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

Overview

Fourth season finale. A look back at the impact of Babylon 5 from 100, 500, 1000, and 1000000 years in the future.

P5 Rating: 8.50

Production number: 422 (but see Notes)
Original air week: October 27, 1997

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Stephen Furst

Plot Points

• Some people on Earth are highly skeptical that the Interstellar Alliance will work, and distrust Sheridan's motives and ability.
• The station will be under the command of a Captain Lochley in 2262.
• With Sheridan's permission, a colony of telepaths will be established on Babylon 5 sometime in 2262. Eventually they will turn against him.
• Garibaldi will be held hostage, possibly by the telepaths, in 2262. The hostage situation will end in gunfire.
• Babylon 5 will be destroyed (though under what circumstances isn't clear) in 2282.
• Sheridan will die in 2282 under mysterious circumstances that will still be debated 80 years later. Popular opinion will hold that he died on Minbar, but not everyone will agree. Later legend will hold that he was carried bodily into heaven.
• Delenn will live until at least 2362, though she'll spend many of the intervening years out of public view, leading some to wonder if she's still alive.
• In 2762, Earth will again be divided into two factions, one in favor of breaking away from the Interstellar Alliance and another in favor of remaining. The two sides will launch a devastating war, rendering the surface of the Earth nearly uninhabitable.
• In 3262, the survivors of that war, now known as the "Great Burn," will largely have lost all records of the time before the war. At least one order of monks, marginally part of the Roman Catholic Church, will work to gather and preserve historical records. They'll be aided in secret by agents of the Rangers, who will slowly "discover" pieces of pre-Burn technology to inch Earth's people back toward the stars.
• The Rangers will still exist in some form a million years hence, and will still consider Sheridan and Delenn to be their founders. They will be involved in the building of something called "New Earth," though what that is isn't clear.
• One million years in the future, humans will apparently have evolved into noncorporeal entities (like Lorien, "Into the Fire") and will make use of Vorlon-style encounter suits and organic ships.
• Earth's sun will go nova in a million years.

Unanswered Questions

• Is Garibaldi back on B5 to stay? What about Lise?
• Who were the people holding Garibaldi hostage? The telepaths?
• Who, if anyone, did Garibaldi's captor shoot? Or was the shot fired by someone else?
• What was the incident with Sheridan and Delenn's son?
• What happened to Mars and Earth's other colonies during the Great Burn?
• Why did the sun go nova? As the sun isn't expected to do so naturally for billions of years, if at all (according to 20th-century astrophysics, anyway) did someone or something cause it to happen?

Analysis

• Among the crowd greeting Sheridan and Delenn as they returned to B5 was a man holding a sign reading, "Sic transit gloria mundis." That translates approximately to, "Worldly glory/fame is transitory." That could be viewed as a negative comment, expressing the opinion that whatever they build will be temporary. On the other hand, that's also the Latin phrase spoken to a newly elected Pope after the ballots are burned and the ashes dropped before him, a reminder that a greater purpose is being served and any individual's contribution is small in comparison. In any case, it appears at least one human agrees with Londo's opinion that marriage celebrations should include somber reflection.

  The historical origin of the phrase is of note, given Sheridan's recent victory against Earth. Whenever a Roman general returned from a successful campaign, a great parade or Triumph would be held for him. The general would ride in a chariot, face painted red and in purple robes. Behind him, a slave would hold a golden crown of laurels and whisper the phrase into his ear.

• Though the implication was that the gunshot at the end of the video clip in 2362 was directed at Garibaldi, that's not certain. It could as easily have been someone else firing at one of his captors to prevent his death.
• The 2362 historians' interpretation of the outcome of Sheridan allowing telepaths to set up a colony of Babylon 5 -- the worst mistake of his career, they claimed he as much as said -- may have been shaded by their less than charitable views about Sheridan. The actual events may have been much less disastrous than they implied.
• It's possible Delenn's appearance in 2362 wasn't entirely a coincidence. The moderator appeared to be sympathetic to her point of view (though he could have just been playing devil's advocate to spark discussion) and may have warned her of the upcoming broadcast and its likely tone.
• The holographic simulation of Franklin was trying to create alien/human hybrids, the same accusation that was leveled against B5 by the Clark administration's propagandists ("The Illusion of Truth.")
• The Ranger said he still had time to join "the celebration" before the sun went nova. What was being celebrated? The Earth's destruction? New Earth's creation?
• Londo said when he came aboard the station that jubilant celebration was how Centauri celebrated a funeral. Perhaps the humans of a million years hence took up that custom, and were celebrating the death of their homeworld Centauri-style. If so, it would provide a subtle symmetry between the beginning of the episode and the end.
• The Ranger's rush to send the records to New Earth would seem to imply that the sun going nova wasn't an expected event, which in turn implies that it was artificially induced. If the nova were a natural event, there would presumably have been years -- more likely centuries -- of warning, plenty of time to evacuate people and historical records.
• The Ranger's effort to preserve Earth's history echoes Sinclair's comment in "Infection" that all of humanity's accomplishments would be lost when the sun died unless people took to the stars.
• The Ranger's parting line, "This is how the world ends. Swallowed in fire, but not in darkness," echoes Kosh's reply to Emperor Turhan ("The Coming of Shadows") that the situation would end in fire.
• One other event was predicted to occur in a million years: it's when Jason Ironheart said he'd see Sinclair again ("Mind War.") Coincidence, or does Ironheart (or Sinclair) play some part in whatever is happening in the distant future? The Ranger appeared to be noncorporeal, implying perhaps that the rest of humanity took a million years to catch up to Ironheart's level of development.

