B5rewatch: The Quality of Mercy
Feb. 2nd, 2016 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthSo I went a long between writing reviews here, but now to return.
1x21: The Quality of Mercy
Fun fact, I had to memorize the quality of mercy speech at one point in high school, I thought of this episode every time I had to deal with the Shakespeare.
That was a really boring trailer. This may not be the best episode ever, but it surely could have had a better trailer than this. On top of which, it’s kind of spoilery in how the plots are going to connect. All around, not a good job on this one.
There’s a fair bit of setup in the opening scene for the...wang gag. Londo’s “Touch this” gesture and then walks out past the Li statue in the middle of frame. I really spend more of the scene going ‘Eee, it’s Virini’ than I do focusing on those facts though.
Hmm, if I was willing to do some episode moving around, it’s possible it would make sense to put this episode after Legacies, that episode might work as a justification for why Delenn is gone from the station. Or maybe move it back a tick to be after VitW and Draal’s joining with the machine sent her home for a bit. Not that there has to be a big reason to justify her going to home for a little while, but it could have some thoughts.
I never really noticed before, but Franklin and Ivanova are really sweet together. Not in a shippy way, but I definitely buy them as friends in a way I’ve had trouble with say Sinclair and Ivanova. It’s just a gentle sort of natural chemistry that I really I like and doesn’t get a lot of play in the series.
Talia does reference spending time on Mars here, which I’ll call set up for the sleep personality. But I also wonder why they have to carry out sentencing so quickly, could they not wait for there to be another telepath? Sure they can’t keep Mueller in the brig for life, but a month or two before carrying out sentencing doesn’t seem unreasonable. Plus...if they’re already going to death-of-personality this guy I’m not sure poking around in his head to see if they can solve a few other crimes seems 100% wrong. The law is mostly a good one in this case with not having telepathic evidence be admissible in court, I’m in favor of that limitation, so I certainly see why the rule exists. But unless the DOP is reversible (and we’re never given any indication that it is), this isn’t looking for new evidence, and it’s not like they can DOP him twice. I’m not sure I’m saying this very well, but I don’t think Garibaldi’s idea is completely unreasonable; morally sketchy still probably but not horrendous.
Really, I think it is a problem that the DOP doesn’t have a reset. Obviously the death penalty doesn’t either, but people aren’t sentenced to death and have it carried out hours later; at this point it’s a years’ long process with plenty of time for appeal and possible change. Granted that’s an American perspective, I’m sure there are countries in the world that act faster, as there are countries that don’t have the death penalty at all. If one were to think of this as more of a frontier town environment the swift, decisive sentencing would make somewhat more sense, but it’s not quite a right fit to think of it that way. On the other hand, it’s probably good that the DOP doesn’t have a rest button, because then it would be used rather than jail at all, give people a new personality for a month while they’re being investigated, if found innocent have personality restored; that’s an even more frightening thought.
Biggs’ acting in the scene where he confronts Rosen’s daughter is a bit off I think. He plays it like he had all the answers when he should have put some pieces together mid conversation, because in one line he’s confronting her all ‘If it works why are you still here?’ and the very next line it’s about her not telling her mother they could leave. He can’t have come to the conversation with both those questions in the same tone.
Hold on a sec, is the bed in the...security bay? med lab? (I can’t tell where they are for this scene) tilted Minbari style? It’s only in shot for a second or so, but the bed seems to be at an angle rather than flat. That’s just weird and I don’t know what to make of it. There was another shot a bit later and it definitely looks like a slanted bed again.
Mueller seems very aware for what’s going on when he’s being scanned, he even continues to remark on it once they’re done. Yet at the same time I don’t think what Talia sees is revealing enough for me to think she was scanning him deeply where she would have made conversational contact with his mind. This just doesn’t quite seem to hold with the way telepathy mostly works in this verse.
A couple of comments on the Londo-Lennier plot. The Franklin plot feels like it’s taking place over possibly days, the Mueller plot clearly takes place over at least many hours if not a couple of days, yet Londo and Lennier spend that whole time in the casino? I’m also kind of pondering how the Minbari do not lie thing interacts with gambling, not that Lennier’s any good at it, but since it doesn’t exactly involve gambling so much as controlling the truth I can kind of see the Minbari being excellent at it.
