Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “No Compromises” Captain Elizabeth Lochley takes command of Babylon 5 ahead of Sheridan’s inauguration… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 2, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “No Compromises”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Janet GreekSeason 5, Episode 1Production episode 502Original air date: January 21, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… The EAS Acheron arrives with the new CO of B5: Captain Elizabeth Lochley. Corwin greets her and apologizes but the rest of the senior staff is busy handling crises. Lochley thinks that’s the sign of a badly run station. A former EarthForce soldier, John Clemens, has kidnapped a Ranger and tied him to a chair. Clemens kills the Ranger and sends him off with a sign attached to his corpse that reads, “Special delivery for Babylon 5.” Sheridan and Delenn get ready for the day, with Delenn having to go off to a meeting with the Gaim ambassador. They’re still keeping separate quarters, and alternating where they sleep together, as they both sometimes need to have meetings in their own quarters. Lochley and Sheridan meet in the former’s office (which used to be the latter’s office). Sheridan explains that he specifically wanted an EarthForce officer in charge of the station by way of moving past the recent unpleasantness—despite the fact that the ISA is negotiating to buy B5 from Earth and most of B5’s personnel are still wearing the Army of Light uniforms. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Sheridan makes it clear that matters military and directly related to station management are her bailiwick, while he is responsible for anything political. Lochley also says Sheridan never asked her which side she was on during the civil war. He agrees that he never asked her and ends the meeting. A maintenance drone finds a capsule that contains the corpse of the Ranger. Corwin reports it to Lochley, who says that the Ranger died of a PPG wound, not exposure to space. Lochley orders the body sent to medlab for an autopsy. Garibaldi is driving Allan crazy with regard to security for Sheridan’s official inauguration as president of the ISA. Allan assures him that it’ll all be okay. Unbeknownst to them, Clemens is watching them make plans. While eating dinner, Lochley is telepathically approached by Byron, who asks for a meeting in Brown 3 and to come alone. Then she’s summoned to medlab, where Franklin reports that the shot was either phenomenally lucky or done by an expert. Sheridan meets with G’Kar and asks that he write the oath of office for his inauguration and also to write a declaration of principles for the ISA. G’Kar is honored and promises to work night and day on it. Sheridan looks like he thinks he’s created a monster… Lochley meets with Byron along with a bunch of other telepaths, but did not come alone, because she’s not an idiot. The security personnel who accompanied her determine that the telepaths have no weapons. Byron and his people don’t wish to join Psi Corps, they just want to be left alone, and wish to form a colony on B5. Lochley will consider it, and meantime allows them access to medlab, as some of them are ill, notably a young man named Simon, who doesn’t speak. When Franklin examines him, Simon shares a mental image of him with a woman. Byron says that nobody knows who that woman is or why that image is so important to Simon. The telepaths also all disappear from medlab when Franklin is distracted at one point. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Delenn finishes her meeting with the Gaim ambassador. Clemens follows the latter back to his quarters and kills him, taking his protective suit. Sheridan returns to his quarters to find both a text message and an audio message threatening his life. He immediately meets with Delenn, Mollari, G’Kar, Lochley, and Garibaldi. Garibaldi and the three ambassadors want him to postpone the inauguration, but Sheridan refuses to give in to fear and wants to go ahead with the inauguration as scheduled; Lochley agrees with him. Garibaldi approaches Lochley afterward, castigating her for taking Sheridan’s side, as the president sometimes needs to be saved from his own worst instincts. Lochley’s response is to ask what the hell Garibaldi—a civilian—was even doing in that meeting. It would be one thing if he reenlisted, but he didn’t. So Lochley doesn’t feel any great urge to pay attention to anything he says. Simon is crawling around the station ductwork and sees Clemens putting on the Gaim suit. Simon telepathically sees Clemens’ plan to assassinate Sheridan. He also makes a noise that Clemens hears, so the latter shoots his PPG into the ceiling, badly wounding Simon. Sheridan arrives at the inauguration. G’Kar has created the oath of office, and also has put together a book that has bits from every religion that is represented in the ISA. Garibaldi has managed to figure out who sent the death threat, though he only has an EarthForce personnel record, not a physical description. Simon stumbles into the inauguration, bleeding, and dies, but is able to out Clemens before he can kill Sheridan. However, Clemens gets away and is able to steal a Starfury. He threatens to blow Sheridan away, as he is holding the inauguration in a room on the outer edge of B5 with a window for some reason. However, Garibaldi takes a Starfury of his own out and grapples Clemens away from the window, at which point station defenses are able to blow it up. Not wanting to give anything else a chance to go wrong, G’Kar asks if Sheridan wants to be president. He says yes. G’Kar has him put his hand on the book and say, “I do.” Sheridan does so, and G’Kar says it’s done, and that’s that. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Byron meets with Sheridan. Lochley apparently denied their request to build a colony on B5, but Sheridan decides that that’s a political decision, and he therefore grants them permission. Garibaldi informs Lochley that he’s been appointed head of the ISA’s covert intelligence division, so now he has good reason to be in on meetings. Lochley looks less than thrilled. Garibaldi also says that Clemens—who did some pretty icky things on orders from the Clark Administration, and was wanted for war crimes—served with Lochley in the past. Lochley allows as how he did, yes. Unlike Sheridan, Garibaldi does ask which side Lochley was on. She just says, “Earth. Weren’t we all?” Get the hell out of our galaxy! When he was a young officer, Sheridan had a sergeant who always washed his socks every day separately from the rest of his laundry. It was so he had something to look forward to every day and a reason to live: he had socks to wash. Never work with your ex. Lochley is not impressed with the chaos on B5, and assumes that means it’s run badly. She’ll probably be relieved of that notion before too long… The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is made director of covert intelligence, because there’s really not much place in the opening credits for a PI or the head of a large corporation on Mars. Also, it never occurs to him, in all his fulminating about how important it is to have good security for Sheridan’s inauguration, to maybe not have it on the outer hull of the station in front of a window. