the Shadows normally do, aside from what(ever) happened to Mr. Garibaldi at the end of season 3.
And it’s a minor thing, but it might’ve been nice to show the Narns celebrating in some other way than setting off fireworks. That’s a human way of celebrating, and indeed it wasn’t a Western way of celebrating until gunpowder found its way over from China. So who knows whether an alien culture would use it? It might’ve been nice to see some more exotic alternative.
Fireworks are a cheap optical effect plus a stock sound effect. How much of your limited budget is worth spending to make the Narn celebration seem appropriately “alien”? Keep in mind your rendering time budget is all being stretched by the next episode. What’s gained by having G’Karn look out and say “I see they’ve released the bleems in celebration”? You don’t want to take a viewer out of the scene and have them thinking about your weird alien celebration and miss the point of the scene.
Is Londo’s speech to Vir improved if he says “hearts” twice instead of heart, or have you repaired a pedantic error at the cost of shifting viewer attention? Especially when the pedantic point is superficial. Humans talk about “a good heart” in this context not because of modern biology, but because of older beliefs that the heart is the seat of the soul/the organ we think with. Centauri hearts have different functions (one is in essence their kidney), so equating their function makes no sense.
Presumably we”re also getting translation comvention here as the Centauri wouldn’t be speaking English. So quibbling over singular/plural mismatches between physical anatomy and figures of speech misses a larger quibble and the fact that not one scene would be improved by inventing an alien language for Londo and Vir to use and burying two great actors under gibberish in the name of verisimilitude.
The problem could’ve been avoided by having Mollari say to Vir that Vir has a good soul. No problems with differing anatomy when using that statement!
That would work. The important thing is internal consistency. If you establish something about an alien culture or biology, you should be consistent in how they think and talk about it. You want to give them a distinct worldview of their own instead of just having them use the same expressions and metaphors a human would.
The ship could have had something like a black box like airplanes that have that could survive explosions…but than, why haven’t other ships like Keffler’s use that instead of sending out a message. So, who knows.
ah yeah, the FIREWORKS, that’s what i wanted to nitpick about, that was the other thing that made absolutely zero sense.
I think you’re teasing me, but I wasn’t saying it made no sense, just that it was too conventionally human and it would’ve been more interesting and imaginative if the Narns had a more alien custom. I could say the same about the Centauri court jester, which is way too European.
no, i was totally serious. i found it totally ridiculous, it unsuspended my disbelief or how to say it. :D
and yes, i agree about the jester as well, it just annoyed me less. :)
Centauri are Time Lords?
Checking Cranston’s filmography I see he had a bit of a run of anime dubs, including Wings of Honneamise, and Macross Plus.
Lots of fictional aliens have two hearts, like the Newcomers in Alien Nation. (In fact, I could’ve sworn the Alien Nation movie had a song called “Two Hearts” under the end credits, but IMDb doesn’t list it. So maybe I’m thinking of another movie with a two-hearted alien character in it.)
And yeah, there was a lot of overlap between Power Rangers and anime-dub voice actors, since Saban started out doing anime dubs, so adapting a tokusatsu show with an American cast was just an extension of that. And it’s gone the other way too, with former Rangers Johnny Yong Bosch and Patricia Ja Lee becoming major dub actors.
Indeed. Even the Doctor has two hearts. That fact even saves him in one of the “modern” episodes.
Oh, and it just struck me — this is another case of Bryan Cranston being connected with Rangers.
I don’t have access to the episode at the moment. But if I’m remembering right, Ericson’s final transmission included a line to the effect of “We can’t let them take us alive and find the secret document on our computer!” So the idea would have been that the Shadows would intercept the transmission and be baited into taking steps to preserve/retrieve the data. Still not a high-percentage play, but it’s not a complete shot in the dark.
He said “We can’t let them take us alive,” but the rest was at best implicit.
