“A Day in the Strife”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by David J. Eagle
Season 3, Episode 3
Production episode 303
Original air date: November 20, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Sheridan and Ivanova are having a meeting with the Transport Pilots Association, which is loud and raucous and completely unproductive. One pilot mouths off at Sheridan, accusing the captain of hoarding weapons, while all he has is a metal rod, and it’s easy for Sheridan while sitting up at the podium. So Sheridan goes down into the crowd and gives the guy a PPG and takes his metal rod. When actually given the opportunity to put his money where his mouth is, the guy backs down rather quietly. (Sheridan had removed the power cell from the PPG he handed the guy, just in case he read him wrong.) Sheridan calls a recess.
Counselor Na’Far arrives from Narn, along with his bodyguard, Ta’Lon (the Narn who was also kidnapped by the Streib with Sheridan). He has been sent by the Centauri to replace G’Kar. Sheridan, however, will not withdraw G’Kar’s asylum. If Na’Far wants G’Kar to leave, he’s got to convince G’Kar to do it himself.
Garibaldi and Franklin are sharing a drink at Earhart’s. Franklin is exhausted, and isn’t even willing to ask a woman who’s obviously interested in him to dance. He’s then informed that he needs to work an additional shift in medlab and exhaustedly agrees to be there in two hours. He goes off to the bathroom, and when he comes back he’s full of vim and vigor and asks the woman to dance.
Na’Far reports to Mollari, asking the ambassador permission to speak directly to G’Kar. Mollari eventually accepts it but makes sure to humiliate the Narn in general and Na’Far in particular as much as he possibly can first. After Na’Far departs, Vir expresses his disgust with Mollari’s kicking the Narn while they’re down, and Mollari’s response is that that’s the only way they’re going to stay down.
A probe of unknown design shows up in the system, sending a signal. Corwin starts the process of decoding it.
Mollari calls in the favor Delenn owes him, asking for Vir to be reassigned to the Centauri embassy on Minbar, which has been closed for some time due to the previous ambassador making an ass of himself. Mollari assures Delenn that Vir will be completely inoffensive and won’t even play politics, as he would consider it impolite. Delenn agrees. Vir does not, as he doesn’t want to go to Minbar and doesn’t want to leave Mollari alone, but Mollari insists.
Garibaldi invites Franklin over for dinner, where the alcoholic security chief confronts the doctor about what may be an abuse of stims. Franklin admits that he’s been using stims, but not abusing them, and he promises to cut back if it’ll make Garibaldi happy.
Ta’Lon and Sheridan share a drink and talk about what they’ve been doing with themselves since they were abducted by the Streib. Ta’Lon says he is in Sheridan’s debt, and he also laments that he’s not sure if he’s protecting Na’Far from outsiders or from other Narn.
The probe’s message is a series of questions about various scientific disciplines. If they answer everything right, they’re worthy of first contact, and the aliens will provide the cure to every known disease. If they don’t answer everything right, the probe will blow up and take half the star system with it. They have one day.
The countdown started once the message was decoded, which was kind. Ivanova informs Sheridan that they can’t get at the probe’s insides to even try to deactivate the bomb. So they scramble to get answers to the questions.
Na’Far tries to convince G’Kar to return to Narn, and also to scale back the rebellious activities. The guerrilla attacks on the Centauri are keeping food from getting to Narn. G’Kar rejects the notion, as the Centauri are manipulating them into stopping their rebellion. Na’Far preaches patience, for the rebel cease-fire to be a temporary one, to give the Narn a chance to heal and the Centauri to develop a false sense of security. When G’Kar points out that the Narn on B5 need a leader, Na’Far offers himself. G’Kar laughs in his face; the Narn on B5 will never trust a Narn sent by the Centauri.
Then the other shoe drops: if G’Kar doesn’t return to Narn, the families of the Narn on B5 will suffer.
