"Ship of Tears" discussion

[ruuger]

This is the discussion post for the episode 3X14, "Ship of Tears". Spoilers for the whole of the series, including the spin-offs and tie-ins, are allowed here so newbies beware.

Summary:
Bester returns to Babylon 5, this time asking for help to rescue a group of frozen telepaths.

Extra reading:
The article for "Ship of Tears" at Lurker's Guide.

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite episodes, so I'll admit bias in its favour up front. Rewatching didn't change it.

But to try for matter-of-factness:

1.) Propaganda!ISN: this time I don't mind JMS versus Journalists, because this is what happens in a fascist state, and Real ISN has presented as heroic before they were stormed.

2.) Bester is back, and you know, of all of Walter Koenig's appearances on this show, which were all good, I think this is the one where he gets to show the most range, from smugly superior to genuinenly shattered, from playing games to serious focus... and it's not that Bester is any less of a magnificent bastard in this one. We simply see more layers. By which I actually don't mean the fact he's in love with someone as much as the highly continuity-relevant information that there are different factions in Psi Corps, which was given for the first time here, and that Bester being a telepath supremacist does not mean he's also in bed with the Shadows. And he's as good with the one liners as ever.

3.) Seriously, one of the things I love best about B5 is that it doesn't do what most genre shows do, simply have all antagonists/villains on the same side, but allow them instead their individual goals, some of which some of the time even coincide with the heroes' goals. Way more realistic and complex this way.

4.) I also love the B-plot around G'Kar and Delenn, which contains what are my two favourite Delenn scenes ever. In five years of show, I never admire and love Delenn more than when, in her meal with Sheridan, she says "WE won't, I will". Delenn insisting on telling G'Kar the truth herself, doing so without obfuscation and accepting the responsibility for the tactical decision she made is fantastic, and also, as I noticed upon rewatch, a great contrast to the constant "we" talk regarding the Earth/Minbari War and the way she regarded becoming half human as a bridge and atonment but without explaining anything about her reasons to the people involved. Not so here. She owns those scenes, both of them, and as the second one is with the mighty Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar, that's really something.

5.) The first time I realised what the "weapons components" telepaths had been meant for, I was completely freaked out. The concept still chills me, more than anything else the Shadows do on this show.

6.) Reversal of expections: whereas the first and second season strongly implied Psi Corps, as a unified whole, was micromanaging Clark, and were directly allied with the Shadows, Bester presents the situation as the other way around: "Through Clark, they (the Shadows)'ve managed to infiltrate Psi Corps." We've talked before about just when the red herrings about Psi Corps being the human Übervillain in the Earth political storyline stopped, and I think it's more that they fade away (much like that other red herring, Centauri Prime sooner or later invading Earth) in the course of the third season, but this is definitely where it gets textual. So from this point onwards we have the Corps presented as split in different factions (not simply as in: future resistance fighters like Lyta when she was still it on the one hand, and Psi Cops on the other, but several factions within the "the corps is mother, the corps is father" believers), and Bester not in a ruling position but as a member of the machinery, albeit an influential one in one of the factions.

7.) Garibaldi works it out: we have two neat show, not tell instances of what makes Garibaldi a good investigator here - he both realises that Carolyn responded to aggressively was Bester's insignia and later makes the big discovery as to why the Shadows both are averse to and want to use telepaths. What nobody at this stage realises, and I didn't, either, is that this makes it highly unlikely telepaths developed by accident. The later revelation that the Vorlons deliberately engineered them as weapons in all the younger races is a logical conclusion.

[vjs2259.livejournal.com]

This was an interesting episode to re-watch; not one of my favorites, but contains some of my favorite moments.

Garibaldi's revelation at the end is him at his gleeful, triumphant best. 'Do not thump the book of G'Quan. It is disrespectful.' Heh. And I love the term 'mindwalkers' for telepaths.

Franklin's optimism, and naivete, about ISN and Earth, and the crumbling of hope reflected in all their faces as they watched the newscast...wonderful. It shows that the common people on the station understand what's going on, too, as they shake their heads and turn away. There's no help there.