Even if you accept that no one noticed Londo messing with the deck of cards, he’s being pretty obvious about moving cards around in his hand. I kind of feel like someone, especially hardened gamblers would notice that (and possibly be aware of the Centauri attributes allowing them to cheat like that).
I kind of feel like it was more in Mueller’s character to kill Lou before getting off the lift. I like Lou but I still have to say that.
I’ve been wondering for a bit who the woman working with Franklin at the clinic is; turns out her name is Rose, which at least is something. And in the absence of actually knowing anything about her or how she got involved with Franklin I’m going to make Rose and the Doctor comments.
I really do like the distinction between the necessary thing and the right thing; almost as much as I like the bit in the ITB novel about the difference between the correct thing and the right thing; both of the comments are things that really resonated with me. It’s both a practical view (that sometimes the best we can do is necessary or correct thing) and an optimistic one (that there is a right thing and it’s something to strive for); and something that very much applies to this show.
It took a lot of years to hit me, but on my rewatch before this one I realized pretty abruptly that Sinclair isn’t really in this episode. To the point where it feel almost random when he does show up at the end. But I do like the joke about the room spinning.
I only say this from a plot and continuity standpoint rather than any attachment, but I do wish Janice had at least come up again. I don’t think she and Stephen would have worked at all beyond the possible occasional hookup, but the end was definitely portrayed as if it was a set up, and I think it could have used more or any in the way of resolution.
Also, this episode has a lot of wrap-up scenes. It’s very B5 and JMS as I’ve observed before, but it still stood out this time.
If the above review seems a bit disjointed in places, it’s because I couldn’t seem to focus on it for very long as I was going through. I think it’s mostly just my attitude the last few days rather than the episode being bad because there’s a lot to like here. It’s not a great episode by any means and I stand by my statement that in terms of wham-ness it’s the breather of the final run, but there’s a lot to like in it. Barring the comedy subplot it’s a pretty serious examination of some issues, the acting is good if not great, especially from the regulars when it comes to the serious pieces; and the comedy subplot is very effective at lightening the mood.
I actually have several notes about the comedy subplot (and then a fairly extensive point about the main plots). As a general observation it’s the only plot in the episode where you get a sense of JMS writing the episode half out of his mind; in VitW it would show up in weird places but here it’s mostly confined to the C plot. Also, I realized that there is a very important reason to leave this episode as the penultimate one rather than move more episodes between it and the finale; it’s the last gasp of s1-Londo before the darkness of Chrysalis swallows him up, and it is important to see that contrast. I know I keep harping on the recommended order not being recommended by me, but once we get out of s1 there won’t be nearly so much.
I’ve also talked before about I don’t think straight up “Minbari do not lie” was ever JMS’ intention and I kind of feel like he regretted letting Peter David make that claim. The Minbari in season 1 pretty much lie as a matter of course and Lennier’s earnestness here is supposed to be noteworthy and indicative of his youth and inexperience. Even though JMS mostly seemed to keep it in canon once introduced he also had a lot of instances of somehow or another defending someone’s honor and made them masters of half/partial truths. Like I said earlier this actually makes poker playing a bit interesting, but as far as the end goes I think it would work either way, because it’s about Lennier’s character as opposed to trying to say something about the Minbari race,
This time around I also had kind of a weird reaction to Lennier’s behavior when it came to the dancers, and it’s part of why I say this plot feels the most loopy in the episode. Because I never view Lennier as a particularly sexual character, and his reaction to the dancer at first is very sexually interested (as an aside, I suspect this is some of why I’m more sympathetic to his feelings for Delenn being tragic instead of annoying, but we’ll discuss that more down the road). Really the whole show is very inclined towards romantic over sexual behavior (weird to point out in the episode with Franklin and Rosen’s daughter who probably aren’t going to be any more than a mostly sexual interaction), which may be part of why the show’s always worked so well for me. I will say that by the time the next scene of Lennier comes around he’s pretty much moved on to annoying Londo with exposition so I guess maybe he was just distracted when it got started.
