Guide Page: "A Distant Star" (original) (raw)

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Contents: Overview -Backplot -Questions -Analysis -Notes -JMS

Overview

Disaster strikes an old friend of Captain Sheridan. Dr. Franklin offers nutritional advice to some reluctant patients. Russ Tamblyn as Capt. Maynard.Miguel A. Nuñez, Jr. as Orwell.

Sub-genre: Suspense P5 Rating: 7.34

Production number: 204 Original air date: November 23, 1994 DVD release date: April 29, 2003

Written by D.C. Fontana Directed by Jim Johnston

Watch For:

Captain Maynard's footwear.

Backplot

Sheridan's first commander, on Earth-Mars patrol duty, was Jack Maynard, who Sheridan admired greatly. "I thought he knew everything," Sheridan says. "He did, too."
The Earth Alliance has a small fleet of huge Explorer-class ships that travel out on the rim of known space, mapping new systems and installing new jump gates. More specialized scout ships follow later to perform detailed or specific surveys of these newly opened systems.
The Explorer ships, which are considered choice commands, can also repair jumpgates.
Navigation in hyperspace involves locking onto jumpgate signals. There seem to be no natural reference points in hyperspace, so a ship must keep its own internal navigation references or lock onto the signals of nearby gates or it will become lost. Until this episode, no ship lost in hyperspace had ever been rescued.
Minbari society is built upon a strict caste structure and obedience to superiors within that caste structure. Delenn has challanged that organization, and the Minbari are beginning to react.

Unanswered Questions

Is something living in hyperspace? (This isn't a new question; it was the subject of a front-page Universe Today story in"And the Sky Full of Stars.")
Why does Delenn feel she is more "one of us" now than she's ever been? Is it because she views humans and Minbari as joined, and she feels she's a part of both halves?
How does hyperspace work in the B5 universe?

Analysis

The appearance of his friend and mentor Jack Maynard suddenly throws Sheridan's new duties aboard Babylon 5 into contrast with his training and experience, kindling a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the job. "I've been beached," he says. This is sure to crop up again in the future. Despite his newfound energy at the end of the episode, what Captain Maynard said is still true; being a governor and a diplomat isn't what Sheridan trained or even wished for. If he's itching for action when a crisis comes up, that might cause him to look less thoroughly for peaceful solutions than someone like Sinclair might.
Delenn's transformation is something that's clearly a mystery to the general Minbari population, suggesting that it is either unprecedented or so rare as to be unheard-of. Yet she seemed to know what she was doing, as did at least some of the Grey Council. The Council is likely harboring many secrets that aren't simple matters of religion and spirituality; what other technologies do they possess that the Minbari public knows nothing about?
Jumpgates act as locator beacons in hyperspace, providing a three dimensional homing signal detectable for a thousand kilometers or so there. To be useful in the featureless and chaotic void of hyperspace it would have to provide both a relative and an absolute reference much like a VOR does for aircraft. If the beacon can respond to ship data requests, then range data and traffic information could also be transmitted to the approaching (or departing) ship. Just how this works is not explained.
Hyperspace is a featureless place, yet it has currents and eddies that corrospond to gravity in normal space. Sheridan says, "We know there is a drift in hyperspace that can pull a ship down the gravitational incline." Gravity works in hyperspace, though apparently not in quite the same way that it works in real space. Electromagnetic waves also propogate in hyperspace, but become distorted rapidly over distance in a random and variable way. Jumpgate beacons are, therefore, very short range -- more like lighthouses in hyperspace -- and communications with ships in hyperspace is possible only when the vessel is near a jumpgate.
What looks like a great deal of hand-waving over the Cortez accident can be explained upon close examination of the circumstances. The timeline of the accident seems to be:
1. Cortez enters the jumpgate.
2. Cortez exits the jumppoint in hyperspace and attempts a restart of her primary power system. The fusion reactor restart fails, and the power system spikes, producing a powerful electro-magnetic pulse (and presumably a sizable radiation pulse) which takes out some systems aboard Cortez, including main propulsion, navigation, and some computer systems. Cortez is now adrift.
3. Many hours later Cortez gets some main power back and systems running. Captain Maynard, after getting a damage report that tells him that nav won't be back up for 48 hours, puts up a distress call, which is received (barely) by B5. At this point Cortez is under power, but without reference points the best they can do is hold station against the pull of a nearby gravity well.
4. B5 receives the distress signal, and Captain Sheridan decides to make a rescue attempt. Cortez is effectively just "offshore" in hyperspace, and despite Ivonova's misgivings he feels they stand a chance of recovering her. Five fighters are launched into hyperspace by B5, and they form up on a line facing down the local gravity well at 1000km intervals.
5. The fighters set up the search pattern, with Cdr. Galus (fighter group commander) and Lt. Keffer together at the far end. This puts them about 4000km away from B5.
6. A shadow ship enters hyperspace almost on top of Galus, colliding with and destroying his fighter. It also rams Keffer's Star Fury, but only knocks out some systems (comms, nav, and propulsion). Keffer begins firing (presumably on internal references) in the direction of Galus's last position. Cortez figures it out, and at about the same time Keffer's fighter gets communications back online. Rather than risk losing a good bearing back to the jumpgate, Keffer tells Captain Maynard to take Cortez directly back to the gate, leaving him behind in his unmaneuverable Star Fury. He is unable to keep station and will drift, eventually losing any reference back to B5.
7. About 24 hours later (more or less -- it seems like the next night, end of shift in C&C, about midnight) Keffer is running out of oxygen--but his Star Fury has succeeded in getting his thruster systems back online. Shortly after that he spots another shadow ship, and using that as a reference point he navigates back to the jumpgate and returns to B5.
This may not have been as much of a crisis as it seemed to be. Cortez, given its stated function of running about on the rim, must carry its own jumppoint generator. The problem was the lack of main power. Since it has already been stated that opening a jumppoint takes a great deal of energy, the size of the Cortez fusion plant would therefore be determined by the power requirements for creating the jumppoint. With only partial main power, she was unable to do so. But given the size of the ship and its presumed independence, it is possible that Cortez could have repaired her main power plant herself, and then opened a jumpgate of her own. This possibility explains why Captain Maynard didn't broadcast a mayday immediately following the accident -- he assumed they could get Cortez out of trouble themselves. It was only after he received the damage report detailing the slow recovery of main power and the long repair time for navigation that he decided to call for assistance.
This episode further delineates the technological capabilities of the Shadows, though not explicitly. They use the same hyperspace the major races do. (As opposed to, for example, the Sigma 957 aliens from"Mind War," who appeared to use something different.)
Though the Shadows presumably noticed the Starfuries and the Cortez and realized they could be seen as well, they took no action against the human ships. This is somewhat in contrast to their apparent desire to remain undetected. Several explanations are possible. Perhaps the Shadow ship was in a hurry; perhaps its weapons aren't functional in hyperspace; or, most intriguing, perhaps it realized that the ships were from Earth and chose to leave them alone for that reason.

