Re: Londo\'s Three Chances
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>And somehow, folks expect me to believe that saving G'Kar's eye - getting him to see the splendor of a madman - is the key to salvation?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
We don't know what the consequences of Londo's intervening at that moment to save G'Kar's eye would have been. We
do know that he carelessly said, "I'm sure whatever your Majesty chooses will be appropriate" and walked away because he is pre-occupied with his own plotting. But if he had stayed to see what Cartagia was doing, and defied him at
that moment, it might have forced the confrontation that much sooner, and led to Londo's killing Cartagia on the spot to save G'Kar. Whether or not Londo survived the experience this would have led to a change of government under very different circumstances, and might have prevented the Drakh's ever becoming established.
History often turns on small things done or not done. If there hadn't been some confusion over the street directions the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would not have been assassinated, and WWI might not have happened. (Ferndinand had already escaped one assassintation attempt earlier in the day, when a bomb wounded members of his entourage, but failed to kill him, on the way to City Hall. When they departed the city part of his motorcade followed the route originally planned, but Ferdinand's driver took an alternate "safer" route - and drove right past one of the "failed" assassins who still had a pistol in his pocket, thus making the successful shooting possible.)
Since we don't really know what might have happened had Londo done something different, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss "G'Kar's eye" as being "the eye that does not see." Had Londo saved it, the later events might not have followed at all.
More from JMS (on Usenet September 18, 1996):
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>There's another way to look at this, which occured to me as I was writing it, so I structured it accordingly.
Morella: "You must save the eye that does not see."
Londo: "I... do not understand."
I.
Eye.
We never actually saw how she spelled or meant this.
Given Londo's background,
one could almost make the case that the discussion was about him. Not saying that's it, but it's a possibility and a subtext.[/i]
jms<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
(Emphasis added)
Peter David picked up on this, and made it part of the drunken Londo's musings, but that doesn't make it the literal answer. Both men forgot the obvious fact that Lady Morella would have been speaking a Centauri language, not English. (Although, based on David's book, I suppose we must now assume that "I" and "eye" sound alike in that language as well.) Londo, as this point, has decided that
everything was about him - the Earth-Minbar War, the Babylon Project, the Shadow War -
everything. So assuming that Lady Morella meant "I" instead of "eye" just fits with Londo's rather gradiose image of himself. (Something that G'Kar himself points out.)
While JMS
did sometimes deliberately mislead in his posts about certain topics
before they played out in the story, I'm not aware of any ocassion when he did so in answer to a direct question long after the answer would cease to be a spoiler. So I think he was telling the literal truth in saying that the primary meaning of the phrase was G'Kar's eye, while the
subtext was the small pun on "I" "eye" and merely intended as another level of meaning. David's book doesn't alter this a bit, because he presents the alternative as Londo's
speculation, and that while Londo is in his cups and on the verge of his long-expected death.
(BTW, in the same scene in the book Londo says that Sheridan's being "the one who is already dead" was "obvious".)
About the last two "chances" - Londo does indeed do both because there is no way to do one without the other. Valen aside (and he cheated) none of the "prophets" presented in
B5 are ever 100% accurate. The destruction of the station was predicted, but not the context. B5 was blown to pieces, but it never "fell" as Lady Ladiera said it would. So it isn't surprising that Lady Morella was "off" a bit.
In fact, Londo arguably
had "failed" the second chance, because the Keeper awoke before Sheridan was safely off-planet. Therefore he had to face "(his) greatest fear, knowing it will destroy (him)" because that was the only way to prevent the Keeper from rescinding his orders and having Sheridan killed anyway. Since Sheridan's escape was the only way to secure the Alliance's help in freeing the Centauri from the Drakh, which was the necessary condition for Londo's redemption, he had to undo his recent failure in not keeping the Keeper unconcious longer. (Londo's whole life was spent in the service of his people, so it is clear that the only way he could redeem himself was to make possible their liberation from the oppression that
his actions had brought on them.)
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
