Babylon 5 4-12: Conflicts of Interest

Episode:

79

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

David J. Eagle

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Air Date:

05-May-1997

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the 79th episode of Babylon 5, titled Conflicts of Interest. For whatever reason they decided to render the station from the back instead of the front for this shot, so there's a close up of B5's ass behind the title. It's also episode 12 of season 4, which means I'm in the second half of the season now. I'm 7/10ths through the show!

Conflicts of Interest was directed by David J. Eagle, who was the only Babylon 5 director to ever have a bird-related surname. He directed episodes like Severed Dreams, And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place and Falling Toward Apotheosis, so he preferred to hang around at the top of people's episode rankings, but this could be the episode where it all started to go wrong for him. We're in season four, so probably not, though it's been a while so I can't actually remember if this one's any good or not.

Here's some more trivia for you: the episode came out on May the 5th, the day after Star Wars Day. I don't think Babylon 5 ever got its own day, but I suppose the 5th of the 5th isn't the worst date you could pick for it.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to go through this episode scene by scene spoiling the events with my recap and spoiling the story by nitpicking everything as I go. I'll even spoil episodes that came before it! But I won't spoil anything that comes after it, so this is safe for first time viewers.

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The episode begins with Garibaldi in his 'office' (a corner of the Zocalo) doing what he can to bring a little joy to the universe. No really, he just managed to reunite a guy with his missing daughter (who is conveniently mute for temporary medical reasons), and he did it for a third of his fee.

His client admits he was wrong about Garibaldi, and I can see why he might have gotten the wrong impression. Garibaldi's been a grumpy dick ever since Zack rescued him from that lifepod. In fact I think this might be the only nice thing he's done all season.

Meanwhile his creepy new friends from Racing Mars have been keeping an eye on him and are almost ready to give him his first assignment. They're not going to tell him what it involves though, because that would give away the episode's twist they want to see how he copes. If he messes up and dies then they'll know he wasn't up to the job. Right now he's entirely... expendable. End of teaser!

ACT ONE

Is this Sheridan's thing now, staring out of the window at the beginning of every episode? Zack's starting to worry about him.

Turns out he should be more worried about himself though as Sheridan wants him to go visit Garibaldi and retrieve his link, Identicard and PPG. Seems that their former security chief 'forgot' to hand them back after he quit.

Zack's noticed that Garibaldi's behaviour doesn't make a whole lot of sense lately, but Sheridan just tells him that the universe is like that sometimes and what are you gonna do? Well besides getting Lyta to scan him, which is so illegal and immoral that no one's even suggested it. 

Franklin's just gotten back from his Mars Resistance story and he's very impressed with the redressed war room.

They've done a good job of moving the railings and cutting the round table in half, and they're pretty much ready to go with Ivanova's new news show except for one slight problem: they haven't got the power to broadcast a signal through hyperspace. Sending a message point to point is no problem, they do it all the time, but sending one to everyone requires more than the station's got. They probably should've thought about this before redecorating really.

Ivanova's been working on this problem for days without getting any closer to a solution, so of course Franklin comes up with the answer immediately. Just get the power from the Great Machine at Epsilon III! It's been sitting there all through the Shadow War waiting for its chance to be a deus ex machina, and now it's finally got a chance to be useful.

Ivanova deals with this in the only way her frustration will allow: by pulling a Duck Dodgers and immediately coming up with a better idea of her own: they could get the power from the Great Machine at Epsilon III!

So she excuses herself and rushes off to take a shuttle down to the planet.

But the scene doesn't end there. Instead it lingers on Franklin for a bit longer, as he goes up to a random extra and tells them that she's scary but he likes her. It's a very jms way to end a scene. Sometimes his idiosyncrasies are a bug, sometimes they're a feature, it's subjective I suppose.

By this point Zack's made his way down to Garibaldi's office to ask for his badge and gun, which probably ranks high on the list of awkward things he has to do today. Garibaldi's cool with it though! He's in a good mood, he's helped a lot of people out recently, seen a lot of happy faces on satisfied customers. Going independent has really worked out for him.

Though he's going to keep the gun.

Garibaldi makes the argument that a private investigator needs a gun to protect himself, Zack makes the counter-argument that he can't just keep a military issue weapon. He also makes it really clear that this is Sheridan's order, just to inadvertently widen that rift between them a little wider. Garibaldi sees that he can't win this and hands over the gun... hoping that he's given enough of a performance to satisfy Zack's expectations. He couldn't just hand over the gun right away, Zack would've known it was too easy.

