Patterns of the Soul

[0:00] So what is to be gained by fighting? Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. I'd like to be the one to make that decision.

[0:06] Music. The year is 2024. The name of the podcast, Babylon 5. For the first time. Welcome to Babylon 5 for the first time, not a Star Trek podcast. My name is Jeff Akin. And I'm Brent Allen. You know, Jeff and I are two veteran Star Trek podcasters who had never seen Babylon 5 before. We missed it in its original run. So we got together and said, let's do a show documenting our journey through Babylon 5. And you know what happened? We fell in love with that show so much that we said we can't stop at episode 110. We got to keep going. So now we're hitting the spinoff series titled Crusade. So this is Crusade for the first time. We're doing the same thing that we did on our trek through Babylon 5. And that is looking for those messages, those sci-fi messages, the things that hold up a mirror to society, show us we can be better in the future, all those great things that science fiction is so uniquely positioned to share. But even though we trekked through Babylon 5, this is not a Star Trek podcast. So we play a game called The Rule of Three, and this is a game that limits us to no more than three references to Star Trek per episode. That's it. Three. One of those places. No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds. And what happens if we make one of those references, Jeff? I'm going to hear this.

[0:10] I want you to know that this thing just made a very large dent in my ship.

[1:35] Hey, Brent. Hey, Jeff. We have a five-star review. Oh, yes. This one's on Apple Podcasts, and it's from Australia. Oh, good day, mate. Throw another shrimp on the barbie. I apologize. I just watched the movie Dumb and Dumber yesterday with my kid. Did you really? Yes, I did. The Lizard King One says, If you're wanting a podcast to listen along while you go through Babylon 5 for the first time, you can't go wrong here. As a person who's enjoyed the series before, this podcast is good for a chuckle, but also a nice reminder of what it was like going through B5 for the first time. Seeing the guys have their doubts and quibbles about things that I did on first watch really transports me back to watching Babylon 5 all those years ago. The podcast, like many, takes a few episodes to find its feet and groove in relation to format and discussion, but eventually, Jeff and Brent get the grasp on it and have some truly interesting views to bestow. Be warned if you're one of those diehard B5 fans who can't stand people comparing things to Star Trek, because you're going to be grinding your teeth since this podcast looks at Babylon 5 from a Trekkie's POV, which I personally find fun. You know what, Lizard King? There are a few things that we consistently hear about people and what it is that they love about the show. And I think...

[3:03] The number one thing outside of a specific element of the show is the overall thing of what you're talking about. It takes you back to what it's like watching the show for the first time. Because this is truly a show where you can only watch it once for the first time. Because once you know what happens, then you know what happens. Like, you're with it. So, I love that. I'm a little disappointed you said chuckle but did not follow it up with the word nugget. Maybe you have or have not gotten to that episode yet. But when you do, let us know. And just like when we get to the end of every episode where we make a prediction based on title alone for the next week's episode, this is the part of the show where we look back on that prediction from last week and see if we got this week correct. So, Jeff, the question for you, my friend, how close were you to Patterns of the Soul? What did you say it would be versus what was it actually? I thought this was going to be a situation where the ship was in danger and Gideon was going to have to make a decision that would violate one of his core values in order to save everybody. Not so much. Ship was not in danger. Gideon's metal was tested, but not his values so much in this one. We might debate that a little bit later on tonight. A little bit, but not much. We might debate that.

[4:18] Not tested in the way that you were meaning. Correct. Correct. There you go. That's a good one. What did you think this was going to be about? Yeah, I just said that this would be a classic Star Trek transporter malfunction episode. And I was not right because you know why? This isn't a Star Trek show and they don't have transporters. Pretty much a swing and a miss before the pitch even happened. Gosh, JMS or whoever it is that wrote this episode. Why couldn't you have transporters? That's called sci-fi 101. Sheesh. Well, Jeff, you and I both, you know, swung, missed. I'm not even sure that we were up to bat in this particular game. Like, I think we just got thrown out before we ever got there. Why don't you tell the folks out there, though? People who maybe haven't seen this episode since it first aired so many years ago.

[5:05] Or maybe people who've never actually seen it. They're just like, I'm just going to go listen to the show by Jeff and Brent because they're too funny and insightful and entertaining guys. Why don't you tell the folks out there at home exactly what this episode was really all about? Well, General Stock Bad Guy issues some orders to Gideon. Go see if some colonists have the plague and then take him into custody if they do. Gideon isn't into it, but he knows when rank is getting pulled on him.

[5:31] Eilerson has someone pulling rank on him too. IPX needs info from him and they're losing their patience. We finally get to see that nano vaccine in action as they head down to this planet and, surprise, the people there don't want to leave. The kind of leader of the group, Robert Black, is pretty cool though. He says they can test him for the plague, but with or without it, they're not going anywhere. And adding to the list of surprises, they'll test positive for the plague. Who knew? In the meantime, Doreena's out doing, um, something. And when she's out there, she runs into Kreia, almost as if they were on Paragus. Kreia is dying. In their last breaths, Doreena finds out it's one of her people. There are other Xandarians here. She scales a sheer cliff and finds a whole gaggle of them. They share that some time in the past, mysterious ships that we see as shadows blew the colony ship they were on up and the survivors set up camp here. These are the last of her people, assuming there aren't others on other colony worlds that also ended up on the planets they were heading to.

[6:48] Gideon, doing the general's evil bidding, digs into the colonist's logs and uses someone else's ultraviolet security clearance, and he finds out these colonists were attached to a bioweapons unit and were testing cybernetic implants. So he sends Dr. Chambers into their waste disposal system to do some digging, and she finds the smoking gun he was hoping she would. Contaminated foodstuffs. They've been eating food laced with the plague. He also finds out that Robert Black, a former Groppo and a veteran of the Battle of the Line, is one of the test subjects of those cybernetic implants. After digging through garbage, Chambers finds Darina with her people. Darina threatens her if she tells anybody about them and tells her that they need to double their efforts to cure the plague because, for her, it's personal now. Chambers, a little weirded out by the sheer aggression from Darina, falls victim to the cybernetic arms and nightmare-inducing voice of Tim. Timmy's the obstinate one of the bunch and just refuses to believe anyone from Earth Force could be honest with them or care about them or anything good at all, so he takes her hostage. After another terribly choreographed arena fight, they head to the colonist's shuttle and take off. They leave Black on the surface and head for greener pastures.

[8:07] Gideon gets crafty and fakes the blowing up of the shuttle. He reports back to Thompson, the bad guy general dude, and lets him know that the problem is solved. The colonists are dead. The general's kind of upset because he would have gotten away with everything if it wasn't for those pesky kids. Gideon tries to call Doreena on her borderline criminal insubordination, but instead he shares that he has some high-powered individual's login info.

[8:34] Eilerson gets a dose of a good conscience and doesn't tell IPX about Doreena's people. And Chambers tells Doreena that the plague is much more effective against her people, and they'll be gone in a year. I guess it really is time to double their efforts. Brent, did you notice any patterns of the soul in this one? I noticed some patterns in the course of the storytelling throughout the episode. Jeff, you know I like good writing. I do. I like when they put elements together, even if things get cheesy in the middle of it, even if things are whatever. Overall, I felt much of this episode was very paint by numbers. We've seen this in every sci-fi show. You go out, you find colonists, you need them to, I'm pretty sure we actually have already done this in crusade once you need them to leave. Colonists don't want to go, right? We've done that. Yep. Something's wrong with those colonists. Something's up with those colonists is everything's not just right. You know, it's, it's not all exactly what it seems. We've seen the, I'm the last of my people. Oh, look, there happens to be a whole colony of these Talaxians hanging out on this moon on the other side of the quadrant.

