Killers and healers and cards, oh my! Will the lovely June Lockhart find peace with her new alien healing machine?
(Originally aired on August 17, 1994)
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Lorraine Senna Ferrara
GUEST STARS
June Lockhart - Doctor Laura Rosen
Kate McNeil - Janice Rosen
Mark Rolston - Karl Mueller
Damian London - Centauri Senator
Jim Norton - Ombuds Wellington
WATCH OUT FOR
* Londo's conversation with the Centauri senator. We'll see Damian London rise through the ranks of the Centauri bureaucracy as the series progresses, eventually ascending to the post of regent.
* Janice Rosen's discussion of her mother's stim addiction. Doctor Franklin fails to learn the lesson of Doctor Rosen's history, and is therefore doomed to repeat it.
ANALYSIS
"A life taken will not balance the loss of another life." While actor Jim Norton speaks the lines, the words are J. Michael Straczynski's. The world of Babylon 5 is his; he makes the rules.
This means that Straczynski has the luxury of wishful thinking. His view of 23rd century criminal justice suggests that human society will become more enlightened in the years to come.
The problem with this assumption is that no matter how progressive the institutions of justice become, human nature remains the same.
Even if the courts refuse to take an eye for an eye or a life for a life, the punishment of "death of personality" would probably fail to satisfy the human hunger for vengeance, because it's an abstraction. No matter what the identity of the individual inside the skin, to all outward appearances the perpetrator is still walking around free.
A mind wipe and life devoted to making restitution for one's crimes lacks the visceral, almost primitive sense of closure that comes from the good ol' fashioned frontier justice that Garibaldi endorses.
The tension between restitution and punishment plays a more central, more powerful form in the third-season episode "Passing Through Gethsemane".
COMING UP NEXT
A shot in the back
Delenn's metamorphosis
Earth Force One goes boom
It's New Year's Eve on Babylon 5. Be there when the ball drops in "Chrysalis" -- in more ways than one.
