Jack of Harts

We lost a beautiful actress in the last week. She played the alien Delenn on Babylon 5, and humanized the alien race that had nearly wiped us out ten years before the show began. And as the series went by, we found out more and more how involved in that conflict Delenn had been. It was one of the central themes of the entire show, and Mira Furlan played the part perfectly. She could be kind and fierce in equal measure, and her own experiences became a significant part of that story.

Mira was an emigrant from Yugoslavia, a nation devastated first by a Communist government, and then by the civil war that followed the fall of that government. She came to America, looking for a better life, and she found it. She built it. And she gave us one of the best characters in science fiction history, in my opinion. A character who saw civil war so closely heartbreakingly, that Mira once walked up to the writer and asked him how long he had lived in Yugoslavia, because of how well he had written what her character was going through.

Delenn’s smile was contagious, her wrath was spine-shaking, her kindness was spellbinding, and her curiosity was poignant. She once said, “We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.” I think that sums her character up, well.

I mourn the death of the actress who gave that character life. I celebrate that she lived, and we got to see a brighter world because of it.

She is proof that “Faith manages.”