“Soul Hunter”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 102
Original air date: February 2, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… Dr. Stephen Franklin reports on board, replacing Kyle, who is now working for the newly reelected President of Earth Alliance. His first patient is the sole occupant of a badly damaged ship that comes unexpectedly through the jump gate. Sinclair manages to wrangle the ship with a Starfury and a grappling line before it crashes into the station.
The sole occupant is an alien none of the Earth Alliance personnel recognize. Franklin works on him in the iso-lab where the atmosphere has been tailored to his needs. Delenn, however, recognizes him as a Soul Hunter, who is apparently the Minbari equivalent of the boogeyman. According to Delenn—who urges Sinclair to kill the Soul Hunter right there in the medbay—Soul Hunters are vultures who are attracted to death. They steal souls right at the moment of death. To Minbari, this is awful, as they believe that Minbari souls are melded together and reborn in the future.
The Soul Hunter—let’s call him “Rufus,” mostly because constantly typing “the Soul Hunter” to refer to him is annoying—wakes up at the same time that a shell-game grifter in downbelow is found out, chased down, and murdered. Rufus announces that he can sense the man’s impending death, and later Sinclair determines that Rufus woke up at the exact time of the grifter’s death.
Rufus then sits up and starts meditating and chanting, ignoring Sinclair’s questions—right up until Sinclair accuses him of being a thief. Rufus angrily retorts that his people preserve souls, they don’t steal them. They wish to preserve the great beings of society. The Minbari hate the Soul Hunters because they tried to save the soul of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader whose death precipitated the Earth-Minbari War. Sinclair informs Rufus that he must remain in the isolab until his ship is repaired, at which point he’s to leave the station.
After Franklin does the autopsy of the grifter, he and Ivanova supervise his body being cast out into space, as his family can’t afford to have him shipped home.
Delenn visits the medlab. She tells Rufus that she’ll tear his ship apart to find his collection of souls and free any Minbari souls she finds. Rufus tells her that he recognizes her as a Satai from the Grey Council, who was there when Dukhat died, and he wonders why she’s playing at being an ambassador when she’s so much more.
Rufus escapes, injuring one of Garibaldi’s security people in the process. A second Soul Hunter ship—this one intact—comes through the jumpgate. The second Soul Hunter—let’s call him Xavier—says that he’s here for Rufus, who is apparently deeply disturbed. After failing to preserve Dukhat’s soul, Rufus went a bit binky-bonkers, and is now killing people in order to preserve their souls. This is a violation of Soul Hunter law, and Xavier is here to arrest Rufus. Xavier is the one who damaged Rufus’ ship.
Rufus goes to N’Garath, a criminal kingpin in downbelow, who sells Rufus a level-five clearance that enables him to find and access Delenn’s quarters, all the better to kidnap her with.
Aided by Xavier, Sinclair, Garibaldi, and the security force search for Delenn. Xavier is able to sense Delenn’s impending death in a particular section, and, because he’s listed first in the opening credits, it’s Sinclair who finds Rufus and Delenn, the latter being slowly bled to death so that she’ll die semi-naturally and Rufus can take her soul.
Sinclair is able to stop Rufus by turning his soul-sucking machine on him, which kills him. Delenn is brought to the medlab, where she recovers, and Xavier departs, with Sinclair making it clear that Soul Hunters are not welcome on B5.
After she recovers, Delenn takes Rufus’ collection of souls and breaks the globes, releasing the souls.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Delenn’s line about how they (meaning the Minbari, or possibly the Grey Council) were right about Sinclair is another hint, along with the “hole in his mind” mentioned in “The Gathering,” that he’s important to the Minbari for some reason.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s deadpan and pessimism are both on full display in her interactions with Franklin.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s security guard who is watching Rufus falls for the sick-prisoner trick and gets his ass kicked and his weapon taken, which probably got him fired.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s response to the presence of a Soul Hunter is to try to shoot him and to generally act batshit. We also get someone else who figures out that she’s part of the Grey Council, and just like G’Kar in “The Gathering,” she tries to kill him (though she did that part first…).
