Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Sheridan faces an inquisitor from Earthdome. Wayne Alexander as Drazi. Raye Birk as William. Bruce Gray as Interrogator.

P5 Rating: 8.08

Production number: 418
Original air week: June 16, 1997
DVD release date: January 6, 2004

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by John LaFia

Plot Points

• Sheridan continues to be held in an interrogation center, most likely on Mars.
• Clark believes Sheridan's credibility as a war hero is a threat to the credibility of the administration. He wants Sheridan to recant in public to restore the public's belief that "you can't beat the system."
• Among the weapons Earth purchased from the Narn during the Earth-Minbari War were paingivers ("The Parliament of Dreams.") The paingivers appear to work as well on humans as they do on Narns.

Unanswered Questions

• Was the interrogation real, or was it all in Sheridan's mind like the interrogation of Sinclair in "And the Sky Full of Stars?"
• Was it really morning?
• Is Sheridan's father still being held?

Analysis

• With Ivanova presumably continuing the campaign to retake Earth, it's interesting that Clark's people seem intent on breaking Sheridan to the exclusion of trying to interrogate him for information about battle plans or other practical matters. Perhaps they figure that he wouldn't give up such information until he had gone over to their side anyway, but given the fact that Clark is willing to send Psi Corps units out to scan the general public ("The Face of the Enemy") it's strange a telepath hasn't been brought in to pull military information from Sheridan's head.

• In "The Face of the Enemy," Ivanova quoted Sheridan as saying, "The person is expendable. The job is not." The interrogator told Sheridan much the same thing, with one exception: Sheridan himself wasn't expendable. But that was only true as long as there was the possibility of him performing a different job: communicating to the public that Clark couldn't be beaten.

• The interrogator appeared to have disabled the paingivers after Sheridan's first exposure to them; on several occasions after that, the two of them were close together but Sheridan wasn't shocked.

• Assuming the images of Delenn weren't telepathic projections of some kind on her part, Sheridan's repeated visions of her echoed his experience on Z'ha'dum in "Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?" The knowledge that Delenn is still out there, awaiting his return, is an island of stability Sheridan can cling to.

  The interrogator clearly knew of his relationship with Delenn -- not a big secret after the ISN report in "The Illusion of Truth." Will the next interrogator realize that Sheridan is using her as an anchor, and try to undermine that directly, e.g. by presenting faked evidence that something has happened to her?

• "Room 17" is probably a reference to George Orwell's "1984," in which Winston Smith, the protagonist, hears of people taken to Room 101, but has no idea what goes on there.

• The interrogator insisted that he was telling Sheridan the truth, but also insisted that the truth is fluid. That means little, if anything, the interrogator told Sheridan can be taken at face value.

• The interrogator said he thought his speech about poison was a metaphor for something, but he couldn't figure out what. In addition to the historical nod (see Notes) the speech can be interpreted as a metaphor for what he was trying to do to Sheridan. First he convinced Sheridan to agree to little lies (the time of day.) After a steady diet of small untruths, the interrogator hoped, Sheridan would become more and more receptive to bigger and bigger lies, until he was ready to swallow anything suggested to him.

Notes

• The interrogator mentioned that Sheridan had been interrogated once before. That referred to "Comes the Inquisitor," in which Sheridan was interrogated by Jack the Ripper (played by Wayne Alexander, who played the Drazi in this episode.)

• Possible continuity glitch: When the interrogator left the room and the loud voice started repeating its message, Sheridan covered his ears. At the beginning of the next act, when the interrogator returned, Sheridan's hands were bound to the chair. Of course, it's possible other people came into the room in the interim and forced him to listen.

• The interrogator didn't get sick from the sandwich, he claimed, because he'd been eating a little poison every day and had built up a resistance. This has historical precedent; for instance, King Mithridates of Pontus, 135-63 BC, who eventually tried to commit suicide by swallowing large quantities of poison but couldn't kill himself because his resistance was too great.

