Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Moments of Transition” Bester returns to the station with a unique proposal for Alexander… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on December 8, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Moments of Transition”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Tony DowSeason 4, Episode 14Production episode 414Original air date: May 19, 1997 It was the dawn of the third age… Garibaldi is awakened out of a sound sleep by Edgars, who is completely unapologetic, as he himself is on call at all times, and he expects the same of his employees. Edgars wants Garibaldi to get something through B5 without dealing with customs. Edgars also assures Garibaldi that it contains nothing dangerous or illegal, he just wants to keep it on the down-low to avoid issues with his competitors. Sheridan can’t sleep, and he contacts CnC to see if there’s any news from Minbar, but alas, there isn’t. Meanwhile, Delenn and Lennier are on Minbar in one of the ancient cities, which is on fire. They’re caring for the many wounded members of the Religious Caste. The Warrior Caste has announced that, if the Religious Caste doesn’t surrender by the following day, they will destroy the city and everyone in it. Neroon meets with Shakiri, the leader of the Warrior Caste. Shakiri derides the Religious Caste for their naïveté and for getting them into pointless wars like the one with Earth, where nothing was actually gained. He also waxes philosophical about how life and death are just two sides of the same coin and that death is merely the release from obligation, and not something to be derided. Which is good, since he’s threatening to basically wipe out the Religious Caste… At B5 customs, Allan notices Garibaldi talking to someone with a package, but is then distracted by the arrival of Bester. Bester insists he’s there on personal business that has nothing to do with the senior staff, and isn’t this supposed to be a free port, like the Voice of the Resistance broadcasts keep insisting? By the time Allan gets Bester sorted out, Garibaldi is still there, but the package is gone. Allan chases Garibaldi down, but the latter denies ever handling a package, and also neither confirms nor denies the rumors Allan has heard about Garibaldi working for Edgars. Alexander is struggling to find work. She has a good line on a corporate job, but when they find out she’s on the outs with Psi Corps, they say they can’t hire her—it’s a liability issue. Bester then approaches her—she’s why he’s here. He knows she’s been having trouble finding employment—some of her prospective clients have contacted Psi Corps for a reference, which they can’t provide, of course—and he has an offer for her. She can be brought back on as a deep-cover agent, not beholden to the day-to-day yuckiness of the Corps and able to still get corporate work. The only catches are as follows: she has to wear the logo and the black gloves and she has to be willing to donate her body to the Corps after her death. The Vorlons obviously made her a more powerful psi than she was, and until that happened, everyone assumed one’s psi index to be a constant. A rating changing is unheard of, and they want to study Alexander’s mind after she dies. Alexander tells Bester to go screw himself. Adding insult to injury, she can’t afford the quarters she has (the Vorlons were paying for them, but the Vorlons have buggered off and are no longer paying their bills), and Allan very reluctantly tells her that she has to move to a smaller space. He then offers her some work: to scan Garibaldi. When Alexander asks if Garibaldi will agree to the scan, and Allan says no, Alexander very loudly refuses. She’s desperate for work, but not enough to betray a friend like that. Allan apologizes, he’s just frustrated by Garibaldi’s behavior. That, however, gives Alexander an idea: to approach Garibaldi. She can help him with his PI work. Garibaldi was nearby when Alexander and Bester had their talk, so he knows what the alternative is. On the one hand, Garibaldi doesn’t like telepaths and can’t pay that much; on the other hand, it’d piss Bester right the hell off. So he agrees. Then Bester shows up, and there’s a brief altercation. Bester tries to scan Garibaldi, which Alexander picks up on. Livid, Garibaldi chases Bester down and tries to beat him up, but security stops him. Credit: Warner Bros. Television On Minbar, Delenn tells Lennier that they will surrender, and it may occur at a place and time of the Warrior Caste’s choosing. Neroon informs Shakiri of this, and that he has chosen the Temple of Varenni. It was a place where disputes were settled in the time before Valen, plus it has equipment that can broadcast the surrender to the entirety of the Minbari Federation. Shakiri approves. He also tells Neroon that Delenn will likely return to B5 after this is all over, and they should find a way for her transport there to suffer an accident. They can’t afford to let her live. After giving Lennier a scroll with instructions in case something happens to her, Delenn officially surrenders—but then she makes it clear that she’s ending the open warfare, not the conflict