[9:43] We've seen this they're tropes they they get used there's there's no one sci-fi show i know tropes is probably not the right word but there's no one sci-fi show that has the the copyright on those ideas what i really appreciated about this episode though was it felt in many ways like it was moving the ball down the field it was throwing into question a little bit about what the plague is, what the nature of the plague is, where it comes from, what does it mean, what does it look like in other species. It also, just from the opening piece of Eilers, there's Eilers.

[10:24] Eilerson getting chewed out by his boss and being forced to do something that he really, it, they're asking him to do, pull a miracle out of a hat and do something he's not really able to do. Then you have Gideon, or actually, I guess flip flop these two, but then you have Gideon, who's also getting told to do something by his boss that he's like, this isn't really like I'm doing my job here. Even if you can't see it, I'm still doing my job here and he's getting pulled off. And then Eilerson, what is it, Jeff, here in the last couple episodes, we've had Eilerson giving us the big, as our friends at Mission Log would say, you see, Timmy, moments here. Only he does it at the beginning of the episode, which I thought was really good, not all the way at the end. He does it right at the beginning and says, so here, you know, we'll talk about this. But he basically gives it the whole, you know, are you really responsible for doing stuff that is morally questionable if you don't even know that it's morally questionable? And it's the whole knowledge of good and evil and all that kind of stuff. And then we see, they tell us about that. And then we see that play out through Gideon and what he does with the colonist. And we also see Eilerson play that out with how he takes that information and what he does with it. And that carries all the way through to the resolution for Gideon because he starts with the, um, absolution through absentia. Like you are absolved from being guilty for this terrible thing that you You just did because you didn't know that it was terrible to Gideon basically going, that's BS.

[11:50] I know what terrible is, whether somebody tells me it is or not. So let me come up with actually a decent human humane solution and tell the other people to screw off basically, you know? So I, I loved the formatting. I loved how they put this through. It felt like 90s sci-fi in some places though. I think you talk about Doreena's fight choreography, which has never been good. It's never been good in any episode we've ever seen her, like all four of them. So, but overall, overall, good. Had a couple of those guest actors that I just, you feel like you've seen them everywhere. And one of them turns out Brian Thompson. We have seen him everywhere, particularly in a lot of Star Trek. He's been in, I think, every series of the Berman era.

[12:33] So yeah, overall, I enjoyed it. I liked this episode despite its obvious problems and despite the places where we've seen it a hundred times before. How about you, Jeff? i'm gonna start very superficially and say that i think this episode might have had the absolute worst acting of the series so far okay between the ipx lady that was talking general thompson tim oh my god tim tim might honestly be the most distractingly terrible actor i've ever seen i'm sorry which one was tim tim was the one who talked like this yeah yeah oh we'll talk about him oh i i got i got thoughts on that go ahead that's who i thought it was i just wasn't sure every word every phrase word everything came out of his mouth was hey what's the paint by numbers thing and then like the way he oh my gosh i because because of what i thought at first the it was the acting and him in a very big way i hated this episode the first time i watched it.

[13:34] Hated it i i got done and you can see it on my reaction i'm just like this this might be the worst episode in the full of Babylon five. So I wanted to watch it. When I watched it the second time, I was like, was it the acting? Was it the soundtrack? Was it the right? Like, what was it about this that, that really turned me off? And I wanted it to just be the acting so badly, but it wasn't like this would just, this was a confusing mess of an episode. Like how did the play get into a food shipment that was way off world. Darina was psychotically, dangerously incompetent. She withholds information like she did in the episode with her and Galen. She threatens Chambers. Like, out of nowhere, she's just this complete liability.

[14:22] Wait, Jeff, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You have a thief in your crew and you're telling me it's just now hitting you that she's a known liability.

[14:31] No, I mean, but I think there's a huge, I'm going to call it a failure of leadership on Gideon's part. And we'll talk about later on where he doubled down on that failure. And I mean, the way that he and Doreena ended in this, I was just like, Gideon should almost be fired for the way he handled her. Okay. it was i mean it was horrible what he that way everything happened and yeah she's a thief she's a liability she's those things but multiple times on her own she's chosen to withhold critical information because of some personal thing going on she and all she does is randomly spider-man climb things you talked about her climbing the sheer cliff face and i'm just she's climbing that thing like the dread pirate roberts man just totally just yeah i feel like she's there to wear really tight revealing brown outfit and cause problems i had a note about that as well i'll bet you did because she looked very uncomfortable in a scene when she was trying to walk awful has she been in that outfit this whole time she has i hand to god honest truth this is the first time i've noticed it i just remember the little lacy things on her shoulders that We're always there. But honestly, the whole plague thing, somehow, like this plague was dropped on Earth. Earth was immediately quarantined. And somehow this plague gets to a corporation way off world, put into a food supply, and that just gets hand-waved away.

[15:58] Like, eh, whatever. An evil corporation literally has this plague. And what we're focused on is the Earth Force infected a few people with it. I thought this was a horrible episode. It didn't end. And it kept, it had like six endings, like six times at the end. I'm like, oh, this is the last. Oh my God, how is it still going? Jeff, I need to read you a note. I need to read you a note. It's all the way at the end, exactly as I wrote it. This episode has more endings than the Lord of the Rings.

[16:27] It does. It just kept. It did. It kept going. I was like, oh my gosh. And I think that proves my point. Like when you're in a conversation with somebody or like you're giving a presentation, let's say you're giving a presentation and you haven't prepared. And you don't have an ending. You just kind of keep rattling where you're like, yeah. And, um, I got to feel it. So blah. And it just kept rattling stuff out. And I'm just like, just fade to black. I'll take the soundtrack longer over the credits than watching any more of this. I hated this episode. I feel everything you're saying. I have notes that are similar to what you just said. Just about everything that you said. I don't have a problem with this episode the way that you seem to have a problem with this episode. Um, the whole idea, uh, I'm going to poke holes in your problems if that's okay. That's the whole idea of the food. That's, that's a great argument. How is it that the food gets infected? And to me, to me, I find it very plausible. I find it very believable. You have a high ranking earth force admiral. I guess he was an admiral. Was he an admiral? General Thompson. General Thompson. You have a high ranking earth force general who can get some stuff done if they need. He has connections back to this other company, which is making superhuman meta human type people.

[17:45] Their experiment gets out, you know, like the freaking I'm sorry here. We're going to go with the next one. Like it's freaking con and all his little followers. They get out and he's got to go get them back and he's got to he's got to figure something out. Well, what can I do? What can I do? He's already quarantined in Earth. He's got connections out there. He's like, I know what I can do. i can i can send some version of this plague out there and he can get it through because he's the general how did he do it i don't know maybe we'll get that story one day we never will but i don't like i to me that's all plausible he could he could do that on his side but that's not how things went down so he was stationed on another planet when this happened leading this bioweapons division he was the one creating the super soldiers it was this super secret illegal thing because we're career military and we believed in the cause yep on the same planet as pro zeta the company making the food stuff whatever right these people get away from earth he's got to do something about it and so somehow he has the plague on this other planet and then gives it to a mega corporation to put it in their food like he didn't he was i didn't read it that he was on earth at all when gideon gave the breakdown i got that he was on the same planet see i don't because either way, whether he was on earth or whether he was on the planet, he can call somebody and get somebody to cough into a box, seal it up and send it over to him. But shouldn't that be like the biggest deal this whole episode? Someone took the plague off world.

[19:13] Yes, it should. And that is something that Gideon Gideon performs malpractice by not ringing the bell on this, uh.

[19:24] This general by not going above his head or going to another general to be like, yo, this is what's going on because if this general is not a rogue acting by himself guy if this is actually something that's systemic within the larger earth force then we have another problem we got to deal with totally otherwise we have a problem in this general and we got to get him out he's not okay like that is that is beyond the pale i you know they don't go into a timeline very much but i'm i feel like the cybernetic stuff was happening under clark and this general, 100% was a Clark loyalist. Oh, he's a Clark guy. Yeah, absolutely.

