B5 3x15-17 ("Interludes and Examinations" and "War Without End")

[sholio]

Deep breath:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA


I'll just get the elephant in the room out of the way first: I did actually know how Londo's story ends. (As apparently so did anyone who'd seen season 3.) I knew he gave himself to the Shadows and had about 20 years of being a Shadow puppet ruler before G'Kar kills him as we're told in the first episode is going to happen. What I didn't know was how or exactly why, although I'd also osmosed that it was more on the heroic sacrifice end of things than going completely darkside.

I just didn't expect to find so many of the details out so early!

Once I got the AAAAAAAAA out of the way - the thing on his neck! AAAAAAA! - I think this is actually less of a *bad* bad end than I had been worried about. I've been speculating and wondering, and I guess I assumed that Londo's personality would've been completely wiped away - but it isn't at all, I mean, his life is obviously horrible, but he definitely has periods of lucidity and being in control; in fact, possibly quite a bit of the time over the years, based on how he explains to Delenn and Sheridan that the amount of time he can shut the creature down has been declining. I also don't get the feeling this is the first time he's seen G'Kar in all that time; it's possible they have regular contact, I guess? And Vir is around too. So he's not completely gone, he's not completely alone, and he's himself at the end. I think this was all significantly less terrible than most of what I'd imagined.

(While still being pretty terrible. I mean, he's spent 15 years either being meatpuppeted or drunk all the time. No wonder his health is failing.)

Even though at this point we don't know much about how he and G'Kar develop between now and then, the softness in that last scene with them is impossible not to notice, and once again in the area of "less terrible than I was imagining," he's in control for their final conversation and he specifically asks G'Kar to kill him. I had guessed that it was probably a mercy killing just based on what little I knew, but I hadn't realized it would be as voluntary as it is, as opposed to G'Kar killing something that basically hasn't been Londo in a long time.

So I might have watched that scene a few times now. That final view of them, dead and still entangled (possibly holding hands, even; their arms are in shadow so it's hard to tell), and Vir picking up the - chain of office? thing? is so poignant.

I also truly cannot get over how that episode recontextualized the Babylon 4 episode in season 1! There's so much of it where I thought I knew what was happening by the end of the episode, but actually I Did Not. I don't know how much of this was planned and how much was refitted from whatever the original plan was when they lost Sinclair, but *wow*. (The identity of the person inside the spacesuit was an especially delightful mindfuck, because of how obvious it was in the original episode for anyone who's familiar with sci-fi tropes that the person in the spacesuit is definitely future Sinclair even before we see his face, and how in fact it turned out to be three different people and absolutely NONE of them was future Sinclair; even the aged Sinclair that we saw originally was in fact current day Sinclair after being artificially aged in the time field!)

Mild negativity about Sinclair, cut for your easy avoidance:

here

I had forgotten how wooden he is. I really do vastly prefer Sheridan in the captain role, and just seeing them side by side, with Sheridan's wider emotional range and playful boyish energy, reminded me of why.

It was nice to get closure for Sinclair, though, and interesting to see his very different relationships with Delenn and Garibaldi than Sheridan has with them. Sinclair's last act with Garibaldi is to try to protect him, which seems very true to the relationship those two have. (As much as I did feel sad about Garibaldi being shut out of the final fight!)

About "Interludes and Examinations," I have much less to say - I knew Adira came back in some way, but that was definitely not what I was expecting in the slightest. Poor Londo (the scene where he starts crying, *ow*), although wow, Londo, way to learn exactly the wrong lesson. STOP LISTENING TO MORDEN, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

I did not expect Kosh's death in the slightest! What!! (Although maybe the Vorlons should consider being slightly less maddeningly cryptic with their warnings. "If I do what you ask, it will lead to my death" - really, Kosh, how hard would that have been?) Actually, between Kosh dying and Franklin quitting (with Garibaldi once again as the mom friend there), not to mention Adira's death, this episode was a pretty rough ride for our cast.

ETA: Also, I'm reasonably confident that I'm back into episodes I've seen. I don't think I saw all of season 3, but I'm pretty sure I saw the episodes in this general area; I don't remember anything specifically, but I keep getting flashes of familiarity as I go along, especially surrounding Franklin's storyline (I definitely remembered that *something* altering happened to him, although for some reason I vaguely remembered it was telepath-related, not a drug addiction) and I got a similar sense of familiarity off the apocalyptic flash-forwards and the views of a ruined Centauri Prime.

Comments

[sholio]

This is suddenly clarifying for me why people watch reaction videos.

XD And I am pleased to provide it.

