s2e10: GROPOS

Babylon 5's always bringing me something new

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This episode leans hard on the tropes, but it knows what it’s doing and does it well. It shifts through tones quite effortlessly, has a literally killer ending and even makes Keffer interesting.

There’s a bunch of tales from the Babylon 5 set about Paul Winfield being unprofessional on set during the filming of ‘GROPOS’, needing cue cards, not bothering to learn lines, and generally disparaging the B5 production compared to Star Trek. It all sounds very awkward.

I don’t think any of that really matters in the end product, because his performance as General Richard Franklin and Stephen Franklin’s father is really good! Perhaps it’s clever editing or some magic tricks from director Jim Johnston, but it comes together well. I believe the character, both in his hard-ass military mode and when he slightly softens towards the end. He has the necessary presence in the scene.

Where this episode really come alive is with the GROPOS themselves. The casting is impeccable throughout. Yang gets two lines, but the actor makes it work. Racist Guy is a caricature but I believe it, and not just a thug. Large is hilarious. They all jump off the screen, and DiTillio uses the tropey setups to fit in a lot of at-a-glance character work. It’s Full Metal Jacket meets Aliens, but it works.

There’s a palpable sense of war becoming real in this episode. Shifting from a theoretical or something happening ‘far away’, to being on their doorstep. It’s no longer just CG spaceships blowing each other up (with the occasional fighter pilot) — we now have real people, the soldiers, and we see their faces and get to know them. I think that’s a really smart move at this point in the season. Contrasting Sheridan and General Franklin talking top-down strategy with the grunts who are going to do the actual fighting works, too. I like that the ramifications of the Narn-Centauri war are already being felt, in an indirect way, so quickly.¹

The only bit that doesn’t quite fit is with Dodger and Garibaldi. The actors both do an excellent job, but I simply don’t buy Garibaldi’s “it’s complicated” freak out. Nothing about Garibaldi has given us the impression that he’d be twitchy about a one night stand. Sure, he has feelings for Lise Hampton, but she’s light years away, married and no longer an option. Garibaldi is a grown man, and it all just feels a bit silly. It feels, to be honest, like a teen’s idea of romance and intimacy, like something you might see in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. I’ve read that this was a change made by JMS, and DiTillio’s original script didn’t have Garibaldi shy away at the last minute. It’s a change for the worse.

My favourite moments are at the end. The bar fight is interrupted by the General, who orders them to ship out. The mood immediately shifts. The following scene, with the GROPOS shuffling back towards their ships, is played in a very low-key way. There’s almost no music, save for a building whine, which sounds like the engines on the ships spinning up. There’s something deeply ominous in the sound design, and seeing these men and women walking to their dooms. It’s an incredibly effective scene.

That’s followed by the news report, which is operating at the very outer limits of mid-90s television CG, but is still nicely staged and conceived. Then the triple whammy: Franklin seeing his father, then Garibaldi getting the casualties log from Lou, then Keffer looking at it. I wish there had been a bit more time to linger on Garibaldi, and then on Keffer — as it is, the show has to cut to credits a bit too tightly for the moment to fully land. Silent end credits, with no music but that background whine of jet engines, would also have been effective.

I like, also, that Lou Welch sticks around after giving the list to Garibaldi. Clearly, the man has already checked it over, and is there in case his boss needs someone to talk to. It’s a nice, subtle moment.

‘GROPOS’ is an episode that by all rights should have been a right mess, or at the very least tipped over into cliché daftness, but it somehow comes together into something rather better than the sum of its parts.

Oh yeah, and Keffer gets the best line of the whole thing. When he discovers Large and Yang in his quarters and squares up against Large, his response to the threat of “Yeah, give me a minute to go fetch a ladder and we’ll sort this out face-to-face” is brilliant. Keffer is mostly a non-character in season 2 so far, but ‘GROPOS’ does a lot to make him more likeable (not least because he isn’t being weirdly inserted into scenes with the top command staff).

Next up is ‘All Alone in the Night’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

We will, bizarrely, see Dodger again, in season 5, during the Drazi Day of the Dead.

This might be the first time we get a really strong idea of Sheridan’s strategic skills on a battlefield, which he hasn’t had much opportunity to demonstrate thus far.

The main thing is perhaps the new defence grid, which will prove useful on multiple occasions. I like the way that upgrade is built into the story in such an organic way: a standalone story with one-off guest stars, who come along and make a fundamental change to the ongoing show. That’s the Babylon 5 concept at its finest.

1. Also, the implication is clearly that Bethesda Dome is where research is being carried out on biological weapons to potentially use against the Narn and/or Centauri. Grim.