Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Points of Departure”


“Points of Departure”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Janet Greek
Season 2, Episode 1
Production episode 201
Original air date: November 2, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… The EAS Agamemnon under Captain John Sheridan has just finished a mission when General William Hague of the Joint Chiefs of Staff contacts him with a new assignment. The Tragati—a Minbari warship that went rogue after the Minbari surrendered to end the Earth-Minbari War—has been sighted near B5. Hague wants Sheridan to go to B5, but not just to protect it: he’s to take command of the station.

Sinclair was recalled to Earth. Hague informs Ivanova—who has been in temporary command since Sinclair was summoned home—that Sinclair is being made an ambassador to Minbar. Sheridan is replacing him. Ivanova served with Sheridan at Io, and while she’s happy with that part of the news, she wonders if the Minbari will be. Sheridan destroyed the Black Star, a decorated Minbari vessel, during the war. It was Earth’s only real victory, and the Minbari still refer to Sheridan as “Starkiller.” This is a provocative move on Earth’s part—the Minbari were the ones who insisted on Sinclair’s posting, and to replace him with someone the Minbari hate is definitely a thing, though he was apparently the late President Santiago’s first choice to replace Sinclair should something happen to him.

When Sheridan arrives (early, to Ivanova’s dismay as she doesn’t have time to gather a proper greeting), she fills him in: Garibaldi is still in a coma after being shot, G’Kar is still missing, and Delenn is still in a cocoon. Sheridan says he’s looking forward to the new posting (especially since the CO’s quarters on B5 has a water shower as opposed to a sonic one).

Hedronn, a member of the Grey Council, arrives in Delenn’s quarters to see Lennier praying over her cocoon. Hedronn, who isn’t all that happy that Delenn took this step on her own nor at the apparent proximity of the Tragati, orders Lennier to tell the humans what he’s been told if the Tragati does arrive at the station.

Credit: Warner Bros. Television

A Minbari boards B5, looking for the part of the station where the ambassadors live. Hedronn recognizes him as Kalain, the second-in-command of the Tragati. Kalain threatens Hedronn and goes on his way. So Hedronn reports to Sheridan and Ivanova. Sineval, the Tragati captain, committed suicide after the surrender and Kalain took the Tragati away. They’ve lived in self-imposed exile for twelve years now. Hedronn also makes it clear that the Minbari still hold a grudge against Sheridan.

Kalain is stopped by security, but he beats up the guard and continues to Delenn’s quarters. Sheridan deduces that Delenn is a potential target and joins a security detail there. They capture Kalain before he can shoot Delenn, though he has plenty of opportunities to kill her before he’s taken into custody. Sheridan points that out while interrogating him, but Kalain just says that Sheridan is the real problem.

Lennier then approaches Sheridan and Ivanova and does what Hedronn said. The secret that Delenn was going to tell Sinclair last time was the truth behind what happened at the Battle of the Line.

The Grey Council observed the battle, and Delenn says that they should examine a human, see why they fight so valiantly, if futilely. Delenn picks a Starfury at random, and it happens to be Sinclair’s. Over the course of torturing him, they discover something shocking: he has a Minbari soul.

Religious orthodoxy among the Minbari says that souls are reincarnated, but there has been a soul shortage, as it were. They captured some more humans and examined them, and they too had Minbari souls. The Grey Council, fearful for killing more humans and therefore more of their own souls, immediately called for surrender—but did not explain why.

Sheridan and Ivanova are not sure they believe that Minbari souls are reincarnated, but it’s obvious that the Grey Council believe it.

Scene from Babylon 5 "Points of Departure"
Credit: Warner Bros. Television

The Tragati comes through a jumpgate, weapons hot. Sheridan orders Starfuries to be mobilized. We see them doing so mostly via Lieutenant Warren Keffer, whose hololetter from home is interrupted by the call to battle stations.

Deeron, the Tragati’s third in command, requests that Kalain be turned over. Sheridan refuses, and even if he acquiesced, he couldn’t do it, because Kalain has committed suicide. (They didn’t check him for a hollow tooth with a poison pill in it? That’s, like, the oldest trick in the book…)

Stating that all that’s left is “honor and death,” Deeron sends out a fighter wing. Sheridan is surprised to see that they can scan the fighters. When he confirms that they’re using the same sensor tech that they had during the war, Sheridan tells the Starfuries not to engage. Sure enough, the Minbari fighters fly past without engaging.