And then there’s my more thinky thoughts for the episode. Consider that both the alien healing device (I do wish we’d gotten a better name for it) and the death of personality are discussed as means of capital punishment (because unless it is reversible it’s hardly different than the death penalty), and that they both are about using criminals to serve the needs of others. Now, if a society is going to have a form of death penalty, finding a way to turn that death into something that actually serves society rather than simply killing the criminal is a plus; but in doing so it seems likely that society would find it, shall we say, ‘easier’ to pass such a sentence. We see how quickly ‘justice’ is carried out on Babylon 5, and while you could argue a certain amount of frontier mentality of swift action, moving so quickly with no option for appeal is sort of troubling. We don’t know much about the society that created the AHD (more on that in a moment) but I can see a society that could start using it a primary means of punishment, losing X-amount of life energy as specified by your crime, which at least has the possibility of appeal if you survive long enough (which is kind of true of many prison sentences anyway, so maybe only a little more problematic). The presence of any kind of capital punishment in the series is something that becomes a bit more noticeable over time as attitudes towards the death penalty have shifted more and more towards the anti side; in the 90s it was already a debated issue certainly, but in my opinion opinions have swung that way); at least we get PTG later to deal with it a bit more.
Now in terms of where the AHD came from, the common assumption I’ve always seen is that it’s Vorlon or some closely related species, which doesn’t seem that far-fetched; but a couple of observations on that. The philosophy behind it is somewhat Minbari; if you have taken from the public good your punishment is to give of yourself to serve that public good. I think Rosen would know if the tech was Minbari now, but something they had in their past doesn’t seem unreasonable and might be how she’s found out as much as she has. And I think we can connect this to Deathwalker, being able to take the life force from someone and use it to prolong the life of someone else, she just figured how to turn that into immortality (or possibly just a multiplying factor as she only really used it on herself so far and so can’t know just how much her life had been extended, or if she would eventually have to keep taking lives in order to keep preserving her extended life). As I said back in that episode, she could have gotten a lot her research from a race as long lasting as the Minbari, where she’d been living for years. Not that that takes away the possibility of it being Vorlon in nature, as the Minbari have basically been the lapdogs of the Vorlons for who knows how long, but it doesn’t feel like a bad theory to for the origins of the AHD, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone really have one.
After all, it doesn’t seem like Franklin really did much to ask around for info about it.
Next time: Chrysalis, I suspect that will be another big one.
1x21: The Quality of Mercy
Fun fact, I had to memorize the quality of mercy speech at one point in high school, I thought of this episode every time I had to deal with the Shakespeare.
That was a really boring trailer. This may not be the best episode ever, but it surely could have had a better trailer than this. On top of which, it’s kind of spoilery in how the plots are going to connect. All around, not a good job on this one.
There’s a fair bit of setup in the opening scene for the...wang gag. Londo’s “Touch this” gesture and then walks out past the Li statue in the middle of frame. I really spend more of the scene going ‘Eee, it’s Virini’ than I do focusing on those facts though.
Hmm, if I was willing to do some episode moving around, it’s possible it would make sense to put this episode after Legacies, that episode might work as a justification for why Delenn is gone from the station. Or maybe move it back a tick to be after VitW and Draal’s joining with the machine sent her home for a bit. Not that there has to be a big reason to justify her going to home for a little while, but it could have some thoughts.
I never really noticed before, but Franklin and Ivanova are really sweet together. Not in a shippy way, but I definitely buy them as friends in a way I’ve had trouble with say Sinclair and Ivanova. It’s just a gentle sort of natural chemistry that I really I like and doesn’t get a lot of play in the series.
Talia does reference spending time on Mars here, which I’ll call set up for the sleep personality. But I also wonder why they have to carry out sentencing so quickly, could they not wait for there to be another telepath? Sure they can’t keep Mueller in the brig for life, but a month or two before carrying out sentencing doesn’t seem unreasonable. Plus...if they’re already going to death-of-personality this guy I’m not sure poking around in his head to see if they can solve a few other crimes seems 100% wrong. The law is mostly a good one in this case with not having telepathic evidence be admissible in court, I’m in favor of that limitation, so I certainly see why the rule exists. But unless the DOP is reversible (and we’re never given any indication that it is), this isn’t looking for new evidence, and it’s not like they can DOP him twice. I’m not sure I’m saying this very well, but I don’t think Garibaldi’s idea is completely unreasonable; morally sketchy still probably but not horrendous.
