Markup View

Author: WeAreAllKosh

Feb 24th 2013 at 1:10:47 AM

^^^^^^ I suppose YMMV (as that's probably the kind of trope this is), but all things considered I didn't think the reaction to Garibaldi was all that unreasonable.

The ISN broadcast merely confirmed their pre-existing suspicions: [[spoiler: remember they (Ivanova specifically, I think) had warned Sheridan that Garibaldi's calling him to Mars was probably a trap, and lo and behold he's captured after going there.]] And those pre-existing suspicions of his loyalty weren't too unreasonable either. He'd recently made a violent public scene accusing Sheridan of being some sort of megalomaniac wanting to be worshipped, he gave some pretty deliberate (or careless) fodder to the recent ISN smear piece that was being used to drum up a cassus belli against Babylon 5, he'd been hanging out a lot with some unknown suspicious characters, and he'd helped those characters breach security protocols after resigning his job as Chief of Security. Remember too that we viewers were shown hints that he was being mentally manipulated--had that not been shown, the changes in his behavior played out slowly enough (over much of the season) that we could have indeed believed they were a true character evolution, albeit a dismaying one--[[spoiler: Bester]] simply dialed the natural skepticism and paranoia he was known for, up a few notches. So the other characters, not seeing any of these hints that we did, plausibly believed this as well.

I actually thought it was remarkable that Number One (who as far as we knew didn't know Garibaldi personally, and distrusted Lyta as a telepath) so readily believed Lyta's telepathic confirmation of Garibaldi's story afterwards. As for the others, [[spoiler: given that he'd just sold Sheridan down the river to the Clark regime]], I'd expect it would take them some time to digest that generally, and consider whether his brainwashing alibi was true, or just a convenient story to attempt to regain trust and cause further damage--but the latter would have probably been just too audacious (why would he even think it would succeed), so they believed him--and it didn't take all that long for them to. So overall, not unreasonable.