Kat Spada: Today, I’m talking to Rachel Manija Brown, a writer who’s published over 30 books, and opened up Paper & Clay Bookshop in late 2024. Rachel, will you tell me about why you decided to open a bookshop?
Rachel Brown: I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.
It had a shop that was kind of a bookshop. I would say about ten percent of its inventory was books, but it was primarily gifts and herbs and crystals and things like that. But it had a really great atmosphere, people loved it, the people who worked there were really great. And all the kids in town used to hang out there, especially the queer and trans and otherwise kind of misfit kids. And I used to hang out there.
[When it went] out of business, I was so sad at the idea of the mountain losing its only bookshop. Especially the thought that all the queer, trans, bookish, and otherwise misfit teenagers, like I had once been, were going to lose their safe space.
I started daydreaming about opening it myself, and I thought, I love this idea so much, maybe in a couple of years when I have actual preparation, I’ll open a bookshop. Then I realized it was at was such a good location, that I would never get that good of a location again. It’s smack in the middle of the tourist district, every person who visits Crestline walks right past it.
Unfortunately, this was all while I was in Bulgaria for a month. So, I spent some time frantically trying to take over the lease, which was extremely difficult from another country. I couldn’t take possession of the shop until November 1st, and I really wanted to open it in time to get all the Christmas customers. And I have a tiny house, so I couldn’t really buy very much, because I had no place to put it. So I took possession of the shop on November 1st, and I opened on November 14th.
I've posted the rest of the edited transcript below the cut. ( Read more... )
Joyride : A buddy road movie focused on Chinese-American women taking a personal journey across China, testing the boundaries of their relationships and coming back stronger. We were looking for a lightweight way to pass an evening, and I'd say this fit the bill, although a little raunchy for my taste (explicit drug use, over-the-top sex). Top-notch cast, particularly Sabrina Wu as the awkward and too-relatable Deadeye.
The Knives Out films: This was a rewatch -- I've seen Knives Out and Glass Onion several times, and I insisted we watch Wake Up Dead Man the day it was released on Netflix -- and I'm happy to say that the series holds up, both as individual movies and overall. I think Knives Out is still my favorite, although a Chris Evans fangirl would say that, but I appreciate them all for their different strengths. Before the rewatch, I would have put Wake Up Dead Man a clear notch below the other two, but now I'm not so sure -- Father Jud is easily the best protagonist in the series, and I appreciate the depiction of a priest who represents the best aspects of Christianity drawn in contrast to some of its very worst. I also found the mystery quite satisfying, maybe even the best of the lot. The major downside was the supporting cast, which was fine (I will never argue with yet another showstopper from Glenn Close), but they didn't quite have the chemistry or interest of the ensembles in the other two films.
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
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This Week's Question: What are your crafting goals for 2026?
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after a few false starts, my mindset is coming together to move on some of the challenges and experiments i've set for 2026.
/reading more/ is again at the top of my list, and while i may set a concrete goal to a year-long total, it will be small to make sure i'm not pushing quantity over quality. the first finished book of 2026 was /in the mouth of madness/ (sutter cane), which was a decent read with a few surprises along the way.
i'm currently reading /a gentleman in moscow/ (amor towles) and it's a MUCH slower read than i anticipated. i'm enjoying it tremendously — the language is lovely and makes me linger — but i keep waiting for more to happen. even if the external action is a bit slow, the inner world keeps me engaged. plus, there are gems like this:
"But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists—the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things."
