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Babylon 5 - 3x06 "Dust to Dust"
I've actually seen up to 3x09 at this point, and I WILL talk about the rest of them soon, because there's lots to talk about, and a lot going on! But this episode was laser targeted on my id with the force of 10,000 suns.
"Local man trips balls on experimental telepathy drug, accidentally soulbonds with worst enemy while beating him to death, subsequently has quasi-religious epiphany about the interconnectedness of all life in the universe"
.... was definitely not on my bingo card for this show, but thank you B5 for supplying this PURE DISTILLED ID ROCKET FUEL.
But it's not just that! (Which I will definitely get back to.) I also loved the Vir and Londo side thread in this episode, and the Bester and Garibaldi subplot! Basically this whole episode was riveting and highly RTMI every minute.
Bester!! "I'm here to save your butts." (I love his delivery of that line.) He and Garibaldi working together was really more fun than I feel like it should have been. Not just working as a team in the field, although that too; the scene where they're walking through the station concourse and Bester is talking about how odd it is to experience mental quiet in a crowd of people was strangely affecting. (I also liked that he instantly submitted to the psychic blocking drug, and didn't try to fake it or counter it.) And the stinger reveal that the PsyCorps invented Dust, because of course they did! The worst/best part about Bester is that he really isn't tormented or conflicted about the awful things he does, but he's also not gleefully evil; he's just a guy doing a job, killing people or stripping their minds or whatever, and then he goes home to his family. I don't think he's lying to Garibaldi that he sleeps perfectly well at night. And I also loved that he's highly competent even without the telepathy, between psyching out the guy they were interrogating, and working smoothly with Garibaldi, gun in hand, to take down the Dust dealers. STUPID HOT COMPETENT BLACK-CLAD VILLAIN.
I was so delighted to see Vir again! (Showing up just in time to get hurt due to Londo's terrible life choices. Poor Vir.) But he and Londo were just so sweet this episode - it's very clear that Londo missed him and values his company (even if he can't help being a jerk to him about the Minbari robe - Londo, please), and Vir defending Londo to Delenn ("He'll surprise you one of these days") and then the scene in the infirmary, Vir tapping on the glass of the isolation chamber and a semiconscious Londo rousing himself enough to acknowledge him with a little wave, MY HEART. And Londo telling him that Vir shouldn't let his ambassadorial position be a joke - because (as we now know, and Vir doesn't) *his* position was, and he knows how it feels and wants better for Vir. T___T
But most of all, I am profoundly Not Okay about the whole sequence with G'Kar on Dust. High as a kite in a drug-fueled psychotic episode, he finally gets the chance to turn the tables, to make Londo afraid and small and helpless - and it doesn't change anything, he's not any less of a victim just because he's managed to turn it around and be the bully for a change.
"How does it feel to be helpless? To be the victim? Do you understand our pain?"
No, he doesn't, and nothing changes, nothing *will* change, the change has to be his.
One thing about G'Kar effectively getting a coredump of Londo's memories is that he got all the unhappiness and uncertainty as well. He's not in a psychological place to recognize it when he's actively mind-raping Londo (to use Bester's phrase), but I think it's interesting that the two specific G'Kar-POV flashbacks we got regarding Londo and the Shadows were both Londo being shocked and upset about how far Morden was willing to go, so G'Kar knows the Narn genocide wasn't Londo's plan all along (not that Londo isn't fully complicit in it) and he also is aware of Londo's unhappiness and shame about the way he got the B5 position - he's got to process it but I think it's interesting that he actually knows all of that now; he probably knows Londo better now that literally anyone on the station, including how much uncertainty, shame, and unhappiness Londo hides behind his genial facade.
Londo's reaction to all of it is also not what I expected at all. I don't think I would have thought he'd be this subdued about it - he doesn't seem to want revenge or retaliation (and he *could*, this is the kind of situation that he could spin into further repression of the Narn on their homeworld if he wanted to push that), he seems perfectly okay with the local B5 justice system handling G'Kar's sentencing and punishment.
Obviously you can't beat empathy into a person and G'Kar's attempts to do exactly that didn't have the desired effect, but it's not that it had no effect. I mean, Londo already knows that what he's been doing is wrong, and he's not going to stop, but he also didn't double down in the aftermath of having karma literally smack him in the face; he doesn't even actually seem angry about it (although it's true that we haven't seen the two of them in the same room yet). And similarly, I think it's interesting that G'Kar wasn't actually outright trying to kill him - as the main goal, anyway - it was more about wanting him to hurt, and suffer the way they've been suffering, and to understand what they're going through. Even eaten up with fury and hate, G'Kar didn't really want to make him dead, at least at G'Kar's own hands, although it could easily have been a side effect; he just wanted to make him see. And I love how much is unspoken but obvious in the last scene in the Dust sequence, when G'Kar wakes up next to Londo's battered, bloody body - but Londo is still breathing, G'Kar didn't kill him, he hasn't crossed a line he can't uncross yet, and he starts to cry.
