B5rewatch: Grail
So I’ve been on vacation for the past week so as you can see I didn’t post anything, I did get a couple of reviews done so maybe I can stave off another large gap for a while. Last time we covered TKO, an episode I do not care for; now we have Grail, another episode I don’t particularly care for.
1x15: Grail
I do actually prefer this to some of the other episodes on the ‘bad’ shelf of episodes, but it definitely deserves to be on that rung of the ranking. I may illogically defend Infection, but that doesn’t make it all that good; I may find this episode better than some, but that doesn’t make it good either.
The promo is...kind of weird. On one hand, someone must have known how silly the Holy Grail plot would sound so made the promo all about the Feeder, and I’m going to have mixed feelings about that as I don’t like misrepresenting the episode but I do understand why the choice was made here. On the other hand, nothing about the promo is engaging at all, because the Feeder plot is mostly so damn bland. It might have helped if they had played up the Kosh impersonation angle (in the episode too for that matter) rather than just presenting it as a creature feature episode; those have never and will never work out very well for B5.
Why exactly did we need to see so much of the docking procedure? It would be one thing if this was going to lead to something important, but it’s not. This is another ‘weirdo comes to B5’ plot; I guess since this episode is going to be hijacked by a couple of randos, it’s kind of fitting that we burn airtime of the arrival of one.
This is all going to come to a head in one of the great the continuity flubs you’ll see on this show (which I have things to say about), but already Delenn and to a lesser extent Lennier seem a bit or a lot OOC. I think Marx got the interpretation of the Minbari as space-elves a little too lodged in her writing of them. On a writing level I partially blame production order, the script would have likely been commissioned before there was a lot to go on; but production wise there were good Minbari stories before this so the direction (wait...DEAR GOD, COMPTON AGAIN?!?!?) should have known the characters a little better than this by now (and this is Compton’s fifth episode out of the nine produced to this point, plus doing The Gathering, he really should have understood better).
Okay, that’s it, I’m not even going to start to blame Mira for not speaking up or giving a more in character performance here, clearly Compton just had no idea what was going on in this show...how many more episodes of this fool do I have to put up with? (Checks IMDB) Oh thank Valen, this is the last one. The director is usually the last person I give credit or blame too, I usually don’t even pay attention - as may be clear from me only noticing all of this after 20 years - but in this case, I’ve had enough.
The fill-in scene in the court room though, does till get a chuckle or two out of me.
Look, I never like this episode that much and now I’ve realized the Compton thing so it’s making it worse this time around, but also Franke’s music seems a little over-zealous this ep.
Also, as noted a couple episodes ago, we really hadn’t had any Sinclair-Delenn interaction since ATSFOS. Realistically, they have to be interacting off screen, at least in official capacities, but since we haven’t seen it and we know they haven’t done anything about what was revealed there it seems like there should have been more layers to their interactions now that I’m not really seeing in them.
In the vein of ‘this might have been more forgivable earlier in the season’ I take issue with Franklin saying they’re going to have to retrain Ms. Runningdeer from infancy. Technically speaking they still haven’t introduced the mindwipe system, and what was done to her does seems more extensive than that; but after S&P I start expecting the universe to feel closer to its final form and this isn’t. In a world where both the mindwipe (and connected reprogramming) technology and telepaths exist I think they have a few more options than just sending her off to retrained like a child.
In a lot of ways, this entire episode’s point seems to be to get out the exposition about the previous Babylon stations (or maybe I just feel that way because it’s the only important thing in the episode, whether or not it was supposed to be). So that exposition-tastic scene seems to have big flashing arrows on it as Important. But I’m also not sure Jinxo would have gotten that nickname from that story, because he’s clearly not the jinx, the problem is him leaving. That, or he ought to be under suspicion of being involved with the various sabotages.
In spite of my feelings towards my nemesis Compton, I think I’m still going to blame the writing (at least mostly) for the awkwardness of Londo’s scene in the casino. The dialog just doesn’t work naturally. Maybe a better director could have brought it up to passable instead of super awkward, but it was still wasn’t going to sound like a real conversation.
Okay, so here’s the continuity flub we all try and forget; and I’ll come back to that because I’ve got a big point from that bit. But I do have other things to say about that scene in the moment. For one, everyone is staring straight into the camera really awkwardly. For two, I enjoy thinking about Delenn sitting there going ‘lalalala, let’s not think about which Religious Caste member might have agreed with the Warriors about the War.’
