Babylon 5 4-18: Intersections in Real Time

Episode:

84

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Writer:

J. Michael Straczynski

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Director:

John Lafia

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Air Date:

16-Jun-1997

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That's a nice looking title image up there I reckon, with a good render of the station. Shame it's a complete fiction. The actual screencap was bit too spoilery to be displayed on the front page of my site where anyone could see it, so I decided that bending the truth a little by Photoshopping my own one would be thematically appropriate for this story.

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Babylon 5's Intersections in Real Time, perhaps the only episode of television to get its name from its own commercial breaks. Well not the act breaks specifically, but the way the episode is sliced up by them to form blocks of story that we intersect with. The 'real time' part of the title is perhaps more self evident:

This is episode 84 of Babylon 5, which doesn't seem like a milestone at first glance, but the 60s Lost in Space series only managed 83 episodes during its three season run. Which means that if you'd made a list of the longest running US space opera TV series of all time at this point in 1997 it would've looked something like this:

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation (176 episodes)
2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (122 episodes)
3. Babylon 5 (84 episodes)
4. Lost in Space (83 episodes)
5. Star Trek (79 episodes)
6. Star Trek: Voyager (67 episodes)
7. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (37 episodes)
8. Battlestar Galactica (24 episodes)
9. Space: Above and Beyond (23 episodes)
10. Galactica 1980 (10 episodes)

Third place!

Non-Star Trek US space sci-fi had much more success afterwards, with series like Andromeda (110 episodes) and Battlestar Galactica 2004 (76). But seeing as only Stargate SG-1 (214), Deep Space Nine (176), and Voyager (172) have beaten Babylon 5's final score since, the series is still top 5 to this day!

SPOILER WARNING: I won't spoil anything that happens after this story, but everything else is fair game.

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Many episodes of Babylon 5 begin with a shot of the station. This one begins with a drain.

Babylon 5 never shot on location, they built all of their own sets, so this floor and this drain were created just for this episode. Well, unless they just filmed it on the bare studio floor. The important thing is there's a grey concrete floor inside a miserable dark cell that's similar to, but not the same as, the one we glimpsed last episode, and Captain John Sheridan is currently lying on it.

The episode provides us with a few black and white flashbacks to the last episode to establish why he's there, with Garibaldi telling him he needs his help to rescue his dad, Ivanova telling him that it's a set up, and Garibaldi revealing that it was in fact a set up. There's no other main cast members in the present day though, only the people bringing in a table and some chairs.

This isn't Sheridan's first time in captivity, he's been held prisoner on a Streib ship and in a cell on Centauri Prime, but this time it's far worse; this time the humans have got him.

Seems like the chairs are there for later as the interrogator's getting straight to business. There's one thing in particular he wants to know: whether Sheridan has any allergies, illnesses, heart problems that require medication etc.

Sheridan feels disinclined to respond and the interrogator doesn't like that at all. Cooperation will be rewarded, resistance punished. Sheridan quickly learns that getting too close to the interrogator also leads to punishment, as they've sneakily fitted him with some Narn paingivers. Hey, I remember them from season one's Parliament of Dreams! Though Sheridan's actually fortunate here as the ones in that episode straight up killed you if you got within 5 feet of the person holding the remote. Plus they were kind of bulky compared to his tiny metal bracelets.

The interrogator carries on with his well-practised introduction speech until Sheridan finally says his first line, asking him why he's here. He replies that he's here to ensure his cooperation through any means appropriate. Though he's got a little button on his table to call in the guards so he doesn't need Sheridan's cooperation to get him sitting in that chair.

Oh no it's one of those chairs with CGI restraints that slam closed around your arms and legs!

The effect's not entirely convincing, I think it might be that the shadow's too low on his sleeve and not dark enough, but they did go to the trouble of making the highlights match the metal paingiver bracelet he's wearing.

Now that Sheridan's sitting uncomfortably, the interrogator repeats his first question, about the allergies and etc. This time Sheridan growls "No", which sounds a lot like defiance, but is a lot closer to cooperation than what he was doing a minute ago. So they're making progress!

Then the regular title sequence comes on with spaceships exploding and clips of all the people who aren't in this episode. In fact Zack's pretty much disappeared from the season at this point.

Babylon 5's broken format a little before, like in And Now for a Word where the whole episode was presented as an ISN special report, but it hasn't quite gone as far has having an alternative opening yet. Not that anyone would've have expected them to. Star Trek and Doctor Who have both had special opening sequences on a couple of occasions, but they did it well after B5 had finished so I can't say B5's letting anyone down here. Still, I feel like it might have worked better if we hadn't been given this brief escape from the cell.

