s1e7: The War Prayer

"My shoes are too tight..."

We’re watching the pioneering 90s TV show Babylon 5. If you want to join us, hit subscribe then go to your account and turn on the Let’s Watch notifications.

Only seven episodes in, I’m finding that this rewatch is bringing with it all sorts of interesting new context that wasn’t there on previous viewings, let alone when I watched the show in the 90s as an impressionable teenager.

Back in those heady days, the events of ‘The War Prayer’ all seemed quite fanciful to me. I was a middle class, straight, white kid in England, and the tensions being explored in ‘The War Prayer’ felt a world away, or from a different age. Obviously I was being naïve, and in the intervening years I’ve thankfully become more informed. It’s depressing that not only is the episode still relevant, but is perhaps as relevant as it’s ever been.

There are two particular real-world things that resonated with this episode. The assault on the Minbari poet at the beginning made me think of the attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, and how art and artists are so often on the receiving end of extremist actions. One of the main attributes of an extremist seems to be an inability to appreciate humour, or artistic expression. The idea of other people having a range of thoughts and reactions is a direct threat to the extremist, who is only capable of seeing the world through a single, quite damaged lens. That this episode focuses on a poet for its opening incident, rather than, say, a politician or anonymous civilian, is unusual and meaningful.

The second thing that worked better for me watching this in 2024 was the character of Malcolm Biggs, the slimy ex-boyfriend of Ivanova and leader of the extremist anti-alien group. I’ve always found Tristan Rogers’ performance to be a bit cheesy and silly, and didn’t really understand why anyone would find him inspiring or be inclined to follow him to such extreme ends.

Doesn’t seem so crazy these days.

This sweater tho amirite

I mean…his entire persona is Nigel Farage, right? Now, I’m not suggesting that Farage is leading a terrorist organisation that is planning assassinations of foreign diplomats, obviously. But the language, the smiley-smiley, overly friendly delivery, the “I’m your best mate” rhetoric, the back-to-the-good-old-days schtick…it’s the same arguments used by Farage and UKIP and the Brexit crowd, almost word-for-word at times.

I was expecting to see a shot of the core shuttle with a big ‘We send the non-aligned worlds £350 million a week. Let’s fund our MedLab instead” slogan emblazoned on the side.

That Bigg’s rhetoric is so cliched, so cheesy, so obviously manipulative, and yet sounds exactly like the worst excesses of the extreme right in the 21st century is depressing and remarkable in equal measure. It works. It gets the votes.

A lot of that stuff worked better than I remembered. But there are all sorts of problems with this episode.

First up, the incessant ‘comedy’ music. Not Christopher Franke’s strong suit. I’m glad they never tried it again. Stylistically, it’s closer to the pilot and the opening episodes.

There’s a really weird scene with Sinclair and Ivanova talking about events from the pilot, which has absolutely nothing to do with what’s happening in the episode and could have been inserted into literally any episode. It’s seemingly an entire scene dedicated to fixing some unresolved plot holes from the pilot, and is very peculiar. Given how I really didn’t like the pilot on this viewing, I’d much rather they’d just moved on and brushed it under the carpet, rather than calling back to it overtly. If I was showing B5 to a new viewer I’d skip the pilot, but shoehorned scenes like this one make that a trickier prospect than it should be. It’s a badly written scene that doesn’t need to exist. The world building in B5 has been clever and subtle so far: this one was not.

The ending also is rushed. We never get a proper confrontation between Ivanova and Biggs, other than the lines as he is escorted off the station. We never see Sinclair trying to explain his actions to the council, or repair the damager of his pretend behaviour. In fact, it’s not clear why he had to lie to the council about the perps having left the station - did he and Garibaldi think that Home Guard had infiltrated the council? Was it being televised, and therefore watched by Biggs? The way it is presented it feels like Sinclair playing to an audience that isn’t there.

The biggest mis-step is in the final shoot-out. After we see the Abbai delegation’s ambassador held hostage, when the guns start firing neither Sinclair nor Ivanova try to protect her! Sinclair grabs Ivanova and pulls her to safety, even though she doesn’t need saving. They ignore the Abbai ambassador, who we see desperately crawling to cover by herself in the background of one shot. After security arrives and arrests everyone, I was convinced that Sinclair (or, at least, Garibaldi) would immediately go to check on the ambassador. But no: - we get a shot of Sinclair checking that Ivanova is OK…and there are no shots of anyone helping the ambassador! The scene ends. The Abbai ambassador might still be cowering behind the crate for all we know.

It’s completely bizarre.

It feels like either a writing error, or a coverage error. Maybe the shots didn’t work in the edit, and they had no choice but to present the scene as-is? Can you imagine the headlines, and the further damage to Sinclair’s reputation among the non-aligned worlds? “Sinclair didn’t even try to help me!”

The shoot-out, and thus the conclusion to the main story, is entirely short-circuited by the omission.

Let’s end on some positives: G’Kar and Londo are both brilliant. Obviously. It’s good to see Vir trying to stand up to Londo, even if many of those scenes are undercut by the ‘comedy’ music. I like G’Kar riling up the crowd: you can see how in another life he could be as manipulative as Biggs, but thanks to a recent couple of episodes we know a bit more about him.

Next week is ‘And the Sky Full of Stars’, which I’m very excited about.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

I love the bit where Biggs claims that he’s going to assassinate Kosh.

Hilarious. Can you imagine them trying to pull that off?

Is it ever confirmed in the episode whether Biggs is Home Guard, or something else? I wasn’t sure.

We have the dodgy scene with Ivanova and Sinclair talking about the pilot episode, sounding more like commenters on Reddit than their actual characters. Hints in there of Earth being generally compromised. Plus Biggs’ plan, as Ivanova points out, would require a huge number of people involved, and he claims to have support in high-up places. In this episode it’s hard to know if that’s true or just Biggs’ showing off, but it becomes increasingly evident as the show goes on that Earth’s government is indeed infiltrated and compromised in all sorts of ways.

Otherwise, I’m not sure there’s much of long-term import in this episode. It rehashes stuff we already know about the Battle of the Line and the Minbari (probably as a reminder in advance of next week), but doesn’t really introduce much that is new.

Anything I missed?