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droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven
My posts on my rewatch of B5 are likely to go like this: watch an episode, and see if it arouses Thoughts of any kind. If so, I will just pick them up and throw them at the screen and see what sticks. Feel free to argue, point out what I missed, and so forth. We'll see how it goes!
For those of you who have not seen Babylon 5 before, there will be spoilers! Also, you should watch it.
At lunchtime today, Beast and I watched the penultimate episode of B5 season 1, The Quality of Mercy. It's the one in which (a) Londo introduces Lennier to the delights of the seamy side of the station, (b) a very nasty murderer is sentenced to death, and (c) Dr Franklin finds a 'quack' offering cures to people with not enough money to go to MedLab. It doesn't seem to have a lot to say about the Arc as a whole, though it's not completely irrelevant either.
Aside: this being written in the US and in the 1990s, it's not surprising that they would assume that you get exactly the healthcare you can afford, but I think it's unfortunate. It would have been more imaginative to think it through first.
One of the things that feels to me like an obvious lesson from the current pandemic, is that having a state-run system that is free at point of use has to be an effective way of dealing with public health. I was invited by my doctor's surgery to book an appointment for my vaccine. I don't know how the vaccine system works in the US, or in the EU or elsewhere where medical insurance is the order of the day, and presumably it is working ok, but still. Anyway, my point, if I can remember it, is that on a space station, I would think it ought to be a priority that ANYONE who needs healthcare should be able to get it, fast, and probably for free. Perhaps the insurance payment is included in the fee for arriving on the station. If someone on B5 gets COVID-2258, they're going to want to know about it fast, before it spreads to everybody else and has as many mutations as there are different species on board. If the first person to stop tasting his food doesn't have the cash to pay to access MedLab, the whole station is very likely stuffed.
Back to the topic at hand, which is really that semi-miraculous medical device that Laura is using to heal people. We'll just have to accept that Stephen's magic glass pencil can measure 'life force', whatever that may be, and go along with it. It's quite unusual for B5 to get that fanciful, and to me, it jars.
Anyway. The device was apparently used for capital punishment, and there is a certain attractiveness to such a notion, particularly when we have seen that the only practical alternative on B5 is a mindwipe. Better to be executed while giving life to (comparatively) innocent citizens who have terminal illnesses than to be wiped clean of your entire life. Well. I wouldn't be surprised if the condemned think so, at any rate, and as a theory the idea of using the guilty to help the innocent has its appeal. (Hmm - I wonder if executed prisoners in, say, the USA, get to donate their organs post-execution? Do recipients know whose bits they now contain? There was a song about it, years ago, Looking through Gary Gilmour's Eyes.)
But they do present a good case for seeing it as Not That Simple when it gets past the distant/theoretical and into the actual. Dr Laura knows that her health has come at the expense of somebody's life, and she is very much not happy about it. Later, much later, Ivanova will come to feel the intolerable burden as well, and if I'm remembering correctly, she resents it very much. It's also capital punishment, which is a thing I would like to hope won't exist in any human society a couple of hundred years from now. It's a pretty grisly society that refuses the life imprisonment on grounds of cost and/or practicality, but uses a condemned prisoner's body to benefit an entirely unrelated person and in the process, kills the condemned. On the one hand - use the soon-to-be-wasted bad person's life to help a soon-to-run-out good person's life. Fine. On the other hand - ick?
I liked Stephen's first impulse to make an analogy with blood donations. If the "life essence" depleted by the machine can be built up again, that seems ideal. Make a regular donation, once a year, once a month, eat an extra bar of chocolate afterwards, and everyone's happy. However. I can't remember what Stephen discovers about it, but what if treating someone else takes away, say, a month of your own life? I don't see many people queuing up to make random donations to strangers on that basis, but it might be something you'd do for family, like donating a kidney to your near kin can be done now. Even so, it might impose a burden of honour that a lot of people would find uncomfortable to live with.
I like the way the show treats the ethical questions raised by the machine (though of course they set it up as black and white as possible by making the prisoner so utterly vile). It gave us quite a bit to talk about as the episode finished. I liked the judge character, who was spot on in his refusal to allow Talia to take a look around the evil guy's brain. Garibaldi was nicely in character. Franklin was in character too, all shoot-first-ask-questions-later-when-I'm-aware-I-wasn't-as-clever-as-I-thought-I-was, just like in that episode with the boy who could not be cut open as it would allow his soul to escape. He's not a bad guy, but is a lot more arrogant than I like my characters to be.