Agreed on the penultimate paragraph. It feels like a play on the IRL Operation Mincemeat, but it’s been transported to a context where it doesn’t really work. Sheridan claims that after the Shadows (somehow) recover the data, that they’ll decide to attack the fake base just before it’s operational. They might outright destroy the White Star and its computer, even if they recover the file they might not actually process it and make a decision within three days, or they might process the file and decide to do something else entirely. Sheridan is bizarrely confident that this is going to play out exactly the way he envisions it. It’s a great episode and this is just a pinprick I noticed on the rewatch, but still…
This may fall under the category of “When you’re falling off a cliff you may as well try to fly – you’ve got nothing to lose,” that Sheridan said the other week. He needs to trick the Shadows and is counting on their First One-ness and ruthless efficiency to not miss a thing, and hopes they notice the bait he laid, but of course there’s so many ways it could go wrong.
Sheridan’s committing all of the Allied ships to this one last stand. It’s all their eggs in one basket, but the alternative is that the Vorlons wipe out a planet with an Earth-size population. That’s unthinkable in Sheridan’s mind. Either they risk everything on this one play or they lose.
And, considering the fact that Psi Corps and President Clarke have been in league with the Shadows, eventually Earth itself, although I don’t know if anyone knew the Shadows were working with Earth.
“At one point, Cartagia notices the jester mocking him directly, and everyone holds their breath until Cartagia laughs.”
I read that particular pause as being more about everyone deciding how to react to Cartagia’s direct statement that he intends for Centauri Prime be destroyed, along with everyone on it, in the service of his impending godhood. (Boom!) Though I guess it could be both.
That’s not how it’s written or filmed. The looks of nervousness and worry are directly off of Cartagia turning to stare at the jester. The other people in the room were having their own conversations and not listening to or hearing what the emperor was saying to Mollari.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I may be misremembering, but I thought it was the exclamation of “boom!” that drew the attention of the others in the room. But I do agree that the reaction of the room follows Cartagia’s glare at the jester, who was mimicking his hand gesture. I interpreted that as it taking a moment for the other Centauri to realize that the jester was making a joke of their impending deaths. But what you’re saying makes sense.
The overthrow of Cartagia is definitely one of this series’ finest moments, right up there with G’Kar’s hysterical laughter when his bloodthirstier countryman demands to know what he’s endured after having just suffered through weeks of torture and humiliation in the name of freeing his planet. I love his sheer bitterness and frustration, knowing that the cycle will continue, that the Narn, like the Centauri, are ultimately lost. And it’s made even better by the fact that it’s exactly the kind of thing that G’Kar himself might have said in the first season. It’s a nice payoff to Kosh’s remark in “Midnight on the Firing Line” about how both races are “a dying people”.
Meanwhile, it’s a nice counterpoint to all of the crappy no-name guest actors that B5 has had on that one of them actually turned out to be Bryan Cranston giving us an early taste of his acting talent.
Incidentally, I really identified with Lennier in the briefing scene. I’ve never figured out how to get people’s attention right away, so in group situations I’m constantly starting to say things and getting interrupted.
I totally agree that it had to be Vir to deliver the killing blow. It was perfect.
I love it when I’m writing a story and the characters tell me what they’ll do. I’ve learned to listen and trust them.
Glad JMS did that too here.
Bobby
Serendipity is one of the best things about writing. I also love it when two ideas I came up with independently of each other suddenly dovetail at a certain point and I realize they solve a problem I didn’t know I had. That happened to me just this morning, when I was writing a conversation and the thought idly occurred to me “Oh yeah, she’d realize at this point that Character X from the previous chapter would react this way to Character Y,” and I put it in without thinking much about it, just following the ideas where they led… and then it sank in that I’d accidentally given that character a far better and more sympathetic motivation for what she’s going to do later in the story.
Even aside from Vir “deserving it” more than Londo, having the assassination go according to Londo’s plan would just have been boring storyetlling.
G’kar, incredulous, hearing that he hasn’t suffered, staring his fellows in the face – with only one damn eye left – is another moment that burned itself into my brain.
