15 thoughts on “Earhart’s: “Sic Transit Vir” Spoiler Space”

  1. Have to say I really struggled with “..Avalon”, but I thought this episode was great.. Focussing on the main characters rather than on the guest star – as per the comment on the previous podcast!

    Nice touches – Vir sniffing round the Emperor’s Throne

    Vir telling Londo how the Royal Court could tell that the report had Londo’s influence but framing it as a compliment rather than the opposite.

    Sheridan seizing the moment before the next crisis.

    Ivanova’s advice to Vir – great scene!

    Ivanova’s naked dream.. be quiet, teenage me!

  2. Not a lot of spoilers in this one.

    One thing I noticed was Virini’s joke about one angry Narn with the key being dangerous. In Point of no Return G’Kar called the humans the key, and he will have an important role in the liberation of Narn.

    And speaking of G’Kar, where’s the scene where he finds out what Vir did? All we get is Londo mentioning that he knows about it when he is sending Vir to tell G’Kar that Na’Toth is alive. And that plot had Londo following Vir’s example and freeing 2000 Narns to get G’Kar to cooperate.

    1. I forgot the bit with Ivanova’s advice to Vir. She was basically describing Marcus.

      I can see how the humor would get in the way of the story. It annoyed me more earlier, I think I’ve just learned to ignore bits of the script. What Lyndisty was describing registered just fine for me.

  3. This episode was good not one of my faves but it had good scenes.
    The episode is more soapy than revealing about the future, we get more about what Vir is becoming and maybe about his future when he touches the emperor throne chair. Also more Sheridan and Delenn voyage of being a couple and can I say as a couple fan I was smiling watching them, it was adorable when Delenn tried to not hurt Sheridan feelings about the food, too adorable and loved the almost kiss and Ivanova interrupting them she was like ohh lol
    Loved the humor stuff of Ivanova w/Sheridanand I wonder if Sheridan realized that the dream was her naked and just wanted to tease her. I also loved the Vir Ivanova talk scene that was pure gold,

    I do see JMS writing the holocaust parallel w/ the Narns genocide the death camps the dr experiment and the people who helped save Jews w/visas like what Vir did.

    1. Oops I forgot when Londo arranges the death of Lord Refa he said that Refa was the person behind the narns experiments and that’s how he got J’akar to help him.

  4. After listening to the podcast, you guys brought something that I had issue w/ that I didn’t wrote in my 1st post. I agree w/you guys the episode does have issues w/having talk about the Narns Geneocide describing it and have humor in the same episode, it doesn’t really fit. I wish JMS would have done better work w/this episode or maybe change the all story if he wanted to do story about genocide using the holocaust as example he should have write episode that didn’t have humor or maybe in small doses , this episode was a bit much.

    But I still didn’t hate it much the humor scenes on their own were fun to watch and Sheridan and Delenn made me smile so much lol

  5. Lyndisty does “appear” again one more time, thought I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting (or removing the memory forcibly) in what is far and away the worst of the “numbered” Babylon 5 novels, “Personal Agendas,” where the Babylon 5 crew takes time off from the climax of the Shadow War to go on some hilarious adventures. It may be the worst Babylon 5 story, full stop. All the other contenders at least made some kind of sense.

    Sheridan and Delenn get trapped on a pirate freighter while investigating weapons being smuggled to Mars in teddy bears, and Garibaldi, Franklin, and Ivanova go to Centauri Prime to attempt to break G’Kar out of the dungeon, only to find out he can’t leave until he’s kill Cartagia (this also means Franklin wears whiteface to disguise himself as a Centauri, and Ivanova is wearing a wig for the rest of season 4 because she shaved her head for the same reason).

    Lyndisty’s really only around to give Vir another plate to spin while he tries to keep Londo from being murdered and G’Kar from being broken out of jail without blowing the whole assassination plot.

    I’m disturbed I retained this much knowledge of the story. I can only assume that if there’d been Netflix or DVD sets or more reliable re-runs at the time, I wouldn’t have bothered with what I was repeatedly warned was a terrible book to get some details about Babylon 5.

