Text 6145, 255 rader
Skriven 2006-08-12 18:13:00 av Robert E Starr JR (6642.babylon5)
Ärende: The Long Night: my review
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The various plot threads that have dominated the past several episodes
move increasingly to their climax, with a few great character moments
thrown in for good measure.


THE PLOT

The Vorlon/Shadow conflict gains yet another complication. The Shadows
retaliate against the Vorlons by unveiling a planet killer of their
own: a gigantic black cloud that envelopes a world, then reduces it to
rubble by firing thousands of missiles directly into the planet's
core, destroying the defenseless world from the inside out.

Sheridan sends Ivanova out to complete the mission she had begun prior
to his return: to find any of the remaining First Ones that she
possibly can, so that Sheridan's fleet might stand a chance in the
coming battle. Meanwhile, he prepares a strategy of his own. Combining
Garibaldi's musings with information from Lennier, Sheridan
determines where the Vorlons are most likely to strike next. To have a
chance of ending the war forever, though, he will also need the Shadows
to be there - forcing the captain to make a very difficult command
decision.

On the Narn Homeworld, Emperor Cartagia has arrived to judge and
execute G'Kar... thus falling right into Londo's plan. Londo and
his co-conspirators successfully prepare a plan to assassinate the
Emperor in such a way that no one will ever suspect foul play or
conspiracy. However, a few overly-hasty words on Londo's part causes
the plan's execution to fall into the hands of a most unlikely
executioner...


THE GOOD

Though there are many memorable threads running through this episode
(as has been the case for this entire run of episodes), the most
memorable of these remains the subplot involving Londo, G'Kar, Vir,
and the mad Emperor Cartagia. These scenes drip with tension, a surreal
sort of black comedy that only raises the tension higher, and a
richness of irony.

Toward the beginning of the episode, Londo receives yet another
reminder of exactly why he must remove the emperor. This occurs in the
scenes involving the jester. The jester is viewed almost as a parallel
to Londo in these scenes. Cartagia seems fond of the jester, just as he
seems fond of Londo. The jester works to placate Cartagia by amusing
him. But suddenly and without warning, Cartagia gives him a single,
harsh look... and the entire room freezes. Everyone's afraid to move;
one Centauri is paused midway through lifting a drink to his lips, and
his hand holding the glass is trembling. No one wants to attract the
Emperor's eye at this moment, lest they become the target of his
whimsical yet deadly wrath.

Then Cartagia laughs, his glee as sudden as his earlier irritation, and
the entire room seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief as he and
the Jester begin joking with each other, gigglingly imitating a massive
explosion. The moment is really quite funny. However, the fear that
permeates the room also makes it extremely disturbing. What if someone
with the mentality of a small child had the power of life and death
over everyone around him? As Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life"
showed, the results would be terrifying for everyone in that child's
wrath - and without Lord Refa to keep him in check, Cartagia has become
that child.

This is underscored by the second scene involving Cartagia and the
Jester. As Londo walks toward the throne room, he hears a sudden cry -
and then the Jester's head rolls across the carpeted floor to land at
Londo's feet. "Humor is such a subjective thing," Cartagia says by
way of explanation. It seems unlikely that Cartagia executed the Jester
for possibly overhearing his plans for the planet's destruction;
after all, Cartagia doesn't seem to mind freely discussing those
plans when surrounded by courtiers. So why did Cartagia have him
beheaded? Did the Jester cease to amuse him? Or did Cartagia simply
decide, at a certain point, that beheading the Jester would provide a
bit more variety to his amusement? Most likely he really had sentenced
the Jester to death with that harsh look, but found it funny to wait to
murder the man long after the crisis had originally passed, so that no
one would see it coming. In any case, the head at his feet reminds
Londo of his own inevitable fate if the Emperor survives.