G’kar’s conversation with the other Narn after the Centauri leave always hits me to this day as incredibly powerful, so I want to make sure it’s highlighted since Keith kind of brushed past it. Not just the “what has G’kar endured” part, but what came before it.
“But the Centauri–”
“Are a *lost* people! They ought to be pitied. They are already on a course for self-destruction. They do not need help from us.”
What great writing, a masterful performance from Katsulas as always, and what a contrast with G’kar’s opinion way back when Morden asked him what he wanted. In many ways, in this scene, G’kar is talking to his past self.
Wow, another almost perfect B5 episode. I had only a few things to nitpick about and when i thought through, i boiled it down to only one. :)
That is – if the whole ship is sacrificed, it’s not very reassuring that the captain has no family…what about the rest of the crew? we care about them less?
Ericsson’s line “They’re Minbari, they’ve trained for this” or whatever was meant to cover that, but it does sound pretty species-essentialist. Still, human or Minbari, they’re all Rangers, and the whole “We live for the One, we die for the One” thing applies.
I was actually thinking how appropriate it was that Londo would kill the emperor. He’s already got so much blood on his hands. What’s one more murder? I felt terrible for Vir when he ended up having to do the deed. Fortunately, the script leaned into that very effectively, and that’s not the only thing it did that won me over this time.
I’ve been complaining that G’Kar giving up everything else he had going on to go on a hunt for Garibaldi didn’t make much sense, and it still doesn’t, but that moment when he broke out into incredulous laughter when the other Narn asked what he’d endured at the hands of the Centauri wouldn’t have landed so well without the part he played in the last several episodes.
As for Bryan Cranston, it took me a few minutes to even recognize him. He was so young! Okay, he was pushing 40, but he still looked a lot younger than I’ve become used to picturing him, and he was terrific in his small part. You know it’s never a good thing when your commanding officer asks if you’re married…
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Not just Breaking Bad and Malcolm. This episode also predates Cranston’s iconic appearance on the X-Files 1998 episode “Drive” – the very one that put Cranston on the back of Vince Gilligan’s mind, allowing for that marriage of character and actor to happen at all.
Sheridan’s way of telling Ericsson they won’t be coming back is one that manages to convey that tragic fact without being overt about it regardless of the answer. He asks if Ericsson is married or not. And it plays well either way. If he were married, it would have been tragic just the same – he would have embraced the sacrifice regardless, but Sheridan and Delenn would probably also end up delivering a message to his loved one. It turns out he isn’t, but it’s still a tragic outcome all the same.
This also got me thinking about Rangers and personal attachments. The show never paints them as celibate monks like the Jedi – and we do see Marcus pining for Ivanova throughout – so their devotion to the cause and their life commitment to protecting the One presumably doesn’t forbid them to have a reason for coming back home either.
Given all the focus on Londo and the Narn homeworld, this also has the effect of making the side events of the episode feel very transitional. I do like the added focus on the Ericsson scenes with Sheridan, but everything else feels almost inconsequential, including the introduction of the Shadow planet killer. That thing is terrifying, and should have been given a LOT more focus, just like the Vorlon planet killer’s introduction two episodes ago. It should played more like the Shadow attack on Narn Quadrant 14 back in season 2 or the bombing of the Narn Homeworld later that year. That’s also the casualty of having to rush through mountains of plot in the sprint to finish most of the the five year story this season.
Cartagia goes out with a bang. And if his account is accurate, I’m surprised JMS didn’t think of Vir beforehand as the perfect candidate for being the one to do it. Because if the plan was for Londo to do it, then there wouldn’t have been much of a point for Vir to even be there in the first place – other than being a sounding board while Londo is planning the whole thing, which could have easily been a role for the Damian London character. But if his account is true, I’m glad he made the switch. I love the way that whole thing is staged. Vir clearly didn’t plan on injecting the needle himself. He was trying to give it back to Londo. It was all split-second timing thanks to Cartagia’s unexpected physical reaction (though given his proven madness, maybe Londo should have anticipated that).
