B5 Watchthrough: The War Prayer

[ariela]

"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.