“Divided Loyalties”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jesus Treviño
Season 2, Episode 19
Production episode 220
Original air date: October 11, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… On Mars, a fatally wounded human passes on a data crystal to a Ranger before he dies. It’s information that B5 apparently needs, because it isn’t safe.
Sheridan and Garibaldi have a clandestine meeting in the bathroom, waiting until it’s empty (and scanned for listening devices) before talking openly. Garibaldi thinks that Winters should be brought into the inner circle. Sheridan agrees.
Ivanova and Winters are sharing a meal, during which Winters mentions that she isn’t sure where she’s going to sleep tonight, as her quarters are being repaired. Ivanova offers crash space in her cabin.
The commander is then summoned to CnC, as there’s a ship coming through the jumpgate that isn’t scheduled or responding to communications. They tow it on board and discover only one person on board, who is unconscious. As she’s brought to medlab, Garibaldi recognizes her: Lyta Alexander, the first commercial telepath assigned to B5.
Garibaldi gives Sheridan a précis of the events of “The Gathering,” plus that Alexander (and the station’s first medical officer) were recalled to Earth after getting to see inside Kosh’s encounter suit.
When she regains consciousness, Alexander is squirrelly. She says one of B5’s senior personnel is a traitor. She meets with the senior staff and fills them in on what she’s been up to since she was recalled. EarthGov and the Psi Corps grilled her for two years before she escaped to Mars and joined an underground movement, working for them while trying to find a way to get into Vorlon space (at which she has thus far failed, as have every other non-Vorlon who’s tried). While on Mars, she learned of Control, an embedded personality inside a host body. The host is unaware of Control, and Control periodically acts while the host is asleep to commit evil acts of evil.
Alexander can activate Control, which will expose it, but that will also kill the host personality completely. Control is activated by a password that is sent telepathically into the double agent’s mind. There’s no scanning involved, just “saying” a word. She wants permission to do this to station personnel.
Sheridan says they have to discuss it, and Alexander is escorted to protective custody.
Ivanova outright refuses to let any telepath in her head in any way. Sheridan first needs to confirm Alexander’s story, which Garibaldi does. But that still doesn’t necessarily prove anything. The traitor Alexander heard about could have been Garibaldi’s deputy who shot him. Sheridan wants to sleep on it.
Garibaldi orders Allan to have Alexander moved to more comfortable quarters so she can get a good night’s sleep. Allan assigns it to two guards played by guest stars so they can be shot with impunity—they’re ambushed, with one guard killed and another wounded. Alexander escapes.
Sheridan is now much more willing to believe Alexander’s story. But she’s missing. Ivanova is still pissed, but Sheridan tries to talk her off the ledge, pointing out that their careers, and maybe their lives, are on the line here. Ivanova then confesses to Sheridan that she’s a latent telepath. Not even a P1, but she can block a scan. She’s gone to great lengths to keep this a secret, and if Alexander exposes that, she’s hosed.
Alexander contacts Delenn and uses her as a go-between. Eventually, they meet up again. The senior staff are given the password first, with Sheridan allowing Ivanova to put off her test for a bit while they test other personnel.
But nobody is Control. Finally, Ivanova relents, though on instinct she blocks Alexander’s first attempt. But Ivanova isn’t Control, either.
Winters happens to walk into the room at that moment, and Alexander shoots the password into her head, and suddenly Control takes over, furious that Alexander has outed her. She tries to shoot Alexander, but is stopped by Garibaldi, who immediately has her taken away.
The senior staff gather to worry about what will happen. They figure that Psi Corps will want the sleeper program kept on the QT, so they won’t reveal much that Control learned while manipulating Winters, but even with that mutually assured destruction, they’ve got problems.
Ivanova visits Control, who makes it clear that Winters is gone forever.
Alexander visits Kosh and reveals that—contrary to her earlier assertions—she remembers everything about her telepathic scan of Kosh, and has kept that secreted away in a corner of her mind. She asks to see Kosh’s true form, a request he grants immediately.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan has to decide if he’ll allow Alexander to probe his staff. The needs of keeping their resistance movement secret proves paramount, especially given the very real danger presented by Control.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova reveals her latent telepathy, allows herself to be scanned and outed to the senior staff and to Alexander as a latent telepath, and loses her new lover, all in one episode.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi decides to pretend to be Control initially when Alexander sends the password, a little practical joke that is appallingly inappropriate given that one of his deputies was just killed and another wounded when Alexander was ambushed by Control. But they were just guest stars, so I guess they don’t really matter all that much…
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn uses the Earth newspaper Universe Today as a way of learning more about the human press (after she was ambushed by Cynthia Torqueman in “And Now for a Word”), of learning how humans view Minbari especially, plus sometimes she learns things from Universe Today that she should have been told (but wasn’t) by her government.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Psi Corps’ sleeper program gets outed. Control isn’t very happy about it.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Sheridan and Delenn have two adorable scenes together, one at the newspaper kiosk, one in hydroponics. The latter ends with Delenn affectionately putting her hand on his.
