B5: Born to the Purple

In which Ivanova smiles and the resident telepath fails utterly at her job. Also there are no green-skinned space babes in sight, but there is a bald chick. Special guest appearance by the original voice of Emperor Palpatine.

Important negotiations are under way, but Londo is distracted by a liason with Adira, the aforementioned not-green-skinned bald chick. Unfortunately, she's a slave to Trakis, a bad guy who's using her to get to Londo's "purple files," which hold the secrets of Centauri's ruling families. He orders her to get the secrets out of Londo's head with a mind probe.

(As this is Babylon 5 and not Doctor Who, I will abstain.)

After a strenuous day of negotiations, Sinclair takes the telepath Talia Winters out for dinner. Londo takes Adira out to dinner to the same restaurant. So Adira, who is planning to drug Londo and use a mind probe  on him later this evening, is sitting about 15 feed away from Talia. And she can't tell that Adira's really really conflicted about something. Now, given that the woman I'll be inevitably comparing her to once totalled a starship, I'm not going to come down too hard on Talia just yet, but it's still a startling oversight. It's not like that scene was in any way important to the resolution of the plot.

Well Adira has a change of heart at the last minute, prompting Trakis to go to Mantis-Man to track her down. Sinclair decides to side with Londo - presumably in order to maintain the status quo on the station - and arranges a trap for Trakis so that Talia can mind-read him and find out where he's holding Adira. Talia basically accomplishes this by telling Trakis not to think about where Adira is. So at the very least she's seen Inception.

There's a subplot about a rather massive hole in Ivanova's ice queen armor, which is great from a character perspective. I'll probably get deeper into it later on.

Refreshingly, the episode doesn't end with an action sequence between Sinclair and the villain of the week. The main guest star is also considerably more attractive than Badger's dad, which might also explain why I like this one more than the last one.