[20:00] Because there's no way that Santiago was about this. Yeah, no way. Or Luchenko afterwards. They weren't doing this. I don't know. Luchenko might. If it was going on and Luchenko heard about it, I could see her sitting there going, yeah, we're going to let that keep going. It'd be inconvenient. It'd be inconvenient to stop. Yeah, I could totally see Luchenko doing the politicking of it. To be like, you know, it's not clean, but politics is rarely clean.

[20:28] True. that outside of that i agree with you down the line about everything that you have here um darina jeff how many times have you and i watched any sci-fi and seen something that happens in an episode and go that person needs to be fired today they should not stay but their faces on the dvd cover so they get to stay well i think honestly like you said you had notes on it i think honestly they need they need a woman on the on the cast and she fits very nicely into this blue tight or this brown type tight thing so my note on that darina has a seven of nine type outfit going on it's molded to her body yeah molded to her body and i'm like you know this isn't a star trek podcast jeff so i'm not gonna go there okay good you already used two references so yes yes if you guys want to know brent's thought on that type of an outfit and what that is in a show go back to any of my beam me up episodes dealing with uh voyager and we'll you'll hear me talk about it there i'm quite opinionated on it as you should be i don't know i think it's that's beam me up a star trek podcast available where you get your podcast anywhere in complete form the complete series is there download it today but i felt as that ending scene she's walking back and forth as chambers is like hey yikes for your people and it looks like it's hard for her to walk like it was that tight it's like oh gosh yeah what a horrible situation to be in.

[21:55] Jeff, I have to, I have to, I have to say something though. I'm ready. I'm ready to say something. I've, I've, I've let you spout out on about this episode after episode and it's gone on long enough and I'm ready to say this after watching this episode. Okay. I think you have been overly harsh on whatever her name is that plays Dr. Chambers. Are you serious? I think, yes, she is not nearly as bad as you make out.

[22:22] Now that said, she stay with me. She has had plenty of chances. She has been given enough to work with. And despite that, she's still not believable in this role. She's just not good in it. She's not as bad as you make out, but she's not good. And this is like, this would be get rid of her in the cast in the off season and recast this role. Sit, send her somewhere else and, and send somebody else in. This is a military show. You can do that.

[22:54] It's she's just not she's not working out man she's just not working out and and you she you're right she reads things so robotically and it it's it's like it's almost like she's not even present with the cast when they film her lines it's like the cast is they're doing their thing and then she comes in individually and they just do like shots of her and cut them in and and it just it It just doesn't fit, you know, but I will say, I still say she's not as bad as you, as you make her out to be. I don't know, man. Like I was so hard on Franklin when at first, and it wasn't because we've talked about this. We've, it wasn't the acting. It was the character. And to my credit, we were supposed to not like him, right? Like that ended up being the story. And I became a huge fan. Presumably the Eilerson character is going to go that same route. Presume. Absolutely. Yep. Because they've set up some of the arc stuff for him. But in this case, like the character of Sarah Chambers is actually pretty compelling. You know, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure she's military because like she was wearing a coat straight from the Nordstrom rack when she went down to the planet.

[24:03] She doesn't have a rank or anything like that. She's literally just a medical professional. She's a civilian contractor who didn't catch the virus. And is doing good work to find it. Supposed to be good at her job. Yeah. I mean, she made the little blake shield thing.

[24:18] Which is huge. I mean, look what they got to do all this stuff because of it in this episode. But they gave her some meat they really did yeah in this one they got they let her go toe to toe with gideon when he was talking about the nano vaccine thing and he's just like you know what some rats were fine with it and she's like yes we.

[24:34] Tested it so oh but the real meat was when she was in the waste disposal area and she's like i could have served on this ship i could have gone but this place made a difference and it was so poorly delivered that not only did i have not developed the empathy for her that we were supposed to in that moment it actually turned me against her like entirely where i'm just like good i'm glad you're on an assignment you don't like that was the exact moment i wrote what i just wrote i'll bet that that was it right there she was i was like because here's the thing as an actor and director i can hear how that line is supposed to be delivered and it's not the way she delivered that line and this is not an actor's choice like this this line is set up to be read one way and one way only and she did not do it that way okay there's more than one way you could have done it but you guys understand what i'm saying but they're all variations on the same theme you know like it's it's a thing and oh so no i i disagree with that i think i'm appropriately hard on her but apparently i'm super hard on doctors so maybe that's it maybe maybe there's something else going on there so pivoting from using dr chambers is our pivot point let's start talking about these colonists Because she ends up face-to-face with Tim and gets.

[25:49] I guess, chased up a mountain. It just looked like they were having a slow, meandering stroll up the side at a park.

[25:58] But this dude is... Angry and has a chip on his shoulder and is i think completely antithetical to everything that robert black is trying to bring to this group in a real day it played out very obviously in a real dangerous way the different perspectives they had but he's also a guy that can be reasoned with eventually as we see at the end of the episode like hey he sent me over some information and so we teleported to his ship before they blew it up for the camera i i want to go back to something you said earlier about just how absolutely robotic he did delivered his lines brian thompson the actor who played robert black he has a very distinct speech pattern yes and it's that same way in every role he does it's just how the man talks but this other guy tim was his name i missed his name he sounded like he was trying to imitate brian thompson as if all the colonists spoke that way, which they didn't like as if this was a thing. And if he was trying to do that.

[27:06] And failed because he definitely failed i would have at least respected that there is i i'm sorry if somebody's gonna tell me i'm wrong they're gonna tell me this is the way it is but i cannot believe that that is that man's actual voice i agree i don't there's no way it is it is not naturally that deep he sounds he sounds like he's talking down like this and he sounds like he's trying to imitate the way that brian thompson speaks and it's it it is it takes you out of the episode and out of the moment in so many different ways and i i just it not a good directing choice or not a good whatever it just casting choice yeah and if if that is how he talks to cast him side by side with brian thompson you can't do.

[27:53] That you can't put those two pieces together because because it just becomes a a blinking red light the whole time every time they're they're on on screen together the first time he spoke it was the scene transition right you hear his voice before you see the actual scene and i fully expected to see brian thompson i was like oh cool it's brian thompson again oh what is this guy doing and his facial expression it's like here's you know uh i don't know aggressive snapback quip number four that he pulls out of the thing to saying he's like you know even gives like the kind of thing is oh my god it was yeah he aggressively took me out of the episode and i get what his character was there to do like again in all of these stories it's the same thing you have the leader who is opposed to leaving but is reasonable and he'll at least have a conversation and explain where they're coming from and then you've got the upstart who's.

[28:56] Like i'm gonna burn it all down i get the role but i i i couldn't yeah he just didn't pull that one off and and i think unfortunately this is a real theme in quite a few episodes of the show putting responsibilities and lines into the hands and mouths of actors both main cast and guest stars that just aren't capable of carrying them and i wonder how much of that is a product of bad casting jms being on burnout so maybe he just like i don't say he didn't care but he wasn't as picky with it or if this was part of tnt and they're distancing themselves from the show and just trying to like like budget cuts and not allowing certain people to be available or something like that like i really wonder i think my understanding in a lot of ways jms delegated a lot in this you know someone somewhere had stayed had mentioned that like doing babylon 5 almost killed him being that involved in doing everything and so this came around and he was delegating a lot more but i i, In his annual review, I would say, you need to work on your delegation skills.

[30:09] You don't get to just give it up. You still have to supervise. You can't abdicate this role. Exactly. You can delegate, but you can't abdicate. It's not going well. I got two references that I want. One I want to go back to just to clarify for people. But when you think Brian Thompson, what character do you think?

