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

Overview

Franklin and Marcus arrive on Mars to begin their undercover mission. Sheridan confronts Garibaldi about his behavior. Mark Schneider as Wade. Donovan Scott as Captain Jack. Clayton Landey as Number Two. Marjorie Monaghan as Number One.

P5 Rating: 7.73

Production number: 410
Original air week: April 21, 1997
DVD release date: January 6, 2004

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jesus Trevino

Plot Points

• Mars has been subjected to a news blackout and an embargo for at least as long as Babylon 5 has, likely as far back as their refusal to submit to martial law in "Severed Dreams." People on Mars have heard little more than vague rumors about the Shadow War. They also appear to know nothing about the Rangers.
• Someone has begun planting Keepers ("War Without End, Part Two") on members of the Earth resistance movement with the apparent intent of wiping it out.
• A Keeper can be partially removed, but portions remain embedded in the victim, and the rest of the organism grows back, sometimes within hours.
• Garibaldi has pledged to support a group that claims to feel the Army of Light has become a cult of personality centered on Sheridan, and that this will ultimately damage the cause. Garibaldi feels the same way, he says, and that's why he said what he did during the ISN interview.
• Ivanova has begun setting up amnesty deals with smugglers to keep the station supplied with food and spare parts.

Unanswered Questions

• Who planted the Keeper on Captain Jack?
• How did they know about his involvement with the resistance?
• Who are the people Garibaldi promised to help?
• What was the large ship being escorted toward Mars by a group of Starfuries?
• "Woo hoo?"

Analysis

• The head of the group that recruited Garibaldi may have betrayed his true intentions with a slip of the tongue. When he first spoke to Garibaldi, he said Sheridan's actions weren't good for Earth, weren't good for business, and weren't good for the President -- not something likely to come from the mouth of someone opposed to Clark.

• The second time Garibaldi met with the mysterious group, the leader made a point of saying, "Are you with us?" several times. Could that be some kind of key phrase related to whatever was done to Garibaldi while he was captured ("Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?")

• That phrase, or one like it, was used by someone else: Sheridan, who shouted, "Are you with me?" to the assembled crowd in "The Summoning."

• If "Are you with us?" was indeed a key phrase, Sheridan inadvertently foreshadowed it earlier in the episode, when he told Delenn that he could make Garibaldi come around "if I could just find the right words."

• Since Garibaldi knows the group is planning to move against Sheridan at some point (they told him as much,) perhaps his acceptance of their offer is, instead of a rejection of Sheridan, actually part of a plan to root out possible threats to Babylon 5's security. If so, a natural question is, does Sheridan know about that plan, or is it Garibaldi's doing? Was the confrontation between Sheridan and Garibaldi just a premeditated ploy to help Garibaldi gain the trust of the new group? Sheridan's conversation with Delenn after the first confrontation argues against that idea, but it's still plausible.

• It's also possible the Brakiri woman was a setup, sent by the group to fawn over Sheridan at just the right time and push Garibaldi over the edge.

• Garibaldi's rejection of Sheridan parallels Judas' rejection of Jesus. Both were part of their leader's inner circle. Sheridan's warning to Garibaldi to stop undermining him can be read as analogous to Jesus' warning to Judas at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:24: "woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.") John 13:2 says the Devil caused Judas to betray Jesus; Garibaldi has also been influenced in some way, in his case by Psi Corps ("Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?")

  Many scholarly analyses ascribe motives similar to Garibaldi's to Judas. Tim Rice's lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar," while perhaps not scholarly, put it succinctly:

  My mind is clearer now.
  At last all too well I can see where we all soon will be.
  If you strip away the myth from the man,
  You will see where we all soon will be.
  Jesus!
  You've started to believe
  The things they say of you.
  You really do believe
  This talk of God is true.
  And all the good you've done
  Will soon get swept away.
  You've begun to matter more than the things you say.

• When Marcus discovered Jack aboard the transport ship, he had his arm around Jack's neck. Why didn't he feel the Keeper? Does it have some way of hiding itself, or was it simply that Jack was wearing heavy clothing to cover his lower neck, and Marcus couldn't feel anything through the fabric?

Notes

• Marcus' comment about hating parasites is probably a reference to "Exogenesis," in which his friend Duncan was taken over by an alien parasite.
• Minbari have 52 rituals related to relationships. Sheridan and Delenn have now completed the first three. One is the female watching the male for three nights, and the third (according to Delenn, who called it the Third Movement of Love and Mutual Understanding) is the mutual exploration of pleasure centers.
• Garibaldi's hair loss is due to something a smuggler brought aboard the station.
• The Pope is a woman in 2261, according to Garibaldi. During his second confrontation with Sheridan, he said, "He's not the Pope. He doesn't look anything like her."
• The subcommander and head of the resistance cell called themselves "Number Two" and "Number One," a nod to the cult classic "The Prisoner." Another reference to "Number One" can be found in "Signs and Portents."
• The name "Captain Jack" is a nod to the Billy Joel song of the same name.
• A slight glitch: When Captain Jack ripped open the insta-heat pack, Franklin said, "That's beef and potatoes." But his lips don't match those words; apparently the original line was something different.
• Marcus and Franklin were playing "I Spy" when they discovered a spy.

jms speaks

• Is B5 about the Shadow War?
  Not just that, but events back on Earth, Mars and elsewhere that are either not touched by the shadow war, or barely touched by it. (In one upcoming episode, where a couple of our characters have gone to Mars, they find that very few on Mars know anything even *happened*.)

• Not everyone back home even knows there *was* a war. Which our characters will find rather annoying....

• About the Pope
  Yeah, you heard the "her" line. Got a fair amount of flack for that one, btw.

  And it's Woo Hoo.

  If Yahoo wants a reference they should call me....

• From some extremist Catholics...and also got some flack from Born Again Rightists over my comments in TV Guide about being an atheist.

• I don't think Earthforce cares about sexual orientation; the reason we just set it out there without comment is that, having come through the realization of other non-human races...a little thing like sexual orientation, nobody even cares about anymore. It ain't an issue.

• Why didn't Ivanova ask Lyta to oversee her negotiations with the smugglers?
  Because telepaths only function in very limited ways due to privacy laws. You couldn't just use them broad-based as lie detectors in the way you suggest, because it first requires getting the *permission* of those involved, and you can be reasonably sure that smugglers aren't going to want people poking around in their heads; second, there was a large group there, and a midrange teep can usually handle only one or at most two people with any degree of accuracy; it goes down dramatically after that.

  I specifically set up rules for telepaths to avoid letting them become the deus ex machina, the easy solution to any problem.

Last update: May 27, 2024