25 November 1998: Sleeping in Light

Wednesday, 25 November 1998:

Sleeping in Light

Every so often we recognize certain starting and ending points in our lives. Of course, we rarely recognize the starting point for what they are at the time they occur, but see them in retrospect when we reach the matching ending point. These periods are usually artificial, encompassing something important to us, but not particularly related to anything else in our lives. But, since human beings are good at detecting patterns, we register them anyway.

Six years ago I was still in graduate school, living in a small apartment with my next-to-last roommate. At the time, I was dating my friend Karen, who lived in a rather larger house, albeit with three roommates. In February of 1993, after some anticipation, I went over to her house to watch the TV movie debut of a new science fiction show, Babylon 5, an episode entitled "The Gathering".

It was pretty good. The aliens looked different, the show had political and philosophical overtones which were lacking from the increasingly-bland Star Trek series, and the computer-generated spacescapes were awesome to behold, better than anything else television had seen to that point. The story was a little clunky, the acting was often a lot clunky, but there were flashes of what was to come. Ambassador Londo Mollari telling Security Chief Michael Garibaldi that his government had sent him them so the Centauri could attach themselves to the greatness they saw ahead for humanity. Commander Sinclair's little "beep beep" joke he played on Ambassador G'Kar to prevent him from trying to tarnish or destroy the station again. The cool-looking Vorlon spaceships.

I was sold.

Babylon 5 did well enough to be picked up as a syndicated series, premiering the following January. Several changes had been made, the best of which was the replacement of second-in-command Laurel Takashima (stuffily played by Tamlyn Tomita) with Susan Ivanova, the gruff, sarcastic and beautiful Lt. Commander played by Claudia Christian.

That first season started very slowly - and lost a lot of viewers along the way - but I stuck with it. Its basic problem was that the collection of relatively standalone stories made it feel like a somewhat less-inventive Star Trek. In retrospect - and after viewing the first season again after having seen the fourth season - what it really was was a staging season, with a collection of police actions and procedural exercises to show us how things worked on Babylon 5 and in the universe around it.

By the end of the first season the show was kicking into gear, setting up some of the big elements which would play out over the remainder of the show. And the characters and actors were starting to come together. Michael O'Hare had grown into the role of Sinclair, a moody and driven individual who was the focus for most of the events going on around the station.

Things changed radically in season two. Sinclair abruptly vanished in the first episode, replaced by Bruce Boxleitner's Captain John Sheridan, a more lighthearted, swashbuckling figure. The difference was striking, as Sheridan felt like more of a "man of action" than Sinclair.

More to the point, war was brewing between the Centauri and the Narn, old enemies in the B5 universe, and the flames were being stoked by a mysterious sixth major race, the Shadows. The series achieved one of its finest moments with "The Coming of Shadows", winner of the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation, in which G'Kar extends a hand of friendship to Londo, just hours after Londo has set events in motion to put their nations at war. The war is played out over the rest of the season, ending in the crushing defeat of the Narns, in another excellent episode, "The Long Twilight Struggle". And Sheridan learns that the Shadows are the ancient enemies of the Vorlons and the Minbari.

Unfortunately, the second season doesn't hold up as well with repeat viewing, except for the "big impact" episodes. There's a lot of filler here, material which somehow seems patently obvious in the context of everything else.

Series creator J. Michael Straczynski has always described Babylon 5 has having an "arc", a 5-year story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This was a big part of what attracted me to it, as the endless things-never-really-change-ness of dramatic series television had bored me to tears for a while. Things should have an ending, a point at which you know it's done, that the point has been made.

But the term "arc" also implies that the story will peak at some point, and Babylon 5 definitely peaked in the middle - a "bell curve", if you will. Season three featured some of the series' best special effects, best music, most exciting moments, and best overall writing. The station is forced to secede from the Earth Alliance (in the show's other Hugo-winner, "Severed Dreams"), builds forces to fight the increasingly-overt Shadows, and ends with Sheridan travelling to the Shadows' homeworld of Z'ha'dum, and seemingly dying there. In between, Sinclair returns and we learn the fate of the station's mysterious predecessor, Babylon 4.

