January Meme: Roman Babylon 5 AU?

redfiona99 asked me: how would you feel about a Roman AU for Babylon 5? (I quite like the idea of circa fall of the Republic but ...

This got my imagination going, but not to the fall of the Republic; it went to either the Third Century Crisis or later the Attila the Hun era instead, or maybe Justinian. Either way, it's tricky whom to cast the Minbari as, since they are canonically the most powerful of the space faring "younger" races - as Londo says, even at the height of the Centauri Empire, they left the Minbari alone - but there has to be something more powerful standing in for the Shadows and Vorlons, while the Centauri need to be still powerful enough to re-conquer the Narn with Shadow aid.

Preliminarily, I'm going with....

Minbari: Persians (The Sassanian Empire, to be precise)

Humans: Arabs

Centauri: Romans (naturally, but depending on whether we're talking Third Century or Fifth Century or Sixth Centauri, the location of Centauri Prime can be Rome in the first case and Constantinople in the other two)

Narn: Goths

Shadows: Attila the Hun

Vorlons: ???? (If you want to be mean, you can say Christianity)

I could also see the Humans as Franks (equally an up and coming power). Howver: the Minbari really need to be the Persians no matter which century you set the story in in a Roman AU because the Persians (or Parthians) for a thousand years were the one Empire the Romans, even at the height of their power, were forced to see at least as equals. The Romans and the Persians never managed to conquer each other, and it's highly symbolic that after a thousand years (Delenn's favourite time span) of duking it out or being in cold war, you have first one and then the other near victorious and then the newly islamized Arabs steamroll over both in the 7th century. (Well nearly steamroll over both, they didn't get Constantinople, and the Byzantines managed to regroup after a century, reconquer big parts and hang on for some centuries more.) Which is why my AU couldn't be later than the sixth century. And if the Minbari are the Persians, you have the problem that the Franks are far, far away and have no direct conflict with them, whereas the various Arab kingdoms, usually client kingdoms of the Romans when the Empire was powerful and in its decline getting more and more independence, did have conflicts with the Persians.


Babylon 5 itself is a problem. I'm tempted to go with Alexandria as THE multicultural city of antiquity and keeping that distinction well after it had no more politicial power, but it's a bit tricky to justify why the Goths should send a representative there. Well, maybe Theoderich really wanted good doctors and illegal copies from the great Library?


Anyway, I could see Sinclair and Sheridan as being (nominally) Roman governors of Egypt in present time who used to fight for their Arab kingdom of origin against the Persians in the past. Londo is a Roman (either Roman Roman or Byzantine Roman) at the start of the story aware of the utter pointlessness of his Senator position and the decline of Roman power and wishing for the past who gets sold on the idea that allying with these new barbarians, the Huns, is just the ticket to get the Empire back to full strength, and of course finds out how horribly mistaken he is, but in fact he's following tried and true later Roman policy of trying to play one nomadic warrior nation against the other. (Later, when he tries to fix what he's done, he has overtones of Aetius "The Last Roman".) The Narn/Goths are first exposed to the Huns (hence them ending up in Northern Italy and Spain to begin with), which is why Goth!G'Kar is an early warner who doesn't get listened to.

Delenn is a direct descendant of Aradashir I. i.e. a member of the Sassanid royal family, and a Zoroastrian, of course. She is on the track to becoming Queen of Queens but declines in favour of "pursueing her studies at Alexandria" while maintaining all sorts of important political connections to Persian generals and heads of influential families. This has long term consequences. (I could also see Delenn as Pulcheria, with Sheridan as Marcian, but then she's Roman, not Minbari.)
Pulcheria, but then she's not Minbari

Arab!Sheridan's breaking point when he declares independence: if it's the Third Century Crisis, can be at any point when the various Roman Emperors assassinate each other in dizzying speed. If it's the Fifth or Sixth Century, when it looks like the Huns could take over the entire Roman Empire, full stop. And then the Archbishop of Alexandria or Justinian himself wants him to kill all the heretics, at which point Arab!Sheridan breaks with the Church as well.

By the end of the story, the Huns are gone, but what was the Roman Empire has been irrevocably transformed, and many new kingdoms arisen. It is a new age, etc.


