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

Overview

Sheridan launches a preemptive strike against the Shadows. Franklin jeopardizes his life while trying to do a good deed. Shirley Prestia as Barbara. Melissa Gilbert as Anna.

P5 Rating: 9.25

Production number: 321
Original air week: September 15, 1996 (UK)
                   October 21, 1996 (US)

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Kim Friedman

An episodic soundtrack is available.

Backplot

• In Minbari tradition, when two Minbari become close it is the custom for the female to keep vigil at the male's side for three nights while he sleeps. This is thought to reveal the male's true personality, because while you're asleep, you can't keep up your guard, and this helps the female decide whether the relationship should continue.

Unanswered Questions

• How many ships did the League worlds withhold from the battle?
• How many ships were destroyed in the battle? How many people died?
• Why has Anna Sheridan come to Babylon 5? Is she as much of a pawn of the Shadows as Morden? (See Analysis)
• How will Anna Sheridan's presence affect Sheridan's near-engagement to Delenn?
• How did Anna get into Sheridan's quarters?
• Why have the Shadows not yet attacked Babylon 5?
• How badly were the Shadows hurt by this battle?
• Why did Sheridan keep dreaming the dream after Kosh died? Is it because of the piece of the Vorlon inside of him, and if so, is it somehow guiding him?
• How did Anna know Delenn's name? Did Morden tell her?
• Were the Vorlons approached to be part of the battle fleet?
• Who else might have survived the Icarus?

Analysis

• In this battle, it's said that for each Shadow ship that was destroyed, two Army of Light ships were destroyed. This forces the question: who has more ships, the Army of Light, or the Shadows? And if the Shadows have as many or more, what does that bode for the coming battles of this war?
• It's plausible that Anna Sheridan is acting on behalf of the Shadows just as Morden is. Will Sheridan react to her presence with an understanding that she's now an emissary of the Shadows?
• Delenn had a flashforward to Anna's arrival ("War Without End, Part Two.") Why, then, was she surprised to see Anna? Perhaps she didn't expect it to happen that night. It's also true that Anna didn't identify herself in Delenn's flash, so perhaps Delenn didn't get as complete a view of the future as Sheridan (and earlier, Garibaldi and Sinclair) did.
• This episode resolves, at least initially, most of Sheridan's dream from "All Alone in the Night." Sheridan is "the hand," one half of a pair of opposing forces. He wears the Psi Corps badge to signify their alliance with Bester, and his position as someone in charge of large numbers of telepaths. Ivanova's statement, "Do you know who I am?" refers to her latent telepathic ability ("Divided Loyalties.") However, it's still not clear who the "man in between" is. It's also not clear whether Sheridan's analysis, even with the help of Delenn and Ivanova, is actually correct.
• Perhaps Anna Sheridan is the "man in between" from Sheridan's dream, despite the personal pronoun problems. Or perhaps she's an envoy of that man.
• "The man in between" implies someone on the other side. Who might that be?
• Sheridan openly talked about Ivanova's latent telepathy in front of Delenn. Does Ivanova no longer consider it such a secret, now that she's presumably beyond the reach of the Psi Corps? Or does Sheridan simply trust Delenn so much that it didn't occur to him he might be violating Ivanova's trust?
• Who is the third spotlight on the Minbari flagship meant for? Most likely it's simply a result of the Minbari doing everything in threes. Sheridan and Delenn gave orders from more than one place in the tactical center, so it's probably not a matter of the lights denoting different functions.
• Garibaldi's empathy for Franklin, to the point of waiting next to Franklin's bed, is likely due at least in part to Garibaldi's own experience with substance abuse ("Survivors," among other episodes.) He presumably knows something of what Franklin has been through.
• When Franklin and Sheridan are discussing Franklin's experience, the doctor comments, "Moments are all we have." Sheridan pauses as if remembering something. He may be recalling Delenn's similar comment in "War Without End part 2:" "Savor the moments, for they will never come again."

Notes

• Franklin's stumble into the crowd was reminiscent of two scenes from "Chrysalis," both Petrov's approach toward Garibaldi, and Garibaldi's later emergence at the party.
• In Britain, Channel 4 edited out seven seconds of the attack on Franklin.
• In a video message in "Revelations," Anna Sheridan was originally played by Beth Toussaint, not Melissa Gilbert.
• Some people have pointed out an apparent continuity glitch, but it's not. When Franklin is being wheeled into medlab after being stabbed, he sees Garibaldi, Ivanova, and Sheridan above him, even though Sheridan hasn't yet arrived on the station. But if you look at the surrounding shots from Franklin's point of view, it's clear he's simply hallucinating and imagining that the doctors around the gurney are his fellow officers; nowhere but that one shot do any people in command uniforms appear.
• The Egyptian blessing was first mentioned in "A Distant Star."

jms speaks

• It takes 7 days to film an episode. My favorite is probably "Shadow Dancing," which you haven't seen yet, mainly because I haven't been able to poke any holes in it yet. It's a good ep.

