Essential Episode #25: The Sentinel by Blair Sandburg

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As did many others, I learned about The Sentinel first through fanfic.  There were many, many post-series stories, most of them falling in one of these categories:

        ·         Blair becomes a cop

        ·         Blair doesn't become a cop

        ·         Blair (or someone else) finds a way to fix everything

        ·         Blair leaves (at least for a while)

And then there were the authors who wanted to obliterate this episode; they wrote AUs where TSbBS never happened.  You can probably imagine how apprehensive I was to actually watch it.  I dragged my feet as much as possible, until a few years ago when I joined the TS Chat group.  We would watch episodes together and then discuss them, so I could no longer avoid it.  This last essential episode, also the show's finale, was really painful to watch. 

 

I've watched it once or twice since then, and dusted it off to be able to do this essay.  I must say that I see it now with a different eye than that first time.  So, on with the description.

 

Blair, at long last, is finishing his dissertation and we see him type "the end", so know he's got at least the rough draft done.  Surprise! Naomi has come to visit, just in time to find out about the diss, which makes her happy and proud of Blair.  She, of course would like to read it.  Instead of saying something sensible (and true), such as "no, because there's confidential information in it that I'm not allowed to reveal", he gives the weak excuse that he wants it to be 'perfect' before she reads it.  

 

Blair's first mistake: he should have found a way to hide his paper really well from everyone, including Naomi (or someone like Brackett or Alex).  Because Naomi has a bright idea: she'll send it to a publisher friend who can give it a look-over and provide Blair with some good solid feedback.  What could be better than having a professional give you advice?

 

While this is brewing, the MC gang are helping protect an obnoxious union leader named Bartley whose life has been threatened by an old nemesis: Klaus Zeller, aka the Iceman.  Wasn't he in jail?  Yes, but apparently Germany has at least one crooked judge who got Zeller sprung.  Zeller has been hired by the shipping industries to assassinate Bartley in order to prevent him from uniting the workers.  As an ominous aside, Zeller has a history of killing any law enforcement person who's tried to stop him.  Of course, that means Jim.  At a rally, Jim spots Zeller and shoots out the scope of his rifle (why the hell he didn't just wound or kill the guy is beyond me).  So Zeller is thwarted for a while and Bartley goes to a safe house.

 

Blair gets a call from Naomi's publisher friend, Sid Graham.  Instead of giving Blair writing tips, Graham wants to publish the diss as a non-fiction bestseller, thinking that "The Sentinel" has pizzazz.  He offers Blair $100,000 in advance for the rights.  Blair, totally flabbergasted, tells Graham that the paper isn't for publication and Naomi acted without his permission in sending it to Graham.  His second mistake is not coming up with a better threat.  He says, "And if you want to keep your friendship with my mother, I suggest you destroy the copy that you have."  You can almost see Sid weighing the scales in his mind: "friendship with Naomi… millions of dollars, hmm… well, I can always get new friends".  What Blair should have said was, "and if you and your publishing company don't want me to sue your asses, you will be sure to destroy the copy that you have, since you now know that you've obtained it without my consent. "  Well, hindsight is 20/20.  Next, Blair wants to confront Naomi and ask her WTF. 

 

Blair's third mistake was not clueing Jim in immediately.  I fully understand why he didn't—Jim’s reaction to bad news invariably sucks.  But being blind-sided should things go south is much worse.  And things go totally south in a hurry. It's unclear what his motives were, but Graham releases excerpts of the diss to the media and it's circus time!  Reporters mob Jim and Blair asking all kinds of questions, and this is the way Jim finds out Blair's diss is out of the bag.  His worst nightmare is realized; people treat him like a freak of nature—not only the press but his fellow workers.  Even a robber who Jim and Megan arrest wants Jim to sign his tattoo, so he can tell his fellow jailbirds that he was captured by "The Sentinel".  The constant press harassment interferes with Jim’s job; at another rally Zeller is in close proximity, but Jim can't see him because of the paparazzi.  Jim is angry and frustrated. 