~
today and tomorrow are pretty quiet days, so i'm hoping to get some cleaning done, bread made, and writing down on paper. i was thinking about tackling the kitchen for a full reorganization and declutter, but i'd more than today and tomorrow for that task, so i'll backburner it until....later. stay shiny, people. xo
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<p class="syndicationauthor">Posted by Sarah</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-face-of-the-enemy/">https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-face-of-the-enemy/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=836387">https://reactormag.com/?p=836387</a></p><post-hero class="wp-block-post-hero js-post-hero post-hero post-hero-horizontal">
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<h2 class="post-hero-title text-h1"><i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Face of the Enemy”</h2>
<div class="prose post-hero-description prose--post-hero">Sheridan’s father is arrested, and Garibaldi offers to help his former commander plan a rescue operation…</div>
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Published on January 12, 2026
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<p><strong>“The Face of the Enemy”</strong><br>Written by J. Michael Straczynski<br>Directed by Michael Vejar<br>Season 4, Episode 17<br>Production episode 417<br>Original air date: June 9, 1997</p>
<p><strong>It was the dawn of the third age…</strong> The Army of Light forces are in a brutal firefight against EarthForce ships. Some of the latter have retreated from the battle, but others, including the <em>Cadmus</em>, are continuing to fight even though they’re outgunned. Sheridan practically begs them to surrender, as he doesn’t want to destroy them, but he will if they keep it up. The <em>Cadmus</em> captain, Leo Frank, finally replies, saying they’re dead anyhow. They were told that every EarthForce ship that Sheridan has defeated have had their crews executed and replaced with Minbari. MacDougan comes on the line and tells Frank that he’s an even bigger idiot than he was at the Academy, and assures Frank that he’s been fed a line of bull. Frank then surrenders.</p>
<p>On Mars, Garibaldi informs Edgars that he has set up Sheridan’s father David to be captured. Edgars promises that, once Sheridan is in custody, Garibaldi will be told the whole truth.</p>
<p>Elsewhere on Mars, Franklin and Alexander arrive. Number One remembers Alexander from the last time she came through Mars, and is pissed that she didn’t reveal at the time that she was a telepath. And Number One is even more pissed at their cargo of a whole mess of teeps in stasis tubes. Later, over dinner, it’s clear to Franklin that everyone in the resistance really hates telepaths, and Alexander explains about the Bloodhound Units that scan anyone suspected of being in the resistance without their permission—and these are deep scans, which are not only violations of privacy, but also can cause heart attacks, strokes, and other fun things. She also mentions a serial killer of telepaths; the mundane police didn’t really care to investigate thoroughly, so the Psi Cops (with whom Alexander was interning at the time) took it upon themselves. They found the guy and put horrible images in his head—to this day, he’s in a hospital in a straitjacket.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="825" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02-1100x825.jpg" alt="Dr Franklin and Lyta Alexander meet with Number One in Babylon 5 "The Face of the Enemy"" class="wp-image-836411" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02-1100x825.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02-740x555.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02-140x105.jpg 140w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02-768x576.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-02.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Television</figcaption></figure>
<p>The <em>Agamemnon</em> shows up and Captain James offers to join the Army of Light. Sheridan is delighted to have his former command by his side, and he goes on board. Then Garibaldi contacts him and says that Clark’s people have his father. Garibaldi claims to have some people who can get him free, but they want to meet in person with Sheridan, alone. Sheridan verifies this information independently, and then, despite the advice of both James and Ivanova, he agrees to meet, using one of <em>Agamemnon</em>’s shuttles to sneak onto Mars.</p>
<p>He also instructs Ivanova to take a <em>White Star</em> and take command of the fleet in his absence. She does so, asking Delenn to keep an eye on things on the station, because they don’t have the budget for another guest star to play a watch officer.</p>
<p>Sheridan meets with Garibaldi, who immediately puts a tranq patch on Sheridan’s hand, at which point folks come to take him into custody. Sheridan resists arrest, and gets the shit kicked out of him for his trouble.</p>
<p>Edgars finally reads Garibaldi in on the whole thing. While Clark is a problem, he’s a temporary one—one way or another, he’ll be out of power soon enough. But the Psi Corps won’t give up the power he’s given them, and it’ll be the end of humanity’s dominance over telepaths. Unless, of course, they level the playing field. Edgars has developed a virus that specifically targets the chromosome that controls telepathy. It’s airborne, 100% contagious, and fatal. The antidote is the vial Garibaldi helped Lise and Wade <a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-conflicts-of-interest/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">smuggle through B5</a>. Once infected, the telepaths have to get regular injections of the antidote, or they’ll die.</p>
<p>Once Edgars and Wade are done explaining their plan, they leave Garibaldi alone. Unbeknownst to them, Lise overheard all of it, and is appalled. When he’s alone, Garibaldi removes a hollow tooth and activates a signal. He then goes to a tram. Lise joins him, but Garibaldi is cold to her, telling her to go back home, even though she’s disgusted by what her husband is doing.</p>
<p>After Lise departs, Bester boards the tram, saying he got Garibaldi’s signal.</p>
