We talked about Londo placing his trust in the wrong people as part of what kept him from realizing his potential in the Centauri court, but burning his bridges with people who might otherwise have been allies could easily have been a part of that, too. (At the same time he doesn't seem like he's particularly unusual for a Centauri of the noble class in being that way. Vir is the unusual one, with his openheartedness and lack of desire for advancement.)
Agreed on the general culture and it still makes me think that if Londo had all of that no-chill flamboyance without the complementary interpersonal acumen, then of course he could have found himself on the outs with the Centauri cursus honorum by middle age.
and this was also floating around in my head as I wrote the fic I posted today. They know him, in all his best and worst qualities, and at the end, they're there for him. It's a friendship very heavily freighted by everything that has come before, but at the end of it all, they aren't going to walk away.
I'm so glad that that's what you wrote. I really love it.
(And we know that Londo would do the same because he already has, sitting up with Lennier after the bombings. For any of them, he'd be there all night.)
(Although even that part may not be completely true. We already know Timov may not like him, but she'll donate her own blood to save him.)
(She did! Londo doesn't know it, though, so the part of this experience that's his subconscious processing would not have her on hand as a counterexample, and the part of this experience that may be something else has hedged its bets with the "almost" of "certainly not.")
(Though now that I think about it, he also sleeps with one of Londo's wives, so it's possible that G'Kar is simply a xenosexual weirdo by Narn standards.)
I am pretty sure this is a true fact about G'Kar and I love it. People on Babylon 5 don't just get to be flawed in dramatically propulsive ways, they get to be weird.
Yeah, for the fic that I wrote, I obviously went with "kick in the hindbrain" because I had to pick something for dramatic purposes
It's quite good for dramatic purposes!
but in actual canon fact I'm completely on the fence about it; it also could easily be that he's been going in circles in his own head about it all night and that point when he finally snapped into decision focus, through fate or their binary-stars-in-orbit synchronicity or pure chance, happened to be that moment. And there's also the possibility that he literally hadn't heard - it's a compressed enough time frame, and a late enough hour, that no one thinking to go inform G'Kar makes reasonable sense - and the moment when he found out was the moment when he made a beeline for the medlab.
That's actually a really good point. I would love to know what their total weirdness about one another looks like to outside observers at this point.
I like that it works if we don't know. I still want to know!
Agreed on both counts!
I do find it interesting that the show itself explicitly acknowledges the possibility of a lingering connection between them in this episode, for the first time since the events of "Dust to Dust" occurred. And we do know from what happened with Sheridan and Kosh that that kind of thing is possible.
Yes. If that was always in reserve from the third season, this episode was the perfect time to pull it out.
You stopped mid-sentence! I need the rest!
Oh, my God, I was so tired!
That sentence was supposed to lead into "specifically Cartagia," because in addition to all the really good points you make about the roles in which Londo casts G'Kar, it fascinates me that this sequence is the one part of Londo's dream/NDE which is directly transposed from his life. We can tell from its prominence in his dreamscape that the whipping of G'Kar is one of his two greatest points of shame over his own silence equaling complicity, the other being his similar witnessing of the bombardment of Narn. The crime against humanity is objectively of greater magnitude, but the personal atrocity is the one that stalks him, the actinic light of the electro-whip flashing at least once behind him when he's refusing to turn around and face everything waiting for him. Londo himself may not even know where to start reckoning with the responsibility for the deaths of millions, but he knows what he didn't do when Cartagia was playing with his stubborn toy.
(Thinking about it from that perspective, it's really interesting that he breaks at the same point G'Kar did in reality, and with the same result, albeit for a completely different reason: he lives. Londo's subconscious acknowledging that he doesn't deserve to die under those conditions any more than G'Kar did? Or just that reaching parity, so to speak, was enough to satisfy whatever part of himself wanted to torture himself that way?)
When Londo broaches the subject of G'Kar's torture in "No Surrender, No Retreat," he frames it in terms of sacrifice—physically, pain endured, the loss of an eye; emotionally, humiliation, the loss of dignity and pride. And that last is Londo's sticking point and has been as long as we've known him, the going-nowhere joke ambassador of a waning power who can brazen out being caught cheating at cards (with his junk, no less) but can't bear to be seen as having been, about anything that really matters, wrong. As you pointed out in the third season, he'd doubled himself down into a place where he could deal better with being hated than being laughed at, better a monster than a failure or a fool. His apology to the technomages really was a case of being sorry for getting caught (plus extortion by Narn opera and five hundred thousand shares in Fireflies, Inc). He won't admit vulnerability until the very last moment of it damn near killing him. So it does feel like a gesture of empathy/reciprocity to transpose himself into G'Kar's place, suffering what he brought G'Kar to suffer, but it also feels to me like part of getting to the point of real apology, of being able to sacrifice enough of his own pride to acknowledge that he galactically fucked up. And then having—broken himself—he can apologize without coercion, completely meaning it. He can just make the choice.
