“Shadow Dancing” is the great big battle climax to the slowly building tension with the Shadows. A force that has been moving against the heroes since the middle of the first season finally gets confronted. The battle itself is a little muddled compared to some of the other efforts the show has done in the past, but the excitement of finally getting to the fireworks factory really helps paper over the flaws. We also get to terminate Franklin’s plot, and do so in a way that punishes the character for being so stupid the whole time.
The episode opens with another ominous countdown message before showing us a council meeting already in progress. Delenn, in full Ranger regalia, give the League some information about the possibility of scoring a victory, but she is being tight lipped about the operational details, much to the Drazi ambassador’s irritation. Delenn points out that they should have earned some trust at this point after everything they have done, and leaves them to deliberate.
Elsewhere Sheridan briefs Ivanova and Marcus on the plan and assigns them the task of monitoring the area they expect the Shadows to attack, and reporting back to the assembled fleet that will be waiting nearby to check the Shadow’s advance. He emphasizes that this is a scouting operation and that they should send the signal and get out. He is straight with them that the danger of the mission means that they probably have a 50/50 shot of surviving.
Back from the credits the Drazi ambassador lets Delenn know that they have agreed to her proposal. With that news Ivanova and Marcus head off on their mission. They loiter behind a moon, and have a discussion of Marcus’s knowledge of Minbari, and Marcus expresses his attraction to her, but only in Minbari. He then leaves her to deal with the horrible Minbari beds.
Zack and Garibaldi get a small walk and talk scene where they discuss Franklin, and Garibaldi expresses that he feels like he has let the doctor down, and that maybe he should have reacted better to Franklin’s admission of addiction. We cut over to a haggard Franklin hanging out in a shitty market and overhearing a Fox News mom talk about how great President Clark is.
Sheridan and Delenn discuss how many ships they have assembled, and Delenn points out that maintaining this level of cooperation is going to be challenging. She then lets him know that she will spend the night in his quarters, watching him sleep as part of a Minbari courtship ritual. Sheridan agrees to play along and they leave to join the fleet.
Franklin ends up stumbling into a mugging in progress and intervenes, receiving a knife to the gut for his trouble. The muggers and the victim abandon him and he is left to bleed out on the floor. Eventually he comes face to face with a hallucination of himself, which was the point of his walkabout. His other self mocks him and berates him for all of his poor decisions, criticizing him for always walking away when things got tough. Eventually the tough talk gets through to him and Franklin manages to stagger into a public area so that he can get transported to Medlab.
Marcus and Ivanova end up detecting an enemy scout, but it manages to spot them and they have to go after it seriously damaging their own ship in the process of killing it to prevent it reporting back. As they survey the damage the Shadow fleet shows up, and it is by far the most of them we have ever seen at one point. They decide that they must signal the fleet anyway, despite not being able to get away from the oncoming ships.
Sheridan and Delenn command from the trippy command space on a Minbari cruiser. They receive the signal, and the fleet jumps to the area and the first real battle against the Shadows begins. The show portrays it as a crazy furball of a fight, with ships being cut apart left and right. Eventually they force the Shadows to retreat, but the camera lingers on the devastated allied fleet.
The characters all regroup back at the station where they scramble to take care of the wounded and learn about Doctor Franklin. Delenn volunteers the stat that for every Shadow ship killed the allied fleet lost two ships, so the victory came at very high cost. Garibaldi points out that now the Shadows know they can hurt them, and they are bound to hit back at Babylon 5. This prompts another of the eerie countdown messages, and a Shadow ship is shown to spit out a weird looking shuttle.
Delenn, Ivanova and Sheridan discuss the next steps of the war, and Sheridan ends up telling them all about the weird dream that Kosh gave him. They discuss how several of the images seemed to be prophetic, and struggle to understand the other images. Sheridan eventually dismisses the conversation, before deciding to get some rest and do more planning the next day. He meets with Franklin and the doctor rejoins the others, or will when he is fully back on his feet.
As Sheridan and Delenn do their thing we get a POV shot of a mysterious stranger arriving on the station. Mysterious enough that Zack and Ivanova begin discussing it, before we get the big reveal, that it is Anna Sheridan, Captain Sheridan’s wife that was presumed dead. With that big reveal we get one final creepy countdown message and the episode closes out.
“Shadow Dancing” is a pretty great climatic episode that puts together many of the pieces that have been carefully laid out all season for one big dramatic fight. I appreciate that the episode does not fall into the “Death Star” trap and suggest that this fight has won the war. Everyone is very realistic about having won a victory, but only one. Then while everyone is bracing for the counter punch the Shadows decide to go with an entire new weapon. Babylon 5 likes to have it’s big battles late in the season but still leave an episode or two to have a quieter but more impactful episode. That would be next week’s “Z’ha’dum”, which is an all timer.
Episodes seem to be on the Roku Channel as of this writing, so who knows. I will continue to work off of my personal copies.
Where do I know them from?
- Melissa Gilbert is a pretty obvious one from Little House on the Prarie.
The Good
- I mentioned how much I like the sense that this was one battle in a war, and I like how the show lingers on the cost of the battle, not just the damaged ships but also showing the badly burned survivors receiving medical care.
- I also love the little moment when Ivanova asks “Who wants to live forever” and Marcus responds with “I do, actually”.
- I am also a big fan of the Shadows not losing their threatening power just because they have a weakness. The show spells it out saying that even with a secret weapon the allied fleet loses far more ships than the Shadows.
The Bad
- The battle was not as clean as in the past. In previous big battle episodes the show went out of its way to really give you a good sense of the geography of the fight, but that was absent here, making everything seem like just one big ball of death. Maybe that was what they were going for, but it led to a muddled experience for the viewer.
Arc Points (Spoilers Ahead)
- Melissa Gilbert was a big get for such a low budget show, but they had the built in advantage of her being Bruce Boxleitner’s wife.
- We get a rehash of Sheridan’s dreams from last season with some explainers, while also setting up the idea of his opposite number looking for him, just as his dead wife shows up.
- Franklin is back in the fold, and maybe healthier mentally. I always liked him repeating his mantra as he dragged himself back to his life. It is something that I have done once or twice mentally when in the throes of depression.
- Speaking of that scene, the inspiration for it came from when JMS was on a long walk in San Diego and was nearly beaten to death by a gang. He had to crawl from where they left him to a more public area for a bystander to notice him and call for help.