Season Two: "The coming of Shadows" (Part Six)
2.10 “Gropos”
A contingent of 25,000 Earthforce troops arrives out of nowhere, on their way to a top-secret campaign and therefore Sheridan has no warning before they blow in through the jumpgate, and he has to find billets for them! Leading them is General Richard Franklin, and no, it’s no coincidence: he is the father of the station’s doctor. He tells Sheridan and the command staff that Earthdome has decided to get involved in, or rather, end, the civil war on an alien planet, Aktor. They intend to make a surgical strike on the rebels’ base and wipe them out. As Sheridan spent time on that planet and knows the layout of the base, Franklin details him to help him finalise the battle plans.
In order to maintain the highest level of security right up to the attack, the Gropos --- or GROund POunderS --- infantry --- have not been told what their mission is. Franklin also tells Sheridan and his staff that they come bearing gifts: the very latest in defence armaments, to be fitted to the station. Sheridan is dubious: B5 is meant to be a place of peace but it looks like Earthdome intend arming it to the teeth and he has no choice in the matter. Franklin checks in with his son, but it’s clear that they don’t get on that well. The general never forgave his son for leaving home and going out among the stars, and there’s been bad blood ever since. They try to talk but as is often the case with fathers and sons, words turn into accusations and old enmities surface.
As is often the case too, a brawl breaks out on the concourse when some jarheads decide to hassle Delenn, and one of the other Gropos, a girl called Dodger, breaks it up. There’s a spark then between her and Garibaldi, and they hook up again later. However Garibaldi’s belief that this could be a real relationship is scorned by Dodger, who tells him she just takes her enjoyment when she can because tomorrow she may be dead. She storms out. As he helps Franklin lay his battleplans, Sheridan tells the general that they have been lied to: this will not be a milk run. It will be hard, very hard, to take the fortress and Sheridan advises the general to abandon his plans. But Franklin tells him that the attack is a trade-off: Earth’s help in return for establishing a permanent presence in their sector, which is strategically close to Narn and Centauri territory. He opines that Earth will at some point have to take sides in the war, and they may as well be prepared.
Garibaldi looks for Dodger later and they make up, but she suspects the truth about where they’re going and knows he knows the truth, but he can’t tell her. She surely realises he’s under orders not to reveal the truth, but she must wish that he could confirm, or dispel, her fears. Just then they have other things to think about as another brawl breaks out, but at the height of it the orders come through and the Gropos are all ordered back to their ships to head to the assault point. The attack is a success but at a very high price, though at least Franklin sees that his father survived, unlike just about everyone else we were introduced to in the episode.
QUOTES
General Franklin: “I had an Alfredo Garibaldi under my command during the Dilgar invasion. Excellent soldier!”Garibaldi: “That’s my dad.”Franklin: “So much for genetics!”
Sheridan: “Are you sure that’s wise General? Babylon 5 is supposed to be devoted to peace. If we start arming it heavily…”
Franklin: “The galaxy is changing, Captain, and Babylon 5 must change with it.”
Dodger: “I didn’t come here expecting to set up housekeeping! I’m a Ground Pounder! I’m cleaning latrines one day, the next I’m up to my hips in blood, hoping not to hear the round that takes me out, you got it? In between I like to see what I can get, to remind myself that I’m alive. Okay, it’s not romance, but it’s all I got time for. I’m so sorry it’s not enough for you!”
Dr Franklin: “I’m a doctor. My job is to heal.”
General Franklin: “Then heal humans. Stephen, I know you’re fascinated with these aliens but they’re a threat to humanity, and they always will be. Help your own kind.”
Dr Franklin: “Life is life, whether it’s wrapped in skin or scales or feathers. Now if you respected these beings instead of constantly trying to murder them all the time maybe you’d understand!”
