Babylon 5 3-14: Ship of Tears

Episode:

58

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Air Date:

29-Apr-1996

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about Ship of Tears, the 14th episode of Babylon 5's third season. I've been watching a few episodes out of their broadcast order lately, but this one's right where it's supposed to be.

Sounds like a fun episode this one, judging by the title, but you never know with Babylon 5. The names are sometimes deliberately misleading to subvert expectations. And sometimes they're not.

I'll be recapping the whole story by the way, so there'll be tons of SPOILERS below. Though if you're watching through the series for the first time, you don't have to worry about me ruining what happens next, because my spoilers stop at this episode.

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The episode begins with an establishing shot of the Vree and Drazi ships still guarding the station like in Sic Transit Vir. But who cares about them when ISN's finally back on the air!

This is a conspicuously well shot scene, with the characters moving across the crowd to get a clear look at the screen. I'd praise the director for it, but it's Mike Vejar again and I feel like I've given him enough praise lately. Whenever an episode impresses me with its direction I check the credits and there's his name again!

There's applause from the crowd as the newsreader appears on the screen; if the government's allowing ISN to air again that has to be a good sign. But then she starts off by feeding people a blatant lie about what happened to knock them offline, saying the last broadcast was part of a campaign of misinformation against the Clark administration. Turns out that things haven't improved on Earth one bit.

Though crime has been eliminated due to the extremely popular martial law declaration, so there's that.

Sheridan's going to have to wait to be disappointed as he's playing in one of the new Thunderbolt Starfuries they inherited from the EAS Churchill when it blew up back in Severed Dreams. They're different from the regular Starfuries in two big ways: they're two-seater craft and they can fly in an atmosphere.

I just hope they called ahead to let Draal know if they're planning to take the fighters down to Epsilon III's atmosphere. They don't need to be testing their ability to dodge missiles just yet.

It's nice to see Sheridan in a fighter again, for the first time since The Fall of Night. Bit strange to see his cockpit readout projected onto his face though.

They really did project the screen onto his face with an LCD projector. Not exactly realistic, but it adds a bit of colour to the image and makes it look more interesting. Though I'm amazed that Bruce Boxleitner can act with the light shining right in his eyes. Showrunner jms must have liked the look because he put one of these shots in the opening titles for season four.

Director Mike Vejar must have been fond of the technique as well, as he used it in the prequel movie, the Crusade movie, even an episode of Deep Space Nine (Valiant). It looked a bit out of place on the bridge of the Defiant though.

Sheridan is told about a distress call in an outer sector and decides to fly off and investigate it himself, because that always goes well for him.

It's Bester in a Black Omega Starfury! What the hell's he doing here?

I don't mean what's he doing in this part of space, even though that is a bit weird (Starfuries can't form jump points on their own so another ship must have dropped him off here). I mean why is Bester in this episode?

There's been a clear pattern forming these last three seasons. Bester only appears once every year, about 6 or 7 episodes into the season, and he's already showed up this year (in Dust to Dust). That means he's come back 15 episodes too early!

ACT ONE

Sheridan runs a scan to see who's in distress and gets a 3D model of a Starfury floating in front of him, but he's able to recognise Bester just from his voice. I suppose it is pretty distinctive.

He won't be going over to wave at him though, as telepaths need a direct line of sight to scan someone. In fact he doesn't have to deal with Bester at all anymore, as they've broken away from Earth. Psi Corps has zero authority out here now, so he could just leave him. Or kill him.

I love how Bester mocks Sheridan's cliché "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't blow you out of the sky," demand. "Curiosity," is basically his answer. If he blows him up now they'll never know why he came here and they won't have an episode.

It's funny how the old school Starfuries have the pilot almost standing up, while the newer Thunderbolts have gone back to traditional seats and a much smaller cockpit.

It makes sense though, as the Starfury is designed for space combat, where the only force resembling gravity is pushing them back as they accelerate. The pilot is basically lying down in them. The Thunderbolts, on the other hand, have to take a planet's gravity into account as well as air resistance, so they're designed a lot more like an modern fighter jet. Well, more like something from 70s sci-fi actually, with that angular cockpit.