Looking ahead. Rufus sees what Delenn has planned for the future and is horrified. Delenn says before losing consciousness that the Minbari were right about Sinclair, the meaning of which will become clear before long…
Welcome aboard. The late great W. Morgan Sheppard plays Rufus, while John Snyder plays Xavier. Sheppard will return in “The Long, Twilight Struggle” in season 2 as a Narn warleader.
Trivial matters. This episode is Richard Biggs’ first appearance as Franklin. Though they are listed in the opening credits, we still have yet to see Bill Mumy or Caitlin Brown as, respectively, Lennier and Na’Toth.
This is the first mention of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader, whom we will later learn was Delenn’s mentor. It’s established that Dukhat’s death is what got the Earth-Minbari War started.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“Typical human lifespan 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.”
“Doesn’t matter. If we live two hundred years, we’d still be human—we’d still make the same mistakes.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
“I’m Russian, Doctor.”
Franklin and Ivanova discussing philosophy.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The soul ends with death unless we act to preserve it.” Thirty years ago, I watched the first season of B5 and was not all that impressed. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember in particular finding each of the first two episodes to be awful.
On this rewatch, I actually really liked “Midnight on the Firing Line,” but “Soul Hunter” is, if anything, worse than I remember.
Part of what I dislike about the episode relates not so much to the episode itself, but the pre-show hype that B5 had online. Creator J. Michael Straczynski spent a great deal of time promoting the show in advance of its debut on the various online bulletin boards of the era, particularly GEnie and CompuServe, and one of the things that he said would be the hallmark of the show was that it would that it would be scientifically accurate, unlike most other screen science fiction.
And then we get this episode, which starts with a damaged ship coming through the jump gate that, somehow, is on a collision course for B5. At this point, my disbelief needs the Heimlich maneuver, because, as Douglas Adams reminded us, space is big—really big. There’s no reason for the jump gate to be all that close to the station. In fact, it makes sense for there to be a certain distance for safety reasons. Yet somehow, this badly damaged ship winds up on a collision course with the station—which is, in astronomical terms, incredibly tiny—and it’s so close that Sinclair is barely able to grapple it in time (after missing twice) to keep it from crashing.
After that, we get the entire concept of Soul Hunters, which is exactly the kind of fantastical thing that Straczynski was supposed to be avoiding. True, we’ve already got telepathy, which is equally fanciful, but the use of telepathy in science fiction is pretty well established, from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (which, as we’ll see, is a huge influence on the use of telepathy in B5)to Professor X and Jean Grey of the X-Men to the Ghosts in the StarCraft game, so one can forgive it a bit more readily.
But this episode presents the swiping and storing of souls as a real thing that Rufus does. Now, you can argue that it isn’t really what he’s doing—but he’s doing something. His soul-sucking vacuum cleaner enables him to see something in Delenn, so it obviously functions on some level. (Also, does he really need to carry that big-ass soul-sucking vacuum cleaner around every time he does this? Is that really practical?) Heck, the whole idea of “sensing death” is pretty much nonsense, too.
There’s some fun foreshadowing of the connection between Sinclair and the Minbari and of Delenn’s true purpose, and nobody ever went wrong casting W. Morgan Sheppard, but these are very minor good points in an episode that is just awful. It doesn’t help that there’s no sign of Andreas Katsulas or Peter Jurasik, and an episode without G’Kar and Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about.
Next week: “Born to the Purple.”
And yes, had there been a third Soul Hunter, I would have referred to him as Sarsaparilla.
https://youtu.be/wtxRXndvruk?si=ERIbg_V6zwZlHarI
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who does not have a sister named Rafaella Gabriela
Do you have a rerlative named, “Abrahamo Lincolni”? (I’ll show myself out)
As Captain America said, I understood that reference (but only after the third name).
Doesn’t Martin Sheen play a Soul Hunter in a later episode?
In one of the movies, which I won’t be getting to for a while, so there’s a chance I won’t remember the joke by then.