between the Warrior and Religious Castes. In this temple, in the time before Valen and the formation of the Grey Council, disputes were settled with the Starfire Wheel, a beam of light that grows in intensity and will eventually burn you alive if you stay in too long. In the olden days, the leaders of the castes would each enter the Starfire Wheel, and whoever left last would be the winner. Delenn steps into the Starfire Wheel. Shakiri refuses at first, not wanting to die like that. Neroon reminds him of what he said about how life and death are equivalent and how death is just a release from obligation, and Shakiri is shamed into entering. While in the wheel, Shakiri offers to share power with Delenn if she agrees to walk out with him side by side, but she refuses. Eventually, Shakiri gives up and leaves the wheel. And then the other shoe drops: this was Neroon and Delenn’s plan all along. But Delenn has changed the plan because, as Neroon tells Lennier, they agreed that Delenn would depart the wheel after Shakiri proved himself a coward. However, she doesn’t leave the wheel, and Lennier realizes that she’s sacrificing herself to show her devotion. Neroon, perhaps knowing that he’s a guest star and she’s an opening-credits regular, dives in to rescue her and allow himself to be killed by the Starfire Wheel after pledging his devotion to the Religious Caste and urging the people to listen to Delenn. On B5, Garibaldi gets another late night/early morning call from Edgars, who informs Garibaldi in no uncertain terms that he’s not to employ Alexander. Edgars wants no telepaths working for him, even indirectly. Garibaldi is forced to cut her loose, and she’s forced to accept Bester’s offer. Bester records a bit of exposition personal log expressing delight that things are proceeding apace with Garibaldi, as he’s more and more alienated from his former comrades, and as an added bonus, Alexander is back in the fold. Delenn, covered in burns, enters the Grey Council chambers on the Valen’tha. She summons the Nine, re-forming the Grey Council. But now, instead of a balance of three from each of the three castes, there are only two each from the Warrior and Religious Caste, and five from the Worker Caste. The people who do the actual work will have more of a say in the Minbari government. Delenn leaves the middle spot open in honor of Neroon and for “one who is to come.” Garibaldi leaves the station for Mars to meet up with Edgars. He tells the customs guard that he has no plans to return. Ivanova comes to Sheridan’s quarters with a head of steam: on Clark’s orders, a civilian transport carrying refugees from Proxima 3 was targeted and destroyed by the EAS Pollux. That’s the last straw for Sheridan. They have to take the fight to Clark, they can’t wait any longer. They’re going to take back Proxima, then Mars, then Earth itself. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it anymore… Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s also mad as hell, and she’s not gonna take it anymore, either. To her credit, she waits to put the murder of civilians on Voice of the Resistance until she’s calmed down. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is mad as hell at Bester specifically, and his attempt to not take it anymore is frustrated by security. He ends the episode leaving for Mars, with no intention of coming back. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Neroon’s sudden-but-inevitable betrayal at the end of last week turns out to be a ruse, as he and Delenn work together to make peace on Minbar, mostly by exposing Shakiri as a piece of garbage. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Alexander is mad as hell, and is forced to take it, as she can’t afford her current quarters, and has no job prospects thanks to being on the outs with Psi Corps. Her only option is to be back on the ins with the Corps… Looking ahead. We finally find out that Bester is at least partly responsible for what happened to Garibaldi between “Z’ha’dum” and “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?” This will pay off the next time we see Bester in “The Face of the Enemy.” Also Edgars’ antipathy toward telepaths is more complicated than he lets on, as we’ll also see in “The Face of the Enemy.” Welcome aboard. Bart McCarthy plays Shakiri. He’ll be back as a Drazi general in “Movements of Fire and Shadow.” Christy Noonan plays Alexander’s potential employer. We’ve got recurring regulars Walter Koenig, back from “Epiphanies” as Bester, who’ll next be seen three episodes hence in “The Face of the Enemy”; Efram Zimbalist Jr., still unseen and in voice only, and not credited, as Edgars, back from “Conflicts of Interest,” next to be actually seen and credited in “The Exercise of Vital Powers”; and John Vickery, back from “Rumors, Bargains, and Lies” in his final appearance as Neroon. Vickery will next be seen in Crusade’s “Appearances and Other Deceits” in his other role as Mr. Welles. And in the category of “stunt casting that has aged badly,” Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, appears as the imaginatively named Mr. Adams, who wants to hire Garibaldi to find his dog and his cat, who are trying