s3e12: A Late Delivery from Avalon

The horses are on fire

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While it has its charms, ‘A Late Delivery from Avalon’ never quite delivers. The ideas are all there and my favourite B5 director is at the helm, but the pieces don’t come together.

In fact, the part of the episode that does deliver is the Garibaldi post office subplot. Which seems appropriate. JMS clearly loves that salt-of-the-earth Noo Yoik taxi driver type character, but it’s a lot of fun here. Combined with Garibaldi having to deal with the rebooting of the station’s computer systems, it seems that his character arc this side of ‘Severed Dreams’ is to handle the bureaucratic fallout from breaking away from the Earth Alliance.

I love the line from the actor who accompanies Garibaldi: “Yeah, but this is the post office.”

Anyway, Michael York is in this one. Marcus references ‘Comes the Inquisitor’, due to a mythical figure appearing on the station, but casting a big name, British genre actor in a whimsical story reminds me more of season 1’s ‘Grail’. Similar to that one, it feels like there isn’t enough time to do this story justice, and everything gets a bit rushed.

‘Arthur’ wandering the station works well: his scenes with G’Kar are enormous fun, and Andreas Katsulas doing Drunk G’Kar is something special. York does what he can with the material, but it’s all a bit too silly most of the time. The episode’s treatment of a serious mental health disorder is pretty weird, to put it politely: here we have someone with a significant personality disorder caused by massive trauma, and he’s allowed to roam about with a massive deadly weapon.

When he becomes almost comatose, Franklin thinks it’s a good idea to return the massive deadly weapon.

Oh, and Franklin’s treatment involves an aggressive shouting match where he tries to argue that ‘Arthur’ shouldn’t be mentally ill. He berates him until the trauma is so great that he becomes unable to move or speak.

At which point Franklin admits to Marcus “well, that didn’t work.” It reminds me of ‘The Long Dark’, and Franklin’s ill-advised treatment for the woman who has emerged from cryosleep (romance her, you’ll recall).

There’s no hint of bringing in a psychiatrist or specialist in the field. Sure, the episode doesn’t have time for that: but if it wants to wade into these waters, it should probably do it a bit more seriously, or at least believably.

Fortunately Delenn shows up and magically fixes everything, and Arthur/David is healed. Oh, except they then have the great idea of embedding him with the insurgent Narn resistance, which I’m sure will work out just fine.

One scene works very well indeed, mind you: the bit where Delenn wordlessly takes the sword. She was there when this all happened, she was Grey Council. This is a personal thing for her, and it’s really quite a kindness to try to help this man: the man who triggered the war and killed her mentor. There’s a lot going on in that scene.

Mike Vejar, then. His directing normally lifts any episode, and this one shoots for some striking visuals — the endless corridor, shot in black and white. But it never really grabbed me, and much of the rest of the episode feels oddly mundane compared to Vejar’s usual work.

Ultimately, it’s an episode that needed to be a bit cleverer or rather longer to properly execute the idea.

Next up is ‘Sic Transit Vir’.

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

A lot of the details around the start of the Minbari war we already knew, as I recall. This is the first time we meet the triggerman, of course. This episode works a little better on a rewatch, with some of the season 4 Dukhat stuff in my brain

Interesting that Marcus ponders Kosh to be Merlin. On this rewatch I’ve really noted how Kosh’s behaviour is quite disturbing at times: the Vorlons are manipulative and clearly not on ‘our’ side'. For my money, we haven’t met B5’s Merlin yet — he’s called Lorien, and he won’t show up for awhile.

We get the beginnings of the station working with the non-aligned worlds here, which will eventually lead to the Interstellar Alliance, and a massive conflagration with the Shadows along the way. In this episode it feels like a weird detail that doesn’t go anywhere, but it’ll grow.