“Confessions and Lamentations”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Kevin G. Cremin
Season 2, Episode 18
Production episode 218
Original air date: May 24, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Ivanova informs Sheridan that a Markab ship is ten hours overdue. She requests permission to send a Starfury team out to find them. The subject of Keffer’s off-duty trips to figure out what the weird ship was he saw when he was rescuing the Cortez comes up. Sheridan tells Ivanova to put the kibosh on those trips.
Franklin is in the cabin of a Markab who died, along with a Markab doctor, Lazarenn, who is obviously an old friend and colleague of Franklin’s. Lazarenn is grumpy at Franklin’s presence, but Franklin needs to sign off on all death certificates on the station. Besides, this is the fourth Markab to die of allegedly natural causes in recent times. He wishes to do an autopsy on this Markab, just to be sure. Lazarenn very reluctantly agrees, not that he has a choice, as Franklin is still the chief medical officer here…
Delenn invites Sheridan to a Minbari meal in her quarters. This is a very big deal, as evidenced by the fact that Lennier has been preparing the meal for two straight days. The preparation is very rigid and specific, and if Lennier screws anything up, he has to start over. The food is also eaten at very specific times and in very specific sequence, and there are also pauses for meditation. During the last of those meditations, Sheridan falls asleep, and then is summoned to Bay 14, as Zeta Squadron has found and towed the Markab ship to B5, with all hands having apparently perished.
Lazarenn blocks Sheridan from entering the ship, saying it’s Markab property, but then a very pissed-off Franklin arrives. He autopsied the Markab, and then autopsied the other three who died of “natural causes” recently. They all suffered from a plague. Lazarenn sadly admits that Franklin is correct, and that it’s one hundred percent fatal and one hundred percent contagious.
As the dead bodies are unloaded off the ship, Lazarenn explains that he was explicitly ordered by his government not to discuss the plague, which is called Drafa. When Drafa first appeared on Markab, it wiped out a population that the mainstream of Markab society viewed as sinful. As a result, the disease itself has a stigma attached to it, that only those who were impure got it. So when it came back recently, people wouldn’t admit that they got it. Because of that taboo, and because medical personnel get no support from the government in trying to find a cure, it’s spreading like crazy.
Franklin calls a meeting of the senior staff and the medical staff. They need to screen every Markab on the station. They also need to find someone in the early stages. Drafa proceeds very quickly from infection to death, and they’ve had trouble tracing the pathology of the disease. Sheridan questions whether or not they should isolate the Markabs, but Franklin says no. If the disease is airborne, then isolating them won’t matter in the recycled atmosphere of B5, and it may cause it to spread far more quickly among the Markab if they’re all bunched up together. Garibaldi points out the security issue—the Markabs may need to be isolated for their own safety once word gets out that they’re all potential plague rats.
B5 is quarantined. This does not make anyone happy. Markab Ambassador Fashar accuses Sheridan of trying to show that the Markab on the station are impure. Sheridan’s assurances that they’re just trying to stop the plague fall on deaf ears. Fashar announces that all the Markabs are going to isolate so they can protect themselves from the plague, which is totally not how science works.
Then a pak’ma’ra is found dead. Franklin has now confirmed that the Drafa is airborne, and that it can jump species.
Delenn observes a Markab girl who seeks out and finds her father in the Zocalo, only to discover that her father is dead from the plague. She asks Sheridan for permission for her and Lennier to join the Markab in isolation, to give them comfort at a time when they’re mostly being treated poorly. They also accept that they may not survive. Sheridan reluctantly agrees.
No one on Franklin’s staff is willing to go into the isolab to perform the autopsy on the pak’ma’ra due to fear of infection. Then Lazarenn volunteers. It’s the least he can do after keeping Franklin the dark until it was too late, he knows Drafa better than anyone, and if he gets infected, then Franklin will finally have his full pathology to follow.
Violence against the Markab who didn’t go into the vault increases, with Garibaldi breaking up a near-lynching of one Markab.
Franklin is using stims to stay awake. Lazarenn warns him about the dangers, but Franklin can’t afford to take a break right now. The two of them discuss the similarities between Drafa and the Black Plague on Earth. Lazarenn also gets the disease, which prompts Franklin to start running tests. Also, the pak’ma’ra definitely has Drafa, so Franklin instructs his staff to find out what Markab and pak’ma’ra have in common.