Notes

• The 2262 newscast referred to Sheridan's visit to the Dalai Lama in Tibet. But the picture shown was of a group of Buddhist monks with golden robes, typical of the Golden Triangle area (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia.) Tibetan Buddhist monks wear maroon robes. Of course, it's possible that changed between the 20th and 23rd centuries.
• The first question in the 2362 sequence was asked by someone named Ray Winston. This may be a reference to the cartoon "The Real Ghostbusters," on which JMS served as producer. Ray and Winston were the names of two of the characters.
• The insignia on Daniel's uniform in 2762 was nearly identical to the logo of the Nazi SS organization.
• Daniel's language (e.g. "realfacts" and "goodfacts") is a reference to George Orwell's "1984," which introduced terms such as "doublespeak" and dealt heavily with the relation between language and propaganda.
• Daniel also made a brief mention of "psychohistory," which is a reference to Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels. In the novels, psychohistory is a science that can predict large-scale human societal behavior.
• It's possible Garibaldi is responsible for the Great Burn. The war between Earth's two factions might have proceeded the same way with or without Garibaldi's subterfuge. But it's not inconceivable that if Daniel's superiors had made the first strike, the other side might have capitulated, or the war might have been over more quickly for other reasons. Of course, it's also possible that it would have been even worse, perhaps wiping out Earth altogether.
• The 3262 sequence may be a nod to Walter Miller's novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz," about an order of monks trying to preserve the knowledge of the past after a devastating war.
• During the 3262 sequence, the Roman numerals in the lower left corner appear to be camera numbers; they corresponded to the different angles from which the scene was shown. Presumably the cameras were all well-hidden.
• The caption under the picture of the Ranger in the book Brother Stephen is illuminating appears to say, "Rangers eis nomen est," which translates to, "Their name is Rangers."
• Although this episode is part of the fifth-season production run, it's actually the fourth-season finale. The fifth-season finale, "Sleeping in Light," was shot during the fourth-season production run because it wasn't clear that the show was being renewed; once the renewal was announced, another episode had to be substituted. For some reason the onscreen credits at the end of the episode don't reflect that; they list a production number of 422 rather than the more accurate 501.
• The title sequence was changed slightly from the regular season four sequence. A clip of the Agamemnon flying through the explosion of the defense platform in "Endgame" was inserted just before the cast credits, and Claudia Christian's name was removed from the cast list.
• The episode's dedication: "Dedicated to all the people who predicted that the Babylon Project would fail in its mission. Faith manages." This is probably a dig at pundits on Usenet and elsewhere who confidently said every year that B5 wouldn't be renewed for another season.
• Shooting began August 18, 1997.

jms speaks

• Why was Claudia Christian's name taken out of the credits but Jason Carter's left in?
  We had no choice. Contractually, when we moved "Sleeping in Light" into the fifth season, we had to move her credit from "Deconstruction" or incur an additional episode's payment. We didn't even realize this until WB called and put us on notice about this literally 3 days before the episode was uplinked. It wasn't a choice we had; they said that it had to be moved. We could leave Jason in the credits because he didn't appear in SiL.

• Any significance to the Agamemnon clip used to replace her credit?
  It seemed an appropriate placeholder when WB told us we had to omit Claudia's credit because she also appears in (the new) 522, "Sleeping in Light," to avoid incurring fees.

• Since this episode was numbered 422 rather than 501, will the production numbers of season 5 episodes be changed too?
  Yes, the S5 episodes will be renumbered prior to broadcast.

