"Severed Dreams" discussion

[ruuger]

This is the discussion post for the episode 3X10, "Severed Dreams". Spoilers for the whole of the series, including the spin-offs and tie-ins, are allowed here so newbies beware.

Summary:
Babylon 5 secedes from the Earth Alliance as a protest to President Clark's actions.

Extra reading:
The article for "Severed Dreams" at Lurker's Guide.

Comments

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

One (of many) things this series of episodes does very well is emphasising just how much events have fallen out of the control of anyone. General Hague’s offscreen death is probably the best way of ending that character’s story, giving a nice “Oh, crap, what do we do now?” moment, and puts an end to Sheridan’s hopes in “Point of No Return” that Hague’s forces could rally support without B5 itself having to take a direct stand.

(I suspect even if the actor had been available, Hague would have just ended up playing Captain Hiroshi’s role. I think it’s much more effective to make it clear right from the start that Sheridan’s going to have to lead the fight himself.)

It occurs to me that the Earth Civil War plot focuses on Mars far more than it does Earth – we don’t ever actually see Earth under the Clark administration, but we do get to see the bombing of Mars here, occupied Mars in season four. For that matter, we never hear much about Earth based resistance – the show does have an unfortunate tendency to portray the civilian population of Earth as an amorphous mass of collaborators, cowards and idiots – while with Mars we don’t really meet anyone who *isn’t* working against Clark. This is probably a budget issue more than anything else – it’s cheaper to render Martian landscapes than Earth ones, still, it’s interesting.

On the subject of cowards and idiots – the Grey Council. What drew my attention rewatching this scene is how stylised and stagey its. The Grey Council may as well be props – none of them move, none of them speak, none of them try to stop Delenn taking the staff. It’s impossible to visualise Neroon as one of those silent unresponsive figures Delenn lectures. Now B5’s done very stagey scenes elsewhere – “And the Sky Full of Stars”, “Comes the Inquisitor”, “Intersections in Real Time” – and the Grey Council’s always been a little stagey. But here – there’s seemingly no attempt to give this scene any naturalistic elements.

(Note that I’m not criticising – I find it very effective. But it’s an interesting contrast with the realistic style of the rest of the episode)

Of course, in hindsight it’s obvious that it’s not as simple as rejecting the Grey in favour of Delenn’s stark black-and-white view on the need for action; that this scene’s almost self-conscious artificiality just draws attention to the fact that of course it’s never going to be as simple in reality as simply making a speech and having most of the council then unswervingly follow you.

May have to think on this some more…

It occurs to me that Delenn and Londo each have one of the two most bad-ass/hell yeah! moments in the series – Breaking the Council/”Be somewhere else!” narrowly beating out Londo’s “What are you going to do, Mollari, blow up the island?” “Actually…” Of course, both actions in the long run have very negative consequences for their people. Probably not intended as an intentional parallel, but it caught my attention.

Minor notes:
- Clark’s pilots follow the Star Wars rule of having evil black helmets that conceal their faces more than the good guy pilots. Of course, that’s somewhat inverted during the boarding sequence, where Clark’s troops have uniforms that call to mind allied WW2 infantry, while Garibaldi’s men are in black riot gear.

- Corwin’s little character arc is nicely understated – we know enough about him to know he’s conflicted, but he doesn’t get any big dramatic moment of decision like Zack did. Probably more realistic, and nice to get a representative of the average loyal B5 crewmember. Nice also – as selenak’s mentioned – that one of the techs did quit.

- I *knew* we saw Hyperion type ships outside the first season!

[selenak.livejournal.com]

General Hague’s offscreen death is probably the best way of ending that character’s story, giving a nice “Oh, crap, what do we do now?” moment, and puts an end to Sheridan’s hopes in “Point of No Return” that Hague’s forces could rally support without B5 itself having to take a direct stand.


Yes, and I agree that even if the actor had been available instead of moonlighting on DS9 (*g*), he'd have been killed off here because of the narrative demanding Sheridan to be the most senior military figure.

Mars and Earth: interesting point. Well, we do see Real ISN resisting (and getting beaten down for it), and it's located in Geneva. (BTW, the European in me loves that JMS made Geneva the future capital instead of some US city.) And I suppose from a Watsonian pov you can say that Mars had a long history of discontent with Earth central and far less population.

Corwin’s little character arc is nicely understated – we know enough about him to know he’s conflicted, but he doesn’t get any big dramatic moment of decision like Zack did.

Yes. I really like the moment when Ivanova asks him whether he's okay. By and large, B5 does a great job of making clear everyone has their story, not just the leads, it's simply that we don't see so much of the others.

It occurs to me that Delenn and Londo each have one of the two most bad-ass/hell yeah! moments in the series – Breaking the Council/”Be somewhere else!” narrowly beating out Londo’s “What are you going to do, Mollari, blow up the island?” “Actually…” Of course, both actions in the long run have very negative consequences for their people. Probably not intended as an intentional parallel, but it caught my attention.

Ohhhhhh, yes, you're right. *adds this to the list of Londo/Delenn parallels*