I may have been talking trash about Born to the Purple, but Infection is a further step down. I have rewatched this series many, many times front to back, but Infection is a very skippable episode and not one that I often go back to on its own. It is a pretty rote scifi plot that doesn’t really do any heavy lifting in terms of arc, other than exploring a bit more about Sinclair’s trauma. The best I can say is that this is the last in a run of skippable season 1 episodes, though it wont be the last one by far.
Its news media time on Babylon 5, and we get to open with Garibaldi listening to a reporter(Mary Ann Cramer) complain about a lack of access to Sinclair. The reporter sheds some light on how Babylon 5 the station is perceived back on Earth, and it was pretty grim.
We switch to Dr. Franklin busy at work before he gets interrupted by an old scientist friend played by David McCallum. He quickly ropes Franklin into some kind of mystery, while his associate, played by Marshall Teague, gets the drop on an unfortunate customs inspector.
Sinclair, Garibaldi and Franklin are suspicious of the sudden heart attack of the customs inspector, but no one is too upset about it, though Sinclair gets a nice little gesture of making sure that the body is fully covered before it is wheeled out.
Vance starts filling in Franklin on some artifacts while C&C notice a mysterious energy surge the moment the cases are opened. Turns out that Vance has managed to uncover organic technology on a world that has been dead for a thousand years. The show often used the presence of organic tech as evidence of a species being much more advanced than Earth, and this is the introduction of that trope, with a helpful explainer from Vance.
The show does not waste any time kicking off the main plot once the exposition is out of the way. Nelson gets zapped by one of the artifacts while alone with it, and immediately starts to change. In true zombie movie fashion he decides to not share any of this with Vance or Franklin. Franklin and Vance may be distracted by a conversation about securing funding that could have happened today, with Vance reasoning that only large corporations have the funds to do the kind of research he wants, while Franklin is uncomfortable with stealing technology from dead worlds.
We get a brief snippet of Garibaldi explaining how he got his job before the reporter shuts him down, and we jump right back to the body horror movie already in progress. Nelson is looking even worse and is now starting to put more pieces of the machine on himself. Franklin interrupts and gets blasted by the transformed Nelson who just says “protect”.
Sinclair and Garibaldi confront Vance, and start working out the particulars of the situation. While Nelson goes on a killing spree elsewhere on the station, looking much gooier. Ivanova chases off the reporter who does the standard “people have the right to know” routine. Meanwhile Garibaldi and the security team take a potshot at a now fully armored Nelson.
Garibaldi, Ivanova and Sinclair compare some notes and up the stakes, realizing that as Nelson gets more powerful, he will soon be capable of destroying the station. Security set up to fight the creature, while Franklin swings by to give some silly exposition about the creature. Formed as a weapon that was supposed to only respond to pure members of its race, a definition set by religious extremists and military fanatics. The obvious problem happens the first time out and the weapons turned on everyone.
After another battle, Sinclair opts for the Ripley solution of blowing it out the airlock. Sinclair baits the creature by taunting it about its dead race, and then kind of clumsily explaining how the machines killed everyone. Eventually he gets through to it and it decides to just kill itself leaving a naked Nelson behind, which strikes me as very werewolf.
Franklin confronts Vance about his culpability in the death of the customs officer and in everything that happened. Vance quickly becomes a much slimier character when he discusses how he had planned to sell the weapons, but Franklin has already arranged for him to be arrested for murder.
This brings us to really the best scene in the whole episode. Garibaldi sits down and confronts Sinclair about his acts of heroism. It is an interesting change of pace for a TV show to question why the hero risks his life, and it also explores some of the personal trauma from the Earth-Minbari war, in the form of the PTSD and survivors guilt of its participants. It is also good to see the main character react to this by being pensive rather than insulted, dismissive or defensive.
Franklin’s story for the week ends on a sour note as he ponders the road that Earth may be heading down because of the war, and he receives orders to transfer all of the bioweapons back to Earth. The final scene is Sinclair explaining to the reporter that Earth needs to be in space and involved in the galaxy to ensure that Earth’s culture lives on after the sun explodes. It is a bit of a cheesy scene but it is nice to see that Sinclair believes in that at least, even if he didn’t have a good answer for Garibaldi earlier.
Next week we take on a much better episode with “The Parliament of Dreams” which has less whacky alien monsters and more examinations of alien cultures.
As always Babylon 5 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, or you can stream it for free with about the same amount of commercials on Tubi.
The Good
- That scene between Garibaldi and Sinclair was unlike a lot of things I had seen when I was watching this show for the first time when I was 12. The idea that the main character’s heroism could come from a place of pain, and unhealed wounds was interesting then and I still like it now.
- Despite the clunkiness of the overall plot, the costume for the Ikarran weapon looked okay overall, and the transformation was suitably disgusting looking.
The Bad
- The reporter character was pretty one note, which is surprising given JMS’s background as a reporter himself
- The plot itself of this episode was pretty run of the mill monster of the week, and none of the performances really stood out well.
- Heavy emphasis on the Earth characters meant we missed out on Londo, Delenn or G’Kar. Even a short scene with them would have been nice, since it ended up being a potentially station destroying emergency.
Arc Points (Spoilers Ahead)
- IPX gets introduced here, and they appear several more times in the show. They are a uniformly awful company in every appearance.
- ISN gets named dropped here, despite its reporters and logos being in the first episode. Another fixture of future episodes.
- Sinclair is confronted with the question of whether he is trying to die. This starts him on a road to finding something worth living for, which will end with him becoming a Minbari religious figure.
- Garibaldi’s alcoholism is obliquely referenced here, but it will come up again.
- Marshall Teague did not get a lot to do in this episode but he showed he could be a good sport and endure tons of prosthetics, a skill which will have him come back in Season 2, 3 and 5 as Ta’Lon, another Narn character.
- One of the missed opportunities of the switch from Sinclair to Sheridan is more of an exploration of his survivor’s guilt. In future episodes they talk in more detail about the Battle of the Line, and one of the numbers that gets tossed around is 200 survivors out of 20,000. Sheridan lived through the same war, but doesnt seem to carry quite the same scars as Sinclair.