Ship of Tears
Reviewed by Veronica Grey, Psi Corps
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This episode is very important to the arc and rather heavy on information. Even though it seems relatively slow-moving, you should pay close attention to it, because there WILL be a quiz later.
First, we have a wonderfully creepy-cheerful teaser scene in which ISN "the galaxy's most important channel!" SEEMS to be coming back on-line...but now, they're a mere propaganda tool for Clark! This will become important later on...
Sheridan is testing out a new Starfury, one of the ones that the Churchillleft behind (they're funky-looking, instead of a snub nose they have this long pointy muzzle sticking out in front of the "x-wings") and picks up a distress signal, only to find--BESTER? That's right, our favourite charmingly sarcastic and arrogant slimeball is back and better than ever. And THIS time he says he's here to HELP.
Well, Sheridan dearly wants to "blow him out of the sky", but reluctantly tows his broken Starfury back to the station, where they try to figure out how they can trust him, and also how they can talk to him without being scanned. Franklin points out that basically they HAVE no more dangerous secrets TO figure out, that all the plotting and scheming they were doing underground against EarthGov is all kind of a moot point by now, after all, they've BROKEN AWAY from Earth! Garibaldi, Ivanova, and Sheridan still don't trust him, and Sheridan comes up with a rather nasty way to find out if he's trustworthy or not. He talks to Ivanova alone, and says that since she's a latent telepath and can tell instantly if someone's scanning her, he'll send her through the door into the room with Bester FIRST. If he tries anything, they'll know, and they can throw him into--no, UNDER--the brig. If not, they know they can trust him.
A little.
Ivanova VERY reluctantly agrees to this plan and we get a great conversation scene between her and Bester in which we first hear about the "superiority of evolution" complex that the telepaths have, that they are a whole new, higher-evolved race, the future of Humankind, and that one day they hope to actually take over. A frightening thought...
Anyway, they then must have decided he's trustworthy--a little--because they decide to all meet with him and hear what he has to say. He tells them about Clark working heavily with the Shadows, that it's not REALLY him but these aliens that are calling the shots back on Earth, and that he heard that a convoy carrying "weapons supplies" for the Shadows is going to be going through hyperspace near here soon. "How did you figure all this out?" they ask.
"I'm a telepath," he smarms. "Work it out."
So they go off to intercept the convoy and take the weapons supplies, and this is the part I REALLY disagree with--they took the Whitestar. Not that THEY used that ship, but that they actually let Bester SEE it. A new, top-of-the-line, secret, special ship and they let BESTER see the inside of it! The line "try not to drool on the controls" was amusing, as was the "Get the HELL out of my chair!" but he should NOT have been there at ALL. Don't tell me there weren't ANY other ships they could have used...a Minbari cruiser, perhaps...?
Anyway, they shoot down the smaller escort ships, grab the supply ship with a tractor beam and are just about to get out when a HUGE mama Shadow ship shows up and...leaves.
HMMMN...
They find out, when they get back to Babylon 5, that the "weapons supplies" in the ship are actually...PEOPLE? Frozen telepaths, actually. All unconscious, in cryo-tubes. (The fans on-line call them "teepsicles", I find that rather amusing in a cold-blooded kind of way. And no, "cold"-blooded was not meant to be a pun.) They all have the Psi Corps symbol on their tanks, strange, VERY advanced cyber-web implants on their faces, and no identification except for bracelets with serial numbers on them.
Franklin decides to try and wake one of them to ask what the hell is going on, figure out who they are and why they were listed as "weapons supplies". So he tries it on a young woman, who completely FREAKS and starts tearing at the wall of the tube as she wakes up, screaming and tearing out her hair and sobbing about the pain, get it OUT of my MIND, etc. Franklin has to sedate the poor lady.
Meanwhile, they show her identification bracelet to Bester, who at first, just glancing at it, informs them that she is a "blip", a telepath who wouldn't join the Corps or take the sleepers. She tried to ran away, and of course they caught her, they "always do". Then, looking more closely, he sees something he evidently recognises and he gets absolutely stunned.