The other days

Two film reviews

Star Trek: Section 31: You could very much tell this started out as a series concept, I thought. Presumably if it had been a series instead of a movie, we'd have gotten more time to get to know the crew team individually, the "who's the mole?" part would have played out over two episodes at least, and ( something too spoilery to describe uncut would have happened )

. As it was, it was enjoyable in a popcorn movie kind of way. There were some bits which I thought worked better than others - ( examples are spoilery again )

On a more positive note, Alok Sahar as a character did work for me: not only was he a new twist on ( a spoilery part of Trek lore )

but the actor has charisma and gravitas.

Also, I had been curious whether the series that became a movie would press the retcon button on Georgiou's development up to end including s3 of Discovery, and/or how they would handle her backstory, especially since s2 (but not s3) of Disco could have given you the impression of downplaying the enormity of what and who Georgiou had been, but actually for the most part I thought the movie handled that well, in a way accessible to new watchers who hadn't seen her elsewhere. ( More spoilerly comments ensue. )

All in all: a mixed affair, Michelle Yeoh gets to do her thing and does it well, but I don't mourn for the fact this didn't become a show.


Conclave: I had read the Robert Harris novel this movie is based on, and of which it is a very faithful adaption, save for the change of name and nationality of the leading character to accomodate for Ralph Fiennes playing him. In the book, he's an Italian named Jacobo Lomeli. In the movie, he's Thomas Lawrence. The only scene where this change is a bit awkward is one early on where Cardinal Tedesco (lead candidate of the traditionalistis) says to Lawrence/Lomeli (allied to the reformers) that the next Pope should be an Italian again. Since in the book, he's talking to a fellow Italian, that conversation makes sense despite them belonging into different ideological camps, but in the movie, it's a bit unclear why Tedesco even bothers. Still, Fiennes gives such a great performance that I really don't feel like complaining - and I've seen Ralph Fiennes deliver good performances before, through the decades. He really deserves that Oscar nomination, all the more so because Lawrence is a quiet, subtle character, who has to handle several major organisational horrors and mysteries along with a personal crisis of faith. I've read three Harris novels and they each employ something a mystery/detective structure without being outright mysteries; Lawrence, our pov character, isn't just the man in charge of leading the Conclave, i.e. the assembly of Cardinals who need to elect the next Pope, and the papal elections form the thriller part of the story in both book and film, he also has to figure out several mystery like questions about several of the frontrunners who each have secrets that impact on their candidacy.

The film is directed by the same director responsible for the most recent adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and I think you can tell from the way sound is used, but I thought this movie has a far firmer grip on giving personalities on all of its considerable ensemble of characters. (The acting is superb all around.) The cinematography is also gorgeous, and btw, extra points for the Nuns wearing actual post Vatican 2, Italy today clothing, not the pre Vatican 2 uniforms so beloved by American tv and movies. And the various twists and turns of the story are delivered smoothly, ratching up the suspense even when like me you know what's coming. Another pleasant surprise was that while Ralph Fiennes is Lawrence not Lomeli, he still speaks the occasional Italian, including in a key sermon he delivers, Bertinez occasionally switches to Spanish, Tedesco speaks almost exclusively in Italian, and of course there's Latin. (All subtitled when used.) I thought, as I did years ago when reading the book, that despite being a solid electiont thriller with scheming and backroom deals and so forth, it's amazingly uncynical in that everyone, including the less or downright unsympathetic Cardinals, is presented as being genuine about their faith; you do believe these men all originally became priests out of a spiritual longing, no matter what their current state. Which, btw, makes the fictional campaigning and election we're seeing play out here feel ever so much more intelligent and somehow ina better timeline than anything going or having gone on in our reality in recent months or now.

Isabella Rossellini being nominated for playing Sister Agnes reminded me of Judi Dench getting nominated for playing Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, in that these are really tiny roles with just a few minutes of actual screen time, and the nomination is presumably meant for their entire life time of work, but also, in the few scenes they have, the ladies are excellent.

In conclusion: of the two, I'd call Conclave a must and Section 31 a "if you have nothing else on your plate", but Conclave doesn't have Michelle Yeoh, so there's that.