During the war, one of the reasons why Earth did so badly is that the Minbari have stealth technology that Earth still, a dozen years later, hasn’t been able to crack. Sheridan bypassed that during the war by mining the asteroid belt with fusion bombs, which destroyed the Black Star. So it makes no sense to Sheridan that the Minbari would be detectable now—unless they wanted B5’s Starfuries to be able to fire on them.

Sheridan also sent a message through the jumpgate, and in response the Minbari ship that had been tasked to find the Tragati (which Hague had told Sheridan about, but which was classified, so Sheridan couldn’t mention it until now) shows up to take Deeron and her crew and the warship into custody.

The Minbari were trying to start the war back up, but they couldn’t make the first move. They had hoped (in vain, as it turns out) that B5’s Starfuries firing on them and/or Kalain’s death in human custody would provide the provocation for the war to reignite.

Now Sheridan is worried that his appointment will cause problems for the station. B5 only made sense as a target for Kalain’s plan because “Starkiller” is now in command.

Lennier speaks to the cocoon, saying he wishes he could have told Sheridan and Ivanova the whole truth, about the ancient enemy that is returning and that the two sundered souls must reunite to face it. (Why he couldn’t tell them that truth is left as an exercise for the viewer.)

After Lennier leaves the room, the chrysalis begins to crack….

Scene from Babylon 5 "Points of Departure": Lennier places candles near Delenn's chrysalis
Credit: Warner Bros. Television

Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan has a good-luck speech, involving Lincoln and the Dalai Lama, among other things, that he always gives in the first twenty-four hours of a new assignment. His first attempt to give the speech is interrupted by Hedronn’s news of Kalain. He finally gives the speech to an empty CnC right before the end of his twenty-four-hour window.

(We’ve seen CnC empty or near-empty before, in “And the Sky Full of Stars,” when Ivanova puts up her feet and no one else is around. This makes no sense, though J. Michael Straczynski has justified it in online postings by saying it’s when they do backups and maintenance and stuff. But the command center of a station like B5 would have to be operational and staffed 24/7 in order to function, as ships that come to the station would not be on the same diurnal cycle as the station, plus non-humans have different circadian rhythms.)

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair has been reassigned to be Earth’s ambassador to Minbar, which makes sense, especially given Lennier’s revelations about Minbari beliefs about their souls. (And for more reasons, which will be revealed in season three’s “War Without End” two-parter.)

Ivanova is God. Ivanova has been holding the station together with both hands in Sinclair’s absence until Sheridan’s arrival. As she puts it, she feels like she’s paying off karma at an accelerated rate.

Scene from Babylon 5 "Points of Departure": Dr Franklin and Ivanova stand outside Garibaldi's sick bay
Credit: Warner Bros. Television

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi remains in a coma. Franklin says there’s nothing more he can do: he’s healed all the wounds. Now it’s up to Garibaldi to wake up.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. The Minbari don’t like Sheridan much, as he destroyed one of their finest warships. We see more of the division of the Grey Council that we saw in “Babylon Squared,” as Hedronn is not happy about Delenn’s actions, but also has Lennier follow her instructions to reveal some of the truth to the humans about their souls being reincarnated in humans, and why they surrendered.

Welcome aboard. Robin Sachs makes the first of three appearances as a member of the Minbari Grey Council. In this episode and his next appearance, “All Alone in the Night,” he’s named Hedronn. He’ll be back in In the Beginning with the character name of Coplann, but it’s possible that Hedronn is a pseudonym that he uses for his cover in this episode as part of the Ministry of Culture. Sachs will also play two different Narn, Na’Kal in “The Fall of Night” and “Walkabout,” and Na’Tok in “Movements of Fire and Shadow” and “The Fall of Centauri Prime.”

Robert Foxworth makes the first of two appearances as Hague—he’ll also be back in “All Alone in the Night.”

Richard Grove plays Kalain, and we’ve got recurring regular Joshua Cox as Corwin, plus two other Minbari are played by Jennifer Anglin and Michael McKenzie, who each played several alien roles over the course of the series.

Trivial matters. Bruce Boxleitner joins the opening-credits cast as Sheridan, replacing Michael O’Hare. O’Hare was suffering from schizophrenia and needed to depart the cast after the first season. J. Michael Straczynski and O’Hare agreed not to reveal the true reason for O’Hare’s departure until after the actor’s death, which Straczynski did after O’Hare sadly passed in 2012. At the time, speculation ran rampant as to why O’Hare was replaced, with Straczynski insisting it was done for story reasons (which was never particularly convincing) and speculation that Warner Bros. insisted that O’Hare be replaced (which is the sort of thing studios would do).