IMPORTANT PLOT ARC POINTS
Ah, kind of none really. This is a pretty much self-contained episode. The only real arc stuff is the first overtures from Earth towards supporting alien governments in return for concessions, something that will kind of fade out and never really develop, so it’s mostly unimportant to the story arc. The only other thing is perhaps a hint of irony, when season three rolls around and we see how those shiny new defence systems get put to use. But that’s for another time.
NOTES
Let’s be honest here, while this may not be season two’s “Infection” or (God help us!) “Grey 17 is missing” --- that’s still to come, may the lord have mercy upon your souls! --- it’s a pretty poor episode and one of the weakest, if not the weakest in season two. It’s doubly annoying that it follows what seems to be an unwritten rule in drama, especially sci-fi, that a really cool, groundbreaking or pivotal episode has to be followed by a really pedestrian one, as if the viewer has had all the excitement he or she can take and needs to regain their breath. Or, as is more likely, the previous episode blew the budget and so it’s back to one-act self-contained dramas with little in the way of effects, which is fine. But why can’t the episode be well written? Does it have to be boring and uninspiring? Remember Star Trek:The Next Generation’s “Family”? Ugh!
Now, this is nowhere near that bad, but even so. After a killer punch like “The coming of shadows” it’s a huge comedown. Okay, so you wouldn’t expect another searing storyline like we’ve just seen, but “Gropos” is basically a ham-fisted attempt to remind us all that war is, you know, hell, as if we hadn’t figured that out already. There are little vignettes within the overall stodgy storytelling and blundering morality lessons --- Franklin’s relationship with his father is well handled if nothing terribly new, and Garibaldi gets some, which is always nice to see with a character who tends often to be sidelined in favour of the main stars. Well, he
is a security chief, after all! Much of his job must entail, as Holly once remarked in Red Dwarf, shining his light down corridors, turning it off, shining it again … the life of a chief of security, even on Babylon 5, can’t be filled with adventure and romance. So it’s nice to see him allowed some licence in this episode.
There are, too, foreshadowings of how Earth is intending to deal with alien governments, jumping in bed with the Akdors in exchange for a strategic post in their sector, with one eye on the developing Narn/Minbari war and trying to figure out which way to jump, who they should ally with and how profitable it will be for Earth. So there’s rather a lot packed along the edges of what is basically a fairly dull story, even given the heartstring-tugging at the end. Hey, we didn’t care about those guys: no point in showing them lying dead on some alien world! We had about twenty minutes, tops, to get to know them, and we didn’t. So don’t expect us to shed a tear for your two-dimensional jarheads, JMS!
Mind you, he can’t be blamed for this episode, as he didn’t write it, but then, chances are he had a fairly large hand in it, for as we are learning, and will learn further, about Londo Mollari, the hand of Straczynski stretches very far indeed and casts a long shadow over this series, and you can be sure there’s little in there that didn’t get his seal of approval before it appeared on screen.
Other than Warren Keffer.
You simply don’t go up to a guy of JMS’s talent and try to bully him into including a “sassy, hip flyboy” into the story for no reason than to hopefully boost ratings and bring in the chicks. But this is exactly what the network execs did, and in return they got, briefly, Warren Keffer. He is the only Starfury pilot (other than those who fly them, like Garibaldi, Ivanova and of course Sheridan, as part of their job) we get any real time with, and the way he goes on it’s just as well. He’s cocky, self-assured and cringeworthy; the worst aspects of the fighter pilot who thinks he’s a cut above everyone else. But he doesn’t last, and JMS throws down a clear marker when he has him killed off at the end of this season. JMS is always careful not to involve him in the main storyline, so that when he does meet his end it doesn’t upset the plot. But then, this was all conceived years ago anyway and Keffer was not part of the creator’s original vision, so he’s just a stone thrown in the pond that creates a brief ripple and is gone.