  More Soviet Revisionism in action....

• Do you ever get the urge to thumb your nose at people on the net who predict B5's demise?
  Nope...no intentions of doing that.

  I have something MUCH better in mind....

• It's discreet...but not obscure.

  And best of all...it's eternal...and the whackos who've bugged me for five years are not.

• A few people have interpreted the final card as "meanspirited" (when it's on one level a reaction *to* five years of constant carping and meanspiritedness from lots of sectors, from the nets to the press and elsewhere)...but what it is, is a statement of hope. That whenever you try something different, there are going to be naysayers, and people who say it can't be done, and certainly can't be done by *you*.

  It ain't just B5, it's any dream out there.

  And in the end, they are wrong.

  Faith manages.

  That's the message of the card.

  That, and the truth that in 10 years the naysayers will be forgotten, and made irrelevant...but the show, the *show*...goes on. And will be around long after they and I have gone to dust. And all people will know when they see that card, 50 years from now, was that some jerks said it couldn't be done, and they were wrong, because they are *always* wrong. If you have the dream, the ability and the passion, you can bring your dreams to life despite overwhelming opposition. That's the message.

  But for those on the other side, they will never see anything other than meanspiritedness because that's all they can *ever* see...because that's all they can bring to the table.

  There's an old saying about books, which I'll rephrase to include B5: Babylon 5 is like a book, and a book is like a mirror: if an ass peers in, you can't exactly expect an apostle to peer out.

• There will always be short-term setbacks, but as long as we climb back a few inches higher than we were before we fell down, we keep moving toward the goal of becoming a better people, and getting off the planet. Taking our place among the stars. While it's vaguely possible that I may *see* a Mars colony sometime within my lifetime, I know that I will never live there...but that ain't the point, it isn't a victory if *I* do it, and a failure if *I* don't, it's if *we* do it or not. Maybe we'll do it today, maybe we'll do it tomorrow, the point is to decide to DO it, and then by god DO IT.

  And yeah, that little closing card is going to remain on the show for its life...which will be long, long after its detractors (and admittedly myself) have gone to dust. On the one hand, it is a statement of hope to anyone else out there who has a dream, to follow it no matter who speaks against you, no matter the odds, no matter what they say to or about you, no matter what roadblocks they throw in your way. What matters is that you remain true to your vision.

  On the other hand, for the reviewers and the pundits and the critics and the net-stalkers who have done nothing but rag on this show for five years straight, it is also a giant middle finger composed of red neon fifty stories tall, that will burn forever in the night.

  In billiards, we call that a bank-shot.

• Does the Great Burn mean the B5 crew ultimately failed?
  It depends on your point of view.

  The fact, as I see it, is that no one and nothing will ever solve all of our problems at once, now and forever. People will always be people. You can't wave a magic wand and fix it all.

  Yes, there was another war...but had the Shadows not been stopped by our characters, there likely wouldn't have been a human race at ALL anymore.

  Yes, there was a war, and many died in it...as tends to happen in war...but the nominal right side in it came out on top, which would not have been the case but for Garibaldi's simulacra giving them a leg up on things.

  We have had, continue to have, and will always have wars, and grief, and struggle...we will climb up and fall down...but each time we climb a little higher, and in the end, we *do* build the world that our ancestors would have wanted for us...we *do* leave the cradle at last, and we take our place among the stars teaching those who follow us.

  For my money, that's as happy an ending as we or anyone can ever hope for.

• You spoiled the events of season five!
  As with anything else, B5 (in whatever incarnation) is about *process*. You saw Londo being strangled by G'Kar...but you didn't know how they got there. You know the result of the Earth/Minbari war...but I suspect there will be a lot of surprises in "In the Beginning."

  As with all things, the joy is in the going. We all know we're going to die, that as the poet said, "we are born astride the grave." But knowing that inevitable reality has never stopped human endeavor before....

  It's the journey and the doing that matters.

• Re: speechwriters and others hanging around after the fall...look at the remains of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the communist party, you'd think they would all have been run out of town on a rail. But many of them just shifted over and found similar positions, or kept the communist party going, after everything they'd done.

  The problem with most people is that they don't hold a grudge near long enough.

  I'd have to check, but yeah, I believe we stuck a ranger symbol on the encounter suit.

• About the 2362 sequence
  Stephen filmed that sequence by having all of the cast on the set at the same time, running multiple film cameras to get each version "live."