• Which of the last five episodes is your favorite?
  It would be an even tie I think between the final two, "Shadow Dancing" and "Z'ha'dum." The two episodes are also linked at the hip, so they're really more like one unit...not so much a two-parter, but siamese twins, story-wise. They're both very exciting, move the arc forward hugely, and though they rely on a lot of backstory, are also good points for folks new to the show to dive in, because they also *explain* a lot of backstory, so they can get into it.

  They're both just lovely, knockout episodes. And, at times, scary as hell.

• About the UK possibly not showing the episode due to violent content
  Yeah, when you get "Shadow Dancing," I'd love to see how much they slice outta this one....

• It is, not to put too fine a point on it...EXTREMELY important to see "Shadow Dancing." If they choose to cut the nasty bits that's one thing, it won't affect what You Need To See, but to not run it at all would be a disaster of substantial dimensions. Still, I imagine they'll run it; the nasty bits can be excised pretty well, if necessary, I should think.

• If they cut 7 seconds, it's likely the 7 seconds of the actual stabbing itself, which is implicit in what happens afterward, so it shouldn't have a major effect on being able to follow the story. It's a reasonable edit, and about what I'd expect given the general attitudes on TV violence among the UK TV networks.

• "You've mentioned a couple times that the upcoming "Shadow Dancing" will be quite violent. Should I be concerned about, say, my two-year old watching it? She's as hooked on the show as I am, and would probably feel quite left out..."

  This is a tough one...I've given it a lot of thought since I saw this, and my sense is to advise the following:

  If you possibly can, videotape the episode. Get the time code on the various pieces. We cut in and out of two stories, an A and a B story. One is violent, the other is not. You don't have to see the one, or see much of it, to follow the other. For someone as young as 2, I'd suggest fast-forwarding past the B story stuff. It's still within what's generally permitted on TV, but it is kinda harsh.

• I've seen and received some email recently that seems to have taken a message of mine and misconstrued it. Someone asked me if it were possible that "Shadow Dancing" might be snipped or dropped for some of the violence therein. I offered an *opinion* that it might be edited, and have no idea what their plans are for airing the episode itself. Let me repeat: this was only my opinion, offered in response to a hypothetical question. I have *no* information on anything C4 might -- or might NOT -- do with "Shadow Dancing," so my inclination would be to wait and see what happens rather than acting prematurely on something that might not happen.

• Have you ever gone walkabout?
  Well....yeah, kinda. Back when I was living in San Diego (before it got nuked...well, that hasn't happened yet, but soon)...I got into a kind of similar mode of thought, and would go for walks through....downtown San Diego at 2-4 in the morning. Hours, hours, hours, just walking through parts of the area where I could've gotten killed. When folks asked me why, I couldn't answer, all I could come up with...was that I was looking for something. And I found it, kinda, and in a somewhat similar situation... but that gets into some other personal areas, and this may not be the right forum for that. Suffice to say I was....almost killed myself, and leave it at that.

• Here's a funny thing.

  Well, funny weird.

  See, every so often, someone will ask, "How much of you goes into a script?" and I'll answer, "More than I know at the time," and they ask for an example. A few questions ago, someone asked about if I'd ever gone...on walkabout, and I thought of the San Diego thing...and it suddenly dawned on me that that was behind the Franklin thing. Long story short: I got attacked and mugged by a gang, and beaten nearly to death....and survived only by a sheer act of will. And I'd honestly never, ever put that together with Walkabout, until the question, and suddenly there it was, I was working out *exactly* what I'd gone though, denying it to myself...the whole time that it was going on. Well. Anyway. That just hit me like a ton of bricks, and thought I'd pass it along.

• In retrospect, that was something I probably should not have mentioned, and would not have, had the thing not just utterly blindsided me in the middle of the conference. What got me through the attack, and its aftermath, those years ago, was sheer unadulterated rage...that I would not allow them to take my life because I had stories left in me to tell. And no matter what, I'd tell those stories. At first, I'd made my peace with myself...I'd never gone out of my way to hurt anyone, had helped where I could, had done some good work...I had a few things on the shelf, not a lot, but a start...but then I just started to get mad about it, and pulled myself back from the edge.