<p>Bester scans Garibaldi and learns all about Edgars’ plan. He’s also appalled, and intends to take care of it in very short order. He debates what to do about Garibaldi, now that his mission is complete. First, he informs Garibaldi what actually happened to him. The Shadows wanted Garibaldi because he was one of the three people most likely to take over the Army of Light if Sheridan was lost, and of those three (the others being Ivanova and Delenn), he was the one most likely to be susceptible to psionic tampering. So <a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-zhadum/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">he was captured</a> and sent to Psi Corps. Bester was able to divert him and use him for their own ends. It wasn’t a full reprogramming, just a bit of rejiggering—Bester needed his natural inquisitiveness and doggedness and investigative instincts intact, as well as his disdain for authority. Bester hadn’t expected Garibaldi to resign as head of security, but that worked out for the best, as it isolated him, making him easier to manipulate.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="825" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03-1100x825.jpg" alt="Bester (Walter Koenig) in Babylon 5 "The Face of the Enemy"" class="wp-image-836410" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03-1100x825.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03-740x555.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03-140x105.jpg 140w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03-768x576.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-03.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Television</figcaption></figure>
<p>Eventually, it led him to be a mole in Edgars’ organization. But now, Bester isn’t sure what to do with Garibaldi—but ultimately, he decides to free him. Not that that’s doing him a favor, as everyone knows he’s the one who turned Sheridan in, so he’s pretty much cut off from his friends.</p>
<p>When the mental blocks fall, Garibaldi screams in anguish. But by the time he can make it back to Edgars’ mansion, both Edgars and Wade are dead and the virus and its antidote are gone from his safe. Of Lise there is no sign—before dying, Wade says that she wasn’t in the house when they were ambushed.</p>
<p>Ivanova rendezvouses with the fleet just in time to get the news of Sheridan’s capture, which ISN is crowing about (and also lying about, saying that he’s being treated well, unlike his own prisoners, and that he has expressed regret over his actions—in truth, he’s continued to get the shit kicked out of him and he’s bound in an empty cell). When asked what they’ll do next, Ivanova says they keep going. A person is expendable, the mission isn’t (a line Sinclair said in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-war-without-end-part-one/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">War Without End</a>,” though Ivanova credits Sheridan with saying it). Cole also says that Garibaldi has tried to contact them and the station, and Ivanova makes it clear that she has nothing to say to him, and also that if he shows up on B5, he’s to be shot on sight.</p>
<p>ISN declares a day of celebration and rest, as the capture of Sheridan means that the resistance is broken. They also report Edgars’ murder, saying it was probably members of the resistance, and also that apparently it was Sheridan’s former security chief who turned him in, and ISN thanks him for his patriotism.</p>
<p><strong>Get the hell out of our galaxy!</strong> Last week, Sheridan was saying that he was getting worried that everything was going too well, and this episode bears out that paranoia, as he’s captured by the bad guys.</p>
<p><strong>Ivanova is God.</strong> Ivanova takes over command of the fleet from Sheridan. Both Clark and Edgars make it clear that they think losing Sheridan will break the resistance, but the look on Ivanova’s face in the latter portions of this episode make it abundantly clear that that is <em>not</em> the case.</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="825" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04-1100x825.jpg" alt="Ivanova in command in Babylon 5 "The Face of the Enemy"" class="wp-image-836408" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04-1100x825.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04-740x555.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04-140x105.jpg 140w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04-768x576.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-04.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Television</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>The household god of frustration.</strong> We finally find out what’s been up with Garibaldi since the Shadows took him back in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-zhadum/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Z’ha’dum</a>.”</p>
<p><strong>If you value your lives, be somewhere else.</strong> Sheridan is insistent that a human be in command of the Army of Light fleet. It can’t be Delenn, because if a Minbari commands a fleet heading for Earth, it’ll feel like the Earth-Minbari War all over again.</p>
<p><strong>The Corps is mother, the Corps is father.</strong> As has been hinted at several times—particularly in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-whatever-happened-to-mr-garibaldi/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?</a>” “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-epiphanies/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Epiphanies</a>,” and “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-moments-of-transition/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Moments of Transition</a>”—the Psi Corps is behind Garibaldi’s weird behavior this season.</p>
<p><strong>The Shadowy Vorlons.</strong> The Shadows helped put Clark into power, but they also provided the tech that enabled Edgars to develop the telepath virus. Typical Shadows, playing both ends…</p>
<p><strong>No sex, please, we’re EarthForce.</strong> When Sheridan is captured, Delenn wakes up and cries out his name, which is a common, if tired, practice among writers who want to show a love connection between characters…</p>
<p><strong>Looking ahead.</strong> For the <a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-exercise-of-vital-powers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">second episode in a row</a>, a character mentions the likelihood of a coming war between telepaths and mundanes (Edgars last time, Alexander this time). J. Michael Straczynski always intended to show that war on-screen, going so far as to have J. Gregory Keyes skip over it in his Psi-Corps trilogy of novels and having the movie <em>A Call to Arms </em>and TV show <em>Crusade</em> take place after it. But it has yet to be dramatized in any form.</p>