Delenn re-encounters the girl she saw in the Zocalo, who is now looking for her mother, whom she has misplaced. Delenn sends Lennier to find her, though he has no good description, and the girl only knows her as “mother,” not by name. But he tries anyhow, and eventually succeeds—just in time for the girl to collapse.
Franklin is frustrated by the lack of any positive tests in his search for the cure. He finally finds it: both Markab (yellow cells) and pak’ma’ra (green cells) have specialized cells that produce neurochemicals needed for brain function. Drafa targets those cells, so the treatment is to stimulate growth of those cells to give the patient time to develop an immunity to the plague.
Unfortunately, it comes too late. The Markab in isolation are all dead. Delenn and Lennier exit the vault, devastated. And before long, ISN reports that the Markab have been wiped out by Drafa.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan gamely attends the Minbari dinner, and manages to screw up pretty much everything in it, concluding with him falling asleep while allegedly meditating.
He also tells Keffer to stop looking for the ship he saw, probably because Sheridan now knows that it was likely a Shadow ship, and they’re trying to keep the fact that they know the Shadows are coming on the down-low.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova tells Keffer to stop his off-duty searches for the Shadow ship he saw in the jumpspace. Keffer gives her static about it, at which point Ivanova reminds him that she’s the commander, he’s the lieutenant, and his only response should’ve been “Yes, ma’am.”
The household god of frustration. When Garibaldi stops the people from beating up the Markab and sending them on their way, the victim reaches out for a hand up. Garibaldi hesitates just for a second, then grabs his hand and then supports the Markab all the way to medlab.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. The meal Delenn and Lennier prepare for Sheridan is extremely ritualized, and bears a resemblance to the Passover seder. There’s even an empty seat for Elijah—er, that is to say, Valen.
Delenn and Lennier stay with the isolated Markabs and get to watch them all die. Delenn tells the little girl a story of when she was lost in a big city when she was a child. Her parents found her then.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Before Delenn and Lennier go into the Markab isolation vault, Sheridan asks that, if they survive, that Delenn call him “John” moving forward. Afterward, a devastated Delenn collapses crying into Sheridan’s arms saying, “Oh, John.” (That last image is sufficiently powerful that it will be used in the opening credits of season three in a manner that makes it seems like she’s crying about the Shadow War.)
Welcome aboard. Jim Norton, who previously played Ombuds Wellington in “Grail” and “The Quality of Mercy,” pays Lazarenn. He’ll be back in “Dust to Dust” as a Narn. The delightfully named Bluejean Ashley Secrist plays the Markab girl, and Maggie Egan is back as the ISN reporter. Various other Markabs are played by Diane Adair, Michael McKenzie, and Kim Strauss.
Trivial matters. Keffer saw (and was damaged by) a Shadow ship while rescuing the Cortez in “A Distant Star.” Sheridan shared a human meal with Delenn in “A Race Through Dark Places.” Delenn and Kosh told Sheridan about the Shadows and why they need to keep their coming a secret in “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum.”
The fact that an empty seat is kept for Valen at the meal Delenn and Lennier prepare for Sheridan is especially amusing in light of the forthcoming revelation in “War Without End, Part II” of Valen’s true identity.
Franklin’s reason for not using the Great Hit Point Rearranger from “The Quality of Mercy” and “Revelations” to help at least treat Lazarenn is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The similarity in name between the Markab and the Marcab Confederacy that is part of Scientology is purely coincidental. J. Michael Straczynski has said that he’d never heard of the latter until after this episode aired, and if he’d known about them sooner, he’d have changed the name of his species, as he loathes Scientology.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“They’re in pain—frightened, dying. Minbari are taught that at such a time, the afflicted should be ministered to, comforted.”
“They’re not your own people, Delenn.”
“I did not realize similarity was required for the exercise of compassion.”
—Delenn making her case to enter the isolation zone and refuting Sheridan’s objection.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Choose whatever strategy makes least sense, then do it.” It’s always impressive, and a bit creepy, when a show that predates something major winds up commenting on it, whether it’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “Homefront” / “Paradise Lost” being a colloquy on 9/11 even though it aired five years prior to it, or B5’s general commentary on the dangers of creeping fascism thirty years before, well, now.