Not a good chance, mind you……………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yep. “River of Souls”. Which was made even worse by the (non)acting of the main human character who, according to some older reports was even more clueless (and couldn’t have cared less about his role) than Joan Collins in STOS’s “City on the Edge of Forever”. (actor was Ian McShane).
Oops; sorry krad. I’ll leave the rest for you when you get to it.
Whoa, whoa! Was Joan Collins clueless about her role as Edith Keeler? Was she non-engaged in the process or something? I confess the only behind-the-scenes stuff I know about that episode is the stuff around Harlan Ellison and his “unflimable” script… I have not heard anything about Collins, and I think her performance is one of the best a Trek guest star turned in. I won’t drag us far afield here, but I guess I’ll have to look into that.
I can’t wait to see Jeb Bartlett as a Soul Hunter, though. Does he do a lot of good walk-and-talk? Ask someone, “What’s next?” ;)
That’ll have to wait until River of Souls, I guess.
Yeah, this episode is pretty bad and arguably more nonsensical than I remembered. As you mention, you would think that if Soul Hunters could somehow sense death and try to get there in time to capture the soul at the last minute, it wouldn’t involve a hugely complicated piece of machinery that would need to be transported, setup, and maintained.
Also, one would think that a station like this would have (a) two to three starfurys on patrol at all times and (b) at least a few pilots on standby to launch in the case of an emergency (even if a were not true). The commander rushing to board his ship and prevent the collision course in this instance is much worse than him leading the attack on the raiding party in the previous episode (at least there he had a specific strategic reason to want to be off station)
In at-the-time online discussions, JMS said it was supposed to show that Sinclair had a death wish and kept putting himself in danger. Don’t think it worked.
As we’ll see in later eps (grin), even Garibaldi questons Sinclair on his “need” to be in the front of the firing line.
That’s essentially the point of a discussion between Sinclair and Garibaldi in “Invasion”.
Then again, I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to erase that episode from memory.
“Infection”, but yeah it was only memorable for David McCallum and for Garibaldi confronting Sinclair about his need to put himself in harm’s way.
I can see what JMS was going for here. In terms of the Soul Hunters, I think it was meant to be a matter of debate in terms of what exactly was being done by the Soul Hunter’s technology. Is it truly capturing the “soul”, or it is somehow copying the consciousness? But more important to the overall narrative was what Delenn, and therefore at least some of the religious caste, believed about souls. Delenn’s belief is that the Soul Hunter was, in fact, trapping the actual soul, thus preventing those souls from rejoining the reincarnation cycle at the heart of Minbari belief.
The idea that something is going on with that reincarnation cycle – that each new generation of Minbari is somehow lesser than the one before it and the stronger, better Minbari souls are going somewhere else – is pretty important to the meaning that some Minbari attach to Sinclair. And of course, Delenn’s presence on Babylon 5 relative to Sinclair is wrapped up in her fervent belief about him.
Those are the elements that I like about the episode.
I think the Soul Hunter concept was a flawed way of revealing those concepts. So much so that they are conspicuously absent from future events where, by the logic given in this episode, they should have appeared.
The Soul Hunter ships are seen in the flashbacks of Season 4’s “Atonement.” At the time of the later, “In the Beginning” TV movie, the Soul Hunters were NOT seen, but JMS stated at the time that it wasn’t due to changing his mind about the concept but just the timing of that movie. The Soul Hunter attack and the Minbari defense of “a wall of bodies” would have taken too long to set up and carry off and he needed the plot move on to the next thing.
Yeah, this episode doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. That final scene of Delenn breaking the globes and releasing whatever has stuck with me for the last 30 years, but that’s it.
Along with all of Keith’s complaints, the pacing is terrible. Parts drag, other parts are rushed. I guess you could put that down to JMS still figuring out how to write something longer than a half-hour cartoon, but it’s really easy for attention to wander.
One other thing that really bugged me was Sinclair after Rufus knocked him to the ground. O’Hare looks like he’s just lounging there before wondering what’s in the bag next to him. There’s no sense at all that he’s been roughed up. He looks comfortable and like he should be holding a glass of whisky.
