Tuesdays with Mollari

Hello, Readers Mine, and welcome to another installment of "Tuesdays with Mollari." I've taken a couple of weeks off from working on Dreams Given Form: The Unofficial Companion to the Universe of Babylon 5 in order to keep some other plates spinning properly, but now I'm back. Work on Dreams Given Form continues to be more fun than anything else, and season 1 of Babylon 5 continues to reward a close and critical rewatch. Today I took notes on "Grail" (1.15), which features David Warner as Aldous Gajic, a human who has dedicated his life to the search for the Holy Grail.

David Warner as Aldous Gajic, complete with Big Stick.

Gajic (named by writer Christy Marx for Mira "Delenn" Furlan's husband Goran Gajic) is regarded by the Minbari as a True Seeker, leading to one of my favorite Delenn lines:

"It does not matter that his Grail may or may not exist. What matters is that he strives for the perfection of his soul and the salvation of his race, and that he has never wavered, or lost faith."

Later in the episode, Aldous himself will note that "Sometimes it's the search that counts, not the finding." This is one of several themes that JMS returns to again and again throughout Babylon 5, as pretty much every character on the show continues to search for - to paraphrase Delenn - "a reason for everything."

In fact, a lot of what we humans do comes down to the act of creating meaning - for ourselves, for our communities, for our posterity. We are creatures who crave significance and the security of there being a reason for everything. This sometimes doesn't work out for us, of course. The universe, as Babylon 5 never fails to remind us, is both more wonderful and more chaotic than most of us are really comfortable with. Yet, as "Grail" suggests, and as JMS will reiterate again and again, the true significance of our lives is the act of seeking, the attempt to create meaning in things great or small. We make houses into homes, lovers into family, strangers into communities, duty into honor. The end result isn't the point. It's all about making a house a home, all the lived experiences that go into that process. It's the journey, not the destination. In the end, we all go "beyond the rim," so all we have is the seeking.

It is also worth remembering that twenty-some years ago, it's likely that JMS was telling himself something along these lines regularly. Babylon 5 can seem kind of inevitable, a brilliant story well and completely told, but in 1994, no one knew if the show would get a second season, much less a fifth. Everyone had hopes, but that's all they were. In television production as in life, an appreciation for the value in the process itself can be the one thing that keep you sane!

In the end "Grail" is a self-contained, "monster-of-the-week" episode, with nothing much to do with the great arc of the series. Yet it fits, because the macro is in the micro. Sinclair's journey, and Sheridan's, and Delenn's. and Londo's, and G'kar's are all just beginning, and even with the final episode of the final season, they have not ended. We know all along how Londo and G'Kar will go out, but what's relevant is everything that happens before that final, deadly embrace. Ends are just punctuation. The meaning is in the sentence before.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next time around, and in the meanwhile, be sure to check out my co-author's brilliant "Third Age Thursdays" over on her blog, Unfettered Brilliance, and be sure and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or even Google+, for all of the latest B5 news that comes across our screens. Until next time -

Hold the Line!