B5 Watchthrough: The War Prayer

"My shoes are too tight, but it doesn't matter, because I have forgotten how to dance."

I talked about Born to the Purple as a Londo episode--and it is--but The War Prayer is a much more interesting character study. Born to the Purple shows Londo as a midlife crisis guy shtupping a pretty young thing. If he was a buffoon in The Gathering and Midnight on the Firing Line, Born to the Purple moves him into "sad clown" territory. The War Prayer gives him a hint of tragic grandeur.

It's not really the plot that's important or surprising--it's pretty clear from the beginning that Londo will cave because that's how these episode of the week stories work in the 1990s. We're not yet in the grimdark Ron Moore 2010s in which showrunners show they're Serious by how much they hate happiness. 

Instead, Londo's storyline here is important because for once, he's not the butt of the joke, and in seeing a more nuanced, mature portrait of him--a more humanized portrait, for all he's an alien--we see layers of a wistful longing to do some good, and a core of restrained pain. I've used "Shakespearean" somewhat mockingly in previous entries, always referring to B5's melodrama, but Londo grows into a Shakespearian figure in the best sense of the word, and the groundwork for that growth is laid in these early episodes.

The title references a Mark Twain piece of the same name. You should read it. It's very short. 

The gist of it is that during a time of war, with the great military pomp and circumstance as young soldiers are sent off to fight, pastors pray a long and beautiful prayer beseeching divine protection for those young men, and for victory. An old man gets up and claims to be a divine messenger. He informs the congregation that both prayers have been heard: the spoken and the unspoken. The spoken prayer for victory is a prayer for the defeat and suffering of the other side. He intones a bloodthirsty mirror to the earlier prayer for victory, and then asks the assembly if they still wish to pray it. The narrator declares him a lunatic, saying "there was no sense in what he said."

(Preteen me wondered why we were all okay with football teams thanking God for victory, given that the corollary was that God had led the other side to defeat, which seems like kind of dick move. Later I'd learn that Jewish law prevents someone who is returning home to their city and sees smoke rising from praying that it is not their home that is burning--both because it's already burning and asking God to retroactively change the past is essentially asking for the unraveling of the space-time continuum, and because it is essentially a prayer for harm to come to someone else, because if the fire's already happening, hoping it isn't your home is hoping that it's someone else's.)

Presumably this is a reference to the aims of anti-alien groups, that hate groups hate because they actually grasp that, if life is a zero-sum game, a prayer for victory is a prayer for someone else's defeat, but if so, the connection to this episode is pretty abstract. Hell, the connection to the rest of the series is pretty abstract, for reasons I can't go into without massive spoilers. 

Plot synopsis:

The A-story, in which a friend of Delenn's is attacked by an anti-alien hate group called the Home Guard, is important mainly because the Home Guard will come back later in the series. In this episode, they're a fringe group, although they'll move closer to the center of power in the future.

(That storyline felt prescient in the Bush era, when it was easy to be shocked by the things reactionaries suddenly felt comfortable saying out loud; it feels even more unpleasantly real in 2020. In this episode, though, we're still back in an analogue to early 2016, when we had the luxury of recognizing that such groups could certainly harm individual LGBT people and members of racial and religious minorities, but knowing that they didn't have the institutional power to manifest their hate in more widespread ways.)

Ivanova learns that the leader of the cell on Babylon 5 is an old flame of hers.

The B-story is about two Centauri teens who've run away to Babylon 5 because they want to marry each other rather than go along with the Centauri tradition of arranged marriage. Londo initially lectures them about the importance of Doing It For The Republic, but eventually caves and arranges for his family--more powerful than either of theirs--to take them both in fosterage so they can't be forced into marriages, which is such an honor that it should mollify their parents.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• Ivanova's military record is spotless. Sinclair and Garibaldi appear to be EarthForce problem children, so maybe Ivanova is supposed to be the babysitter. 
• The only two humans to have direct contact with a Vorlon--Dr. Kyle and telepath Lyta Alexander--have been transferred back to Earth.
• The Home Guard is gaining popularity on Earth.
• Londo's a sad dude. 

