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The Gathering

Alluveal

Regular
After listening to the latest B5 Podcast, I was intrigued by some of the comments made in regard to the pilot: The Gathering.

One point of contention was the whole Vorlon assassination attempt, and a few questions were brought up:

1. Vorlons are telepathic, why didn't Kosh know that wasn't really Sinclair?

2. What's with the glowing hand that gets slapped with a poison tab?

Just curious what you all think about this and other Gathering tidbits.

Lulu
 
I really do need to rewatch the series, but aren't Vorlons only telepathic with each other? Or if the reach out, as the Vorlons did with Lyta? I don't think they just wander around reading just anyone's thoughts.

The best explanation I've heard for the whole hand thing is: we aren't seeing what happened, we are seeing how Lyta is interpretting what happened. Although maybe Kosh just wanted to take on a human form in honor of meeting Valen?
 
As I've understood it, the hand thing is explained this way:

Note that Kosh requested all the scanners in the docking bay to be turned off. But he was still wearing his encounter suit -- meaning he planned to reveal a part of himself to the commander of B5, i.e. his hand.

But JMS has implied that Kosh didn't know it was Sinclair he was about to meet. Which makes no sense, considering that the Minbari knew it was Valen's soul running the new station, and if they'd reported as much to the Vorlons Kosh should have known... and since Kosh had never seen Valen as a human, he would have known only if he'd heard from the Minbari or scanned the faux Sinclair... arrgh, now I've gone and confused myself.

Where's Joe D when you need him?
 
Vorlons may be telepathic, but they (or at least Kosh) may also be sufficiently respectful of their allies not to scan them uninvited on first meeting.

Lyta says right in the dialogue that she will be reliving Kosh's experience as herself, and therefore she'll see her body, not his. (Yes, creaky, but that's the explanation given in the film itself, so I see no reason to quibble with it.) And in the picture it is woman's hand. The glow effect was supposed to make this clearer. :)

Kosh short-circuited the entire welcoming procedure by coming aboard early and unannounced. He may not have expected to be met by anyone right inside the docking bay, much less Sinclair. The humans were all rushing to reach the bay in time to greet him and barely made it. Nor is it necessarily the case that the Minbari would have told everything to the Vorlons. ("The Minbari never tell anyone the whole truth") They may have withheld Sinclair's identity, or they may have not revealed that in Sinclair they had identified the particular soul of Valen as one of the captured Humans. Hence Kosh's surprise at recognizing Sinclair as Valen (and there's no reason to suppose that the Vorlons could not see past the relatively minor physical differences between Sinclair and Valen.)

Although the line was added only for the TNT re-edit, JMS has said that he wrote it in an early draft and cut it before shooting because it was a potential spoiler. And I'm pretty sure he indicated that it was supposed to be a moment of recognition - indicating that Kosh was not expecting to see Valen in whoever greeted him.

I think the "handshake" was a spontaneous gesture, based on a tradition that Valen may have introduced the Vorlons to, and which the assassin anticipated. (Or the assassin had some more direct means of peircing Kosh's encounter suit. Don't forget, they are primarily worn for concealment, not protection, and Kosh's suit was damaged more than once. Since the Shadows probably indirectly supplied the poison, there's a good chance they also supplied a way to open Kosh's suit - dumb luck he saved them the trouble.)

Regards,

Joe
 
I dunno. I mean, if Kosh and Ulkesh are as old as we think, do you suppose they (personally) would have had some direct contact with Valen and therefore might have recognized him in some way? (The same way we can recognize Delenn in her human form?)

I'm reading that book, To Dream in the City of Sorrows, that you suggested, Joe. Where I'm at now, Sinclair just had another dream and in it Ulkesh and Kosh are talking to him (one on each side of a mirror/reflection.) "They" both say "you are who they say." So, if it was one of the vorlons touching Sinclair's mind, then they know at this point that what the Minbari claim is true, and chances are they know more than the Minbari (in that it's not just Valen's soul Sinclair is carrying, but that he IS Valen.)