• From a discussion of a 1997 convention featuring Stephen Furst
  BTW, if you want to flip Stephen out, and you get this before leaving the con, give him the following message from me (I don't have the hotel info at hand). Tell him Joe says this:

  "Don't worry anymore about using mainly securecam style coverage in act 3, I've just come up with another approach where I can cover it in dialogue to let you do whatever you want with the camera, so you'll have all the flexibility there you want."

  Here's a use of a convention you haven't seen much before....

• The "Just Married" label was missing from the shuttle when it docked.
  The painted letters were on the *right* side of the shuttle as it went in. The CGI inside the bay showed the left side.

  We don't miss these things.

• How did Delenn get into the studio?
  Most TV studios that I've seen have back doors that open out onto the back lot or the outside for fire control reasons. You can get into any of the 3 B5 stages from the outside in, oh, about 5 seconds through any of a number of doors. (Note to anyone looking on: yes, those stage doors are secured, and there are guards, and unless you're a Minbari you're not getting in.) And most of the TV studios I've been in have been the same.

• It was mainly Earth that bore the burden of the great Burn, and yes, that was the one Garibaldi got into....

• Wouldn't the colonies offer Earth some help?
  Some probably would offer to help...but if technology is now suspect, some might not want that help...other colonies might be of the "screw 'em, they got what they deserved" perspective...often politics gets in the way of charity.

• "By any chance, is the post-apocalyptic religious order shown in "Deconstruction . ." a direct decendant of Brother Theo's order on Babylon 5?"

  It's altogether possible....

  And Theo is only awaiting a story worth bringing him in for.

• Interesting aside...for the last 6-8 months, I've been doing a fair amount of research into medieval England, especially the medieval church, for a play I'm writing (which may become a novel if I'm not careful). Dumped several hundred dollars on a massive order from Amazon.com back a few months ago to fill out what I needed. That was what tangentially led me into the post-Burn sequence in "Deconstruction." My brain has been full of monks for the last 8 months or so, and knowing the role they played in maintaining secular knowledge from about 500 AD and for some time thereafter, that seemed the perfect route to go that would also resonate with the look of the Rangers and the religious caste Minbari and the whole feel we were setting up.

  It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)

  Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others.

• The future wasn't being transmitted back; we were seeing the records of the past from the point of view of the final character, one million years hence, who has come to collect them prior to the final chapter in Earth's history.

• "My personal nit is that JMS has the sun going nova in only a million years. This seems several orders of magnitude too soon for me."

  Actually, the computer voice specifies that it is continuing to note atypical solar emissions...atypical meaning something unusual is going on.

• And what if you, say, interfered substantially with the mass of the sun by, say, causing a series of jump points to open up *inside* the sun across several days?

• You'd also substantially decrease the mass of Sol, which as I understand it, would result in the sun going nova.

• A lot of folks have found the eventual "going out" of Sol to be depressing...but as was stated 'way back in our VERY FIRST EPISODE, this is the one thing we can be sure WILL happen, sooner or later (probably later). Ed. note: "Infection" was indeed the first episode shot, but aired fourth.

  All the more reason to get off the planet, asap.

• Did the future humans leave the galaxy as the Vorlons did?
  No point in leaving the galaxy; stars go nova, it only affects the immediate vicinity (big as that is). By this point, they were in the position of the Vorlons, and now have to take their (our) place guiding the younger races, the next wave, while not getting in the way and remembering the lesson of the shadow/vorlon conflict.

• What about the other races?
  The Minbari eventually make it; the Narn and Centauri do not. They don't die out, they just don't hit a state of First One-ishness, which is darn close to immortality (barring violence).

• Was Sinclair prescient? Did you have the sun's destruction mapped out way back in season one?
  One needn't be prescient...it's *going* to happen one day.

  And to the second half...yeah, Deconstruction (or at least the events that would go into it) was mapped out back then.

• I think it's fair to say that Sinclair has been in large measure forgotten by Earth by the time of Deconstruction...but Valen lives on in the memories of the Minbari...a reasonable trade-off.

• They were speaking English a million years in the future?
  That's what you heard, that doesn't mean that's what it was; same as when you go to Minbar, they're not speaking English, that's just our hearing of it.

  Since when do news anchors quote the Bible?
  Ted Koppel.

  Why were Sheridan's childhood photos in black and white?
  Even now portraits are often done in black and white just for artistic merit.

  NYU is still around in the future?
  Trinity College is a working college in Ireland that dates back to the American Revolution. Ed. note: In fact, Trinity College is even older than that -- it was founded in 1592.

• Did Lise and Garibaldi get married?
  No, they're not yet married.

Last update: June 22, 1998