Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Lyta Alexander returns to the station at Kosh's behest. One of Theo's brothers discovers that he may have a hidden past. Brad Dourif as Brother Edward. Louis Turenne as Brother Theo. Patricia Tallman as Lyta Alexander.

P5 Rating: 8.38

Production number: 305
Original air week: November 27, 1995
DVD release date: August 12, 2003

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Adam Nimoy

Backplot

• Mindwipes were instituted after Earth decided that they were more humane than the death penalty. They are apparently not very complete; the old memories remain in some form or another, but are inaccessible without the intervention of a telepath. (See also "The Quality of Mercy.")
• Minbari religion is based on the notion that souls are part of a larger whole, of the universe itself, which is in the process of trying to discover itself. Souls can only be perceived via the physical bodies they inhabit, but the real soul is something only dimly related to the body.
• Valen, the great Minbari spiritual leader and founder of the Grey Council, appeared a thousand years ago. He is believed to be a Minbari not born of other Minbari, according to Lennier.

Unanswered Questions

• What happened to Lyta? Was Kosh inhabiting her body? Was the body not even Lyta's to start with? She has gills on her neck that allow her to breathe in Kosh's quarters, and several health problems have been completely repaired. What else did the Vorlons do to her, and why?
• Given how easily she pulled the information from the Centauri, have her telepathic powers increased? Or could any P5 do the same?
• What did she see on the Vorlon homeworld?
• Why is Londo so anxious to find out what she saw that he'd resort to threatening her?
• What was Lyta's mission for Kosh? Why does he want an aide all of a sudden, when he hasn't had one before?

Analysis

• If Garibaldi and Sheridan are any indication, mindwipes are widely considered to be insufficient punishment for serious crimes. How widespread that perception is isn't known.
• Could the techniques used to put a mindwipe in place be related to the method used by Bureau 13 to implant hidden personalities ("Divided Loyalties" and, more ominous, comic #8, "Silent Enemies?") Both seem to involve submerging one personality and causing another to become dominant, though in the case of Control, it's not clear which was the original.
• Edward's execution was not only a sort of crucifixion (notice how he's suspended from the metal frame) but also resembles Sheridan's suspension from what looks like the same kind of frame in "Comes the Inquisitor."
• Might Valen have been a Vorlon, or a Minbari under Vorlon influence? If, as Lennier says, he was truly not born of Minbari parents, that strongly suggests he wasn't Minbari at all, and Vorlons certainly have the power to appear as Minbari.
• If Minbari consider the universe to be a manifestation of a single soul, how did they ever find it conscienable to fight the Earth-Minbari War? (see jms speaks)
• The Vorlons didn't hear, or didn't respond, to Lyta's signals, and took five days to respond to her telepathic broadcast. What's interesting is that they apparently didn't come until she was nearly unconscious. Could that be related to what happened to Sheridan in "All Alone In the Night?" Maybe she was only able to make contact when, as Kosh said of Sheridan, her mind was quiet enough to hear the Vorlons. Or, of course, it could simply have taken them several days to locate and reach her, in which case they could even have been responding to the non-telepathic signals.
• Why didn't Franklin notice Lyta's gills? Perhaps he did and didn't feel they were worth mentioning (gill implants aren't completely alien concepts; G'Kar has them, as noted by the assassin in "The Gathering.") It's also possible she didn't get them until her errand in the middle of the episode. Franklin did note that she had elevated oxygen levels in her bloodstream, though, which would tend to indicate both that she had the gills before he examined her and that he didn't notice them. Given the powers of illusion Vorlons have demonstrated, covering up gills would probably have been a small matter with Kosh's help.
• Whatever left Lyta to enter Kosh's suit looked a lot like the creature inhabiting Sheridan in "Knives." Could Sheridan have inadvertently been inhabited by a Vorlon? Certainly it would be consistent with him being made to see things that weren't there; Kosh clearly has that power.
• Psi Corps may have strict rules against unauthorized scans, but Sheridan and Garibaldi don't hold those rules in particularly high esteem. Now that they have a non-Corps telepath at their disposal, someone whose loyalty is presumably above reproach thanks to her association with Kosh, will they begin calling her in on a regular basis?
• The Centauri telepath, likewise, seemed to show contempt for the Corps' regulations. What regulations, if any, are Centauri telepaths obligated to follow? Clearly they're not simply allowed to roam freely, since Londo had this particular telepath's name on a list.
• If Lyta can implant nightmares, other psis can presumably do the same. We've seen one nightmare: Londo's prophetic dream. Is it possible that someone or something implanted it in him? (He says, in "Midnight on the Firing Line," that Centauri have such dreams as a matter of course, but that doesn't rule out an external influence.)