Franklin is frustrated by a Llort patient who is in obvious distress, but with whom he can’t communicate because the translator is late. Plus the answers he needs for the probe are slow to come because the expert on Earth is off on vacation. Franklin snaps at his contact on Earth, and then pops some stims, just like he said he wouldn’t.
Na’Far meets with the Narn on B5, who, as predicted by G’Kar, reject him handily, calling him a traitor. Violence almost erupts, though Ta’Lon is able to maintain the peace by partly unsheathing his sword. When the local Narn express disgust that he would take up arms against a fellow Narn, Ta’Lon points out the Narn with the knife behind his back trying to sneak up on Na’Far. Not wanting Narn to fight against Narn, G’Kar agrees to return to the homeworld.
In CnC, they’re down to their last five questions. Just as they’re about to send those last five, Sheridan orders Corwin to stand by, as something seems wrong to him. Why would they offer cool scientific advances to a species because they already understand science? What if instead they’re testing to see if they’re so smart that they’re a threat?
When they fail to send the answers, the probe just leaves the system, lending credence to Sheridan’s hypothesis that they don’t see them as a threat. Sheridan, though, doesn’t want anyone to fall victim to this, so he sends a mechanical probe with all the answers, downloading them once B5 is out of the prob’s blast radius. Sure enough, it goes boom, thus proving Sheridan’s hypothesis.
Pretty much every Narn on the station—including Ta’Lon—urge G’Kar not to leave the station. Yes, their families will be in danger, but they were already in danger. What they want is to be free, and the only way that’ll happen is if G’Kar stays on B5 to lead the rebellion.
Garibaldi apologizes to Franklin for doubting him. Franklin gives the I-can-stop-anytime speech that all junkies give, and also lies through his teeth and says he got through the entire shift without taking any stims.
Vir goes off to Minbar. He’s not happy about it.
Sheridan and Ivanova once again meet with the transport pilots. It does not go well…
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan has a nice reunion with Ta’Lon. The Narn says he owes Sheridan a debt he must repay as a matter of honor. Sheridan jokes that he’s not sure what his superiors will say if he starts showing up places with a Narn bodyguard, to which Ta’Lon confidently replies, “They will say, ‘Here is a man who will live to be a hundred and fifty’.”
Ivanova is God. At one point, Ivanova compliments Sheridan on his ability to see the good in any situation. Sheridan’s reply is that if he didn’t, he might end up like her. Ivanova is not amused…
The household god of frustration. As an alcoholic, Garibaldi recognizes that Franklin may be a fellow junkie. But he chooses to believe his friend when he lies to his face and says he has it under control.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn disabuses Mollari of the notion that they ever used to be friends, a relationship that pretty much only existed in Mollari’s head. She also agrees to Vir’s reassignment, but cautions Mollari that he may regret it.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari makes it clear that he’s gone completely evil as he not only kicks Na’Far while he’s down, but steps on his face while he’s at it. His response to Vir’s expression of disgust is to finally get rid of him, under the pretense of being fond of him and wanting what’s good or his career. (And it is a good career move, truthfully…)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. Apparently, if you draw a K’tok sword (which is what Ta’Lon carries), you can’t re-sheathe it until it draws blood. Ta’Lon draws it to show support for G’Kar, and has to bloody his own hand before he can put it away. (He also says to G’Kar: “I carry my sword in my hand. You carry yours in your heart and in your mind. As I see it, that gives you a two-to-one advantage in arms.”)
Welcome aboard. Marshall Teague returns from “All Alone in the Night,” now given a name, Ta’Lon, and officially becoming recurring; he’ll be back in “Point of No Return.” The great Stephen Macht plays Na’Far. Recurring regular Joshua Cox is back from “The Fall of Night” as Corwin, and this is the first time he’s credited with the name he got back in “And Now for a Word” rather than as “Tech #1.” He’ll return in “Voices of Authority.”
Trivial matters. Mollari piloted Delenn and Draal down to Epsilon III in “A Voice in the Wilderness, Part II,” which is the favor Mollari calls on to get Vir reassigned.
