Jumpgate #11 - Believers
Added 2022-05-31 18:49:15 +0000 UTCThe Babylon 5 rewatch continues as Vera and I hit an episode that... Vera had a lot of thoughts on. Let's just say Franklin doesn't come out looking too good in this one. But I think we have a great conversation on this one, so come join us!
Comments
Boy this was a mess. In universe, especially since we already have seen with Soulhunter that souls are apparently a real thing, Franklin is a massive dick who does not respect non-humans and their cultures and believes one bit. Out of the Babylon 5 universe, I have seen and read way too much about different high-demand religions and cults doing this exact thing and causing unfathomable amounts of pain and I have absolutely no patience for the parents here. In conclusion, thanks I hate everything about it
Gesa K
2023-08-06 12:48:13 +0000 UTCAgreed on all fronts
Jessie Earl
2022-07-13 08:04:05 +0000 UTCThis episode has such a crappy outcome. Every character sucks, and the episode goes back and forth between making the parents sympathetic but also putting them in the antagonist role. Franklin especially makes fucked up choices in terms of medical ethics, but what also got to me was during the surgery he does a prayer for the child's soul and makes a point of asking the child if they felt they still had a sole post surgery and to try to convince their parents. Most of the episode he's acting as an atheist straw man, but then it turns around and has him believe the christian view of the soul is correct and the alien's religion is wrong about souls. Given the show explicitly showed souls in a previous episode, it's a whole extra layer of genuine in universe harm Franklin was willing to cause the patient to sooth his personal moral qualms with the situation, medical ethics be damned
Blueberry Hill
2022-07-07 16:27:51 +0000 UTCVery much agreed Becky
Jessie Earl
2022-06-06 21:08:26 +0000 UTCOver twenty years later, I'm still furious that Franklin didn't lose his medical license, and both the parents AND Franklin felt like straw men in this story. The parents were a straw man of religious parents. but Franklin was a straw man of an atheist. His internal conflict was reasonable, but while his behavior wasn't at the "God's Not Dead" level of straw manning of how an atheist treats religious folks, it was pretty bad. If the parents and child had been human, Franklin would have had legal grounds to supersede the parents' religious beliefs in order to save the child. They weren't human, though, and Franklin didn't have the knowledge or understanding of their culture to make those decisions for them. THIS is the episode I skip on every re-watch because it makes me so angry.
Becky Sparks
2022-06-05 18:17:28 +0000 UTCYeah, that is facinating on those legal terms tbh
Jessie Earl
2022-06-03 21:39:56 +0000 UTCIt's so interesting to hear that this was written by an adoptive parent. As an adoptive parent myself, I have started to see this episode coded first and foremost as a story of medical neglect, with all the tragedy and trauma falling out of that initial crime. That might be why I'm much more sympathetic to Franklin than most people I've talked/listened to about this. Parental rights and religious rights do not extend to allowing the abuse and neglect of children. Nobody, not even a parent, is allowed to hurt a child. But, of course, on Babylon 5 it's not that simple since our own legal frameworks and social contracts don't get extended to alien visitors.
Keith Morse
2022-06-01 15:03:08 +0000 UTCI really enjoyed this conversation you and Vera had about this episode! I really think the writers tried to roll three different ideas into one episode and failed at it tremendously. The three ideas being 1) do parents have the right to withhold treatment from their children. 2) bad medical ethics and 3) science vs religion. They could have done any of these ideas by themselves and it could have worked, but they bit off more than they could. Also, as a medical person, Franklin absolutely should have been fired, had his medical license revoked and possibly charged with assult.
Alana Halper
2022-05-31 19:05:24 +0000 UTC
