Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Delenn agrees to lead the Rangers, but Marcus must protect her from a deadly threat. Garibaldi investigates a secret level of the station. Robert Englund as Jeremiah. John Vickery as Neroon. Time Winters as Rathenn.

P5 Rating: 6.93

Production number: 319
Original air week: September 10, 1996 (UK)
                   October 7, 1996 (US)

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by John Flinn III

Backplot

• The forces of light are now actively recruiting telepaths, but it's been a slow process.
• Garibaldi's grandmother was a police officer in Boston. (First mentioned in "By Any Means Necessary.")
• Valen originally set up the Rangers 1000 years ago, under the control of the Warrior Caste, but they have been inactive until recently.
• Grey Sector in B5 is mainly comprised of industrial units.
• No Minbari has killed another Minbari in 1000 years.
• Delenn's father died ("passed beyond the veil") 10 years ago because he was heartbroken about the Earth-Minbari war. Delenn's mother entered the Sisters of Valeria.
• The security forces on B5 use PPGs rather than bullets because bullets run the risk of puncturing the station's hull.

Unanswered Questions

• What will be the limits of Ivanova's promise to Franklin?
• How will being chosen as leader of the Rangers change Delenn?
• Is Neroon right in suggesting Delenn is taking over control of Minbar?
• Who or what was responsible for an entire level of Grey sector being lost from the view of the B5 residents?
• What will happen to Grey 17 and the people there?
• What will the future relationship be between the Warrior Caste and the Rangers?
• Was Kosh present at the ceremony? If not, why not?

Analysis

• Tension among the Minbari castes is increasing. Some members of the warrior caste think Delenn is a religious zealot who is trying to grab hold of military and political power. The warrior caste is unhappy about the religious caste building warships without telling them; believes the Rangers should be commanded by one of them, now that Sinclair has left; and is unhappy about non-Minbari being trained with Minbari in the Rangers. However, Neroon's experience with Marcus may change some of these perceptions.
• Delenn's mother joined the Sisters of Valeria. Valeria is also the being that Minbari who were present at Kosh's appearance in the garden ("The Fall of Night") claimed to have seen. Is this just a coincidence, or is there a deeper relationship?
• Jeremiah's group must have contained some highly skilled computer hackers. Getting the lifts to pass by their level would be the least of their troubles; since the station spins to simulate gravity, lower levels have greater apparent gravity. Everyone below their level would be expecting slightly lower gravity than they'd actually experience. Perhaps the difference would be too slight to alert people in a residential sector, but presumably industrial operations would be affected if gravity was off by a few percent.
• Jeremiah clearly knew about Minbari religion, given the similarity of his view of the universe and Delenn's ("Passing Through Gethsemane.") Yet in that episode, Brother Edward clearly hadn't learned about Minbari beliefs, implying that the Minbari aren't generally open or forthcoming about them. How did Jeremiah learn about Minbari religion?
• Garibaldi's makeshift gun couldn't have worked as shown. Even if the steam were enough to detonate the gunpowder in one of the bullets, the first one to go off would almost certainly have been the one closest to the back of the pipe, where the heat was greatest; all the bullets would have been propelled out the pipe at once, and probably at low speed.
• Franklin's backup file on the underground railroad is code-named "Harriet." This is probably a reference to Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who was instrumental in running the original underground railroad in the United States.

Notes

• Sinclair's belongings include a medal for fighting on the Battle of the Line, his identicard, an Earthforce insignia, and the Ranger brooch.
• When Garibaldi falls unconscious, the surrounding rubble includes, among other things, a newspaper with the headline "Santiago Elected." That may indicate the amount of time the cult spent sequestered in Grey 17; Santiago's re-election took place three years earlier ("Midnight on the Firing Line.") It's unlikely the paper dates from Santiago's original election; unless his previous term was less than a few years, the previous election would have happened long before Babylon 5 was constructed, possibly even before Babylon 4 vanished in 2254.

jms speaks

• Garibaldi has a big role in "Grey 17 Is Missing."

• Lennier will be getting some more screen time shortly, in the next batch of episodes. (There's some very nice stuff with him and both Delenn and Marcus in "Grey 17 Is Missing.")

• You'll hear about Delenn's parents in "Grey 17 Is Missing."

• The Jeremiah thread was one of those things that looks great on paper, but when you get it into a camera...I dunno, it's one of those weirdnesses that happens in television. Sometimes you've got what you think is an average script and it just roars to life on-camera, and something that looks great on paper, but in real life...ehh...I'm happy with all the other stuff in the episode, but the Jeremiah thread didn't come off as it should've.

  I think in part it's also my fault, in that my brain was gearing up for the stuff that begins ramping up starting with the next episode, and the Grey 17 thing was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, and there wasn't going to be a chance to do it down the road, if at all, after this season, so I went for it. As for the Zarg, that's also one of those things that didn't come off visually as I'd wanted. So overall, I'd agree...of all the season 3 eps, this one is probably the least effective of them all. But one in a season, that ain't too bad....

• Why did you write all the episodes this season?
  "Was there some incident that we don't know about? It seems to me that there must have been. "

  Nope. No incident. The situation with year 3 was that *so much* was being paid off, and set up, and foreshadowed, and required such intimate knowledge of where the show was going, and where it'd been, that it made it nearly impossible to bring in any outside writers.