<p><strong>Welcome aboard.</strong> Recurring regulars Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Mark Schneider, Diana Morgan, and Richard Gant make their final appearances as, respectively, Edgars, Wade, the ISN propaganda-spewer, and MacDougan.</p>
<p>Other recurring regulars include Walter Koenig, back from “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-moments-of-transition/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Moments of Transition</a>” as Bester; Marjorie Monaghan, back from “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-lines-of-communication/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lines of Communication</a>” as Number One; Denise Gentile, back from “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-exercise-of-vital-powers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Exercise of Vital Powers</a>” as Lise; and David Purdham, debuting the recurring role of James. Koenig and Gentile will both return in “Rising Star,” while Monaghan and Purdham will be back in “Between the Darkness and the Light.”</p>
<p>Additionally, Ricco Ross plays Frank, and creative consultant Harlan Ellison makes his only physical appearance on the show as the Psi Cop Bester talks to in the flashback. Ellison previously did the voice of Sparky the computer in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-ceremonies-of-light-and-dark/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ceremonies of Light and Dark</a>,” and he’ll come back to voice Zooty in “Day of the Dead.”</p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="825" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05-1100x825.jpg" alt="Harlan Ellison makes a cameo appearance in Babylon 5 "The Face of the Enemy"" class="wp-image-836409" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05-1100x825.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05-740x555.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05-140x105.jpg 140w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05-768x576.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-05.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Television</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>Trivial matters. </strong>Alexander came through Mars to get to B5 in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-divided-loyalties/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Divided Loyalties</a>.” The guy who murdered telepaths was previously mentioned by Bester in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-epiphanies/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Epiphanies</a>”; the full story of that rogue investigation and punishment was told in the novel <a href="https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Deadly_Relations_-_Bester_Ascendant" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Deadly Relations—Bester Ascendant</em></a>, the second book in J. Gregory Keyes’ <a href="https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Psi_Corps_Trilogy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Psi-Corps trilogy</a>.</p>
<p>Garibaldi helped Lise and Wade obtain the cure for the virus in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-conflicts-of-interest/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Conflicts of Interest</a>.” He was captured by the Shadows in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-zhadum/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Z’ha’dum</a>,” returned to B5 in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-summoning/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Summoning</a>” and resigned as head of security in “Epiphanies.”</p>
<p>Efrem Zimbalist Jr. tripped over the line “the telepath problem,” as that was (deliberately) very similar to rhetoric used by the Nazis against the Jews. It wound up working, as it meant that even Edgars realized the enormity and horror of what he was planning.</p>
<p>Wade refers to telepaths as “homo superior,” which is a term first used in Marvel’s <em>X-Men</em> comics in the 1960s to refer to mutants (people born with super-powers).</p>
<p>MacDougan says his entire crew is intact, though one assumes that his first officer is in the brig after what happened in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-no-surrender-no-retreat/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">No Surrender, No Retreat</a>.”</p>
<p><strong>The echoes of all of our conversations.</strong></p>
<p>“The truth—the whole absolute truth—is only a few days away. How many people can say that?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know, but I think the last guy got thirty pieces of silver for the same job.”</p>
<p>—Edgars giving Garibaldi assurances and Garibaldi feeling very Judas-y about the whole thing. </p>
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1100" height="825" src="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06-1100x825.jpg" alt="Garibaldi in Babylon 5 "The Face of the Enemy"" class="wp-image-836407" srcset="https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06-1100x825.jpg 1100w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06-740x555.jpg 740w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06-140x105.jpg 140w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06-768x576.jpg 768w, https://reactormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/babylon-5-face-of-the-enemy-06.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1100px) 100vw, 1100px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Credit: Warner Bros. Television</figcaption></figure>
<p><strong>The name of the place is Babylon 5.</strong> “They believe that you’re a pain in the ass, sir, but they trust you.” It took seventeen episodes, but we <em>finally</em> find out the full story of what happened to Garibaldi after the Shadows took him in “<a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-zhadum/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Z’ha’dum</a>,” and it’s a doozy. Walter Koenig does magnificent work here, slowly explaining what’s going on while sitting across from an insensate Jerry Doyle. Koenig’s Bester is his usual awful self and it’s magnificently played. His only concern is for his own ambitions. I particularly like the way he refers to “my” telepaths, even though he doesn’t actually run Psi Corps (at least not yet).</p>
