“Messages from Earth”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 3, Episode 8
Production episode 308
Original air date: February 19, 1996
It was the dawn of the third age… Cole brings Dr. Mary Kirkish on board. Brought from Mars to B5 by the Rangers, Kirkish is wanted by EarthDome, and several bounty hunters try to nab her and Cole in downbelow. Cole manages to take care of them, but Kirkish is badly injured.
She’s sent to medlab, and once she’s stable and conscious, she’s brought to see the war council.
Kirkish works for Interplanetary Expeditions. She tells the council of an IPX mission to Syria Planum on Mars several years ago, during which they found a strange vessel buried, which viewers and council recognize as a Shadow vessel. One of Kirkish’s colleagues touched the vessel and immediately died. The other members of the team were put in isolation, and Kirkish saw another Shadow vessel show up and free the buried one, with both vessels flying off. Garibaldi saw some of what Kirkish saw when he was serving on Mars at the same time, and he also found a scorched Psi Corps badge near the site.
Kirkish went on with her life, but recently, she learned that another Shadow vessel was found on Ganymede. And this time, EarthDome intends to keep it for themselves. The council is scared shitless of what the Clark Administration might do with Shadow technology.
Sheridan has a cunning plan: he will take the White Star to Ganymede and destroy the Shadow vessel. This strikes everyone as a hilariously bad idea, but Sheridan says he’s doing it anyhow.
Allan attends a NightWatch meeting. One of the guards apparently is in direct contact with NightWatch on Earth, and he announces that several allegedly disloyal people in the government are being targeted for arrest. There is supposedly a conspiracy of people planning to sell out Earth to “the aliens.” They have been given carte blanche by NightWatch to increase their surveillance of people who might be disloyal. Allan is uncomfortable with turning into Big Brother. He is, however, the only one in the room who is.
Cole briefs Ivanova on Shadow vessel movements, but Ivanova isn’t really paying attention, which Cole notices and starts inserting nonsense into the reports to get her attention. Ivanova blames Cole for Sheridan buggering off on his own on a crazy-ass mission, but Cole says that he didn’t bring it to Sheridan hoping Sheridan would do it, he brought it to Sheridan hoping he would order Cole to do it.
The White Star arrives at Ganymede. They intercept communications that indicate that they are trying to bond a pilot to the vessel. Delenn goes into a near-panic, as doing this wrong will end very badly for everyone.
Delenn is quickly proven right, as the Shadow vessel goes completely batshit and starts firing on everyone and everything, completely out of control. Sheridan manages to lure the vessel away from Ganymede and into Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. The planet’s heavy gravity crushes the Shadow vessel, and almost does the same to the White Star, but the vessel—barely—manages to escape the gas giant only somewhat scathed.
At which points, the EAS Agamemnon shows up. This puts Sheridan in a quandary because he doesn’t want to fire on an EarthForce ship, and he especially doesn’t want to fire on his former command.
They open a jump point in the atmosphere, which should create enough of an electrical charge to keep anyone from following them. This works, and they stumble back home.
ISN reports that Ganymede was attacked by an alien vessel that was destroyed by the Agamemnon, which is almost what happened.
The security guard tells Allan that he needs to use his friendship with Garibaldi to help NightWatch keep Earth safe. Allan’s relationship with his boss isn’t the best right now, and he accidentally makes it clear that he thinks something’s going on with the command crew.
Cole brings a fake org chart of B5 to cheer Ivanova up, which lasts right up until Sheridan tells her to turn on ISN, where they hear the story that martial law has been declared on Earth.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan decides to be a manly man and do the crazy-ass mission himself instead of sending Cole, even though the Rangers’ raison d’être is to do crazy-ass missions. By doing so, he puts himself in the position of possibly having to fire on the ship he used to command.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova got Cole an identicard, which will make his life easier living on the station. In return, he got her fresh bacon and eggs. This serves to embarrass Ivanova when she has it at breakfast with Sheridan and Garibaldi, causing her to threaten to kill him.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi saw a Shadow ship once. He didn’t like it very much. He’s also very kindly checking up on G’Kar in jail.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Kirkish is convinced that she’ll probably be killed now, but she’s at peace with that because she’s told someone about the Shadow ship who can do something about it—however, Delenn tells her to stop being silly, the Minbari will take her in, and she sends Kirkish off with Lennier to be made safe in Minbari space.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar has found a measure of peace and enlightenment in prison. He is working on a book, which he hopes to finish by the time he gets out of jail. In addition, he has been singing, and the other prisoners have taken up a petition to get him to stop, as the initial assumption was that G’Kar was being tortured.
Also the Narn language is written and read from right to left.