INTERSECTION ONE

There's the proper title for you.

Act one begins with Sheridan alone again, with two bright lights aimed at his face, presumably to annoy him. But his new friend soon returns and removes them.

The interrogator wishes him a 'good morning', but Sheridan's onto him and tells him that it's not morning. He saw daylight through the door earlier and there's no daylight now, therefore it's a different time of day. Either that or they have some kind of 'curtain' technology to cover the windows.

So the interrogator uses his remote to make it daylight outside again.

Oops, Sheridan should've realised that a place like this has its sinister lighting built in. But the interrogator decides to leave the light on if that's all it takes to make Sheridan believe it's morning, and again wishes him a 'good morning'.

The door slams shut, sealing them in, and the interrogator starts getting stuff out of his briefcase. But he forgot his glasses so he casually strolls out again to get them. Is he deliberately tormenting Sheridan by flaunting his freedom and leaving him alone with an open door for a moment? It's a mystery.

But he's unambiguously trying to torment Sheridan when he presses the button on his desk to inflict agony with the paingivers. Parliament of Dreams had a fairly decent looking electricity effect on its paingivers, but here they're just going with a sound effect and Bruce Boxleitner's acting and I think that was the right choice. Even the most subtle effect would've made this a little cheesy, and Boxleitner sells it just fine.

The punishment was for contradicting him by the way. The only truth permitted in this room is his truth.

The interrogator looks through his diary and his folders for a moment, then checks his watch. It's now lunchtime! I suppose it could've been 11:58 am when he walked in the room, it doesn't necessarily contradict anything.

He can't take a lunch break though as he's very busy looking through his stack of files. In fact he's noticed something interesting here. Seems that Sheridan never showed an interest in politics, which makes it seem very unlikely that he'd try to overthrow his own government... unless he's been under the influence of other people.

Sheridan denies it, succinctly, but the interrogator's got him in a trap here. He points out that everyone's influenced by other people in some way and to deny being influenced indicates that he's become removed from other people.

If the interrogator's been trying to bait Sheridan into a discussion he's failed so far, but he has something far more tempting for him: a corned beef sandwich with mustard. Even if it's been wrapped up in a bag for a few hours it's still the best meal that Sheridan's seen for a long while. The interrogator says they haven't fed him in two days, and Sheridan can be absolutely sure about the 'haven't fed him' part of that claim at least.

But he can only have a sandwich if he'll admit that it's lunchtime and disregard the previous truth that it's morning. Sheridan says he's sure it's lunchtime somewhere... and the interrogator lets him get away with it, freeing his hands from the restraints so that he doesn't have to feed it to him himself.

Sheridan hesitates for a moment, but when the interrogator points out that he ate half of it right in front of him and they obviously don't want to kill him, he digs right in.

This was a mistake.

It gives the interrogator a chance to demonstrate his point that the truth is fluid and you can choose to believe differently. Also the mustard was a bit weak. And it's poisoned.

It's supper time now so the interrogator has to go, but he explains to Sheridan that if you take a bit of poison every day you become desensitised to it. He can't decide what that's a metaphor for (possibly all the toxic ideology he had to swallow to get this role he's playing I imagine), but he's sure he wants to be out of the room before the sandwich takes effect. Seems they're going to be making use of that drain in the floor very soon.

INTERSECTION TWO

Act two begins the next 'morning', after the cleaners have finished with the place, and the interrogator reveals that the sandwich was just part of the process. They have to break him physically first. Though he does have a nice glass of fizzy liquid for him to drink, which gets lots of close ups. Sheridan's as fascinated by it as the camera is, but isn't in a trusting mood at the moment. The interrogator is a bit frustrated by his reluctance as he's telling him that it's safe and he hasn't lied to him at all so far. Well, aside from when he said it was morning, lunchtime and supper time in the space of 10 minutes, but he's not going to mention that.

He does mention that he's the one ally he has, which kind of seems like a lie as well. We'll see if he heroically breaks him out before the end.

Anyway, today the interrogator's here to do a bit of bookkeeping, filling in a few gaps in Sheridan's file. He doesn't want him to reveal his master plan or the technical specifications of his ships or anything like that, he just wants to know whether his second in command was called Susan Ivanova. Well he doesn't want anything, but his superiors don't like blank spaces in their records.

Though he does choose to slam the leg restraints back on the moment that Sheridan sits down. Which gives us a nice close up of his control panel.

