Gosh darnit, I missed commenting on this earlier, and I've had this comment prepared since MR Discworld started:

Where's my cow?
Is that my cow?
It goes 'WHAT WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS BOOK?'
It is Mark!
No, that is not my cow!

I don't have a lot to say about this one, beyond noting that I think I liked Star Trek: TOS's take on Jack the Ripper more (what is it with that particular historical bogeyman and science fiction?)

So, this episode fucked me up so bad when I first saw it as a baby queer. I'd never seen a canonically queer character in any kind of mainstream entertainment; I'd been used to the kind of slash fandom where you look for evidence, not that the characters are queer, but that they aren't definitively *not* queer. And Ivanova was my idol. (Ivanova's ability to go between butch and femme looks wound up being the thing that led me to figure out I was nonbinary. I'm pretty sure I love her more than Mark does.) Hence this is the episode that utterly destroyed me, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Let's go over some points:

1. First and foremost, this episode was censored. I've heard the advertisers threatened to pull out if they made the Ivanova/Winters romance unambiguous, and that the suits were scared. It's perhaps important to remember that this was before Buffy went there, or Xena, and years before Ellen came out on her show; it was doubtless a tough sell. Given that, I actually think they did a pretty good job of making it as clear as they could while maintaining the required level of plausible deniability. I hate that they had to, but I appreciate that they didn't give up on it.

2. One of the ways I think they compensated quite well for the censorship was in having Ivanova's "coming out" as a telepath positioned in the middle of a story where her queerness is actually at the centre of her role in the plot. It's a clever thing in a way; telepaths are an invisible minority, feared and rejected and forced to suppress their true nature. Note there's no suggestion anywhere in the episode that Talia and Ivanova's relationship is taboo or unusual; we first see them on a public date, completely at ease. Having the scene where Ivanova goes, obviously frightened, to tell her friend/brother figure that she's been hiding a major part of who she is from him and everyone, and placing that scene right after we see her talking about her feelings of vulnerability with Talia, lets us have a coming-out that's network-approved and makes sense in the context of the future B5 presents. (Telepaths aren't a perfect analogy for queer people, of course, because they're legitimately dangerous. It still works pretty well in this story.)

3. On the subject of whether Talia's feelings for Ivanova were real, I'd just like to point out that Ivanova is basically the worst possible person for Control to target, because she's extremely private and hostile towards the Corps specifically; the logical target is Garibaldi, who was clearly super into Talia and not at all suspicious of her. The only reason to pick Ivanova over him is that Ivanova was the one that Talia, the actual person, was attracted to. That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

As a former high-tech worker who grew up in the Silicon Valley, this comment thread hits home for me because the tech industry my parents worked in when I was small was apparently largely run by technical people who cared about what they were making and the one I worked in was run by suits who... yeah, do exactly that.

It's weird to me that Franklin stroking unconscious people's hair is apparently a thing - he did it to Alisa Beldon, for example. Like, it's meant to be reassuring bedside manner I think, but...

Right?!

I haven't done my rewatch of this episode yet, but I have specific memories of watching this as a baby queer juuust reaching some early conclusions (at some point I may write about how Ivanova led me to discover my gender identity) but who had leaped eagerly onto the Ivanova/Winters ship some time in episode 1. This was considerably after the show first aired, but before there was much in the way of queer representation in mainstream entertainment, so I was basically looking for subtext I could read into and use as a jumping-off point for fanfic. And boy, this episode was a gold mine.

It's... they spend the entire thing engaged in a custody battle and end by going out for coffee, which... I mean, it's a totally normal platonic activity, but also I'd seen multiple shows where two women going for "coffee" basically signalled that they were A Thing, so I seized on that. (I've since learned that the "coming out" episode of Ellen ended with a coffee date, too. I'm still not sure if it's a trope though.)

Fasten-zip.

I remember the first time I watched this episode being so confused because I couldn't quite believe David Warner wasn't playing a villain. I was so used to him being evil!

A thing that came to me listening to Mark reading this bit is that I kind of imagine the noises coming out of the speaking tube sounding like the grown-ups in a Peanuts cartoon.

Also, this is my first re-read of this book since I watched Leverage, and I feel like Moist would really get along with Sophie...