  So yeah, in a sense, I've faced that black, implacable wall...and it does drive you, after a while. And I do think, to a large degree, I'm still trying to define myself, to find what it is that's at the center for me, beyond the work. But then, I don't think that's terribly special...it seems to be the standard dilemma in an industrial society.

• In response to a review
  Slight correction to the preview of the final 5 scenes at Worldcon; in the Delenn/Sheridan scene, she never said female Minbari can cut off the partner's sexual organs if they're pressed...what she said was, "If he forces the issue, she can complain to the elders, leave once he is asleep, even cut of his --" she searches for the right word "-- *access* to her family." The humor is in his horror at what she might've been searching for in that word. A small correction in an otherwise great review, but as someone once said, god is in the details.... [That quote is from the architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.]

• The Minbari greeting is a hoot...there's a lot in that episode I just like a lot.

• Earth is still letting people come to Babylon 5 as tourists?
  It's difficult and limited, but yes, there's still some travel, just as one may travel to countries that the US does not recognize officially or have diplomatic relations with. How long they continue to allow this...we'll see.

• How did Marcus heal so quickly?
  For starters, we're talking about more than two weeks of story time. Between Grey 17 and Rock was several weeks, then you've got about 2 weeks from Rock to Shadow Dancing. That's five weeks, and now you've got the issue of medicine 250 years from now...and you can be sure that these kinds of injuries will be fixed much more quickly. It isn't like he showed up the very next day like this, we *did* allow for proper amounts of time.

• How did you think up the Shadows' strategy?
  I dunno...I just thunk it up as efficient and ruthless. I guess it comes naturally when you're a producer.

• "Seems to me the strategy is: wait in hyperspace "near" the flock of refugee ships, and when they signal for help (as they will when the Shadow fleet appears), pop out of hyperspace and engage the Shadow fleet. The point is, the Shadow fleet is going after a known target (or so Sheridan guesses), if you hang around near the target, they will tell you when the attackers appear. No need to for your ships, even a scout, to sit in normal space, the refugee ships are all "scout ships" in a sense."

  Massive logic problem. If you wait until they're right on top of the refugee ships, or very near, they'll just dive into the midst of the refugee ships and there's no way you can have a clean battle without resulting in *MASSIVE* amounts of civilian casualties. What you suggest would all but insure that the refugee ships would be destroyed (defeating the purpose of the mission) and the piles of civilian ships running for cover in every direction would hinder our side, but not the other side, and we'd lose even MORE of our own ships.

  "2) Delenn and Sheridan spend the night together and we get to watch... comercials. Talk about giving "short shrift" to a rather interesting event. Couldn't this have been pushed into a different episode? I mean, here they are, alone together, in a "ostensibly" romantic situation, lots for them to talk about I should think. Well, I'd like to know what was said... And what do we see? Sheridan is already asleep!"

  It's not a matter of being pressed for time. The whole point of the ritual was to watch him sleeping. We had that nice moment right before they took off with the fleet, and bunches of others, including the big kiss, right in the previous episode and throughout the whole thing.

  "3) I think the battle could have been done with a bit more of an "umph" to it. Perhaps the use of intercutting between the two plots was distracting in this case. It was a good battle, just not quite as effective as "Severed Dreams" or "Long Twilight Struggle" (which did have effective intercutting)."

  That's because there was more emotional content to the other two battles you mention; the bombing of the Narn homeworld, and EA fighting EA in SD. Not all battles are created equal, it's a matter of context. You can't expect to get exactly the same reaction to all of them.

• Why didn't the Shadows emerge right next to their targets?
  So they could drive any other ships toward the center, into the killing zone. If they come in into the center, everybody splits in every possible direction, and that makes running 'em all down harder.

• If the shadows were to materialize in the midst of the refugee ships, they'd just scatter in every direction. The purpose is to wipe out all those ships quickly and efficiently...so you start at the outer fringe, drive everyone inward, and then wipe them all out. To jump into the middle of them makes it very hard to do this...it's like herding kittens.

• Most refugee ships are NOT jump capable. Remember, it takes a LOT of power...you've got the heavy cruisers, and long range exploratory vessels, and not much else. That's what makes the White Star so special, that it can be as small as it is and still generate a jump point. The Asimov class passenger liners, for instance, can't jump, and have to rely on gates. The smaller ships the refugees would've been using would have had to get to their local gate, and then line up to go through it in small groups. Which means 85% of them would've been trapped there, ducks in a shooting gallery.

• Did the Minbari telepaths need line of sight to affect the Shadow ships?
  Actually, we never showed what the Minbari telepaths were looking at; for all you could tell, there could've been viewers or other ports above their beds.

