selenak

Face of the Enemy

According to JMS, if he‘d known he‘d get a fifth season for sure ahead of time, this and the next episode‘s plotpoint is where he would have ended the fourth season - i.e. Sheridan captured and interrogated, Ivanova determined to continue with the war, Garibaldi himself again but on the run - with everything else that happens in the fourth season from this point onwards spread across the first third or even half of the fifth season and what actually happens in the first third of the fifth season as subplots. I can certainly see how that would have made for a good cliffhanger season ending, but it wouldn‘t have changed two problems with the entire Garibaldi storyline: a) Garibaldi and Sheridan were never so close that the betrayal happening here (complete with Judas self reference on Garibaldi‘s part) is als heartrendering as it should be and would have been if this were Garibaldi and Sinclair, and b) because Garibaldi is the only Sheridan critic this season, and Garibaldi is mentally compromised, post-Z‘ha‘dum Sheridan really does have an untouchable hero-is-always-right syndrome going on, which isn‘t going away, alas. Not to mention: I can buy that Sinclair despite a fallout would trust Garibaldi enough to meet him in what very much looks like a set-up, and that Garibaldi, despite enhanced paranoia driving him against Sinclair, would know he would. Otoh even upon this rewatch, I could just about make me believe Sheridan would do it, with his father‘s life at stake, but not that Garibaldi would have assumed that, because part of what drove mentally-compromised-Garibaldi away from B5 was the conviction that Sheridan had turned into a megalomaniac with no concern for those who weren‘t yes-men anymore.

All this said, the episode itself is suspensefully written and really well acted, except for Sheridan‘s capture, which goes on way too long. (Seriously. I get that Sheridan is the hero of the show, and that he‘d struggle even when drugged, but we didn‘t need to watch it that long.) I have to single out Jerry Doyle here, who does convey that Garibaldi is mentally and emotionally shutting down more and more - never more than when he tells Lise she needs to leave, which sounds unfeeling only at first until you realise it‘s amazing he got that out at all because Bester is about to arrive and certainly would have had no time and no good treatment for Mrs. Edgars - until he‘s the complete instrument listening to Bester‘s reveal monologue, and then the reverse transformation once Bester withdraws and restores Garibaldi‘s mind. Walter Koenig, of course, is as good as ever.

Here‘s a question: if Bester had been a bit less of a paranoid bastard and had actually asked for help instead of force-drafting Garibaldi to play investigator on his behalf, would Garibaldi have helped? This is assuming a scenario where the Shadows still capture Garibaldi and Bester‘s allies in the Corps still redirect Garibaldi to him, but where Bester most un-Bester-like then acts like a good ally and does what Londo did with G‘Kar on Centauri Prime, i.e. tells Garibaldi what‘s at stake - or as much of it as he knows - and then asks Garibaldi to go undercover to find out the truth. I can‘t make up my mind on this; I mean, obviously Garibaldi in his right mind would NOT have handed over Sheridan to Team Clark, and yes, he never liked telepaths, but he also wouldn‘t have been on board with a plot to either enslave or (if they rebell) kill them in the way Edgars planned, and if he‘d heard about Lise being married to Edgars, that would have provided a further incentive.

I do love the irony that Sheridan‘s capture comes about not through Clark and as the side product of a plot which actually has nothing to do with him. Mind-messed-with Garibaldi was simply under instructions to do ANYTHING to find out the truth of what Edgars was plotting, anything at all, and if that had required another gesture, he‘d have done that instead.

Ivanova giving a shoot-to-kill order is entirely ic for her under these circumstances, BUT it reminds me of something else I hadn‘t wondered until this rewatch, to wit: why after Garibaldi quit his job didn‘t we see at any point any attempt on Ivanova‘s side to talk to Garibaldi and/or to mediate between him and Sheridan? I mean, the two of them had grown close through years of working together. She had the closer relationship with Sheridan, true, but Garibaldi was her friend, she‘d known him through the crucial Sinclair years, and they also had Talia in common. (As in, Garibaldi had an unrequited thing for her.) Again, it‘s not that I think Ivanova should have acted differently NOW that Garibaldi has handed Sheridan over to Team Clark, but that it wouldn‘t have hurt seeing her attempt to talk to Garibaldi earlier when he was still on the station.

