s2e19: Divided loyalties

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On first viewing, this feels like a larger episode than it is. It’s presented as a massive, story-shifting rug pull, one that’s going to shake up everything you know about the show. On repeat viewings, it’s notable mainly for how little changes.

Today there’ll be some light spoilers in the non-spoiler section for any first-timers reading this. Nothing major.

The problem with the momentous stuff happening in ‘Divided Loyalties’ is that none of it actually matters. This is highlighted directly in the script, with Sheridan and Garibaldi pondering the various consequences of Talia’s big reveal, all of which amount to….nothing really. The episode ends in a weird stalemate, the Psi Corps unable to respond, and the B5 crew unable to take further action. It finishes with a big ‘so what?’ shrug.

That’s a problem, because the episode literally just killed Talia Winters. It’s very clear that the personality construct being unlocked destroys the original, yet we get Ivanova being a bit sad, Garibaldi basically saying “phew, that was a close one” and not much more than that. It’s compounded by the show’s general mishandling of Talia’s character: her episodes have mostly been decent, especially ‘A Race Through Dark Places’ and ‘Mind War’, but there’s so few of them it feels like we barely knew her.

We’ve hardly ever seen her professional life, we’ve never seen her outside of work other than to hang out a bit with Ivanova, and she’s never made a significant impact on the wider story. The implications of ‘Mind War’ were fascinating, with Ironheart’s gift, but the show only returned to that once.

If Talia was going to return with the new ‘Control’ personality in charge, that would be fascinating. Perhaps there could be a plotline of Garibaldi trying to resurrect the original Talia personality, while battling the Psi Corps baddie version. That would have been super cool! But, and here’s the minor spoiler, Andrea Thompson was leaving the show. That’s it for the character.

It makes all the drama around the hidden Psi Corps plant a bit of a non-event. None of the characters respond as strongly as they really should to events, there are no real plot consequences, and the show just carries on. It might have been more effective to have Talia simply leave in order to get a new job. The end result would have been the same.

Oh, and it also short-changes what would have been a really important relationship for Ivanova (and for American TV in the 90s). Bah.

All that said, it’s not a bad episode! It’s well constructed and put together in general (other than the quite poor super-close-up hallway shootout), the central threat is really effective (lack of consequences aside), there’s some cool virtual set stuff in the hangar and garden, we get the big reveal of Ivanova’s latent telepathy, and of course we get to see Lyta Alexander again from waaaay back in the pilot.¹

Oh, one thing that’s interesting: the jokey newspaper scene at the start. It’s hilarious that the show predicts personalised news feeds, but entirely overlooks the collapse of print media. Then again, perhaps it’ll go full circle, with a resurgence of interest in physical media for quality news reporting, a bit like the return of vinyl, or the success of magazines like Delayed Gratification? Babylon 5 does a remarkably good job of not dating itself through weird retro-future details, but this definitely feels like one.

In some ways this episode highlights the risks of telling a tight story in a serial format: if you set things up and then don’t pay them off, it can be worse than a purely episodic show with no real continuity.

Next up is ‘The Long, Twilight Struggle’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

Lyta Alexander! She’s back, briefly, and talks of trying to enter Vorlon space. That, at least, is going to be important. Plus we get another audio hint of what’s to come with Kosh at the end of the season.

Not exactly a spoiler, but we get more details on the Psi Corps being the Big Bad, and connections to Mars and suppressing the rebellion. I don’t think it’s mentioned, but it’s a Ranger who receives the message from ‘Derek’ (that Mars set is unexpectedly elaborate, too, with the water section, considering it’s only used in a single scene).

But yeah, Lyta aside, the problem I have with this episode is that there are so few spoilers. I wish in this section I was talking about the exciting plotline of Evil Talia and how that’s going to play out in season 3 and 4, but, alas, that was never a possibility.

1. This rewatch has rather soured me on the pilot, so a callback to it isn’t really my favourite thing. It makes the pilot required watching for new viewers, which is awkward as I think it’s a far weaker opening than ‘Midnight on the Firing Line’.