The scene where they talk to Londo and Vir though is decent and does not contain massive continuity errors. Not the most nuanced understanding of the characters mind you and the music goes super wacky, but it’s okay.
I’ve thought this throughout the episode, and no doubt could some more, but Aldous’ big speech scene seems a good time to say that I know Warner is trying, I can see him trying to save his scenes, but between the script and the Compton factor it’s still not really selling it.
Also, while this episode is very explicit in its Sinclair as Seeker relevance, considering Aldous’ story it’s really more relevant to Sheridan. A man with a good job and a loving home life, tragically loses that family, finds it hard to adapt to life without them, given a new mission from a strange outsider; a man in search of a cause, futile though that cause may be. Sinclair is a man searching for answers yes, and dedicated to larger goals certainly but the specifics are not as near a match as they are for Sheridan; and Sheridan is at the start of the journey Aldous talks about, so that’s where my thoughts go.
...Did Kosh agree to meet with Aldous or are they just dropping in? Because I kind of don’t think either option works. Also, not going to check with the Narn? The League world reps? The occasional completely non-aligned groups that pop up on station? Brother Theo’s order would be ashamed of your shoddy investigation, Aldous.
There actually is something in the idea of the fake Kosh, it just isn’t explored very well. The Vorlons are virtually unknown especially to the humans at this point, they’re incredibly powerful and explicitly mysterious. This could have been a way to give us a lot of insight into how the Vorlons are perceived by people not in the inner circle, when even the inner circle doesn’t know what the Vorlons are up to most of the time.
It also makes me consider that the encounter suits the Vorlons use may not be a Vorlon creation, they could get them from somewhere else thus explaining why the one the na’ka’leen is in looks so similar. It would be a further way to hide their identities if the way the younger races see them (in their encounter suits) isn’t even something they would design for themselves.
Shows yet again how little I usually pay attention during this episode that I’m only now noticing that the shot Aldous takes is clearly to the bicep and should not be life threatening (Deuce gets basically the same wound and he just runs off). Considering the pacing of that bit doesn’t work (it’s way too slow, I would bet money it was scripted as him jumping in front of Jinxo or at the last second pushing him out of the way rather than the shown ‘hey Thomas get down, now I’m going to stand here waiting to get shot in the arm’) I’m putting another mark in the anti-Compton tally (I have no idea how many that makes, but a lot I think).
But for all that, it does close on one of the most enduring Ivanova lines. Considering she had basically nothing to do all episode, at least she gets that much.
Part of the problem with this episode, as mentioned earlier, is that Aldous and Jinxo basically take over the episode and it isn’t a welcome take over either. They’re not particularly interesting characters, it doesn’t offer a fresh perspective on the B5 universe, and it’s not a good story. The na’ka’leen part could have been done better as a Garibaldi story, but I’m not sure how to save the Grail quest part - not that we would have lost anything if it wasn’t there. And for the record, I like ‘View From the Gallery,’ but this doesn’t work the same way. With the exception of the scenes involving Delenn, we’re not really given any insight from a new perspective, and even that’s nothing we couldn’t have been given by other means.
Anyway, I guess it’s a good time to buckle down to talk about the Minbari. This actually does feel like a Minbari heavy episode, even though the episode is really not about them. Possibly because Aldous is giving a very Minbari-esque performance, and naturally because they do take the time to exposit about Minbari culture a lot (relatively speaking). And it feels like exposition just being dumped on us carelessly; and while the philosophy does track with Minbari culture (...sort of...if you squint a little), even that is let down by the great continuity flub.
Which finally brings us to the one thing I have deep thoughts about in this episode, and it’s a really perplexing thing. Because what it proves to me is that JMS hadn’t fully fleshed out the Minbari culture at this point and that’s weird to me. I know he didn’t like rewriting others’ scripts, but this shouldn’t have happened.
It shouldn’t have even been written that way to start with, if the guest writer wants to explore Minbari culture, they should be given information on Minbari culture. And the line does get the relationship between the Religious and Warrior Castes right, and how that was important in the EMW; but to ignore the Workers so completely says to me that they weren’t included in the Minbari Cliff Notes.
Beyond that, JMS had to have at least gone over the script before shooting (since I think he wrote the alien abduction trial scene) and even if he was unwilling to demand a rewrite or do it himself it could have been...not fixed, but improved by saying here that Minbari have two dominant castes and then papered over the flub himself in a later script. One word and it could at least be hammered to fit future canon.
