Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #5: Londo Mollari and G’Kar, Babylon 5
Bound together because they’re amazing individually and sublime together. The evolution of these two characters and their relationship is one of the greatest achievements in the television I’ve seen.
Londo, a brazen imperialist languishing in a joke of an assignment because nobody wants to bother with him, and G’Kar, a firebrand facing down a war with nothing but his voice and the loyalty he has bought with his own blood—this is the stuff of epics. The give and take, the push and pull, G’Kar insistently buying Londo a drink in giddy hopes of a cessation of hostilities as Londo sits there meditating on the backstabbing attack he had personally arranged scant hours ago…it never stops being good. Londo’s businesslike walk into perdition and G’Kar’s gradual transformation beat against one another over, and over again. Londo’s best moments are the ones where he realizes how far he’s let everything go against G’Kar’s people, and G’Kar’s best moments are spitting defiance, sometimes literally, at the chains of Londo’s empire.
There are days when Londo and G’Kar carry the show. In Babylon 5’s stately, intricate storytelling, they inject boatloads of personality, successfully shining as both people and icons. The elevator sequence is one of the greatest scenes in television, fight me.