Really, I think it is a problem that the DOP doesn’t have a reset. Obviously the death penalty doesn’t either, but people aren’t sentenced to death and have it carried out hours later; at this point it’s a years’ long process with plenty of time for appeal and possible change. Granted that’s an American perspective, I’m sure there are countries in the world that act faster, as there are countries that don’t have the death penalty at all. If one were to think of this as more of a frontier town environment the swift, decisive sentencing would make somewhat more sense, but it’s not quite a right fit to think of it that way. On the other hand, it’s probably good that the DOP doesn’t have a rest button, because then it would be used rather than jail at all, give people a new personality for a month while they’re being investigated, if found innocent have personality restored; that’s an even more frightening thought.
Biggs’ acting in the scene where he confronts Rosen’s daughter is a bit off I think. He plays it like he had all the answers when he should have put some pieces together mid conversation, because in one line he’s confronting her all ‘If it works why are you still here?’ and the very next line it’s about her not telling her mother they could leave. He can’t have come to the conversation with both those questions in the same tone.
Hold on a sec, is the bed in the...security bay? med lab? (I can’t tell where they are for this scene) tilted Minbari style? It’s only in shot for a second or so, but the bed seems to be at an angle rather than flat. That’s just weird and I don’t know what to make of it. There was another shot a bit later and it definitely looks like a slanted bed again.
Mueller seems very aware for what’s going on when he’s being scanned, he even continues to remark on it once they’re done. Yet at the same time I don’t think what Talia sees is revealing enough for me to think she was scanning him deeply where she would have made conversational contact with his mind. This just doesn’t quite seem to hold with the way telepathy mostly works in this verse.
A couple of comments on the Londo-Lennier plot. The Franklin plot feels like it’s taking place over possibly days, the Mueller plot clearly takes place over at least many hours if not a couple of days, yet Londo and Lennier spend that whole time in the casino? I’m also kind of pondering how the Minbari do not lie thing interacts with gambling, not that Lennier’s any good at it, but since it doesn’t exactly involve gambling so much as controlling the truth I can kind of see the Minbari being excellent at it.
Even if you accept that no one noticed Londo messing with the deck of cards, he’s being pretty obvious about moving cards around in his hand. I kind of feel like someone, especially hardened gamblers would notice that (and possibly be aware of the Centauri attributes allowing them to cheat like that).
I kind of feel like it was more in Mueller’s character to kill Lou before getting off the lift. I like Lou but I still have to say that.
I’ve been wondering for a bit who the woman working with Franklin at the clinic is; turns out her name is Rose, which at least is something. And in the absence of actually knowing anything about her or how she got involved with Franklin I’m going to make Rose and the Doctor comments.
I really do like the distinction between the necessary thing and the right thing; almost as much as I like the bit in the ITB novel about the difference between the correct thing and the right thing; both of the comments are things that really resonated with me. It’s both a practical view (that sometimes the best we can do is necessary or correct thing) and an optimistic one (that there is a right thing and it’s something to strive for); and something that very much applies to this show.
It took a lot of years to hit me, but on my rewatch before this one I realized pretty abruptly that Sinclair isn’t really in this episode. To the point where it feel almost random when he does show up at the end. But I do like the joke about the room spinning.
I only say this from a plot and continuity standpoint rather than any attachment, but I do wish Janice had at least come up again. I don’t think she and Stephen would have worked at all beyond the possible occasional hookup, but the end was definitely portrayed as if it was a set up, and I think it could have used more or any in the way of resolution.
Also, this episode has a lot of wrap-up scenes. It’s very B5 and JMS as I’ve observed before, but it still stood out this time.
If the above review seems a bit disjointed in places, it’s because I couldn’t seem to focus on it for very long as I was going through. I think it’s mostly just my attitude the last few days rather than the episode being bad because there’s a lot to like here. It’s not a great episode by any means and I stand by my statement that in terms of wham-ness it’s the breather of the final run, but there’s a lot to like in it. Barring the comedy subplot it’s a pretty serious examination of some issues, the acting is good if not great, especially from the regulars when it comes to the serious pieces; and the comedy subplot is very effective at lightening the mood.
