Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Paragon of Animals” A small world plagued by raiders begs the alliance for help. By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 16, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “The Paragon of Animals”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Michael VejarSeason 5, Episode 3Production episode 504Original air date: February 4, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… A meeting of the Interstellar Alliance representatives is not going well, as nobody beyond the big four—Earth, Minbar, Centauri Prime, Narn—wants to sign the Declaration of Principles. As the author of the declaration, G’Kar is taking that particularly personally. But the Drazi, Markab, Gaim, et al are mostly just interested in the sharing-technology part of the alliance and aren’t interested in having morality legislated to them. Garibaldi and Sheridan discuss the meeting after it’s over, with Garibaldi saying that the IA needs to show strength first—morality will take care of itself. Raiders attack the Enphil homeworld. The Enphil ask a Ranger for assistance from the IA. Sheridan, Delenn, G’Kar, Mollari, and Garibaldi meet to discuss how to get the other worlds to sign the declaration. G’Kar is madly rewriting it, thinking his revisions will make it more palatable. Mollari, meanwhile, is losing his will to live and volunteers to sacrifice his corpse to the Pak’ma’ra. (G’Kar seconds the motion.) Garibaldi talks about how they should use telepaths to gather covert intelligence. Sheridan’s objection that that’s against Psi Corps rules is met with derision by Garibaldi: they’re not Earth, they’re the IA, and they aren’t subject to Psi Corps’ rules. And the Minbari, the Centauri, and every other race that has telepaths uses them for various military functions. Garibaldi wants permission to ask Byron’s gaggle if they’d be interested, since they said they’d work for their place on the station. Sheridan reluctantly agrees. However, Byron says no before Garibaldi can even ask. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Ranger who went to the Enphil homeworld stumbles through the jumpgate to B5 in a badly damaged White Star. He’s brought to medlab in a coma. Delenn says they need a telepath, so Alexander is hired to scan him. She gets the information about the Enphil and then the Ranger dies while she’s in telepathic communication with him. Alexander is rather devastated by this, and isn’t all that receptive to Garibaldi’s subsequent request for a favor. But eventually—after telling Garibaldi just how awful the experience of feeling someone die is—she agrees to try to convince Byron to accede to Garibaldi’s request. Delenn and Sheridan discuss the situation. The Enphil have asked for their help. This is exactly the kind of situation the IA was meant to be involved in. Sheridan regrets that they have to show the flag, as it were, before they even have their feet under them, but it needs doing. Since the raiders trashed one White Star, they need to send several, and Delenn suggests sending all the ones they can spare. The Enphil are on the edge of Drazi space, though the Drazi haven’t shown any interest in their world. Nonetheless, Sheridan lets the Drazi ambassador know what they’re doing, and the ambassador agrees to have a Drazi fleet rendezvous with the White Stars. After the meeting breaks up, the ambassador moves determinedly down a corridor, passing by Byron. In the middle of the night, G’Kar finally revises the declaration to his satisfaction—or, at least, to enough of his satisfaction that he’s willing to show it to others. He leaves a copy outside Sheridan’s quarters, and the president reads it aloud to Delenn. As he reads it, we see the White Star fleet heading to rescue the Enphil, the Enphil waiting for their asked-for assistance, and Franklin writing a condolence letter to the family of the Ranger. Alexander approaches Byron, who castigates her for constantly taking orders from other people. (Why Alexander doesn’t reply that she takes orders from people who specifically pay her to do the things they’re ordering her to do is left as an exercise for the viewer.) Byron is willing to loan out a couple of trained telepaths to Garibaldi if it’s what Alexander wants. So when she asks for it, he says yes. He also provides the very first bit of intel: the Drazi ambassador went from his meeting with Sheridan to contact his people and set up an ambush. Turns out that the Drazi have been supplying the raiders, and a Drazi fleet will ambush the White Stars and wipe out the Enphil homeworld. Credit: Warner Bros. Television When Alexander passes this on, Sheridan orders the White Stars to go ahead to the Enphil homeworld instead of rendezvousing with the Drazi fleet as originally planned. Sheridan thanks Alexander, saying she saved a lot of lives today. The White Star fleet shows up at Enphil to drive off the raiders and prepare for the invasion that’s coming. Sheridan shows this to a meeting of the ambassadors, and the Drazi ambassador is suddenly very nervous. Eventually it comes out that the Drazi are the ones coming, and can he please call them to warn them off so they don’t get massacred? Sheridan agrees, and he uses this as a way to show how important the Declaration of Princples is. Everyone signs it after that. Alexander returns to Byron and says she wants to know more about his people. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan really didn’t want to have to do a major show of force this soon in the IA’s history. He also, like Ivanova before him, hates it when Garibaldi is right. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi admits that he doesn’t like telepaths much, but he also thinks it’s ridiculous that they don’t use them. After Byron turns him down, he begs Alexander to plead on his behalf, promising that it’s the last favor he’ll ever ask—until the next time. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is the one who recommends sending as much of the White Star fleet as can be spared to rescue the Enphil. If you’re gonna do a show of force, do a damn show of force… In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari has hilariously little patience with the minutiae of being one of the leaders of the IA. Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. G’Kar is constantly revising the Declearation of Principles, even still doing so after everyone has signed it. Credit: Warner Bros. Television We live for the one, we die for the one. For the second time in three episodes, a Ranger shows up just long enough to get killed. Obviously, these guys have the same life expectancy as a Starfleet security guard, and maybe Lennier should reconsider his new career choice… The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron lectures Alexander on the subject of taking orders from other people when she should do things for herself. Alexander finds this argument compelling despite the fact that taking orders from people who pay her to do jobs is pretty much how she makes her living. Looking ahead. Sheridan makes the latest in a series of incredibly unsubtle references to the forthcoming Telepath War that we never actually got to see. Welcome aboard. Robin Atkin Downes officially makes Byron recurring with his return from “No Compromises”; he’ll be back next time in “A View from the Gallery.” The Drazi ambassador is played by Kim Strauss, who has portrayed a variety of heavy-makeup roles on the show—including the Drazi ambassador back in “The Fall of Night”; he’ll be back in this role in “A Tragedy of Telepaths.” Tony Abatemarco plays the Enphil leader and Bart Johnson plays the ill-fated Ranger. Trivial matters. The title comes from the title character’s “What a piece of work is man” speech in Act II of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Byron quotes in the episode to Alexander. Byron mentions that telepaths have to run songs through their head to help keep stray thoughts of others from invading their minds. This was likely inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which was the inspiration for a lot of the use of telepathy in B5. The echoes of all of our conversations. “I was modifying Clause 12 in the Declaration of Principles. I was thinking that if I could make it more linguistically suitable to the Drazi, they might be open to signing it.” “Great Maker, I need a drink.” “Well, they don’t like to say ‘we commit’ to anything—they prefer ‘the universe, through us, agrees to’.” “Make that two drinks.” —G’Kar and Mollari discussing revisions to the Declaration of Principles Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We are one.” There are three factors that keep this from being as good an episode as it might be. The first isn’t so much the episode’s problem as an issue with Garibaldi’s current status. After what Bester did to him, Garibaldi shouldn’t be entrusted with anyone’s lunch order, yet here he is being given a major piece of responsibility in the IA, which is absolutely bugnuts. I already covered this in my rewatch of “Endgame,” and my objection now is even stronger than it was then. The second is one I mentioned in the recap above: Alexander is used to taking orders from people because that’s how she makes her living. Yes, she is beholden to other people, but that’s part of the job description. If Byron was objecting to her doing these jobs, that would be one thing, but it’s written as him criticizing an aspect of her personality, which is not what’s going on there. The third is related, and that’s the spectacular limitations of Robin Atkin Downes, whose rants at both Garibaldi and Alexander are completely ineffectual thanks to Downes’ flat line readings. Whatever passion and insight there might be in Byron’s words are completely sucked away by the lack-of-charisma force field that Downes emits. Having said that, the main story is effective, showing what the IA is capable of, and what it stands for. G’Kar’s constant revising of the declaration is, I must admit from the perspective of someone who’s spent his life crafting words for a living, absolutely hilarious. (It reminds one of the old joke that, from a writer’s perspective, works aren’t finished, but simply released into the wild.) And Sheridan’s frustration with having to flex his muscles before the IA even has its shit together is well played by Bruce Boxleitner. I also very much like Garibaldi’s argument for why they should use telepaths, as the rules that Sheridan defaults to are Psi Corps’ rules, and why the heck would you follow those? Next week: “A View from the Gallery.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Paragon of Animals” appeared first on Reactor.