And G'Kar has known since he saw his own death in Londo's mind that granting this request will kill him. The twist of it being the Keeper waking and trying frantically to preserve its puppet, I don't know if either of them could guess. But he would recognize the dream when he reached it and he did what was not only necessary, but kind. They go down in one another's arms.

Yes!

I'm not entirely sure that Londo knew for certain that killing him would kill G'Kar; he may have believed he still had enough choice about it that there was at least a possibility it wouldn't end that way. The way he described the dream all the way back in early season one sounded like he thought it was either/or - one of them was going to kill the other, it could go either way. But G'Kar definitely knew that he was going to his death.

And the way that Londo quietly and calmly submits to G'Kar's hands around his throat is also pure id fuel. OTHER SHIPS CAN NEVER.

(I had wondered why I was so feral about them as a teen considering how little of the show beyond season two I had seen - I'm not sure if I saw "Dust to Dust" at all - but I definitely saw this episode, I remember just enough of it in snatches to know that, and that would probably have done it. Especially since even then my narrative kink for enemies-to-whatever was running strong, and this episode implies heavily enough that their enmity has softened into something much warmer by this point that even a teenager knowing nothing about where the show was going could hardly have failed to notice it.)

It is impossible for me not to hear a kind of callback to the elevator episode in the double-speaking of "I am as tired of my life as you are."

I also noticed that! (Way to continue to to obfuscate for the viewer just how close they are or aren't at this point in their lives. And it's a very Londo thing to say.)

Londo died on his feet doing something noble and brave—and maybe not even futile—after all.

He does. And making a much more active choice about it than I had realized he would be able to at this end of his life. And what really gets to me about it is that he didn't ask for death to escape the hell that his life has become; he asked for it because it was the only way to prevent the Keeper from having Delenn and Sheridan killed.

Knowing what little I knew about his fate, I guessed back in the Inquisitor episode that the Inquisitor's final judgment on Delenn was foreshadowing Londo's mode of death - as it was, but not at the time or in the way I would have guessed, and I didn't guess at all just how directly it was foreshadowing G'Kar's as well. I saved the quote because I was expecting to need it in season five, not season three.

"How do you know the chosen ones? No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions. Not for glory. Not for fame. For one person. In the dark. Where no one will ever know ... or see. I have been in the service of the Vorlons for centuries, looking for you. Diogenes with his lamp, looking for an honest man willing to die for all the wrong reasons."

I guessed at the time this had to do with the circumstances under which Londo went to the Shadows, which it sort of does and - not being there or knowing how it happens yet - it still might in ways I don't know about yet. But it's very directly how he dies here. He dies to save Delenn and Sheridan, who will never know exactly how much letting them go cost him, or that he knew that it would be the end of him at the moment when he chose to do it.

And G'Kar dies for Londo. (And also to save Delenn and Sheridan, and in the ultimate twist that his younger self could never anticipate, to save the Centauri.) But mostly for Londo. And he knew he was going to the minute that he walked into that room.

In other ways that this show makes me open my eyes and stare at the wall at 3am, another thing I realized belatedly is that Sinclair also kind of does this for Garibaldi. Not nearly as directly as Londo and G'Kar do, but I was thinking about Sinclair's sacrifice vs. the Inquisitor's (slightly unreliable-narrator) description of what makes a Chosen One, considering that Sinclair is probably the most classic Chosen One in the narrative so far. And his sacrifice is much more of a typical heroic sacrifice for the greater good, not for glory exactly, but that is more or less what happens to him.

But it's also Sinclair taking great pains to keep Garibaldi out of it, knowing that Garibaldi would definitely go with him if he could, and that it would rip him out of his life and probably kill him if he does.

(And Kosh dies for Sheridan, too, with Sheridan having no idea that he's sending Kosh to his death, or even that Kosh cared enough to do something that huge. But Kosh knows it.)

[sovay]

I'm not entirely sure that Londo knew for certain that killing him would kill G'Kar; he may have believed he still had enough choice about it that there was at least a possibility it wouldn't end that way. The way he described the dream all the way back in early season one sounded like he thought it was either/or - one of them was going to kill the other, it could go either way. But G'Kar definitely knew that he was going to his death.

I went back and rewatched the relevant scene in "Midnight on the Firing Line" (DO YOU KNOW WHAT MY LIFE CANNOT AFFORD RIGHT NOW A BABYLON 5 REWATCH I DON'T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WRITE ABOUT MOVIES) and Londo sounds pretty secure in his conviction of both of their deaths, even if Sinclair tries to argue him out of subscribing to it on obvious grounds of self-fulfilling prophecy:

"I will kill him, though. Sooner or later. Somewhere."