<p>Then there’s his bland declaration that he’s not capricious or cruel, which is only half right. He’s definitely not capricious, as every single thing Bester does is calculated. But he’s <em>incredibly</em> cruel. While it’s plausible that he has no personal animus against Garibaldi—I doubt he cares enough about him to dislike him—he’s still perfectly happy to be as nasty as possible to him. Garibaldi is now in the worst possible place, having betrayed his friends, his colleagues, the husband of the woman he loves, and the cause he believes and fights for, and with no obvious way to prove otherwise. (As usual, Bester reckons without the fact that Lyta Alexander is now a badass psi, but we’ll get to that two episodes hence.)</p>
<p>And that’s only a piece of this episode in which a lot happens. There’s Garibaldi’s actual betrayal of Sheridan, there’s Edgars’ revelation of his master plan, there’s MacDougan giving Frank a verbal smackdown (I <em>really</em> wish we’d gotten more than two episodes out of Richard Gant’s MacDougan, he was truly fabulous), and there’s Sheridan’s happy reunion with his former crew.</p>
<p>What’s most impressive about this episode is that two very lengthy chunks of the episode are basically monologues of exposition, one by Edgars, one by Bester. Both are leavened on a scripting level, the former by Wade and Garibaldi putting their own comments in, the latter by the flashbacks. But truly it’s the performances and the directing of same by Zimbalist, Koenig, and director Michael Vejar.</p>
<p>There’s a reason why Vejar is the franchise’s most prolific director, and this episode is a particularly strong example of why. There are many powerful visuals in this, from the closeups of Bester during his monologue at Garibaldi, the shadowy closeups of the stone-faced Garibaldi while Bester monologues at him, and so on. I particularly like the long shot in the flashback of Bester and two other Psi Cops standing over the comatose Garibaldi, one of the Psi Cops slowly moving to close the door, a magnificent visual metaphor.</p>
<p>And then there’s Ivanova sitting in the command chair of the <em>White Star</em>, determined to keep the fight going. One of the themes of the past few episodes has been the importance of Sheridan to the Army of Light, and how vital it is to remove him. This, however, flies in the face of reality. As Bester says at one point, there are three people ready to take over from Sheridan if he’s lost, and while Bester himself did a bang-up job of removing Garibaldi from that particular chess board, the erstwhile security chief is also (by far) the least of those three options. Among Sheridan, Ivanova, and Delenn, Sheridan is the one who scares me the <em>least</em>. All capturing Sheridan gets them is an unfettered and pissed-off Ivanova, and that doesn’t improve their position overmuch…</p>
<p><strong>Next week:</strong> “Intersections in Real Time.”[end-mark]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-face-of-the-enemy/"><i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Face of the Enemy”</a> appeared first on <a href="https://reactormag.com">Reactor</a>.</p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-face-of-the-enemy/">https://reactormag.com/babylon-5-rewatch-the-face-of-the-enemy/</a></p><p class="ljsyndicationlink"><a href="https://reactormag.com/?p=836387">https://reactormag.com/?p=836387</a></p>
This really shouldn't be the case but as far as I can tell, I am in at least the top 5% (maybe even considerably smaller than that) of people regarding knowledge of what went on during the production of The Last House on the Left. I have achieved this not through formal expertise or through special access, but by merely:
1) Going through the DVD/Blu-ray extras systematically 2) Reading all of David Szulkin's making-of book 3) Spending more than three minutes searching for evidence
Given Last House was the film that launched Wes Craven's career in horror, it is absolutely absurd how useless the horror and cinema media have been, for decades, in interrogating what happened away from the fictional story. Wes Craven himself should have been asked far more searching questions than he was.
This criticism applies to cinema academics too. It's deeply ironic, in a bad way, that there have been so many people writing papers and articles about the way Mari is portrayed in the story from various progressive and feminist viewpoints, yet almost none writing about the serious abuse by men of the real young woman who played Mari.
The fact that the most likely place to find details of what Sandra Peabody endured is in listicles is a terrible indictment of how badly so-called "serious" horror and cinema media have failed.
If you asked someone to name the main trends in genre book publishing from the past year or two, they’d probably mention romantasy, cozy fiction, horror and a few other things. But I’ve been blown away by a sleeper trend lately: novels about people storing their memories remotely, gaining access to someone else’s memories, or sharing a memory with another person. In general, memory seems to be on a lot of people’s minds lately.
Just recently, I’ve loved a ton of books on this theme. The notion of copying, storing, and sharing memories isn’t exactly new—in fact, I played with it quite a bit in my novel The City in the Middle of the Night. (Yoko Ogawa’s influential The Memory Police also deals with the ways our memories are controlled and overseen.) But this new wave of novels is using the concept to explore deep questions about personal identity, as well as the ways that our memories can be politicized and policed by repressive regimes.
To find out more about this topic, I talked to four authors of recent books that deal with this concept in various fascinating ways. (I also reviewed some books on this theme a while back for The Washington Post.)
One of my favorite books of 2025 was The Antidote, the long-awaited new novel by Karen Russell. The Antidote is the sobriquet of a prairie witch in dustbowl-era Nebraska, who acts as a sort of bank vault for people to store their unpleasant memories—with the promise that you can retrieve the memory later when you need it. But after a catastrophic dust storm, the Antidote and other prairie witches find their vaults cleaned out, all the stored memories gone forever.
