Inspired by a Star Trek meme post. We had some amazing reoccurring actors that you might not have recognized.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Babylon5
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It was the dawn of the third age of mankind. Ten years after the Earth Minbari war. The Babylon project was dream giving form. It's goal to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call. Home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanders. Humans and aliens wrap in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.
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Happily! Comes The Inquisitor is one of my all time favorite episodes, so he always stuck out to me.
It is so creative! Like, is he good/redeemed, or rather still has evil/maladaptive qualities even if harnessed to now be put to better use for the benefit of himself + (a wider, larger) society, or is the situation far more complex than that? It is definitely one that sticks with you:-).
Vorlons bio-engineered the younger races to perceive them as gods so they'd be more easily manipulated later. I don't think they'd have hesitated to completely reconstruct Sebastian's personality- if Sebastian even was Jack the Ripper. Or, ah, the original... jack the ripper.
we know that the Vorlons had an interest in human development (because they were creating telepaths as weapons.) It's possible they created Sebastian as an artificial construction, and the memories of being taken in was just to explain where he came from rather than "yeah... you were grown in a vat, bub."
Kosh Naranek aside... the Vorlons were assholes.
Yeah and he could also have been a clone, so both rather than either-or:-). I don't think they'd hesitate to lie to him, or conversely to tell the truth about his abduction, so if he has memories that they allowed him to keep I presume they would be real - the Vorlons just couldn't care less otherwise so why not? (Occam's Razor)
You bring up a very interesting point about Kosh: yes the Vorlons were assholes, but he (it? they?) was not - and oddly enough, it wasn't that he "wasn't a (real) Vorlon", but rather like he was a true one and all the others were the fakes?
I don't quite have the words but like, he was what he was because he knew about the ancient task that they had set out for themselves hundreds of thousands or even millions of years hence, and decided to actually do it rather than as the others all seemed to, do the exact opposite of "guide" the younger races (to self-discovery).
John Sheridan was ofc the same type, as too was G'Kar: both men ready for war, while in the service of peace (a different purpose than the Vorlons... or is it?).
We see this all over now: people showing up on January 6 at the USA capital to "defend" democracy by... overthrowing it? And religion that somehow becomes warped into diddling kids, yet side by side with others in the "exact same" religion who take care of widows and orphans and do so much good in the world. The cheaters are never going to be honest about who they are, preferring instead to hide out within the existing substance living as parasites rather than do the work of making their own structures, borrowing its reputation and forms of earned authority - e.g. President Clark did not declare himself an emperor but retained the title of a democratic "President", despite the literal coup that gave him that position.
Kosh, John, and G'Kar were those who refused to blindly follow their culture to "just do the thing", and instead questioned everything according to the logical principles of self-consistency: "is what I'm doing right according to the goal that I want to eventually reach?", and by doing such they not only served their peoples (hehe, but not necessarily the ones in charge at the time) but also lead them, as in they went out ahead and did that next right thing, thus setting an example for others to follow, if they wanted.
So I said that I lacked the words but a stab at it could be: Kosh was who he was not despite being a Vorlon, but rather because of it. However, if true, that has massive implications for the nature of Truth, i.e. it must not be defined by a majority-rules consensus (even for something like a race of people or a democracy) and rather some other standard that if not purely external then at least is not entirely internally defined, in the sense that it is a combination of whatever was internal but also subject to the (external?) constraints imposed by the need to remain logically consistent.
As in, there was a "correct" way to be, and Kosh chose it in defiance of his people, which we as consumers of the media recognize and respect.
That show is so deep. Or perhaps it is better to say that I feel deeper as a result of thinking about the material presented in the show.:-)
Honestly I think the “what happened “ is that Josh had an epiphany when Sheridan challenged him. When was the last time a younger race talked back that way? Not to mention all the time spent mentoring Sheridan, where it wasn’t some random that it could just be written off.
Remember that he still arranged for Lyta to get to their home world so she could be worked over.
My theory was that they had kept him tucked away somewhere in Vorlon space all that time - I forget if they said he worked over others, but if so then he could have been kept either in stasis or merely with no work to be done in-between, which might be heaven for some but for his personality type seemed like hell.
But either way, like you said about Lyta, he was an absolute tool - their absolute tool.