There are a few clunkers in the season, but overall it was great television, and contains several episodes I go back and watch again and again.

Season four was a step down. Straczynski stated that he had essentially laid his cards on the table by the end of season three, and the series moved into resolution mode. The Shadow War was brought to a fairly swift conclusion, and unfortunately I never quite bought the Shadows' motivation. Straczynski said that B5 as a whole is essentially about growing up, and their motivation fits that theme, but it made for a few dramatically unsatisfying episodes.

The rest of the season primarily dealt with the civil war among the humans. Unfortunately, it was unclear whether or not the show would be renewed for its fifth season, so this story was brought to a very rushed conclusion by the end of the season. Things seemed too packed, and victory perhaps a little too easy for our heroes. The one truly compelling moment was learning that due to his experiences at Z'ha'dum, Sheridan would only have 20 years to live. A terrible thing that must be, to know that you will die, and have a clear idea of when. How fatalistic.

Apparently the original plan had been for the Civil War to stretch into season five, which would have been better, since when the series was picked up by TNT for its fifth season, there seemed to be little left to resolve. The two main threads of the fifth season involved the problems with telepaths in human society (which always seemed like a mysterious problem; other races had had experience with telepaths for centuries and had seemingly integrated them smoothly into their societies. Why was humanity not trying to learn from them?), and with the playing out of Londo Mollari's ascension to the Centauri throne and damnation at the hands of the former allies of the Shadows. The season contained many extraneous elements, and would have been well-served by having five-to-eight episodes cut out and replaced with the end of the Civil War.

The final few episodes were interesting in their drawn-out depiction of how all of the main characters ended up leaving the station, and for where. It was a rather majestic manner of farewell to the station and the people we've followed for five years. Most moving was the departure of Sheridan and Delenn from the station in "Objects at Rest", with a panoramic view of the individuals who would form the next wave of protagonists on the station, in some mythical continuation of the series.

And tonight was "Sleeping in Light", the long-awaited conclusion to the five-year arc.

Twenty years after he went to Z'ha'dum, Sheridan knows he is dying. He calls his old friends to Minbar for one last gathering before the end. Then he says goodbye to his wife, Delenn, and takes a ship first to Babylon 5, which is being closed down after 25 years of service, and finally to the site of the final events of the Shadow War, in which the course of the future was changed. Then he goes to his final rest.

It was a disappointing episode, trying to jerk tears from our eyes as Sheridan said his farewells to everyone. It succeeded best when Sheridan visited B5 and met with Zach Allen, Garibaldi's replacement as security chief. They stood in the central corridor of the near-empty station reminiscing. Later, the remainder of the surviving crew attends the station's decommissioning ceremonies and say their final farewells. On their way out, Garibaldi picks up a shot glass, a nice reminder of that long-ago conversation between himself and Londo, when it all started.

And then Babylon 5 is destroyed. Ivanova's voice-over says, "Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations", a phrase often heard early in the series, but rarely heard later on. It was a nice bit of closure.

Ultimately, though, "Sleeping in Light" was a nondramatic episode. There was little conflict, and the end result of all the plot elements were revealed or broadly hinted at a year or more before. Sheridan doesn't go on some final grand mission, we never meet his and Delenn's son, David, it's just (as Tracy put it), a long funeral. One shocking scene or pleasant surprise would have been nice.

Alas.

As a series, Babylon 5 had two major flaws.

The first is purely a plot point. In the first season, a large device was introduced on the planet about which the station orbited - the "Great Machine". It appeared with much fanfare, and was later strongly implied to be a key piece in the overall story. However, it only figured in a couple of minor ways - helping to move Babylon 4 through time (though why it was involved in this was entirely unclear), and helping with "voice of the resistance" broadcasts in the Civil War. Who built it and for what purpose was never made clear, though my guess is that Sinclair ultimately had some responsibility for it. But this was a nagging element of the series which was entirely unsatisfactory.