 

Once again, Jim's gifts become the brunt of his focus.  He wishes for the days before he came online, bemoaning the fact that he was a good, but anonymous, cop.  Delusional Jim!  Blair, of course, takes it as a personal affront:  attack the senses and he feels attacked because it's the primary reason he's with Jim… isn't it?  Jim, although bitter, advises Blair to take Graham's offer—which has ballooned to three million dollars—and start his new life.  In a ridiculous fact-checking fail, reporters tells Blair he's being nominated for a Nobel Prize in science (there isn't such a category).  And the icing on a very bad cake is that Chancellor Edwards and the university are happy with the prestige this is bringing to the U—did they even read the excerpts to tell whether it was a valid dissertation?  It sounds like they're ready to award him his doctorate on the spot, and perhaps even crown him king.

 

Back to the crime du jour.  A decoy arranged by the police has made Zeller believe that he killed Bartley.  So Zeller decides it's time for revenge against Jim.  He shoots into the PD with a  titanium bullet; hitting both Simon and Megan, but not the target: Jim!  Perhaps Zeller needs glasses; he keeps missing his mark. 

 

The good news from the hospital is that Simon and Megan will both survive.  Blair tries to get Jim to accept his senses and use them to get Zeller.  Jim thinks that Zeller targeted him because he's a sentinel.  So if it wasn't for him, his friends wouldn't have been shot.  Sheesh, Jim, lay off the guilt already!  Jim leaves and Blair ponders what to do to help things.   Later, Zeller learns that he's been played and that Bartley is still alive.  Bad news for his reputation as a great assassin. He goes to Plan B, or perhaps it's Plan C by now because he's really screwed up this job.

 

At the loft, Naomi is begging forgiveness for her interference.  Blair tells her that one thing that came out of it is the validation that his work is important and worthy of notice; that everything he hoped to get out of it—the brass ring—has happened.  He now knows what to do to make things right with his real brass ring, Jim.  He gathers the press for an announcement on live TV.  Eloquent and poignant, in seven sentences Blair destroys his academic career.  He refutes the information in his thesis, saying that the claim that Jim has hyperactive senses is fraudulent, citing his desire to impress his peers and the world as his reason for making everything up.  At the PD, Jim catches the press conference and is totally gobsmacked. 

 

But no time for reflection; Bartley thinks that Zeller has died in an explosion and is antsy to come out of hiding.  Since Jim can't persuade him to stop (he didn't try particularly hard), he goes to the hospital to check on Simon and Megan.  Blair is there and they finally get a chance for a "moment".  Jim doesn't know what to say. Blair leads the way with a couple of lines.   He makes some self-deprecating statements to the effect that the diss was "just a book" and he had no business running around like he was a cop or something.  Jim acknowledges that the diss was Blair’s life.  And, in a statement heard 'round the world, Jim tells Blair that he was a great partner, a great friend and a great cop (in All But Name). He then invites Blair to help him finish up the case.

 

Bartley is getting ready for his own press conference, and is using Simon's office as his command center.  Zeller, who's still alive but nursing his wounded pride, decides to complete the hit on Bartley with some bonus kills—he plans to take out all of Major Crime.  Zeller gets into the building, with guns and everything, showing that the PD has pretty shoddy security.  He goes a little crazy totally psycho, shooting up everything and hitting a couple of people.  He flees to the roof with Jim right behind him, taunting that he still missed Bartley.  Zeller hits Jim in the leg and then rappels down the building.  Blair, helping Jim to the edge, looks down and makes a great statement: "Do we pull him up or knock him off?"  Hmm, perhaps Blair's tough day has translated to a loss of compassion for poor crazy Zeller.  Or perhaps he remembers that Zeller shot him point blank in a previous episode.  Zeller takes the decision out of their hands by shooting up at them.  He might not be able to hit Bartley, but he makes a money shot; slicing his own rope, he falls and dies. 

