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The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5
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[1][ISMAP]-[2][Home]
### GUIDE ### [3][Background] [4][Synopsis] [5][Credits] [6][Episode
List] [7][Previous] [8][Next]
_Contents:_ [9]Overview - [10]Backplot - [11]Questions - [12]Analysis
- [13]Notes - [14]JMS
_________________________________________________________________
Overview
An old friend of Garibaldi's arrives and tries to take part in a
dangerous alien combat sport. A rabbi helps Ivanova come to terms
with her father's death. [15]Theodore Bikel as Rabbi Koslov.
[16]Greg McKinney as Walker Smith. [17]Soon-Tek Oh as The Muta-Do.
[18]Don Stroud as Caliban.
Sub-genre: Drama
[19]P5 rating: [20]6.41
Production number: 119
Original air date: May 25, 1994
Written by Larry DiTillio
Directed by John Flynn
_________________________________________________________________
Backplot
* Ivanova's brother Ganya was killed in the Earth-Minbari war a year
after her mother committed suicide.
Unanswered Questions
Analysis
* The fact that aliens of several races -- including a Centauri --
all seemed to agree that humans had no business fighting in the
Mutai seems to indicate that there is a lot of resentment toward
humans among the other races, enough that they see the distinction
between humans and themselves as much greater than the
distinctions between each other.
Notes
* Walker Smith was the real name of famed boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.
jms speaks
* At one point, there was a discussion in the scene about the whole
gills/scales/fins issue, to define kosher...but it *really*
brought the scene to a screaming standstill, and we needed to
concentrate on the relationships at that moment. In addition, as
we looked at it, you would have to get into the question of how
alien gills/scales/fins compare to earthly gills/scales/fins,
because they're going to be very different in many ways. In short
order it became a massive Talmudic discussion, and we only have an
hour for the show....
* Babylon 5 (the show) got not a dime for sticking in the [21]Zima
sign. We just thought...well, it'd be funny.
* Yes, slappers = skin tabs, for introducing medication. The ones in
TKO had been stolen from B5 medsupplies.
* Through a miscommunication, Warners thought TKO was in the slot in
which we'd placed Quality [of Mercy], so that went out to TV
Guide, and it's now too late to change the order back. Doesn't
matter; neither are really arc-stories, though it was hoped to
hold back some of Susan's development in TKO just a tad longer.
* It was Larry's idea to name the character Walker Smith, after
Sugar Ray Robinson.
* If the deceased has been dead for quite a while, the period during
which one must sit shiva is greatly reduced to a day or so, I'm
told.
* Larry wrote the shiva stuff all on his lonesome. As for being an
abbreviated version...apparently shiva lasts 3 days for someone
recently deceased. If it's been months since the death, the
service is usually much shorter, and again, there was only Ivanova
and Koslov who actually were part of or knew the deceased.
* I'm told that shiva need not last 7 full days, if the death was
not recent, and if the body has already been buried.
* Now, on the samovar issue...whatever your background, if your
family grew up in Russia and has been there for several hundred
years or more -- and the Ivanov family has been there since at
LEAST the 1800s -- you do become part of the culture. That, as I
always understood it, was part of the reason for making sure
children learned hebrew, yiddish *and* the dominant language of
the culture, to give their kids a fighting chance in a difficult
world. It's not so much a case of the culture assimiliating the
individual (though certainly that happens as well), but the
individual INCORPORATING the culture.
Ivanova is jewish. Ivanova is russian. Of the two, she tends to
see herself as a russian first. There's no value statement there,
that's just the way she is. Her parents were both russian, going
back many generations on both sides. Some in her family tree were
jewish, and some were not; there was some intermarrying. That may
be part of why she sees herself as more russian than jewish, but
it may be just a quirk.
(And to the protest of, "Well, you created her," yes, I did. But
there comes a time, if you've done your job right as a writer,
when the character more or less takes over, and starts telling YOU
who and what he or she is. There are times I mentally turn to
Ivanova and say, "Okay, what do *you* think?" And she talks to me
in my head, as do all of my characters. It's part of making your
characters real.)
When she went off to boarding school overseas -- part of an
ongoing international system put into place by EarthGov to help
its various member nations get along with one another -- she
identified most strongly with that russian aspect in relation to
those around her. She learned to speak English without a
perceptible accent.
The samovar is a valued and valuable part of russian life. It is
the family hearth, on one level, a possession passed on from
generation to generation. Knowing that Ivanova was not terribly
religious herself, he would generally not leave her any of his
personal religious artifacts, but would dnate them to the local
synagogue, while some, like a menorah, might go to other
relatives. People who could appreciate them and use them. The
samovar is a very personal object; to the correspondent with a
fiance who is russian...*I* am byeloruss, white-russian,
one-and-a-half generation American born. And I can tell you that
the biggest fights I've ever seen over bequeaths were over a)
money, and b) the samovar.
