Babylon 5 s02e18 Confessions and Lamentations
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Lt Keffer has been looking for an unidentified ship he saw once in hyperspace. That's potentially deadly! The mystery of the shadows and the different threads all feel strung tightly. I always want to know more than they reveal.
A Markab ship is late/missing, and four Markab have died of natural causes on the station in the last few days. Interesting to have them be involved in two, simultaneous mysteries. Connected, I wonder?
Date night is levelling up! Delenn is reciprocating the human style date with a Minbari ritual dinner. Lennier hasn't slept in two days in order to ritually prepare it correctly, and now they must eat it ritually/
Terribly amusing that this is her date night. Like, is this super romantic to Minbari? Lennier cooked, is that normal romantic behavior, too? Too funny.
Markab ship found, but everyone on board is dead! The mystery deepens. Trying to figure out if it could be a life stage thing, or if not, then what else it could be.
Sheridan is gratefully free of the dinner invitation. Hoping, for Lennier that it isn't so labor intensive or require fasting for two days as he prepares it!
Ah, plague among the Markab. It's "100% terminal and 100% contagious," which is horrible, but it appears to only effect Markab? Recorded history, but also a legend and strange occurence that only happened once, a thousand years before.
I'm impressed they recognized it again so fast!
Bad govt pandemic planning and response for ratings, relevant in 2023. C'mon society.
Indeed, it is to be earnestly hoped that the disease can be studied and stopped, and that it isn't communicable to non-Markab.
Sounds a little like rapid-onset rabies, tbh. Pandemic lockdown and quarantine!
A terrible situation to have to manage. Large scale people management and crisis management is so not my thing.
Sheridan doesn't want to give Delenn permission to go into the isolation zone to help care for the self-isolated Markab, because she'll be at risk and he can't authorize her and Lennier to come out of it again till the crisis has passed.
"Don't look away, Captain. All life is transitory, a dream. We all come together in the same place, at the end of time. If I don't see you again here, I will see you in a little while, in the place where no shadows fall."
"Delenn - when I do see you again... call me John?"
awww, it's so sweet.
Garibaldi-special fighting! The fight choreography is good, but Garibaldi fights with such a panache. It's entertaining every time. The Markab who aren't self isolating are having such a hard time. The quarantined ones' lack of privacy and general tension would be miserable, too.
Little history lesson on the black plague. I like how Dr Franklin says so confidently that it was in the 14th century, like it's a universally known measure of time and this Markab doctor would know earth's calendar.
Also sad times to be dying in a lab sealed in with a corpse of a patient you didn't save, and being studied as you die of the disease.
Using the least common sense possible while deciding how to look for a little Markab girl's mother. Lennier and Delenn are so intelligent and make the funniest decisions sometimes, anyway.
Dr Franklin used to hitchhike on starships. That's pretty cool. Dr Franklin has done some cool stuff in general.
The plague has officially jumped species!
It's dangerous business, being old friends with Dr Franklin. Almost everyone he knows that gets introduced in the show, dies. I rather feel like his father is the only person from his past who's been on the show and lived.
Dr Franklin has a breakthrough and a potential treatment! But it appears that the only living people inside the quarantine zone are Delenn and Lennier. That would be horrible! This has got to be as heartbreaking a conclusion of their earlier conversation there could be. I didn't think they were going to fail to discover a treatment in time to save any of the Markab! All known Markab everywhere are dead. Wow, they really did that!
Dang, they went to a dark as fuck place with the conclusion of this one! It was compelling! Another I think of as a little, self-contained horror story. Especially dark for Delenn and Lennier, and Dr Franklin. I hope Dr Franklin has his own therapist or at least some really good coping mechanisms, at least Delenn and Lennier have each other and highly ritualized Minbari life to help them cope.
Really, no one did it like B5. I'm so impressed by the storytelling and how well contained the episodes are while still advancing the overall plot.
"When I do see you again...call me John?"
I'm gonna fuckin cry!
what excellence lies ahead...!
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Figuring Lennier out is weird because even during events where he should be a central core character, he's treated more as a support, a second thought. In S1 we meet him as this naïve young Minbari who's fresh out of his time at the temple, he doesn't know much about the universe and sees his culture in idealized lens. But by S4 (in the few moments we get inside his head that is) he's all skeptical about the Minbari and clings even harder to Delenn because of it.
But the thing is, while he's present at a lot of crucial events that would explain the shift in his thinking, he doesn't really participate as an active character, and therefore leaves us to figure out his arc by overanalyzing small nudgets of nuance sprinkled here and there over the show.
Maybe JMS just didn't know what to do with him personally besides being Delenn's protector/aide, or maybe Lennier just think of himself as so insignificant he prefers to live vicariously through Delenn and his idealized vision of her. Which would also explain his animosity to Sheridan even more, as it's not only a simple jealousy sparred from unrequited love, but a literal "if I was Delenn I wouldn't choose him". But she does and that fantasy is ruined by the time S5 begins.
What's curious is that his choice is to join the Rangers, who follow the same line of suppressing their personal will for a bigger cause. He's not parting ways with Delenn in order to know himself better, but to continue running away from that. He craves purpose for the sake of it, but he's never in the frontline, the first to take a step, he's only there to support others more corageuous to do so.
Hence why his ending feels so strange and somewhat unsatisfying to me. You can see hints of what could have lead him to reach that point, but never a strong development and character direction that corroborates that idea.
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