Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” Two maintenance workers take center stage as aliens attacks the station. By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 23, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “A View from the Gallery”Written by Harlan Ellison & J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Janet GreekSeason 5, Episode 4Production episode 505Original air date: February 11, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… In hyperspace, an alien ship destroys a probe. Corwin reports to Lochley that the probe was destroyed by the alien fleet that the Gaim warned them about. Lochley puts the station on alert and tells Corwin to set aside a lifepod for Sheridan and Delenn to escape in if necessary. Corwin points out that they won’t go, and Lochley says to leave that to her. Two of the maintenance crew, Mack and Bo, mutter about how they always have to clean up the messes made by the command staff. Lochley and Sheridan pass by Mack and Bo as the latter are working. As Lochley tries to convince Sheridan to use the lifepod if it becomes necessary, Mack and Bo comment on how much they appreciate that Sheridan gets his metaphorical hands dirty, always right there in the action with everyone else. Mack and Bo take their lunch break. Bo has salami, which impresses Mack, as that’s hard to get. Mack is having spoo, and convinces Bo to trade half his sandwich. Bo is revolted by the spoo, while Mack is in heaven getting to eat salami. Bo is sent to medlab to fix a console. He overhears Franklin giving instructions to the medical staff on dealing with casualties. Bo makes a comment about why he bothers to set up to treat the enemy. Franklin tells the story of when his father was a POW, and was treated by an enemy doctor—he would’ve died if not for that alien physician. That was when Franklin decided he wanted to be an MD rather than follow his family’s footsteps as soldiers. Ironically, that alien doctor was killed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Mack is sent to CnC to fix the secondary targeting console—just as the aliens come through the jumpgate. Mack fixes it—there was an insect inside the console—just in time for it to be needed in the firefight. That was the first wave, and Lochley tells Corwin to be ready for the next wave, while she goes off to yell at Garibaldi. Mack and Bo are riding the lift when Garibaldi and Lochley enter, the latter yelling at the former for the incomplete intel the Gaim provided about the aliens. Bo and Mack continue their maintenance work, and they notice a boarding pod attaching itself to the station hull. The two of them wind up in the middle of a firefight in a cargo bay, but Allan is able to cover them while they get to safety. Safety turns out to be with Byron and his gaggle of telepaths. At one point, Bo mentions that he wishes he was out there in a Starfury fighting the good fight. Byron telepathically links him with a Starfury pilot so he can experience what’s happening. Mack, freaked out by the telepaths, suggests they go to one of the shelters, and leads Bo away to one of the designated shelters. They share the shelter with, among others, Mollari and G’Kar. The former laments that the universe hates him. The latter says that this feels like home to him, as he spent most of his childhood in shelters like this while the Centauri bombed his homeworld. Mollari further laments that he didn’t have a childhood, he had too many responsibilities. They depart the shelter together. Credit: Warner Bros. Television En route to deal with a fire in Red Sector, Bo and Mack come across Sheridan and Delenn. The president orders to the two of them to escort Delenn to a lifepod—he can’t ask security, as they’re all too busy repelling boarders. However, Delenn is able to convince them to let her go with a combination of empathy for their positions and threats to sabotage the pod if they put her in it. The White Stars show up and rout the aliens. Soon it’s all over and the station is safe. Mack and Bo complain that they have to clean up all the messes now, but they pass by Franklin checking the many dead bodies of Starfury pilots, at which point they realize that there are other messes here to clean up that they’re not involved with. In CnC, Mack, while making repairs to damaged consoles, tells Lochley that she’s all right in his book. Later, the pair pass Delenn and Sheridan, and Delenn impresses them by remembering their names. Get the hell out of our galaxy! When Lochley asks Sheridan if he’d do anything different if their positions were reversed, Sheridan has to admit that he wouldn’t. But he also refuses to report to the lifepod when the fighting gets rough. Never work with your ex. Lochley runs the battle as best she can while waiting for the White Stars to show up. Ivanova is God. Mack and Bo discuss the rumors flying about regarding Ivanova’s departure, which is a bit of meta commentary on the rumors flying about fandom regarding Claudia Christian’s departure from the show. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is apparently just as mediocre at being the head of covert intelligence as he was as the head of security… Credit: Warner Bros. Television If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn likens Mack and Bo to the Worker Caste of the Minbari, and not only asks their names, but later remembers their names, neither of which Bo and Mack expected. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… As a member of a prominent aristocratic family whose father died when he was very young, Mollari didn’t get much of a childhood. Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. G’Kar spent his youth in bomb shelters taking refuge from Centauri bombardment. We also learn that the Narn day is 31 hours long. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Byron is apparently a strong enough telepath to insert someone’s mind into someone else’s so they can experience what the other person is experiencing. Either that or he can put a very convincing illusion in someone’s mind… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. After Delenn remembers his and Bo’s names, Mack declares that he’s in love. When Bo reminds him that she’s married (indeed, they earlier discussed how much in love she and Sheridan are), Mack shrugs and says they can work something out. Welcome aboard. Joshua Cox—who has been upgraded to a billed-at-the-beginning-of-act-one guest star for this final season—is back from “No Compromises” as Corwin. Robin Atkin Downes is back from “The Paragon of Animals” as Byron. Both of them will be back in “Strange Relations.” Bo and Mack are played by, respectively, Lawrence LeJohn and my fellow Bronx native, the late great Raymond O’Connor. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Trivial matters. The aliens who attack are never identified and never mentioned or seen again. The White Star fleet isn’t immediately available because they were almost all deployed to the Enphili homeworld in “The Paragon of Animals.” One of the things that was promoted during the run-up to B5’s premiere in J. Michael Straczynski’s online campaign to create buzz for the show was the involvement of Harlan Ellison as a creative consultant, also with the likelihood that he would write some episodes of the show. Given that Ellison’s history includes plenty of teleplay writing (The Outer Limits, the 1980s iteration of The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Starlost, the original Star Trek), this wasn’t a real surprise. However, in the end, he only contributed to two episodes, of which this was the first, and in both cases it was only sharing story credit with Straczynski. According to Straczynski, the original concept was Ellison’s. (Ellison’s second story credit will be “Objects in Motion” toward the end of the final season.) Mack’s description of the White Stars as looking like plucked chickens was apparently Straczynski’s initial reaction when he saw the designs of the ship. Byron, for the second time in two episodes, quotes Hamlet, this time the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. Given that Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet spinoff play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was one of the inspirations for this episode, quoting that play is particularly apropos. The crawler Mack picked out of the console was a Madagascar hissing cockroach with fake wings and a crest. That Bo is, like Straczynski, tall, bearded, and speaks softly but intently and Mack is, like Ellison, short and more outspoken and glib, is probably a coincidence. The echoes of all of our conversations. “We spent our days in shelters we made ourselves. We sang songs, we prayed, we ate, we slept. I spent my life in one such shelter or another. I will tell you the truth, Mollari: this is probably the closest thing I have to a home.” “Yes, well, don’t start singing. You’ll frighten the children.” —G’Kar and Mollari bantering. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “It tastes like chicken.” This is a really promising first draft of what should’ve been a great episode. Which is frustrating to me, because this is the kind of story I generally adore, from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Data’s Day” and “Lower Decks.” J. Michael Straczynski has said that he wrote this script in a single eleven-hour period, and sadly, it shows. It’s possible to write well under pressure, of course, but it’s also very easy to not write well under that same pressure. Some of the dialogue here sparkles. The Mollari-G’Kar scene in the bunker is classic, as exchanges with those characters almost always are, but it’s Mack’s coda that really nails it: “So how long you figure they been married?” Bo’s line about how he understands Sheridan after seeing Delenn smile—“I’d claw my way out of hell and straight through ten miles of solid rock to see that smile again”—is a letter-perfect description of Mira Furlan’s radiant smile. And Franklin’s explanation of why he became a physician is one of Richard Biggs’ best bits in the show’s entire history. Others, though, fall completely flat, from the “grow bigger shoulders” rhapsody in clichés to the awkward colloquy on how the station is bigger than all of them at the very end, which just feels a little too self-congratulatory on the part of the scriptwriter. Sheridan’s convincing of Delenn to go in the lifepod also just rings wrong on every level, and Lochley and Garibaldi’s argument about intelligence providing just feels constructed and fake. Some manage both—for example, Mack and Bo’s discussion of Sheridan gets a little too precious, but it ends magnificently. “I heard he was dead once.” “Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.” The episode is still mostly watchable, mainly due to the usual suspects of Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik, as well as guests Lawrence LeJohn and Raymond O’Connor, who make Bo and Mack feel real. That “mostly” caveat is due to, once again, Robin Atkin Downes and Tracy Scoggins, who are completely ineffective as Byron and Lochley. This was Lochley’s first real spotlight as the new captain, and she managed to make it perfunctory and somnolent. The one exception, interestingly enough, was at the very end when she gives Mack a bright smile in response to his saying she’s all right in his book. It’s the first time Lochley feels like a person rather than an automaton. Next week: “Learning Curve.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “A View from the Gallery” appeared first on Reactor.