(My current headcanon/fanwank for this is that Susan is military enough that Garibaldi quitting strikes her as desertion, and she‘s deeply angry with him about that.)

The scene with Lyta and Stephen Franklin where she tells her story from her internship with MetaPol before she transferred to commercial telepathism (something brought up earlier this season): if you accept the Psi Corps trilogy of books as canon, the Psi Cop she interned with, who found the serial murder of telepaths and left him with such a gruesome mental punishment was Bester, and that‘s what he was alluding to in Epiphanies. I find this explanation a bit problematical in that this story provides far more leverage against Bester (as the main actor) than against Lyta (as a young intern, she wasn‘t in a good position to stop him if she‘d wanted to), but whether or not it was Bester, the story itself is a good reminder of both how scary telepaths can get and that the war Lyta predicts is brewing for multiple causes (since the Psi Cop young Lyta was interning with was tracking down the serial killer in the first place because the mundane police didn‘t care given that the victims were telepaths). Even Franklin‘s attempt to reassure her - saying that after the current war, they‘ll do „something about the Corps“ is a case in point - Franklin, the Corps is a symptom, but it‘s not the root of the problem, which is the second class citizen status for telepaths.

Lastly: early on, Sheridan telling Ivanova that she needs to be his second in command because having Delenn, a Minbari, command a fleet set on invading Earth Space is a really bad idea given what happened the last time and what Clark‘s main propaganda argument is is an excellent point, though one wonders it didn‘t come up earlier.

Intersections in Real Time

I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, it is a good and visceral depiction of what „modern“ torture is like, echoing descriptions from Amnesty as well as 1984, and it provides a great and deliberate contrast to the gory old school torture of G‘Kar by Cartagia earlier this season. Making the interrogator(s) a bureaucrat figure is just right, has „banalty of evil“ written all over it, and not leaving the room until the very end of the episode (and then only to enter an identical other torture room) pays off, it enhances the claustrophobic atmosphere, and Bruce Boxleitner definitely delivers in a situation where the camera is always on him, the two other characters not withstanding, and his ability to move is very limited. The episode would not work if he wasn’t up to it, and he is.

And yet. As ever, I can’t help but compare this “torture the leading man” episode with TNG’s Chain of Command II. Now Intersections in Real Time is far more focused - there is no Jellico B-Plot, and the person torturing Sheridan is not from an alien race, it’s an ordinary human being acting on behalf of another. But what makes the TNG episode the one with the greater emotional power to me is that while both episodes give their Captain a moment of defiance of the torturer near the conclusion, the TNG episode doesn’t end on that note. It ends, instead, with the conversation between a barely recovered Picard and Troi in which he tells her that if his rescuers hadn’t shown up when they did, not only would he have given Gul Madred the “there are five lights” assurance to stop the pain but he actually was starting to see five lights, as ordered. Whereas the B5 episode doesn’t countersay Sheridan’s defiant declaration, though it does deliver a suckerpunch but letting everything come full circle and reveal the torture routine will now start again, just with a new interrogator.

I think what I’m getting at is that by showing that no one, including the heroic lead, is immune to being broken by torture, TNG made or kept Picard human and the torture real, while B5’s insistence that Sheridan can withstand all this made him and it less so. YMMV, obviously.

Trivia: I always forget that Wayne Alexander didn’t solely play Sebastian/Jack the Ripper and Lorien and Season 5 Spoiler, but also the Drazi in this episode until I rewatch it and hear his voice. Of course, the episode itself has a callback to “Comes the Inquisitor” when the Interrogator asks Sheridan whether he’s already been tortured, err, interrogated, and by whom, and Sheridan says “you have no idea”.

The other episodes