"And the Sky Full of Stars" is the eighth episode of the first season of the science fiction television series, Babylon 5. It first aired on 16 March 1994.
Title
The episode title is derived from a line from Babylon 5s pilot episode: "…and the sky was full of stars, and every star was an exploding ship — one of ours."
Plot
Two men meet aboard Babylon 5, and prepare a device. They gain the help of Benson, a security officer, who provides them with a power cell in exchange for paying off illegal gambling debts he owes. That night the two men abduct Commander Sinclair and use the device on him. Sinclair finds that he is trapped within a virtual reality illusionary environment, in which one of his captors demands to know what happened to him at the Battle of the Line, the final battle in the Earth-Minbari war ten years earlier. Sinclair was leader of a squadron of fighters which was ambushed by Minbari vessels. While the rest of his squadron was wiped out, Sinclair managed to survive, though having lost a day's worth of memories. His captors want to know what he saw, in order to discover why the Minbari suddenly surrendered after Sinclair's disappearance.
Meanwhile, security chief Michael Garibaldi discovers that Sinclair is missing, and orders security teams to search the station. When he learns Benson is on one team, and that his gambling debts have been paid off, Garibaldi suspects Benson knows about Sinclair's disappearance. Benson returns to Sinclair's captors and begs for help, but they kill him and throw his body out through an airlock. The body is later found by the station staff, allowing them to narrow down the likely area where Sinclair is kept.
Meanwhile, Sinclair struggles to fight off his captors' influence on him, but they eventually break through to his subconsciousness. Sinclair relives his experiences of the Battle of the Line. After his fighter was damaged, Sinclair was taken aboard a Minbari vessel and was taken to the Grey Council, the ruling body of Minbar. Sinclair demanded to know who they were, and pulled the hood off one of them, to reveal Delenn. The Grey Council knocked Sinclair out, scanned him, and returned him to his ship so as to be found by human forces. The trauma of reliving the event for Sinclair enables him to escape his bonds, slamming the device into one captor, shocking him, and stunning the other one. As Sinclair runs, he is still heavily sedated and experiences hallucinations of the Grey Council instead of the regular station staff, and threatens to shoot any that cross his path. Garibaldi sets off to stop him, as does Minbari ambassador Delenn. At the Zocolo, Garibaldi tries to convince Sinclair of his hallucinatory condition, but when Delenn appears, Sinclair recognizes her. He breaks out of his trance in time to kill the pursuing captor.
Dr Franklin helps purge the sedatives from Sinclair's body. Learning that Earth's government has taken custody of the surviving captor, Sinclair tries to interview him before he is taken away, but discovers he has no memories of what happened. Sinclair goes to see Delenn, who asks if he remembered anything he saw; Sinclair feigns that he had forgotten it and leaves, only to record his memories in his personal log that night. A Minbari official approaches Delenn to see if Sinclair had remembered anything, saying that if he should ever recall his encounter with the Grey Council, he must be killed.
Production, Visual and Sound Effects
Cast and filming
Michael O'Hare, who played Commander Sinclair, regarded this as one of his favorite episodes." It delves into the missing 24 hours of Sinclair's memories from the Earth-Minbari War and his pain and frustration from that.
Actor Judson Scott played the character of Knight One. Scott is known for playing Khan's chief henchman in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and became friends with Ricardo Montalbán, who played Khan. Scott has played characters in a number of stage productions, and television science fiction and action series, including The Phoenix (1982 TV series), the 1984 series V, and the Star Trek franchise.
Sound and Visual Effects
The Babylon 5 makeup department involved in this episode, consisted of the team from makeup design company Optic Nerve. The team – Everett Burrell, Greg Funk, Mary Kay Morse, Ron Pipes and John Vulich – won the 1994 Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Makeup for a Series for "The Parliament of Dreams", a previous episode of the season. The initial design for the Minbari characters was created by production designer Steve Burg, with the Optic Nerve team finalising the design.
For its visual effects scenes, Babylon 5 pioneered the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) scenes – instead of using more expensive physical models – in a television series. This also enabled motion effects which are difficult to create using models, such as the rotation of fighter craft along multiple axes, or the rotation and banking of a virtual camera. The visual effects were created by Foundation Imaging using 24 Commodore Amiga 2000 computers with LightWave 3D software and Video Toaster cards, 16 of which were dedicated to rending each individual frame of CGI, with each frame taking on average 45 minutes to render. In-house resource management software managed the workload of the Amiga computers to ensure that no machine was left idle during the image rendering process.
The flashback sequence from the Battle of the Line contained a large number of CGI sequences, with 25 scenes in the space of one and a half minutes. For comparison, the entire 90-minute pilot episode only had around 55 CGI sequences. The Starfury fighters, also designed by Steve Burg, were a function-driven design for a plausible zero-gravity fighter. The positioning of the four engine pods at the extremities of the craft was inspired by Ron Cobb's design for the Gunstar fighter from The Last Starfighter. The basic shape of the Starfury's wings was inspired by an earlier unused design by Burg for a military robot fighting machine, which he had originally designed for Terminator 2. This was merged with the multi-engined configuration to form the Starfury design.
Despite having a similar wing configuration to the Star Wars X-Wing fighter, this was purely coincidental. Burg recollected, "The X-Wing is a very long needle shaped craft from most angles, whereas the Starfury is a very blunt shape. The X-Wing is also very much configured like a WWII fighter. Ideal for the 'Star Wars' universe but not what we were going for on Babylon 5." Burg also points out that the Starfury's wings/struts were not aerodynamic: they were there to lever the engines away from the center of mass.
The Minbari cruisers were designed by the animators at Foundation Imaging, with Ron Thornton contributing to the design. Thornton indicated that the design was influenced by the proud and impressive appearance of the lionfish, but was also designed to be more vertical, like the sunfish.
Music for the title sequence and the episode was provided by the series' composer, Christopher Franke. Franke developed themes for each of the main characters, the station, for space in general, and for the alien races, endeavoring to carry a sense of the character of each race.
Reviews
Rowan Kaiser, writing in The A.V. Club, sees the episode as the first real demonstration of Babylon 5s heavily serialised overall storyline. Kaiser points out the dichotomy between an episode which, on its own, fails to answer the question of why the Minbari surrendered; and the episode as part of a larger story where there will be a payoff for what we see here. He writes,
Elias Rosner, writing in the entertainment magazine website Multiversity Comics, in intrigued by the questions that the episode raises. He comments, "What is Delenn up to? Why is a member of the Grey Council acting as an ambassador? And why can he never know what they did to him? The questions are raised and they're all good ones. Certainly the strongest part of the episode."
While Kaiser regards the episode as moving "entertainingly quickly",
DeCandio also praises Mira Furlan's portrayal of Delenn, "Mira Furlan has done superb work in showing Delenn’s complexity and depth—and deviousness. There is a lot more to her than meets the eye, and Furlan expertly plays it without overdoing it or losing the character’s charisma and charm."