• Perhaps simply by coincidence, this "1984"esque story is the 84th one-hour episode.

• Taking numerology to an absurd extreme, add episode 84 to room 17 and you get 101, the mystery room number from "1984."

jms speaks

• About the title
  Each act took place in real time, no time jumps...the conversation happened as it happened. Since you had act breaks in between them, those became intersections...in real time.

• As this has the potential to be a very cool and somewhat experimental episode, I'd rather say nothing until later.

• I don't usually comment on this, but...if I had known *with absolute certainty* that there would be a season 5, then season 4 would have ended with 418, "Intersections in Real Time." So you only pull 4 episodes forward, really. You'll understand when you see it.

• I like this one a lot. It takes some real chances, and it has some nasty twists and turns. I like that in a story....

• Actually, one episode coming up in this batch is, according to John Copeland, the single most subversive thing we've ever done on the show. It's a *mean* episode and completely, unabashedly underhanded in its way of illuminating certain things. While, oddly enough, ending in a positive fashion, despite George Johnsen's comment at playback during the audio mix, "Okay, what sadistic m-----f----- wrote this thing?"

• "You understand the concepts of breaking down a human psyche."

  (shrugs) Well, sure...I work for Warner Bros.

• Warner Bros.' wacky scheduling is actually appropriate this time.
  Yep...it is that. At last I have a proper cliffhanger and a proper wait afterward.

• Why do people do end-of-season cliffhangers?
  It's basically a means to get the audience, which has been away for a long time, to come back to resolve a hanging point and jump-start them into the episodes. If it ends cleanly, apparently a lot of folks in any series will just forget to tune in the following season.

• Was Bruce Boxleitner's beard for real?
  Bruce had some time between episodes, and began to grow the beard for real, and we darkened it down for later acts.

• The costumes and set design were ripoffs of "The Prisoner."
  You're wrong. The costumer has never even *seen* the Prisoner, as far as I know, and the suit he wore was one of our standard earth suits which we've used before on the show, just tailored it to fit his form. And the set design is just your basic black room with chairs, nothing more. I also doubt muchly that Flinn has ever seen The Prisoner...which was a very well and brightly lit show, whereas this played to darkness.

• Was the Drazi really there? He was played by the same actor who played Jack.
  The Drazi was really there...has to be, or the ep loses some of its teeth. And yeah, we kinda liked the symmetry of Wayne being in this ep.

• Yes, the Drazi was working with the EA the whole time, rendering Sheridan's "victory" impotent.

• What was the message of this episode?
  The message is just that, that we *all* have to choose to resist from time to time, and that one individual can fight the system. And we are all that individual at one time or another.

• There was a lot of give-and-take in that episode, and at times maybe the interrogator was near the truth, or a form of it...but always distorting it, using it for his benefit. Slippery slopes indeed....

• "Theres alot of truth to your notion of the TRUTH. It raises points I'd rather not think about. Where do these notions of yours originate?"

  Usually at 3 in the morning when I can't sleep....

• Why doesn't Clark just have Bester reprogram Sheridan?
  Because they don't want him reprogrammed; as William says, another teep could see that he'd been altered. They want him *sincerely broken*. Not just rewired.

  And yeah, I wanted this to function almost as a play in structure. In fact, when we shot it, we did it in full-act chunks. The actors would come in in the morning, rehearse it as they would a play, then we'd shoot it the way we'd shoot a play, straight through.

• But if Clark is in control of the Corps, no other teep would scan Sheridan, right?
  It matters because there are plenty of alien teeps out there as well as human ones, and you can always get a rogue in there.

• Did Sheridan say very little to avoid giving the interrogator anything to use against him?
  That's one reason (among many) that I kept Sheridan silent for the most part; a) because the less he says the better overall from his position, and b) the audience would want to respond for him.