"Local man trips balls on experimental telepathy drug, accidentally soulbonds with worst enemy while beating him to death, subsequently has quasi-religious epiphany about the interconnectedness of all life in the universe"
.... was definitely not on my bingo card for this show, but thank you B5 for supplying this PURE DISTILLED ID ROCKET FUEL.
But it's not just that! (Which I will definitely get back to.) I also loved the Vir and Londo side thread in this episode, and the Bester and Garibaldi subplot! Basically this whole episode was riveting and highly RTMI every minute.
Bester!! "I'm here to save your butts." (I love his delivery of that line.) He and Garibaldi working together was really more fun than I feel like it should have been. Not just working as a team in the field, although that too; the scene where they're walking through the station concourse and Bester is talking about how odd it is to experience mental quiet in a crowd of people was strangely affecting. (I also liked that he instantly submitted to the psychic blocking drug, and didn't try to fake it or counter it.) And the stinger reveal that the PsyCorps invented Dust, because of course they did! The worst/best part about Bester is that he really isn't tormented or conflicted about the awful things he does, but he's also not gleefully evil; he's just a guy doing a job, killing people or stripping their minds or whatever, and then he goes home to his family. I don't think he's lying to Garibaldi that he sleeps perfectly well at night. And I also loved that he's highly competent even without the telepathy, between psyching out the guy they were interrogating, and working smoothly with Garibaldi, gun in hand, to take down the Dust dealers. STUPID HOT COMPETENT BLACK-CLAD VILLAIN.
I was so delighted to see Vir again! (Showing up just in time to get hurt due to Londo's terrible life choices. Poor Vir.) But he and Londo were just so sweet this episode - it's very clear that Londo missed him and values his company (even if he can't help being a jerk to him about the Minbari robe - Londo, please), and Vir defending Londo to Delenn ("He'll surprise you one of these days") and then the scene in the infirmary, Vir tapping on the glass of the isolation chamber and a semiconscious Londo rousing himself enough to acknowledge him with a little wave, MY HEART. And Londo telling him that Vir shouldn't let his ambassadorial position be a joke - because (as we now know, and Vir doesn't) *his* position was, and he knows how it feels and wants better for Vir. T___T
But most of all, I am profoundly Not Okay about the whole sequence with G'Kar on Dust. High as a kite in a drug-fueled psychotic episode, he finally gets the chance to turn the tables, to make Londo afraid and small and helpless - and it doesn't change anything, he's not any less of a victim just because he's managed to turn it around and be the bully for a change.
"How does it feel to be helpless? To be the victim? Do you understand our pain?"
No, he doesn't, and nothing changes, nothing *will* change, the change has to be his.
One thing about G'Kar effectively getting a coredump of Londo's memories is that he got all the unhappiness and uncertainty as well. He's not in a psychological place to recognize it when he's actively mind-raping Londo (to use Bester's phrase), but I think it's interesting that the two specific G'Kar-POV flashbacks we got regarding Londo and the Shadows were both Londo being shocked and upset about how far Morden was willing to go, so G'Kar knows the Narn genocide wasn't Londo's plan all along (not that Londo isn't fully complicit in it) and he also is aware of Londo's unhappiness and shame about the way he got the B5 position - he's got to process it but I think it's interesting that he actually knows all of that now; he probably knows Londo better now that literally anyone on the station, including how much uncertainty, shame, and unhappiness Londo hides behind his genial facade.
Londo's reaction to all of it is also not what I expected at all. I don't think I would have thought he'd be this subdued about it - he doesn't seem to want revenge or retaliation (and he *could*, this is the kind of situation that he could spin into further repression of the Narn on their homeworld if he wanted to push that), he seems perfectly okay with the local B5 justice system handling G'Kar's sentencing and punishment.
Obviously you can't beat empathy into a person and G'Kar's attempts to do exactly that didn't have the desired effect, but it's not that it had no effect. I mean, Londo already knows that what he's been doing is wrong, and he's not going to stop, but he also didn't double down in the aftermath of having karma literally smack him in the face; he doesn't even actually seem angry about it (although it's true that we haven't seen the two of them in the same room yet). And similarly, I think it's interesting that G'Kar wasn't actually outright trying to kill him - as the main goal, anyway - it was more about wanting him to hurt, and suffer the way they've been suffering, and to understand what they're going through. Even eaten up with fury and hate, G'Kar didn't really want to make him dead, at least at G'Kar's own hands, although it could easily have been a side effect; he just wanted to make him see. And I love how much is unspoken but obvious in the last scene in the Dust sequence, when G'Kar wakes up next to Londo's battered, bloody body - but Londo is still breathing, G'Kar didn't kill him, he hasn't crossed a line he can't uncross yet, and he starts to cry.
no subject
Yes! He doesn't even beat up on Vir in a personal way, he just goes through him to get to Londo, because Londo has become for him the face of Centauri Prime. Which could be considered a fairly ironic success as an ambassador in context, really.
it's bloody, brutal, violent, and uncomfortable for the viewer to watch. It's not just Londo attacked in his own mind; it's Londo huddling on the floor, covered in blood and crying as he begs his attacker to stop. It's the bruised, extremely unphotogenic aftermath.