The Antidote turns into an examination of buried historical trauma, especially the attempted genocide of Native Americans—thanks in part to a New Deal photographer’s magical camera that takes pictures of the past and future.
In writing The Antidote, Russell says, “I was interested in what happens when people are unable or unwilling to reckon with the past, in the exiling of memories from our waking consciousness and from our public histories, those things that many of us must continuously forget or suppress in order to go on living as we do, and how that ‘collapse of memory’ harms us individually and collectively.”
Russell adds, “I do think that whatever else a memory might be, it’s never the fullness of what happened. It’s always a (re)creation, never static or inert.” And that “these secrets that can feel so private and so personal, can become, in aggregate, something like a mass denial. Who and what we exclude from our family stories and collective histories has tremendous consequences, for all of us.”
Russell says that while she was researching the novel that became The Antidote, she learned about an astonishing act of curatorial violence. Everyone has seen the iconic Dust Bowl photographs taken by New Deal photographers like Dorothea Lange—but the architect of this program, Roy Stryker, used a hole-punch to destroy the photographic negatives he didn’t want to include, in what Russell calls “an act of artistic curation and in some cases political calculation.” Russell says there’s a “shadow archive of unpublished and hole-punched negatives,” suppressed for decades, which you can now view online at the Library of Congress.
Russell kept returning to one particular image of “a student with a hole-punched ear,” and “that hole-punched negative came to feel like the heart of this novel.”
Another book I loved in 2025, Mia Tsai’s The Memory Hunters, takes place in a world where some special people, like Key, can harvest memories from other people. Key can also unearth memories from people who lived long ago, using a complex process involving mushrooms. When Key finds an old forbidden memory that contradicts the official record and threatens the political order, she’s forced to hide it—but the memory is taking over her personality and she’s in danger of losing herself. Her bodyguard and lover, Vale, is forced to take drastic measures to save her.
Tsai says she’s always been fascinated by the concept of memory. “Memory is magic!” she says. “How can something so crucial and something we stake our lives and personalities on be so easily tampered with?” Tsai points out that a lot of books that came out in the past year were probably acquired in 2023, and written in 2020-2022, if not earlier. And there’s one thing about the early 2020s that seems especially relevant to her.
Says Tsai:
I think the wave of memory-related books has a lot to do with how we’ve been gaslit as a nation over how devastating Covid has been and continues to be (plus the global gaslighting over the genocides to which we’re daily witnesses). What we experienced and what we remember does not match up with what we’re being told. And invalidating a memory is so deeply personal. It’s hurtful and provocative to say, “No, that’s not how it went.”
The gaslighting began before Covid, of course, and the first Trump administration was already bombarding us with lies and trying to erase the very existence (and accomplishments) of marginalized communities. All this, while “burying our ability to process beneath continual outrage,” says Tsai. “In a way, sharing memories to verify their realness became a way to bond with someone else, a way to confirm that what we experienced was real, unbelievable as it was.”
Tsai sums it up perfectly: “Memory-recording lets us know we were there and it happened; memory-sharing proves we were alive and not alone.”
Recently, Tsai visited some Civil War battlegrounds, and saw a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Nearby, there was a sign entitled, “The War Over Memory,” which detailed “one of America’s first great delusions,” or one of our earliest propaganda campaigns, “the effects of which we’re still feeling 160 years later.”
It’s not just that we’re being lied to about events that we personally witnessed, says author Seth Haddon—it’s that we have more ability to witness those events than at any other time in history, because we’re all connected. We can share the experiences of people around the world who are “enduring violence, displacement, [and] oppression.” And at the same time, mainstream and official narratives present a very different picture of reality. “This gap between lived (or viewed?) experience and official stories has made the question of memory feel newly urgent,” says Haddon.
In Haddon’s great space-opera novella Volatile Memory, a trans scavenger named Wylla finds a mask that gives her enhanced abilities—but when she wears the mask, she also experiences the memories and consciousness of the dead person who wore it before, a woman named Sable. Haddon uses the sharing of Sable’s memories to ask some deep questions about how our memories make us who we are, but also how our embodiment shapes our experience of being alive.
Haddon says that the notion of “preserving the self” is even more important when we’re under so much pressure to deny what we’re witnessing. The main way we can preserve the self is by holding on to memory, “even if it can’t be free from personal/contextual bias.” Our memories end up “feeling more intimate and trustworthy than the flood of information we receive from elsewhere, especially in a time when so many sources feel compromised.” We feel as though an individual person’s memories are “purer and more authentic” than the narrative shared by a lot of people, even if the notion of authenticity is inherently messy.
