© 1997 Ragnar Fyri. All rights reserved.
to the tune of "Sergeant Pepper's lonely heart club band"
Spoiler warning: If you are a Babylon 5 fan from some distant part of the
world that's long behind the rest of us, you may not have seen the double
episode "War without end" yet.
If so, DON'T READ ANY FURTHER until you have seen
that episode. (Check out some of my other works
instead!) Thank you.
This year (1997) marks the 30th anniversary of the record I have
mentioned a couple of times, and once I was for some reason thinking about
the song and the TV series at the same time, I wrote this:
For those who didn't get it, "Min" is supposed to be the Minbar
equivalent of "Men" (Okay, so I did that just for the
rhyme!). A thought that just occured to me was that B4 is
pronounced "before", and that is indeed where (or rather
when) it went! Maybe after the war is over there will be another
space station built (or brought forward from the past?) with a
name whose initials sound like "after". (Not in English,
obviously, but maybe in some new language? In Norwegian "etter"
sounds a bit like 1R...)
Okay, you're still here near the end of season 3 or
even further ahead. Has it ever occured to you how many round numbers
there are in fictive history? Things always happened ten, two hundred
or three thousand years ago, and we are not talking about approximations
either. Important things did happen on this date exactly twenty years
ago. Or as the SPLHC Band would put it, twenty years ago today.
'Twas a thousand years ago today
Brother Valen leapt into the fray
He'd been going in and out of phase
but he promised he would save our race
Now let me introduce to you
the act you've known for all these years:
Valen Sinclair's shadow Fighting Crew!
We're Valen Sinclair's Shadow Fighting Crew
We hope you'll let us save your world
We're Valen Sinclair's
one and only Shadow Fighting Crew
So says the Prophecy, we've heard!
Valen Sinclair's Shadow
Valen Sinclair's Shadow
Valen Sinclair's Shadow Fighting Crew!
Our founder Jeffrey Sinclair
went travelling in time
He brought the B4 back to us
and then he made a speech to us
and this is what he said:
"I don't really want to start a war
It's been done a hundred times before
But the Shadows gonna waste us all
if we cannot engineer their fall
I'm looking for A Few Good Min
to be the founding members in
Valen Sinclair's Shadow Fighting Crew!"