Our Throwback Thursday post takes us back to the space station of humans and aliens all alone in the night. While there may be more than enough plot for a single episode, “A Voice in the Wilderness” feels a bit stretched in order to fill out a two-parter. The main storyline of the episode revolves around the reawakening of the planet below Babylon 5. Long thought to be uninhabited, Babylon discovers that Epsilon III holds many secrets including alien technology miles below the surface and a dying guardian (Curt Lowens) entrusted with keeping the planet’s vast power and knowledge out of the wrong hands. The right hands, it turns out, are those of Delenn‘s (Mira Furlan) old teacher (Louis Turenne) who volunteers to take over as the heart of the machine, and who will be seen again when the time is right.
The episode includes a battle of wills between Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) and a gung-ho Earth Force captain (Ron Canada) who wants to be first in line to grab the alien technology for Earth and isn’t at all interested in how his actions put both his own crew and Babylon 5 in jeopardy. Oddly enough, other than the original guardian’s race showing up, no other aliens arrive to make a claim on the planet. The sequences, along with Girabaldi (Jerry Doyle) searching for news about his ex-girlfriend on Mars once revolts break out, foreshadow larger issues with the Earth government and Babylon 5’s precarious relationship to it (which will continue to be large themes of the show in the coming seasons).
