Babylon 5 – Summer DVD Review – And The Sky Full Of Stars

babylon 5

Babylon 5
And The Sky Full Of Stars

Original Air Date: Mar 16, 1994

Aeon Cole – TwoCents Reviewer
aeon@thetwocentscorp.com

This is the eighth episode of the first season and the first really major plot point in the overall story arc. We get the answer to one major question but of course the answer just leads us to more questions. Commander Jeffery Sinclair was at the Battle of the Line and disappeared for 24 hours just before the Minbari surrendered.

He has always claimed that he blacked out during this time and had no memory of what had happened. For some on Earth, there has been a cloud of suspicion hanging over Sinclair’s head.

The episode opens with a mysterious stranger passing through station security. Another man sits in the waiting room and when the first man passes he gets up and follows him. Commander Sinclair walks down a hallway and passes a security officer. They greet each other as they pass then the security officer is jumped as he rounds a corner. Officer Benson has incurred some debt with the local loan sharks and his life is threatened if he doesn’t pay up by the next day.

In a cabin somewhere on the station, the two men are assembling some sort of machine. One man says he’s identified their target and flashes a picture of Sinclair on a holoscreen. Meanwhile, Benson is called to Sinclair’s office. Sinclair and Michael Garibaldi are waiting for him. They have found out about his gambling and are concerned he might become a security risk. Benson denies any wrongdoing but is removed from duty pending an investigation.

After Benson leaves the office Garibaldi tells Sinclair he believes the man is lying. Sinclair utters a line that sets the tone for the rest of the episode and several more to come. He says, “Everyone lies, Michael. The innocent lie because they don’t want to be blamed for something they didn’t do, and the guilty lie because they don’t have any other choice.”

Back in the cabin the two men are concerned about finding a power source for their machine but one of the men says he has it under control. We then see Benson sneaking into a storeroom. Later he shows up at the cabin and delivers a power source. He is promised that money will be deposited into his account.

Dr. Franklin has Delenn on his exam table and is scanning her. He thanks her and says he now has a base line of a healthy Minbari to work from. Delenn asks him about his days hitchhiking on star ships and this leads to a discussion about the Earth/Minbari war. She asks Franklin if he was involved in the war and he answers that toward the end of the war Earth Force wanted all of the xenobiologists to hand over their notes to be used in biological warfare research. Franklin says he destroyed all of his notes rather than have them used that way. He then asks Delenn how she was involved in the war but she declines to answer leaving one to wonder what she has to hide.

Sinclair is asleep in his cabin having a nightmare about his final battle before he blacked out. He wakes up in a sweat to discover that the computers and his com-link are not working. He dresses and walks out into the station, which appears to be deserted. He makes his way to the Observation deck but no one is there. At first the computers seem to be dead but they finally come online and let him know that there is one other life sign on the station in Blue Sector. Sinclair goes to Blue Sector. The lights go out and one of the men from the cabin appears out of nowhere. He is the interrogator and he has Sinclair trapped.

Delenn walks into Garibaldi’s office to say she had a meeting with Sinclair an hour before but he never showed up. Garibaldi tries to reach Sinclair on the coms but gets no reply. He begins a search. He finds Sinclair’s cabin empty and his com-link on the table. He calls for an all out search of the station.

The interrogator tells Sinclair that he is trapped in a virtual reality net and he proceeds to force Sinclair to remember what happened at the Battle of the Line. He accuses Sinclair of colluding with the Minbari to take over Earth from the inside.

“Look at Earth: Alien civilization. Alien migration. Aliens buying up real estate by the square mile. What they couldn’t take by force, they corrupted! Inch by inch!”

Why else would the Minbari have surrendered when they were on the verge of winning? He pushes Sinclair right to the edge and finally Sinclair has a flash of a memory. He has been taken aboard the Minbari cruiser. First he is tied up and a Minbari holds a small pyramid in front of his face and it glows. Then he is standing in the middle of a circle of grey hooded figures. He asked, “Why am I here? What do you want?” When he doesn’t get answers he walks up to one of the figures and pulls back the hood revealing the face of Delenn.

Sinclair breaks free of the VR net but is hallucinating that he is still on the Minbari ship. He fires at his own security officers but is finally talked down by Delenn. As he points his weapon at her head in his hallucinatory state he keeps repeating, “I know you. I know who you are,” before he comes out of it.

He goes to visit Delenn after he’s recovered and when she asks if he remembers anything he lies and says he doesn’t. After he leaves, one of Delenn’s superiors steps out from behind a door and says that if Sinclair does remember, he must be killed. Sinclair goes back to his cabin and enters into his personal log that he now remembers everything.

Nothing in this episode can be taken at face value. The idea that everybody lies is pervasive. And the big questions we are left with at the end of it all is, what are the Minbari hiding and what was Delenn doing at the Battle of the Line?

One of the things I really like about this series is that the devil is in the details. There were several things that came up in this episode that are crucial to the future story though they are so easily passed over and forgotten once the episode is over. This series really need to be watched more than once to fully understand how everything fits together.

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