Zack's on to him though and asks for the second gun as well.

Garibaldi wishes that Zack would've refused and Sheridan had sent someone else so this wouldn't have had to come from him. It seems like it's driven a rift between the two of them now as well.

He's sure taking this badly, considering that quitting was a choice that he made, and these regulations were in place long before Sheridan took command. In fact he handed he badge and gun over himself during In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum. I bet Sheridan hasn't even kicked him out of his cosy command staff quarters!

Then we get to see Ivanova's taking a shuttle out through the docking bay door. I wonder why ships aren't dropped out of the side of the station like the Starfuries, it seems like it would save a lot of time and effort. They wouldn't have to send them back up to the docking bay entrance on a lift and force incoming traffic to wait.

Hey Garibaldi still likes Daffy Duck! I guess there's hope for him yet.

This is a clip from Duck Amuck, one of the all-time greatest Looney Tunes, where Daffy is continually tormented by an unseen antagonist who is manipulating his life. So there's a bit of a parallel there to what Garibaldi's going through at the moment, even if he doesn't realise it. The episode just goes and gives away the twist at the end of the cartoon though! That's not fair on people who haven't watched it.

Oh and it seems that Garibaldi has kept his nice quarters, though he's probably paying rent on them now.

Then Garibaldi's new friend Wade shows up, just as he's about to have dinner. Damn, now I'm hungry too.

Wade reminds him about that time a couple of episodes ago where he said he wasn't happy about how things were being run around here and wanted to do something about it. Now he's offering him a chance to do that. He needs him to help smuggle someone from Earth onto the station and protect them while they're doing their business here.

Garibaldi's still holding a grudge over Zack choosing Sheridan over him and he assures Wade he's got absolutely no problem going up against his former security team. Garibaldi genuinely seems to be under the delusion that he has some kind of high ground to operate from here.

ACT TWO

Act two begins with Ivanova's shuttle finally reaching Epsilon III...'s atmosphere, on its way down to the planet. Is this episode taking place in real time or something? We see the whole landing sequence and then she goes and meets, uh, Zathras?

She's amazed to see him, seeing as she watched him disappear last year on a space station heading a thousand years in the past, but he assures her that they've never met. After a bit of enthusiastic confusion from Ivanova he works out that she must be mistaking him for his identical brother, Zathras. They're not all Zathras's down here, we saw a different looking member of his race in War Without End, but there's enough of them to make things more frustrating than they need to be. There's 10 of them in total, well 9 now...
 
Fortunately you can tell them all apart by the imperceptibly different ways they pronounce each of their names. It's another awkward jms joke, but it gave him an excuse to bring actor Tim Choate back to the show so I'll let him off. Though he could've just said it was his last name! Jeff Zathras, Bruce Zathras, it would've made perfect sense.

I'm impressed by how long the two actors kept going here. This is close to a four minute unbroken take, without a single cut, and that's very atypical for TV.

Zathras goes on a tangent for a bit about how gets bored and talks to dirt, but he does eventually agree to help her get the power they need for their new TV show, so that all worked out in the end. In fact he figures out that she needs the Great Machine's power for her news broadcast in approximately the same amount of time it took Franklin to come up with the idea, making her feel even worse.

Unfortunately this doesn't lead to her meeting Draal, as the actor was still busy (that's why we got Zathras). In fact we'll never see John Schuck in the role again, or Tim Choate as Zathras for that matter. Those two actors are done, and it's a shame because Babylon 5 still has a few sets left that they haven't eaten.

Oh this is an unusual shot. They've shown ships docking from all kinds of angles but I don't think we've ever seen a shot looking straight up before. It's not Ivanova this time by the way, it's a different ship.

Back inside B5, Garibaldi leads Wade into one of the darker parts of the station, using a copy of his Identicard to get through a lock. I suppose if anyone can produce new Identicards it's the head of security. I suppose he came up with the idea after all the crap he went through in Survivors.

Turns out that the contact from Earth couldn't make it, so they'll be meeting the guy's wife instead.

Oh damn, it's... some woman that Garibaldi apparently recognises.

It's been a long time since we've seen her, but this is actually Lise, Garibaldi's ex-girlfriend! She showed up twice in season one and then we never saw her again. Until now. They've brought back the same actress as well, which the episode confirms by flashing back to when Garibaldi had that flashback in Babylon Squared.