[30:31] This cannot count as a reference. Correct. He is the black and white or the red and white face dude from that second season episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, where we very first mentioned the Dominion. Yeah. That's the episode. I think when I see him, I immediately recognize him as that guy. There are. I looked up his IMDb.

[30:51] The dude has been in everything since like 1988, and he's still going. He looks great. Yeah. I said, oh, my gosh, I didn't know he'd been in that much stuff. and it's not just like as a voice actor in a video game like no no this is like facetime on screen but he's been i mean just genre stuff he's been in a lot of sci-fi stuff over the years you know but i mean he's in x files and he's been in um i don't know name any show from the 90s or early aughts he was in it totally but did i did i hit the role that you're thinking of totally yeah he was so it's not tomalock it was like tomacheck or something like that something i I don't remember exactly, but like his eyes, his big old, even like his cheeks had muscles, you know, in that. And the paint just pulled it out. It was great. But for me, that's the Star Trek role I think of for him. For me, he will always be the vessel for the master in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was the first big, like the first bad guy vampire we saw. And I feel like he defined that role through the series. He was so perfect for it. That's cool. I haven't seen that show yet. A possible upcoming series. It's on the list. And then in my recap, and this is just for my Knights of the Old Republic people out there. I know you're out there. But tell me that dude did not look exactly like Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic 2. I mean, this is all flying over your head. It's a Star Wars game. It's actually the... I got that.

[32:20] It's the progenitor to the Mass Effect games. Basically, Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Bioware had the agreement to start working on Night 3, and then the license stuff changed or whatever, but they'd created all these assets for it as a next-gen title, and they pivoted and turned it into Mass Effect. But Kraya is this, at one point, when Doreena is kind of blowing it with him at first a little bit, that was like, influence gained, influence lost, Kraya. If you know, you know.

[32:53] I was pretty blown away at how blatantly they modeled him after her in that moment. He flips back his hood and he's got kind of yellow eyes and she's like, Oh my God, we're the same people. Cause we have yellow eyes. Like that's the thing. Well, they got like little bumps on their forehead or, you know, whatever.

[33:12] Yeah. Yeah. She immediately. Cause, and that was my thing. I was like, are they the same? Are they supposed to be the same?

[33:17] I need you to tell me that you're the same so that I understand that I'm picking up what you're telling to tell me. And yeah it turns out they're the same okay cool got it learned some neat stuff about their culture they when they it's time to die they know i'm sorry i'm sorry i gotta go back now i gotta go back to dude he had perhaps the worst wig i have ever seen in a.

[33:37] Show like it was so bad and if anybody tells me that was his royal hair i will not believe you i will say again that's there had to have been an intentional choice to make him look like crea because that's what her hair looks like down to the little fasteners he honestly like his whole getup looked very native american like he looked very generic native american elder tribesmen nobody else looked like that just him and you didn't get the pan flute of indigenous person when he was on there either so it was just as really weird aesthetic choices with him and also like he's there he's like death is knocking on my door and you look at him and he's well hydrated dude looks super healthy and just great it's like i don't know it's like it's like they filmed it and like yeah we'll we'll do some stuff in post and then they forgot they there's some sort of stricture or some weird tradition thing about her people and doctors did you catch that like yeah yeah i i was taking notes or something i know what you're talking about and i'm like i didn't deem it important enough for me to stop and like take note of what she was actually saying in that moment i just noted i'm like oh it's against their traditions to see a doctor yeah some people they do yeah.

[34:51] I want to talk about if we can, and if you tell me that we need to save this for the next segment, then let's do that. But there is a very clear through line of this episode, and I mentioned it in my opening thoughts. We start with two scenes that are effectively identical. You have Gideon and Eilerson both getting reamed out by their superiors, right? Like just overbearing, poor leadership, bad. You know, I don't need to explain myself to a subordinate kind of a guy, right? Like, you know, and they've got to go do something that they've got effectively. They have to produce. They're being told you have to produce or you're going to be fired. Right.

[35:32] And I loved this interaction between Gideon and Eilerson. He's like, IPX doesn't give paid vacations. And I was like, well, for a cause like this, we'd all happily chip in. I was like, oh, burn sick burn. I was also like, I was like, oh, is IPX the Amazon of the 23rd century? Again, the whole piece, Eilerson says it right up at the beginning that the corporation knows all, sees all, and tells very little. So if you make a bad call, you can honestly say you were acting in good faith. It's absolution and ascension. And at that point, I'm like, that's what this episode is about. We're going to watch Gideon and probably even Eilerson go into a situation not being given all the information they needed to be given. Which I think we can say that happened with Gideon for sure.

[36:23] And he was expected to make a call. Actually, they both were expected to make a call to do something that would have been awful, right? Like morally awful.

[36:33] And, you know, Eilerson's whole thing is, well, you're not at fault. It's not your problem. You acted in good faith. And they get all the way down to the end. And Gideon sees these people and sees Doreen as people, right? And it's like, okay, we can take them back. We can do whatever. Nope. Turns out they were infected on purpose, which I do want to dive into that. They were infected on purpose. And then he came up with a way to effectively allow the people to live out the rest of their lives. They're on the planet, knowing they're going to die in several years. And the other side of that, the other actual legitimate concern beyond the generals, like, I want my, my experiments back of, we can't let the plague get beyond this planet. It's got to stay here it's got to die with you guys like so we'll keep you here and we'll monitor that and if you break my quarantine of your planet uh which by the way the general's whole thing was setting up a quarantine on that planet is just not feasible and i'm like gideon did it with a thing one satellite but as far as the pieces of that fall into place like i and even even eilerson when he's doing his report at the end he's like well you know we found him down there that could be really useful and he makes he does the whole um the whole computer delete last entry thing right and he actually puts out a a different report um he has his little little uh, moment of conscious.

[38:02] Did you track that as it went through? Like, did you track that's where the writing, what the writing was doing as you were going through? I tried. I saw it, but I don't, I don't think the dots connected on this one. And a lot of it was in the scene where Eilerson set it up. And this was again on my second watch where I'm like, oh, okay, okay. So he's trying to set it up. And there were like, there were those lines, the moment where he deleted the message. And then the moment where Thompson said to Gideon straight up, he's like, well, you know, you did what you could do. and you can know you acted in good conscience, you know, sort of a thing. But the whole premise, I think, was flawed from go because Eilerson set it up as, hey, man, like, you're military, so, like, you're responsible for what you do, but IPX, corporations, we got to figure it out. Like, we just do what we're told to do.

[38:51] We have plausible deniability. We don't have, like, he was trying to set it up in terms of, like, I can live in the morally gray because I don't know what's going on. And that's how corporations work. And I'm like, it's exactly how the military, you're wrong. Like what you're saying is patently wrong. And so from there, they take different paths, right? Like Eilerson goes through the path of, I'm going to find some information. And even, you know, argues at one point, was it with Dr. Chambers? I think like, I'm going to tell them I have to, you know, because they're there. And then he comes back around, whereas Gideon from Go is like, I don't like what this guy's saying, and I'm going to find a way to not do the exact – he's making his own choice. Well, what Gideon did there was he said – he looked at that guy, and he's like, he knew he was full of poop. He knew he was full of it. And he's like, okay, General, this is what you're telling me to do. I've got to obey. I'm your subordinate.

[39:51] We need to find out more about what's going on here because we need more information. He didn't. And that's the thing. Where Eilerson would have just been like, well, just go do whatever you got to do. It's not your fault. Gideon said, no, I need to find out more information. I do need to know the difference between good and evil here so that I can make an honorable decision at the end and bring people together. And I think that's a Gideon thing, right? I think that's Gideon. And we even interrogated that. I'm sorry. Not just Gideon. We've made this comparison. Sheridan did similar stuff. We even saw Sinclair do similar stuff for the short time we had him. That's what I was going to say. We interrogated quite a bit in the fourth season when we were fighting those Clark captains. And he had to be like, we're not supposed to be automatons. We're supposed to question the veracity and the morality of the orders we're given. And so, I mean, I don't know. I think I saw that thread going through and I saw their different paths. But I felt like, again, it was the execution of it. I have it as a list in my closing thoughts of a thing to mention. But this would not garner any Excaliburs or White Stars or anything because it was done, I feel it was done so sloppily.