I actually have several notes about the comedy subplot (and then a fairly extensive point about the main plots). As a general observation it’s the only plot in the episode where you get a sense of JMS writing the episode half out of his mind; in VitW it would show up in weird places but here it’s mostly confined to the C plot. Also, I realized that there is a very important reason to leave this episode as the penultimate one rather than move more episodes between it and the finale; it’s the last gasp of s1-Londo before the darkness of Chrysalis swallows him up, and it is important to see that contrast. I know I keep harping on the recommended order not being recommended by me, but once we get out of s1 there won’t be nearly so much.
I’ve also talked before about I don’t think straight up “Minbari do not lie” was ever JMS’ intention and I kind of feel like he regretted letting Peter David make that claim. The Minbari in season 1 pretty much lie as a matter of course and Lennier’s earnestness here is supposed to be noteworthy and indicative of his youth and inexperience. Even though JMS mostly seemed to keep it in canon once introduced he also had a lot of instances of somehow or another defending someone’s honor and made them masters of half/partial truths. Like I said earlier this actually makes poker playing a bit interesting, but as far as the end goes I think it would work either way, because it’s about Lennier’s character as opposed to trying to say something about the Minbari race,
This time around I also had kind of a weird reaction to Lennier’s behavior when it came to the dancers, and it’s part of why I say this plot feels the most loopy in the episode. Because I never view Lennier as a particularly sexual character, and his reaction to the dancer at first is very sexually interested (as an aside, I suspect this is some of why I’m more sympathetic to his feelings for Delenn being tragic instead of annoying, but we’ll discuss that more down the road). Really the whole show is very inclined towards romantic over sexual behavior (weird to point out in the episode with Franklin and Rosen’s daughter who probably aren’t going to be any more than a mostly sexual interaction), which may be part of why the show’s always worked so well for me. I will say that by the time the next scene of Lennier comes around he’s pretty much moved on to annoying Londo with exposition so I guess maybe he was just distracted when it got started.
And then there’s my more thinky thoughts for the episode. Consider that both the alien healing device (I do wish we’d gotten a better name for it) and the death of personality are discussed as means of capital punishment (because unless it is reversible it’s hardly different than the death penalty), and that they both are about using criminals to serve the needs of others. Now, if a society is going to have a form of death penalty, finding a way to turn that death into something that actually serves society rather than simply killing the criminal is a plus; but in doing so it seems likely that society would find it, shall we say, ‘easier’ to pass such a sentence. We see how quickly ‘justice’ is carried out on Babylon 5, and while you could argue a certain amount of frontier mentality of swift action, moving so quickly with no option for appeal is sort of troubling. We don’t know much about the society that created the AHD (more on that in a moment) but I can see a society that could start using it a primary means of punishment, losing X-amount of life energy as specified by your crime, which at least has the possibility of appeal if you survive long enough (which is kind of true of many prison sentences anyway, so maybe only a little more problematic). The presence of any kind of capital punishment in the series is something that becomes a bit more noticeable over time as attitudes towards the death penalty have shifted more and more towards the anti side; in the 90s it was already a debated issue certainly, but in my opinion opinions have swung that way); at least we get PTG later to deal with it a bit more.
Now in terms of where the AHD came from, the common assumption I’ve always seen is that it’s Vorlon or some closely related species, which doesn’t seem that far-fetched; but a couple of observations on that. The philosophy behind it is somewhat Minbari; if you have taken from the public good your punishment is to give of yourself to serve that public good. I think Rosen would know if the tech was Minbari now, but something they had in their past doesn’t seem unreasonable and might be how she’s found out as much as she has. And I think we can connect this to Deathwalker, being able to take the life force from someone and use it to prolong the life of someone else, she just figured how to turn that into immortality (or possibly just a multiplying factor as she only really used it on herself so far and so can’t know just how much her life had been extended, or if she would eventually have to keep taking lives in order to keep preserving her extended life). As I said back in that episode, she could have gotten a lot her research from a race as long lasting as the Minbari, where she’d been living for years. Not that that takes away the possibility of it being Vorlon in nature, as the Minbari have basically been the lapdogs of the Vorlons for who knows how long, but it doesn’t feel like a bad theory to for the origins of the AHD, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone really have one.
After all, it doesn’t seem like Franklin really did much to ask around for info about it.
Next time: Chrysalis, I suspect that will be another big one.
