jedi_of_urth

So after finding more to say about Infection than I kind of expected, far more of it in defense than it really deserves, how fares an episode I actually legitimately like?

1x04: The Parliament of Dreams

This promo is...weird. Not weird in and of itself as it’s well enough put together I guess, for all it only focuses on one of the multitude of plots in the episode; but weird because at this point in the series who’s really going to care about threats to G’Kar? In season 3, threats to G’Kar could get people excited and anxious for the coming story; but in early season 1, before we’re even really gotten to know him? Not that they could have made any kind of promo for any of the other plots, so while weird this is probably the best they could do.

This is an episode that my viewing of is quite influenced by the fact that I saw it backwards. I’d read City of Sorrows before I ever saw this episode, I might have even seen parts of season 5 before I saw this. I always knew G’Kar as we will come to know him later so this wasn’t my get to know G’Kar episode; I knew Catherine’s fate long before I’d ever seen her on screen; I never had theories about what was going on in the Minbari ceremony because I knew the shape of the future and saw this as fitting in with it; I could never suspect Na’Toth of being the assassin not just because she’s in the credits but I already knew about her (I may or may not have known her, but I knew about her); I aww-ed over Delenn’s greeting to Lennier because I’d already seen Atonement. I have no basically no ability to relate to a newbie experience because so much of this episode connects to things I already knew about before I saw this episode where the setups happened.

On with the show, how was G’Kar planning to eat Ambassador G’Kar’s dinner? Narn mouths seem to work much like human ones (owing to actors and never being told about abilities the effects couldn’t show) and I’m not sure how you get a mouth on that creature.

I wish we got more scenes of Londo and Ivanova being buddies; down the road she is, if memory serves, harsher on him than a lot of the others are but for right now they seem to get along great.

As I mentioned in passing last time, I really wish the loss of Ko’Dath had been handled better. A suspicious airlock accident should have got more attention, or JMS could have worked a mention into the ‘And Now For a Word’ section when they were discussing airlock safety if we’re supposed to accept that as not suspicious but just something that happened. I know by the time they knew Ko’Dath wouldn’t be sticking around it was too late to do a major overhaul of BttP to have her behave in some way that would justify her leaving s quickly, but I wish there was a bit more thought given to it after the fact when JMS was writing it.

While viewers with good memories could recall that G’Kar has gill implants, you can’t really see them when he goes to see Na’grath. While that would no doubt have been a time consuming round of makeup and effects, for something that didn’t need to have attention drawn to it, it would have been nice to see.

While the big expository speech covering the history of Jeff and Catherine is fairly awkward, when they get to just interact they have decent chemistry. But again, my opinion of this ship has always been influenced by knowing that they are the couple that managed to find each other across time and space (although I seem to have a different headcanon for how that worked out than a lot of people); I expect to see them as good together so that mostly ends up being what I see.

Okay, let’s talk for a bit about the Minbari ritual; I do plan to do an overall rundown of my thoughts on why the presentation of the various religions works for me, but for now let’s just talk about the Minbari. For one, I’ve never gotten the feeling this was supposed to be Sinclair and Delenn getting married, but it was meant to foreshadow that they would. The fact that this happens in the same episode that introduces Catherine is part of a larger issue I have with the idea of this ship that I’ll get into down the line. However, there’s a lot more to the ceremony than that and all of that feeds more into the story we ultimately got; though we’ll never know how it might have been important to the initial planned story, it comes off quite well with the story we’re going to see. This is the first time we have Valen mentioned (unless you watched ITB out of order contrary to my recommendation) and paired with the focus on Sinclair ends up feeling on rewatch like massive foreshadowing even though it probably wasn’t in the cards now (put a pin in that thought until Babylon Squared...probably). It’s about the Minbari idea of rebirth that will be so important to Delenn and Sinclair in the future (and the past as it were); although the ceremony here has little resemblance to what we get in Ceremonies, that is a cobbled together version of the ritual so I don’t really mind.

How exactly did Tu’Pari kill the hulky bodyguard? If not for the death blossom I might fanwank that he managed to poison him before he entered G’Kar’s quarters, but that doesn’t really work does it?

I do wonder if the pun about being ‘late’ would really translate to Narn. It seems like creative word play, but in theory they’re not speaking English to each other. I’ll mostly allow it, because we don’t know that the Narn language and colloquialisms wouldn’t allow for the pun, but I feel the need to mention it.

The same Minbari seems to be in the background in both of Catherine’s scenes in the...business area. He’s probably Worker caste there doing business, but I suddenly want to know his story. More conspiracy minded idea could be that the Grey Council is keeping tabs on people close to Jeff. More twisted minded, maybe there’s a Minbari sect that knows who she is in terms of history.

Random speculation given what we later learn about Narn naming and Na’toth’s minimal beliefs: maybe Narn who do not choose a religion choose a name honoring their own family history; hence Na’Toth being the daughter of Sha’Toth.

Another note regarding the Minbari ceremony, how does Catherine know more about it than Jeff? Combined with Jeff’s ignorance about the Grey Council while Sheridan will show up and just already know everything about them, I think maybe he’s made a point of not learning about the Minbari before now. Food for thought on the Jeff as racist bigot theory.