[41:02] Interesting. And it's just very much in the way it was said. I don't know. Again, I think they put a lot of responsibility on the character of Eilerson to introduce and carry that concept forward. And he just didn't have it. But they're doing that more and more with Eilerson.

[41:18] It's like he's becoming the, here's what we're talking about in this thing. But he's also going to use these big grandiose words. So you better be able to decipher what he's talking about in light of everything that was going on there. Which leads to this i just have to read this note because it's i think it's hilarious of course this douchebag is reading chaucer for fun and bragging about it he was not reading chaucer for fun he was sitting there with the book in his hand waiting for somebody to come in to be like oh did you see what i was doing am i far enough in this book to make it look like i'm actually reading it or should i right it's like he was waiting for a photo op of him sitting in a chair with a little light and he's got the book but actually it's upside down and didn't even realize it you know hey i got a question okay on on the what did you think of robert black's compromise at the beginning of the episode like chambers and gideon are down there and they're like they're like hey we got to take your blood we got to do this and and and you know big other dude is like the hell you are you're getting none of and he comes in he's like what's going on.

[42:22] Okay well we can't do that you're going to test me you can test me that's fine and if i if i'm infected then you can test everybody else but if i'm not infected everybody else would have been infected now too so then we don't have it and you guys can move on your way well what'd you what'd you think of that as he stepped into that situation and brought calm and clarity and showed why he was the chosen speaker of the colonists is exactly what you said the second he was on screen everything was cool again. My exact note is just Black is a great leader. He brings calm. He says, test me and only me. And then if I'm positive, he steps in front of the people that he's with to take.

[43:01] The hit, like it was great. And then I think what was cool was later on, we learned about how he came to be with this group when, uh, he had his, his love, Emma, who didn't survive a cybernetic surgery. And he was like, I was lost. And I, you know, I didn't know what I was going to do. And it was awful. I was in a bad place. These people got me, they understood me and they gave me a new purpose in life. And he's the one who rose up into that leadership thing, which they were going down his his resume and i found it interesting that a gropo which we know to be a ground pounder like this is your infantry just whatever was then at the battle of the line well so real quick just so you know and i almost corrected you but i interrupted your recap more than once so i needed to not um i you and i have been mistaken for two and a half three years now chef oh it's never been the battle of the line according to the subtitles that i had on it's the battle of the lime oh the lime with an m the battle of the lime makes all the difference in the world now that you understand that it's about citrus fruit and i think especially being from 1999 with the rise of lime wire it makes sense that we would have the battle of the line wow Wow. That's digging back. As I say, as I'm wearing a green, a bright green t-shirt.

[44:27] But at first I was just like, how does a Groppo grow up to be on the battle of the line? But then I remembered, and in the beginning, where they were just like, look, if you can strap on a helmet, if you can show up, if you'll muster with us, like, we need people to go out there and do it. Dude was a patriot and a soldier through and through to the end. And I love the moment where he's just like, that's why we did this stuff. That's career military. He raised his fist. I believed. We believed. Well, I mean, so they volunteered to go be effectively lab rats, as they say in the show, to get all these implants and to try to become super soldiers. Basically, they volunteered to go become Wolverine. Yeah. Yes. You know what I mean? And they said that it failed. Something didn't work. And so now they're back on Earth.

[45:15] Think about this. What kind of living situations are they in? Because they can't get out into public. Their existence cannot be known to normal people. So they leave and escape whatever prison they were living in. And I'm assuming it was a type of a prison, maybe not like maximum security jail sales, but they certainly weren't free. And these people are seeking their freedom. And they go out and find escape. Just so happens it was right before the plague hit, like pure total dumb luck, but they got out scot-free, you know, there's a story here that we're not fully getting and we're never going to get it, unfortunately, but that's an interesting story.

[45:58] Because it turns out he's a good, like, they're all good dudes, it seems like. Like, even Tim, who is awful, is a good dude. But he's awful, and the chip on his shoulder is understandable. Because back to the we believed, like, they were stepping up to the cause. They were doing what so many soldiers do. You know, as we record this, we're just a little ways off of Veterans Day in the United States. And regardless of how you feel about war or military or anything like that, a veteran, like, that's a type of person, right? A service mentality and sacrifice and all of those things. And, I mean, need to be honored. And I think these people are just really great examples of that. And then they were very wronged by their government. And Tim just didn't take it well, understandably. I do have an important question for you, though. It better be important. I think it might actually be the most important thing that came out of this episode. Okay. Whose login info do you think Gideon was using? You know, so he's talking about he won this stuff like in a poker game. I really thought that he was talking about the apocalypse box. Oh. And that he would have gotten the information from the apocalypse box. But I don't know that that's the case either. I think this might have been in a completely entirely separate situation.

[47:20] Yeah, because he talked about how they were playing Sharks, which is a game I'm not familiar with, but they were both three sheets to the wind. I heard that. I was like, Gideon wasn't that drunk when we saw that scene. Exactly. Exactly. So...

[47:34] I spent some time trying to tear it. So the username was Benedict. Uh-huh. And then the password was sharks. So this is somebody who gambles or plays quite a bit. And I'm like, do any of those things line up? Benedict Arnold is what I'm thinking. Yeah. Eggs Benedict. There's that. Yeah, it doesn't. Eggs? You know who loved eggs when they got, that was really pushing on Ivanova when she got her eggs? Garibaldi. And he would have been three sheets to the wind at some point.

[48:05] Oh, so what we're saying is that was actually Garibaldi, but it couldn't have been Garibaldi. Why? Because we know the type of passwords Garibaldi chooses. True. And Anti-Up is not. Well, Anti-Up was Gideon's password. That was his override password. Okay. Well, even still, Sharks is not. Doesn't line up with Peekaboo. Right.

[48:25] So sorry. Sorry to poke a hole in that theory, but I do like it. It's got to be somebody. They can't just. Oh, I got this secret. Log in and then they never use it again like it had to have been another one of the threads that would have been picked up on i wanted to think was garibaldi because in my head i was like this would have been a point in season five when he was drinking maybe on mars you know or something and gotten this game and we know how garibaldi was with security codes so you know he held on to those things but yeah i you know that's one of those i would i would love for this to be such a big fandom that people are posing like fan theories about, hey, so the guy that Gideon got the codes off of, that was Garibald. And here's my red yarn as to who it is. I would love to have that much of a fandom of this show making those kinds of connections. My first thought was, I'm like, is it Veer with his Abrahamo-Linconi? Oh, could be. Yeah, yeah. Tying that to Benedict. But then I was like, I don't know. He was three sheets to the wind. He went through his drinking phase and stuff. Except though this is Earth Force, though. This is not going to be an alien. And this isn't going to be Sheridan with the Interstellar Alliance either. Although, what if it was Sheridan? Because Sheridan also was Earth Force. He was. Yeah.

[49:48] And Benedict, oh, my gosh. How many conspiracy theories originate with Benedict Arnold crossing over to the British? And we all know. I mean, it's very well known and discussed and interrogated completely how much of a conspiracy theory nut John Sheridan was. Almost about as much as his previous marriage to Lockley. I need to let that go. So this is actually the point where I said Gideon should almost be fired for what he did. Okay. He and Doreena are sitting on the shuttle. We got a lot of shuttle time in this episode. And the thing I noticed, a little side note, there's no seat between the pilot and co-pilot. It doesn't exist. No, but we saw that in the last episode.

