Ivanova (Claudia Christian) awakes early and goes to C & C. The station receives a distress call from a Starfury pilot escorting a freighter attacked by raiders. Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) orders Delta Wing launched. A man named Morden (Ed Wasser) arrives from the Rim. Sinclair has a meeting with Ivanova and Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) about the increasing raider attacks. They can’t figure out how they can appear so fast. Sinclair asks Garibaldi to investigate what happened to him at the Battle of the Line. He tells Garibaldi that the memory of meeting Delenn at that battle has come back to him. The Centauri Republic has arranged to buy the Eye, a valuable Centauri artifact lost for a hundred years. Morden is watching everyone.
Morden meets G’Kar and asks him what he wants. G’Kar says to see the Centauri utterly destroyed. A Centauri liner arrives and Mollari meets it. On board is Lord Kiro (Gerrit Graham) and Lady Ladika (Fredi Olster). She has a vision of the station being destroyed and faints. She is taken to Medlab but is not hurt. Lord Kiro dismisses her vision because she is often wrong. Laughing, he says she told him he would be killed by shadows. He is there to retrieve the Eye from Mollari and bring it to the Emperor. Morden meets with Delenn and asks her what she wants. She senses a dark presence and sends him away.
Kiro inspects the Eye in Mollari’s quarters. He says it originally belonged to his house and wonders why he should give it to the Emperor. He muses about claiming the throne and Mollari tells him that without support he would be dead in a day. In space, the freighter Achilles, headed for Babylon Five, detects raiders. Delta Wing is launched with Ivanova leading the team. Ambassador Kosh (voice of Ardwight Chamberlain) returns, almost crossing paths with Morden. Kiro tells Mollari he is ready to leave for Centauri. On the way to meeting him with the Eye, Mollari meets Morden, who asks him what he wants. Unable to get rid of Morden, Mollari says he wants the Centauri Republic to return to its former glory.
In C & C, Sinclair is informed that Ivanova’s team is approaching Achilles. He inquires about the cargo manifest of Achilles. Mollari heads for the shuttle with Kiro, but they are attacked, and the Eye is taken. The two Centauris are kept as hostages. Sinclair discovers there is nothing of value on the Achilles, realizes the raiders are only staging a diversion to distract the station’s fighters, and orders Delta Wing to return. Kiro’s ship, just about to leave, attracts his attention, and Sinclair heads for customs. He heads off Mollari and the others. The raider leader takes Kiro hostage and leaves in Kiro’s ship. Sinclair orders Alpha Wing to disable it and programs the jumpgate to reject the ship’s codes. But a raider battlewagon comes in and launches a wing of fighters to attack the station.
During the raider attack on the station, the Centauri ship reaches the raider vessel. Kiro and the Eye are taken aboard. Escorted to a shelter, Ladira has a vision and tells Mollari the shadows have come for Lord Kiro. Morden runs into Kosh and is ordered to leave. Kosh says, “Leave this place. They are not for you.” Eventually the raider wing is disabled or destroyed, but the battlewagon opens a jumpgate and escapes.
The battlewagon returns to normal space, far away. The raiders change their mind and refuse to help Kiro stage a coup against the Centauri government. They will ransom the eye, and Kiro too, to the Republic for profit. But a strange alien vessel appears and blows the ship to pieces. Ladira instantly senses the death of Lord Kiro. Mollari thinks his career is over after losing the Eye, but Morden turns up and hands it to him in a box. Garibaldi has found out that Sinclair was hired to run the station at the insistence of the Minbari government. He sees Lady Ladira off as she warns him of her vision of the station’s destruction.
This is the first appearance of the Shadows and their agent Morden. He wears a black stone on a silver chain. In a Babylon Five novel, it is said the stone was a gift from his wife. The shadows got his cooperation by saving her from a hyperspace accident. Ed Wasser, who plays Morden, was picked for the role because he has a strange resemblance to Rod Serling. He said that many years later, he was buying flowers when the clerk asked him what he wanted. He answered, but the clerk repeated the question until Wasser remembered playing the role. Sadly, the clerk thought it was on Deep Space Nine. He was brilliant in the role, as enigmatic as Kosh. Interestingly, Morden does a number of good things, and yet you feel he is evil, while Kosh does some really bad things to people, but you think he’s good.
A sign on the station advertises the Rolling Stones’ Farewell Concert in the Presley Arena. Signs and Portents was also the title of the entire first season, emphasizing its importance. The Shadows were named for Karl Jung’s shadow—the part of the mind that is all desire, and destructive. J. Michael Straczynski likes to have one great action moment, one nice character moment, one solid dramatic moment, and one that is fall down funny, in every episode.