And then we have this, and man is it weird watching this after living through 2020. Of course, it also hit hard in 1995, as there’s quite the allegory for the AIDS epidemic here, as well as for the Black Plague, which is right there in the script.
The basic theme is a good and powerful one: when there’s a disease, focus on the medicine. Because diseases don’t give a shit about your politics or your religion or your moral fibre or any of that nonsense. It acts completely indiscriminately, and you have to treat it thusly. If you don’t, you only make it worse.
Which is exactly what happens with the Markabs. The Sodom-and-Gomorrah-esque story of how Drafa got started has grown roots in their culture, and they focus way too much on the irrelevancies of politics and morality and religion, thus choking off the air supply to the medical research.
Hilariously, the end result is that you could argue that their lack of moral fibre did kill them all: their hubris led to their genocide.
On the one hand, I find it difficult to credit that the entire species was wiped out. They’re a space-faring people, and as Douglas Adams reminded us, space is big—really big. On the other hand, the allegory works much better this way: that the Markabs’ stubbornness and unwillingness to just let science do the work led to their complete elimination as a species.
As for the other stuff, while I like the concept of Delenn returning the favor of her and Lennier preparing a Minbari meal for Sheridan, the execution was a little too ha-ha-look-at-the-funny-aliens-and-their-rituals with Sheridan stumbling over everything. Especially since the dinner was so very much like a Passover seder. I would rather they went for Sheridan appreciating the nuances of another culture than having him go all ugly-American on us for laughs.
And hey, look, it’s Keffer! Showing up just long enough to remind us he’s there and continue to utterly fail to make us give a flying fig about him! Sigh.
Next week: “Divided Loyalties.”
A solid episode, and interestingly one with almost no beats for the larger story. Sheridan and Delenn’s relationship takes a big step forward, and we have Franklin abusing stims, but that’s about it.
There have been one or two other candidates, but I’d say this is the first time we can unquestionably say there was an important conversation in an elevator. Franklin and Lazarenn in this case. (For those not aware, it’s often joked that B5 is a show about people having important conversations in elevators. If this is the first one, and given JMS is writing everything from now on, maybe that’s just a tic of his.)
When Franklin lit into his staff, I thought he must have learned his technique from his father. It lines up well with Sheridan (?) telling him recently that he’s just like the general. You could also ascribe it to the stims, and that might be a factor, but I’d say this was mostly his father. His reaction after Lazarenn’s death is probably connected to his overuse of stims, though.
It also occurred to me that if/when we have contact with other sentient species, medicine is going to need a new term. Zoonosis refers specifically to diseases jumping from animals to humans, so it would be rather insulting to those other species. Maybe xenonosis?
As somebody (sorry, I forget who it was) commented a couple of weeks ago, it is also a critical point on Delenn’s personal journey for this season, separately from her relationship with Sheridan. She is reminding herself of her convictions and her calling, as she sees it. I think you can draw a fairly straight line between her grief and pain at the end of this episode and a line she is going to deliver in 3 episodes that is one of my favorites.
I’d say the “important conversations in elevators” trope is one that Star Trek got a lock on well before B5 came along. Part of the reason they had turbolifts on the Enterprise was as a place for characters to have private conversations, since they hadn’t come up with the idea of a ready room yet.
That’s a fair point, but it’s a reputation that has stuck to B5 nevertheless. The show was a major influence on Mass Effect, and the reputation is why the loading between different levels of the Citadel space station is an elevator ride with banter among the various crew members you have with you.
It’s probably an artifact of the show coming along in the early days of widespread Internet, so the tag got good circulation. An observation like that about TOS might have been seen by a number in the high tens or low hundreds in a fan zine, but wouldn’t have the spread to really catch on.
I remember this one hitting me as being the first time a show I was watching had just wiped out a race that, whilst not a major one, the Markab had been a consistent background presence over the course of B5 up to this point.
