B5 Watchthrough: And the Sky Full of Stars

[ariela]

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!??!?!