Notes

• The title, as noted in the episode, is a Biblical reference. In the New Testament, Matthew 26:30-50, Jesus goes to Gethsemane with Peter and two others to pray and contemplate his imminent betrayal. They fail to keep watch over him, and Judas is able to lead the Romans to Jesus. Gethsemane is also referred to, not always by name, in Mark 14:32-52, Luke 23:39-51, and John 18:1-13.

• Delenn's opinion of Garibaldi's eye-for-an-eye attitude echoes that of Gandhi, who said, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

• Malcolm, Edward, and Charles are all names of rulers of Scotland.

• The names Edward and Charlie may also be a reference to two H.P. Lovecraft stories. In "The Thing On the Doorstep," a character named Edward falls in love with a woman whose grandfather has shifted his soul into her body, replacing hers. In "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward," the title character becomes obsessed with the memory of an ancient ancestor.

• Shooting began on September 11, 1995.

jms speaks

• I'd rather not say anything at all about "Gethsemane," because a large part of the plot turns on something you need to discover mid-viewing, and anything I might say would only detract from it. It's a lovely, sad, very moving story; it's kind of my Twilight Zone story in the B5 universe, with some very strong emotional twists as we go along. It's not the kind of story I get to do within the B5 structure very often, and I'm extremely pleased with this one (and Adam Nimoy did a *bang-up* job directing it; he thinks it may be his best work ever).

• Thanks. Adam did a great job interpreting the script on that one, and it's definitely one of our most successful episodes...though today I took a look at another, more completed version of episode 8, "Messages," and *man* is this amazing...just a knockout...trouble is we keep raising our own bar and won't accept anything less...so the pressure becomes quite astonishing after a while.

• Adam was great in that he's a *very* serious director who sits down and really thinks through the subtext of the episode, the thematic aspects, the underlying symbology, and then sits with the actor and *really* works with them so that they fully understand the nuances of the scene. A lot of TV direction can be rushed...you're always under the gun...so it's rare to find someone who really takes his time and prepares the cast.

• "Gethsemane" isn't a horror-type story at all, though it does have a very TZish [Twilight Zone] feeling, so it doesn't owe to any of those. Best to just let you see it when it airs.

• Brad read the script, fell in love with the part, and dived for it.

• Two things on the upcoming episode ("Gethsemane")....

  1) This is episode #5 in shooting order; I'd originally planned to end the first batch of new episodes with #4, "Voices of Authority," which is a major -- and I mean major -- wham episode. But the EFX requirements were pretty hideous (though not as bad as "Messages"), so I moved "Gethsemane" into that slot, which is a very strong episode, though not an arc'er.

  2) On the story question...yes, this was the story that someone else (don't want to use names, no sense in blaming anyone) had accidentally suggested while I was working on it early in season two. So I had to scuttle the script for nearly a year. Finally, very chagrined over what happened, the individual gave me a notarized form explaining the situation. At that point, I was able to reactivate the story. So no, it's not any kind of "it's okay to do this" notion about story ideas; as it is, the story was tied up for about a year, and might never have seen the light of day had not the other person made great efforts to set the situation straight.

• On another service, someone without considering what he was saying (not his fault, it just happened) said, in essence, "What if somebody on B5 found out that he had been mind-wiped, and used to be something awful previously?" Well, I'd had "Passing Through Gethsemane" on the wire at that time, but when I saw this, I had to scuttle the story. It lay there, untouched, for over a year, until I could finally meet the fellow and get a signed release indicating what'd happened. If that fan had not been fair and reasonable, that episode -- which many consider one of our best -- would never have been made.

• Was there any nod to the person who suggested the idea, and what was the story originally like?
  No, no nod to the person who suggested it, since this isn't a competition, and the suggestion cost me a year where I couldn't do the story. (So I wasn't in the cutest frame of mind about this for a long time, even though it wasn't really his fault.)

  Basically, it would've been a one-shot, with two monks arriving to scope out B5 for the arrival of the rest later on. (You'll notice that none of the other monks get into the story here; that's a hold-over from the original outline, which I saw no need to change at this point.) So this would've been folded into an introduction to the order as they come to check out B5's facilities.

• They would've gotten the info in a different way, without resorting to a telepath.

• Carol: *exactly* the right point. In his earlier talk about Gethsemane, Edward mentioned that old JC had to go through all that to atone for the sins of others; when he sees Theo later, through the grate, he uses the same notion of atonement for the acts of another, in this case, *his* other. The logical parallel parses pretty closely.

