Babylon 5: Believers

[chaos42]

You do make some excellent points about this episode but there is one i would point out that is the kids ability to choose, hes been told this belief since he was small and the parents don't allow him access to any other point of view, the father wouldn't let him watch any of the stations channels because they demonstrated false belief systems. That right there is the hub of the matter. the parent is focused on his beliefs over the life of the child and won't allow any other point of view in. Its how we have people who are members of groups they get recruited at a young age taught only this is right everything else is wrong. So the kid can't actually make an informed choice, plus the parents treat the doctor badly using rather rude descriptors, and while you may claim that is just a translation issue i think its more a sense of being better than them. I just don't have sympathy for these parents, they are like people who don't believe in modern meds. and do holistic meds. and a person dies from something easy to fix like in that ds9 episode. Its especially an issue with people who deny things that are highly infectious like in the ds9 episode with the markab virus that wiped them out. The issue also have is those parents killed their child how is that ok. I think murder is still a crime even if it is assisted suicide.

[Madner Kami]

And with the Soul Hunters, they seem to use, you know, technology for that. Which again could be Clarke's law at play, can you tell the difference between someone's active brain patterns scanned into an energy pattern, and their soul? It's not so weird from crystalized data. And it's certainly not unreasonable for Sinclair to not automatically presume that one CAN harm a soul with...a knife. It would be the craziest homeless rambling version of "Horton Hears a Soul" if Sinclair ran around his fucking medlab based on the word of two civilians, with no credentials to show us, that "EVERYBODY STOP! No more life-saving surgery until we settle this soul issue! I'll issue a proposal to the President immediately to investigate! He'll have to take this seriously!"

Exactly. Technomages are a thing in Babylon 5 and while the existance of souls is treated ambivalent in the setting, the setting also implies heavily that magic is just very advanced technology. For example, not even the Soul Hunters belief in an afterlife or reincarnation, unlike anyone on this planet would assume if smoething like a soul would be proven to exist and instead try to save "souls" from the oblivion that is death.

[Nevix]

Chuck admitted out right that he didn't want to do this review.

I think he did fine and handling it, given how hard it is to find a middle ground on subjects like this.

As an aside to the next episode:

The next episode is the one where every spacefaring race has to show their dominant religion, and at the end there's an introductory thing for all the different religions on Earth.

The point of that episode was to state that there is no one dominant religion on Earth.

[BunBun299]

I am a religious person. I grew up Christian. From 7th grade until graduation, I attended Christian Schools, at my request, because I was unhappy in public schools and asked my parents to send me there. I don't attend church these days nearly as often as I should. My sleep schedule makes it problematic. And I have read the Bible cover to cover, several times.

And with all of that, I say that if you refuse life saving care for your child because of some sort of religious reason, you are a horrible parent and a horrible person, and the state should take your child from you. I have no sympathy for the parents in this episode what so ever. They should have been arrested for murder as soon as Franklin found them.

I will respect beliefs I do not share to a point. The point where that belief starts causing harm to children is past that point.

[Aotrs Commander]

Never liked this episode, even it Had A Starship Battle In It.


Since Chuck brought it up...

As an engineer, I have always found the basic conciet behind A Cold Equation to be utterly ridiculous (and honestly, a bit offensive); safety margin exists for a reason, because nothing runs without errors. Having something be THAT insensitive to error fundementally undermines the whole concept of the cold, hard laws of maths - because you're *literally ignoring half of them.* I mean, you are basically going "space is hard and maths is uncaring" in the same sentence as "but the laws of probability don't exist, because errors never happen and stuff never breaks down." Which means the whole concept boils down to nothing more than "this is a narrative vehicle for a lose/lose moral choice" (the narrative equivilent of a D&D Paladin trap) which says frack-all about the uncaringness of the universe.

You wanna tell that story? Remove the girl altogether, and just have them calculate exactly just as they did, and them have a part break down and they all die because of the uncaring laws of maths and probabilty that says "failure rate of parts is 10^9[1]," and that means sometimes the improbable happens.



[1]When my Dad worked at Rolls-Royce in fire precautions (i.e. stopping the engines catching fire) that was, I recall, the acceptable threshold for indivisual part failure (1 in one billion).

[Wargriffin]

Honestly

JMS should have had the kid kill himself to really fuck over morally superior Franklin.

[Fianna]

I am a religious person. I grew up Christian. From 7th grade until graduation, I attended Christian Schools, at my request, because I was unhappy in public schools and asked my parents to send me there. I don't attend church these days nearly as often as I should. My sleep schedule makes it problematic. And I have read the Bible cover to cover, several times.

And with all of that, I say that if you refuse life saving care for your child because of some sort of religious reason, you are a horrible parent and a horrible person, and the state should take your child from you. I have no sympathy for the parents in this episode what so ever. They should have been arrested for murder as soon as Franklin found them.

I will respect beliefs I do not share to a point. The point where that belief starts causing harm to children is past that point.

Except it's not like the parents are denying their child life saving surgery just because their religion says it's wrong. They believed that performing the surgery will inflict a fate far worse than death on their child. Even if you think their beliefs are wrong and that the decision should be taken out of their hands, they were trying to do what was best for their child. Like, when ancient doctors covered sick people with leeches, we can say that in almost all cases, they were not helping their patient, and indeed were making them worse, but given that they genuinely believed leeches could rebalance a person's bodily humours and make them well again, they were legitimately trying to do what was best for their patient.

[Durandal_1707]

I'm not going to get involved in this debate, just to say that this episode is, IMO, one of the more thought-provoking SF episodes I can name, regardless of who you feel was in the right. A highlight, especially for Season 1 of this show.

[CareerKnight]

You wanna tell that story? Remove the girl altogether, and just have them calculate exactly just as they did, and them have a part break down and they all die because of the uncaring laws of maths and probabilty that says "failure rate of parts is 10^9[1]," and that means sometimes the improbable happens.

The Cold Equation wasn't about the cold and uncaring universe, it was about a no win scenario like this episode. The characters have two choices, nether of them good but they have to pick one
cause no magical third option that removes the tough choice is coming.

[Imperator-zor]

Long story short I don't like this episode. You can go on about doing what you feel is best, but when you get into Child Murder then your garbage beliefs can go be stuffed into a Recycler.

Imagine if we got some time displaced Aztecs on B5 which wanted to sacrifice people so the world would not end. Would this be acceptable? They have their convictions and are motivated by them and feel that by smearing blood onto statues is the best course of actions.

There are occasions in which it is best to force help on people. I would not throw the idea out.

Seriously, this episode got me in a Bad Move when I saw it for the first time in more than a decade.

Zor