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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.
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Babylon 5 does like to serve up moral dilemmas, and even years later, after watching the series umpteen times, I'm still not sure how I feel about the machine used for capital punishment - kill one while healing others, the mindwipe option - destroy evil personality, fit body with shiny new helpful personality, or the idea of spacing someone convicted of treason. I would, however, like access to that machine, as I'm sure many people with health issues would, and if I were 100% healthy, I wouldn't object to donating a few days' worth of life energy to help others.
I do agree about Franklin being arrogant, and Believers is still an episode that's uncomfortable to watch, for that reason. Franklin always assumes he's right and everyone else is wrong. But if he'd known about the machine before, he could have cured the boy without surgery. I'm sure the parents would have willingly donated life energy to heal their child.
It's an interesting insight to Minbari culture, and one that is important further down the line, that they find honour in helping others save face. Minbari don't lie, except when they do.
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I like the dilemma about the machine. If there actually were such a thing, it would take a great deal of work to figure out a way to use it - in our society, I mean. The idea of donating a few days of 'life energy' would work for me, too, and I think a lot of people would be willing to do it. There was a good queue at the blood donation centre, after all. But I suspect that the temptation to use it for capital punishment would be very strong. So I think it was a good thing to lob into the episode - I don't really see it being connected to the Arc in a major way, aside from "well, this Thing can be good or bad depending on how it is handled", but it's an interesting conversation to have.
As for Believers, yes, there is a sort of sense of doom because we can *see* Franklin disregarding the parents' opinions. Now, in many ways, I am on his side - it's obviously an analogy for those present-day religious beliefs that don't allow their members to be helped by certain aspects of modern medicine, and I have little time or sympathy for them. But when beliefs are held so firmly that even the threatened death of one's own child doesn't shake them, those beliefs have to be taken seriously as a component of the situation, and Franklin didn't. As character-building, I like it, because he's all the way to one end of the scale, and that makes for an interesting personality to throw into the mix. A doctor who was less certain of himself might well be less interesting to watch, and indeed, less able to work with the majority of patients. But although I approve of the character, I don't *like* him particularly.
From the writing point of view, the episodes have to happen in the order they do, otherwise the entire audience ends up shouting at Franklin to Use The Machine! As you say, the parents would have leapt at that solution. That's one of the big things that B5 does so much better than Star Trek - because it is *planned* instead of episode-by-episode (unless you're Worf), there is continuity. Things We Know, and Characterisation, don't generally get tossed aside For Plot. But then, I used to write ST:TNG fanfic, and never attempted it with B5 because there weren't anywhere near the spaces available.
I've just watched the opening episode of season 2, and there seems to be quite a lot of things that Minbari don't do, except when they do. Minbari do not kill Minbari, but they'll destroy a battleship full of Minbari if they have to. They can be quite pragmatic. But I don't think much of their logics. Sheridan had a victory and destroyed one of their battleships and is thus detestable - meanwhile the Minbari were laying waste to the Earthforce military without much difficulty. Talk about sore winners.
no subject
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.
Sadly I don't think it would have made a difference if it had been written today. I see far too many AUs set in completely different worlds that still take it for granted that healthcare must be expensive for the individual. It's like the writer can't concive of a world where this isn't the case. (It's the same with higher education!)
I completely agree with you that a kickass Lennier is always a nice thing to see!
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I like my notion of including health insurance in the fee they pay to board Babylon 5.
I do like the way the non-arc episodes often have something thought-provoking in them. Which may possibly tie into the overall theme of the season, but may not. I was never quite fannish enough to go that deep at the time, when there must have been lots of cool discussions online.
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It's a real shame there isn't a gorgeous Blu-Ray version of the show. I rewatched ST:TNG on Blu-Ray recently and it looks *so* good, it quite makes a difference to how I perceive the shows. I mean, the first season is, uh, less bad! What they did with B5 was a brilliant way of presenting science fiction, and the stories really hold up - in fact, I can't help thinking that if there were a really clean, beautiful version available it could be shown now and would still work. All those references at the beginning of the show to 'Earth first!' and the Home Guard, and later Homeland Security, well. Yeah.