Oh, plus he's got news about Sheridan's dad! He's been held in another facility and he's alive. Sheridan wonders why he's telling him this, the interrogator says 'Why not?' It doesn't go against his orders so he figured he'd give him the news.

He also lets Sheridan know that they'll only be holding his dad for as long as they're holding him, so really they're all waiting on him now.

Alright, the next step of the process is... hang on, where did that food wrapper come from on the table? I don't remember him having a second sandwich. In fact the everything on the table looks exactly like it did in act one, in the exact same positions. This interrogation's starting to make me lose track of reality as well.

Anyway, there's a nice callback to Comes the Inquisitor here as the interrogator notes that Sheridan's been interrogated before and asks if it's anyone he knows (Sheridan doesn't mention it was Jack the Ripper). The interrogator says it's strange then that he doesn't know the rules, then pulls out a pile of papers and explains that the next step of the process is for him to sign this document confessing to his many crimes.

The interrogator reads a few of them out for us and the two characters get louder and louder as Sheridan claims they're lies and the guy just keeps reading. He can be a very shouty interrogator. Turns out that there were 547 officers on that ship they blew up in Severed Dreams by the way.

But just signing the document isn't going to be enough as Sheridan's going to have to read his confession aloud in front of the public as well. He'll also have to name accomplices, apologise for his actions, and blame alien influences, exactly like tri-vid writer/producer Lee Parks did live on ISN in The Illusion of Truth. So I guess now we know what they put the guy through to obtain that admission.

Sheridan demands an attorney and a military tribunal but all he receives is more shouting as the interrogator lists the things that he's not going to get (a courtroom, a tribunal, an attorney, justice, mercy, fairness, hope, and a last minute escape). And then the interrogator storms out.

Incidentally they've got a guard standing outside the door, but he's behind the wall so you can't see him. You can only barely see the edge of his uniform through the gap in the door. I though that was a nice subtle touch in a series that isn't usually known for its subtlety.

INTERSECTION THREE

Like most acts, act three begins with the interrogator entering the room and saying 'good morning'. Then he goes back out again and comes back with a Drazi prisoner. They've added a third character to the story!

The Drazi is played by Wayne Alexander, who played Lorien earlier in the season and Jack the Ripper in Comes the Inquisitor. So I guess he was someone the interrogator knew after all!

The interrogator tells the Drazi to repeat his confession, so he does, saying that he was one of the aliens who manipulated Sheridan to turn against his own government. Well I'm glad they finally caught the guy who's been influencing everyone!

This is meant to be an example to Sheridan of how this process works. The guy confesses, then they let him out of the cell! Presumably along with any family members they're using as leverage.

The Drazi also names Susan Ivanova, Delenn and Senator Ross Fowler. The interrogate notices Sheridan's confusion at that last name and clarifies that President Clark doesn't like the guy so he's killing two birds with one stone. Actually the saying he goes with is "waste not, want not" and I'm not sure that makes any sense here.

It's interesting how much information the interrogator is volunteering here, even though it confirms every bad thing Sheridan's ever suspected about Clark. It all helps support his claim that he never lies which makes it easier for Sheridan to disregard the times when he blatantly did. A bit of expert gaslighting.

That's real stubble that is. The actor had a bit of time to grow it before filming the episode.

Sheridan interrupts the Drazi because he's had enough. He hasn't said a lot this episode, because it's counterproductive to give ammo to your enemies, but he's not going to let this guy be broken by them. In All Alone in the Night he saved his alien cellmate with a metal bar, but here all he's got at his disposal are his words and Bruce Boxleitner's perhaps underappreciated acting range, so he decides to give a speech.

The interrogator tries to make Sheridan understand that this guy is his alibi, the only way he avoids the death penalty, but he's not interested in hearing it. Sheridan tells the Drazi that all he has to do is say "No I won't," one more time than they say "Yes you will," and that surrendering to them will make him expendable.

The Drazi tells the interrogator that he's done cooperating. Sheridan got through to him! Even though this was apparently the Drazi's very last chance.

So the guards come in to put him on a table and wheel him out to room 17, ignoring Sheridan's protestations. The interrogator also ignores his questions about what they're going to with him, but then there's some screaming and the lights dim for a bit, and it certainly seems obvious what happened. Someone just had a horrific accident while changing a bulb.

The interrogator explains to Sheridan that they're all expendable except for him, though that only lasts as long as his superiors' patience does.

He presses a button on the table to turn the radio on, tuned to the 'YOU WILL COOPERATE WITH THE STATE FOR THE GOOD OF THE STATE AND YOUR OWN SURVIVAL' station, and then walks out and leaves him for the night.

