The Grey Sector

Story:  Knives
Written By: Lawrence G. Ditillio
Season: 2

An old friend of Londo’s arrives on the station, and it turns out he is being disgraced back home.  Londo tries to get his reputation restored, but events are already in motion to charge this man as a traitor, because he disagrees with the events set in motion by  Londo himself.  The friend then challenges Londo to a duel, and dies in the process, in an attempt to give his family over to Londo, so they’d be spared the fate of his disgrace.  It is a decent story for Londo that makes him start to really regret some of his decisions he has made so far.  That’s a nice idea, but I also felt he was regretting the path he was on very early on, and then even more so after G’Kar bought him a drink after he’d already sent the Shadows to destroy the Narn outpost.  So it’s just more in a long line of episodes that shine a little light on Londo’s regret of dealing with the Shadows. 
The B-story is standard Star Trek fare, Sheridan gets possessed by some alien and it seems kinda scary and probably evil, but it turns out it was just trying to get home.  Very Trek kind of stuff.  For all the nonsense about B5 vs. DS9/Trek, it’s hard to deny how much influence Trek had on this show on the whole.  It is very different in some ways, but in others you can’t help but see similarities.  Not just in the superficial similarities that this series and DS9 share, but this show was just as capable of using hackneyed sci-fi plots.  Still Trek and this can easily succeed in executed said hackneyed sci-fi plots, and this is a decent execution of such a plot.  

NEXT TIME: Disease

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