“Convictions”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Michael Vejar
Season 3, Episode 2
Production episode 302
Original air date: November 13, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Garibaldi and Allan are dealing with Drazi pilgrims, who wish to visit the place where Dro’shalla appeared (really Kosh, but whatever). Ivanova calls Garibaldi away, leaving Allan to deal with the pilgrims. Ivanova reports that there have been anonymous messages left in CnC threatening chaos. It could be a crank, but Garibaldi promises to look into it.
An explosion in downbelow happens right when the “chaos” was promised. Garibaldi isn’t sure what caused the explosion at first, but he can’t rule out a bomb given everything that’s been happening on B5 lately…
Ivanova interviews Brother Theo, who leads a group of monks who wish to live on B5. They have rented accommodations in downbelow, and they intend to try to learn more about God by talking to the various aliens who come through B5. Ivanova is concerned, but Theo assures her that they won’t harass anyone and will only talk to those who wish to be talked to. They also will earn their keep, as their number include many programmers, scientists, and so on—plus they are also dedicated researchers.
Ivanova thinks they’re nuts for willingly settling down on the station, but Theo has an answer for every objection she raises, so she gives in.
It quickly becomes clear that it was a bomb explosion, and Garibaldi tasks Morishi, his bomb expert, with re-creating the events.
Lennier is in the waiting area, being tormented by a jerk in a porn ’stache and no concept of personal space and another guy who has fallen asleep on his arm. He gets rid of the former by telling him he has a fatal disease that is transmitted by touch, and the latter by the simple expedient of getting up.
As Lennier goes to greet Delenn, who is arriving alongside Mollari, there’s another explosion. Lennier tosses Mollari through a doorway right before a blast door closes—with Lennier on the wrong side of it.
Lennier is taken to medlab, with both Delenn and Mollari beside themselves with concern over his well-being. Garibaldi confirms that this bomb is of the same design as the one in downbelow. He doesn’t think it’s a terrorist attack—though he’s checking into known terrorist organizations—partly because these haven’t been high-value targets, though they have been somewhat crowded ones. Also, nobody’s taken credit or made demands.
The explosive is a commercially available one, so Garibaldi starts the work of tracing it. Ivanova notes the timing as being the same as the anonymous chaos warnings. Sheridan orders stricter security protocols across the station.
G’Kar carries on at great length to Garibaldi about how this must be the doing of the Centauri—and one decent piece of evidence in his ranting and raving is that a Centauri recently used an explosive to try to kill Sheridan. Garibaldi tries to blow him off, with only partial success. (Why Garibaldi doesn’t mention that Mollari was almost one victim of the bombing is unclear, as that’s one strong bit of evidence that it wasn’t a Centauri…)
Mollari carries on at great length to Sheridan and Ivanova about how this must be the doing of the Narn—and one decent piece of evidence in his ranting and raving is that such attacks have been happening with frequency on the Narn homeworld. Sheridan tries to blow him off, with only partial success.
Mollari then visits Lennier in medlab, babbling at him for some time. He takes a break to give Lennier a chance to talk, which is sadly met with expected silence.
A third bomb is found by Garibaldi’s people before it goes off, so nobody is hurt. These are not professional jobs, and Morishi has confirmed that the explosives all come from a batch that was stolen from an ice-mining company on Vega VII, and also used in explosions that happened on Proxima III. Sheridan orders a check on all ships that came from Proxima recently. Ivanova thinks that the bomber may be observing the effects of their labors, but when Sheridan orders Garibaldi to run a search on surveillance footage, the latter points out how time-consuming and difficult it would be. Ivanova, however, has the perfect people for the job…
Brother Theo promises to find anyone who is at all the bombing scenes. When Garibaldi calls this a nutty idea, Theo shushes him, and the monks get to work on the surveillance footage.
Mollari departs Lennier’s bedside. He calls for a transport tube, but G’Kar is in it. He decides to wait for the next one—but then there’s an explosion, which sends a fireball down the corridor. With no choice, Mollari dives into the transport tube, which then becomes stuck. Mollari is rendered unconscious, finally awakening two hours later. Mollari is shocked that G’Kar has done nothing to try to escape, nor did he take advantage of Mollari’s unconscious state to kill him. G’Kar points out that the consequences for a Narn killing a Centauri is to kill 500 Narn, including the perpetrator’s family. So G’Kar can’t kill Mollari, but he can sit and watch the ambassador die slowly. Mollari thinks G’Kar is nuts and tries to cry for help. (At one point he cries, “Can anyone hear me?” and G’Kar gleefully says, “I can hear you!” just to torment him.)
Theo and his monks find one face that’s at every single bombing site. Garibaldi is able to match the face to a name: Robert Carlson, who was on a transport from Proxima and took a job with station engineering. Garibaldi assembles a tactical team, joined by Sheridan. Carlson, however, is prepared and sets off a small bomb to show he’s serious, and announces that he has a dead-man’s switch for a bomb that will destroy the whole station. He demands to speak alone to Sheridan, with the captain unarmed and without a link. Sheridan gets rid of his PPG, but hides his link down his pants and leaves the channel open.
Garibaldi has Morishi check the fusion reactor, since the explosives Carlson has been using aren’t enough by themselves to blow up the whole station, but if he attached it to the fusion reactor—which he’d have access to as an engineer—it would be very very bad.
Carlson is completely binky bonkers, seeing himself as an agent of chaos, which is his way of dealing with the fact that his life isn’t everything he wanted it to be. Morishi finds the bomb and has to separate it from the reactor. Sheridan tries to bargain with Carlson, but he wants a ship out of there and isn’t interested in negotiating. He forces Sheridan to sit at one point, which beeps the link down his pants. Carlson then goes really batshit and is about to activate the dead-man’s switch. Sheridan and Carlson fight over it, but eventually Carlson is able to drop it—
—and the bomb goes off harmlessly in space, because Morishi is good at his job.