• The interrogator looked like an ordinary person.
  Exactly. The banal face of evil. You look at most of the guys who ran Treblinka, or Bergen-Belsen, and they're largely ordinary looking guys, who could be accountants or repair men or car salesmen. They're *us*...and this was designed to remind us of that. The evil, mustache-twirling villain is too easy, and too far from the truth of it.

• This was one of the elements that made the episode interesting for me; most SF tends to ignore the darker sides of the common person. They deal with the big bad guys, the evil federations and Darth Vaders and all the other major forces out there, but all too often the real damage is done not by the single Evil Leader, but by the ten million people who *follow* him, the bookkeepers who track the bodies and the trains and the pain by placing the right figures in all the right columns, who make the trains run on time, who run the gulags, who build the new state empires that will be built with slave labor, any or all of whom could say, as many have, "I was just doing my job."

  Not so much "following orders," we've heard that before, applied to the military...but just "doing my job." To the interrogator, he was simply doing his job, and doing it to the best of his ability. It is something he does, then he goes home to his wife and kids, and has dinner, and sits out on the porch trying to forget what he does because he thinks he *has* to do it...assuming he thinks about it at all.

• Referring to "Comes the Inquisitor"
  "It's Johnny who's "alone in the dark", facing unrelenting pressure to give up, knowing that if he dies under torture his friends may never know for certain what happened to him."

  Which is what the Inquisitor said he would have to face.

• This story must have been based on "Closetland." There were a bunch of similarities...
  The one room;

  Interrogations usually take place in one cell. Take a look at "Midnight Express," or any of a dozen or so other interrogation movies.

  the two main characters;

  Closetland had just two; here we had others, a second interrogator, the Drazi, others.

  the taunting with food and drink;

  Standard fare for any such interrogation.

  the recorded message about cooperation and rewards;

  ditto

  the talk about breaking the body to then break the mind;

  ditto again

  the ruse of taking the prisoner to another room, yet having it be just another prison.

  Where did this happen in Closetland? It didn't, from what I dimly recall of the thing.

  I based this episode on a fairly substantial amount of reading and background in knowing about how people are treated in prison camps and the like. There are only so many things you can do to someone in a closed room to try and break them. Heck, look at William Saroyan's "Hello, Out There" for other similarities that *way* precede Closetland. I'm sorry to astonish you, but the techniques of interrogation existed long before B5 or ST or Closetland came into existence, and will continue (sadly) long afterward. The techniques are the techniques, and those are well documented. The *stories* have nothing whatsoever in common.

  Over the last ten years or so, there have been a number of films which have looked at the process of interrogation in South American and European countries, using a very similar structure to what was done here, because the ways in which the "problem" are handled are pretty much universal. They don't all stem from the same film, or book, or story...but rather from the realities involved. They did what they did, and we did what we did, for the same reasons: to bring this sort of behavior into the light. There have also been innumerable plays with a similar structure.

  In cop movie #1, a suspect is arrested, read his Miranda rights, brought to the station, stuck into a cell with one or two other people, brought into an interrogation room with one or two cops, goes round and round with them, and finally confesses. Cop movie #2 does a similar thing...now, did movie #2 take from movie #1, or did it just draw on what is *done*?

  No, I'm sorry, but I wasn't thinking about Closetland, or Star Trek, or The Prisoner, or much of anything else when I wrote this episode. I was thinking about this character, from this show, who must be made to confess to alien influence, *which has been paraded by Earthforce for almost a year now*. It is an absolute and logical extension of what has gone before. As someone who has degrees in both Psychology and Sociology, and who has been a supporter of PEN International (a multinational group that monitors the treatment of writers who are prisoners of conscience in other countires) for years, I have had a longstanding interest and familiarity with this area...and through my European roots with relatives who were in Germany and Poland when the camps were in full swing, and later when the Russian government beat down its people. I have plenty of personal background on this one.

Last update: May 27, 2024