Real life fighter planes have have curvy windows for basically as long as they've had enclosed cockpits, but X-Wings, Colonial Vipers, and those Thunder Fighters from Buck Rogers are all much more boxy. The reason for this is that curved glass is a bastard when it comes to reflections, especially when you put it in front of a blue screen.

Babylon 5 didn't use physical models, so reflections wasn't an issue for them, so I don't actually know why this looks like it does. Maybe it's a homage, maybe it made it cheaper to build the cockpit set, or maybe they just didn't have the extra polygons to spare.

The Thunderbolt is less curvy than the Starfury in general, and I think that must have suited the limitations of mid-90s CGI technology as it looks great. Much better than the average curvy alien ship of the week. They've even painted a scary shark mouth onto the front of Sheridan's fighter, pretty much identical to the nose art you can see sometimes on a real life A-10 Thunderbolt II.

Anyway, he shoots Bester, episode over.

Actually Bester's fine, but it's going to take them a while to fly to the station so the episode's checking in on what Ivanova and G'Kar are up to instead.

He's come to collect on a debt they owe him. He's been wanting in on their secret alliance since Voices of Authority, and now that he's given them Narn security officers and his favourite book he feels it's time they made him part of the team. To be honest I thought he was on the team at this point, seeing as he showed up with rest of them to confront Zack in Point of No Return, but I guess not.

Bester's made it on board by this point, but no one in the command staff is especially happy about it. Garibaldi's surprised the little creep can even fly a Starfury, but to be honest I didn't even think twice about it. Everyone in sci-fi can fly everything.

They can't give Bester a telepathy suppressing drug this time, as he claims that if they do that he can't help them. Though that might not be a problem anymore as they've already done everything they've been conspiring to do; there's not many secrets in their brains left for him to find. Still, it doesn't hurt to make the enemy think you've got more secrets than you do.

Sheridan asks the others to leave so he can chat with Ivanova a bit... about her secret latent telepathy. She can detect people scanning her, so if Bester tries to scan her they know they can't trust him and the deal's off. As far as Bester knows he can scan them with zero consequences and never get found out, so it seems unlikely he'll be honourable, but they'll see what happens.

The incentive for Ivanova to go through with this, is that if Bester tries something they get to lock him up until he dies of old age.

Bester doesn't need to scan her to know how that would make her happy, mentioning that she'd like to re-enact The Cask of Amontillado. Fortunately in 2019 I've got Wikipedia here to tell me that's an Edgar Allan Poe story where someone gets walled up inside a prison and left there. Though the victim in the story was dressed as a jester, so she'll have to find him an appropriate costume first.

He manages to piss her off enough to get a slap, though she doesn't detect him taking advantage of her anger to make her easier to read, so I guess he's just amusing himself.

Then he decides to get to the point, saying that President Clark isn't calling the shots at home, and it's apparently not the Psi Corps either. Someone's whispering in his ear... the Shadows. And he suspects the B5 crew know more about them than he does. The Shadow plot's finally coming back!

Then he demonstrates the vastness of his ignorance by claiming that the real reason Ivanova hates telepaths is because she envies what they can do. Nice try Bester, but Ivanova loved her telepathic mother, she loved commercial telepath Talia Winters, and she's a telepath herself, so... probably not. But this reveals a lot about what he thinks about 'normals'; he really does think that the crew all hate him because of his powers and not just because he's an asshole.

Bester intends to make sure the future belongs to the telepaths, but first he has to stop aliens interfering with the Psi Corps and using his telepaths for their own ends. And he thinks he knows how to hurt them.

This scene only lasts three minutes, but I feel like Walter Koenig just had more lines than in Star Trek's entire three year run. Turns out he's a pretty good actor!

ACT TWO

Act two begins with Sheridan and Delenn discussing their hesitance to bring G'Kar into the club. You can tell this is a secret intimate discussion as the camera's peeking in on them from the next room.

Sheridan points out that G'Kar was the first one to warn them about the Shadows, as Delenn chose to keep them a secret to bide time while they built up their forces. By the time the Centauri moved against Narn itself they both knew they must be getting outside help from the Shadows but they chose to do nothing about it, and if they bring G'Kar into their war council they'll have to tell him that.