The podcast also brought up the whole "take him back to the Vorlon homeworld for trial" thing. Why do that if they know he has Valen's soul or know that Sinclair IS in fact Valen? And, if we go off "In The Beginning", both Kosh and Ulkesh are present on the Grey Council's ship during Sinclair's interrogation. It's a big leap to assume that they were informed of what the Grey Council found in Sinclair, though I have a sneaking suspicion they already knew.

"The truth points to itself... go before it's too late."

And on a side note, Joe, I think you're absolutely right about Sakai and Sinclair/Valen. Though I'm only about halfway through the book, I read the comics "In Valen's Name" and at the end, the last thing Valen says is...

"I found her. I finally found her."

=)
 
And also, in my mind there is a reason that no statues of Valen's true likeness were never allowed. Sinclair didn't want to risk changing history. Everything had to happen in the order it was meant to. And if the Minbari were to recognize him AS Valen, things might have been thrown off kilter.
 
I dunno. I mean, if Kosh and Ulkesh are as old as we think, do you suppose they (personally) would have had some direct contact with Valen and therefore might have recognized him in some way? (The same way we can recognize Delenn in her human form?)

Kosh and Ulkesh are the two Vorlons who greeted Valen when he appeared with B4 during the previous Shadow war, as shown in War Without End II. Kosh worked with Valen personally to defeat the Shadows, that is how he recognised Sinclair as Valen in The Gathering and why he recognised him as "Entilzha."

Why do that if they know he has Valen's soul or know that Sinclair IS in fact Valen?

They don't know that yet, no one does. All they know is that he has some connection to Minbari and possibly Valen, but they don't know he's Valen yet.

I hypothesize that they wanted to take this mystery guy home and probe him and cut him up- mentally or physically- and solve the mystery once and for all. The attempted assassination of Kosh temporarily changed his situation as "let's wait and see what happens" to urgent.
 
The assassination allowed the Vorlons to show off their military power and to deep scan Lyta. Sinclair and the other people running the space station were placed under great pressure. To activate this test Kosh may have taken a dive, risky since the poison was real.
 
They don't know that yet, no one does. All they know is that he has some connection to Minbari and possibly Valen, but they don't know he's Valen yet.

Exactly. The only person in the entire universe who knows that Sinclair is Valen is Kosh himself - and he's incapacitated about 12 seconds after he finds out, so he' hardly in a position to tell anybody about it. :D

Regards,

Joe
 
Yeah, I don't know if that was Ulkesh with Kosh there. I seem to remember both encounter suits being the same as Kosh's (green not purple.)

Hmmm... wait, I just had a Drazi moment...
 
IIRC, both Vorlons that were chillin' with Valen at the end of WWE2 had red encounter suits.

Sometimes, even Vorlons need a makeover. :)
 
hm.. did they? Ok, I knew it was one or the other... green or the purpley like Ulkesh had. Still..... odd that. Green. PURPLE!
 
They were wearing different encounter suits, but JMS has confirmed in various places that the Vorlons who met up with Valen just before the Minbari arrived were, indeed, Kosh and Ulkesh. (Maybe their regular suits were at the cleaners and they borrowed some. You'd think they'd get pretty funky after a couple of hundred years.)

Regards,

Joe
 
I was trying to type a post earlier this afternoon that said that the two Vorlons that were with Valen when B4 was found were indeed Kosh and Ulkesh, but our power went out in the middle of my post! :mad: :LOL:

GKE said their suits were red. I don't remember them being red though. I thought one was brown like how we saw Kosh on B5 and the other one looked like purple like Ulkesh. :confused:
 
but our power went out in the middle of my post!

My sympathies. We also lost power yesterday afternoon and night for about 5 hours. It wasn't particularly a pleasant experience.
 
Well ours was only out for an hour.....in the middle of a calm, bright sunny afternoon. :rolleyes: Maybe you guys are at fault. :p
 

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