It does do a couple of things right, beyond having W. Morgan Sheppard in it. JMS tries really hard to be agnostic about what the Soul Hunters do. Maybe it’s just uploading a brain scan and modeling a personality. OK, it’s pretty clear it’s more than that, but there’s no indication as to who’s right about what happens to whatever it is in those globes. Maybe the Minbari are right, maybe the Soul Hunters are. Hmmm, maybe that’s actually the only thing this episode does right.
i didn’t mind the pacing except for the final search and boss fight. that was ridiculously long and free of tension as it was obvious what’s gonna happen.
One of my biggest problems with the episode is that it was presented as if the souls were really there and being captured. Particularly the fact that Rufus was able to see into Delenn’s mind. And that last scene, while visually very striking and memorable (kudos to director Jim Johnston), is pretty much telling the viewer that Delenn is genuinely freeing the souls. The script may try to be agnostic about it, but the storytelling fails to be so.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad – agree, this part really sucked in the episode.
My wife was confused by that last scene. She asked, “is that lady having an orgasm? That’s creepy.”
To be fair, JMS had written for one-hour dramas as well before B5. For example, his tenure on Murder, She Wrote.
Or as some of us like to call it, SOOOOOUUUUUL HUNTER!!!!!
Riffable moment: As Sinclair misses the first grapple attempt, “I’m telling ya, these claw machines are always rigged.”
John Snyder will appear again in “By Any Means Necessary” as unsympathetic labor negotiator Orin Zento. The name of the Narn warleader W. Morgan Sheppard will later portray is G’Sten.
Favorite dialogue:
Franklin: Blood pressure is rising. Respiration up twelve percent.
Garibaldi: So that’s good, right?
Franklin: For a human, yes. In this case, it may be good, or he may be hyperventilating before his heart explodes all over the Isolab.
Garibaldi: Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.
[Sinclair and Delenn enter]
Sinclair: How’s he doing?
Garibaldi: Doc says it’s fifty-fifty. Either way, I’d stay on this side of the glass if I were you.
So much initial hostility. I personally enjoyed this one. Then again, I also like the Doctor Who serial Timelash for the same reason so many hate it, in that H.G. Wells get portrayed as a blithering moron. So take from that what you will.
Gee, that dialogue exchange left me completely cold. And I actually adored “Timelash,” mostly for all the teeth-marks that Paul Darrow left on the scenery….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Darrow ate a LOT of scenery in “Blake’s 7″…<grin>
Like Brad Dourif, Paul Darrow is good in anything. In case you’ve never heard of it, Darrow was also in Rough Magik, a pilot for a BBC show that never went to series. It’s on YouTube and should be the first thing you get in a search for the title. Just remember to use a K instead of a C.
Left you cold, eh? Huh. I thought it was brilliant humor! :-p But seriously, while I can’t remember what I thought about that exchange on first viewing two+ decades ago, at least on rewatches what I do like about it is that it does help to further establish Garibaldi’s sense of humor. And also something about Franklin’s reaction hints at the Franklin/Garibaldi bromance to come.
I have never loved this episode. I don’t hate the metaphysical/spiritual aspects, for their own sake. The show certainly seems to build some kind of “soul” into its ontology and you either have to accept that or not. I wasn’t exposed to JMS’ online presence until later, so I wasn’t specifically primed to expect a “hard” approach.
But I find the scenery-chewing in this episode a bit irksome. Also, I just never liked N’Grath at all. The idea of having non-humanoid aliens is a good one, but the budget and technical limitations just made it a bridge too far.
I did, and still do, like they way that show hints at its bigger picture by dropping fragments without necessarily trying to explain them. I like the mystery – often more than the reveal – and I think that at this point I was sufficiently curious about what the Grey Council was and why it mattered that Delenn was part of it, but didn’t seem to want anyone else to know that, that I was prepared to keep going.
Yeah, N’Grath was a good idea done in by the limitations of the technology of the era, alas.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thank you. I now think that was my big objection to him/it/her, not to the idea of a really alien alien (we didn’t really know about Vorlons or the Shadows back then).