According to his online postings, J. Michael Straczynski was inspired to write the probe plot in part by the findings of a House of Representatives science sub-committee that held hearings in the 1970s on the subject of what to do if extraterrestrial life tried to contact us. The conclusion was that we should do nothing, for precisely the reason Sheridan outlines in this episode.
Vir was sent to Minbar at least in part to give Stephen Furst a more flexible schedule to accommodate his co-starring role in the sitcom Misery Loves Company, in which he starred with Christopher Meloni, Dennis Boutsikaris, and the great Julius Carry. (This is more consideration than Andrea Thompson got…) This accommodation would prove to not be needed for long, as the sitcom was cancelled after eight episodes.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Corwin, check these figures again. Make sure they came through the translator okay. I don’t want to get killed because of a typo—it will be embarrassing.”
—Ivanova, gathering the answers to the pop quiz.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We are fighting for our world, Na’Far.” Once again we have stuff with the humans that’s kinda meh, leaving it to the stuff involving the non-humans to actually hold my interest. (Tellingly, the only parts of this episode I remembered from thirty years ago were Vir’s reassignment and all the Narn stuff.)
First we have the Alien Pop Quiz Of Doom, where the first thing I thought of when Corwin explained it, was that it was a bait-and-switch to get rid of the smart competition. Now, I write stories for a living, so I think like that, but still, it’s frustrating when you think of the strategic thing half an hour before the military strategist does.
And I mostly just found the Franklin-Garibaldi plot annoying, mostly because Franklin says everything that every junkie ever says, something Garibaldi, as a cop and as a junkie himself, should recognize. Indeed, his status as an alcoholic is why he knows that Franklin is going down the garden path, as it were. So seeing him let Franklin off the hook is annoying. It doesn’t help that Franklin is mostly a self-righteous ass, which makes it a lot harder to sympathize with him. (Also, he’s in charge of medlab, so he should know how the personnel are allocated. He’s the one who should be asking people to cover shifts, he isn’t the one who should be asked…)
So once again we find ourselves looking to the plotlines involving Mollari and G’Kar for solace, and boy, do they come through. I mentioned last week how you can go from loving Mollari to hating him. This week, you just hate him, which is by way of showing why fobbing Vir off on the Minbari is a spectacularly bad idea. First he kicks poor Na’Far while he’s down, with Na’Far reduced to saying, “You missed a rib.” Then the ambassador explains to an appalled Vir why they have to kick the Narn while they’re down (basically to make sure they don’t get back up).
Mollari then approaches Delenn about taking Vir off his hands, and here in particular Peter Jurasik shines, as Mollari is trying very desperately to fake sincerity. It is to Delenn’s credit that she doesn’t buy his bullshit for a nanosecond, but agrees anyhow, if for no other reason than she probably thinks Vir is better off as far away from Mollari as possible.
Indeed, Mollari thinks the same. Vir is the closest Mollari has to a conscience, and it’s damnably inconvenient. So he gets rid of him. Stephen Furst beautifully plays Vir’s departure like a puppy who’s been inexplicably abandoned by his favorite person.
The Narn end of things also shines. Having a guest star of the calibre of Stephen Macht and his fabulous voice certainly helps. Macht—who was one of the finalists for the role of Jean-Luc Picard back in 1986—gives Na’Far a desperate dignity. He’s not a bad person, he’s just trying to make the best of a bad situation, only to discover that he’s never going to be provided with the materials for that manufacture. Marshall Teague also does excellent work as Ta’Lon, and of course Andreas Katsulas is his usual superlative self. G’Kar has always wanted what was best for his people—sometimes at any price—and we see that writ large here. He’s willing to sacrifice his life (he obviously doesn’t believe Na’Far’s assurance that G’Kar will not be put to death, nor should he) to save others. He only doesn’t because the Narn on the station know the most important lesson: safe is good, free is better.
Next week: “Passing Through Gethsemane.”