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn insists that she and Sheridan maintain separate quarters for political reasons. It’ll be easier once the ISA capital is set up on Minbar. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari is against the idea of an inauguration being so big and bombastic, as it just invites trouble. Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. G’Kar’s been writing a book that is already creating a bit of a sensation among Narns. He also reveals that Narns choose their own name upon reaching adulthood. We live for the one, we die for the one. Clemens targets a Ranger to use as a means of messing with Sheridan’s head because part of the Rangers’ remit is to pass on information, and he has information he wants Sheridan to have, to wit, that he’s coming for him. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron and his people are powerful telepaths who don’t want to do any of the things we’ve seen human telepaths do: neither join Psi Corps nor fight Psi Corps. They just want to be left alone. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Welcome aboard. Robin Atkin Downes, having previously played the Minbari named Morann in both “Atonement” and In the Beginning, kicks off the recurring role of Byron, which will continue for seven more episodes; he’ll be back in “The Paragon of Animals.” Christna Gavin makes the first of two appearances as Sarah, returning in “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Recurring regular Joshua Cox is back from “No Surrender, No Retreat” as Corwin; he’ll return in “A View from the Gallery.” Anthony Crivello plays Clemens and Timothy Eyster plays Simon. Trivial matters. TNT—one of the cable stations owned by the Time Warner conglomerate that also owns Warner Bros.—agreed to pick up B5, agreeing to not only air the planned fifth season, but also the spinoff series Crusade and four B5 movies. The first of those movies, the prequel In the Beginning, debuted on the 4th of January 1998, a couple of weeks before this episode. The first thirteen episodes of season five aired straight through from late January to mid-April, then three more episodes aired in June. The second movie, Thirdspace, which took place during season three, aired in July, with the final five episodes airing in late October and November. The third movie, River of Souls, which was contemporary with season five, aired the same week as the series finale, “Sleeping in Light.” The final TNT movie was A Call to Arms, which aired in January 1999 and served as a pilot movie of sorts for Crusade, which debuted in August 1999. (This rewatch will look at all four of TNT’s movies between the end of the fifth season and the start of Crusade.) As with every other new season, there was a new opening credits sequence. This time the voiceover is a kind of “best of” of scenes and lines of dialogue from the first four seasons of the show, meant to bring new viewers up to speed. Claudia Christian and Jason Carter are no longer in the credits, with Tracy Scoggins as Lochley added to the “Also starring” secondary stars. This is the first time we’ve seen a Gaim without a helmet on. The echoes of all of our conversations. “On my world, we have learned that an inauguration is simply a signal to assassins that a new target has been set up on the firing range.” —Mollari being remarkably prescient with regards to Sheridan’s inauguration. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Let’s eat.” My memories of B5 from three decades on is that the show was on a bell-jar-style curve: low on the ends, high in the middle. The first and final seasons were both poor, but the middle seasons were excellent. I’ve already had to revise my opinion of season four, as I wrote last week, and I went into “No Compromises” wondering if I might do the same for season five. Sadly, this is not an auspicious start, and it’s primarily on the back of two disastrous bits of casting. The first is in the opening credits, and that was one that filled me with dread in 1997 when it was announced: Tracy Scoggins as the replacement for Ivanova. I knew Scoggins mainly from her being terrible in the first season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman as Cat Grant and from her being even more terrible as Cassandra in three episodes of Highlander: The Series, plus she was replacing my favorite character on the show. While the character of Lochley is well written—J. Michael Straczynski was smart to make her nothing like Ivanova—Scoggins is mostly just incredibly wooden in the role here. Jerry Doyle isn’t exactly what you’d call a master thespian, but he acts her totally off the screen in their two scenes together. Just in general, she comes across as ineffective and ineffectual. Bad as she is, she’s Meryl Streep compared to the dreadful don’t-hate-me-because-I’m-beautiful performance of Robin Atkin Downes. He looks like he should be posing for a romance novel cover, which is not the appropriate look for a telepath living on the raggedy edge. B5 has generally sucked at showing people who look like they’re living difficult lives. Probably the most egregious example prior to this was Alison Beldon in “Legacies,” not to mention the general portrayal of the folks in downbelow being way way too kempt. On top of that, Downes’ Byron comes across as vapid and dull, making it very hard to give a damn about the character. Which is a problem, given his importance to the first half of the season. It’s telling that a child actor, Timothy Eyster, gives a more charismatic performance while not talking as Simon than Downes can manage. As ever, Andreas Katsulas is able to help rescue the episode from total awfulness. His reluctance modulating into enthusiasm, then modulating further into obsessive perfectionism when Sheridan asks him to write the oath of office and declaration of principles is an absolute delight. So is his fuck-it moment at the end when he swears Sheridan into office in about six-and-a-half seconds. Still, this is overall an inauspicious start to the final season. Next week: “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “No Compromises” appeared first on Reactor.