I love this episode for how it is (almost) on the nose about infectious diseases. (Just a note on my expertise here. I recent retired from the federal government in a position dealing with infectious disease policy and research.) The sociology is spot on, as we have all seen well too much of. The biology and ecology, not so much. It is pretty much impossible for a pathogen to be simultaneously highly infectious, fast acting, and 100% deadly. The problem is that if you kill your hosts that fast there is no time to transmit before your host dies,taking you with it. Even the Black Death only killed about 1/3 of Europeans. Evolution will move the pathogen to reduce at least one of those three traits, if not more than one. And as was pointed out in the review, space is big. Wiping out the whole species is unlikely. However, I will forgive on these points. I am never one to let science get in the way of a good story, as long as the correct science is obscure enough or enough in the background to be ignorable.
Even if a disease is 100% fatal it won’t infect 100% of the population. There will always be a few people who carry genetic mutations that result in them simply not being able to become infected by it (as we see with HIV).
Franklin said in the briefing that the infection had an incubation period of anywhere from days to several weeks before symptoms started to show. So there would certainly have been time to transmit it before you knew you were infected, the same reason COVID-19 was able to spread so far with its 2-week incubation period.
Also, the fact that the last outbreak was a thousand years ago and the new one is now suggests that the plague may have been engineered by the Shadows, in which case it wouldn’t necessarily follow normal evolutionary logic.
This is supported by the fact that when G’Kar was warning people about a returning dark race, the Marcab was a race that talked about remembering The Shadows.
The episode did make a point of saying Markab fled the homeworld to the colonies, taking the plague with them. The final news does say that while some might have survived, it wouldn’t be enough to sustain them.
I suspect that, pre-COVID and having missed the worst part of AIDS, I would have found the Markab’s wilful blindness too extreme to credit. On this viewing, it’s entirely too plausible.
Besides the 100% communicability and fatality (which doesn’t make sense), my issue was the instant assumption that, since it jumped to a Pak’ma’ra the disease must be airborne. Since they are carrion eaters, my assumption watching it was that the Pak’ma’ra ate a Markab corpse they found somewhere. Lip service should have been given to this possibility since that’s just about all we know about the species.
This one hit harder (post covid) than it did initially.
Given that the episode was an allegory for the AIDS epidemic that had been going on for over a decade and was still taking a lot of lives at the time, I’m not sure that’s true.
@ChristopherLBennett, that rather assumes everyone on Earth had the same keen awareness of the AIDS crisis – which, given that particular health condition was very often hushed up or wilfully ignored or sunk deep in denial because of it’s being equated with turpitude, is a somewhat bold assumption (Especially when one considers that the AIDS epidemic began when the 24-hour news cycle was in it’s very early years and the all-seeing eye of Social Media was more of a twinkle than a fully-formed witness).
Coronavirus2019, on the hand, was not regarded as a ‘mere’ venereal disease and absolutely dominated the media cycle (Including public discourse) in a way that made it impossible to ignore for just about anyone on the planet with a working monitor.
Sadly this global awareness did not always translate into sensible comprehension, but it’s still not unreasonable for this pestilence to have had more of an impact on the Public Imagination than AIDS (Though it’s definitely unfair, given that ignoring the progress of a disease because it seems to afflict those whom one disdains or because it’s often contracted in circumstances of embarrassing physical intimacy is … well, the word ‘diabolical’ occurs and not in jest).
“that rather assumes everyone on Earth had the same keen awareness of the AIDS crisis”
On the contrary. My point is that, for some communities at the time, this episode would’ve hit just as hard as it does for us post-COVID. So it’s an invalid generalization just to say “it hit harder than it did initially,” because it would’ve depended on whom you asked. It’s inappropriate to talk about the majority’s perception as if it’s the only one that deserves acknowledgment.
By the time this episode aired AIDS had been well known to the public in the US for over a decade. When I was first in college in 83 it was known about, but not worried about as it was still regarded as a “gay plague”. By the time I was in the Army in 85-88 all the soldiers were being warned about it alongside all the other STDs out there. The surgeon general’s report came out while I was in the Army and got extensive coverage. “And the Band Played On” also came out when I was in the Army and that’s a book that will get your blood pressure up…
By 95 everyone in the US, where this was airing, was well aware of AIDS.
Even post-COVID, I will always think of this one as “the AIDS episode.” It’s about as subtle as a brick to the face, but it’s better than very pointedly refusing to comment on it at all, like some contemporary science fiction series were doing (look up David Gerrold “Blood and Fire” if you don’t know what I mean).
