4 thoughts on “Earhart’s: “The Ragged Edge” Spoiler Space”
I said in my non-spoiler comment that there’s good stuff in The Ragged Edge, and for me that’s the G’Kar material.
Here’s where we get to see G’Kar actually be Londo’s friend, not in the sense of having an icky voyeuristic laugh together, but in the more real and significant sense of being able to understand Londo’s position from a sympathetic perspective and take Londo’s side as a result.
This has an important connection to the other G’Kar storyline, the religious-leader stuff. Among other things, that’s about the fact that G’Kar hasn’t brought the other Narn along with him on the moral journey to becoming the different sort of person that his attitude to Londo in this episode shows him to be. They need to give up their hatred and fear of the Centauri, and this episode establishes that the central test for G’Kar as a religious teacher is whether or not he will be able to persuade them to do that.
This is all nice and coherent, as the failure of G’Kar as a religious teacher ultimately feeds into the resolution to the Mysterious Raids storyline that gives rise to his remarks on Londo.
I think that one can’t use S1 G’Kar straightforwardly when asking if it’s in character for G’Kar to seek to reject the position of influence and power that he’s offered here. For what it’s worth, S1 G’Kar was willing to act as a religious leader in a more normal way, playing the role of officiant in a ceremony. And it is likely that he was not uninterested in personal power and status, although status is not a driving motivation for him in S1 in the way it is for Londo.
But it doesn’t matter, because he’s not the same G’Kar. There’s some continuity, but, overall, G’Kar has become a quite different and morally superior person to the one that he was in S1.
On that note, our hosts cleverly insinuated their pro-Narn propaganda from back in S1. 🙂 It’s not accurate to say that G’Kar said “All I want is the safety of my people” in Signs and Portents.
Here’s that exchange:
“ What do I want? The Centauri stripped my world. I want justice.”
“But what do you want?”
“To suck the marrow off their bones, and grind their skulls to powder.”
“What do you want?”
“To tear down their cities, blacken their sky, sow their ground with salt. To completely, utterly erase them.”
“And then what?” [emphasis added]
“I don’t know. As long as my homeworld’s safety is guaranteed,* I don’t know that it matters.”
S1 G’Kar wants the genocide of the Centauri as revenge for their invasion of his homeworld. Wanting the safety of the Narn people isn’t “all” that he wants — it’s what he comes up with when asked what *else* he wants, and it’s far from obvious that he even thinks of it as something that is likely to come up.
S5 G’Kar simply isn’t the same person as the person who said those things to Morden.
*The phrase “safety of my people” is actually not G’Kar, but Londo, in Interludes and Examinations, when he makes one of his big wrong turns, his rapprochement with Morden:
“Everybody around me dies, Mr. Morden, except the ones that most deserve it. That is about to change. You said that you would go away for as long as I wanted. I no longer want that. All I want now is revenge. They took from me .. the one thing that I have .. have ever truly loved. And you will help me, Mr. Morden, to strike them down. Give me this, and the safety of my people, and let the rest of the galaxy burn. I don’t care anymore.”
This is a very close parallel to what G’Kar says in Signs and Portents. Londo, like G’Kar then, is animated by revenge (note esp. the significance of the ordinarily colorless word “want” in what he says), and thinks of the safety of the Centauri as an afterthought.
But if anything, Londo’s people are a more real consideration for him in this exchange with Morden than they are for G’Kar in his (perhaps because Londo has experienced his people being threatened in the recent past in S1 in a way in which G’Kar at the time of Signs and Portents seems to think is behind the the Narn for the forseeable future).
Ambitious visuals in this and next produced episode (Corps) were the beginnings of trying new technologies for Crusade, which was entering pre-production, and was going to be all over the place instead of a static station. That was also one of the reasons why John Copeland was directing. He was deeply involved in getting Crusade going and took lessons.
Really looking forward to the next one. The Babylon Podcast hosts disagreed so much that they had to do an additional special episode just for arguing about Day of the Dead and its magic chalk.