Notes

Captain Maynard has seen a shadow ship in the past, though he didn't recognize it as such, and now Lt. Keffer has seen one as well.
Garibaldi's special dinner:
Bagna Cauda (from Jeff Smith's -The Frugal Gourmet-)
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 lb. butter (1 stick) - not margarine!
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
6 anchovy fillets, mashed
black pepper
Heat oil and butter together in top of double boiler. In a small skillet cook the garlic in a bit of this oil until soft. Add the anchovies, and cook till the fish turns into a paste, about 5 min. Mix this paste with the hot oil and butter. Transfer to a chafing dish or fondue pot to keep warm on the table (it congeals as it cools.)
The Egyptian blessing: "God be between you and harm, in all the empty places where you must walk." This blessing was quoted by creative consultant Harlan Ellison in his short story, "Paladin of the Lost Hour."
Delenn's speech about "starstuff" is very similar to a section of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, as well as a section of the playThe Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
(unverified) As the Cortez exits the jumpgate, its hull numbers can be read, "14286." Later, when Sheridan grants clearance for it to leave, its number is stated as "C199."

jms speaks

To be filed under the heading of, "What I does, I takes the rap for; what I does not, I doesn't take the rap for," when we discussed the hyperspace accident in our production meetings, Jim -- our director -- asked if he could so some fratzing and sparking, some fire...I said I did not *want* huge gouts of flame, just a few small sparks, fine, a bit of smoke from components burned out, fine...and that day I was over in the other facility overseeing a mixdown of the audio...and guess what he did in my absence? Yup.
So many questions about hyperspace came up over the last year or so that we figured they should be addressed; be assured, we're staying as clear of technobabble as ever, despite my Spousal Overunit's absolute and unshakeable conviction that *everything* is, at its root, a math problem.
To get in and out of hyperspace you have to know where you are and where you're going, otherwise you'll come out even *more* lost, hundreds of light years from home; you jump in, and you're even further gone now.
Once in hyperspace, you can ride the navigational beams between beacons (narrow beam stuff, to cut through the interference, as noted in "Distant Star"), and by corrolating the beacons, know where you have to come out.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
And the Cortez might've been able to locate some stars, but any fix on its position would only have been within a few light-years, not nearly precise enough for their purposes. They'd still be lost.
Should a ship have been named after Cortez, considering what effect his arrival had on the native Americans?
If Cortez had NOT landed in northern Mexico, do you think it would have remained undiscovered until now?
Fact #1: somebody was bound to discover the Americas.
Fact #2: any sufficiently advanced civilization or culture will inevitably attempt to exploit any civilization or culture not sufficiently advanced to fight back on a level playing field.
Blaming explorers for exploring has always seemed to me really kind of silly; do people *really* think that if Columbus hadn't landed here, it'd be 1994 and we still wouldn't know the world was round and that this continent was here? It doesn't matter who discovered it, the same result would've come. Somebody had to discover it sooner or later.
Did the Cortez spin to produce gravity?
Yes, it rotated to create its gravity, as you can see quite clearly in the episode.
(He coughs and speaks in his Executive Producer Voice:) "I *LIKE* the opening title sequence."
Now...onto other matters.
We re-mixed the narration and music today in the titles, and it's a LOT better. I slightly shifted the placement of some of the lines, and Bruce's rendition is very nice. Really carries the weight. Look for it to appear starting in episode #4.
Actually, we just redid the narration with Bruce yesterday, and it's MUCH better. We'll be able to get it in starting in episode #4.
While we were at it, btw, we took the opportunity to re-do the faceplate shot in the main title sequence. It was fine, but it could've been better. Now it is. Expect it around the same time as the new VO.

Originally compiled by Dave Zimmerman

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