• Not sure he *wanted* to die, as much as he felt it was *necessary* in order to atone for the sins of another...his own "other," in this case.

• Where was Malcolm's mind wiped?
  We established in "The Quality of Mercy" that the equipment to handle mindwipes is there on-station, locked away until mandated by a court. A court assigned telepath is usually brought in to do a preliminary scan before it happens and to verify the wipe immediately afterward. In that same episode, Talia was used only because a court teep wasn't available.

• Yes, B5 has a court system, authorized by the Earth Alliance Judicial System, to conduct trials of this sort (which we've seen before). And in this case, again, there wasn't a trial per se as Ivanova noted; he pleaded guilty from the start, quite proud of what he'd done. So all that remained was the sentencing.

• I'd say there were extenuating circumstances here that made it more than just a simple murder (and not all murders get wiped, esp. in cases like second-degree or manslaughter). He'd stalked Edward for years; arranged to break the mindwipe; and engaged in slow, deliberate, methodical torture unto death. The degree of premeditation is staggering.

• No, the other brothers aren't mind-wiped.

  You're mis-remembering "The Quality of Mercy." Telepaths do NOT perform mindwipes. A court appointed teep makes a scan before and after for purposes of comparison, but the wipe is done by a device held under lock and key until ordered out by a court. The only reason Talia did it in QoM was because they couldn't get a court teep there in the required time (which was also stated in the episode). So here the court appointed telepath would have come and gone by now.

• Mindwiping was presented too positively.
  I'm not sure I presented it positively; I just presented it, didn't make a moral judgement about it. Some of those in the show did, but then we had Edward saying it *isn't* moral, that it's a monstrous thing to do. Like any form of punishment it can seem fair to those not facing it.

• There are templates used, with some variations. In a government monitored situation (which this wasn't, they thought he was dead), mindwipes are kept in servile positions, not allowed to achieve, as that would be a kind of reward. Those guys you see along the roadsides picking up trash and putting them in bright orange bags? Mindwipes.

• Re: mindwipes no longer considered people...this really is not that much different from prison inmates, who are given numbers, have no real civil rights, and are treated like cattle. (And many of them deserve it; a few deserve worse; a few deserve better.)

• About the moral ambiguity
  Thanks. That's really the intent; to get people to talk about the issues raised, and to examine the issues. We won't tell you what to think about an issue, because I don't have an answer myself...but if it made you stop and consider this stuff, and decide for yourself where you fall in the discussion, then it's done its job.

• It's a hard thing to walk the line between not being effective and being heavy-handed...I think it worked quite well in that respect.

• The Centauri did not steal the bag; he had left long before Edward lost it (we see him drop and leave it behind in the hallway). As Garibaldi said, someone found it and tried to sell it.

• If the Centauri teep had had more time to react he probably would have gone after Garibaldi...but Lyta came in too fast, and she took his attention quickly.

• Re: the Centauri...note that Edward wasn't killed where they found him. He was taken and killed elsewhere, in a area they'd more or less secured for that purpose. That was the area he knew about.

• Re: the use of Lyta to extract the info...this is the main reason why there's a Psi Corps, and there are exacting rules, otherwise it can easily become deus ex machina. We won't ever do this sort of thing trivially, and here it was definitely meant to be a little disturbing...it was a sheer matter of life or death, the guy was a creep, and somewhere Edward was bleeding to death. Even after so many viewings, and even having written the thing, I find that one scene vaguely scary.

  It's the best of the first four, I think. But better is coming....

• The interrogation scene was disturbing.
  Yes, that's definitely the sense I was going for. That scene frankly unsettles and scares me a little, because it does show our characters skirting the line...yes, it's absolutely necessary, every moment is precious if they're going to try to save Edward's life...but it's still a bit creepy.

• How Sheridan and Garibaldi got away with it?

  "Telepath? What telepath? Never happened. Can you describe her? No? I see. Well, I don't remember seeing anyone in there, Mr. Garibaldi, do you? We'd check the logs to be absolutely sure, because we'd hate for this sort of thing to happen, but we had a small glitch in the software, and the recorders didn't work...still, we're working on it, and we hope to have it taken care of in the next few months. Would you like some more tea, Ambassador?"

• What Kosh was doing with Lyta (that sounds vaguely suggestive) wasn't a one-time event. There was a transference going on, and that aspect will be heard from again.