The problem with this discussion is that it has very little to do
with who Susan Ivanova *is*, and more to do with the politics of
what a russian or a jew or a russian jew *should be*. She is what
she is, like it or not.
* "The remark: '...pouting in that way that only 13 can...'"
. . . the comment is essentially correct; ain't nobody can pout
like a 13 year old.
* To the problems some have with Theodore Bikell's accent not
sounding real...it's my understanding that he was raised in
Russia.
Ivanova does not have an accent because she was educated overseas,
her father wanting her to have certain advantages the rest of her
family did not.
Nowhere did we say that Andrei or the rest of the Ivanov family
ever emigrated. They didn't. They live in Russia. Or lived, in any
event. Not everyone migrates to the US or to Israel, and not
everyone wants to.
On the treel/kosher discussion...I can only shrug. Nobody's ever
shown that jews go forward into the future, placed them at the
heart of a science fiction show as a regular character, nobody's
shown shiva before in (and possibly out of) an SF series...and
some folks are complaining that not every aspect of a treel's
kosher-ness was discussed at dinnertime.
Some days, you just can't win....
Feh.
* _What was that Harlan Ellison book Ivanova was reading?_
The book is Harlan's autobiography, which he plans to write around
the year 2000, and yes, that's his photo. (He borrowed the prop
when we were finished and casually carried it with him to a few
places, just to make people nuts thinking there was a book out
they'd missed....)
* [Posted 28 May 1994] BTW, there's an interesting couple of
articles about this episode in this week's Jewish Journal, for
another perspective on the show.
* _Channel 4 in the UK didn't show "TKO" during the initial run_
TKO's main importance is to the Ivanova arc, as she finally comes
to terms with her father's death. Do I have an opinion on C4's
decision not to show TKO?
Absolutely.
* If the problem is showing bare-kunckle fighting to the death, then
somebody should point out to C4 that *nobody dies* in the match.
* The Mutari are those who fight in the Mutai; and you *did* see
Narns and Centauri and others hanging around the ring. The only
ones you won't see there are Minbari. It ain't their thing.
* As I've noted before, over the long haul, as you watch episodes,
you will see things you didn't see before. Sometimes they're
clues, and sometimes they're comments which now read a different
way than they did the first time you saw them. There's been a
number of the latter very subtly sprinkled through the episodes
aired so far...lines that everyone jumped on as meaning one thing,
but which will mean something else, and lines which nobody thought
much of the first time out...but which will elicit a wince of
irony later on.
There's a corker in "TKO," but at the moment, it's absolutely
invisible. It's not a clue, it's not necessary for the story, it's
just one of those things that, after you've seen all the rest of
this season's episodes, you will go "Ouch," when you see it next.
* Actually, the idea of Zima lasting even into 1995 is hysterical. I
keep fighting the urge to have some guy show up on B5, "Zo then I
zays to him, nize ztation"...and five Narns just jump on him and
beat the shit out of him, WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM!
* We've killed off all of Ivanova's close family, yes. Maybe some
cousins are left, but that's about it.
* There's a Billy Joel song, where one particular lyric (and I'm
quoting from memory) says, "You still have a pain inside you /
That you carry with a certain pride / It's the only part / Of a
broken heart / You could ever save." That's Ivanova.
She's had her heart stomped on a lot. And she's been holding it
in. Even with her father's death, she sucked in the pain, fought
back the tears. There is one episode, which will be right at the
end of the year, where she finds she can't run from her pain
anymore...can't run from the tears...and deals with them in a
scene that's very moving and absolutely brings tears to the eyes.
[27][Next]
[28]Last update: January 28, 1998
References
1. file://localhost/cgi-bin/imagemap/titlebar
2. LYNXIMGMAP:file://localhost/lurk/maps/maps.html#titlebar
3. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/background/014.shtml
4. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/synops/014.html
5. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/credits/014.html
6. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/episodes.php
7. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/013.html
8. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/015.html
9. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#OV
10. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#BP
11. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#UQ
12. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#AN
13. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#NO
14. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#JS
15. http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Bikel,+Theodore
16. http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+McKinney,+Gregory
17. http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Oh,+Soon-Tek
18. http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Stroud,+Don
19. file://localhost/lurk/p5/intro.html
20. file://localhost/lurk/p5/014
21. http://www.zima.com/
22. file://localhost/lurk/lurker.html
23. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/014.html#TOP
24. file://localhost/cgi-bin/uncgi/lgmail
25. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/episodes.php
26. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/013.html
27. file://localhost/home/woodstock/hyperion/docs/lurk/guide/015.html
28. file://localhost/lurk/lastmod.html