to take over the world, a not-even-a-little-bit-veiled reference to the strip characters of Dogbert and Catbert. It was only a little bit amusing in 1997, and is mostly just awful now, given what a toilet turd Adams has become in recent times. Trivial matters. We never will find out who “the one who is to come” is that Delenn refers to. Speculation is that it’s her and Sheridan’s son David, or Sheridan himself, or someone else entirely. It’s possible Delenn was just speaking generally, but nobody ever speaks generally on a show written by J. Michael Straczynski, so that’s likely a plot point that just never had the chance to be explored. Allan helped Alexander decorate her quarters over pizza in “Epiphanies.” They have clearly become friends. Also, Allan refers to Garibaldi as “Michael” rather than “Chief,” signalling that he no longer believes Garibaldi is coming back to work. The final scene between Sheridan and Ivanova sets up the next episode—and, truly, the rest of the season, as the fight between B5 and the Clark Administration will dominate the balance of season four. The echoes of all of our conversations. “I mean, being a freedom fighter, a force for good—it’s a wonderful thing. You get to make your own hours, looks good on a resumé. But the pay sucks.” —Bester speaking a bitter truth to Alexander Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Is it wrong to value life?” One of my biggest complaints with B5, both when it first aired and on this rewatch, is the inability of the show to let us see the characters of Presidents Santiago and Clark. We were told to feel things about Santiago’s assassination in “Chrysalis,” and we’ve been told to have animus toward Clark ever since then, but we have no sense of either one of them as a person. I mention this only because J. Michael Straczynski understood this with the non-human characters. In just one episode, he was able to make us understand and care about Emperor Turhan. The Centauri monarch’s death in B5’s medlab had meaning quantum leaps ahead of that of a president we’d never even heard speak a line of dialogue dying in a CGI explosion. And this time around, he does it again with Shakiri. The head of the Warrior Caste is someone we didn’t even have a name for until the end of last week’s episode, but in just a couple of scenes—his grand philosophical conversation with Neroon on the subject of life and death and his acceptance of Delenn’s surrender—he shows himself to be a bloviating jackass with no sense of history and tradition and no consideration for lives lost. Then he proves himself a hypocrite when he refuses to enter the Starfire Wheel, and then tries to super-villain his way out of it by offering to share power with Delenn—the same person he expressed his intention to secretly assassinate earlier in the episode. Delenn, of course, doesn’t accept it, because she, unlike Shakiri, has convictions. So does Neroon, which is why he’s willing to sacrifice himself and save her, though that action smacks of “we can’t let the opening-credits regular die, we gotta kill the guest star.” Also, it’s not a great look on Delenn that she’s willing to sacrifice herself without even letting her fiancé know what she’s planning. Delenn knows exactly how this feels, having been on the other end of it in “Z’ha’dum,” so you’d think she’d at least drop Sheridan a line and say goodbye, y’know? The B5 portion of the plot works very nicely. It’s never bad to have Walter Koenig evil-ing it up as Bester, and what’s fun about this is that Bester comes out 100% victorious here. It’s hard for a bad guy to be effective if he always fails, so this is a good way to keep Bester in the worthy-foe category, and also provide pathos for both Garibaldi and Alexander. One of my favorite lines in a movie is from The Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya says to Westley, “I work for Vizzini to pay the bills. There’s not a lot of money in revenge.” I’m always impressed when a work of dramatic fiction remembers that people need to feed, clothe, and house themselves. Alexander isn’t part of B5’s working staff like Sheridan, Ivanova, Franklin, and Allan (who get paid by docking and repair fees), and she’s not part of an organization like Cole (it’s not stated explicitly, but the Rangers must have the means to support its members). She’s a telepath who needs to be hired to work, and her main client meandered out beyond the rim several episodes ago. And her one hope is dashed by Edgars’ unwillingness to have a telepath on the payroll in any way (for reasons that will become clear in a few episodes). Patricia Tallman plays it beautifully, too, her sad expression as she looks at herself in the mirror putting the black gloves on is just heartbreaking. The contract exchange between Bester and Alexander is the only low point, as the whole “I want your body” bit is just puerile nonsense, and Bester explaining why a telepath saying, “Are you out of your mind?” is funny is just awkward and awful. A pity, as the rest of the scenes between the two are gold. Next week: “No Surrender, No Retreat”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Moments of Transition” appeared first on Reactor.