• We couldn't hear the characters speak at the end of the battle. Audio problem?
  No, we just figured we'd let the music take it.

• "When I saw "A Late Arrival at Avalon," Marcus's line asking "Who is Morgana La Fey" got me to begin speculating that Anna Sheridan was alive and that she was working for the Shadows. My question is whether or not Marcus's line was intended that way--i.e. as foreshadowing that a significant female figure not presently on the scene (Anna?) would arrive at B5 to play Morgana to Delenn's Lady of the Lake?"

  yup.

• No, Sheridan isn't the man in the middle...the man in the middle is the one out there who sent Anna. As Ivanova says, his opposite number.

• Why did Kosh send those dream images?
  Well, certainly Kosh was accessing that which he could, in part to prove he knew what he knew, in part to set things up. Although who knows, there may be more to it...that that's what they came up with doesn't necessarily mean that is the full extent of it.

• The snow globe was shown as a flash-forward in "WWE-2," and we did see that image of Sheridan in Psi Cop uniform in "All Alone."

• With "Shadow" my hope is really to erase most (though obviously not all) suspicions or predictions on how the last one will go. If we already had our big EFX battle, it won't be that...Anna's here, so it can't be that...it can't ever be a return to tabula rasa, an empty slate, but by doing what's normally done in the season closer one episode prior to that, it may help ease the way for a different tonality to come in.

  And thanks again...you definitely won't be disappointed.

• Was "Commander Ivanova is on channel 4" a reference to the UK network? And what could possibly come next?
  Yeah, the channel 4 reference was a nod to the UK. Wondered if it'd get noticed....

  Good point, when you do a battle like that...what do you do next that won't seem anticlimatic? Usually you save something like that for your last episode of the season, not your next-to-last, or you've blown your big EFX show 1 show early. It makes for a real challenge...what do you do to follow THAT up?

  I think we figured it out....

• Why not show more of Sheridan getting ready to sleep, with Delenn watching over him?
  Basically...we've got 44 or so minutes...we could've shown the whole battle as shown, or shown Sheridan trying to sleep. One would have to go to make room to include the other.

• Why did the White Star make its own jump point when there was a jumpgate nearby?
  And then, there are just times you do it 'cause it feels more dramatic that way....

• Do people on Earth hear about events like this battle?
  They've heard rumors, usually the ones furthest away from Clark's confining influence....

• Why the change in actresses playing Anna?
  There was a combination of reasons, including production schedules, for the decision.

• Why were station personnel seemingly surprised to see Anna? And why did Melissa Gilbert come last in the list of guest stars?
  The script said the extras shouldn't make a big deal about seeing her. The director did that on the set. That's not what I had in mind, but it isn't that big a deal...I figure she's a striking looking woman, maybe that's a good justification.

  The ordering of credits was done to de-emphasize and hide (as much as possible) the appearance of Melissa.

• Under SAG rules, you must put guest stars of a certain calibre in the opening credits; also, for Melissa to take back-billing would have been a break in her work to date elsewhere. We had no choice in this, it's all stuff regulated by the guilds.

• Were the Vorlons absent from the battle because of the death of Kosh, or for some other reason?
  There are other reasons, which yes, will be addressed soon....

• Why didn't they call in the Walkers from Sigma 957 ("Voices of Authority?")
  Simple....you don't bring in the big guns like that until you're ready for the final assault. You don't whistle 'em up when convenient. You can probably go to the well just once with these guys, and you want to do so only when you're ready for D-Day.

• Was the bit about true faces taken from an existing religion on Earth?
  As far as I *know*, at least, that bit about seeing your true face revealed as you sleep is something I came up with on my own. There's just something I like about it, and if you've ever watched someone's face while they're sleeping, you understand.

  Though one person did comment, "So a man's true face is all mushed up against the pillow and drooling?"

  We don't talk anymore.

• "I gritted my teeth tighter when the dialogue launched into some anti-male paranoia about "What if the male demands the female stay a second night?", and the various "vengeances" she could take for a custom that is, after all, steeply in her favor. I could accept all that in an anthropological sense: "Look what anti-male customs the Minbari have. Isn't that fascinating, if you put the moral judgements aside?". But then... Yeesh!"

  The "vengeances" she cites, should the male insist she stay another night, are "she can leave once he falls asleep, complain to the elders, even cut off his access to her family." These hardly sound like anti-male rhetoric, but rather precautions taken to deal reasonably *should* someone get out of line. It doesn't state that all men do this, but sets in place what to do should *some* men do this.

  This is not a problem of context. It is a problem of perception. It has nothing to do with the scene, and everything to do with how you perceive the role of males in society.

Last update: November 12, 1998