Now, that shape would be problematic, as it would then be Lennier dismissing the Workers (and Delenn not correcting him), but I could make it work. Lennier’s still only recently out in the larger world so forgets about the Workers; and Delenn doesn’t want to tell these strangers the complexities of Minbari politics when it doesn’t concern them. It could have actually been foreshadowing of how even our mostly good hearted Minbari heroes kind of dismiss the Workers as not a significant force in Minbari culture and set up Delenn figuring out over the years that that’s not the way it should be.
But chiefly, it makes me realize something; the Workers aren’t mentioned at all in season 1. Minbari society is presented as being divided between the Religious and the Warriors and this is just the one time it’s said in so many words so it becomes a spoken continuity problem instead of one that is sort of there in the implication.
So what this makes me think is that maybe they didn’t exist in JMS’ head during s1; that that’s a retcon come s2 (just that this is the only scene that explicitly shows it was a retcon instead of being able to claim it was always intended to exist in the later form). And what I realize then, is that that makes sense given the original plan for the show and the changes come s2.
The plan was (as I understand it) always to have the destinies of the Minbari and humans linked, symbolized ultimately by the union of Delenn and Sinclair, the Religious and the Warrior. By that same logic, those are the two forces already present in Minbari society; most likely also to be brought together by the war that is to come (brought together for good rather than bad). But the departure of Sinclair/O’Hare threw a cog into that setup; now instead of two leading voices, there were three, and JMS was able to retcon that there were three main castes in Minbari society too, thus giving us how everything is about threes for the Minbari, and leaving this one line to stick out as wrong.
But it’s not the only one. Early on the Grey Council was presented as a Religious council, presumably with the Warrior hierarchy on the other side, and not with a specific number of members. But by late in the season JMS knew that at the minimum he needed to take some of the pressure off O’Hare (and Sinclair the character), if not - as it turned out - him needing to leave entirely; so Minbari society started to show more of a base three structure around Sinclair, Delenn, and whatever third character he was going to need to bring in. The irony of this is that Sheridan is probably the least important to the Worker Caste of the three Ones, and yet on a meta level I’ve concluded that they exist because of Sheridan.
Is that quite enough babbling on one line that most (not really incorrectly) just dismiss as a continuity glitch? I think so, so let’s move on.
Next time: Eyes
1x15: Grail
I do actually prefer this to some of the other episodes on the ‘bad’ shelf of episodes, but it definitely deserves to be on that rung of the ranking. I may illogically defend Infection, but that doesn’t make it all that good; I may find this episode better than some, but that doesn’t make it good either.
The promo is...kind of weird. On one hand, someone must have known how silly the Holy Grail plot would sound so made the promo all about the Feeder, and I’m going to have mixed feelings about that as I don’t like misrepresenting the episode but I do understand why the choice was made here. On the other hand, nothing about the promo is engaging at all, because the Feeder plot is mostly so damn bland. It might have helped if they had played up the Kosh impersonation angle (in the episode too for that matter) rather than just presenting it as a creature feature episode; those have never and will never work out very well for B5.
Why exactly did we need to see so much of the docking procedure? It would be one thing if this was going to lead to something important, but it’s not. This is another ‘weirdo comes to B5’ plot; I guess since this episode is going to be hijacked by a couple of randos, it’s kind of fitting that we burn airtime of the arrival of one.
This is all going to come to a head in one of the great the continuity flubs you’ll see on this show (which I have things to say about), but already Delenn and to a lesser extent Lennier seem a bit or a lot OOC. I think Marx got the interpretation of the Minbari as space-elves a little too lodged in her writing of them. On a writing level I partially blame production order, the script would have likely been commissioned before there was a lot to go on; but production wise there were good Minbari stories before this so the direction (wait...DEAR GOD, COMPTON AGAIN?!?!?) should have known the characters a little better than this by now (and this is Compton’s fifth episode out of the nine produced to this point, plus doing The Gathering, he really should have understood better).
Okay, that’s it, I’m not even going to start to blame Mira for not speaking up or giving a more in character performance here, clearly Compton just had no idea what was going on in this show...how many more episodes of this fool do I have to put up with? (Checks IMDB) Oh thank Valen, this is the last one. The director is usually the last person I give credit or blame too, I usually don’t even pay attention - as may be clear from me only noticing all of this after 20 years - but in this case, I’ve had enough.