I thought the costume was very well-made allowing for the show’s budget. It had detailed texture and moving mouthparts, which is more than some productions could manage. True, the head was immobile otherwise, but whoever heard of an insectoid with facial expressions?
Although we do get into credibility issues again, since compound eyes are impractical for anything larger than an insect.
It’s also just not very alien? It’s just a scaled-up insect.
He(it?) also never got much in the way of character development. He’s a generic crime boss who happens to be an insect. That’s it. Just not very interesting to me.
At least they tried to do something more than gluing rubber to an actor’s face. “Scaled-up insect” isn’t very alien, no, but “human with different head features” is even less alien.
If they’d had the budget or technical chops to stick with the character or give him longer scenes, they might’ve developed him more.
What happened to that Mantis maquette?
My conjectures for why the Soul Hunter’s ship (and all the other damaged ships that need to be grabbed for dramatic tension) hurtling towards the station is that the axis of the jump gate needs to point in the direction of the destination because of economic needs like not wasting fuel by making excessive course corrections from the gate to the station.
As for the gate being close, I’d say economies again. This time for air and electrical systems. The less time in transit the lower the costs. Of course the closeness means that a off-station transit queue is not much, but there is little shown of the inbound queue that can hear in the C&C traffic control. Inbound and outbound jump are orchestrated so the ships do not bump or otherwise have the jump field get messed up. Future episodes will show what happens then. Also future episodes will show why ships do not queue in jump space.
That traffic control is done via radio transmission, brings up another possible reason for the closeness. Light speed will start having impacts for traffic control (and remote drones) at any sizable stand-off distance.
Having the jump gate aimed ten degrees away from the station isn’t going to require that much fuel compared to what’s necessary to decelerate the ship to orbital velocity prior to making the jump.
The lightspeed thing doesn’t work, I’m afraid. The gate could easily be thirty thousand miles away and the radio roundtrip would still only be a tenth of a second. The chance of hitting the station over that distance is not so much minimal as utterly implausible — it would literally be as unlikely as throwing yourself at the Earth from the International Space Station and happening to hit a particular building in New York.
Travel time is more of a concern — maybe they don’t want to force ships to carry the fuel needed to accelerate from the jumpgates and then decelerate again near the station. (But, again, fuel is never a concern at any other point in the series… but possibly that’s because of a great many decisions just like this one.)
Also, it’s less cool if you can’t see the jumpgate because it’s a tenth as far away as the moon is from the Earth :)
Wow – ok well being religious I guess this episode didn’t bother me that much. How you deal with the grail episode will be interesting. Certainly not as good as later episodes – we still haven’t gotten to some of the best quotes in the first season. But I didn’t hate this episode nearly as much – but I didn’t spend time on the bulletin boards you mention so didn’t see the hype for accuracy, and to be fair the show is more accurate than say star trek – but it is not a hard sci-fi book that wouldn’t work for TV. Barely works for movies..
I didn’t much care for the “soul” concept either, but the episode was ambiguous about it, showing that different species have different beliefs about what happens to the consciousness/soul after death, and remaining agnostic about which one is correct. Minbari believe in reincarnation, Soul Hunters believe there’s no life after death without artificial preservation. If you set aside JMS’s boasting, which is a metatextual thing and thus irrelevant to an assessment of the text itself, it’s no different from Star Trek‘s business about Vulcan katras, Sargon’s energy globes, and other ways of preserving consciousness post-mortem. Although the episode does seem to side more with Delenn’s beliefs given that ending, and given everything this episode was setting up for the future.
Plus nobody ever went wrong casting W. Morgan Sheppard as a villain. His performance is effectively creepy and weird, so much so that it seems incongruous that Soul Hunter #2 just talks and acts like a stuffy English butler.
There were things that bugged me. The “collision course” bit was silly, as was Sinclair going out to catch the ship personally — although I like it that they used a plausible rendezvous method of matching course and grappling rather than using a “tractor beam.” (Although a more plausible method would’ve been to attach some thruster drones to the derelict and bring it under control that way.) Soul Hunter #2 being able to translate his directional death sense into a location on a map was kind of implausible — he didn’t know the station well enough to make that kind of spatial adjustment, I’d think — and the station’s so big that the general area covered by his fingertip would’ve been about the size of a city block, not narrowing it down much.