Which means we get to see his old hair! I miss season one Garibaldi, he was a lot more cheerful and much less cranky.

It's a bit of a coincidence that they'd both be involved with this same business, but I'm too happy that they're finally doing something with Lise to complain. The series kept a lot of balls in the air, but this ball had been gone so long I thought it was never coming back... okay to be honest I'd forgotten about her entirely, but she's a good character to bring back. The episode is Garibaldi's film noir detective story and who else would make a better femme fatale for him?

ACT THREE

Garibaldi's managed to get Lise back to his quarters without incident during the ad break, so now they can finally relax and have an argument. He's a little confused about how she's managed to lose one husband and gained another in the three years since they last spoke (in season one's A Voice in the Wilderness), especially as he didn't even hear about it. Don't blame her, man, blame the writer!

But the writer's determined to turn this contrivance into something positive, by using her story to do a bit of world building. Turns out that her first husband, Franz, had an affair and then divorced her, and the Earth-appointed judges on Mars always favour people born on Earth. He took everything, including her daughter, so now Garibaldi gets to feel like an asshole for bringing it up.

He doesn't though, because now he's angry she didn't come to him for help! In fact she hasn't spoken to him at all. Her excuse is that she didn't want to mess his life up, because things were finally working out for him.

Garibaldi eventually puts all the clues together and realises she didn't just remarry after Franz, she remarried William Edgars, the richest man in the universe. So now he knows who hired him for this job.

I think jms has gotten better at writing these kinds of scenes, because that was a lot less awkward than the scenes of Sinclair and Sakai in season one. Garibaldi's clearly ready for it to be over though, as he's happy to let Wade interrupt so they can get on with the job.

Hey it's Londo! He skipped the last three episodes but he's finally back. G'Kar only missed two episodes, but he spent the time well as he's managed to find himself a brown eye to replace the blue eye he was given in Atonement. It's still not a match for his natural red colour, but he's getting closer.

G'Kar clearly wasn't expecting Londo to be here, but Sheridan needs them both for this. He tells them about the raids on commercial transports and how the Drakh are involved. Londo recognises the name, telling him they're bad news but they haven't seen for centuries. Unfortunately they're back and they're armed with Shadow tech.

But Sheridan has a plan. The Rangers haven't got a job to do anymore now that the Shadows are gone for good, so he wants to give them a new mission: to patrol the borders and stop piracy. And he wants to start with the border between their worlds.

Londo's obviously against it, because the Centauri are powerful enough to handle it themselves and don't want to show weakness, and G'Kar's not keen either. But Sheridan needs an example to encourage the League races to sign up, and if the Narn and Centauri both agree to it then they're going to have to give it serious consideration.

So is G'Kar still an ambassador then, or what? Do the Narn even have a government for him to represent? The series hasn't just been vague about his current position, they've said absolutely nothing. Plus do they even have a border between their two empires to patrol? Did the Centauri abandon all of the Narn worlds? I feel like we should know these things!

Sheridan's actually in the room with them by the way, he's not just a head on a TV screen. The room's lit so dim this season that he's almost disappeared into the darkness, but he is in there.

Meanwhile Zack's finally discovered that one of the incoming passengers has gone missing. The computer logged the unauthorised entry when it happened but didn't bother to alert anyone. It even knows that it was Garibaldi's ID that was used to open the door.

Zack orders the computer to cancel all his Identicards and the computer's happy to comply without even asking if he's sure or requesting a password from him. B5's computer don't give a fuck.

It seems that William Edgars, the richest man in the universe, was planning to go to a crappy bar in Down Below to collect a mysterious vial of mysterious liquid from this guy on the left. Whatever it is must be bloody important if he was willing to come here himself. It's at least important enough for it to be locked inside a clear molecular isoblock that's harder than diamond. They should make windows out of this stuff! Or maybe not, as anyone who knows the molecular code can get it open.

Garibaldi's not been himself this season, but he's still got concerns about what this liquid could be used for, or who it could be used on.

Lise tells him that the telepath gene might be mutating into a virus and this could help them stop it. I didn't know genes could turn into viruses, but then I'm not a geneticist. Garibaldi's satisfied by her answer at least, as there's nothing more plausible than an industrialist finding ways to get even richer off selling people what they need to live. Plus right now his attention has wandered to all the new people entering the bar.  