 

A few days later, Blair is looking around Simon's office, telling Joel that he's cleaned out his office at Rainier and is doing the same at the PD, because he's sure no one will want a fraud around.  Well, he's dead wrong, because Simon (who's a pretty quick healer), Jim, Megan, Naomi and the rest of the gang gather around to tell Blair they want him to join them as a real detective; after attending the academy.  We cut away as Jim is nuzzling and Blair is negotiating: "I'm still not cutting my hair".

 

Whew!  So much good stuff.  All I can say is thank goodness for the fan initiative that brought back TS for this last season.  Instead of a dead Blair, we've got a bumpy set of episodes with a finale that I'm not sure I would want to be any different.   Although it's one of the most wrenching episodes, it's also one of the most complex and touching.  I hate the plot but I love these characters, because of who they are and how they've evolved.

 

 I'll start with Simon, who got pulled into the "sentinel thing" against his will; averting his eyes and showing his "talk to the hand" gesture more times than I can count.  Yet, he stands stalwartly by his friend Jim, and he does so even before Jim goes to Peru to rescue him and Daryl.  He viewed Blair as a necessary evil; a bee buzzing around him—annoying but necessary to produce the honey.  Yet over time he recognizes Blair's contributions; even asks him to be a point man in the investigation of Spaulding's death in Warriors.  Although I think if you made him choose between them, he would still back Jim, he's an honest enough friend to question whether Jim can continue without Blair.  In the end, he respects Blair enough to offer him a place in Major Crime.  Simon is a good friend, but he's not crazy and he takes his career very seriously.  He recognizes the huge sacrifice Blair made for Jim (and for Simon, who now doesn't have to explain things to the DA or the commissioner).  But, despite that, If he didn't think Blair could do the work, he would have tried to do something else to help him.   He believes, as Jim does, that Blair has the makings of a good detective and would be an asset.  What a turn-around from that first impression where he thought Blair was "a neo-hippy flower child with time on his hands now that the Dead are broken up."

 

Megan, although only introduced at the end of the third season, is the counter-balance to Simon in the character dynamics.  At first adversarial, she comes to respect Jim as a colleague, and she's as tough and driven as he is.  But she also comes from a culture where the mystical is more accepted than in the U.S. She's intrigued by the unknown and she has a lot of respect for Blair and his work.  She also doesn't come between Jim and Blair or try to denigrate Blair's contributions, which was Cassie's mistake.  She's the one who accompanies Blair to Sierra Verde, and she's able to draw conclusions and keep her mouth shut.  When Jim and Blair are at odds in this episode, it's Megan who brings the voice of reason, telling Jim that Blair didn't hurt him intentionally and praising Blair's accomplishment, even while acknowledging his dilemma.  She's the one Blair talks to when Jim shuts him out—telling her that publishing his work is his biggest dream; and his worst nightmare. 

 

What can I say about poor Naomi?  Of all the characters, I'd have to say she suffered most from the Jessica Rabbit syndrome: "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way".  The actress who played Naomi  admitted as much years later; that the writers rewrote her for whatever they needed.  In this episode, they needed her to be the heavy, but saved from being truly bad by being ditzy.  "I promised Blair I wouldn't read it, but you can"—puleeze!  But she does her job here, and she did her job as a loving and protective mother in Spare Parts to the point where we and the guys can give her the benefit of the doubt.  Blair believes her and we love and trust Blair; ergo we believe her.  Some of us, anyway!

 

Of all the characters, Blair has changed the most from beginning to end.  It isn't simply that he no longer wears multi-colored vests and earrings.  He made a fundamental change in his life's goals.  I think the problem was that he was kind of stuck in a mental groove, viewing himself as that same anthropologist/post-grad student he was when he first met Jim.  Perhaps the "roller-coaster ride" in the end wasn't just exciting, it was all-consuming.  With every escalating case he had less and less time to recognize that it wasn't academia he was turning away from, it was Jim he was turning towards.  The first wake-up call was in "Flight", where he turns down a possible career-making expedition because "it's about friendship".  That certainly should have set off alarms if he was still thinking as an anthropologist or a scientist.  He’s way too close to his subject and has a dissertation that would have his committee asking "Where's the beef?"  By "Warriors", he admitted to Jim that he was stalling; that he had enough material to finish his thesis and get his PhD long before.  It's also interesting that he hadn't previously revealed this tidbit to Jim; perhaps he was concerned that when he finished the diss, Jim would want him to leave.