If I remember right Delenn had lost her position on the Grey Council by that point, Earth wouldn't make a move against the Centauri, and they didn't even have a White Star, so there wasn't actually a whole lot they could've done to save Narn. But Sheridan feels like they sacrificed his world to keep a secret.

Delenn decides to take full responsibility for her choice but Sheridan is completely opposed to the idea of her telling G'Kar alone. Then he takes a moment to answer a call from Ivanova, and in those five seconds goes from "I am not going to..." to "Are you sure you want to do this?' Seems like she is.

Sheridan and Ivanova have finally gotten all of their meetings out of the way now so they're ready to deal with the main plot.

Bester (who still hasn't tried scanning Ivanova), tells them about a convoy of ships bringing supplies through hyperspace to the Shadows. They'll need to capture the ship with the weapon supplies on it, not destroy it. Sheridan asks him where he got his intel, leading Bester to put on his best 'I can't believe you're this dumb' face, before reminding him that he's a telepath.

We learned in A Distant Star that locating a ship in hyperspace is next to impossible, but we get some new information here. Hyperspace amplifies telepathic ability, meaning that a trained P-12 like Bester can detect the convoy better than their sensors. The Psi Corps has been keeping this little trick to themselves, because the last thing they want is for the military to put telepaths on the front lines. They're not expendable like mundanes are... because there's lots of mundanes and telepaths are hard to breed! It's logic, not racism, honest!

Man, Bester really isn't putting too much effort into winning over his allies here. Though I guess one of the most important things you want in an ally is honesty, and he's being very open with his contempt.

Interesting that the other worlds haven't been advertising this hyperspace telepathy boost either though. The Minbari and Centauri must have known about it for hundreds of years.

Meanwhile Delenn invites G'Kar into her quarters... but the scene cuts off there so the episode can show off some spaceships instead.

Our heroes have actually caught Shadow ships doing something than obliterating outposts and fleets for once! Or at least they will do once Bester figures out where they are.

Well now Bester knows all about the White Star. Seems they really aren't concerned about him learning their secrets anymore. Though a tactical genius like Sheridan should've predicted that he'd sit in his chair the moment he left it unguarded.

Last time Bester showed up the episode was all about him tormenting Garibaldi, but this time he's driving Sheridan nuts. Well, in this scene anyway. It's a smart bit of writing, as it turns it from a boring scene of the characters searching for a convoy into a fun comedy scene (without it devolving into farce).

Lennier's here as well, which means this is apparently the first time a Lost in Space regular and a Star Trek regular have ever acted together in the same scene. (Plus there's a Babylon 5 regular here too!) Though it wasn't the last time Lennier's actor got a chance to act alongside a Trek star.

Deep Space Nine 7-08: The Siege of AR-558

In fact Bill Mumy went on to join Starfleet for an episode after the end of Babylon 5's run, giving him a chance to share scenes with half the DS9 cast.

Back in Babylon 5, on Babylon 5, Delenn is finally telling G'Kar the truth. When G'Kar told the council about the Shadows back at the start of season 2 the Grey Council could've confirmed his story, but they chose not to, and Delenn had to obey.

Actually the Minbari weren't at that council meeting, because Delenn had just come out of her cocoon and Lennier was busy looking after her, but that's not much of an excuse.

In In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum, Sheridan talked about the theory that Winston Churchill let Coventry get bombed during WWII to cover the fact that the British were able to decipher German messages, and that letting Morden go to cover their preparations for the Shadows felt the same to him.

But Delenn claims that letting Narn get bombed to mislead the enemy actually saved Narn lives, as if the Shadows knew the game was up they would've just attacked their homeworld directly and obliterated them. This way there is at least hope.

G'Kar replies that if she'd told him this at the end of season two he would've killed her. Now, he's probably not going to do that. Sure is fortunate that Kosh broke into his dream a few episodes back and put the idea into his head that some must be sacrificed if all are to be saved. G'Kar understands now that it's about how they got here as much as it is about where they're going.

He doesn't like it, he can't even forgive her, but he gets it, and she invites him into the war council. He's finally got that alliance with the Minbari he asked for way back in The Gathering, when they were both in this very room!

The Gathering

At least I think it's meant to be the same room; it does have the same kitchen counter. Man these two are looking different these days.

