Closing the book of G’Kar.

I think I’ve been failing spectacularly to explain to anyone who isn’t already a fan of Babylon 5 why the death of Andreas Katsulas, who played Narn nemesis-turned-nobleman G’Kar, has hit me like a kidney punch. Of course, I sometimes have a hard time explaining to non-fans why I dug B5 so much in the first place, so maybe it’s more indicative that my powers of persuasion, or communication on the whole, are somehow diminished at a quarter of four in the morning. (Y’think?)
Every character on Babylon 5 underwent sweeping, far-reaching changes over the course of the show, and every one of them was played by actors who were up to the task. But where adventures on the “early” end of the show’s spectrum – the pilot movie The Gathering and the prequel movie In The Beginning – were narrated or introduced by Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), the “voice” of Babylon 5 became that of G’Kar. Tragi-comic Londo rode just a few too many handbaskets to Hell over the course of the show to stand any chance of being accepted as an impartial observer of events. As he rose from antagonist to leader of an entire embattled race to spiritual leader, G’Kar was a far more inspirational character to follow, and he consistently wound up with magnificent monologues such as his pledge to free Narn in The Long, Twilight Struggle, or the epilogue of season 3’s Z’Ha’Dum, or the reading of the Interstellar Alliance’s declaration of principles.
To have anything less than a classically trained actor in that role, especially with the unique requirement of translating real emotion through a rubber face mask, would’ve been a disaster. And not even every classically trained actor could’ve pulled off the sheer range of that character. The flipside of that, however, is that actor and character gradually became one: in his appearance as his other fan favorite SF character, Commander Tomalok in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s series finale (filmed around the same time as the end of B5’s first season), the previously stoic and menacing Romulan became markedly more G’Kar-esque. (Though to give him credit, it’s not beyond the realm of imagination that someone asked him to play it that way, having watched his work on B5. Though I’m sure no one on the Paramount lot would ever admit to that.)
Whether fan hype or the computer effects or just the lure of Something Good That Wasn’t Star Trek drew you to sample Babylon 5, chances are pretty good that Andreas Katsulas had a heck of a lot to do with you sticking around for the rest of the story.