We live for the one, we die for the one. Cole is surprised that he wasn’t sent on the mission to Ganymede, which he fully expected, not being aware of the fact that he’s on a TV show where the first-billed person in the opening credits has to do most of the cool stuff.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Whatever operation was involved in getting the Shadow vessel off of Mars involved Psi Corps in some way. This is the second time (after “Matters of Honor”) that we’ve seen the Psi Corps involved with the Shadows.
The Shadowy Vorlons. Apparently there are Shadow vessels buried in various spots in Earth’s solar system. That kinda sucks.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Delenn and Sheridan share a lovely moment on the White Star, as Sheridan shares a story of how rain on the roof has always been a comforting noise that would enable him to sleep, going back to childhood. It’s something he particularly misses living in space. Delenn then has the computer play the sound of rain on the roof. It’s sweet as heck, and Sheridan is able to sleep, which he does while holding Delenn’s hand.
Also Cole is obviously continuing to try to win Ivanova’s favor. He starts the episode by giving her bacon and ends it by giving her a good laugh, proving that he’s doing a good job of it…
Welcome aboard. Nancy Stafford plays Kirkish, and we’ve also got a Robert Knepper moment, as Vaughn Armstrong—probably best known for playing eighty bajillion roles on the various Star Trek spinoffs, including the recurring role of Admiral Forrest on Enterprise—makes the first of two appearances as the never-named security guard loyal to NightWatch. He’ll be back next time in “Point of No Return.”
Trivial matters. The events Garibaldi describes were shown in detail in issues #5-8 of DC’s Babylon 5 comic book by Tim DeHaas & John Ridgway, the four-issue “Shadows Past and Present” arc that told of Garibaldi’s time serving on Mars.
G’Kar was imprisoned following his attacking Mollari while doped to the gills in “Dust to Dust.” The book G’Kar is working on will eventually be released as The Book of G’Kar, and become quite the publishing sensation.
Allan started suspecting that something is going on with the senior staff, which led to a rift between him and Garibaldi, in “Voices of Authority.”
IPX was first seen in “Infection,” as the company Hendricks was working for.
One of the NightWatch folks says that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, which is, ironically, a Thomas Jefferson quote.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Full power! Give me everything you’ve got!”
“If I were holding anything back, I would tell you.”
—Sheridan spouting a space opera cliché and Lennier repudiating it.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Did I mention my nose is on fire and that I have fifteen wild badgers living in my trousers?” This is one of those episodes that’s very important to the overall storyline, which masks the fact that it isn’t all that good.
Visually, it’s a masterpiece. The flashback scenes on Mars with the discovery of the Shadow vessel and the later retrieval of it are superb, as are the present-day sequences on Ganymede and Jupiter with the White Star, the crazed Shadow vessel, and the Agamemnon.
But the actual story is a slog, due in part to clumsy scripting, and in part due to weak casting. One of the many problems with season one was too many guest stars whose stilted line readings brought an episode down, and that still shows up periodically. We get it in spades with the completely uninspired line readings of Nancy Stafford, who brings absolutely no sense of menace or wonder or fear or much of anything to the role of Kirkish. She’s there to deliver exposition, and she does it in a spectacularly bland fashion that drains the life out of what she’s saying. Thank goodness the visual effects are up to the task of conveying what’s happening, because Stafford utterly fails at it. And her dialogue is clunky as hell, too.
Then we have Sheridan putting on his manly-man pants and going off to do the incredibly dangerous mission himself, even though it makes absolutely no sense that he’d be away from the station for so long without explanation. Indeed, it’s a stupid move from a political standpoint, as one of the NightWatch folks notices that the captain’s away with no explanation, and isn’t that weird? And it’s not like Sheridan doesn’t know that NightWatch is a problem, given that he upbraided one of the security guards for trying to punish sedition just two episodes ago.
To make matters worse, the script lampshades this by having Cole say that he expected to be the one sent on the mission, which raises the question, why the heck wasn’t he? If nothing else, Cole was far less likely to freeze when the Agamemnon showed up. Which was also cheaply manipulative, by the way—not only is Sheridan up against an EarthForce vessel, but it’s his former ship! Oh noes!
There are individual scenes that work beautifully. Both Cole-Ivanova scenes are a delight, ditto the Delenn-Sheridan scene in the White Star sleeping quarters and the G’Kar-Garibaldi scene in the former’s cell. And while Stafford’s casting was a misfire, Vaughn Armstrong’s wasn’t: he’s perfect as the NightWatch toady, quoting Thomas Jefferson while doing more or less the opposite of what Jefferson did.
Next week: “Point of No Return.”