It’s also a really good moment for Delenn: “I did not realise that similarity was required for the exercise of compassion” are words to live by (even if Delenn herself turns out to be a bit hypocritical in this regard). It’s also appropriate, I think, that the episode leavens-up the “Sodom and Gomorrah” stuff with some depiction of the positive aspects of religion.
Not bad, but I have a hard time believing, A, that no Markabs would be immune to the disease, and B, that the Markabs would be such a Planet of Hats that 100 percent of them subscribe to the same superstition about drafa rather than having a variety of different belief systems. Lazarenn shouldn’t be the only reasonable one. JMS said on Usenet that that was because Lazarenn was trained offworld, but that makes it far worse, because it echoes the old ethnocentric stereotypes where the only “good” ethnic character in a story is the one who was Western-educated and assimilated into white culture while the traditionalist natives were uniformly evil, superstitious, violent, or whatever.
Also, “yellow cells” and “green cells” are silly names for cells that somehow produce neurochemicals — and how can the neurochemicals be produced by something other than the neurons themselves? What, do the neurons have gas tanks and the yellow cells pull up and refuel them?
Though it’s hardly surprising from an American writer of JMS’s generation, the lines about the Black Death are quite Eurocentric. For one thing, the plague didn’t “hit Earth” in the 14th century; the bacteria has been detected in samples as far back as 4-5000 years ago, and there was a pandemic in the Byzantine Empire in the 540s CE. And the Black Death outbreak in the 14th century started in Asia and killed at least as many people there as it would later kill in Europe.
JMS’s Usenet comments said he chose the Markab because he wanted it to be a species the audience would know and care about, but I have no recollection of seeing any significant Markab characters before this episode.
I have an issue with the “if it’s airborne, we’re screwed because of the recycled air” logic. Surely the air would be filtered as a matter of course, to deal with known infections and contaminants.
“I find it difficult to credit that the entire species was wiped out. They’re a space-faring people…”
The newsreader at the end does suggest that there could be some survivors on far-flung colonies.
As for Sheridan, he was trying to respect the Minbari’s traditions as best he could. To be truly “Ugly American,” he would’ve just gone ahead, started eating, and made fun of their rituals while he was at it, and then insulted the food for not being steak and potatoes.
Yes, actually. Human astrocytes appear to play a role in recycling neurotransmitters as well as signaling to neurons by releasing chemicals such as glutamate. Check out these Wikipedia articles on glial cells
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia
and astrocytes in particular
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrocyte
for more information.
Not all that emits neurochemicals is a neuron!
And have quite a few color-based names for real cells and real tissue structures, such as erythrocyte, leukocyte, eosinophil, basophil, substantia nigra, and red nucleus. So “yellow cells” and “purple cells” as names isn’t a ridiculous as it may sound at first.
JMS’s Usenet comments said he chose the Markab because he wanted it to be a species the audience would know and care about, but I have no recollection of seeing any significant Markab characters before this episode.
Last week, on “Knives”? The dead Markab that passed through Sector 14, causing the entire Sheridan B plot? I’d say that was a pretty good indicator that something grim was about to happen to the Markab.
I didn’t remember the name of the species, which is kind of the point. We’ve seen them here and there in the background, but not prominently enough for me to remember them.
And the Markab in “Knives” committed suicide because he couldn’t deal with the memories the entity was inducing, IIRC.
And if folk want a literary take on the topic, I highly recommend Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book, which involves both the Black Death and a future disease outbreak. Written in the mid 80s, it also has the sociology down pat. And of course, being a Willis story, the writing is great. I reread it while in lockdown in 2020 and was amazed at how well she predicted human reactions.
I’ve heard the argument that one of the major problems with the COVID response was that scientific advisory bodies didn’t include any sociologists. If writers were accurately predicted the sociology back in the 80s, there might be something to this.
Historians could have accurately predicted the response to COVID, as that response has literally been seen with every recorded pandemic. There are ALWAYS some people who react that way; the only thing that differs is how many of them are in a position of authority when the disease hits.