Yiming Ma’s fascinating These Memories Do Not Belong to Ustakes the theme of censorship and repression to a further extent, taking place in a future dominated by a new Qin Empire, in which everybody has a Mindbank that records their memories. Some past memories are contraband, either because they have subversive themes that the government disapproves of or because they contain historical events that the government wants to cover up. Ma’s novel in stories contains a narrative assortment of forbidden memories, which the main character has inherited after the death of his mother.
Ma says that he was interested in resilience when he wrote These Memories, because it’s by having a shared narrative that we can “stay resilient and resist” during times of political turbulence. This shared narrative can come from writing that explores “both individual and collective memory.”
Ma also was inspired by the fact that researchers have continued to make a lot of new discoveries about how memories are made and stored. For example, scientists have new evidence that memories can be stored outside the brain, and that our memories are dynamic rather than static, meaning that we are constantly revising them every time we revisit them. And that long-term memories can form independently from short-term memories.
Ma was also inspired by research that reveals that some people cannot form mental images, which shows “how differently we all experience our memories and dreams.”
I was also struck by a moment in the recent novel Slow Gods by Claire North. An artificial intelligence explains that artificial minds store memories the same way humans do: by compressing them into narratives with most of the details stripped out, because the raw sensory data is too huge to store in the long term. I also found it fitting that the last book I read in 2025 was There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, in which monsters go around devouring people’s memories, and one particularly terrifying monster kills anyone who can remember that it exists.
What I’ve personally gotten from this recent flood of books (and what I tried to explore in The City in the Middle of the Night) is that even though we fixate on individuality—the notion that one person’s experience is totally unique—the more we can share our experiences, the more we can realize that we are one. That our fates, and our pasts, are bound together, and memory is always, on some level, collective as well as personal.
I also increasingly think that being able to experience another person’s memories is a higher form of empathy—and empathy is something we are all longing for right now, in the midst of so much performative cruelty. Not to mention community, which can only be formed by the feeling of shared heritage. (And heritage is in many ways just another word for memory.)
Says Tsai, “I don’t feel this every day, but I certainly do now: What a glory it is to continue surviving and making memories with others.”[end-mark]
This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.
New year, new luck, yo! And of course, again for the purposes of the DailyQuotes list, here's the list of funny/silly/thoughtful/whatev's quotes for 2026. As usual, a line has a chance of finding its place here if it inspires others to either have a giggle, or go into deep contemplation (keep hoping, lol). A link to this list will also be displayed on the community sidebar:
"The NATO charter clearly says that any attack on a NATO member shall be treated, by all members, as an attack against all. So that means that, if we attack Greenland, we'll be obligated to go to war against ... ourselves! Gee, that's scary. You really don't want to go to war with the United States. They're insane!" (edelsont)
I buy primroses and pots full of bulbs as soon as they are available, it does so much for my mood to have them where I can see them from the couch. I have daffodils, grape hyacinths, a couple of different hyacinths and these netted irises.
This is a reminder that the deadlines are fast approaching.
18 January: Default deadline - countdown timer link This is the last possible date to default on your assignment without any penalties. If you know you can't finish your assignment, please default as soon as possible to give us time to find a PH on time and avoid delays. 25 January: Fanworks are due - countdown timer link
If you have already submitted your work, please know we are still reviewing and approving works (it's going slowly due to RL responsibilities but we're getting there!). Unless there is a problem with your work, we will try to approve it as soon as possible. Please remember to periodically check your email in case we need to contact you.
Mit dem PERRY RHODAN-Roman, den wir in der vergangenen Woche veröffentlichten, schlossen wir den aktuellen Handlungsblock um die Topsider und die politischen Umwälzungen im Sternenreich der echsenartigen Wesen ab. Christian Montillon verfasste »Das Sternengrab«, und in diesem Roman setzte er klassische Hauptfiguren wie Perry Rhodan, Atlan und Sichu Dorksteiger in Szene.
Rhodan erweist sich als Diplomat, Atlan ist der kluge Kommandant eines Raumschiffs, und Dorksteiger setzt ihren wissenschaftlich geschulten Verstand ein – die Figuren handeln also exakt so, wie es ihren Charakteren entspricht. Das wird dann von unterschiedlichen Topsidern gespiegelt.
Wie das alles mit den anderen Handlungsfäden des laufenden »PEGASOS«-Zyklus zusammenhängt? Der Autor liefert einige Hintergründe und bietet den Lesern ein bisschen Raum für weitere Spekulationen. So mag ich’s!
“White Cat and Butterflies” by Arthur Heyer (1914)
Humans have a thing for companion animals. If it’s alive, breathing, and a human can live with or adjacent to it, swim with it, fly with it, and above all connect with it, someone has probably tried. But logistically and practically, it comes down to the big three: horse, dog, and cat.