Back in the A plot, the White Star is engaging the Shadow fighters guarding the convoy. Their weapons have never been able to seriously damage Shadow vessels before, but these ships are much smaller and aren't proving to be much of a problem. They're a bit of a rubbish escort really.

The White Star also features a tractor beam, which is something Earth vessels don't have, so they use it to grab the transport ship before it can escape.

But then the fighters' daddy comes over to see who's been blowing up its ships. The dialogue makes it sound like it's much further away than this, but it's a good looking scene so whatever.

Whatever distance it is, one good shot is all it needs to end them... but it doesn't take it. Instead it runs away! They're safe but they've no idea why, and Sheridan decides to decline Lennier's suggestion that they could fly over and ask it.

Now they have a chance to check out this ship they've captured. All Bester knows about it is that it contains some kind of weapon supplies.

They seem a lot like humans to me though, cryogenically frozen mid-scream, with a Psi Corps logo on every pod. Walter Koenig didn't actually join Star Trek until season two, so he missed out on appearing in Space Seed, the episode that Khan and his people were found frozen on a spaceship. Seems like he might have gotten a second chance!

This is another shot that appears during the opening titles later, in season five this time, so it's a good thing that the ship's lit so well really. I don't know who else is benefiting from the lighting through, as it seems that everyone's asleep.

ACT THREE

The transport ship did have a pilot though, though it takes a while for the episode to reveal the corpse. There's an incredibly slow pan across while Sheridan hypes up how gross it's going to be. Their theory is that they burned themself with acid rather than let the B5 crew capture them alive. We know it's not a Shadow though, we've seen them before and so has Sheridan.

They've also found about 100 telepaths in sleeper tubes and it doesn't look like they were put into them voluntarily. Bester's not going to be happy.

Actually Bester knew all along and didn't tell them, big shock. Though they were described to him as being weapons supplies, so he technically wasn't lying!

Down in Medlab 1, Franklin starts thawing one of the telepaths out to examine them. Apparently they have cyberweb implants in their skulls. I wonder if that's anything like the cybernetic implants that Knight 1 and 2 used on Sinclair back in And the Sky Full of Stars. Did the Shadows want to put these people into a virtual reality cybernet as well?

Franklin's curious so he puts his face right up to the pod to get a better look...

JUMP SCARE!

Turns out the woman really doesn't want to be in the pod! Franklin gets her out but she screams in his face until someone can get over with a hypospray to knock her out, or whatever it is they use in this series.

They bring the bracelet she's wearing up to Bester, who recognises it right away. It means she's a blip: a rogue telepath who refused to join the Psi Corps or take the sleeper drugs. It's his job to track them down, and he always does.

He carries on explaining her bracelet for a while, but his demeanour changes when he reads the part that tells him where she'd been sent for re-education

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Botany Bay? Oh no!

Actually they were sent to Mars, but that's not what's caught his eye. He demands to see her, right now.

Unfortunately she's still asleep, and having some bad nightmares. I mean 'bad' as in 'bad television'.

I mean this is like an X-Files parody, or one of those alien abduction TV movies that were coming out at the time. They can barely hold their giant drill with their obvious finger extensions!

The makeup's actually pretty good though, and they even have animatronic eyes.

There's also a shot of a Shadow vessel, but then the dream's over and we're back in the real world watching Franklin run down the corridor with all the alert spotlights on.

They get inside Medlab to find that someone's turned a smoke machine on and made the place look all moody. Fortunately they keep emergency flashlights right by the door... well they do in this episode anyway. Don't expect to see them there in earlier stories.

Garibaldi and Franklin walk around in the dark for a bit, shining their torches on things, until they finally get around the corner to reveal their mysterious telepath all tangled up in wires. It looks a bit ridiculous, but then how could it not? Time and money would not have solved this particular problem, and I think they pulled it off pretty well.

ACT FOUR

She calls out to Bester by his first name and then immediately tries to zap him with force lightning to remove any doubt that they've met before.

But Garibaldi realises that she wasn't aiming at him, she was aiming at his Psi Corps badge. So he gets him to hand it over and then throws it in front of her to see what she does. Bester must be really affected by what's happening here, as he just gives up his badge without even making a quip.