Meantime, apparently Ivanova and Winters are sleeping together now. But not any longer.
Welcome aboard. Three recurring regulars in this one, two of whom will be opening-credits regulars eventually. Back from “The Gathering” is Patricia Tallman as Alexander; she’ll return next season in “Passing Through Gethsemane” (and become an opening-credits regular in season four). Back from “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” are both Jeff Conaway as Allan and Ardwight Chamberlain as Kosh. Conaway will return in “The Fall of Night” (and become an opening-credits regular in season three), while Chamberlain will return in “Comes the Inquisitor.”
Trivial matters. This is the final appearance of Andrea Thompson as Winters, though she will remain in the opening credits for the rest of this season. The character will eventually be replaced by her predecessor, Patricia Tallman’s Alexander, who makes a return appearance in this episode. Cha cha cha.
Sheridan recalls the Kosh-induced dream he had in “All Alone in the Night,” specifically Ivanova half hidden in shadow asking if he knows who she is, which may have been a portent of this secret, especially since Ivanova specifically says she doesn’t know who she really is.
Allan is still wearing his Nightwatch armband that he started wearing in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.”
The kiosk allows you to print your copy of Universe Today only with the types of stories you want to read. It’s a feature that—like many science fictional predictions—seemed very futuristic in 1995 and seems quaintly retro now.
This episode kicks off the B5 tradition of holding the final four episodes of a season until right before the next season airs. “Confessions and Lamentations” aired in May of 1995, with this episode and its three subsequent ones airing in October and early November, with season three then debuting immediately after that. This sequence will be repeated in season three, and sort of in season four—the final four episodes of the fourth season were also held until the fall of 1997, but season five (which was on TNT instead of the discontinued PTEN) didn’t debut until January 1998.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I never told them—I never told anyone. I hid it all away in the smallest, tiniest corner of my mind. They could’ve killed me and they still wouldn’t have found it. Only at night, alone, would I open that small door in my mind where I kept the memory of you and listen to your voice. Listen to you sing me to sleep.”
—Alexander revealing to Kosh (and the viewer) the truth.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Go to hell.” The heights to which I loved this episode when it first aired is matched only by the depths to which I despise it in retrospect.
When I first saw it in the fall of 1995, I thought it was such a wonderful twist and a nifty setup for future plots. I assumed, incredibly wrongly, that we’d be seeing Winters periodically as an antagonist using her inside knowledge about B5 to damage our heroes.
It wasn’t until later that I found out that Andrea Thompson was frustrated by her lack of much of a role for someone in the opening credits of a TV show, and was written out rather than give her a more flexible schedule so she could find other work instead of being on call regularly and hoping she might be in an episode.
Instead, the uppity woman was written out permanently. And if that sounds unfair, you’d be right if this was a lone event, but it isn’t. At roughly the same time, Stephen Furst got a co-starring role in a sitcom called Misery Loves Company, and his B5 schedule was adjusted to accommodate. (Not that it needed to be adjusted much, as the show only lasted eight episodes.) It’s hard not to draw conclusions when the man gets the accommodation and the woman gets unconvincingly written out.
And looking back at the episode from three decades on, it’s unconvincing as hell. We start with the out-of-nowhere revelation that Ivanova and Winters are sleeping together. The leap from “okay, maybe I don’t hate you as much as I hate other telepaths” to “sure, stay in my quarters, and you can sleep in my bed” is way too long and too far to be in any way convincing.
But, of course, there wasn’t time to develop the relationship, because Winters needed to be gotten rid of. Winters will never be seen again, and only referenced once or twice, but otherwise is completely disappeared.
Which, as I indicated above, takes the wind out of the sails of the whole thing. We get about ten minutes of shock and betrayal from the crew in the episode’s final act, and then that’s it. This huge game-changing character alteration is a total nothingburger for the remainder of the franchise’s duration. What started as a literal character assassination instead becomes a figurative one because an actor had the temerity to ask for the ability to work more.
Actually, two theoretically game-changing alterations are unconvincingly dropped here, as Winters’ telekinesis is allegedly a huge deal, though absolutely nothing has been done with it for the better part of two seasons. And now it never will.
Finally, at no point does anyone bring up the fact that Alexander commits murder in this episode. What’s more, it’s premeditated murder. Alexander says right up front that her sending the password into someone’s brain will make Control come to the fore, killing the host body’s personality completely. The ethics of this is completely glossed over and ignored. After all, we’ve got an actor to write out!
The episode has its merits. For all that having Garibaldi suggest bringing Winters into the inner circle in the episode in which she’ll be revealed to be a traitor is clumsy writing, I love that Sheridan and Garibaldi have important clandestine meetings in the bathroom. All the stuff with Ivanova’s latent telepathy is brilliantly done, full of pathos and anguish, fantastically played by Claudia Christian. And I’ve been a fan of Patricia Tallman since the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, and she does good work here.
And hey, I’d say Thompson got her revenge, as she wound up on NYPD Blue for four years, and a lot more people watched that show than B5…
Next week: “The Long, Twilight Struggle.”