 

 By the fourth season, after the horrific traumas of Sentinel Too, he's changed even more.  He still admires Jim as a person, even though sometimes Jim totally pisses him off.  He's still fascinated by Jim's sentinel capabilities, which continue to evolve, as well as the elusive mystical elements that are part of the gift.  But he's also heavily into being Jim's partner, and Jim seems to take it for granted that Blair is his partner.  When Blair shows up late to the rally in this episode, Jim's comment "Nice of you to join us" shows a definite expectation that Blair should be by his side.  Blair's apology shows he feels the same way. 

 

He's becoming more and more disenchanted with University politics, especially after Murder 101.  But he continues to work on his sentinel dissertation, even though it's a cause of friction between Jim and Blair.  If these two men had just once sat down and reviewed their original agreement; what had changed and how they had changed, how different might the outcome have been?  If they talked about what Blair could do to get his doctorate and stay with Jim (switch to forensic anthropology, perhaps?), not only would Naomi have had nothing to send to Sid, but the pervasive tension brought on by the diss situation could have been resolved.  I sometimes wonder whether Jim wasn't the only one with fear-based responses.

 

Ah, spilled milk, eh?  Jim, Blair and even Simon continued happily on the roller coaster, never noticing that their labels for each other—'Jim's boss',' Lone Wolf Ellison', 'flaky but helpful Observer Sandburg'—were totally outmoded.  For all intents and purposes, Blair and Jim were work partners and Simon was their boss.  And they had become friends—caring about each other's well-being.  This is what I mean about getting stuck in a groove and not recognizing it.   They had wake-up calls along the way, like when Finkelman revokes Blair's pass, or Brackett and Alex find Blair's research, or Blair is fired from the Uni.  But they blithely ignore them. Why did they have to be such clueless men.

 

And on that segue let's get to Jim.  Many fen vilify him for his reactions in this episode; feeling he should have known that Blair would never betray him for money and fame.  But does he truly believe that?  Jim is a man of action and often his words are hasty and don't truly represent his feelings.  Most of the time he comes out ahead by following his instincts, but his knee-jerk reactions to emotional turmoil rarely start out well.  The first hint that his secret is out is when he's confronted by reporters, all eager to interview "the sentinel".  His first assumption is that Blair is to blame, and he's right—it was Blair's actions and inactions that got them from here to there.    Of course, this brings back a lot of fears he's never really dealt with; fear of betrayal, fear of abandonment, fear of being viewed as a freak and fear that the bad guys will know he's got an edge.  The ridiculous reaction by his coworkers, Blair's attempts to prevent Jim from finding out what Naomi has done, and Zeller taking advantage of the situation do nothing to assuage these fears. 

 

When he finally learns all the facts, he's still angry at Blair, but it's a justified anger.  He asks what Blair's plan was to guarantee his anonymity, and he questions Blair's security measures.  Those are absolutely things that were Blair's responsibility to control.  But, even before Blair's press conference, I don't think that Jim truly believed that Blair did it on purpose, or perceived it as a betrayal.  If he did, I think he would have immediately thrown Blair out of his life.  Jim doesn't do that, nor does he throw Naomi out.   In the middle of all the chaos, he makes a decision to let everything outside of his control go, while he tries to pick up the pieces and make a life for himself of his choosing.  Of course, it's very pie-in-the-sky to think he can go back to the way things were before the senses, but Jim's always been pretty good at denial.  Still, his decision shows that he's already going to put it behind him and to try to fix what he can on his own.  Very Jim-like.  So, his reaction of shock when he sees the press conference is total.  I think he expected Blair to be sorry and to try to mitigate the situation, perhaps through some tap-dancing and misdirection.  And although Jim has risked his life many times for friends, and even strangers he's sworn to protect, I don't think he ever had someone make such a monumental sacrifice for him.

