It’s the penultimate episode of Season 1, with a Minbari warleader, a brand spanking new telepath and a replacement for those damn gravity rings. Let’s talk about “Legacies” and everything that came after it.
It’s the penultimate episode of Season 1, with a Minbari warleader, a brand spanking new telepath and a replacement for those damn gravity rings. Let’s talk about “Legacies” and everything that came after it.
I had forgotten the Neroon was in an episode this early. I was pleasantly surprised last night when I saw him again. He’s a favorite of mine, and I love his arc.
Wondering when the worker cast is first mentioned. At present we only have mention of there being warrior and religious. Was this the original intention?
I’m another Neroon fan. With the exception of Londo, he’s my favourite character in the show. His character arc is fantastic, culminating in his sacrifice and rejection of his caste of birth.
Neroon is probably my favorite “major guest” character: a fabulous combination of an interesting character with an actor who just rivets my attention to the screen.
I do feel that Neroon’s story suffers a little from lack of screentime. His final turn to the religious caste comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t build on anything that we ever see onscreen. Part of that is that Neroon is introduced in S1 as the representative of the warrior caste, and is the only warrior-caste character we get to know in any detail. So it’s peculiarly difficult, at least for me, to see in him any hidden leaning towards anything else – he’s our default reference for what a warrior-caste Minbari is like.
But season 4 is rushed for obvious reasons that aren’t the production team’s fault, and it’s probably the Minbari civil war that’s the element that suffers the most from this in general.
And, in terms of S1-S4 overall, it’s really, really, elegant how the Minbari plot in Legacies that introduces Neroon turns on the same aspects of Minbari culture that will be crucial in his last story in S4. One of those things where I have a sneaking suspicion that JMS may not have had it all planned from the beginning, but definitely did an amazing job of making it seem like it was all planned.
I think the Minbari civil war is in season 5 though, tied to the introduction of the Drahk. But I think I can see the progression for Neroon. He is the only warrior cast who ever seems willing to work with Delen.
‘Tastes like chicken’ is reused as a gag in s5, in reference to spoo IIRC.
You mentioned the dissonance of the Narn keeping slaves considering their background and their arc. It seems that you stuck on them having a form of slavery similar to the chattel slavery of the US where wealthy individuals owned other sentients to perform economic tasks for the owner’s benefit. While this is a familiar form of slavery in the US it is not the only type. With the expansion of Narn territory after the emancipation from Centauri rule they conquered neighboring species turning them into slave populations not to individuals but the state. I believe Sinclair confronts G’kar about this either in The Gathering or the Midnight on the Firing Line when he calls G’kar to task.
We see this in European colonialism, precolonial Africa and South America, as well as Mongol Conquests and Post-Meiji Imperial Japan among many others. In fact chattel slavery, or the owning of individuals by individuals tends to be the exception more than the rule in human history. While still a horrible practice, it is fits within both their expansionist idiom
Just to agree with this: It’s not really inconsistent with the militaristic and aggressive Narn that JMS portrays in the Gathering and Midnight on the Firing Line. It’s just that we haven’t seen those Narn for a while at the end of S1. However, they would presumably have been what D. C. Fontana had to go on when she was writing the initial script.
I think this is the trick that JMS plays: he fades out the “bad Narn” as S1 goes on. He doesn’t deny the reality of the earlier picture – he just stops mentioning it. So by the time one hits The Long Twilight Struggle, the viewer is able to have pretty much unalloyed sympathy with the Narn.
This entails suppressing certain plot elements – we never (in the show) see the perspective of a people that the Narn conquer and oppress in their expansionist phase.
In my recent all-of-the-B5-universe rewatch (almost at the end of The Lost Tales!), I decided to try reading the novels, even the early “at best partly canonical” ones. The novels haven’t really turned out to be my sort of thing so far, although bloody-minded completism means that I’m determined to get them all read. But one interesting feature is that two separate novels set during the Narn-Centauri War pick up on this absence and have plots that focus on the reactions of the Narn’s non-Centauri victims to the conflict.
Incidentally, much of this is why I feel our hosts have a bit too positive a reading of G’Kar’s overall arc (“Christ allegory” and so on) and too negative a reading of Londo’s. But I’ll wait and see what they say about S4-S5 when they actually get there…
Which novels are these?
I’ve always found Peter David’s trilogy about what happened to Centari Prime between the series end and the future flaws we see in War Without End to be quite excellent. It even has Londo, near the end, starting to dictate the story beginning with his, “I was there at the dawn of the third age…” Speech that starts ” The Gathering.”
I also really enjoy the techomage trilogy.