[50:30] And he's starting to push on her a little bit. Like, you knew this stuff, and you didn't tell us. And she's like, well, you know, I mean, I had some stuff. And he's like, you got to tell us these things moving forward. And she's like, okay, secret for a secret? And he's like, okay. No, not okay. She straight up hid information from you. You don't give her anything back for that. She's lucky that she's still on your ship. And, oh, it was just a way to tell the story of how he got this stuff. But I'm like, she, you do not tell her that after that gross incompetence, that was, although he had a great line where she's talking about who she trusts and she's like, well, you cheat. And he's like, ah, that's subjective. Well, you know, and I had this later on and we got this in a bit. Gideon may be a cheater, but he's an honorable, honorable cheater. He has his moral limits of what he's willing to cheat with and where he's going to stay upright. He's like, I'll palm a card from time to time, but I'm not going to genocide an entire race through secrecy, you psychotic individual. Like, wow. I want to talk about Doreena for a moment. So Doreena, at least up to this episode, believes she is the last of her race.

[51:43] This may be more a question of what would you do if you were in that position? Or what do you think Doreena? Do you think Doreena feels any, I don't know why I was thinking about this in this episode. But do you think she feels any responsibility to procreate and at least have like half of her genome continue out there somewhere in the world so that like because when she's gone, like that's going to be it like like.

[52:11] Does it, you know, does she, do you, would you feel that need to like, Hey, I'm the last of my kind. I better have some offspring and at least in some way, shape or form, keep this going. I look forward, Brett, to the day I'm the last man on earth because then I'll finally have a chance.

[52:31] Oh, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. No, absolutely. I feel like that would be like top of mind. And I imagine that, like, let's pretend this is happening on Babylon 5. Like, she's on Babylon 5, and she ends up there. If I'm Dr. Franklin, I can't not interject myself in there and be like, we have to keep this going. Jeff, if you're Dr. Franklin, whether she wants to or not, you're impregnating her. Now, whether you do something outside of her body or a more, how did Jakar put it? A more traditional pairing right or not yeah you know at least early i should say early dr franklin yeah that's fair that's fair for the good of the species but i thought it to the point even of like here are these people i've found a tribe of my people uh hey random dude over there i need something to take back to the world we gotta we gotta we gotta get this going here or even when dr chambers is there although they have the thing about doctors but be like hey snag some genetic material like we'll clone them or in vitro them or something because yeah.

[53:49] I think she definitely had. I would hope that she has a feeling of that. Did you think at any point Doreen as people were going to be immune to this plague? Yeah, I did. And they weren't. Oh, the exact opposite. Um, because what, where I really thought was as we got bits of information all the way through was these people were going to come to the planet. And at first I was like, well, they're not going to be infected with the plague. This is just what they're going to tell people so that they can get them off the planet or something like that. But then they weren't. And oh, it turns out they are infected with the plague. Okay. And I remember thinking to myself at that time, well, the people, because we know they're sick, right? Like they're saying you got to leave so that our people can live and stuff like that. So there is clearly something going on there. I was like, what it's going to be is it's not going to be the plague. They're going to be immune to the plague, but it's going to be something else about these guys where they're genetically modified.

[54:42] And that's what's doing something to them. Yeah. And that's why, so it's going to look like it's the plague spreading, but it's not actually the plague spreading. And it turns out I was wrong on all of those predictions all the way around. Yeah. Totally. Just the plague and super hyper excel at 500% faster against her race than, than humans, which should give Doreen a pause for going gallivanting around the, the universe looking for a cure to this plague, or maybe all the more reason to, I guess. Yeah. I think all the more reason to, cause that's the other side. Well, especially if she's the last one of her people, you know, like, you know, she's what you would call expendable. She's got nothing to lose. Yeah. She's got somewhere between one year and 40 years left, which I mean, if I knew someone only had 20 years left, I'd be super upset about it all the time because what only 20 years? Sorry, I'm banging on a lot of drums from B5 today. That isn't necessarily fair.

[55:36] Oh, two. So two observations just from a, from a production standpoint, uh, Gideon, I think this is the second time we've seen it. Jeff Gideon's got a kick-ass chess set. Yeah. I want that chess set that that that that uh translucent blue and white oh and it's it's elevated like it's got multiple but it's not 3d chess it's it's just the the board oh man it looks good it takes up way too much room on his desk it's almost his whole desk like for for a man who who has a job and is doing stuff it is more than a decoration as that takes up as much room on his desk is my whole setup here exactly i'm thinking this because like i have a hard time like slapping stuff down to do anything extra and it's the same thing i just as you were saying that because one thing i noticed about it was it was sideways to him like where he's sitting you've got one set of the players facing the edge of his desk the other set facing the monitor is he playing a chess game against something like a like a mail order thing or a facetime kind of thing that'd be cool, Can you imagine playing futuristic long-distance chess? I've got a chessboard. You've got a chessboard set up on your end. They're connected so that when I make a move, your chess piece makes a corresponding move. That'd be great. You know what I mean?

[56:53] It's connected like that. Almost like we'd be on the internet and be looking at the same screen and be able to move things even though we're on different sides of the move. No, but I want the physical. The physical, yeah. That'd be so cool. But yeah, that set looks incredible. It looks so good. It looks so good. I really like that is a prop replica I want. Let's talk about a prop replica I do not want. Okay. The device that Dr. Chambers was using to detect the virus when she was going around that thing looked like a rejected prop, like a prototype reject prop from the Ghostbusters films. I kept saying, is that her PKE meter that just didn't work? It looked like a bad PKE meter. They're like, here's three choices. They picked the one in the middle. This was the one on the left. It's like, it was awful. It was awful. Agreed.

[57:42] Okay, I made this note, and after this, I think I'm good on all my notes here. They were poisoned with the plague by this pro-Zeta corp, which, first of all, I want to know what pro-Zeta is. Is that just a word that the writer thought sounded cool, or is it pro? Does it mean like for and in support of whatever Zeta is? Now, Zeta is a letter in the Greek alphabet. It's not the last letter, by the way. But what is, what, what is there? Is there something here we're missing? But I, I said here at this point, and this is earlier in the episode, I was like, so there, if they can be, if they can be poisoned on purpose with this plague, there are greater implications to this that I'm not even putting together right now in this moment. I think, I think that this is meant, I think they're meant to be the corporate spec. This is the first mention and we're going to get a few more and it's going to turn out They're actually in league with the Drak or some, some. That's what I was, I was like, is it possible that this, that this earth organization, like, you remember how like Sycor was supposed to be in league with the, with the shadows and then that barely materialized? Is it something kind of like that? Like.

[58:57] Maybe that's how they got the plague. Nothing was smuggled off the planet. They helped bioengineer it, and they have the prototype on hand. Do the people that work there have keepers? And it's that sort of an issue going on. The Drak have infiltrated this thing. Does that general have a keeper? Do we have keepers on Earth?

[59:17] Right? Like, we know Londo's got one out there, because he's the emperor now, right? We know he's got one. Who else has one? at this point david doesn't have his yet right but he gets one later um but remember uh that one human that we saw in that one episode who had one he was the dude on the captain jack captain jack yeah that guy so keepers are given to humans it's established in this in this uh place the idea that that general could have had a keeper 100 could happen or the idea that anyone in that organization that Pro Zeta Corp or whatever this organization is that's making these superhumans, they could all, that could be part of the Drock plague. You just answered your own question of how that happened, Jeff. You made it more plausible than I even said. What I know from the Legions of Fire books is the Drock have a lot of ways through the Keeper to influence and make things happen. Even not through the Keeper, there was a character that didn't have a Keeper, but still they were able to influence through his dreams. And stuff like that, give him visions of a thing that led him down a path. So very much that general could have, or the person could have had a keeper, they could have given the inspiration for them to create their own little version of the plague there.