It’s not that the scientific advisory bodies did not have the expertise, it’s that the politicians were not listening to them. (To be fair, some state and local governments may very good use of such expertise. Others and the federal government, not so much.) I was on two different interagency task forces, one in the mid 2000s and one in the mid 2010s, both of which predicted what would happen in a plague and what needed to be done to prepare. Both reports went nowhere. A bit has been done since, and I fear it will now all be undone.
On the suggestion that because it was designed by the Shadows, its ecology would have been different, evolution still happens. You could start a pathogen with those characteristics, but once it is loose, it won’t stay that way. I completely agree with the person that suggested that no one having natural immunity is unlikely.
One final note, plague is still very much with us. It is native to Central Asia, but has been endemic in the Western US for the past 100 years. I strongly urge you not to try to pet any prairie dogs. The reason that you do not hear about it is that we now have very effective antibiotics against it. About once a decade someone dies from it, but only because of a lack of diagnosis.
If the plague in question were engineered, rather than naturally occurring, who is to say that the Shadows had not spent some time honing this particular weapon of biological warfare?
Heck, it’s even possible that they’re using an historic term for a new and distinct disease, rather than a new strain of an old virus: is it confirmed that the plague of one thousand years ago and the modern affliction are one & the same?
I am afraid H5N1 is going to be the same song, second verse. We’ve been watching that virus for 3 decades now, and it could not have picked a worse time to begin to make its long-anticipated move.
I’m hopeful that what was learned during COVID about rapid vaccine development will be applied in this case. Although some other country than the US will probably have to take the lead on developing a vaccine.
You have to be careful on that front:
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-evidence-bird-flu-vaccinations-virus.amp
That is a mainstream site by the way.
Gatekeeping can backfire—as when Gradualists pooh-poohed any hint of catastrophism with impact theory and the ice-dam floods that gouged out the channeled scablands
Your last paragraph seems like a complete non sequitur. If you’re attempting to draw an analogy between vaccines and resistance to scientific ideas, the analogy doesn’t work, because scientific facts don’t evolve to adapt to the beliefs resisting them; rather, the beliefs eventually give way to the unchanging facts. It’s not an arms race between reality and denialists, because reality is completely unaffected by what people think of it.
Plans to make an mRNA vaccine for H5N1 influenza A are already in place, so when the virus becomes human-to-human transmissible the medical community (in theory) will be ready. But even the best vaccine won’t help if people refuse to take it or to follow other prevention guidelines (like masking). And at least in the US, that encompasses at least 1/3 of the population.
The other problem is that COVID did a very good job of burning out medical professionals, so you won’t see the same level of effort from them the second time around. COVID caused quite a few of them to hang up their stethoscopes after the worst of the pandemic was over, and most of them are NOT going to jump back into the fray for a second round after all the abuse they experienced during the first go-round.
An episode that has little connection to the overall arc, and yet has tremendous dramatic implications for the characters. “Confessions and Lamentations” is a major turning point for both Franklin and the pairing of Sheridan/Delenn. The way Sheridan puts just enough fear and longing in his voice as he pleads for her to call him John when she walks into a potentially deadly situation with no way out. In essence, he’s reliving his worst nightmares, fearing another Anna Sheridan situation.
It might be an AIDS allegory, but the entire plot point of sequestering the Markab in quarantine away from everyone else hits particularly hard, especially post-COVID. I’m tremendously glad Garibaldi, Sheridan and everyone else treated the matter so seriously (I don’t think I’ve ever wished more literal harm on other people than during that period – the nerve of so many real-life leaders and other high-profile personalities outright lying in order to break quarantine to further their own ambitions and interests, putting everyone else in jeopardy).
That final sequence where the little girl coughs to death in front of Delenn and then we cut to the final shot of the bodies flanked by her and Lennier. Easily one the most haunting visuals the show’s ever put on screen, starkly lit by John Flinn’s blinding cinematography. Delenn breaking down on Sheridan’s arms is one of the most striking shots of any sci-fi show from that era. The way Mira Furlan’s face contorts in pain, her mouth wide open. That shot is a gut punch every time.