And that's so physicalized for a mental assault. I agree that it is not actually a sexual interaction and that it doesn't push the overtones so far that it gets into the territory of needing to treat it like one—which would have significantly complicated the aftermath—but it does sound like a deliberate choice to contrast with the show's own established shorthand for even invasive telepathy. I do not remember, for example, anyone getting a Cronenbergian nosebleed after a particularly hard scan.
It is really interesting that the Centauri, alone among any of the younger species we've seen so far, *all* seem to have a little touch of telepathy. Centauri have regular psychics as well, we've seen a few, but they have a casual use and acceptance of precognition - which, if our speculation about Londo is right, might go along with other telepathic talents as well - that is really unique outside of the older races like the Vorlons.
As far as I can recollect, it is. And if the Minbari turned out seers on the regular, it would feel of a part with their generally spiritualized, enlightenment-oriented culture, the embodied universe talking to itself and so on, but they actually seem to have about an average incidence of telepaths and nothing resembling an oracular tradition beyond their scripture. The Centauri are so much more notoriously into realpolitik, it's fascinating for them to be the one species for whom it is just normal to know something about the future, whether through the death-dream or consultation of a prophetess or both. (Humans in the meantime appear to be taking a depressingly recognizable approach to the emergence of empirically verifiable psi, i.e. corporatizing-cum-militarizing it and doing their best to breed the TP equivalent of a Carolina Reaper.) Their telepathy overall seems much more socially integrated than in any of the other younger races that we see, which makes me curious about all sorts of aspects of Centauri culture that the show doesn't necessarily more than touch on, e.g. the thing where the imperial court uses permanently paired telepaths as ansibles when the emperor travels offworld, which absolutely no one else has, either, possibly because no one else has telepaths who can sustain a link across light-years, that's actually fucking nuts. Incidentally I am accepting your interpretation of the Dust assault, both because it seems internally credible and because it's great.
(And it just figures that if G'Kar was going to invade someone's mind, it would be the person who knows how he's going to die.)
At this point in the series, I do not think it is a spoiler to say that while great and often difficult moral complexity governs both of their storylines, quite a lot of their mutual universe is also dictated by black comedy and triple-distilled id.
The true irony is that he was sent to B5 because he was viewed as a useless joke, but he actually turned out to have a diplomatically useful talent for making new friends and bridging cross-species cultural gaps simply by being the person he naturally is, and if he wasn't quite so fueled by unhappiness, resentment, and yearning for a lost Centauri golden age, he could have been really good at it. But then he blew it all up on ambition. LONDO!!
Just imagine that I put "THIS!!!" and some upward-pointing arrows in about 64-point type here.
While Londo is desperately trying not to be a joke, to be feared if he can only have respect that way, the people who like(d) him, actually are aware of most of his flaws, if not the depths of his insecurity, and like him anyway.
Londo in the first season managed to pass out flat on a table in front of at least two people with whom he would form—until he detonated them—genuine friendships! He has that past as a pilot and a duellist which means he can never have been a total lightweight, but his admission earlier this season that Vir reminds him of his younger self rings true to me, because his cynicism is the self-defensive kind, the deflection of someone who doesn't want to admit they ever had the naïveté to be disappointed or disillusioned and yet as recently as his assignment to Babylon 5, he was still hoping to be taken seriously, still hurt to find out he wasn't. That stupid, heartbreaking line to Morden back at the start of his enmeshment with the Shadows: "There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." It isn't hard at all to imagine him as wide-eyed as Vir. Whatever he would say about it, I don't think Londo actually lost his innocence until quite recently, and it was self-inflicted.
no subject
Yeah, and it makes the entire sequence really vividly memorable, much more so than if it had been a relatively bloodless mental invasion. (I also realize that, eight episodes further along, they _still_ haven't been in the same room together since this happened; they're both off on other plot tracks right now.)
I do not think it is a spoiler to say that while great and often difficult moral complexity governs both of their storylines, quite a lot of their mutual universe is also dictated by black comedy and triple-distilled id.
WHEEEEEEE.
Londo in the first season managed to pass out flat on a table in front of at least two people with whom he would form—until he detonated them—genuine friendships!