[1:00:37] And maybe it's seeded out in other areas, but like, yeah, we'll give it to the humans and let them do it. Quick start page search result. Prozata is a European DDoS protection Kubernetes IT company. They have a really nice, really cool-looking website, actually. So they're going to turn into a protein manufacturer in a couple hundred years. Just what I need is somebody to manufacture my protein off-world. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be great. Man, can you imagine the tariffs on that thing? Well, Jeff, with all of that, I think we've hit a spot. We have examined this episode in more detail. I think, why is it always the episodes that are not the most amazing episodes we spend the most amount of time picking apart? But we have hit that spot where it's time to boil this down and see what messages truly are contained within this show. I have a feeling I may have picked out a few that you didn't or a few more. Maybe you have them, too. You just have been saving them to address them here. And Brent's been jumping the gun. Jeff, my friend, talk to us about it. What messages did you find in this episode? One of my favorite ones wasn't so much a message as it was a punctuation mark on a message we've gotten before. Okay. And that was the message of forgiveness.

[1:01:58] Doreena finally, like, goes to Chambers and is like, hey, so that whole threatening to kill you if you didn't keep my secret. Sorry. Sorry about that. Doesn't miss a beat. You're forgiven chambers says i forgive you i get it and i think that's one of those things of like she was able to see what happened through the lens of darina she understood the situation she was in what she was faced with and she didn't hold that against her it's just i forgive you that's okay thanks for coming, And I think in that moment, it just put in action what we talked about when we talked about forgiveness a couple weeks ago. And that's, it's okay to apologize. It's okay to seek and give forgiveness. It's okay. And they did it really well. Tim actually delivered some messages in this one that I really appreciated. The first one. Okay. The human race doesn't measure the quality of what it's accomplished. Just the quantity. I tried to do it. I can't even do it. It's so bad. But we just measure the quantity. Oh, my. I want to talk about a mirror to society. We don't care about quality. Produce, produce, produce all the time. I, you know, the last couple of years have gone through some substantial life changes. And one of the things that I've worked through in my work on that is being okay, not doing anything.

[1:03:21] I'm just going to do nothing because that's all right. I talked a couple episodes about Thich Nhat Hanh and his thing that, you know, the quality of your actions are based on the quality of your being and your being is non-action. Just being is just being. And I thought, what an incredible thing to reflect on. What if we lived in a world that prioritized quality and understood that like a 40-hour work week is meaningless unless you've got good stuff coming out? And if you have good stuff come out of it in eight hours, why do 40? Like just focus on the stuff that needs to happen and don't have this driving need for noise, for distraction, for I'm just not being productive today and I feel guilty about it. It's such a true, true statement.

[1:04:17] Unfortunately we didn't talk about it much he just kind of said it to justify their running away and you know living somewhere else but i just thought that was that's a thing that has to be called out but the other thing he brought up speaking of just having to move too fast and do do do is he says i'm sorry i just need to point out you just said do do do do i did almost as good as duty how many weeks did we run that joke over on stargate too much oh man yeah we're awesome but no like he says there's a lesson to the drock maybe there's a lesson to the drock plague slow down and enjoy life or it will be taken from you yeah oh my god i'm in my late 40s and i am a person who can say oh my gosh the last 18 years i don't even know like it's just a whirlwind i'd yesterday i was 30 in doing these and what happened and that's because i was in that mindset of do do do quantity over quality yeah what i immediately heard when he said that was and this isn't going to be a statement around the response to covid and everything but But I was so hopeful in that time.

[1:05:34] Like, we're all sitting at home. There was like, what, two, three-week period where 90% of the country, at least in America and other places, 100% of the country, were just in their houses.

[1:05:47] We weren't even going outside. The roads were all but empty. And I remember people talking about, like, this is our chance to really refocus what's important in our lives. Yeah. take stock you know of what we have and and enjoy things and realize that you know maybe just hanging out with our family is totally okay and i was like this is going to be great assuming we cure this thing and people are safe and everything's good, best thing to come out of this is going to be like, we're going to slow down and we're going to appreciate life and all it has to offer. Unfortunately, that's not what happened at all.

[1:06:24] Just turned into a big political bailiwick and we're still stuck fighting about it all this time later and huge missed opportunity. But there was a moment where we just got to sit.

[1:06:36] We got to breathe. It's like the world got to breathe, which is very odd considering the fact that everything was air transmitted like yeah very ironic you know but but we did like we got a chance to like we weren't spending money we were together with our people we were you know some some people unfortunately were isolated which which.

[1:06:57] Uh you know it's a good point some people liked it some people didn't you know well honestly it led to the other epidemic pandemic that we're still dealing with now out of it and that's the mental health yeah pandemic because of that but i i remember pictures of like wildlife reentering the cities charts of like look at look at our greenhouse emissions and carbon footprint like every like the planet yeah the planet breathed better yeah and i think and you made a great point i want to just make sure to shine a light on it that it wasn't great right like it was this was not a good time a lot of a lot of people died a lot of people were hurt a lot of people and isolated unnecessarily yeah but but there were there were those things like i can look back at it now and be like hey it's great i have whole teams that can work remotely now and i've got the infrastructure for it that's a great thing that came out of this this was a great thing that could could have come out of it but it reminds me so i uh my daughter and i and i know you similar in your family we have a love and appreciation of the theater and my daughter is in a musical theater phase right now.

[1:08:08] And so a little while ago, we went and saw the Cat Kid Comic Club, the musical.

[1:08:16] Which is one of the Dave, Dave Pilkey, uh, things, which is a lot, it was a lot of fun, but we got out of the theater pretty late. It was, it was dark and we took the light rail. We took the train up here in Portland and it was dark. And my daughter says she's nine. And she says, what did, what did people do when there wasn't light? Like when we didn't have lights, did they just like sit around and like what I'm like, no, they, they went to sleep. Right right and actually for most of all of the time in the world we just lived on this the cycle of the sun and so like in the summertime we were up more doing more things in the winter time we slept a whole bunch and she was like well was that awful like i'm like well people didn't have tv they didn't have radios they didn't have the internet they had each other and their community and their work and it was great for them and it just really got me thinking i don't know if people were happier back then. I imagine in a lot of ways it was awful. They didn't have plumbing.

[1:09:16] It would be little things like that. A lot of people had no voice in the political discourse that was occurring. But there had to have been, at least at like a family level, just, I don't know, more of a fulfillment that existed for a lot of people. You know what? We eat dinner and then we sit down by candlelight and Ma or Pa reads from a book to us And then we all go to sleep in the same room because our house has three rooms total. Which makes you wonder how you ever have more than one kid. Good point.

[1:09:50] Well, there was a schoolhouse where they had to go out into the fields. Time to go play. Yeah. Get out of the house for a while. You need to go work in the fields for about 15 minutes. You know what I love the most about that story? I think it's super cute. Is the fact that your daughter thinks you were old enough to live at a time before we had lights.

[1:10:11] I don't know that she thought that, but my, oh, my daughter certainly has asked like, daddy, did you, did you have, did you have bathrooms in your house when you were growing up? Well, I don't have had so much about you being old. That's more about you growing up in Kentucky. Did you, that's fair. It's fair. But yeah, that's a, that's a lot of what I pulled out. You said you pulled out a couple other things. What other, I mean, I think it to me, you know, and you said this would be a no, whatever rating that we would give. And I would completely disagree with you on that. And I would stump, I would stump for these. And if you still only gave it one, I would reach through the computer and slap you because I literally think the message of this episode was exactly what they set up. And, and specifically what I mean by that is, you know, we got that whole line. I've talked about it a bit where Eilerson talks about, um, this, this absolution in absentia. I've never heard that phrase before this episode, but I think it's a great phrase. Absolution and absentia, which if I understand it right, at least according to this, it's you're not guilty because you didn't know you were doing wrong, right? Like you did not have the knowledge of good and evil, so you're not guilty. And Eilerson was a guy that at the beginning of the episode was content to bury his head in the sand and just let be what happens. I'm just out here doing my job. And we saw him by the end of the episode, not be like that anymore to pick his head up out of the ground, look around and be like, I can't do that because that's wrong.