In addition to Boxleitner, Robert Rusler and Mary Kay Adams join the opening credits, the former as Keffer, the latter (who doesn’t appear in the episode) replacing Caitlin Brown in the role of Na’Toth.

The opening credits have a new voiceover, spoken by Boxleitner, which has some of the same information as the first season’s voiceover, although in a different order, and foreshadowing (ahem) the conflict that will develop over the course of the season. In addition, the actors’ faces are shown over their credits now.

In the original airing of the episode, Mira Furlan’s credit was with an image of Delenn in her first-season makeup. After her new form is revealed in “Revelations” next time, the credit changed to an up-to-date image. (On the original DVD set, the new-image credits are used on this episode, however that has been fixed on more recent releases and in the version that is on streaming services.)

Delenn told Sinclair about Sineval committing suicide in “Legacies.”

The first issue of DC’s Babylon 5 comic book by Straczynski, Michael Netzer, & Rob Leigh, published in late 1994, takes place between “Chrysalis” and this episode, chronicling Sinclair’s being recalled to Earth.

What happens to Sinclair, as well as Sakai and the as-yet-unintroduced-onscreen Marcus Cole over the course of season two is chronicled in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan, released in 1997. The first batch of nine B5 tie-in novels were not closely supervised by Straczynski, and were later declared to be non-canonical, with two exceptions; Drennan’s novel is one. (Drennan was Straczynski’s wife at the time, and also wrote one episode of the show.) The other was Jeanne Cavelos’ The Shadow Within.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

“If you are going to kill me, then do so. Otherwise, I have considerable work to do.”

—Lennier’s completely calm response to Kalain pointing a gun at him.

Bruce Boxleitner as Commander Sheridan in Babylon 5 "Points of Departure"
Credit: Warner Bros. Television

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We cannot escape history.” My memory of watching this episode thirty years ago is of relief and joy, and particularly a sense of energy that was completely missing from season one. A lot of it is the change at the top of the ensemble, as Bruce Boxleitner—whom I was a fan of from his time as the co-lead with Kate Jackson in the spy show Scarecrow and Mrs. King, not to mention his work as the title character alongside Jeff Bridges and fellow B5 star Peter Jurasik in Tron—is a much more dynamic lead than the often-somnolent Michael O’Hare.

And, to be fair, part of it is that this is a rather exciting episode, mostly because it brings the Minbari as a current threat a bit more to the fore. In the first season, the Minbari have been mysterious “other” type aliens. The Earth-Minbari War was an abstraction, a thing of the past—even Sinclair’s rather brutal role in its end was more of a puzzle to solve than anything. Plus, of course, Mira Furlan’s Delenn (who is only directly seen in flashback in this episode) has always been a calm, pleasant, friendly, almost ethereal presence for the most part.

But the legitimate threat that the Minbari potentially pose is front-and-center here, seen through the much more nasty performances of Richard Grove and the late great Robin Sachs, as well as the brief over-the-comms roles of Jennifer Anglin and Michael McKenzie. The scene where Grove’s Kalain gets Sachs’ Hedronn in a headlock and puts Wolverine-like blades to his throat is striking and memorable, beautifully filmed by director Janet Greek (rapidly becoming B5’s rock-star director). Sachs is always a joy—he was brilliant as Ethan Rayne on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, plus he was magnificent as Sarris in Galaxy Quest—and Grove conveys an impressive arrogant contempt.

It’s also nice to finally get the whole story of the hole in Sinclair’s mind, since that’s been dangling since the pilot movie, and really took too damn long to resolve. Having said that, it’s annoying to hear Lennier say, “Oh, but I didn’t tell them everything,” and why the hell not, for crying out loud????? Seriously, there’s absolutely no good reason given why Lennier had to hold back the information about the “ancient foe,” especially knowing in hindsight that we’ve seen this foe, the Shadows, twice, in “Signs and Portents” and “Chrysalis,” and we know from the former of those two that Delenn and Kosh know this is coming. So why keep it a secret, beyond the need to create suspense and mystery?

This episode provides a nice breather between the many things that happened in “Chrysalis” and the many things that will happen next time in “Revelations,” and also resets everything nicely with Sheridan at the top of the ensemble. A good start to the new season.

Next week: “Revelations.” icon-paragraph-end



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