I adore her delivery of the line about similarity not being a requirement for compassion. One of the better JMS lines. And it might appear as a one-off line, but it comes with tremendous implications in the later seasons (without going into spoilers, obviously). And knowing Furlan’s own Yugoslavian background, you can tell she puts just enough edge to her voice when saying that line to Sheridan.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more sorry for Franklin than I do here and the way he breaks down onscreen, tearing the office apart. The stage is set for his most destructive character arc. I’ve once heard that the stims addiction was actually going to be given to Takashima, had she stayed on the show past the pilot episode. Biggs isn’t always the best actor, but he really sells the pain and frustration here while the Medlab computer is doing the analysis. He’s burnt out, and we feel just as fatigued. A brutal episode in every way.
As for the Markab, I’m pretty sure there might still be a few strays out there that escaped the plague. The ISN report made that possibility clear. Still, there is no going back to what they were. It’s impossible to undo that damage ever again.
“Delenn re-encounters the girl she saw in the Zocalo, who is now looking for her mother, whom she has misplaced. Delenn sends Lennier to find her, though he has no good description, and the girl only knows her as “mother,” not by name. But he tries anyhow, and eventually succeeds—just in time for the girl to collapse.”
This always struck me as strange. Just ask the child her own name, then ask around for “so and so’s mom.” If they’re conversational, they know their own name, and they’re one of their own favorite topics of conversation. We find out eventually it’s Sh’naal, but only after the mother is already found.
Is it credible that a child wouldn’t know her mother’s given name? I’m pretty sure I always knew my parents’ given names as far back as I can remember. I mean, wouldn’t she have heard her parents address each other by name, or be addressed by friends that came to visit?
To be fair, that kid has been through a conga line of trauma. She may not be really capable of thinking clearly.
True enough. It could’ve been some kind of regression.
When I was in grade school, and reading the various Dick and Jane books, there was one where little sister Judy wandered off. A policeman found her and asks for her name. She says Judy. He asks for her last name. She says Judy. He asks for her mother’s name. Mommy. So even then, in the sixties, it was considered reasonable that a young child would not know either her family name or her parent’s name.
The story, of course, was, as many Dick and Jane books were, a lesson story.
I can buy that an adult author might believe a small child wouldn’t know her mother’s name, but a fictional account hardly constitutes evidence of whether it’s actually plausible in real life. Belief is not data — or rather, it’s only data on what people believe, not on what’s actually true. And adults tend to underestimate what children are capable of.
Anyway, from the illustrations I can find, “Baby Sally” (she was renamed Judy in Catholic Church editions) was quite young, apparently a toddler. The Markab girl seemed older than that; as Keith said, she was old enough to be able to go out into the station unescorted to look for her father, and her lines when speaking to her father were above the toddler level of diction.
That’s a great point too. My recollection is the same as yours, and it seems even sillier here considering this young lady is capable enough to be sent out to find her father on a dangerous space station and actually succeeds in doing so. If anybody out there has countervailing knowledge or experiences, then I’d love to hear about it.
It could be that Markab have a custom of spouses addressing each other by a title or term of endearment instead of given names. In Japan, wives tend to address their husbands as “Anata,” which literally just means “you” but in context is a term of endearment analogous to “Dear” or “Honey.” And I’ve seen movies and shows with rural American couples addressing each other as “Mother” and “Father.” So in a culture with such a custom, a child might not hear her parents’ given names very often. It’s hard to believe she wouldn’t know them at all, but maybe she heard them infrequently enough that she couldn’t remember under the stress of the situation.
By the by (Pedant Powers —Activate!) The ugly American was actually kind of the hero of a subplot. He was an engineer working in SE Asia, and he happened to be homely. But he was trying to design tech that the locals could build from what they had available, to pump water and so forth. He was the only American not making assumptions out of arrogance.
Interesting — I didn’t know the term was taken from a novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American
Fascinating! I had no idea that was where the expression came from.
I’m not sure ‘genocide’ is quite the right term – unless the plague in question actually was a creation of The Shadows, as speculated by some in this thread – since that suggests intelligent action on the part of some Evil piece of work.
Whatever the Makrab leadership might be accused of, intelligent action is certainly not on the list of charges: I’d suggest ‘suicide’ or ‘self-extinction’ for the category for this particular Darwin Award, since they died with their victims.