And, it was nice to see a glimpse of kickass Lennier. Not... so sure about Londo's naughty bit.
For those of you who have not seen Babylon 5 before, there will be spoilers! Also, you should watch it.
At lunchtime today, Beast and I watched the penultimate episode of B5 season 1, The Quality of Mercy. It's the one in which (a) Londo introduces Lennier to the delights of the seamy side of the station, (b) a very nasty murderer is sentenced to death, and (c) Dr Franklin finds a 'quack' offering cures to people with not enough money to go to MedLab. It doesn't seem to have a lot to say about the Arc as a whole, though it's not completely irrelevant either.
Aside: this being written in the US and in the 1990s, it's not surprising that they would assume that you get exactly the healthcare you can afford, but I think it's unfortunate. It would have been more imaginative to think it through first.
One of the things that feels to me like an obvious lesson from the current pandemic, is that having a state-run system that is free at point of use has to be an effective way of dealing with public health. I was invited by my doctor's surgery to book an appointment for my vaccine. I don't know how the vaccine system works in the US, or in the EU or elsewhere where medical insurance is the order of the day, and presumably it is working ok, but still. Anyway, my point, if I can remember it, is that on a space station, I would think it ought to be a priority that ANYONE who needs healthcare should be able to get it, fast, and probably for free. Perhaps the insurance payment is included in the fee for arriving on the station. If someone on B5 gets COVID-2258, they're going to want to know about it fast, before it spreads to everybody else and has as many mutations as there are different species on board. If the first person to stop tasting his food doesn't have the cash to pay to access MedLab, the whole station is very likely stuffed.
Back to the topic at hand, which is really that semi-miraculous medical device that Laura is using to heal people. We'll just have to accept that Stephen's magic glass pencil can measure 'life force', whatever that may be, and go along with it. It's quite unusual for B5 to get that fanciful, and to me, it jars.
Anyway. The device was apparently used for capital punishment, and there is a certain attractiveness to such a notion, particularly when we have seen that the only practical alternative on B5 is a mindwipe. Better to be executed while giving life to (comparatively) innocent citizens who have terminal illnesses than to be wiped clean of your entire life. Well. I wouldn't be surprised if the condemned think so, at any rate, and as a theory the idea of using the guilty to help the innocent has its appeal. (Hmm - I wonder if executed prisoners in, say, the USA, get to donate their organs post-execution? Do recipients know whose bits they now contain? There was a song about it, years ago, Looking through Gary Gilmour's Eyes.)
But they do present a good case for seeing it as Not That Simple when it gets past the distant/theoretical and into the actual. Dr Laura knows that her health has come at the expense of somebody's life, and she is very much not happy about it. Later, much later, Ivanova will come to feel the intolerable burden as well, and if I'm remembering correctly, she resents it very much. It's also capital punishment, which is a thing I would like to hope won't exist in any human society a couple of hundred years from now. It's a pretty grisly society that refuses the life imprisonment on grounds of cost and/or practicality, but uses a condemned prisoner's body to benefit an entirely unrelated person and in the process, kills the condemned. On the one hand - use the soon-to-be-wasted bad person's life to help a soon-to-run-out good person's life. Fine. On the other hand - ick?
I liked Stephen's first impulse to make an analogy with blood donations. If the "life essence" depleted by the machine can be built up again, that seems ideal. Make a regular donation, once a year, once a month, eat an extra bar of chocolate afterwards, and everyone's happy. However. I can't remember what Stephen discovers about it, but what if treating someone else takes away, say, a month of your own life? I don't see many people queuing up to make random donations to strangers on that basis, but it might be something you'd do for family, like donating a kidney to your near kin can be done now. Even so, it might impose a burden of honour that a lot of people would find uncomfortable to live with.
I like the way the show treats the ethical questions raised by the machine (though of course they set it up as black and white as possible by making the prisoner so utterly vile). It gave us quite a bit to talk about as the episode finished. I liked the judge character, who was spot on in his refusal to allow Talia to take a look around the evil guy's brain. Garibaldi was nicely in character. Franklin was in character too, all shoot-first-ask-questions-later-when-I'm-aware-I-wasn't-as-clever-as-I-thought-I-was, just like in that episode with the boy who could not be cut open as it would allow his soul to escape. He's not a bad guy, but is a lot more arrogant than I like my characters to be.
And, it was nice to see a glimpse of kickass Lennier. Not... so sure about Londo's naughty bit.