The horse is not, as a species, amenable to curling up in the house by the fire. That job is more suited to the dog and the cat. I’ll leave the dog for another day; for now, let’s focus on the cat.
Here is a small furry predator, around ten pounds (4kg) on the average. It’s a mammal like us. It walks on four paws with retractable claws, and true to its nature and heritage, it has sharp fangs. It has a long tail which it uses for balance and to express opinions. It’s quick and reactive. Its eyes are large, round, and slit-pupiled, and reflect light: eyes that can see well in low light, especially the light of dawn and dusk, when it’s most active.
It pings a number of human awwww reflexes. Soft fur, deceptively soft paws, round head and ears that activate the aww cute baby module, little squeaky voice, and the coup de grace: it purrs. Its tropism toward warmth and comfort puts it in a human lap more often than not. It’s small enough to be portable, big enough to be useful as an eliminator of vermin around human habitations (which is probably how it ended up as a companion animal in the first place).
It is not, however, harmless. Cats are poised right on the edge between tame and feral. If they’re not socialized to humans as young kittens, the feral takes over. They’re as wild as a fox or a raccoon, and in some ways more dangerous, because humans don’t always realize how effective a cat’s armament is.
That little ten-pound fuzzy thing can rip a human to shreds with its claws. It’s fast, furious, and absolutely merciless to anything that tries to hold or trap it. Cat rescues handle ferals with Kevlar gloves.
Even a socialized cat has a threshold beyond which a human can’t safely go. Stay on the right side of it and you’ve got a lovely soft purry cuddlebug. Smart humans know what happens if they push their luck.
That’s part of the allure. That edge of danger. The sense that you’re sharing your house and your sleeping place with an animal that can seriously hurt you, but chooses not to. Chooses instead to grace you with its presence, its personality, and its purr.
Humans are storytellers by nature. We make sense of the world by turning it into narrative. We perceive and create patterns. We construct explanations. We invented science to anchor those explanations to the observed and observable world, but before science was story.
In one story, the cat is divine. She’s a goddess; a mystical power. In another, she’s a manifestation of evil. A demon, a creature of the darkness. In yet another, she’s the reason for the existence of the internet, which is, we’re assured, made of cats.
Cat magic is old and powerful, but it’s not only fantasy that celebrates the cat. Science fiction has its own lore of the feline, both the original domestic cat and the felinoid alien. Science fiction authors are well known for their affinity with the species, from Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh to many a more modern talent. It’s an article of faith in the genre that a writer should, if at all possible, have a Writer’s Cat. Or two. Or three.
Yes, yes, I know many who have Writers’ Dogs instead or too, and then there’s the SFWA Cavalry of song and story, where the horsefolk are. But cats are a mainstay.
I’m starting this chapter of the Bestiary with science fiction because I want to. That’s how a cat does it. A cat makes her own decisions. You can persuade her, but if you try to force her, you’ll need those Kevlar gloves.
Because I want to, and because it’s a roaring good story, I’ll be starting with C.J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur. Do join me in the reread (or the read if it’s new to you), and let me know what else, either written or film, you’d like to see. Especially if it’s been published or aired in this century, and better yet, within the past decade. I’d love to know about newer science-fictional cats and their attendant humans.[end-mark]
NB we note that 'Lamar' says that the breaking point with his actual, RL, girlfriend was when he found her doing the horizontal tango with his best friend, but it's clear that there were Problems already there, about having to relate to another human bean who was not always brightly sunshiny positively reinforcing him....
what would he tell his kids? “I’d tell them that humans aren’t really people who can be trusted …
I'm not entirely persuaded that individuals haven't made up imaginary companions (even way on into adulthood) before - I seem to remember some, was it in Fandomwank back in the day, accounts of people being married on the astral plane to fictional characters?
I am not going to see if I actually have a copy of the work on my shelves, or if I perused it in a library somewhere, but didn't that notorious work of 'participant observation' sociology, Tearoom Trade argue that many of his subjects were not defining themselves as 'homosexual'.
I also invoke, even further back, Helen Smith's Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 about men 'messing about' with other men in Yorkshire industrial cities.
And there is a reason people working on the epidemiology and prevention of STIs use the acronym 'MSM' - men who have sex with men - for the significant population at risk who do not identify as gay.
I had, I must admit, a very plus ca change moment when I idly picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Roundabout (1962), and found the piece she wrote on marriage bureaux. In which she mentioned that the two bureaux she interviewed tried to get their subscribers not to be too ultra-specific in their demands - that if they met potential partners in real life they would be more flexible.
Was also amused by the statement that 'Men over thirty are always very anxious to persuade me that they could have all they women they liked, if they bothered'.
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rachelmanija
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