I was also bothered by the line about the Hunter going to the “Alien Sector” because he’d draw too much attention elsewhere. That’s incredibly human-biased thinking, as if all aliens blend together. Surely the Soul Hunter would be just as alien to every other species as he was to a human, so he’d stand out just as much, particularly since many of those species are more familiar with the Hunters than humans are. Really, the whole concept of having just one ghetto-like “Alien Sector” on a station whose whole professed purpose is to promote interspecies unity is just so ugly and human-centric.
The creature effects for N’Grath the information broker were more impressive than I remembered. The design is too derivative of a preying mantis, but the sculpting and execution are good, and the suit performer (Russ Johnson, according to the B5 wiki, though the voice is uncredited) does an impressive job creating an alien body language, so it doesn’t just look like a guy in a suit. I respect the effort to create a non-humanoid alien, and it’s disappointing that they gave up on it after half a season.
I wasn’t so impressed by the prop design, though. The Soul Hunter’s consciousness extractor was very cheap-looking.
Sheppard best known as MacGyver’s resident Hannibal stand-in, Dr. Zito.
I remember Sheppard as Dr. Zito, but I wouldn’t say that’s what he’s best known for. He was Blank Reg in Max Headroom, Ira Graves in TNG: “The Schizoid Man,” a Klingon prison warden in ST VI, a Captain Ahab figure in Voyager: “Bliss,” the villain in the Elvira: Mistress of the Dark movie, the old version of Canton Delaware (played by his son Mark Sheppard) in Doctor Who, the voices of Odin and Petros Xanatos in Gargoyles, etc. Wikipedia says one of his best-known roles is “the Confederate general Isaac R. Trimble in the films Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.” And before that, he was a Royal Shakespeare Company associate for 12 years.
Also, apparently Sheppard was a runner-up for the role of G’Kar.
“I was also bothered by the line about the Hunter going to the “Alien Sector” because he’d draw too much attention elsewhere.”
To be fair, if there is an sector full of humans and a sector full of aliens, an alien should show up less in the alien sector simply because the background there is more varied.
Except we see aliens all the time in the “human sectors” of the station. Calling it the “alien sector” is deeply problematical — it’s really the sector for diverse environmental needs. It’s supposed to be a cosmopolitan port of call for everyone, not a human territory with a segregated sector for nonhumans. Humans are aliens to everyone else, after all.
This is true, but then again, one of the themes of B5 is that humans haven’t actually grown any more enlightened and will take all of our many issues out to the stars with us. Also, all the security personnel on the station looking for this guy are all human …
Yeah, but the inhabitants of the “alien sector” aren’t just passive extras (or aren’t supposed to be). Given what we were told, many of them would presumably know about the Soul Hunters and react with intense fear and revulsion at the sight of one. It’s a basic principle that you can only hide out among a population with their cooperation. If they don’t want you there, they won’t protect you from the authorities and may well rat you out to them, if not drive you out themselves.
On prop design: the thing plugged into Delenn’s ankle is 100% a “solder sucker” style pump desoldering tool, and breaks any immersion I might have every time I see it.
I was able to watch it – unlike some ST:ENT episodes – but with great suffering. However Sheppard was really great in the role and that helped me through it this nonsense. Was it mentioned in the review that the whole station was able to afford 3(!!!!) people to search and save an ambassador and that included the commander and the chief of security. This feels even worse than on DS9, where Odo sometimes at least seemed to have people in security…And of course it was the commander out of the three who ran into the evil guy with Delenn, who else?
The part I skipped through was this search and the Big Boss Fight – it was obvious that neither Delenn nor Sinclair can’t get into serious trouble at the beginning of the series, so it was totally meh…otherwise the episode at least had an OK flow and the cliché of questionably neutral or evil guy going totally evil and killing people actually kinda worked at least…
The incompetent security guy in the sickbay was total copy from any Star Trek episode…
Nah; his shirt wasn’t red…