This is an interesting shot, as the stranger on the left comes over to accuse Wade of something or other, but the bartender's flipping bottles in the centre of the shot to pull your attention to the background. The stranger shoves Wade backwards and the camera zooms right in to another man in front of the bar, who pulls PPG and opens fire. If it was a well-coordinated attempt to let him take a clear shot at Lise or Garibaldi it utterly failed, but it looked good.
 

Garibaldi knocks the stranger out and gets a free PPG for his trouble. Now he's armed again!

But there's more of them waiting outside and the mysterious vial delivery man gets gunned down! It's lucky for the others he was in front really.

This is way better than the Down Below action scenes in earlier seasons, even though right now all they can do is run the other way and block the door with a convenient metal bar. I don't know who keeps leaving stuff like this lying around, but it's been a real help.

What isn't a help is Zack cancelling Garibaldi's ID so they can't get out through the next door. Wade and Lise both react by going 'aww' and turning their head, and they are so perfectly synchronised that it's hilarious.

Now they're trapped, stuck listening to the people outside blasting through the door.

ACT FOUR

Fortunately it turns out that Babylon 5 has those cinematic air vents that are big enough for someone to crawl through. So the actors stack some empty boxes up and climb up onto them. I hope they had some mats hidden just off screen in case they toppled over, because Wade actually topples them over as he's climbing up and it didn't seem to take much effort.

Then it's Jerry Doyle's turn to do a stunt as he leaps up from the floor without the boxes and manages to pull himself up into the hole.

It's taken four years but Garibaldi has finally gone full John McClane. It's funny though how the vents have the same texture as every other wall on the station.

Garibaldi sends the others ahead while he waits at the hole to ambush their pursuers.

PPGs are designed not to burn through the hull, but it seems they can get through thick metal doors just fine. This effect looks kind of terrible though and I think I know why that is. There's all these bits of molten metal going everywhere but it's not lighting up the room so it looks obviously superimposed.

The door looks convincingly heavy when it falls to the ground though.

One of their pursuers climbs up into the vent and he and Garibaldi have a bit of a stand off, until he gets bored and leaves. But Garibaldi realises what he's about to do and races down the vent to warn the others that they're about to start shooting the vent up from underneath!

He saves them in time and then makes Lise start repeating 'Docking Bay 3' in her mind, so she knows where they're going to meet in case they get separated.

Garibaldi kicks a vent cover open and drops through it, then catches Lise and helps her down (no help for poor Wade). Though what I should actually say is that Jerry Doyle dropped down and caught Denise Gentile, because the actors are still doing their own stunts here.

They're in the clear now, because Garibaldi worked out that the guy must have been a telepath, and had a terrified Lise repeat 'Docking Bay 3' in her brain so loud it drowned out the true plan he had in mind (not that they could've read him again without line of sight). He is actually going to Bay 3 though, he's just going there alone. With security.

First he has to say goodbye to the love of his life, who he may never see again. Fortunately it doesn't take him long and then he's back on the move.

There's a brief clip of Ivanova's shuttle taking off from Epsilon III and then the episode cuts to the zero-G docking bay at the top of the station for some reason. It's not Docking Bay 3, so I don't know why the camera's suddenly so interested in it. They can't even film scenes up in this part of the station, there's no gravity!

Inside Docking Bay 3, the two telepaths are ambushed by Zack's team. But they munch on a poison tooth and die! All they were able to get out of them was "To the future." which is entirely useless, and their line delivery wasn't all that impressive either.

Garibaldi runs in with his gun drawn, like an idiot, but fortunately no one shoots him. They don't confiscate his illegal weapon either, so I guess he gets to keep it!

Another interesting angle of a ship docking, this time the camera's pointed straight down the station. Doesn't really sound all that interesting, but I haven't seen it a hundred times already so it's different enough for me.

It looks like Sheridan still hasn't found the light switch for his office, but right now he's more preoccupied with chewing out Garibaldi. Sheridan wants to know why there's three dead bodies on his station, but Garibaldi claims not to know anything about it. He doesn't know why they were coming after them at least.

Now it's Garibaldi's turn to be angry. He tells them that he could've handled this a lot better if they hadn't cancelled his Identicard and taken away his gun, and he seems to be genuinely pissed off about it! Plus they brought him here to try to blame him for something even though he hasn't broken any laws.

So Sheridan lists the laws he's broken, including trespassing and using an unauthorised Identicard, but Garibaldi feels that they hardly count! They can fine him, whatever!

