In the eighteenth episode of the second season of Babylon 5, could this show PLEASE stop hurting me, THANKS. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Babylon 5.
Trigger Warning: For extensive discussion of death and death of a child, illness, ableism, HIV stigma
What the fuck WHAT THE FUCK! This show is a lot!!! This did not go as I thought it would and IT’S SO GRIM, GOOD GOD. Which is wild to me because the tweet for “The Coming of Shadows†just went live (relative to me), and I thought I had a sense of how grim this show would be, but NOPE.Â
Y’all, an entire fucking species just died on this show. THE WHOLE FUCKING SPECIES. Like, I thought this was sad enough after that child died, but y’all…
This is a lot. Is there a greater message here? Perhaps, and I actually think the one aspect of this episode that will carry into the future is not anything to do with Dr. Franklin or the Markab. It’s Delenn’s relationship with Sheridan, which has just moved a step closer to something… I don’t know, actually. Possibly romantic? The chemistry is there, and the show has been slowly building an emotional foundation between the two of them. I admit that I’d love to see this go forward! I think that’s something unmistakably human, too: finding companionship in some form or another.Â
But that aspect of the episode, while HEARTBREAKING (the way she says, “John!â€, will forever destroy me), is just a tiny part of the greater whole. It was hard to watch this episode without thinking of the possible analogue to HIV and the stigma that surrounds it. Though I don’t believe that the writers (or, I suppose in this case, JMS, since he had writing credit on it) intended for that to be the sole metaphor here. There was a huge moral aspect to the Black Death as well, and I think if JMS had wanted this to be an HIV or AIDS metaphor, he probably wouldn’t have made this a disease that acts so rapidly or is 100% fatal. Part of how stigma around HIV operates is the mistaken belief that it is an immediate and inevitable death sentence, when that is absolutely not the case with the available medicine in this day in age. I have plenty of HIV+ friends who all got the disease at various stages in their life, at various points in time, and with different drugs available to them. And yes, as sad as it is to say, I have lost friends to HIV, too. If you’re in the gay or queer community, it’s kind of impossible not to know someone who isn’t affected by HIV.
Anyway, I think there’s some value in analyzing this episode as a means of discussing stigma, and I would encourage everyone to do their part in terms of research—reading available information from trusted sources, including and ESPECIALLY first-person ones—about HIV and the stigma that’s attached to it. And that’s one aspect this episode totally nails: humans ascribing a moral reason for a disease when there is none present, and then trying to moralize a cure that only makes matters worse. Much of the moralizing around HIV—that it is a filthy disease, that it warrants slut-shaming, that it’s a “gay†disease—has contributed to the silence around it, and that only makes it harder to deal with it on a societal level and on a personal one.Â
But given the way that Drafa spreads, I found the Black Death analogy far more powerful. This is a disease that could possibly wipe communities out in a matter of weeks, but the religious and moral negativity attached to it only makes matters worse. Unsurprisingly, this enrages Dr. Franklin, and we know from past episodes that he detests when religion gets in the way of him trying to do his job. And it’s interesting, too, since we just learned what Dr. Franklin’s religious leanings are. He’s trying to solve this as best as he can, and that’s why Dr. Lazarenn’s arc is so damn tragic. I see this as a story of two men trying their best to solve a horrific problem, and when it gets so bad that Dr. Lazarenn is infected, it seems logical to him to volunteer himself to be studied.
Yet there is so much tragic irony here. Dr. Franklin’s studies of Dr. Lazarenn help him come to an important discovery… just sixty seconds after Dr. Lazarenn dies. Delenn and Lennier, fully aware that they risk getting infected themselves, sacrifice their own health so they can comfort the dying Markab. They even help reunite a mother and a daughter separated in the chaos. And right when Dr. Franklin figures out a medicine that can delay death—and possibly help the Markab develop a resistance to Drafa—he finds out that all the Markab on the station have died. LITERALLY ALL OF THEM.
This episode is a punch in the gut, y’all. What the HELL.
The video for “Confessions and Lamentations†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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