I’m glad Vir found some spare time to get himself drunk and remorseful all the while Londo is trying to pull everyone’s strings and rush the court back to Centauri Prime to deal with Morden and the Shadows.
And with Cartagia being that unpredictable, leave it to G’Kar to really find that reserve strength and willpower to fully crack those shackles. After two years seeing Narn being beaten back again and again nonstop, seeing him overpower the shackles and the Centauri guards was cathartic.
I’m surprised the surviving Narn had fireworks in hand for the occasion. I’m guessing the resistance had gunpowder leftover. I’m glad we see it’s not a flawless victory lap, with the more warmonger Narns giving G’Kar just enough pause to reconsider everything that happened up to this point. It also nicely sets up G’Kar’s final arc in the series.
Vir wasn’t just handing the injector back to Londo. JMS called this out specifically in his newsgroup comments: “Nothing about it was at all accidental…he had to go pick it up, turn, move to Cartagia, stick it in, and then pull the trigger. Nothing accidental about it. But if we’d shown him doing all the prep, the shock wouldn’t have been as substantial.”
So Vir did make an intentional choice to kill Cartagia, although presumably it was a choice to save Londo in the heat of the moment, rather than something premeditated.
And leftover gunpowder wouldn’t produce fireworks like those shown, with starbursts in multiple colors. You’d just get a quick smoky explosion. A fireworks shell would have to be specially put together, with pyrotechnic stars made with the right metals or salts to burn in the desired colors. It’s not something you could just whip up in a few minutes from weapons materials alone.
Then that settles it. It was a damning split-second choice made out of his heart and devotion to Londo. No wonder he blamed himself afterwards.
I’m not sure it’s blaming himself, exactly; it’s just wrestling with the shock and guilt of taking another person’s life for the first time. I mean, he was completely on board with the idea of Cartagia dying at Londo’s hands, so it’s not like he thinks he did something wrong, per se; it’s just very hard for him to live with having that blood on his own hands instead.
Exactly. Anyone who has ever taken a human life in a justified act of self-defense will tell you that it is the worst thing they have ever done.. Just because it may be necessary to kill a person does not mean that it is an emotionally easy thing to deal with, especially in the aftermath when you have time to think about it. This marks the end of what is left of Vir’s innocence, and while it had to happen (especially if Vir is to later become Emperor), it is still heartbreaking to see.
Yes, and it’s good when a story acknowledges that reality. I see too many works of fiction where killing is treated as a casual thing, where the “heroes” kill a bunch of bad guys without a twinge of remorse and even someone who kills for the first time is able to shrug it off without difficulty or even toss out a callous one-liner about it. That’s just not a credible depiction of human psychology (or that of aliens who are symbolic surrogates for humanity).
I wonder if JMS initially had Vir around to help Londo and give him someone to bounce off of, so to speak, because he wanted Vir around for Morden’s impending comeuppance. And then he was in the perfect position to take on the more substantive part in this episode.
Yeah. Vir’s presence in this story, more than anything, had to have been to payoff his long-term promise to Morden.
I don’t suppose anyone would doubt that Londo was prepared to kill Cartagia. Certainly not Londo himself. So if he killed Cartagia it would not reveal anything about him to the audience, or change him in any way. So I see no advantage in having him do it.
But having Vir do it does change Vir, and our view of Vir.
So it is absolutely right to have him do it. I am actually surprised it was originally meant to be Londo.
So nothing new today?
It’s a holiday in the US.
I mean I live and work in the US – my office was certainly open. Heh – hopefully get something today or tomorrow.
It’s not a big one, Columbus Day, AKA Indigenous Peoples Day. My son-in-law works for the state and got it off, my daughter works for the city and didn’t.
I also vividly remember reading the postings from JMS in the early days of the internet where he said a character raised his hand while he was writing that scene and said he should be the one who killed the emperor. Very powerful. Thank you for doing this rewatch.