She zaps the badge and takes a chunk out of the floor as well. Plus she's tapping into Babylon 5's systems and C&C is detecting an energy surge. I'm suddenly reminded of that other time in season one where an organic weapon made a mess of Medlab and started causing energy surges, but this episode's so much better than Infection. And not just because this is tying into continuity in a big way.

The telepath's not in a fit state to have a normal conversation with them, she keeps saying things like "machine says kill to protect" and "sign hurts us" but she does tell them that she's in pain and would very much like them to stop 'it' talking in her mind. So Franklin gets over to her with another hypospray and knocks her out again, ending the crisis.

That was easy enough to solve! Sheridan didn't even have to put on body armour and chase her down the corridors while making a Kirk speech.

It seems like Bester's actually kept his promise not to scan the crew, but he does scan their mysterious cable girl, and he gets a flash of everything she dreamed about.

Including a new image of a person fading inside a Shadow vessel (not to scale).

Back in Sheridan's office they discuss who this blip is and why she knows him. Turns out that by pure chance they woke up Bester's lover. In fact the woman's carrying his child! He's already got a wife and kid, but that was a genetic pairing arranged by the Corps, he doesn't love her. Not like he loves Carolyn.

Bester then goes on to give them the whole story of how he met Carolyn and how they fell in love. He's sharing a lot of information this episode considering he's talking to inferior mundanes that hate him about as much as he hates them.

It guess it's hard to stay mad at people when they give you an awesome mug like that. Hey, he's gotten his badge back too! It's only lightly scorched.

Sheridan and Ivanova figure out that the telepaths from the ship were going to be plugged into Shadow vessels to serve as their CPU, that's why Carolyn tried to merge with the station. Though they don't get why they're after telepaths in particular, as they know that's not necessary.

Anyway, they're going to carry on trying to cure the telepaths they've recovered, and Bester is keen to do whatever he can to make that happen. Their war just became his war.

It's very convenient that he's suddenly found himself strongly motivated to help them out due to events that happened off-screen without us getting the slightest hint about them until now, but he comes off as sincere. And even if he's lying about Carolyn, I imagine he'd help them out just so the Psi Corps can get hold of that ability she has to shoot lighting from her fingers.

And then G'Kar is brought down to their brand new gigantic war room set! I've read that it replaced the casino set and that seems plausible to me. The floor's the same at least. It could've done with a little pit or a platform for the section with their round table, but other than that it looks pretty good to me.

It seemed a bit implausible to me at first that the incredibly cash-strapped crew of the Babylon 5 space station would get this room built despite everything else going on this season, but then I realised that the incredibly cash-strapped crew of the Babylon 5 TV show got the room built despite everything else going on this season too. Plus no one on screen ever says those walls aren't made of plywood.

ACT FIVE

The crew see Bester off, but it's not long before they're back in the new war room again. For once Garibaldi's the one calling the Code 7-R and now G'Kar has to drag himself down there as well.

Back in Dust to Dust we heard that Narn telepaths were eradicated 1000 years ago. Because everything in this series is a 1000 years ago. Ikarra 7 was invaded a 1000 years ago, Valen came from nowhere and formed the Grey Council 1000 years ago... but there's a bloody good reason for that: it was when the last Shadow War took place. Now Garibaldi's just figured something out by reading the equally ancient Book of G'Quan that G'Kar let him borrow. I mean his copy's not that old, but the original was.

It's nice to see Garibaldi happy for once. In fact he's so pleased with himself that he keeps tapping the book until G'Kar has to tell him to stop (it's disrespectful). It's almost bizarre to see, though that's mostly because they had to ADR his voice in because of problems with the sound.

Seems that he's the first person to figure out that that the Shadows killed the telepaths because they were afraid of them, and they had a good reason as G'Quan was able to drive them all off their world with just the last few survivors. If the Shadows are using a single human as the brain in each of their vessels then telepaths may be able to jam their connection to the ship! That's why the Shadow vessel backed off from the White Star earlier: because Bester was on board.

Things have pretty unrelentingly bleak lately, but they've finally got some good news!

In other news, all their worst nightmares have come true as the Shadows have begun attacking openly. Well, okay the nightmare Ivanova had last week about coming to work naked hasn't come true, but this is still pretty bad.