Delenn's scene with G'Kar is one of my favorites, although this time I watched it with rather a jaundiced eye. I had forgotten she used the 'we' construct throughout, referencing the Grey Council of which she was a part, and she never mentioned Kosh as a party to that decision. And I found it the 'I couldn't act against the Council' declaration somewhat disingenuous--I mean, the Council had pretty much told her not to do the Chrysalis transformation and she saw her way clear to defy (some of) them in that case.
I think she was following Kosh more than the Council here, and she doesn't tell G'Kar that. Still, she takes responsibility, in a potentially dangerous one-on-one situation, and I give her massive chops for that.
Her telling G'Kar alone is right (cause John sure wasn't in the loop for the decision to leave Narn to the Centauri's tender mercies) but I caught a whiff of protectiveness, a predictive echo of her 'protecting' him from full knowledge of Anna's fate.
So, interesting re-take for me on that speech.

Bester. Well, I just take a totally different view here. Koenig doesn't sell me on the love story, so it all falls flat. Bester comes across to me as a skeevy bastard, rather than a magnificent one. The whole thing about Susan's mother's eyes? Ick. And whether he had the power to free Carolyn or not, he was still in a higher position of authority than she was as a blip, so getting her better food? In return for sex? With the power imbalance that sort of 'favor' would be hard for Carolyn to interpret. And getting her pregnant in her situation? Double ick. Also I can't help wondering about Bester's wife and daughter...a loveless forced marriage is never a good thing, but I feel for them too. I hope they found love somewhere else, like he did. Especially the daughter.

My husband had an excellent take on Bester here. After Bester makes his pronouncement that telepaths are 'superior' to humans, he then goes on to prove that they are not; that they have every failing of every other human. That's good stuff.

[alexcat.livejournal.com]

I almost missed the post.

This wasn't one of my favorite episodes though it is one that incidcates how deep in with the shadows Clark really is. Thge newscast was chilling. I found Stephen's odd hope that things would work out to be rather contrary to his pessimistic nature. Maybe it was the stems talking.

I sort of wish Sheridan had blown Bester out of the sky and that problem would have been solved. I have to agree with vjs2259 that I didn't buy Carolyn being the love of his life either. She was just a pretty blip that he knocked up because he could. Were the blips treated so badly that they'd prostiute themselves for better food, yet they refused to become part of PsiCorp or take sleepers? That doesn't add up eiother for me but then I never was able to understand the telepaths at all.

I liked it that G'Kar didn't let Delenn off the hook so easily when he told her that might forgive her someday but not today. He did seem to join the group with lots of enthusiasm though. I loved his admonisment to Garibaldi not to thump the Book of G'Quan.

When Sheridan said 'we have a weapon,' I found that a chilling statement too since they'd be using the telepaths literally as weapons, more or less, as much as the Shadows did.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Man, I enjoy a good Bester episode.

I think it’s fun that Bester has been gathering information about the Shadows for some time – the line in “Dust to Dust” about the Corps being all that stands between humanity and the abyss implied it, and here it’s pretty much confirmed – and now has to organize a conspiracy against his own superiors and the Clark administration. It occurs to me that Bester would have been a much better character to be revealed as “Sheridan’s equal and opposite” than what we eventually got.

(For that matter, they both have lovers turned into Shadow ship CPUs, and Sheridan’s eventual use of the cryo-teeps is at least as ruthless as anything Bester does to Garibaldi – and considering the stakes and timetable of what Edgars was up to, Bester might actually come out ahead morally speaking…)

I do agree that Bester’s relationship with Carolyn has a ton of authority and dubious consent issues – but I also agree that Koenig and the script do sell me into believing that Bester does love her. One thing this episode highlighted for me is that Bester likes to control conversations – his conversation with Ivanova early on seems purely designed to antagonise her, to make it so she’s reacting to him not the other way around. But once he finds out about Carolyn, he stops doing that, and his scene with Sheridan after confronting her is one of the few times in the entire series when he’s not trying to steer a conversation in any direction but just speaking honestly.

- B5 seems to have a lot of ‘Grey’ type aliens, and they all seem to go in for traditional alien-abduction behaviour. Have any of the RPGs or novels or anything made any connections between the Vree, the Streib and the Shadow-allied doctor aliens?