Carlson whines that it’s not fair and Sheridan punches him in the face.
Lennier wakes up, to Delenn’s relief, and expresses concern that he saved Mollari’s life, given the damage Mollari has already done. He also evinces absolutely no enthusiasm for the likely kudo he’s to receive from the Centaurum.
Mollari and G’Kar are rescued, to the latter’s great disappointment.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! When Carlson asks if Sheridan is with Garibaldi, the latter says no at the same time that the former says yes, prompting a look of annoyance on the part of Garibaldi. Garibaldi is being a good security chief there, keeping the CO of the station safe; Sheridan, though, is the top-billed character in a TV show and therefore is morally obligated to put himself in danger…
Ivanova is God. Ivanova goes to great lengths to discourage Brother Theo and fails rather hilariously. But that also means she’s the first to realize how helpful he and his gaggle of monks can be in finding the bad guy…
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi comports himself quite well here, particularly during the hostage negotiation, when he figures out that the bomb must be on the fusion reactor and having Sheridan put the link down his pants.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Lennier commits the sin of lying to the asshole in the waiting area, and says he’ll do penance later. Of course, right after that, he saves Mollari’s life and winds up badly injured and in a coma, so one could say he did that penance right away…
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… I picked this particular title for this particular section based on the very light-bulb joke that circulated around the interwebs back in the day and that Mollari and Franklin both tell in this episode. (See Trivial matters.)
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar takes tremendous glee in the notion of getting to watch Mollari die slowly in front of him, and is bitterly disappointed in their being rescued.
Welcome aboard. Louis Turenne returns in the new recurring role of Brother Theo, who will return in “Passing Through Gethsemane.” Turenne previously played Draal in the “A Voice in the Wilderness” two-parter, but that role was recast because of Turenne’s difficulty with the Minbari prosthetics, and he was given this role instead.
The hilariously named Patrick Kilpatrick plays Carlson. John C. Flinn—one of the show’s regular cinematographers and who also directed many episodes—plays the asshole who talks to Lennier. And this week’s Robert Knepper moment is the great Cary-Horiyuki Tagawa, who does a superlative job of playing Morishi as a lived-in character.
Trivial matters. The terms of the Narn surrender, including that 500 Narns would be executed in retaliation for the murder of a Centauri by a Narn, were established in “The Long, Twilight Struggle.”
The fake disease Lennier claims to be dying of in order to get out of a conversation with an asshole is called Netter’s Syndrome, named after executive producer Douglas Netter.
The light bulb joke that Mollari and Franklin both tell is one that had been going around the B5 boards on the internet, and J. Michael Straczynski decided to include it as a tribute to the online fan base (which was in general massively supportive of the show).
Kosh appeared as Dro’shalla to the Drazi on the station when he rescued Sheridan from the Centauri bomb (which G’Kar also mentions to Garibaldi) in “The Fall of Night.”
While trapped in the transport tube, G’Kar sings the same song about fish that he sang in “The Parliament of Dreams.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Bastard!”
“Monster!”
“Fanatic!”
“Murderer!”
“You are insane!”
“And that is why we’ll win!”
“‘Go be the ambassador to Babylon 5,’ they say, ‘it will be an easy assignment.’ I hate my life.”
“So do I.”
“Shut up!”
—The final lines of the episode as Mollari and G’Kar do their best impersonation of a pair of twelve-year-olds.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I fear I have served the present by sacrificing the future.” Even back when the show first aired, this was always the “G’Kar and Mollari are stuck in an elevator” episode, and I honestly didn’t remember a damn thing about this one beyond that, not even that it was the debut of Brother Theo and his gaggle of monks.
And I do love Brother Theo and his gaggle of monks. This is a lovely update of what monks would be doing, combining the patience that would be required for, say, copying illuminated manuscripts with the desire for learning and knowledge that would mean a tropism for learning things like computer programming. Plus Louis Turenne brings a quiet dignity to the role that is extremely compelling. As is the way Claudia Christian plays Ivanova’s amused and frustrated resignation during her interview with Theo…
Speaking of amused and frustrated, we have Lennier dealing with the jerk in the waiting area. I was particularly amused to watch it because I distinctly recall an I-Con convention decades ago—though I no longer recall whether it was before or after this episode that it happened—in which Bill Mumy was pigeonholed by a fangoober who would not shut up and leave him alone. Poor Bill was trying very hard to extricate himself without being rude…
The primary plot of Carlson’s terror campaign works just fine. I like how well the procedural elements are handled. In particular, it’s nice to see Garibaldi be portrayed as competent at his job for a change. Patrick Kilpatrick plays a pretty standard psycho, though I have to confess that the plotline got less interesting once he was revealed. This is mainly because Carlson is so boring an antagonist, because he’s, well, a pretty standard psycho. You know he’s crazy because he periodically shouts his dialogue for no obvious reason. Oh, and he sweats a lot.
But, as usual, what makes the episode is the Mollari-G’Kar double act, in this case enhanced by Mollari’s scene in medlab with the unconscious Lennier. Peter Jurasik does a superlative job with Mollari’s stream-of-consciousness babble at the comatose Minbari. One of the show’s strengths has been allowing Mollari a certain complexity, as you can go from liking him and feeling sorry for him one moment to being reminded that he’s a fucking monster the next. That latter is handled nicely by his scenes with G’Kar in the transport tube. Andreas Katsulas modulates beautifully between giddy glee and furious anger, the latter particularly when he throws Mollari’s words from “The Long, Twilight Struggle” back in his face by way of explaining why G’Kar couldn’t kill Mollari even though he was at the Narn’s mercy.
Next week: “A Day in the Strife.”