This all leads to another very memorable scene: the death of Cartagia.
As G'Kar fulfills his end of Londo's bargain by providing a
distraction, Londo prepares to execute his scheme. However, the Emperor
remains a mad child, babbling uncontrollably about his godhood, and
Londo loses his composure at the exact wrong moment by snapping at the
lunatic to "shut up." As Cartagia reacts by physically attacking Londo
for his impudence, the role of execution falls to Vir... according to
J. Michael Straczynski, a last-minute decision taken while writing the
script. It was the right decision, and it does have a sense of
inevitability. Not only is it more dramatically effective for the
innocent Vir to strike the final blow, but it also ties in with one of
the series' many recurring themes: that of responsibility.

Vir's hands would not be clean of the Emperor's blood no matter
what. Vir was entirely complicit in the assassination, after all. It
was Vir who, when directly confronted with Cartagia's casual sadism
in "The Summoning," snarled at Londo to "kill him." In the precredit
sequence of this episode, it is Vir who argues with Londo's allies
that Cartagia must be killed. It is Vir who delivers the poison to
Londo, along with specific instructions on how to use it. Vir feels
horribly guilty at the episode's end, because he was the one who
finally killed the man. But he would have been a key part of
Cartagia's death regardless. The blood was already on his hands;
having to physically commit the crime brings home that responsibility..

Vir's subsequent scene with Londo, as the younger man gets well and
truly drunk, is by far my favorite scene of an episode that has many
great scenes. By this point, I have long since come to regard Stephen
Furst's deceptively multi-layered work as Vir on the same level
(albeit in a different way) as the work of Peter Jurasik and Andreas
Katsulas. Once again, parts of the scene are quite funny. It's hard
not to laugh at Vir's explanation of how he got drunk ("I was raising
a toast to Emperor Cartagia, but since he wasn't here I had to drink
for him. And I couldn't be rude, I had to drink with him..."). But
even at this point, the pain in Vir's voice and face is
heartbreaking. When he goes on to memorably talk about how little he
ever wanted out of life, how very basic and fundamental his ambitions
were, the scene moves from the memorable to the truly powerful.

This kind of blow, the shattering of Vir's cheerful innocence, is at
least a part of what Londo had tried to protect him from, when he sent
Vir away to Minbar in Season Three. As Londo responds with another
splendid monologue, which he sums up by telling Vir how much he envies
the younger man's good heart, it is hard not to feel just a bit
teary. Who could have guessed, watching Londo's outright contempt of
Vir in early Season One, how far these two would come? Who could have
guessed at that point that Vir would become a character capable of
carrying this level of emotion?

The direction is well-turned here (as throughout the episode), with the
Narn fireworks in the background making a perfect counterpoint to the
emotion. Vir is grieving the death of his own innocence in the
foreground, as the Narns celebrate the rebirth of their freedom in the
background. But it's the words themselves, and the actors delivering
those words, that truly carry the emotion here. Maybe that's one of
the reasons I like this show so much. The very reliance on monologues
that the show's detractors criticize highlights something that too
few modern modes of entertainment even remember - the power of
rhetoric, of words and language, to move us. In an age when most modern
entertainment is more concerned with the power of pyrotechnics to
"sting (us) with the theremin, loudly" (as Ray Bradbury wrote in
"Fahrenheit 451"), it is just wonderful to find a work - a television
series, at that - that is willing to show that language itself is
still, as it was in Shakespeare's day, the building block of the best
drama.


G'Kar also gets some memorable moments in this episode. There has
been a fair amount of Christ imagery centered around G'Kar throughout
this subplot. He has endured torture and taunts, the removal of his
eye. And yet he comes through his ordeal stronger than before. Without
his eye, he tells Londo, he sees more clearly than ever. His calm
rattles Londo, his statement to Londo that "You have an empty heart,
Mollari. Did you know that?" Londo's response begins with the words,
"I know" - tellingly, there is a pause before Londo twists the
statement around to what will happen to G'Kar and his people if
G'Kar cannot focus on the task at hand.

