Myth Happens

My afternoon somewhat derailed with the discovery that Damian London, otherwise known from nine memorable appearances on Babylon 5 (1994–98) as the eventual Regent of Centauri Prime, had died in 2022. I had missed the news at the time.

I don't know that I ever saw him in another role. It didn't matter. I loved that one more than anyone outside the circle of the main cast, even some of the one-shot guests who haunted themselves into my unfinished fiction, so much so that writing about him feels like excavating a quarter-century out of my id. Like so many small, important characters, he took a couple of appearances to come into focus, but by the time he was a semi-regular in the Centauri arc of Season 4, which had the thoughtfulness to air right as I was coming off a year of carrying the red-spined Modern Library edition of Robert Graves' I, Claudius (1934) everywhere with me like a talisman which I had duly chased with the inimitable 1976 BBC series, he could have been committee-designed to catch me. I loved his anxious flicker of a face, his restlessly fluttering hands and his giddy quaver of a tenor which broke up too easily over its own ineffectual jokes, a flamboyant little fusspot with an apparent attention span of prevailing fashion and a skittish tenacity underneath the sycophancy, risking his no-name skin to acknowledge the horror of his glamorous emperor's caprices even as it visibly frightened him to talk about not talking about it. Watching his flighty, essential decency rewarded with a regency gave me the same pleasure as downtrodden Kaliko elevated to Nome King and confirmed a pessimism about my character preferences that would take decades to dismantle when his short reign slid almost instantly into the nightmare endgame of a deal with shadows that he never made. "Once I would have thought—pastels for the curtains. But I think we're well beyond pastels now." Dwindled to a cracked oracle instead of an imperial redecorator, a teetotaler trying to drink himself to death before he could be made to order the next round of atrocities, he was a tiny cameo of tragedy in the planet-scorching sweep of the fall of Centauri Prime. I couldn't watch his last scene without tears, this fragile, ridiculous, tormented little figure facing his death with more dignity than he had anything in life. The last movie that had made me cry, my grandmother had been dying.

"I have been many things in my life, Mollari. I have been silly. I have been quiet when I should have spoken. I have been foolish, and I have wasted far too much time. But I am still Centauri, and I am not afraid."

It makes a better story if I began to write fanfiction only after I had established myself as a professionally published author and it's true that for ten years I hardly even paid attention to Yuletide, but a string of barely scuffed serial numbers can be detected in my juvenilia and in the spring of my senior year of high school the Regent of Centauri Prime, who had not yet been extra-canonically confirmed with the name of Milo Virini, became the first character for whom I ever wrote fic, now mercifully lost to the sands of Geocities, unlike my mild grudge against the site maintainer for editing my submissions without checking with me first. I wrote, too, a nonfiction appreciation of the character which despite the same interference almost certainly represented my first independent effort at media criticism. I wrote him into a scene for an open-ended choose-your-own-adventure website where some other user had left the plot hanging on Centauri Prime with their OC. God bless link rot. When this interview came out, I was in college and my horizons of television were being broadened by British comedy and I read it; I still have the text of another, moderated AMA-style by TNT and The Zocalo Today, which I saved and copied as a now very extinct Word document in the same year. The actor answered one question in character as the Regent to Cartagia. "Just think, I got to be the Regent and I didn't have to chop anybody's head off. I saw the room with all the heads. I'm glad I wasn't one of them."

I don't actually know much more about the actor than he shared in interviews, which means the trivia that he loved science fiction serials like Buck Rogers when he was a kid in the '30's and no idea if he left anyone. It never occurred to me to write to him when he had an address on the open internet, which I regret in the same way as never writing to Peter Dickinson or Tanith Lee. He was ninety-one when he died. He outlived many of the major players of Babylon 5, which in a kindlier timeline is what one might have wished for Regent Virini: an unambitious regency, a peaceable retirement, the uneventful survival of history. Neither fire nor shadow. Pastels.