B5 Watchthrough: TKO

[ariela]

TKO is one of the low points in the first season--an attempt to do a martial arts movie complete with awkward dialogue, a hackneyed plot, and some Asian stereotypes that haven't aged well. It can't quite be said to be one of those martial arts movies in which a white guy learns the martial arts of an Asian culture and then is magically better at it than all of the members of the culture he learned it from, since the protagonist in this case is Black, but sub in "human" for "white" and "alien" for "Asian" and it follows the formula to a T. There's nothing significant to the arc in it, and no reason to subject yourself to it. 

The B-story, however, is pretty well done and made it one of the most memorable episodes of S1 for me. 

The plot is pretty simple: Ivanova's childhood rabbi (played by Broadway's most tenured Fiddler on the Roof star, Theodore Bikel) comes to Babylon 5 and tells her she should sit shiva for her father. She resists, because she's still angry at him. 

***

So, look, this might not seem like that big of a deal if you're not Jewish, but I am Jewish, and I'm going to talk about it. 

There are very few scifi shows showing future worlds in which Jews exist. Oh, we get a lot of analogues for Jews--depending on who you ask, and which episode it is, Star Trek has the Bajorans, the Ferengi, and the Vulcans; Mass Effect has the Quarians and, more problematically, the Volus--but while Federation culture in Star Trek appears to be predominantly white Christian culture (they may no longer exactly practice Christianity, but they celebrate Christmas, the morality is Christian, and characters quote the Bible), and there are representatives from many different Earth cultures (O'Brien is emphatically Irish, Chekov is Russian, Picard is French), there appear to be no Jews, at least in the shows and movies. Similarly, in The Expanse, various recognizable denominations of Christianity (the Mormons, the Methodists, the Catholics) survive into the future, but even at interfaith clergy gatherings, there is no sign that Judaism is still practiced at the time the series takes place. 

For a member of a people that's survived several thousand years of people trying to wipe us out, the idea that scifi writers believe that a few hundred years from now, we'll be gone is pretty depressing. 

Similarly, while there's no shortage of Jewish characters in non-SF TV, there's very little Jewish ritual shown (unless, obviously, the show is actually about Jews, e.g. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and when it is shown, it's usually in the context of a Very Special Episode (see, for example, The Good Wife's "Unorthodox" or Law & Order's "Chosen") in which Orthodox Judaism (and by extension, Judaism in general) is treated as an exotic, anachronistic culture more like the Amish than the majority of American Jews. When Jewish practice is shown, it's generally either the parts that most resemble Christianity (e.g. a rabbi giving a sermon in The West Wing; Hanukkah celebrations because Hanukkah's just Jewish Christmas, right?; the actual burial part of a funeral) or the party after the actual ritual, usually a bar mitzvah or wedding. Maybe the main character will visit a Jewish family that's sitting shiva, but there won't be any ritual going on at the time other than the mirrors being covered and people wearing black.

What you don't see is what day-to-day Jewish ritual practice actually looks like: lighting Shabbat candles, saying blessings, celebrating holidays that aren't Hanukkah or Passover, studying Torah, touching the mezuzah when leaving the house. 

It was already a big deal that, at the end of The Parliament of Dreams, the show emphatically noted that Jews exist in its universe (and, perhaps, in all of our diversity! since that line of adherents of different religions is really long, and Sinclair calls out that the Jewish guy is specifically an Orthodox Jew). Dayenu! But we get more. The second-in-command of the station is Jewish. 

And she has possibly the most realistic relationship with her Jewishness that I've seen on TV: a fraught one. 

And--and!--like most modern non-Orthodox Jews, she's gotta figure out how to make Jewish ritual work for her (as my rabbi's fond of saying, the purpose of Jewish practice is to serve the needs of Jews, not the other way around) while making it accessible to the non-Jewish loved ones she wants to include. 

Just as beautifully, Ivanova's either not the first Jew Sinclair has considered a close friend, or when he got to know her, he read up on Judaism, because he's a lot more familiar with Jewish ritual than your average non-Jewish human. Either way, between the Orthodox man in The Parliament of Dreams and Ivanova and Sinclair's implied Jewish friends and the Jewish residents of the station who show up to support Ivanova in mourning and Ivanova's rabbi and a rabbi who collaborates with a priest in helping pass on important information later in the series, not only are Jews still clearly around 300 years from now, but they're not tokenized, and in fact, seem to be thriving.

Look, it's not perfect. The morality of B5 is very Christian (not least in its love of martyrdom--Delenn even says that willingness to self-sacrifice is a requirement for sentience), and the pressure on Ivanova to forgive feels pretty Christian to me, but that's a small quibble. 

Babylon 5 is a series written by an agnostic that is fascinated by the same questions human religion is designed to explore (less interested in the how of things than the why) and that is comfortable leaving mysteries unsolved. A lot of scifi seems annoyed that it has to deal with religion at all, or uses it as a shorthand for the primitive irrationality that human beings retain, even in the future. For all its Christian morality, B5 seems to view religious practice itself much the way my Jewish community sees it: as less interested in answering questions about God than cultivating wonder and exploring what it means to be human). 

As the rabbi says, nes gadol. 

***

So, anyway, skip the A-story, enjoy the B-story. 

It's perhaps most significant in that Ivanova, who up until this point has been pretty private and buttoned-up, finally is willing to recognize that her crew cares about her and be vulnerable around them.

Deep dive:

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

Main takeaways:

• Ivanova's mother's suffering, as a telepath who wouldn't join PsiCorps, was even more intense than we've heard about previously.
• Ivanova joined Earthforce against the wishes of her father. 
• Sinclair is willing to walk right up to the line of forcing people under his command to take leave if he thinks their emotional health is at stake.
• Ivanova and her rabbi have a nice discussion about whether an alien form of fish is kosher, which is the sort of question that Jews have enjoyed debating since the possibility of space travel became a thing (there was even a long-running thread on how to determine whether you can eat an alien, which, alas, I'm having trouble finding). 

Comments

[jadelennox]

You know, I don't even remember the A plot of that episode, but the B plot, which I haven't watched in years, is one of my fictional touchstones. Everything you say about representation, of course, but more than that. It was so genuine, so real -- and during the most saccharine season of a show with a tendency to the saccharin. Long before I lost my own dad, that plot of complicated feelings -- complicated about grief, and about religion, and about loved ones -- rung very true to me.

It probably helped that they cast Theo Bikel, of course. 😂

[roninkakuhito]

I think with Sinclair it might be a little bit of column a and a little bit of column B. I suspect that he has other Jewish friends, but he also comes from One of the more academic Catholic traditions, and I think he was in the seminary but I might be wrong there. And especially if he is a lapsed Jesuit seminarian, I suspect there is a strong tendency toward researching Faith practices kind of built into him