  There has never been any series in television history where every episode was utterly beyond criticism. Some are better, some are worse, some are average. There are many Twilight Zones by Rod Serling that are utterly brilliant. And some that just fall flat. That's the nature of the beast. Sometimes something will look great on the page, and fall flat on the stage. (And sometimes it happens in reverse; you think you've got something that won't work, and somehow the filmed version just takes off.) There's a lot about Walkabout I like; and there's some stuff that just didn't work out. You try something different here and there, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it don't. TV, or any form of writing, is the constant process of trial and error. It's not like one day you forget how to write, or you're writing bad...you very rarely fall below a certain facility once you reach it.

  There's not a writer alive who has turned out nothing but terrific stuff. Now, one could turn out a lifetime of mediocre stuff, by not trying...but I think it's better to shoot high, and sometimes fall, knowing that you'll get something great one out of every five tries, than not try at all and just do okay.

  "Grey 17" is the same thing, for me. There are bits in that I like a lot. And some parts of it just fell down dreadfully. That's simply the nature of the beast. I thought I'd try something different in the tone of "Grey" and while most of the writing works (mostly), the production fell down on a couple of aspects. It happens. It doesn't mean anything.

  On the other hand, the following 3, "Rock," "Shadow" and "Z'ha'dum" are some of the best stuff we've done. The preliminary P5 survey has "Z'ha'dum" as the best episode of the entire series to date. Did I suddenly learn to write better? If there were a problem with being tired, then by all rights you should see a descending order in quality. But these last 3 are some of our best work.

  The real key here is something I heard someone say a while back about TV: a flaw, or a flop, or a misstep happens by accident as often as by inability; but real quality is never an accident. So the latter is more indicative of the level of the show than the former, since accidents or missteps *always* happen.

  "Walkabout," for me, is a good episode with a very few clunky parts; for me, it's a middle of the road episode. "Grey" falls a bit short of that, for me. But then, I'm very hard on my shows; a lot of folks have liked "Walkabout" a *lot*. I didn't much like "Infection," but many did; and some shows I love dearly, like "Geometry," don't catch on. It's subjective. And where you say the battle falls short, others like it...so on one level, I'd caution against applying your standard as an objective one that is somehow more true than another, and thus asking "what's wrong with *you* that I had this opinion?" If everyone on the planet shares that opinion, then you've got something. Otherwise....

  And there are always some people who don't want the character stuff at all, they want battles...and some for whom the CGI is of secondary interest to the plot...and those who want arc stories *only*...and those who like the stand-alones. Some of it is a function of what you want.

  Anyway...point being, and I went around the barn a few times to get there, no, there's no "incident" and I don't even know what this could refer to. Some episodes work better for some people than others. That will happen whether you've got 1 person or 50 people writing scripts. I caught a lot of *very* negative comments on Peter David's script, which you cite (as well as many positive ones). The Brits in particular seem to uniformly dislike that one. And in the P5 surveys, the freelance scripts are *all* in the bottom third of the rankings. So it's really not a question of freelancers or no, it's just that TV is variable, as is any kind of writing. Not every episode is going to work for you. Nor should you expect it to. I'm very much an X-Files fan...but there are some scripts that work better for me than others. Doesn't mean anything other than that show didn't quite jell for me. That's the nature of TV.

  I'm sure somebody will cite this as being defensive about it, but honest and true, I'm not. I'm just trying to explain it from this end of things. My prior exec producer said, "You're doing *real* good if, in a season, you've got one-third that are pretty good, one-third that are okay, and one-third you never want to see again the rest of your natural life." I think we do a heck of a lot better than that, and that's a heck of an accomplishment.

• I think it's about 3/4ths of a good episode. Where it falls down, for me, is the Zarg...I just have this constant desire to go to everyone's house and personally apologize....

• How did they sneak the Zarg onto the station?
  There was a line about slipping the egg into the station...don't remember now if it made it through the edit or not.

• Entil-Zha, whoever that is at the time, is for all intents and purposes the One for the Rangers.

• Does Neroon's revelation at the end of the episode mean that the warrior caste is now more willing to fight beside the religious caste?
  I think he's closer to an understanding, but we'll see if the others all feel the same way.

• Why did Sinclair/Valen leave the warrior caste in charge of the Rangers, if they aren't involved in the war?
  Because *at the time* the Warrior Caste *was* involved, and it would've been a slap to them to do so.

• Do Minbari beliefs have some bearing on the true nature of the B5 storyline?
  It has some bearing, in a way, but more in a thematic than literal sense.

• Was Delenn's visit to the city as a child deeply important, since she only saw her mother twice?
  You're right that it was a big deal to them, but it doesn't really center in the story much, so I don't know if it'll ever be explored. It's just background detail at this point.

• What happened to Delenn's father?
  He croaked.

• Were the people in Grey 17 there by choice?
  Depends on your definition, but basically, they were there as part of this cult...but any good cult leader knows you should make it just a *bit* hard for them to get out.

• It's Harriet for Harriet Tubman, who ran the slave underground railroad around the time of the Civil War.

  And no matter how much Ivanvoa trains, she'll never be much past a P1, and that's more or less useless to them.

• So her ability is never going to factor into the story?
  Only if one assumes everything applies only to the Shadow war.

Originally compiled by Jason Snell.

Last update: March 9, 1998