"Ambassador—"

"My people, we have a way, you see. We know how, and sometimes even when, we are going to die. It comes in a dream, eh? In my dream, I am an old man. It's twenty years from now and I am dying, my hands wrapped around someone's throat and his around mine. We have squeezed the life out of each other. The first time I saw G'Kar"—punctuated with that superbly inappropriate fingersnap, as if he were placing a face from a party the morning after—"I recognized him as the one from the dream. It will happen. Twenty years from now, we will die with our hands around each other's throats."

"Twenty years is a long time. Long enough for your people to come to an understanding."

"Believe as you wish. Twenty years from now, one of us will be wiser and older, or one of us will be dead. Who's to say?"

Which sounded more to me like graciously dropping the subject than agreeing on the mutability of the future, strengthened by his apparent non sequitur when Garibaldi has intercepted him from shooting G'Kar: "Well, it seems I am still on target for my appointment twenty years from now." I am inclined to believe that for most of his life, with whatever emotions about it, Londo really did believe in their mutual death. At the very end, he may well have hoped that G'Kar would be faster than the Keeper, that he himself would die first by just enough to fulfill his death and no one else's. The future comes true on the slant. I don't think G'Kar had any such hope and I don't think he needed any.

(I had forgotten just how much first-season Londo looks as though he just rolled out of bed five minutes before he had to be anywhere and most of the time it probably was true. And even then, the kind of man who would pull strings to get his nephew what he thought was a safe civilian job and end up transfixed by the guilt of having inadvertently placed him in a hostage situation. He really cares about all the wrong things for the job he's in, except they are all the right things at the last.)

Especially since even then my narrative kink for enemies-to-whatever was running strong, and this episode implies heavily enough that their enmity has softened into something much warmer by this point that even a teenager knowing nothing about where the show was going could hardly have failed to notice it.

There's so much time between them and so much more than any one thing, there's almost no point in trying to put a name to it. They are each other's most important person. You would get that just from their one scene together in this episode and it sounds like you did. It would have riveted me.

And what really gets to me about it is that he didn't ask for death to escape the hell that his life has become; he asked for it because it was the only way to prevent the Keeper from having Delenn and Sheridan killed.

Yes. He could have asked for his own sake years ago. He waited until it meant more than himself.

He dies to save Delenn and Sheridan, who will never know exactly how much letting them go cost him, or that he knew that it would be the end of him at the moment when he chose to do it.

The not knowing is heartwrenching for me. I can imagine them putting the pieces together once word gets out about the transition of power on Centauri Prime, but, no, it isn't about what history will say about Londo who may well be vilified after his death as the drunken mad emperor of his wrecked and burning planet, the only other person who was there for the truth is G'Kar and the knowledge will die with him. At least it's the two of them, there in that dark. It really is together.

(Vir may well guess. He was there on the scene. But there's no banking on it. That's not what matters.)

And G'Kar dies for Londo. (And also to save Delenn and Sheridan, and in the ultimate twist that his younger self could never anticipate, to save the Centauri.) But mostly for Londo. And he knew he was going to the minute that he walked into that room.

Yeah, look, be right back, screaming forever.

But it's also Sinclair taking great pains to keep Garibaldi out of it, knowing that Garibaldi would definitely go with him if he could, and that it would rip him out of his life and probably kill him if he does.

I would also love to know how this part of the arc was originally scripted, because it works so beautifully with the separate moving parts of Sheridan and Sinclair, and the parallelism is one of the things that I am not convinced would work so well if it had just been the one guy.

[sholio]

Thank you for going back and finding that! I think I was just remembering the end of that speech ("one of us will be wiser and older, or one of us will be dead") but not accurately recalling the rest of it. Anyway, you're right, and that's just all the more poignant - they both knew where it was going to end for decades, but not the all-important why.

(DO YOU KNOW WHAT MY LIFE CANNOT AFFORD RIGHT NOW A BABYLON 5 REWATCH I DON'T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WRITE ABOUT MOVIES)

#mood

(I can hear the faint sound of all my fanfic WIPs as well as my novels screaming at me while I sink deeper into a pit of Babylon 5 feels. I wrote 4K of Londo/G'Kar drawerfic this week based on vaguely osmosed spoilers from future episodes. Help.)

I had forgotten just how much first-season Londo looks as though he just rolled out of bed five minutes before he had to be anywhere and most of the time it probably was true.

