Well, that's certainly fair. I don't share the same view, but that's hardly a surprise; whatever else there is to call this episode, it's certainly high-concept

Well, that's certainly fair. I don't share the same view, but that's hardly a surprise; whatever else there is to call this episode, it's certainly high-concept, and those do tend to be the more divisive ones among the fanbase. For me there's something akin to a "twist budget," maybe; a show that does it too often or by too much of a leap starts to look overly pleased with its own cleverness. This doesn't reach that threshold with me, and indeed I thought the twist here actually did a lot to add depth and pathos to the character of Sebastian. For him merely to have been a sneering villain would probably have worked, set against Furlan's and Boxleitner's performances, and given after all this was a story about Delenn and Sheridan. Making him a repentant monster, with a unique perspective on their values and choices drawn from the horrific miscarriage of his own, turned what could have been just a sneering villain into something almost as pitiable as frightening, and shed new light not only on Alexander's performance but, in a narrative sense, on the depth and extent of the Vorlons' involvement in human history - a topic on which the story would later have much more to say, and putting in some work to help set that up here would help those later occasions likewise avoid tipping over into the "too clever by half" sort of twist. That said, the specific questions you ask here have been asked before, and JMS has answered them. Those answers are collected on the Lurker's Guide page for this episode [1], and I think are worth your review; even if you find they fail to persuade, they'll at least still yield insight into why the story was written as it was. [1] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/043.html http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/043.html