Jim Mortimore, Clark’s Law.
S. M. Stirling, Betrayals.
I can’t honestly recommend either as reading experiences to anyone whose tastes resemble mine, although both are in the top half of what I’ve read of the novels so far. But YMMV.
There was a major (in my mind) plot inconsistency that kind of ruined this episode for me. I did not buy Naroon’s antagonism. He blamed the humans/Sinclair for the theft of the body, yet HIS guards were constantly with the body. I don’t think he would think that the humans could outsmart or out-muscle Minbari guards, so he should not have thought that humans were to blame.
Also, regarding what caste one belongs to in a mixed Minbari marriage, the crew concluded that the mother’s side takes precedence. Copying from the Lurker’s Guide for this episode: Caste membership is determined by heritage. Membership in the religious caste takes precedence if one parent is in the religious caste and the other is a warrior. (This is ambiguous; Delenn’s statement on the matter could be interpreted to mean that the mother’s caste takes precedence over the father’s.) .
Regarding the guards, I assumed Neroon thought his fellow Star Riders were loyal without fault.
I agree that since the Minbari were the ones guarding the body, they should have shouldered the blame.. Neroon wouldn’t have liked it, but I kinda expected Sinclair or Garibaldi to at least mention the fact that B5 security were kept away.
Nice to hear that the young telepath was followed up, even if it wasn’t on-screen. Given how important telepaths are to the overall story, and the importance of Human-Minbari relations, she could have been a more pivotal character to come back to – she was a “high P10” so one of the most powerful Teeps! Had Kosh swooped in and taken her away it would have made for some good scenes, but I guess she was mainly needed just to uncover Delenn’s actions, and of course “chrysalis” foreshadowing.
Yay for Neroon love! (He was also in a recurring role at the end of DS9 as a Cardassian, if you care for such trivia.)
I think it was this ep where this came up, but the number of Minbari speaking roles that go to women is really awful: three in the whole series. (I went through the series once counting. It’s the same for Narn and a bit better for Centauri.)
And, randomly, it may not indicate a matriarchal society for a person’s status to be dependant on the mother’s: classical Roman law had the same thing – whether one was citizen, free, or slave depended on what she was – and that wasn’t anything to do with power for women.
…this is rubbish only having two eps left to listen to. I don’t like it!
Someone, Shannon I believe, said she didn’t remember previous mentions of Narn expansionism, but they actually mention it in G’Kar’s very first scene in The Gathering. When he is arguing with Lt. Cmdr Takashima she says, “so, in that case being the piece loving Narns we’ve all come to know an love, except for a few planets out on the fringe who say you’ve invaded them.”
Also as for episode order, Chip is right about the triluminay, but I noticed that the Crysalis device itself actually takes a huge step backwards in this episode. Here Delen is working on the second level. In Signs and Portents however she is clearly working on the second level. Unfortunately even the original airing order does not fix this issue, leading me to believe that chronologically Babylon Squared is actually much earlier in the year.
I know this is JMS’s prefered ordering, but he has given prefered ordering in the past that is clearly not chronological with Crusade, where the episode where Gideon is given the ship and mission is like in the center of the series. I think we may be seeing another example of that here.
I meant to say here, in Legacies, Delen is working on the first level.
So I’ve gone back through the episodes on Season 1 looking for the Crysalis device and its stages of construction and I have put together a different episode order that I think might actually flow better that regard.
Midnight on the Firing Line
Soul Hunter
Born to the Purple
Infection
The Parliament of Dreams
Mind War
The War Prayer
And the Sky Full of Stars
Deathwakler
Believers
Survivors
By any Means Necessary
Babylon Squared (Delen gets the Triluminary)
The Quality of Mercy (as mentioned in the podcast froma crew perspective this feel svery much like a counterpart to B Squared)
Eyes (Delen is still gone)
A Voice in the Wilderness 1 and 2 (Table where the device is going to be built has been cleared off)
Grail (something that looks like the top of the device sits on the table by itself)
Legacies (Triluminary is used and Delen is working on first row of device)
Signs and Portents (Delen is working on second row)
TKO (something to slightly space out Morden’s apperances)
Chrysalis (completion and activation of chrysalis device)
I do not care for Signs and Portents and Chrysalis being so close together but I wanted to keep as much in JMS’s order as possible, while still building the Chrysalis device logically, so no other “filler” episodes could realy be moved. Also given Eye’s direct reference to a large number of events that must therefore take place before it there is not actually as much “filler” as one would initially suspect in the season, unless you moved Eyes itself to slot it between Signs and Portents and Chysalis, and just take Delenn’s absence to be another journey off station.