INTERSECTION FOUR

This episode has some great shots by the way.

The message is still playing on repeat when the interrogator returns, but Sheridan hasn't been alone all this time as someone must have come in to give him an IV drip.

In fact it seems possible that there's been a few days of off-screen visits since the last act, as the interrogator mentions that his lack of cooperation forced them to take him off solid food at some point, and if he continues this refusal to cooperate then he won't be receiving any more intravenous nutrition either. 

He shows him the confession again, the one he needs to sign, and this time we get to read it ourselves!

Well... almost. I spent ages trying to clear it up by blending multiple screencaps together but the image quality on the DVDs just isn't high enough. The HD remaster, on the other hand, has considerably more detail and if you click this screencap you'll get to see a nice high-resolution readable version instead!

You'll also see that there's no joke text there, it's all exactly what you'd expect it to say. I guess showrunner jms felt that he didn't have enough work already, despite writing 22 scripts this season in addition to his producer role, and decided to write a few hundred more words just as something to do.

The interrogator reminds Sheridan once again that he's the one doing this to himself and if he'd just sign the form and confess of his own free will then he'd get to go out the door. He straight up admits they'll assassinate him eventually, when he's been forgotten, but he will have some freedom before that point. They'll want to use him as a symbol of the truth: that you can't beat the system.

Sheridan looks up and he actually seems to cheer up a little. Is he really considering his offer? Is he really going to...

Nope he's just seen a vision of Delenn. Well that's a good sign! Sure he's hallucinating, but she got him through death at the start of the season so I'm sure she can get him through this as well. Plus there's no damn way he's going to give up while she's watching. She doesn't even say anything, she doesn't have to.

Sheridan spits on the confession and says 'no'. The interrogator says that what happens next is out of his hands and then walks out. Everything's out of his hands with that guy! Seems like Sheridan's the only one who can make choices for themselves here.

INTERSECTION FIVE

The interrogator's gotten urgent by the start of act five, as he strides inside and wakes Sheridan up. He explains that his credibility as a war hero has become a threat to their credibility and they can't have that. But what they can do, is fake a confession. They can even create a faked video of him reading the confession no trouble (we could do it right now with 2021 technology in fact). Obviously having him outside where people can see him, even scan him telepathically, would be ideal, but sometimes you've got to compromise.

He's really laying on the concern, saying he can save Sheridan's life if he'll let him. But Sheridan has given it some thought and he really likes the idea of updating the current truth by proving that you can beat the system. As far as he's concerned he wins every time he says 'no'. And so he does.

The guards come in with a gurney and strap Sheridan down onto it. Then they take him down the same corridors the Drazi went down, to room 17. They're pretty distinctive hallways for B5, with some very realistic pipes, and they even have a ceiling, so I'm wondering if they actually filmed this outside of their sets for this. Maybe in some other part of the former hot tub factory they used for their stages.

Anyway, someone seems to be saying last rites, so that's generally not a good sign.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though, and Delenn's waiting for him there.

Sadly it's not the real Delenn, but a last minute rescue would be really nice about now, seeing as we're pretty much at the last minute.

Comes the Inquisitor foreshadowed that Sheridan and Delenn might one day be called upon to sacrifice themselves in some dark isolated place with no one ever knowing about it. And that's exactly what's happened. Well, actually Delenn cheated by sacrificing herself on live TV in front of everyone on Minbar, but Sheridan did it properly by nuking himself on Z'ha'dum. They both survived however so now he gets to do it again!

Sheridan finds himself lying in a room with what seems to be his executioner, standing next to what seems to be an electric chair. The executioner adjusts one of his leather gloves, takes a step forward... and heads right out of the door.

Then the guards come back again, this time to get him off the gurney and onto the chair.

Turns out that when you take the cloth off it, the gurney looks a lot like that table he's been staring at for the last few days. The chair's kind of familiar as well. And I'm sure I've seen that executioner somewhere before as well.

The executioner... can take the form of the people he's killed? That's one hell of a twist.

Turns out that the Drazi prisoner was just an actor hired to screw with him and his execution was as easily faked as the time of day was: they just dimmed the lights a bit.

A new interrogator arrives and begins the script over again from the start, saying "Good morning" and asking if he has any allergies. Hopefully Sheridan doesn't accept the sandwich this time.

The horror of the situation is that they can just keep sending in new people. He can keep winning every time but the prize is more suffering. But he hasn't lost an eye yet so he's still doing better than G'Kar did.