I keep waiting for the act break, seeing as we're still in act four and quickly running out of story, but it's still going. Garibaldi feels much the same way about his day, but before he goes to bed he has to check on the message he's come home to. It's from Lise... and he deletes it.

And that's the end of act four.

ACT FIVE

But we're still in the same room when act five starts!

It must be a few days later though as he gets a call from Alfred Pennyworth telling him that Lise has arrived home. He claims to be William Edgars, but I've seen Batman: The Animated Series, I recognise that voice. It's Efrem Zimbalist Jr. continuing Babylon 5's tradition of great actor names (and his voice is pretty good too).

He just called to let Garibaldi know that he's heard what he did, and he's awesome. In fact he'd like to hire him, though it will mean he has to come back to Mars. Garibaldi's close to wearing out his welcome on the station entirely, so Mars doesn't actually sound all that bad to him right now.

Just then the episode is interrupted by the bottom three-quarters of a test card, featuring a fairly unhappy looking Ivanova. Which is fitting as she hates reading the news.

But she just had to come on and tell everyone that they've been listening to propaganda and lies long enough, and now the truth is back in business.

Personally I think they should've gotten the Rangers to pull a daring raid on Earth to break ISN's Jane out of prison, or wherever Clark put her, and then get her behind a news desk again. People know Jane, they'll trust her!


CONCLUSION

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Conflicts of Interest is first Garibaldi episode in a while, and also the best in a while (better than Grey 17 is Missing, that much I'm sure of.) It helps that he's in a more interesting situation now than he was back in the third season, as he's not the local security chief on a series that's increasingly focused on the bigger picture. On the other hand, he's also clearly not quite right in the head after his stay in a Psi Corps facility and that makes it a bit harder to portray him as the heroic protagonist.

They had an opportunity here to have an episode entirely from Garibaldi's perspective, with Sheridan behaving like the unreasonable power-mad jerk he sees him as, but they didn't do that. Instead jms chose the arguably more challenging approach of making them both the hero of their own plots, yet antagonists to each other. Well, Sheridan doesn't have a plot exactly, but he does have a scene where he tries to talk G'Kar and Londo into doing the right thing to help save lives, and it really seemed like it was going to turn into a plot at the time. Meanwhile Garibaldi finally got to go full John McClane at last, with no help from Sheridan and the traitor Zack, who took his badge and gun and nearly got him killed! The episode really works hard to make Garibaldi sympathetic despite the fact that he's the one being unreasonable, and there's no reminders of his brainwashing this time.

It helps that he's more like his old self when he's away doing his own thing, especially when he's dealing with Lise. I thought the scenes between them worked surprisingly well for soap opera relationship drama, even the ones where they're on the run with Wade. For once the inadvertent humour came from the actors, not the action, and now I want to see the three of them team up again. The ending's a good sign, as it promises that Garibaldi's eventually going to join them on Mars. Next time though they should probably warn him about what he's going to be dealing with, as it's a bit risky to leave him in the dark to test what he can do when he's the one responsible for keeping them both alive!

The episode also features an Ivanova storyline, which defies storytelling convention by having its protagonist receive the solution to her problem about a minute into the first scene. Then Claudia Christian got to sit back and let a CGI shuttle take over for the rest of act one. In act two she shared a long unbroken take with Zathras' brother Zathras, where he assured her there'd be absolutely nothing that would complicate the implementation of this solution, and then it was back to CGI shuttle shots until the ending. A whole 1/8th of her 8 minute subplot was unnecessary stock VFX shots, so I have to assume the episode was running short and they had to pad it out a bit. It's a bit of a shame they didn't give her anything to overcome as it makes the first broadcast of the new Voice of the Resistance feel a bit unearned. There were no conflicts here, interesting or otherwise; she was mostly just exasperated with things.

Overall I thought the episode was pretty good. It's not B5 at its very best, but it's just as solid as the episodes surrounding it and it moved the story forward without making me impatient for arcs to actually go somewhere. Delenn's issues took the week off, but Ivanova's got the Voice of the Resistance running, Sheridan has a plan to deal with the pirates attacking civilian transports, and Garibaldi managed to impress one of the richest men in the galaxy. The Shadow War's a memory at this point and the issues with Earth barely get a mention here, but this is far from filler.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, Babylon 5 continues with Rumors, Bargains and Lies, the first of two episodes this season to feature a comma in the title.

Okay, its your turn now. There's a box down there and you can write whatever you thought about the episode in it.