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This page was originally created on Jan 24th 1995
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COMMANDER SUSAN IVANOVA

Starring Claudia Christian


No boom Today, Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
The highly ambitious russian, Commander Susan Ivanova is second in command and in charge of the every-day operations of the Earth Alliance Space Station Babylon 5.

Nutshell info:

Ivanova has very sharp intelligence and a strong will, if she wants something she gets it, even if it takes to bend the Earth Alliance rules a bit. Being russian descent she is somewhat pessimistic with a sense of doom hanging over her, yet she has her moments of great belief in humanity. From her comments on russianity we can see that she is proud to be russian, and I can only guess that the Russian Consortium of 23rd century is politically very unlike the Russia at the last quarter of the 20th century.

There is nothing funny about Ivanova, she's deadly serious, but with her wit and a nice touch of pessimism she can either deadpan just about anybody and kick their ass as a sidepoint, or send the watcher twisting on the floor with laughter. Either way, she stays as cool as a siperian freezer.

Susan is used to being stepped on and to having to survive on her own. Since her mothers suicide she has been keeping her lonelyness and sorrow to herself, even when her father, the last member of her family died, she sucked in the pain and shut off the tears. At least until her familys rabbi "Uncle Yossel" Koslov came bring her her legacy, and tries to have her sit shiva for her father. She first refuses, but as the rabbi is leaving Babylon 5, she goes thru her fathers last words to her and finally forgives him for not being able to give her his love as a father should and calls the rabbi to sit shiva with her. This leads us to a heart-breaking scene that brings tears not only to her eyes.

Her mother was discovered to be a latent telepath on her 35th birthday and was forced to take Psi-reduntant drugs, which drove her to finally take her own life after ten years. Andrei closed himself from the rest of the family and a year later Ganya was killed in the war. Susan always blamed her father for not being able to help her mother, and felt he still couldn't find a shred of love for her. She thought he always just tried to control her life, and decided there was no place for her home anymore. So she joined Earthforce against Andreis wishes. Later (in 2258) when Susan asked Andrei to come and visit her on Babylon 5, he refused by saying that man had no place in space before he learned to live in peace on earth, and later that year he died.

When she was thirteen Susan had been a great admirer of a radical neo-communist author, who her father felt was personally responsible for the destruction of russian cultures. Andrei was invited to one of his readings and had no intention of going but Susan pleaded him to take her. She formulated "the perfect question" for the author but he just answered that he had better things to do than to answer questions of a wench that was barely out of diapers. Susan was crushed but Andrei stood up and said that his daughter was neither a wench nor had used diapers for many, many years, but HIS writings were still to rise above the contents of those garments.

Before her suicide Sofie had been in Susans mind for various times, and shared her love for her with her, this obviously tied them to be very close to each other. "You can't imagine what it's like to feel your own mothers love for you, no one must ever intrude upon that memory, especially not Psi Corps." This may be the reason for Susans absolute refusal of being telepathicly probed. She rather resigns and leaves her post to get drunk in the station casino, a scene where we will find out why she is so efficient in removing unauthorized personel from the observation dome.

Other Trivia:



See also:


And keep in mind the Babylon 5 mantra:
URL: http://www.iki.fi/explorer/ivanova/index.html
(c) 1995 Juho Heikkila
explorer@iki.fi

Babylon 5, its characters etc. are copyright by Warner Brothers, no infringement of that copyright is intended.