Tuesday, December 4, 2012

B5: Confessions and Lamentations

This is the Dr. Franklin episode for the back half of Season 2. It is remarkably similar to that earlier one with the sick kid, only remarkably less preachy.

So the good Doctor has this friend named Dr. Lazarus Lazeren. He's a Markab, which is a word my spell-checker is recognizing to my considerable surprise. And four Markabs have died within the last week, which is extraordinarily suspicious, apparently. This leads me to ask exactly how many Markabs are on the station.

It turns out that there's this plague that apparently means all the Markabs are sinners. The B5 crew doesn't want to isolate and ostracize them, but the Markabs take care of that by isolating themselves. A little Markab kid loses his daddy. Delenn is sad.

Delenn has Sheridan over for dinner. There's an incredibly long running gag about how the food must be prepared and then eaten in a very specific way. Sheridan is remarkably slow to take the hint. But he appears to be trying.

Well anyway it's not clear whether the disease can spread to other species, so all the Markabs decide to isolate themselves and pray, because prayer always works in these situations, right? (This is why I compare it to that episode with the sick kid and the Luddite parents.) Delenn decides to go into the quarantine room to comfort the dying Markabs. Lennier goes with her because come on. Sheridan tries to talk her out of it, telling her that they're not her people. "I did not know that similarity was a requirement for compassion," says the woman who became half-human in order to forge a better understanding between two species.

So she and Lennier go into the quarantine room to watch the aliens die comfort them in their final hours. That alien boy from earlier (actually per the credits, the character's played by a girl, but I couldn't tell and am apparently a sexist prick. Look, the kid hasn't hit puberty yet, is never assigned a gender on-screen, and is buried underneath a layer of latex. How should I know?) can't find her mother. Delenn sends Lennier off to find the mother. What's her name? "Mama." Lennier gets a fancy new mantra: "Faith manages." You need it, buddy. Well surprise surprise, he somehow manages to find the mother (maybe her name actually is Mama), just in time for the kid to keel over. Because in case you haven't figured it out yet, JMS hates kids.

Well, another alien drops dead from the disease, so Dr. Lazeren decides to go in and do the autopsy himself. He catches the disease. Or maybe he had it before, but that was never addressed. He and Franklin are old friends. You can tell because he keeps calling Franklin "Stephen," and calling him on his stim habit. They go off on some discussion about how the Bubonic Plague was carried by rats, and the people killed the cats that were chasing the rats off because they were religious stupid. Lazeren says something that might make you think that this episode's going to resolve itself on a counter-intuitive solution, but nope, Franklin Sciences the Science, but not before Lazeren dies. Oh well.

Down to the quarantine room to administer the cure to the Markabs. No, wait, first we have to whip up a batch of vials of cure. That might not have taken so long, except that Dr. Franklin destroyed most of the vials in the medlab in a fit of grief after Lazeren died. By the time that's done, the only two people left alive in the quarantine room are, surprise surprise, the two in the opening credits.

Everyone is sad. Except for some a-hole bartender. The end.

On Certain Other Shows, it'd be just about acceptable to introduce a new character and establish his relationship with one of the regulars by having the new guy call the regular by his first name. It seems strangely out of place here.

I can't really say that much positive about the episode itself, since the plague comes out of nowhere and is resolved by the time the episode ends. The arc stuff is nicely worked in, though. Sheridan and Delenn are getting bored by each other's customs to know each other better. Keffer's obsessed with whatever he saw in hyperspace. Franklin's addicted to stims.

Sneaking a peak at my episode guide, this is the last "standalone" of Season 2, so "meh" is kind of acceptable. It has to remind you of where the characters are in their relationships with themselves and each other (and if I ever have to write a phrase as full of philosophical vomit as that, please take away my internet connection). It does that. Meh.

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