I keep being struck by that now that the show has started having more season one flashbacks. The hair!! Clearly the one thing he didn't bring with him from Centauri Prime was a hairdresser ... But I think you're right - he was a joke of an ambassador stuck in a backwater outpost his people didn't care about; he had no reason to do anything other than gamble and drink. (And his constant drinking in the early episodes is a knife through the heart now, knowing how all of that ends up.) Until he wasn't, and now he's groomed to fit the part.

There's so much time between them and so much more than any one thing, there's almost no point in trying to put a name to it. They are each other's most important person. You would get that just from their one scene together in this episode and it sounds like you did. It would have riveted me.

It is so true. It's also true that, even knowing little of the rest of the context (including in my case only having seen part of season three; based on how I remember a lot of what's happening in this area and nothing before it, I think I came back into the show somewhere around here as my viewing got intermittent due to college) it's clear that if G'Kar wanted him dead, he could easily have killed him anytime. But he didn't, and he does it now only because Londo asks him to. That also says a lot about where they are now. As you say, they are the most important person in each other's lives, and sometimes that's because of hate and sometimes it's because of mutual interdependency and sometimes other things as well.

The not knowing is heartwrenching for me. I can imagine them putting the pieces together once word gets out about the transition of power on Centauri Prime, but, no, it isn't about what history will say about Londo who may well be vilified after his death as the drunken mad emperor of his wrecked and burning planet, the only other person who was there for the truth is G'Kar and the knowledge will die with him.

I KNOWWWW. I think between Vir knowing how the Keepers work, and the circumstances surrounding their escape, they'll probably figure most of it out. Vir might even have heard the final conversation between Londo and G'Kar. But as you say, it's not about that. Londo did what he did because it was right, because it would save Delenn and Sheridan, and because it would save his world, and he will die without knowing or expecting that anyone will know about it, or think of him as anything other than a drunken tyrant. It's not for glory or posterity. It's because at the end, he knew the right thing to do and he went for it.

At least it's the two of them, there in that dark. It really is together.

And yes, he didn't have to do it alone.

I would also love to know how this part of the arc was originally scripted, because it works so beautifully with the separate moving parts of Sheridan and Sinclair, and the parallelism is one of the things that I am not convinced would work so well if it had just been the one guy.

I am also very curious what the original plan would have been! I can't imagine anything working better, especially since part of what makes "War Without End" such a mindfuck is because it turns the original B4 episode on its ear in ways that probably weren't intended when the episode was filmed - it seemed fairly obvious where some parts of it are going in ways that probably *were* where it was going back when Sinclair was going to be the captain throughout, and it's Sheridan as a monkey wrench in the whole thing that makes parts of it so unexpected. I'm sure later seasons would have twisted the original episode in interesting ways, but not the same ways.

[sovay]

(I can hear the faint sound of all my fanfic WIPs as well as my novels screaming at me while I sink deeper into a pit of Babylon 5 feels. I wrote 4K of Londo/G'Kar drawerfic this week based on vaguely osmosed spoilers from future episodes. Help.)

I will reply to the rest of this extremely more-ish comment when I have slept, but I do not think I can send help except to encourage this project, I'm sorry.

[sovay]

Thank you for going back and finding that!

You're welcome! And it's right there in the first episode, superficially undercut by the skepticism of Sinclair, but seeded earlier than any other part of the metaplot that I can call to mind. As Chekhov's guns go, it's just ridiculous.

Anyway, you're right, and that's just all the more poignant - they both knew where it was going to end for decades, but not the all-important why.

I am still chewing the furniture about them thirty years after the fact!

(Parenthesis to note that even without launching myself into a rewatch, re-immersing myself in a show which I encountered for the first time as a teenager has produced a predictable perspective shift, and I feel it is a credit to the show that it can be reapproached from a point in time where I am much closer to the median age of the main characters and also sometimes wonder what happened to the last twenty years of my life, even if I like to hope that my midlife crisis would not involve quite so much starting of interstellar wars.)

But I think you're right - he was a joke of an ambassador stuck in a backwater outpost his people didn't care about; he had no reason to do anything other than gamble and drink. (And his constant drinking in the early episodes is a knife through the heart now, knowing how all of that ends up.) Until he wasn't, and now he's groomed to fit the part.

I particularly like that image of him being fitted for what is expected of him. So much of Londo's reversal of fortunes should come off as narrative gotcha because of the ironies and instead it's just painful and never precisely symmetrical and all too real.

I can't imagine anything working better, especially since part of what makes "War Without End" such a mindfuck is because it turns the original B4 episode on its ear in ways that probably weren't intended when the episode was filmed

Yes! The entire episode ends up being such an excellent and non-anvillicious meditation on how the future doesn't turn out even how you theoretically know it will.