Another thing this episode does serve to illustrate --- apart from the fact that 25,000 squaddies in one place is never a good idea! --- is that old enmities die hard. In the case of the Narn and the Centauri, this shared hatred has reignited the war between the two species, and to some degree this is partially mirrored in the encounter between the jarheads and Delenn. When she complains she has done nothing to them, one of them snarls that he had friends who died on The Line, clearly showing that the recent Earth/Minbari war is still raw and fresh in the minds of many, and that the enforced peace does not necessarily extend to everyone. However, whereas the Narn and the Centauri have rekindled old rivalries, it’s unlikely Earth and Minbar will do the same. These are two races now aligned together --- the Minbari helped finance Babylon 5, remember --- and apart from that, Earth is not prepared for another war so soon, much less against an adversary that essentially had it defeated until their at the time inexplicable surrender.
ABSENT FRIENDS
Most of them really. This is very much a human-driven episode, with only Ambassador Delenn making an appearance, and that in a small almost cameo. No Londo, no G’Kar (though the war between the races is certainly mentioned), no Lennier and of course, no Kosh, as there will be none for quite some time now, right up to about the end part of the season.
SKETCHES
Stephen Franklin
Although this is generally an episode that focusses on Garibaldi, there’s a lot of Franklin in it too. We meet his father, who is a career military officer and it would seem quite xenophobic, telling his son that aliens are a threat to humanity. He has a problem with Stephen treating aliens, believing he should concentrate on helping his own people. He seems to be a hard man, uncompromising and with little time for fatherly love, but at heart of course he loves his son and worries about him, and the doctor reciprocates.
We’ve heard before from Franklin’s own lips about his refusal to allow his research to be used in making weapons, and here his father offers him another such post which the doctor turns down, referencing that earlier decision, which General Franklin no doubt saw as tantamount to treason, refusing to help his own people and disobeying the direct orders of, one would have to assume, a superior officer. For General Franklin the world is black and white, divided up into two sorts of people: those he trusts and those he does not. For his son, the world is equally clearly divided but his worldview is that, as he says, life is life no matter how alien it may be, and he as a doctor has taken a sworn oath to protect and preserve it.
We see why Franklin left home, as he mentioned earlier in the series --- hitch-hiking across the galaxy and offering his services to anyone who would give him a berth to somewhere he had not gone before. But now we see there was more to it that just a young man’s desire to explore,and see strange new worlds. Franklin left because waiting for his father to come back from whatever campaign he was on at the time became too painful, and rather than face that he essentially ran away. It’s said this broke his mother’s heart, though as it’s his father who says this we must take it with a grain of salt and wonder if he is talking about himself. But surely Stephen’s mother was not happy to see him go.
Michael Garibaldi
In our first real look at the security chief, we get a glimpse into his personal life. We already know that he has history with a woman on Mars named Lise Hampton, that he lost her when he agreed to accept Jeffrey Sinclair’s offer to come work with him on Babylon 5, and that he regrets how things worked out. In the episode “A voice in the wilderness” he tried to find out what had happened to her and though relieved to find she had survived the riots, was crushed when he learned she was married, and indeed expecting. Now he falls for Dodger, but is worried that he is moving too fast, which proves to be his undoing when he tells her. She is just looking for a fling, a bit of fun, some human contact, knowing she could be dead tomorrow. As indeed it turns out she is. But he can’t quite understand the idea of a one-night-stand and so loses her.
When he apologises and they intend to pick up where they left off, it’s too late as Dodger, along with every other character introduced here, dies in the assault on the rebel stronghold, and perhaps Garibaldi wishes that for once he had just thought with some other part of him rather than his head. But he was trying to do the right thing. Problem is, he was trying to do it with the wrong woman.
Garibaldi also mentions to her that he is interested in a “lady the kind a guy like me hasn’t got a chance with”: this is of course Talia Winters. He’s been pursuing her now for months, although she for her part has shown him little if any affection and has given him no reason to believe she feels the same. In fact, when she needed to talk to someone it was not Michael she turned to but Susan Ivanova. Considering what will happen near the end of the season, it’s probably as well Garibaldi didn’t push the relationship, as we will see.
(Well, for a pretty poor episode I managed to find a lot to write about it, didn't I?)
