s1e10: Believers
The avalanche has already started
We’re watching the pioneering 90s TV show Babylon 5. If you want to join us, hit subscribe then go to your account and turn on the Let’s Watch notifications.
This episode sealed the deal for me when I was a teenager. I think I must have been about 14 when I saw this, probably on the VHS releases rather than the original UK air date. I ignored B5 for most of its first season as I thought it was a Star Trek rip-off, and didn’t really discover it properly until I won a set of four-or-so VHS tapes of the back-half of the season.
‘Believers’ was a big deal, though. I’d never seen anything that had such a bleak ending, or which undermined the heroes’ attempts to Do The Right Thing. It’s a story in which there are no easy answers, and no morally ‘correct’ choice. Franklin and Sinclair fail to find a clever solution, as I’d been trained to believe always happened.
Watching it again today, it’s a muddle of an episode, bogged down by extremely on-the-nose writing and dreary direction and editing. That said, there are good performances in here and the central ethical debate remains solid. It raises questions of belief without ever belittling the parents or anyone else. The execution of the episode is the problem here, though, to my more jaded adult eyes.
There are a lot of cross-fades in this episode. Almost every scene seems to start and finish with a soft fade, which often feels to me like the director or editor wasn’t sure how to get in and out of the scenes. It’s a lazy way to segue and takes all the teeth out of the bite. There’s also a curious drop in quality whenever a cross-fade is used; presumably the original dissolve was done digitally and wasn’t possible/easy to recreate using the HD assets for the blu-rays, resulting in a perceptual difference that is quite distracting.
Sinclair and Franklin are both solid in this episode. Franklin’s exasperation is well handled, and the guest actors playing the parents do a decent job. In particular, the father’s attempts to not show emotion while he’s breaking inside is effective, even when the writing is over-obvious. There’s a version of this story which focuses on the parents rather than on Franklin which could have been interesting, showing the same story entirely from their point of view. That would have been a good way to explore their fears and desperation.
It’s also an episode of loose ends at times: Ivanova gets into a big space fight that we never see, and the parents effectively murder their child while on board the station but we don’t get to know the ramifications of that act. Are they arrested? Does B5’s neutrality mean it’s OK for parents to murder children? Regardless of their beliefs, the agreed laws on Babylon 5 you’d imagine would prohibit that. The episode didn’t have time for that, of course, but it’s a shame — it would have been an extra wrinkle in the moral dilemma. Franklin’s arrogance is on display here, but he at least tries to meet the parents halfway. You can’t imagine Garibaldi treating them with respect following the death of the child.
Lots of references again to the pilot, and the operation on Kosh, which I find increasingly awkward given the way the pilot has aged. If I was introducing someone new to the show, I’d likely skip the pilot, but these callbacks make that increasingly tricky.
My favourite scene in this one is probably when Sinclair, Garibaldi and Franklin are covering imports. It feels like real bureaucracy, and the three of them feel like a good team. Those moments of normality work well on the show.
It’s a mediocre, fairly dull episode with a fascinating central idea and an amazing end twist. Generally, though, this one is quite skippable.
Next up is ‘Survivors’.
‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️
This might be the first episode to not have any wider arc implications or details. I didn’t spot anything, at least. Perhaps that’s part of why it feels so flimsy: the world building is limited and it therefore seems to be a small episode, unusually confined and limited in scope.
The sequence with the various ambassadors feels like a re-introduction to each of them. Perhaps, given it’s coming about halfway through the season, this was intended to be an easy on-ramp for new viewers who might have missed the earlier episodes?
This episode has the subtlety of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, but it also establishes the show as very much "not Star Trek." This ending just doesn't happen in that universe (those universes?).
The father gives convinces the mother, who suddenly remembers that she's been pushing so hard because she lost a goldfish in the first grade, or a grandparent shows up and saves the day, or Dr. Crusher/Pulaski/Holodude in that unwatchable mess/Bashir comes up with a cure just before we cut to the last commercial.
The closest we might have come would be one parent saving the kid and the other stomping off angry. But only in an episode of DS9 that Ronald Moore wrote and somehow snuck past Paramount.
Honestly I feel like they could've dropped the Ivanova subplot (although I did like the fro and to line); if you're not going to show the big space battle, what's the point?
As far as the wider episode, the father's nearly breaking down got me, and I agree, Franklin's arrogance right before the big twist was a good moment too.