The fill-in scene in the court room though, does till get a chuckle or two out of me.
Look, I never like this episode that much and now I’ve realized the Compton thing so it’s making it worse this time around, but also Franke’s music seems a little over-zealous this ep.
Also, as noted a couple episodes ago, we really hadn’t had any Sinclair-Delenn interaction since ATSFOS. Realistically, they have to be interacting off screen, at least in official capacities, but since we haven’t seen it and we know they haven’t done anything about what was revealed there it seems like there should have been more layers to their interactions now that I’m not really seeing in them.
In the vein of ‘this might have been more forgivable earlier in the season’ I take issue with Franklin saying they’re going to have to retrain Ms. Runningdeer from infancy. Technically speaking they still haven’t introduced the mindwipe system, and what was done to her does seems more extensive than that; but after S&P I start expecting the universe to feel closer to its final form and this isn’t. In a world where both the mindwipe (and connected reprogramming) technology and telepaths exist I think they have a few more options than just sending her off to retrained like a child.
In a lot of ways, this entire episode’s point seems to be to get out the exposition about the previous Babylon stations (or maybe I just feel that way because it’s the only important thing in the episode, whether or not it was supposed to be). So that exposition-tastic scene seems to have big flashing arrows on it as Important. But I’m also not sure Jinxo would have gotten that nickname from that story, because he’s clearly not the jinx, the problem is him leaving. That, or he ought to be under suspicion of being involved with the various sabotages.
In spite of my feelings towards my nemesis Compton, I think I’m still going to blame the writing (at least mostly) for the awkwardness of Londo’s scene in the casino. The dialog just doesn’t work naturally. Maybe a better director could have brought it up to passable instead of super awkward, but it was still wasn’t going to sound like a real conversation.
Okay, so here’s the continuity flub we all try and forget; and I’ll come back to that because I’ve got a big point from that bit. But I do have other things to say about that scene in the moment. For one, everyone is staring straight into the camera really awkwardly. For two, I enjoy thinking about Delenn sitting there going ‘lalalala, let’s not think about which Religious Caste member might have agreed with the Warriors about the War.’
The scene where they talk to Londo and Vir though is decent and does not contain massive continuity errors. Not the most nuanced understanding of the characters mind you and the music goes super wacky, but it’s okay.
I’ve thought this throughout the episode, and no doubt could some more, but Aldous’ big speech scene seems a good time to say that I know Warner is trying, I can see him trying to save his scenes, but between the script and the Compton factor it’s still not really selling it.
Also, while this episode is very explicit in its Sinclair as Seeker relevance, considering Aldous’ story it’s really more relevant to Sheridan. A man with a good job and a loving home life, tragically loses that family, finds it hard to adapt to life without them, given a new mission from a strange outsider; a man in search of a cause, futile though that cause may be. Sinclair is a man searching for answers yes, and dedicated to larger goals certainly but the specifics are not as near a match as they are for Sheridan; and Sheridan is at the start of the journey Aldous talks about, so that’s where my thoughts go.
...Did Kosh agree to meet with Aldous or are they just dropping in? Because I kind of don’t think either option works. Also, not going to check with the Narn? The League world reps? The occasional completely non-aligned groups that pop up on station? Brother Theo’s order would be ashamed of your shoddy investigation, Aldous.
There actually is something in the idea of the fake Kosh, it just isn’t explored very well. The Vorlons are virtually unknown especially to the humans at this point, they’re incredibly powerful and explicitly mysterious. This could have been a way to give us a lot of insight into how the Vorlons are perceived by people not in the inner circle, when even the inner circle doesn’t know what the Vorlons are up to most of the time.
It also makes me consider that the encounter suits the Vorlons use may not be a Vorlon creation, they could get them from somewhere else thus explaining why the one the na’ka’leen is in looks so similar. It would be a further way to hide their identities if the way the younger races see them (in their encounter suits) isn’t even something they would design for themselves.
Shows yet again how little I usually pay attention during this episode that I’m only now noticing that the shot Aldous takes is clearly to the bicep and should not be life threatening (Deuce gets basically the same wound and he just runs off). Considering the pacing of that bit doesn’t work (it’s way too slow, I would bet money it was scripted as him jumping in front of Jinxo or at the last second pushing him out of the way rather than the shown ‘hey Thomas get down, now I’m going to stand here waiting to get shot in the arm’) I’m putting another mark in the anti-Compton tally (I have no idea how many that makes, but a lot I think).