There is more Christ imagery, as G'Kar is seen paraded through the
crowd, chained to a cross. Even here, he pauses to urge his people to
"be strong." Finally, in his last scene, he tries to quell the rage of
the other Narn, urging his people to redress their wounds, rather than
to seek revenge. He is not quite preaching forgiveness here, but he is
at least urging the Narn to let go of their hatred and focus on
themselves.

In that last scene, it is as if G'Kar is arguing with his old, Season
One self. Back in "Midnight on the Firing Line" and "Signs & Portents,"
G'Kar had wanted nothing more than revenge against the Centauri. What
did G'Kar want? "I look forward to the day when we have cleaned the
universe of the Centauri, and carved their bones into flutes for Narn
children," he said to Sinclair. To Mr. Morden, he said he wanted "to
suck the marrow from their bones and grind their skulls to powder...
and then... as long as my people's safety is guaranteed, I don't
know that it matters." These words could just as easily come from the
mouth of G'Lorn, the Narn with whom G'Kar argues in this final
scene.

But G'Kar has come to see that it's not that simple. His people and
the Centauri are tied together. Their mutual hatred has the potential
to undo both worlds. The Narn desired revenge against the Centauri for
the occupation of their Homeworld. Then the Narn became the aggressors,
assaulting and laying claim to more and more Centauri territory,
starting with their sneak attack on Ragesh 3. This led directly to
Londo's deals with Morden and Refa, striking back at the Narn. In
this very episode, as the Centauri abandon the Narn Homeworld, one
minister even describes the devastation of Narn that ended the war as
the Centauri having taken their revenge. Now the Narn want to take
revenge against the Centauri all over again. If this cycle continues -
as G'Kar now sees, though he was unable to see it before - then
Kosh's prediction of "Midnight on the Firing Line" will come true.
The Narn and the Centauri will indeed both be "a dying people."


In the other plot strand, back on Babylon 5, the command staff deal
with the latest complication involving the Vorlon/Shadow War: the
Shadows have unleashed a planet killer of their own. The imagery of the
Shadow planet killer is a wonderful CGI creation. The sight of the
missiles pouring down out of that cloud onto the helpless world beneath
is at once horrifying and breathtakingly beautiful, in an Apocalyptic
sort of way.

Sheridan gets to share some of the guilt Vir feels in the Centauri
story as he reaches the grave decision to order Ericsson and his
Rangers to their deaths. Near the episode's end, we see Sheridan,
sitting alone at his desk in the dark, listening mutely to Ercisson's
final transmissions. "They've taken the bait," is all he says; the
emotional weight he is left to carry as a result of this order rests
entirely in his posture, in his eyes, in his grim voice. I was reminded
of the story Sheridan told to Zack in "In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum" -
Churchill, reaching the painful but strategically necessary decision to
allow a defenseless village to be bombed. Then, Sheridan was referring
to the emotionally difficult decision to release Morden. Now he has
directly shared in Churchill's dilemma, by sending people to certain
death for strategically important reasons, and the burden obviously
wears heavily on him.

The episode ends with a final voice over from Sheridan, a voice-over
that ends with a bookend to the series' pilot. Sheridan quotes
Tennyson's "Ulysses":

We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The poem, in effect, opened the series, as Sinclair quoted the closing
lines in "The Gathering."  Now, as the conflict of the Shadows and the
Vorlons comes to its climax, the poem returns. In "The Gathering," its
meaning had to do with rebuilding, as Sinclair explained to Delenn the
need of humans to keep building and rebuilding a structure until it
finally was able to last. Now its meaning has to do with confrontation
- as the season's title observes, "No surrender, no retreat."

It is nice to see that Sinclair is remembered. After "War Without End,"
it would have been very easy for the series to have pretended that the
station's original commander had never existed. The sly reference
here to the poem - a torch passed from Sinclair to Sheridan - keeps
that early phase of "Babylon 5" a part of the story, rather than just a
"false start" or a minor prologue. It's also appropriate that the
series' original lead gets a nod as the series' central conflict
moves to its climax.



My Final Rating: 10/10.
                                
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