I said in my non-spoiler comment that there’s good stuff in The Ragged Edge, and for me that’s the G’Kar material.
Here’s where we get to see G’Kar actually be Londo’s friend, not in the sense of having an icky voyeuristic laugh together, but in the more real and significant sense of being able to understand Londo’s position from a sympathetic perspective and take Londo’s side as a result.
This has an important connection to the other G’Kar storyline, the religious-leader stuff. Among other things, that’s about the fact that G’Kar hasn’t brought the other Narn along with him on the moral journey to becoming the different sort of person that his attitude to Londo in this episode shows him to be. They need to give up their hatred and fear of the Centauri, and this episode establishes that the central test for G’Kar as a religious teacher is whether or not he will be able to persuade them to do that.
This is all nice and coherent, as the failure of G’Kar as a religious teacher ultimately feeds into the resolution to the Mysterious Raids storyline that gives rise to his remarks on Londo.
Having listened to the podcast, a follow-up:-
I think that one can’t use S1 G’Kar straightforwardly when asking if it’s in character for G’Kar to seek to reject the position of influence and power that he’s offered here. For what it’s worth, S1 G’Kar was willing to act as a religious leader in a more normal way, playing the role of officiant in a ceremony. And it is likely that he was not uninterested in personal power and status, although status is not a driving motivation for him in S1 in the way it is for Londo.
But it doesn’t matter, because he’s not the same G’Kar. There’s some continuity, but, overall, G’Kar has become a quite different and morally superior person to the one that he was in S1.
On that note, our hosts cleverly insinuated their pro-Narn propaganda from back in S1. 🙂 It’s not accurate to say that G’Kar said “All I want is the safety of my people” in Signs and Portents.
Here’s that exchange:
“ What do I want? The Centauri stripped my world. I want justice.”
“But what do you want?”
“To suck the marrow off their bones, and grind their skulls to powder.”
“What do you want?”
“To tear down their cities, blacken their sky, sow their ground with salt. To completely, utterly erase them.”
“And then what?” [emphasis added]
“I don’t know. As long as my homeworld’s safety is guaranteed,* I don’t know that it matters.”
S1 G’Kar wants the genocide of the Centauri as revenge for their invasion of his homeworld. Wanting the safety of the Narn people isn’t “all” that he wants — it’s what he comes up with when asked what *else* he wants, and it’s far from obvious that he even thinks of it as something that is likely to come up.
S5 G’Kar simply isn’t the same person as the person who said those things to Morden.
*The phrase “safety of my people” is actually not G’Kar, but Londo, in Interludes and Examinations, when he makes one of his big wrong turns, his rapprochement with Morden:
“Everybody around me dies, Mr. Morden, except the ones that most deserve it. That is about to change. You said that you would go away for as long as I wanted. I no longer want that. All I want now is revenge. They took from me .. the one thing that I have .. have ever truly loved. And you will help me, Mr. Morden, to strike them down. Give me this, and the safety of my people, and let the rest of the galaxy burn. I don’t care anymore.”
This is a very close parallel to what G’Kar says in Signs and Portents. Londo, like G’Kar then, is animated by revenge (note esp. the significance of the ordinarily colorless word “want” in what he says), and thinks of the safety of the Centauri as an afterthought.
But if anything, Londo’s people are a more real consideration for him in this exchange with Morden than they are for G’Kar in his (perhaps because Londo has experienced his people being threatened in the recent past in S1 in a way in which G’Kar at the time of Signs and Portents seems to think is behind the the Narn for the forseeable future).
Psst, does anyone know where I can get me some Dust?
Congratulations on the 100!
Ambitious visuals in this and next produced episode (Corps) were the beginnings of trying new technologies for Crusade, which was entering pre-production, and was going to be all over the place instead of a static station. That was also one of the reasons why John Copeland was directing. He was deeply involved in getting Crusade going and took lessons.
Really looking forward to the next one. The Babylon Podcast hosts disagreed so much that they had to do an additional special episode just for arguing about Day of the Dead and its magic chalk.