• Why did it take Lyta so long to get to the Vorlons?
  Well, she didn't go directly into Vorlon space; she left, went around a bit, had to find a pilot willing to take her...it was a time consuming process.

• Contacting the Vorlon government isn't the hard part; getting into and out of their space is what's hard. We showed in the pilot that B5 and Earth were in *contact* with the Vorlons; Lyta was trying to get inside their turf, and they aren't exactly neighborly in that respect.

• Why did it take so long for a med team to get to Edward? They were in a pretty distant part of DownBelow, and in B5 you don't have trains or cars; there's just the transport tubes, and the central core shuttle. Even if they gave a damn about what happens to lurkers in DownBelow (and they generally don't), it would still take at least 5-10 minutes to get a trauma team down there, and he was dead within about 3. (I was once mugged half a mile from a police station and a mile from a hospital; took 'em 30 minutes to get there.)

  Sheridan and Theo didn't *discover* that Edward was using the computer; Theo was concerned that he was looking into it in general. And if they had blocked the computer in his quarters, he would have been able to access one somewhere else. They didn't know he'd actually done it until after the fact.

• The absolution scene, based on what used to be called the rites of extreme unction, or last rights, is now called the "celebration" of passing, and I went to the Catholic church's information office, and got the actual text. I made a few adjustments here, condensing it a bit (on the logic that Edward didn't have a lot of time), and modifying a few small points here and there, on the second logical point that in 250 years, such might have taken place (as the current ritual has been adjusted a bit here and there over the years). So if it felt right, it was.

• One caveat here overall...it's been complimented and commented upon that I would expose a belief system in my show which I do not personally agree with (presenting the face of religion even though I'm an atheist). That I could be this tolerant is apparently praiseworthy.

  I would just suggest that at some point, when and if I should offer a point of view from another perspective, which one watching might not personally agree with, the same tolerance is given, since the virtue of tolerating divergent attitudes has been deemed praiseworthy...and is something ever to strive for....

• Basically, Sheridan believes in a lot of things; he's very eclectic in his views, can incorporate lots of different perspectives, and has a respect for all views. In one of the early season 3 eps, in fact, one character upbraids him for having "no clearly defined pattern of faith," to which Sheridan replies, "I'm eclectic, open-minded."

• "The themes of faith and forgiveness were worthy of a theologian. Are you sure there isn't something you'd like to tell us?"

  Never shoot pool at a place called Pop's. Never eat food at a place called Mom's. The difference between horses and humans is that they're too smart to be on what *we'll* do.

  And I have lost people. Too many people. Lost them to chance, violence, brutality beyond belief; I've seen all the senseless, ignoble acts of "god's noblest creature." And I am incapable of forgiving. My feelings are with G'Kar, hand sliced open, saying of the drops of blood flowing from that open wound, "How do you apologize to them?" "I can't." "Then I cannot forgive."

  As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it's only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it's gone forever. No afterlives, no second chances, no backsies. So there can be nothing crueler than the abuse, destruction or wanton taking of a life. It is a crime no less than burning the Mona Lisa, for there is always just one of each.

  So I cannot forgive. Which makes the notion of writing a character who CAN forgive momentarily attractive...because it allows me to explore in great detail something of which I am utterly incapable. I cannot fly, so I would write of birds and starships and kites; I cannot play an instrument, so I would write of composers and dancers; and I cannot forgive, so I would write of priests and monks and minbari....

• In legal terms, in order to qualify for "a crime of passion" there cannot be premeditation; it happens suddenly, in the heat of the moment. By virtue of stalking Edward for nine years, the "crime of passion" defense quickly goes by the boards.

• From what Ivanova tells Lyta, about two weeks have passed since the apprehension of Edward's killer; and yes, with slight modifications to prevent mindwipes from running into one another, they usually use preset templates in creating a basic history for the person to be wiped.

• Why did Ivanova tolerate Lyta?
  Real simple. Lyta has proven that she was telling the proof about the traitor; and she's on the run from the Psi Corps herself, putting her and Ivanova on the same side; and she helped when she was asked to try and find Edward.

• If there were just one pure and unchanged universal soul running through everything, there wouldn't be any point in breaking itself into pieces and investing itself in different species/people...it would just keep running into identical versions of itself.

  So the soul form in Minbari is different from the soul form in humans; also, in their view, having been civilized longer than us, their soul form is more elevated, more evolved...and thus the pieces are more precious, to them, and to the Soul Hunters.

• No, there's really just the one Minbari religion, and the warrior caste tends to follow it, but not lead it.

Last update: May 27, 2024