Plot Synopsis:
When a damaged ship comes hurtling through the nearby jump gate on a collision course with the station, Sinclair must go out to tow it out of harms way. Inside the vessel is one severely injured passenger, who is brought to the Med Lab and placed under the care of new arrival Dr. Stephen Franklin. Franklin has never seen the passenger's species before, but he is game for a challenge.
On his way to visit the injured alien, Sinclair runs into Delenn, who offers to help in the identification process. When she catches sight of the alien, however, she immediately tries to kill him with Garibaldi's gun and has to be restrained. She claims the alien is a Soul Hunter, a being who steals souls, and pleads with Sinclair to get rid of the alien before someone dies. When she has calmed down, she further explains that the Soul Hunters are immortal beings who snatch souls at the moment of death. Only the most worthy souls are taken, she says, and the Soul Hunters seem to have a special interest in the Minbari.
Meanwhile, the Soul Hunter in the Med Lab comes to, and he senses the approaching death of a lurker from Downbelow, who is brought to Dr. Franklin with what indeed turns out to be a fatal stab wound. Sinclair confronts the Soul Hunter regarding his rather creepy sixth sense, but the alien chants a mantra to himself and refuses to cooperate. So Sinclair tries a different approach: he accuses the Soul Hunter of being a thief. The Soul Hunter instantly rises to the bait, denying the accusation and insisting that he takes souls to preserve them, not to destroy them. Sinclair points out that the Minbari take a different view, to which the Soul Hunter replies that the Minbari are selfish and refuse to share their great minds. Franklin thinks all this talk of soul gathering is a load of hogwash, but Sinclair seems less certain. He asks the Soul Hunter why the Minbari receive his kind with such hostility, and the Soul Hunter replies that at the start of the Earth-Minbari War, he tried to preserve the soul of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader, and was blocked by Dukhat's fellow Minbari.
Later, Delenn confronts the Soul Hunter. She demands to know where his collection of souls is stored and vows to seize them and free them from their prisons. The Soul Hunter states that releasing the souls will result in their destruction; Delenn replies that not to release the souls would diminish the Minbari as a race, a notion the Soul Hunter dismisses as false. Then he recognizes Delenn as one of the Minbari who stopped him from "preserving" Dukhat. He addresses her as "Satai Delenn of the Grey Council" and wonders aloud why such an important leader of the Minbari would stoop to serving as an ambassador. Delenn leaves in a hurry without providing a response.
With Delenn gone, the Soul Hunter pretends to collapse. The guard stationed in the Med Lab moves to check on the alien and is knocked unconscious for his trouble. The Soul Hunter then makes his escape. In alien sector, he buys a map of the station from an insectoid and searches out his quarry: Delenn. In the meantime, another Soul Hunter arrives and informs Sinclair that the Soul Hunter they have aboard is dangerously mad - that he has taken to killing people outright in order to take their souls instead of patiently waiting for death. With this second Soul Hunter's help, Sinclair finds Delenn in the first Soul Hunter's clutches. When Sinclair comes upon the scene, the first Soul Hunter is slowly draining Delenn's blood to hasten her death. Sinclair turns the Soul Hunter's collection machine on the Soul Hunter himself and rescues Delenn. Before he dies, the Soul Hunter tells Sinclair that Delenn is Satai. Later, back in his quarters, Sinclair asks the computer to translate the word "Satai" and learns that Delenn is a member of the Grey Council. He too wonders why a woman of her station would condescend to work as an ambassador, but he figures that Delenn will explain in the fullness of time.
While Delenn recovers in the Med Lab, Sinclair tells the second Soul Hunter that the Soul Hunters cannot be permitted on Babylon 5 because their presence is too disruptive. The second Soul Hunter concedes this reality, then asks what happened to the first Soul Hunter's collection. Sinclair declares the collection's disappearance a "mystery," but we later see Delenn breaking apart each of the first Soul Hunter's bubbles and releasing the souls within.
Overall: 5.3 - A boring episode overall, which is a shame given the story's baseline assumptions.
Writing: 5
This episode attempts to take advantage of Babylon 5's situation as a center of culture clash by setting up a religious conflict between the Minbari and the Soul Hunters, but as demonstrated by the paucity of the highlights below, the script simply doesn't sparkle. For reasons I will discuss further below, I want to like this episode more than I do, but aside from the nod to Delenn's secretiveness, there is very little here that catches my interest.
Acting: 4
I love Mira Furlan, but in this episode, she is really overwrought. I understand that, for her character, the stakes are high, but wow - her distress here borders on the ludicrous. Meanwhile, I don't understand W. Morgan Sheppard's choice to deliver all of his lines in this drawn out, hypnotic cadence. Instead of conveying that his character is creepy and insane, he merely succeeds in putting me to sleep. On the up side, though, the late Rick Biggs is entirely natural in his first appearance as Franklin.
Message: 7
Here we are at the second episode, and already, Babylon 5 is trying to depart from the usual materialist assumptions of science fiction. I don't know that it entirely succeeds. The notion that a soul can be "captured" in a physical container still contains within it a whiff of the material, but at least the writer acknowledges that the soul exists in the first place - and that it is eternal.
Highlights:
FRANKLIN: It's all so brief, isn't it? The typical human life span is almost a hundred years - but it's barely a second compared to what's out there. It wouldn't be so bad if life didn't take so long to figure out. Seems you just start to get it right and then... it's over.
IVANOVA: It doesn't matter. If we lived two hundred years, we'd still be human. We'd still make the same mistakes.
FRANKLIN: You're a pessimist.
IVANOVA: I'm Russian, Doctor. We understand these things.
No comments:
Post a Comment