Like Delenn said, the reason they kept quiet about the Shadows is because they didn't want this to happen, they needed more time to prepare first. Now there's no point in sneaking around anymore, the Shadow War that Ivanova promised in the opening titles is officially on.

It's just a shame it couldn't have started in front of a better nebula, because that background is just nasty.


CONCLUSION

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Ship of Tears is a pretty bad story. I mean if this had been a stand-alone episode the structure would've been all wrong. The heroes go out on a mission, effortlessly succeed and the enemy ship runs away. They open one of the boxes they've found, a cyborg telepath starts to take over the station, then they solve that problem in two minutes as well. There's nothing left for them to do after that really, so they just hang around and chat for the last 20% of the episode.

But as 42 minutes of entertainment this is great, and as a piece of the overall arc it's essential. It's a chapter of a much bigger story that makes it very clear that the Earth plot is going on the back burner now while the Shadows come back in full force. The two episode break is over.

Both plots in the episode follow up on Dust to Dust, as G'Kar's enlightenment comes into play in the B plot, while the A plot eventually comes back to the lack of Narn telepaths and the idea of using telepathy as a weapon. Also Bester's back!

The A plot is all about Bester and the Shadows and both of those things are great! I mean I wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with them, but Walter Koenig is excellent as the crew's arch-nemesis who likes to sit on their chairs and mock them, while the Shadows do the job of being their arch-nemesis who likes to turn people into weapon supplies and wage war against the entire known galaxy. The story is about three things: setting Bester up as an ally, revealing the Shadows' weakness, and putting Bester and the others in a room together, and really the third one is where the episode shines.

Carolyn coming out of nowhere as only thing Bester truly cares about isn't so great; that could've probably been handled better. Especially as he already gave a perfectly sensible reason to ally with them, as the Shadows have infiltrated the Psi Corps. But I do like how it mirrors Sheridan's obsession with Anna. Both of them have lost someone they love to the Shadows and they're the most important thing to them. Though Sheridan seems to have been able to move on recently, thanks to his love of Delenn.

The B plot is all about Delenn's conversation with G'Kar, as she reveals the truth about the secrets she's been keeping all series (that everyone's been keeping from him lately). But the way she did it surprised me, as she claims that the Grey Council made her do it and that if they'd gone public about the Shadows even more Narns would've died. I realise that you have to be very careful about what you say sometimes to a guy whose planet is currently under both occupation and several layers of dust and rubble, but she went into that room to take full responsibility and I don't think she ended up doing that.

I thought it was interesting though when she said that the Narn homeworld would've been destroyed either way, as it made it sound like the Shadows were coming after them specifically. I don't think that's what she meant, but the revelation about the Narn telepaths at the end of the episode made me realise that the Shadows did have a good reason to go after the Narn in retribution. They thought they had it bad with their cycle of revenge with the Centauri, but they may be caught in an even bigger cycle with the Shadows. At least they've rediscovered how to fight back now.

It's not 100% ideal to learn about your enemy's weakness after they're already taking steps to counter it, but it's much preferable than not knowing at all. I guess this is why the Shadows sent someone to each of the ambassadors back in Matters of Honor: they wanted to know if anyone knew about their Achilles' heel. But the trouble with Garibaldi being the one to put all the pieces together and work out that the Shadows are afraid of telepaths, is that the book pretty much says it outright and G'Kar's been reading that thing from cover to cover his whole life. A guy who was trying to make Narn telepaths as early as the pilot movie and was using telepathy as a weapon earlier this season is not going to have overlooked the part in his holy book which talks about using telepathy as a weapon against the darkness!

Anyway Ship of Tears isn't all-time top ten great, but it's a solid episode with some horror elements that gives the Shadow War plot the huge shove forward it's been needing. Plus we're learning things and that's always good. Director Mike Vejar's back to kicking ass with after the disappointing dream sequences of A Late Delivery from Avalon, writer jms has gotten all the daft comedy out of his system after Sic Transit Vir, and the actors are always good. Except for when their voice is dubbed over the top, as that makes things a bit weird.

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COMING SOON

Babylon 5 will return with Interludes and Examinations.

Thanks for reading by the way. I'll make it up to you by reading your comments.