Nobody notices this at the time, but when asked about it later, he says that he recognises who this belongs to--Carolyn--his LOVER. This is a great twist. Bester is STILL a villian, but by giving him someone he truly CARES about, which it seems he does, all the evidence points that way anyway, it DEEPENS the character. He's evil...but he has FEELINGS. He's not just some killing robot, he's a PERSON. I love this kind of shades-of-grey stuff.
He DEMANDS to see her right now, but that's sort of a problem. You see--she's kind of...um...INTERFACED with the computer and mechanical systems in Medlab. When they find her, they find a darkened, smoky, sparking room with her hiding up against the wall, wrapped up in a...COCOON of wires! She starts babbling incoherently, most of what she says as if she is under posession, with only tiny, small moments of being herself, in which she BEGS pathetically to be set free, to make the pain stop. "The machine says kill...to protect...I am the machine...MAKE IT STOP!! MAKE IT STOP TALKING IN MY MIND!" When she sees Bester, she recognises him, and was about to ask him for help when she sees the Psi Corp badge on his uniform, upon which she INSTANTLY tries to blow him away with bolts of electricity from her fingers! This gives Garibaldi an idea. He takes off Bester's Psi Corps badge and throws it onto the floor in front of her.
ZAP! "The sign hurts us...we cannot hear the machine..."
They figure out that these telepaths must have been altered to hook into Shadow vessels, to be the controlling core element that makes the ship operational (as we learned about back in "Messages From Earth"), but why telepaths in particular? Delenn never said anything about that...
Meanwhile, in the subplot, we have a VERY ticked-off G'Kar who had asked to be let "in" several episodes ago, accosting Ivanova in the hallway and demanding to know why Sheridan hadn't kept his part of the bargain yet. Ivanova says that things are very busy but she'll do the best she can. Then Delenn feels she must fess up to what her people did, or rather didn't do, about the Shadows to G'Kar. This makes a very emotional scene (Mira Furlan REALLY CRIED on camera, which is hard to do just on cue, out of nowhere! I think she is easily the best female actor on the whole show--best MALE actor goes to Peter Jurasik, of course) in which she tries to explain why the Grey Council did NOT speak out about the Shadows in time to rally the other races to save Narn from the Centauri. The other races wouldn't have listened, wouldn't have believed them even if they HAD said anything. All that would have done would be to tell the Shadows that they were aware of them, force them to act OPENLY, not quietly. They needed time to build up the forces of "light", so they had to remain silent. You must understand, Delenn begs G'Kar, tears running down her face (as I said before, REAL tears), it would have done no good. Under the Centauri, there is still a HOPE for survival, for victory. If the Shadows had attacked Narn openly, there would have been NO hope. NONE of your people would have survived. We had to choose between the death of millions--
and the death of BILLIONS.
"And I hope that, someday, when all this is over, you can find it in your heart to forgive me, G'Kar.
"Maybe", says G'Kar. "But not today". And he leaves the room.
Gee...
Anyway, Garibaldi has been studying the book of G'Quan that G'Kar lent him, and he finds something interesting....
G'Kar is finally let into the War Council, and looks around, when Garibaldi, looking like the proverbial cat that ate the equally proverbial canary, makes his startilng discovery to the rest of them. "It's all here," he says, thumping the Book. ("Please do not thump the Book of G'Quan"). He explains.
"Your people have no telepaths, right?" he asks G'Kar.
"Yes, and it is a great concern to us," he answers. "Why do you ask?"
He then opens the book to the passage he saw earlier and has G'Kar read it aloud. It tells about how, 1,000 years ago, the Ancient Enemy showed up and the VERY first people they blew away were the "mindwalkers".
Telepaths.
The Shadows were last on the move 1,000 years ago! And it seems they're AFRAID of telepaths!
Everything they've learned during this weird day starts to fall into place. "The sign hurts us...we cannot hear the machine"--somehow, maybe telepaths can block their signals, mess up the Shadow ships' brainwaves! So they're hoping that using teeps of their own IN the ships will counter that.
"We have a weapon, people," Sheridan realises. "We really do have a weapon."
"Let's just hope it's in time." says Ivanova...
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