Yes! They know what he's like, or what he was like at that point, and it didn't alienate them, at least nothing whatsoever like the war crimes and genocide did.
He has that past as a pilot and a duellist which means he can never have been a total lightweight
I am so intrigued by that aspect of Londo's past, honestly! It sounds like he must have cut quite a dashing figure as a young man, and I think it's such a good choice that we meet him not as that version of himself, but as a dissolute, middle-aged man whose flamboyant, "live fast die young" youth has fallen into a more pathetic form of drinking and whoring as he tries to hold on to the frayed edges of his brighter past.
And yeah, I agree about Londo's innocent/idealistic side, and corresponding disillusionment when the world didn't live up to his ideals. In an interesting way he's kind of a "mirror darkly" reflection of the more idealistic set of protagonists, who managed to weather the entire organization they had devoted their lives to going full fascist and throwing them to the wolves, came out the other side still holding to their ideals, and built something new. In his own way, Londo is trying to do that too, but it's dark and distorted and awful.
no subject
Like three rounds deep into this conversation it just clicked for me: it literalizes not just the violation, but what we're been talking about with Londo's complete refusal to deal with the mortifying ordeal of being known. He looks afterward just about how he feels about anyone finding out.
WHEEEEEEE.
I really think it's one of the best things that has ever been on television. And it's so tropetastic. In many ways I don't know a lot about J. Michael Straczynski, but I feel I could make an educated guess about his most popular tags on AO3.
Yes! They know what he's like, or what he was like at that point, and it didn't alienate them, at least nothing whatsoever like the war crimes and genocide did.
Chaos muppetry generally goes over better than war crimes!
The Celebration of Life as portrayed in "A Parliament of Dreams" actually feels key to the current state of Centauri politics, in that their identity as a species/polity is inextricably intertwined with their victory in a mutually genocidal war which it is implied they were initially on the losing end of. Humans at least got the Centauri for their first contact, but the Centauri got the Xon. Londo says outright that they have so many gods in their pantheon because they needed all the help they could get. But they prevailed, and what used to be a celebration of continued survival became a feast of conclusive triumph, and they tell jokes about the extermination of the other sentient species on their homeworld, the first other sentient species they knew. I do not in any way mean that Centauri society does not have respect for other sentient life—they're not like the Dilgar, who snuffed entire planets for the hell of it. As a planetary history, theirs feels extra-diegetically like a combination of American manifest destiny and the Punic Wars, so, you know, a normal level of genocide with jokes about it afterward. But it makes sense of their attitudes toward the Narn, which feel otherwise more obsessed and more annihilating than your average post-imperial resentment. They must have lost other colonies, other occupations in their millennially spacefaring history as their empire bled off around the edges. By all accounts including Londo's, the Republic is much contracted and attentuated from its extent at its height. It wouldn't have occurred to me in the '90's, but now that I've spent several decades of drowning in nationalist nostalgia, it makes sense to me that the resistance of the Narn sticks in the Centauri imagination not just because it is a recent humiliation but because it conjures up the centuries of total war with the Xon which were their original springboard into empire: it's part of the evocation of past glories; it's a familiar dyad to the death. Carthage never stopped haunting Rome and we have established that the U.S. is ghost-soaked up to here. The Narn make such an excellent Other for the Centauri. I have no doubt the reconquest has been immensely popular back home.
I am so intrigued by that aspect of Londo's past, honestly! It sounds like he must have cut quite a dashing figure as a young man, and I think it's such a good choice that we meet him not as that version of himself, but as a dissolute, middle-aged man whose flamboyant, "live fast die young" youth has fallen into a more pathetic form of drinking and whoring as he tries to hold on to the frayed edges of his brighter past.
Phrasing it that way really snaps into focus how much Londo functions as a synecdoche for his beloved Republic—and it's a great description—and I also love it as character work. The way we meet him, the bravery, the gallantry, the wistfulness are a suprise: that he can still handle a shuttle and a blade and thought once that he would die on his feet doing the futile right thing. One of those meteors that didn't manage to burn out and instead just sort of sputtered and still flickers, except he's flared up for the wrong thing. Nobody wants their chaos muppet friend to get their act together into an efficient, even if partly inadvertent fascist.
In an interesting way he's kind of a "mirror darkly" reflection of the more idealistic set of protagonists, who managed to weather the entire organization they had devoted their lives to going full fascist and throwing them to the wolves, came out the other side still holding to their ideals, and built something new. In his own way, Londo is trying to do that too, but it's dark and distorted and awful.
They are trying to build a future. Londo is trying to resurrect a past. "I want it all back, the way that it was." And not only is that never a good idea, it never works: "Every generation of Centauri mourns for the golden days when their power was like unto the gods! It's counterproductive!"