Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Shadow Dancing” With the Shadows next target known, a massive counterattack is prepared… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on August 11, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Shadow Dancing”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Kim FriedmanSeason 3, Episode 21Production episode 321Original air date: October 21, 1996 It was the dawn of the third age… The opening caption reads, “Z Minus 7 Days.” It’s like it’s one week to the finale or something… Delenn and Lennier plead with the League of Non-Aligned Worlds for help with a joint strike against the Shadows. However, the two Minbari are parsimonious with specifics, not saying where this strike will be and only hinting at the huge-ass White Star fleet they now have. It’s necessary for security reasons to keep those details under wraps, but that also makes it hard for the League representatives to agree. Meanwhile, Sheridan sends Ivanova and Cole with a White Star to Sector 83 as a scout. As soon as the Shadows strike, they’re to send a signal, but not engage unless fired upon. Sheridan is up-front that there’s only about a 50-50 chance of survival if they engage the enemy. Delenn returns to the meeting room to find only the Drazi ambassador present. At first, she’s crestfallen, thinking that this is bad news, but the ambassador says he’s been asked to speak for everyone: they’re in, the others are all back talking to their governments. Delenn is visibly relieved. Allan and Garibaldi have a conversation whose sole purpose is to remind viewers that Franklin is on walkabout after admitting that he has a stim addiction. Garibaldi is worried that he didn’t do enough to help the doctor. We then cut to the doctor in downbelow, seeing a family of tourists who are exploring the area for some stupid reason. When their daughter runs over to say hi to Franklin, her mother makes her get away from him, because they don’t know where he’s been. Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Z Minus 6 Days.” Sheridan thinks the League is holding back, not sending all the ships they possibly can. Delenn agrees, but there is little they can do—they need to defend their own worlds, after all. Sheridan is also not sure Delenn should join the fleet, since so much of the war council is going on this mission, but Delenn insists. She also informs Sheridan that, after the battle, they will spend the night together—but not that way. Minbari tradition is that when a couple gets close, the man sleeps and the woman watches him to see his true face. If she likes what she sees, the relationship deepens. If she doesn’t, they go their separate ways, no hard feelings. Franklin comes across two thugs beating up some dude. Franklin moves to intervene, and gets stabbed for his trouble. When he asks the dude he helped for assistance, the dude says he’d get arrested and buggers off, leaving Franklin bleeding on the deck. Ivanova and Cole discuss the latter’s fluency in Minbari, then she goes to get some sleep. She struggles to sleep on Minbari beds, and finally finds a way to be comfortable—at which point Cole calls her to the bridge: a Shadow scout ship has arrived. The White Star manages to jam their attempt at a transmission, but they also can’t get their own signal out. There’s a brief firefight, and the White Star manages to destroy the scout, but their jump engines are offline, meaning they’re sitting ducks. Sheridan and the rest of the fleet jump into the fray just as all the Shadow ships show up, and the battle is joined. Sheridan and Delenn stands in a holographic chamber that shows him the entire battlefield and allows him to be in touch with every allied ship. He directs the battle from there. Ivanova and Cole are able to join in once their engines are fixed. Eventually, the Shadows retreat rather than continue. It’s a victory, though it came at significant cost. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Back in downbelow, Franklin is going into shock and delirium and he hallucinates himself in uniform. His imaginary self is snotty and obnoxious, calling him out for his tendency to run away from things. He ran away from his father’s desire for him to enter the military, he ran away from residency, being an itinerant doctor instead, he ran away from his responsibilities during the Earth-Minbari War, destroying his research, and he’s running away now. Franklin drags his bleeding ass through the corridors to where there are people, at which point help is called and he’s admitted to medlab. The fleet returns to B5. Sheridan is grateful when he hears that Franklin got medical attention in time and will survive. Garibaldi is happy about the victory but worried about what the Shadows’ next move will be now that they got spanked. “Z Minus 4 Days.” Franklin, still recovering, is unofficially directing traffic in medlab. Sheridan comes and offers him his old job back. (No mention is made of poor Dr. Hobbs, who is, frankly, a better and more ethical doctor, and also doesn’t have a history of drug use, but hey, Jennifer Balgobin isn’t an opening-credits regular, so screw her.) Sheridan, Ivanova, and Delenn discuss what the Shadows’ next move might be, though they’ve done nothing in the past couple of days. Sheridan discusses the dream Kosh sent him back when he was a prisoner of the Streib. Some of it, he knows what it meant—like Ivanova’s not knowing who she really is, which related to the revelation that she’s a latent telepath. But then there’s the warning about “the man in between.” Delenn speculates that it might be his counterpart among the Shadows. A ship is disgorged from a Shadow vessel in hyperspace and travels to B5. Its passenger disembarks, and her ID sets off a flag. Allan immediately contacts Ivanova: it’s Anna Sheridan. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Anna goes to Sheridan’s quarters, where Delenn is watching Sheridan sleep, as promised. While Delenn is looking at a snowglobe on Sheridan’s desk, Anna comes in. Delenn drops the snowglobe in shock, and it shatters on the deck. “Z Minus 2 Days.” Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan wins a major battle against the Shadows, moves forward in his relationship with Delenn, and then his supposedly dead wife shows up. Quite the eventful episode for him, and this is just a warm-up for next time… Ivanova is God. Unlike her CO, Ivanova cannot sleep on the angled Minbari beds. She finally is able to get comfortable when she takes the pillows off all the beds and arranges them on the deck. Oh, and she also holds her own in command of the White Star, taking on the Shadow scout. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi castigates himself for not doing more to help Franklin. It’s actually very sweet of him to be that concerned about his fuck-up friend, mostly because Garibaldi’s the same kind of fuck-up… If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn and Lennier plead passionately for the League of Non-Aligned Worlds to help out. Her passion and Lennier’s calm do a lot to sell it. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Each of the ships in the fleet have telepaths on board, which is a big part of how the Shadows are routed. We live for the one, we die for the one. At one point, when they’re about to join the battle, Ivanova rhetorically asks, “Who wants to live forever?” Cole rather passionately replies, “I do, actually.” Credit: Warner Bros. Television No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Cole tells Ivanova in Minbari that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but he chickens out when asked for a translation, just saying that it’s a simple greeting. Also, Sheridan and Delenn take a step forward in their relationship, Minbari-style, which involves the woman watching her partner sleep, which probably isn’t creepy. Looking ahead. Delenn speculates that “the man in between” from Sheridan’s Kosh-induced dream might be Sheridan’s own counterpart among the Shadows. Sheridan will meet that person in the very next episode, “Z’ha’dum.” Welcome aboard. The big guest is the end-of-the-episode appearance of Melissa Gilbert as Anna, taking over the role from Beth Toussaint, who played the part back in “Revelations.” Toussaint wasn’t available for this and the next episode, so they re-cast with Gilbert, who was Bruce Boxleitner’s real-life wife at the time (they divorced in 2011). In addition, Mark Hendrickson and Jonathan Chapman play the Drazi and Brakiri ambassadors, respectively, while Nicholas Ross Oleson, John Grantham, and J. Gordon Noice play the folks fighting each other in downbelow, and Shirley Prestia, Doug Cox, and an uncredited little girl play the family of tourists. Plus, recurring regular Joshua Cox is back from “War Without End, Part 1” as Corwin; he’ll be back next time in “Z’ha’dum.” Trivial matters. Sheridan and Delenn figured out that the Shadows were herding ships and refugees into Sector 83 in “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place.” Kosh sent a prophetic dream to Sheridan in “All Alone in the Night.” Franklin’s hallucination reminds him of his backstory as established in “And the Sky Full of Stars” and “GROPOS.” The very last scene is what Delenn saw in her “flash forward” in “War Without End, Part 2.” Corwin says that Ivanova is on Channel 4—this is a tip of the cap to the channel in the United Kingdom that aired B5 in that country. This is the only B5 episode directed by Kim Friedman, who directed some truly great episodes of both Deep Space Nine and Voyager. She later was nominated for an Emmy for directing an episode of L.A. Law. The echoes of all of our conversations. “I just hope you found what you were looking for out there.” “I don’t know. I guess I found what I—what I needed, not what I wanted.” “Which was?” “Short, sharp kick to the head.” “Oh well, hell, I could’ve done that for you—all you had to do was ask.” “Yeah, well, you would’ve enjoyed it too much.” —Garibaldi and Franklin bantering. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Take responsibility for your actions, for crying out loud.” There’s a serious disconnect going on here. We keep intercutting between a really tense battle between the allies and the Shadows and Franklin having his Superman III moment. J. Michael Straczynski has said that what Franklin went through was him working through a similar incident that happened to him when he was living in San Diego, which he himself didn’t even realize while he was writing it. That, at least, explains why he thought (if even subconsciously) that it was of the same importance as the big-ass battle. However, while watching it, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching two wildly different episodes being smashed together unconvincingly. It doesn’t help that the “meet yourself” moment (a) is horribly clichéd and stupid (hot tip: don’t remind your audiences of Superman III), and (b) involves Franklin, who’s annoying and uninteresting. Every time I’ve done one of these rewatches here on Reactor, I’ve found myself reexamining something that I felt from the initial viewing. (As an example, I came away from my Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch intensely disliking the character of Geordi La Forge.) For this rewatch, it’s become clear that I really don’t like Franklin at all, which is a surprise, because I have good memories of him from my first watch, though I suspect some of that is colored by my friendly acquaintance with Richard Biggs (and sadness at his too-young death in 2004). But I watched this episode and spent the time with Franklin yelling at himself like the crowd in Monty Python shouting, “GET ON WITH IT!” Plus at the end, when Sheridan offered him his job back, I kept asking why. All the evidence points to Hobbs being way better at the job than her erstwhile boss… I was far more invested in the rest of the episode. Delenn and Lennier’s attempts to get the League on their side was fascinating, because on the one hand, I understand the need for security, given that the Shadows have agents all over the damn place. (We’ve seen that they have people in Garibaldi’s security force, for one thing.) But man, it’s got to be annoying that they keep withholding important information, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the League’s governments held back ships just out of spite. I’m always happy to see Ivanova-Cole banter—the on-screen chemistry between Claudia Christian and Jason Carter is superb—plus the tension of their confrontation with the scout ship was beautifully handled by Straczynski’s script, the performances, the excellent direction by Kim Friedman, and fine work by the special effects crew. The limitations of B5’s nascent CGI effects are minimized here mostly by keeping everything moving fast, by intercutting with the human action inside the ships, and also by the fact that the ethereal Shadows are better served by the style of effects. (Until around 2010, CGI was always crap at conveying mass, but that’s not an issue in certain cases—like, say, the acrobatics of Spider-Man and Daredevil, or the insect-like Shadows.) I also like the idea of the holographic strategy center from which Sheridan can direct the battle. In the end, though, this episode is mostly setting us up for the big-ass finale next week…. Next week: “Z’ha’dum.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Shadow Dancing” appeared first on Reactor.