Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Learning Curve” An aspiring crime boss in Downbelow decides it’s time to get rid of Security Chief Allan… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 30, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “Learning Curve”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by David J. EagleSeason 5, Episode 5Production episode 506Original air date: February 18, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… On Minbar, we see Turval teaching new Ranger recruits how to meditate—with varying degrees of success—when Durhan arrives. He has been summoned to B5 to give Delenn—who is now Ranger One—an update on the training, and wishes Turval to accompany him. They also bring two students, Tannier and Rastenn. On B5 in downbelow, there’s new thug in town! Trace is trying to make a name for himself as the new crime boss, and is showing his bonafides by killing someone who owes him money. Delenn happily greets the arriving Rangers. Turval was a teacher of hers, and Durhan is one of the most respected members of the Warrior Caste. She offers the four of them a tour of the station. Garibaldi invites both Lochley and Allan to join him for lunch. The conversation starts out pleasantly enough, talking about their Starfury shortage, but modulates into an argument between Garibaldi and Lochley (with a beleaguered Allan trying and failing to change the subject) about Lochley’s alliances during the recent civil war. Lochley storms off in a huff, encountering Sheridan in a lift. Sheridan offers to talk to Garibaldi for her, but she says she can handle it. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Allan investigates the latest murder in downbelow. Trace—who is responsible for all three murders that Allan is now investigating—decides that his next target should be Allan. His people caution against that. Lurkers killing lurkers is one thing, but you start going after the higher-ups and they’ll come down on Trace like a ton of bricks. But Trace insists that this is the way to get security in their pocket, which shows a hilarious misreading of this station’s personnel. Delenn, Turval, and Durhan discuss the Ranger training, including the difficulties in training a pak’ma’ra to be a Ranger. Delenn makes some clever suggestions on how to use the pak’ma’ra. Turval also talks with Delenn about Cole and Lennier. The former was his finest student, but he also joined the Rangers for the wrong reasons, which is probably why did the dumb thing he did to get himself dead. The latter is training a little too hard, as if he has something to prove. In Allan’s office, Garibaldi briefs two of Byron’s rogue telepaths on their new jobs as intelligence gatherers. After they leave, Garibaldi tries and fails to convince Allan to let him look at Lochley’s personnel file. Allan is then summoned to meet with an informant. Said informant is actually working for Trace, luring Allan into a trap. The informant is angry when she realizes that Trace plans to kill Allan—she though they were just going to rough him up a bit. Trace then orders her killed, because that’s apparently his only move… Unluckily for him, Tannier and Rastenn hear her screaming and run to help. That is to say, Tannier runs to help. Rastenn thinks it’s none of their business and they don’t know enough to intervene. Tannier saves the informant, but gets his ass kicked. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Delenn specifically requests of Lochley that the Rangers handle this rather than station security, citing the Rangers’ independence and the IA constitution and Sheridan’s agreement. Lochley isn’t thrilled, but acquiesces. Tannier, injuries and all, must confront his terror and get justice by confronting Trace. On Lochley’s orders, Allan clears all security from the sector Trace is in. The criminal thinks this means his actions are having the right effect, and oh boy, is he wrong. Durhan, Turval, and Rastenn dispose of Trace’s henchthugs, while Tannier confronts Trace directly. Durhan promises Trace that, if he defeats Trace, the rest of them will let him go. Trace isn’t thrilled at any of this, and his attempts to fight back are poor at best. He’s not much of a fighter, he prefers to have other people do his dirty work. Even wounded, Tannier doesn’t have too much trouble taking him down. Allan then comes in and arrests Trace. The Rangers head off, with Delenn wishing them well and asking Turval to keep an eye on Lennier for her. Get the hell out of our galaxy! After a comment from Lochley that indicates that she knows Sheridan better than she’s let on, Delenn confronts Sheridan, who admits to knowing Lochley previously, though the specifics are given off-camera. Never work with your ex. Lochley refuses to give Garibaldi a straight answer regarding what side she was on during the civil war, though she makes it clear that she was not okay with Sheridan’s actions. The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is frustrated by his lack of knowledge of which side Lochley was on. Lochley also surprisingly doesn’t bring up the fact that a major victory for Clark’s side was Sheridan’s capture, which Garibaldi orchestrated (under Bester’s control, but I doubt that part was public knowledge). If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Turval was yet another one of Delenn’s mentors, the third we’ve met, after Draal and Dukhat. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Two of Bryon’s telepaths start working for Garibaldi as intelligence operatives. They don’t say anything during Garibaldi’s briefing for them, which prompts a snotty comment from Garibaldi, and which prompts amusement from your humble rewatcher that the show’s budget had been sufficiently cut by TNT that they had to make all the non-Byron rogue telepaths extras who have no lines and get paid much less. We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers have gone from only being humans or Minbari to accepting any member of the IA. Accepting a pak’ma’ra has proven challenging. Also a badly wounded Ranger fresh out of the hospital can still totally kick your ass. Looking ahead. We are teased with the specifics of the past that Sheridan and Lochley have, which won’t be revealed to the viewer until the next episode. No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. After Sheridan tells Delenn the truth about his past with Lochley, Delenn sleeps with her back to him. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Welcome aboard. Turhan Bey, last seen as the Centauri emperor in “The Coming of Shadows,” plays Turval. The other Minbari are played by Nathan Anderson (Rastenn), Brendan Ford (Tannier), and Brian McDermott (Durhan). The character of Tannier will return in the movie Legend of the Rangers, played by Todd Sandomirsky. Dawn Comer gives Allan somebody to talk to as an unnamed security guard, while Trevor Goddard plays Trace and the delightfully named Mongo Brownlee plays Trace’s second. (Amazingly, IMDB only lists about thirty roles for him, none since 2008, which is surprising—how can you resist casting someone named Mongo Brownlee???? A name like that, you make a role for him, dagnabbit.) Trivial matters. This was Turhan Bey’s final role. He retired from acting after this, and died in 2012 at the age of 90. Delenn was officially made Ranger One (following Sinclair’s travelling back in time to become Valen in “War Without End, Part 2”) in “Grey 17 is Missing.” Lennier left Delenn’s service to train as a Ranger in “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari.” Cole sacrificed himself to save Ivanova in “Endgame.” Durhan was mentioned as being the one who trained Neroon in using the pike in “Grey 17 is Missing,” and the character also appeared in the novel To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Kathryn M. Drennan. N’Grath, who was established in season one as running most of the criminal activity in downbelow, is apparently no longer around, though what happened to him is not specified (beyond “hoo boy, did the CGI not work on that one…”). The echoes of all of our conversations. “Did it ever occur to you that just because somebody doesn’t agree with you, that doesn’t mean they’re the enemy?” “No.” —Allan asking a simple question, and Garibaldi saying, “Bazinga!” Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “At the end, Captain, we all stand alone.” One thing that has proven to be B5 Kryptonite is whenever they show us bad guys in downbelow, because it almost never works. In this particular instance, the entire plotline is done in by an exacta of bad casting and weak writing. Trevor Goddard is first-season-level bad as Trace. He’s about as menacing as a guy cosplaying badly as an “evil” knight at a Renaissance Festival. It doesn’t help that he’s written so poorly. In stories like this, J. Michael Straczynski tends to default to tired crime-drama clichés that have no bearing on reality whatsoever. For starters, if someone owes you money, killing them is a poor way to punish them, as that guarantees that you’ll never collect the debt, which is a shitty way to do business. And the notion that you’ve made an example of them is hilariously pointless, as decades and decades of evidence has proven that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent to crime. Trace kills three people in this episode, and plans to kill two more, and that doesn’t make him a successful crime boss, it makes him a serial killer. (Well, serial orderer, since he doesn’t actually commit the killings himself, but still.) We even have his lieutenant telling him that this is a bad strategy (said lieutenant played by the superlatively named Mongo Brownlee—seriously, best name ever), to no avail. Sadly, it takes the wind out of the sails of that entire plotline. By the time Tannier confronts Trace, we’ve been given no reason to take Trace in the least bit seriously as a threat thanks to Goddard’s awful acting and Straczynski’s weak writing. But hey, at least we got Mongo Brownlee… The Minbari/Rangers stuff is fine, though it feels like we’ve been down some of these roads before, particularly with Delenn meeting up with an old teacher. And I would rather have seen Lennier’s overdoing it in training rather than be told about it second-hand. Still, the banter among Durhan, Turval, and the trainees in the teaser is delightful, and nobody ever went wrong casting Turhan Bey. Finally, the Lochley/Garibaldi pas-de-deux continues to fall flat, mainly due to Tracy Scoggins’ stiffness, which stifles her ability to convey emotion. Her rant at Garibaldi over lunch has neither passion nor intensity, at least one of which is required to make the dialogue land. Instead, it’s just dull shouting. (Also, Garibaldi still shouldn’t have his job, but that’s rapidly becoming a dead horse of mine…) Mongo Brownlee! Next week: “Strange Relations.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Learning Curve” appeared first on Reactor.