    1. Dear >Pantheon of Gods and God-Human bridges< David!
      I *wish* you were making that up as some clever defence of the humour in this episode!

      (And on the humour with genocide, and the comments above, I'm going to post in the non-spoiler section, because I think Steven and anyone who didn't like this episode deserves to give it another showing)

    2. I have never been more happy than i am right now that I skipped all of the “Non-JMS-approved” books.

      I mean…wow.

    3. Wow, I’m quite happy I never bothered with the rest of the non-canon novels after I read a couple back in the 90s and got fed up with the inconsistencies and contradictions with the series. However, if novels count, Londo’s wives all make an appearance in the Centauri Prime Trilogy. I don’t believe Lyndisty is even mentioned there, while Adira definitely is.

      Also Adira does briefly return outside of body bag in the series as well, in Day of the Dead. I remember fierce fights over that episode in The Babylon Podcast, so can’t wait the conversations in about two years or so.

  6. Some thoughts on Centauri women in response to our hosts’ comments on the podcast.

    First, I think Timov deserves more note as a figure comparable to Lady Morella. Actually, so does Adira, if you concentrate on how she’s written instead of how she comes across onscreen – it’s just that the actor plays her as an absolute drip.

    But in general, I don’t think it’s a problem that Centauri women are portrayed as having been for the most part socialized into problematic assumptions about their roles. I don’t think that the show presents it as a good thing that Centauri society is so gendered, any more than it presents it as a good thing that it’s aristocratic and has a close-to-if-not-quite absolute monarch. Aliens in SF, after all, typically represent distorted mirrors of aspects of our own society, and the Centauri, with their nostalgia for the past, do among other things serve to examine our own nostalgia for idealized “courtly” pasts.

    I think the problem is more that the show drops the ball with *other* aliens. It’s not just that there’s no Centauri Na’Toth – there aren’t any more Narn Na’Toths after her, either. There’s Delenn, but, as I’ve mentioned before, there are no other female Minbari after Delenn’s poet friend in season one – aside from the *seamstresses* in S4.

    Seriously, humans and Centauri are apparently the only species which have significant numbers of women at all.

  7. I think this episode was an ambitious attempt at stark contrasts that just didn’t work. I think JMS was really trying to play up the comedy vs. tragedy in a way that, maybe if directed differently, maybe acted differently, might have actually EMPHASIZED how horrible the Centauri’s are, rather than seeming downplayed. This is one episode that I wonder how it would look if remade with today’s sensibilities.

  8. Even shifting the G’Kar/Vir elevator “Dead…dead…dead…dead…” scene from Comes The Inquisitor, or something like it, to this episode might’ve redeemed it.

    But perhaps it’s more timely and on-the-nose than we’re giving it credit for. It’s kind of like the evening news in the U.S. dealing with incidents of unthinkable violence, and then popping the clutch and shredding the gear box by shifting suddenly to a story on a popular augmented reality game.

    These bizarre head-on collisions of comedy and tragedy happen in the real world, perhaps more than we’d like to admit, and perhaps more than we remember because we tend to compartmentalize things in hindsight. Absurdity and abject horror rolled into one incomprehensibly small space, offering no time to make sense of any of it. So it’s hard for me to dock too many points for that. Did JMS pull it off particularly skillfully? Not here. But, as has already been pointed out, we’ll always have Grey 17 Is Missing* to make this episode look better by comparison.

    * in light of JMS’ involvement in a certain Luke Perry project in the earliest 21st century, I always laugh nervously at Robert Englund declaring “I’m Jeremiah, welcome to the end of the world!” in Grey 17.

  9. Isn’t this episode something of a relevation of a turning point for Vir?

    He’s following in the footsteps of Franklin with the underground railroad thing. He’s stuck his neck out, put his balls over the wall. He risked being known as a genocidal war criminal to help free thousands. If his Centauri seniors had caught him he’d have been executed but for his calculation that Londo’s reputation and favour protected him.

    Definitely the markings of the man who will remove a dangerous dictator, replace an imprisoned one and go on to be one of the more benevolent emperors of Centauri Prime. Also, a big hit with the ladies.

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