I’m tempted to make a further remark to the effect that these MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH-style consequences very clearly indicate BABYLON 5 to be fiction, rather than factual, but that’s too depressingly-cynical even for the AD 2025.
You’re right — genocide is a deliberate crime, by definition. A naturally evolved disease exterminating an entire population cannot be called genocide, any more than a boulder falling on someone’s head can be called murder. It’s only murder if someone pushed the boulder, and it’s only genocide if someone delibrately inflicted the disease.
I suppose you could argue, though, that the leaders’ self-destructive choices that led to their species’s virtual extinction could be called negligent genocide.
It has been reported that there was at least one attempt in Colonial America, during the French and Indian War, to trade blankets and linens from smallpox victims to the tribes, in a deliberate attempt to spread the disease among them and shorten the war. Historians are uncertain whether it was done to any significant extent, or whether it was even possible to spread the disease that way. In any case, it was a deliberate plan to infect enemies with a naturally occurring disease.
Well, yes, of course bioweapons can be used for genocide, but what’s at issue here isn’t the general question, but whether the word applies in this specific case. If drafa is a naturally occurring illness, then the extinction of the Markab is not genocide, by definition. If drafa was created by the Shadows, as one might infer from the timing, then it would be genocide. But we have no evidence for that, so “genocide” is the wrong word to use in this instance.
The one major problem I had with this episode is after finding a ship floating in space where every individual on it is dead you would never dock it to the station and certainly wouldn’t start offloading bodies. The minimally intelligent thing to do would be to park it adjacent to the station in its own quarantine while you figure out what happened (you would probably send bio-hazmat crew aboard to explore and examine).
And then when you more-or-less simultaneously discover that there is an infectious disease in the same species already on the station, you doubly wouldn’t drag the bodies onto the station at that point.
From a story perspective, given the diseases was already on the station, it wouldn’t have changed any practical outcome, but it some minimalistic logic would have been nice.
That’s the same reaction I have in Star Trek: Voyager when they discover some potentially dangerous alien gizmo or unexploded missile and beam it aboard to study it six meters away from the warp core. The one time something sensible like this got done was in TNG: “Unnatural Selection,” where they were afraid that a subject might have a deadly pathogen so they beamed him aboard a shuttlecraft in flight to study him rather than bringing him aboard the ship.
They did that after they brought onto the ship. Granted, he was encased is some kind of hand-wavy shell to prevent contagion. Pulaskey wanted to bring him out for study, counting on the force fields for safety. Geordie and Picard weren’t convinced by that (force fields could fail) and they came up with the idea of beaming him to the shuttle craft and studying him there.
I keep remembering that episode of Stargate where Thor explains how the Asgard unwittingly awakened the Replicators, and Jack’s response.
“We do that sort of thing all the time. . . I kinda expected better from you.”
“I find it difficult to credit that the entire species was wiped out. They’re a space-faring people…”, I believe in that episode there was a mention that some isolated Markab colonies might survive but for all intents and purposes their culture is pretty much done. Also, it’s mentioned that a LOT of Markabs started to fly away from major population centers (ie sinful places) to those isolated colonies, effectively spreading the disease ….this is so much like 2020 it hurts.
Fleeing to the countryside to escape plague is the backstory for Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s unfortunately a natural response that pathogens take advantage of to aid in their spread.
Though one thing that’s striking in recent outbreaks is how little intellectual knowledge of the germ theory of disease really penetrates to human behavior- how much most people (even in health care) find measures to stem spread an intense imposition, to be ended as soon as possible. Semmelweis’s difficulty convincing doctors to wash their hands rings very familiar.
This was one of Delenn’s finest hours.
When Delenn came out of the quarantine area and all but collapses in Sheridan’s arms just “broke” me. The shot, the lighting, the pure angst shown – just wow!
The parallels, given the time, as you point out, krad, are not subtle – and it still works, only for the pseudo-religious reason rampant in today’s society.
The dinner was a throwaway, but something like it would have been necessary to advance the developing Delenn/Sheridan thread.
I like they way that JMS is insinuating into episodes long before the crisis, Franklin’s deepening dependence on stims. We know that it can’t turn out well for him. He’s nailing up that gun on the wall, and soon, he’ll use it.
My take on the race being wiped out was mostly that it was “effectively” wiped out.