But for all that, it does close on one of the most enduring Ivanova lines. Considering she had basically nothing to do all episode, at least she gets that much.
Part of the problem with this episode, as mentioned earlier, is that Aldous and Jinxo basically take over the episode and it isn’t a welcome take over either. They’re not particularly interesting characters, it doesn’t offer a fresh perspective on the B5 universe, and it’s not a good story. The na’ka’leen part could have been done better as a Garibaldi story, but I’m not sure how to save the Grail quest part - not that we would have lost anything if it wasn’t there. And for the record, I like ‘View From the Gallery,’ but this doesn’t work the same way. With the exception of the scenes involving Delenn, we’re not really given any insight from a new perspective, and even that’s nothing we couldn’t have been given by other means.
Anyway, I guess it’s a good time to buckle down to talk about the Minbari. This actually does feel like a Minbari heavy episode, even though the episode is really not about them. Possibly because Aldous is giving a very Minbari-esque performance, and naturally because they do take the time to exposit about Minbari culture a lot (relatively speaking). And it feels like exposition just being dumped on us carelessly; and while the philosophy does track with Minbari culture (...sort of...if you squint a little), even that is let down by the great continuity flub.
Which finally brings us to the one thing I have deep thoughts about in this episode, and it’s a really perplexing thing. Because what it proves to me is that JMS hadn’t fully fleshed out the Minbari culture at this point and that’s weird to me. I know he didn’t like rewriting others’ scripts, but this shouldn’t have happened.
It shouldn’t have even been written that way to start with, if the guest writer wants to explore Minbari culture, they should be given information on Minbari culture. And the line does get the relationship between the Religious and Warrior Castes right, and how that was important in the EMW; but to ignore the Workers so completely says to me that they weren’t included in the Minbari Cliff Notes.
Beyond that, JMS had to have at least gone over the script before shooting (since I think he wrote the alien abduction trial scene) and even if he was unwilling to demand a rewrite or do it himself it could have been...not fixed, but improved by saying here that Minbari have two dominant castes and then papered over the flub himself in a later script. One word and it could at least be hammered to fit future canon.
Now, that shape would be problematic, as it would then be Lennier dismissing the Workers (and Delenn not correcting him), but I could make it work. Lennier’s still only recently out in the larger world so forgets about the Workers; and Delenn doesn’t want to tell these strangers the complexities of Minbari politics when it doesn’t concern them. It could have actually been foreshadowing of how even our mostly good hearted Minbari heroes kind of dismiss the Workers as not a significant force in Minbari culture and set up Delenn figuring out over the years that that’s not the way it should be.
But chiefly, it makes me realize something; the Workers aren’t mentioned at all in season 1. Minbari society is presented as being divided between the Religious and the Warriors and this is just the one time it’s said in so many words so it becomes a spoken continuity problem instead of one that is sort of there in the implication.
So what this makes me think is that maybe they didn’t exist in JMS’ head during s1; that that’s a retcon come s2 (just that this is the only scene that explicitly shows it was a retcon instead of being able to claim it was always intended to exist in the later form). And what I realize then, is that that makes sense given the original plan for the show and the changes come s2.
The plan was (as I understand it) always to have the destinies of the Minbari and humans linked, symbolized ultimately by the union of Delenn and Sinclair, the Religious and the Warrior. By that same logic, those are the two forces already present in Minbari society; most likely also to be brought together by the war that is to come (brought together for good rather than bad). But the departure of Sinclair/O’Hare threw a cog into that setup; now instead of two leading voices, there were three, and JMS was able to retcon that there were three main castes in Minbari society too, thus giving us how everything is about threes for the Minbari, and leaving this one line to stick out as wrong.
But it’s not the only one. Early on the Grey Council was presented as a Religious council, presumably with the Warrior hierarchy on the other side, and not with a specific number of members. But by late in the season JMS knew that at the minimum he needed to take some of the pressure off O’Hare (and Sinclair the character), if not - as it turned out - him needing to leave entirely; so Minbari society started to show more of a base three structure around Sinclair, Delenn, and whatever third character he was going to need to bring in. The irony of this is that Sheridan is probably the least important to the Worker Caste of the three Ones, and yet on a meta level I’ve concluded that they exist because of Sheridan.
Is that quite enough babbling on one line that most (not really incorrectly) just dismiss as a continuity glitch? I think so, so let’s move on.
Next time: Eyes