So this time I have plenty of closing thoughts, from wild speculation to the usual observations about production quality. But I also want to observe that I felt far more engaged with this episode, even reviewing it, than I have so far. I like MOTFL, but pulling it apart it seems pretty flawed, and BttP is important long term but on its own I’m not overly invested, but this episode I just like. I felt like I was going long stretches without having anything to comment on, even though I ended up saying plenty it turns out.

Okay, on to the wild speculation wherein I briefly care about Narn and Centauri cultures instead of the interconnected fates of the humans, Minbari, and Vorlons.

First up the Narn. Having an assassin’s guild feels out of place in this verse, it sounds more fantasy than sci-fi. But for the Narns it makes a shred of sense if I’m willing to do the fanwank-fu. Narn history is more than a bit difficult to make sense of (how much space travel were they capable of before the Centauri occupation; if little, how did they have colonies like Ragesh 3; if lots, then how were they so easy conquered and kept subjugated?) but there’s two possible explanations for the Narn having an assassins guild: they could have had one before the Centauri occupation and revived it in a new age once they were free; or it’s something the Centauri have (which is somehow less surprising) and the Narn picked up the practice from them. I come to offer theories, not so good at making final conclusions.

Now a bit about the Centauri. The Centauri pantheon has a structure I’m not sure I follow. They have both emperors elevated to godhood and a variety of household gods, but supposedly there’s only fifty total (if you include the one Vir doesn’t think you should), and are a Maker religion. I’m not actually sure that’s enough gods to cover all the things they seem to consider gods, but it’s too many to say the 50 refers only one of the levels (except maybe the collection of household gods, and in the same conversation as the 50 gods is mentioned Londo references elevating emperors to godhood). Someday I could use a diagram of how it works.

That being said, the variety of Centauri gods does feed into my stance on the “dominant religion” principle of the episode. The Centauri are no more demonstrating a “dominant religion” than Jeff’s human demonstration is. Londo pulled out his personal household god statues and threw a party and called it a religious festival. The entire idea that we as viewers are seeing the “dominant beliefs” demonstrated is rather false; we’re getting insight into the cultures yes but it shouldn’t be taken as JMS resorting to planet of hats territory. We only see three demonstrations all episode; the Centauri (who throw a party mostly honoring themselves more than the gods); the humans (where demonstrating the diversity means more to us as viewers because we’re familiar with it); and the Minbari (whose presence of the station is led by a Religious Caste member of the Grey Council, who also has a mandate to educate Sinclair on key elements of Minbari culture pertaining to Valen; but really she’d never have thought to demonstrate anything but her personal religious practices). Not that it isn’t important to viewers (who so far are mostly human after all) to see such representation of different religions, but I’ve heard a common-ish complaint of this episode that only the humans are shown to have religious diversity; and I just don’t think that applies.

I also think there’s a fair number of reasons in universe why only the humans, and specifically Jeff, would choose this as the demonstration (and that’s before the thematic reason of ‘humans form communities’ being a key theme of the show). For one it’s a sheer numbers game; with half the station’s population being human and the other half divided between at least two dozen races, there’s more ability and cause for the humans to represent a variety of faiths than the other races. For Jeff specifically, he seems to have a fairly studied and contemplative attitude to religion, so he’d know that Earth doesn’t have a dominant belief, and if it does have anything with a plurality it really isn’t his faith so he’s in no position to be the one demonstrating anything for this; so especially coming up on a deadline without a plan in place he said ‘screw it; and just introduced a bunch of people of different faiths.

Moving on from religion, we finally have all the ambassadorial aides here, and it’s one of the few times they’re all in an episode, so I may as well take the time to discuss them a little bit. They really are three very different relationships and it’s a little unfortunate that we only know how two of them really go in the long term instead of having all three to compare. Londo at this point (and really for a long time) is very dismissive of Vir, sometimes he’s a useful tool to Londo, sometimes he can be friendly towards Vir, and sometimes he treats him like shit; but the middle ground if fairly dismissive especially early on. Delenn does not so much look down on Lennier as fully expect him to look up to her because anything else would be un-Minbari of him – because let’s be real, she needed him to be young and inexperienced and needing the “I cannot have an aide who will not look up” instruction, because if he’d been willing to challenge her, her long term plans might have been jeopardized. G’Kar and Na’Toth are the most balanced, the most peers, where one just happens to outrank the other but the technically subordinate one has plenty of sass and snark (at least until Susan finds her proper Susan-voice, which may not be until John gets there and she’s much more comfortable sassing him directly); which makes one wonder what they might have developed into had we seen more of them over the years to come.

Okay, that enough rambling? Let’s close this out. I’m pretty sure this one must have been written once production of the series had started, or at least given some rework once they were underway. The characters seem a lot more...themselves than they have up to now; and while time to settle into the roles and possibly better direction probably played a part in that, the overall feel is that the dialog and action feel more natural; the characters more in harmony with how the actors best play them.

While technically speaking this one may not be essential viewing; if someone asked me to pick out only the most important eps of s1, I’d have a hard time leaving this one out, because for the growth of the show it feels significant and it does have echoes a long way down the road.

Next time: as if I didn’t have enough to say on this episode, the next one is Mind War