[1:11:39] Gideon didn't change on the other hand. Gideon was Gideon from the start of the episode to the end of the episode. And he rejected. And here's here's the message. He rejected the idea, the notion of absolution by absention. I can't I cannot stay ignorant and have my actions just be whatever they are. My actions have to be done through knowledge. I need to know what I'm doing before I do these things because I am responsible for what happens. And I love that as a piece, the idea that you are actually responsible for your actions. And I think it asks a good question. When are you responsible for your actions? Is it when you're aware of them?

[1:12:24] It's hard to hold somebody responsible for the things that they do if they don't even know that they're doing wrong. Although we do. We do all the time. I mean, you know, what is it? Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law. We hear that, especially if you go to other countries, you know, hey, this is just because you didn't know you get pulled over in a state that has different driving rules than you do. Well, sorry, you should have studied up on the book before you came here to the state. To your point, it's your responsibility to know what it is. I'm going to I'm going to reframe my my take on that because you did say a thing. And I think I was really looking at it from an Eilerson versus Gideon standpoint. And you're right. This is just who Gideon was. But I'm going to take Gideon off the table. And this is part of why I didn't talk about it, even though I have the note about it in here. But we talked about it earlier. But the real story was just Eilerson.

[1:13:16] He was sitting back talking about, you know, Adam and Eve screwed up when they knew what it was. They just stayed ignorant. They could eat whatever they wanted the whole time. It would have been great. Yeah. But we watched him go from, I just don't know, to a moment of, well, I'm going to do it because it's the thing that I have to do, to, yeah, I'm not going to do it. Like, we watched the arc happen in Eilerson in this, which goes back to he's going to be our message deliverer, and he's the one with the, I'm going to learn a lesson arc over a lot of this. Well, he's going to be the most dynamic character of the show, which is – but we know that about him. We know he's supposed to be one way and end up in a different way. He's got to be dynamic. And we saw that in a really microcosmic way here in this episode. So, yeah, yeah. I think if I look at it through the lens of an Eilerson, that's a great message. And then separately look at the message of Gideon of just, yeah, you're full of crap and –.

[1:14:15] Yes, sir. No. And if I go back to previous litmus tests that we use, because we always talk about, well, how much did the writer mean for this to actually be the message? The writer said it. This is literally what the episode was about. And it was constructed around this idea. Even if it wasn't executed to the greatest deal, looking at UTKO, the way it was constructed, the way it was put together. I, Jeff, really appreciated and enjoyed this episode, despite the obvious flaws that we've spent the last 90 minutes pulling out. We did spend a lot of time pulling those out. But I'll just wrap that up by saying, if I look at the Eilerson arc and the Gideon line independently, I think the writing was up to snuff for those two stories. Everything else, not. But for those, they told what. That's all this other stuff.

[1:15:08] That's the paint by numbers thing. I was taught. We've seen this in every, every it's unique to the show, what they did, but it's the same. It's the same stuff we see. They needed a device in which to encapsulate the message. Here's the easiest thing we can come up with, which is, which is what the rolling from the tomb episode did to like, here's this Joan of Arc thing. And here's this, and here's what we're actually talking about here. I'm curious, Brent, what you're going to talk about because you get, To add this to our growing list, we have a top 10 now in our objectively correct, immutable.

[1:15:49] Inarguable, incontrovertible, and all the other things, uninterrogatable ranking of Crusade to date. Do I list at the top five or the bottom five, you think? I'm going to go for the middle. Okay. I'm going to start here with number four, The Path of Sorrows. And fifth, we've got Appearances and Other Deceits. Sixth, we've got Each Night I Dream of Home. Seventh is Visitors from Down the Street. And then eighth, Racing the Night. Brent, where is Patterns of the Soul going to go? You know, Jeff, I've talked about before, I really am a sucker for writing that does what this episode did. I love this kind of stuff. the execution of it. Certainly there are places where this needed to be improved. Overall, I enjoyed the episode. Is this a favorite episode that I'm going to rush to watch? No, but I do think that this, this falls in the category of a good episode, even if you don't, however, you're incredibly right to read the middle five of this.

[1:16:53] When I look here and I think there's path of sorrows, there's appearances and other deceits. Great episode. Each night I dream of home. Really enjoyed that episode visitors from down the street that's the x-files episode yeah and to me that's the dividing line right there okay so this one is going to slot into our new number seven below each night i dream of home but above visitors from down the street an episode i enjoyed, even if i didn't understand all the pieces to it but it i don't know there's just a dividing line and then you have racing the night memory of war and rolling from the tomb which are are not the greatest of all episodes they are not but again three out of 11 and a first season of a sci-fi show from the 90s pretty incredible that's that's great, Well, there you go. Well, Brent, that's going to do it for Patterns of the Soul. Next week, we are watching The Well of Forever for the first time. We don't read up on these. We don't read the synopsis. We don't look at the thumbnails or anything. We just guess what it's going to be about based on the title alone. So, Brent, what do you think The Well of Forever is going to be about? You know, Jeff, this is not a Star Trek podcast. Correct. But what The Well of Forever is, is the cousin to the guardian of forever. Jeff, it's a time travel episode. We haven't had one yet here in Crusade. Time for a time travel episode. Here we go. Well of forever. Wow.

[1:18:18] All right. What do you got? I think this is going to be Galen. We haven't seen Galen in a little while. Yeah. He's going to be seeking out the wisdom of the techno mages that have gone beyond. And the well is going to be some place or something that he goes to. The ones who have gone beyond the rim? Or the ones who are just in hiding and are still, like, right here? Those that are wherever they actually are. wherever they flew off to. He's going to seek some of their wisdom. And we'll find out right here next week. Thanks, everybody, for joining us for this. We've had some pretty heavy and great conversations the last few weeks and really appreciate you all being here for it. But thank you so much. If you are watching us on YouTube, make some comments down there. Let us know what we missed. Is there things in the messages that you got that we didn't get or bring up? You can also email us at Babylon5first at gmail.com with any of those. We'd love picking up those pieces. Also, if you have any fan fiction around Garibaldi or whomever else might have given that login information, we would love to see that. If you have none of those things and don't want to make a comment or you're listening on a podcasting app and can't, you know, do a comment down below or whatever, just please share this podcast.

[1:19:32] Anybody who might have an interest in Babylon five or crusade, it would mean the absolute world to us. So until next time, it's time for us to get out of here. I'm going to, yes, Brent, what's up? Hey man. Um, on a scale of zero to Eilerson, how well can you keep a secret? Was that like Eilerson keeping a secret when he makes like a big discovery? Like, Hey, I'm in the mess hall and it sizzler. And I figured everything out and I'm going to tell everybody was just more like eilerson keeping a secret like deleting a message or something like there's a lot of eilerson to be kind of sussed out on how much he would how much he would keep a secret so i mean if i said eilerson that's honestly a massive spectrum of eilerson to eilerson so maybe i'll just say eilerson for crying out loud where are you going i don't know we're doing the same thing we did through our trek through Babylon 5 and we're digging for those messages. Our trek through Babylon 5. You just made a whole lot of people angry. Well, I'm setting up. It's a setup for what's coming next. I get it. I smell what you're putting down. It's good. Transition thing.

[1:20:49] It's so hit or miss. You know what else is hit or miss? What's that? Whether or not we get predictions right. You liked that transition, didn't you? good that's a professional that's uh okay wait how we got um this is gonna be a nightmare shoot where was that no i'm trying to give you a clean edit point hold on.