(I find it both deeply enjoyable and telling that one of the signature elements of the relationship he and G'Kar have formed by this point is that G'Kar can tease him. Londo is really not at home to teasing. He probably never has been. And G'Kar can just yank his chain and Londo will put up with it and vice versa.)
no subject
Agreed on the general culture and it still makes me think that if Londo had all of that no-chill flamboyance without the complementary interpersonal acumen, then of course he could have found himself on the outs with the Centauri cursus honorum by middle age.
and this was also floating around in my head as I wrote the fic I posted today. They know him, in all his best and worst qualities, and at the end, they're there for him. It's a friendship very heavily freighted by everything that has come before, but at the end of it all, they aren't going to walk away.
I'm so glad that that's what you wrote. I really love it.
(And we know that Londo would do the same because he already has, sitting up with Lennier after the bombings. For any of them, he'd be there all night.)
(Although even that part may not be completely true. We already know Timov may not like him, but she'll donate her own blood to save him.)
(She did! Londo doesn't know it, though, so the part of this experience that's his subconscious processing would not have her on hand as a counterexample, and the part of this experience that may be something else has hedged its bets with the "almost" of "certainly not.")
(Though now that I think about it, he also sleeps with one of Londo's wives, so it's possible that G'Kar is simply a xenosexual weirdo by Narn standards.)
I am pretty sure this is a true fact about G'Kar and I love it. People on Babylon 5 don't just get to be flawed in dramatically propulsive ways, they get to be weird.
Yeah, for the fic that I wrote, I obviously went with "kick in the hindbrain" because I had to pick something for dramatic purposes
It's quite good for dramatic purposes!
but in actual canon fact I'm completely on the fence about it; it also could easily be that he's been going in circles in his own head about it all night and that point when he finally snapped into decision focus, through fate or their binary-stars-in-orbit synchronicity or pure chance, happened to be that moment. And there's also the possibility that he literally hadn't heard - it's a compressed enough time frame, and a late enough hour, that no one thinking to go inform G'Kar makes reasonable sense - and the moment when he found out was the moment when he made a beeline for the medlab.
That's actually a really good point. I would love to know what their total weirdness about one another looks like to outside observers at this point.
I like that it works if we don't know. I still want to know!
Agreed on both counts!
I do find it interesting that the show itself explicitly acknowledges the possibility of a lingering connection between them in this episode, for the first time since the events of "Dust to Dust" occurred. And we do know from what happened with Sheridan and Kosh that that kind of thing is possible.
Yes. If that was always in reserve from the third season, this episode was the perfect time to pull it out.
You stopped mid-sentence! I need the rest!
Oh, my God, I was so tired!
That sentence was supposed to lead into "specifically Cartagia," because in addition to all the really good points you make about the roles in which Londo casts G'Kar, it fascinates me that this sequence is the one part of Londo's dream/NDE which is directly transposed from his life. We can tell from its prominence in his dreamscape that the whipping of G'Kar is one of his two greatest points of shame over his own silence equaling complicity, the other being his similar witnessing of the bombardment of Narn. The crime against humanity is objectively of greater magnitude, but the personal atrocity is the one that stalks him, the actinic light of the electro-whip flashing at least once behind him when he's refusing to turn around and face everything waiting for him. Londo himself may not even know where to start reckoning with the responsibility for the deaths of millions, but he knows what he didn't do when Cartagia was playing with his stubborn toy.
(Thinking about it from that perspective, it's really interesting that he breaks at the same point G'Kar did in reality, and with the same result, albeit for a completely different reason: he lives. Londo's subconscious acknowledging that he doesn't deserve to die under those conditions any more than G'Kar did? Or just that reaching parity, so to speak, was enough to satisfy whatever part of himself wanted to torture himself that way?)
When Londo broaches the subject of G'Kar's torture in "No Surrender, No Retreat," he frames it in terms of sacrifice—physically, pain endured, the loss of an eye; emotionally, humiliation, the loss of dignity and pride. And that last is Londo's sticking point and has been as long as we've known him, the going-nowhere joke ambassador of a waning power who can brazen out being caught cheating at cards (with his junk, no less) but can't bear to be seen as having been, about anything that really matters, wrong. As you pointed out in the third season, he'd doubled himself down into a place where he could deal better with being hated than being laughed at, better a monster than a failure or a fool. His apology to the technomages really was a case of being sorry for getting caught (plus extortion by Narn opera and five hundred thousand shares in Fireflies, Inc). He won't admit vulnerability until the very last moment of it damn near killing him. So it does feel like a gesture of empathy/reciprocity to transpose himself into G'Kar's place, suffering what he brought G'Kar to suffer, but it also feels to me like part of getting to the point of real apology, of being able to sacrifice enough of his own pride to acknowledge that he galactically fucked up. And then having—broken himself—he can apologize without coercion, completely meaning it. He can just make the choice.
(I find it both deeply enjoyable and telling that one of the signature elements of the relationship he and G'Kar have formed by this point is that G'Kar can tease him. Londo is really not at home to teasing. He probably never has been. And G'Kar can just yank his chain and Londo will put up with it and vice versa.)