The second flaw was more fundamental to the series as a whole. In short, replacing Jeffrey Sinclair with John Sheridan was a colossal mistake.

Straczynski has gone on record that Babylon 5 "is very much the story of Jeffrey Sinclair", and it seems clear that Sinclair was intended to be the show's protagonist all the way through. Although Boxleitner seemed more comfortable in his role than O'Hare did in his, Sinclair was a far more interesting character than Sheridan. Sheridan had his haunted moments, but Sinclair was quite moody, and extremely introspective, less a soldier than a philosopher, and many of the speeches that Straczynski wrote for Sheridan sounded a little corny in his mouth, but would have been quite natural for Sinclair.

Moreover, Sinclair's ties to the other characters would have given different meanings to some of the series' development. If Sinclair and Delenn had gotten involved, there would have been the added complication that Delenn shouldered a great deal of guilt for what she and her people did to Sinclair in the Earth/Minbari war. When Garibaldi was turned against his friends by the Psi Corps, it would have had an added feeling of tragedy had the commander at that time been his friend Sinclair rather than simply his commanding officer Sheridan. I'm not sure how the 20-years-thing and the Babylon 4 threads would have played out exactly, but I think it would have given the series a much stronger sense of closure had Sinclair been around for all five years. Instead, the first season seems like this uncomfortable add-on to the rest of the show, although even there there is symmetry, as season five has the same problem.

Straczynski has always said that O'Hare's departure was a mutual decision, and an amicable parting. Fair enough, but I think it was a mistake, and I think it hurt the show.

So, the long ride is over, and it has been a lot of fun, oh yes. Although there will be future TV-movies and the spinoff series, "Crusade", Babylon 5 is now complete.

When O'Hare left, Straczynski remarked that the departure of Sinclair for another part of the B5 universe was much like the division of the main cast in Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. That, combined with uncomfortable names in the series such as the "Rangers" and "Lorien", have led many fans to try to draw tight parallels between LotR and B5. (I hope Straczynski has regretted ever making that remark, especially inasmuch as I feel he was trying to explain why it was okay to make a move that - as I said - I regard as an error.)

What these fans miss is that LotR was about endings - the conclusion of an age, with something new to come, but we don't know much about it. The last few paragraphs of the novel are like a mighty iron door closing, never more to be opened again, and we're sad because we know what magic there was in that age - some bad magic, yes, but all in all a wondrous period of time that we shall never see ourselves.

Babylon 5 is quite the reverse: It's about beginnings. The very first story begins with Londo saying, "I was there at the dawn of the third age of mankind." The so-called second age ends, yes, but only as a way of getting to the third age. And the many loose threads left at the end of the series - most of them minor plot points only tangentially connected to the main stories set up in the first three seasons - suggest that this is a beginning, and that there are many more stories which will be played out in the centuries to come.

And, ultimately, Babylon 5 itself is a beginning. It's not the first show to have an "arc" of this sort (The Prisoner certainly preceded it in that way), but it has a certain quality all its own in the length of the story, and the breadth of the story. It had many rough points, yes, but perhaps it is only pointing the way.

We shouldn't be sad to see Babylon 5 leave us (although I admit I am rather wistful). There are always new things being created, and we can look forward to those. And we'll always have Babylon 5 as it stands to remember and to watch again.

Since that first TV-movie aired in 1993 I've dated another woman and had a brief-but-traumatic dating experience with yet another. I left graduate school and got a job. I moved into my own apartment and got some cats. And seen a host of smaller changes in my life. I know that I have to get up tomorrow, and the next day, and that a week from now my life will probably not be significantly different from the way it was today.

But in some small way, tomorrow will feel different, because I know that Babylon 5, which I followed for six years, is now a part of my past.

But endings can be good things.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)