 

When Blair said in Warriors, "It's about friendship, I just didn't get it before", he was having an epiphany about what friendship means to Jim.  The press conference in TSbBS provided Jim's epiphany.  Up until then, I don't think he truly believed that Blair's definition of friendship was as deep as his own.  I think he always felt there was a limit to Blair's commitment; perhaps because Blair continued to work on the sentinel dissertation despite the fact that Jim really didn't want him to complete it.  Perhaps, because Jim tends to compartmentalize things, he put Blair in a "good backup to have but he's only here temporarily" box and never changed the label, despite everything they went through together.  And I think, in the end, that is what Jim's ashamed of; not that he thought Blair betrayed him, but that he didn't give Blair's depth of feelings for Jim the credit that they were due.  And, perhaps if he had, they might have talked out the situation and come to a different solution than Blair's self-immolation of his career.  Of course, I'm not really sure Blair fully understood what he was willing to do for Jim up until the time he took that irrevocable step, so perhaps they both learned something.

 

Of course, when Jim is upset, he tends to clam up (when he's not blowing up) and then overcompensates to make up for it.  So, his simple invitation at the hospital for Blair to come back to his side and his statement that Blair was "the best cop I've ever met" is pretty Jim-like behavior.  But his statement that Blair was "a good friend and pulled me through some pretty weird stuff" couldn't have been truer. 

 

Fen have long been divided about whether Blair would have accepted the badge and, if he did, whether he would have succeeded.  For myself, good stories have persuaded me of different possibilities.  But I can really see him accepting the badge and doing well, and here's why.  From the beginning, he had no real hesitation to spontaneously do what was necessary to get the job done and stop the bad guys.  He could have waited for Jim to come down from the tower in Switchman, headed off the tow truck long enough for Jim to make it to the car and they could have followed the bus.  His instinct was to "do" something to help Jim be successful.  He had no hesitation at holding a gun on Veronica, and in the last scene he asks Jim "Do I get a badge?"  He wants to be on the inside; something he probably doesn't even understand prevents him from keeping professional distance right from the start. 

 

Throughout the show there's examples of that need driving him to do more than simply watch Jim's back.  He's obviously not suicidal, so he does actually stay behind Jim in dangerous situations.  But in a fire fight, he's a go-to guy—that's where Jim's admiring statement in the hospital comes from.  He's earned that praise. I can only imagine formal training will make him better.  Blair progressively participates more and more as a detective, and less as a casual observer.  He's gone native.   And, finally, at the end of this episode, when he looks at the badge and says "really?", there's hope in his eyes that it's a bona fide offer.  That's why I think he would take a badge and do a great job—because he was already on that path.

 

Essential Elements:

v  The senses:  Jim still uses them well and often.  The shot where he takes out Zeller's scope is reminiscent of his shooting down Veronica's barrel in Switchman.  In fact, his ambivalence about the senses also brings it back full circle.  Despite the fact that three times he's affirmed that he accepts the mantel of a sentinel, he remains a man uneasy with this gift that he so often perceives as a double-edged sword.

v   Relationships:  I'm not sure I can add much more to the analysis above.  The crime was actually the most boring aspect of the episode and Zeller, in the end, turned out to be a deadly but clownish villain.  The other crime, exposing Jim and threatening his relationship, was the main thrust here; it served to bring up all the unresolved stuff these men and women had been pushing aside for the sake of crime-fighting.  But sometimes you just can't push it aside any longer, and this episode showed that in spades.

v  Sound bytes: Fraud, best cop I've ever worked with, I'm not cutting my hair.

v  Influence on fanfic:  Do I even have to say anything?  I don't think there's an author who hasn't done either a post-TSbBS story or a "fix-it" to the episode.  Some have written dozens.  All the speculation, all the future fic that follows the canon timeline starts here.

episode-related fanfic