If Babylon 5 had gone according to plan, this would've been the season four finale, with the first few episodes of season five wrapping up the current arc in a similar way to how the Shadow War was wrapped up in six eps at the beginning of this season. But it seemed certain that the series would be cancelled (due to its network disappearing), so jms did the sensible thing and accelerated the plot a bit to fit it all in before the end of season four. And then they got a fifth season after all.

But the scheduling actually worked out in jms's favour for once, for the original US broadcast anyway, as the series took a break here, making this episode into a cliffhanger after all! In fact people had to wait almost four months to see what happened next. UK fans, on the other hand, got the whole season in one uninterrupted block... starting a month after this episode aired in the US.


CONCLUSION

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I've been kind of dreading writing about Intersections in Real Time as it's not the kind of thing you can summarise easily without skipping over all of the actual content. The dialogue is basically a scripted brainwashing program, the interrogators aren't characters, they're performers, and it's as much about the process as it is about Sheridan's resistance.

On paper it maybe doesn't come across as the most entertaining premise for 40 minutes of television. There's nothing wrong with putting two capable actors in a room together with an intelligent script, but here the guest star gets almost all the lines and half of them are just "C'mon, will you confess already?" It's also kind of bleak, with the way the hero is trapped in a cell, poisoned, electrocuted, and tortured with lights in his face and "YOU MUST CONFESS" FM playing all hours of the night, and the very best he can hope to achieve is to prolong the torment.

But it worked for me, and from the review scores I've found it doesn't seem like I'm in the minority on this one. It's maybe not my favourite of the season, there's only so far you can get without Londo, G'Kar and explosions, but it's top five for sure. Plus it must have saved them a ton of money.

There's a number of reasons it works, but I think one of the main ones is the furniture. Seriously, all you get in this episode is the actors, a table and two chairs, and there's nothing going on to draw attention from them. It takes place in a dark, featureless room and it's the most monochrome episode of colour TV I've seen since the last time I watched Star Trek: Enterprise. So if those chairs had looked like they'd been borrowed from the mess hall set they would've been a distraction.

Instead they're interesting without stealing focus. Sheridan's chair looks like it came in the same set as the interrogator's seat, but it's missing the padding and has convenient attachments for torture lights and an IV drip. The table is an unusual and functional design, but it's function isn't revealed until the very end when we see you can fold it out to wheel prisoners around on it. Why would you even do that? To fuck with people, that's why.

I thought the episode went a tiny bit too far with the reveal of the Drazi as the executioner at the end though. Revealing him to be acting is fine, but having him standing there behind interrogator #2 comes off as goofy. I might even say it's too obviously inspired by The Prisoner... if I'd ever seen the series and I knew what I was talking about. But the rest of the mind games were as fascinating as the furniture (in a good way). It's not generally a good idea to give an episode over to a guest star I've noticed, but Raye Birk absolutely nails his role. He's exactly as theatrical as he needs to be without going full ham, despite the fact this is basically a stage play. Even more so than usual for the series I mean.

Not only is the episode owned by a guest star, but it's also set entirely within his domain, with no shots of Babylon 5 outside of the opening titles. That's never happened before.

Okay there's the tiniest glimpse of the station behind Ivanova's shoulder in a flashback but otherwise there's nothing familiar for us to latch onto here besides Sheridan. The claustrophobic setting and total focus is a big part of why the episode works so well, and jms knew it, that's why he was kicking himself at the time for writing an extra scene featuring other characters doing stuff elsewhere. Fortunately the episode was apparently running something like 7 or 8 minutes long, and the next episode was 7 or 8 minutes short, so he was able strip it down to just the Sheridan scenes and save it. That means this ended up being the first episode of the series to be missing new footage from both Ivanova and Garibaldi. Though it does have a tiny bit of hallucination Delenn.

It's a bit weird that they never bring in a telepath to scan Sheridan for his intel, but I suppose the last episode established that there's health risks involved. In fact they don't even ask him for any real information, they just give him a few relatively innocuous easy questions to let him practice complying. I think the reason for this is that at this stage they don't want him to tell them his facts, they want him to believe their facts. Plus it's a lot easier for a man like Sheridan to sign a confession to save his dad than it is for him to betray his cause to save himself, so they're taking small steps. A little bit of poison every day, until he becomes desensitised.

Anyway, it's a damn fine episode and a really cruel place for a series to take a break. Oh that reminds me, I'll be giving Babylon 5 a rest next week and writing about something else instead...

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NEXT WEEK

Babylon 5 will return with Between the Darkness and the Light, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'll be reviewing Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1!

Thanks for reading, by the way. I don't think there's quite enough words here yet though, so if you could leave some thoughts and observations in the box below that'd be a big help.