B5 Watchthrough: And the Sky Full of Stars

Like Mind War, And the Sky Full of Stars is an episode that only just misses being on my watch-in-full list. It fills in key details of what happened to Sinclair during the Battle of the Line, a mystery teased starting in B5's terrible pilot with Sinclair being told "There is a hole in your mind."

But while Sinclair's flashbacks are well done, the mechanism for getting to them involves an awkward plot and a lot of overacting by a guest star. It also involves a lot of Garibaldi trying to locate and rescue Sinclair. That's all well and good the first time you watch it, but it's really just filler, and while the flashbacks are key to one of the main mysteries of Season 1, the logic of how the Knights get them falls apart fast (if they DO have Earthgov's backing, why not just have a telepath scan Sinclair instead of engaging in this elaborate plot which A) doesn't actually get the info they came for and B) is dangerous enough to them that it renders one of them a vegetable and alerts everyone in the station's command structure to what they were doing?) So watch the flashbacks and skip the rest, unless you're already invested and want a few more episodes to add to your watch-in-full list.

Plot synopsis:

There's no B-story to this one. The storyline is that two mysterious figures, known as Knight One and Knight Two come to Babylon 5 and kidnap Sinclair. They've got some pretty significant funding behind them, and might be part of a secret Earthgov initiative to root out traitors among the command staff of various Earth colonies and installations. They hook him up to a machine that lets them manipulate his mind, and force him to remember what happened during the Battle of the Line:

Sinclair's unit was decimated by a Minbari warship. While attempting a suicidal ramming run at it, Sinclair was capture and interrogated by the ruling body of the Minbari, the Grey Council, which included Delenn. They wiped his memory and returned him to his ship, after which they surrendered to Earth, despite the fact that they'd been winning the war by a wide margin. 

We're still left with the mystery of why the Minbari surrendered and what they learned from Sinclair. 

Sinclair manages to escape, but he's having trouble telling the difference between his flashbacks and reality. He keeps attacking random people in B5 because he seems them as Grey Council members. Delenn approaches him and it appears that he's going to shoot her, but instead, he shoots Knight Two, who had popped up behind her and was going to shoot either her or Sinclair (I can't tell). After he recovers a bit, Sinclair denies remembering anything to Delenn, even though he does.

In a nice, subtle bit of worldbuilding, newspaper headlines in this episode both provide epilogues to previous storylines and foreshadow new ones:

• Is there something living in hyperspace? (foreshadowing)
• Narns settle Raghesh 3 controversy (follow up to Midnight on the Firing Line)
• PsiCorps in election tangle (foreshadowing)
• Homeguard leader convicted (follow up to The War Prayer)

While this might not seem like a big deal today, when TV shows pay so much attention to detail and worldbuilding that they hire linguists to create entire languages for them, when shows like Lost can expect that people will freeze-frame them and analyze the tiniest bit of set dressing for clues, when we've seen entire transmedia franchises built off clues in movie posters, at the time it was so freaking cool. And while I'm sure there were other shows explicitly catering to analysis-obsessed online fan communities by throwing out these sort of hidden clues, I can't think of any offhand.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways: 

• Whatever the Minbari learned from interrogating Sinclair, it caused them to suddenly surrender in a war they were decisively winning.
• Delenn is definitely a member of the Grey Council, Minbar's ruling body, so it's weird that she's posing--or at least serving--as an ambassador to this experimental space station. 
• While Garibaldi believes that Sinclair has a death wish due to trauma from the war, Sinclair's willingness to sacrifice himself by ramming the Minbari cruiser suggests that the death wish may have already been there. 
• IS SOMETHING LIVING IN HYPERSPACE!??!?!