Grey 17 is Missing

[Yukaphile]

Couldn't they have asked the Minbari for humanitarian aid? I dunno, I haven't advanced that far into B5 (I'm just about to begin "Interludes and Examinations"), but it was the Minbari choosing to take a stand with Sheridan over Earth Central which drove off the EA ships. You'd think this is the kind of thing the religious caste would be only too happy to do. Then again, some people wouldn't accept charity starving and half-naked if they were an inch from death. Pride, man. While some lurkers have pride, others really don't, which I've seen so far. But then, isn't B5 supposed to be neutral? Giving the Minbari too much free reign might be seen as them taking control of the station, which might be bad for PR. What do you guys think? I think they should have addressed this in the Babylon Treaty in one of the episodes I just watched.

Also, one final thing to note regarding the mention to "Voices of Authority." I would have totally been with that lady from the political office making the moves on Sheridan. Yeah, she's a jackbooted Fascist mouthpiece, but... come on, she's gorgeous, and as far as I could tell, completely willing. I get why he refused her, it's against all his principles, and he's slowly falling in love with Delenn, but... it reminds me of what Chuck said in his review if "Prime Factors," how there might be more important things than sex, but MY GOD, man, where's the urgency? That's what he said, and I agree. What do you guys think? He's a hero, he couldn't step outside those boundaries, even in though in real life those two would totally have gotten busy together. Your thoughts?

[CharlesPhipps]

Mind you, the Mimbari by and large aren't very disposed to humans given they planned to commit genocide against humanity within recent memory. They're basically elves and elves tend to come in two flavors of hippie, peace, and justice or racial supremacy and genocide.

(discounting they make good cookies too)

My general view on the implications are that the Clark government is a reactionary Far Right one (not a terribly surprising idea given Clark is a Hitler stand in) and the groundwork was there for him even beforehand. We saw with the Sinclair "By any means" episode that generally the government of this Earth just outright hates the poor, union workers, and disadvantaged. It's not a case of not having the resources to care for these people as I can't imagine it would cost more than a few Starfuries to house or shelter everyone to a minimum but acceptable limit.

It's just they don't want to.

I also don't blame, necessarily, B5's staff for this as institutional problems require institutional solutions and they have a lot on their plate with Chaotic EVil Space Demons and Lawful Evil Space Angels. The Lurkers might get help, though, after supply lines are reoppened to Earth.

[CharlesPhipps]

The telepath thing annoyed me, particularly in season 5. I felt like they never actually explained why it was such a bad idea to let the telepaths have their own colony. That was the fulcrum issue of that conflict in S5, but they never addressed it, much less debated it like they should. They just assumed it was a given for some reason, and that turned what should have been a cool speculative debate of the sort Trek was fond of into a vapid "no, u!" argument.

I think part of the issue seems to be the somewhat unpleasant idea of "entitled" refugees that has shown up in some stories but not usually utopian fiction. The telepaths are separatists rather than integrationalists and generally act constantly in their own self-interest, which is perfectly believable in RL, but really throws Sheridan for a loop as he's gotten most of the rest of the galaxy to work with his integrationalist plan.

But the telepaths want nothing to do with non-telepaths.

The homelessness thing always seemed weird to me because even if it is a five mile can city, it's still a space station, with all the physical bookkeeping and bottlenecks that entails. Their census shouldn't be nearly messy enough for a homeless population to exist. Even with it being a bustling port and all, the number of people that can go completely unaccounted for should max out in the low double digits at most. It's not even a social safety net thing, it's just the inherent nature of a closed and completely artificial environment. As such this element always felt like flagrant "space is an ocean" type bad writing, and I tended to zone out for those episodes as a result.

Mind you, five miles is also a lot different in a space station than five miles in a city on the ground as while the big bubbles are nice, the simple fact is there could a lot more square (rectangle? cube?) miles worth of tunnels and levels and infrastructure centers that means there's maybe 50 miles of 1 mile tunnel stacked above one another, only equally 500 feet up. A super-structure like B5 can potentially be vaster than a normal city in space and a full-on arcology.

It does imply more than enough oxygen (100% recycling probably), food, and water is available, though.

[Yukaphile]

It was the warrior caste who led the war of genocide, wasn't it? Over a misunderstanding, sure, but that was a decade prior, and the religious caste had changed a lot since then.

[FaxModem1]

It was the warrior caste who led the war of genocide, wasn't it? Over a misunderstanding, sure, but that was a decade prior, and the religious caste had changed a lot since then.

This is a question that's answered in season 4, and that's all I'll say about that until you get there. Needless to say, they do make a point about how during the Narn-Centauri war, and during the Shadow war, they took a lot of refugees in. Even to the point of using Epsilon III as a place to house them in the latter case. So it does make you squint when you realize they still have a bunch of lurkers being mugged and waiting to be saved by King Arthur since station Security clearly isn't doing anything about it.

=====

The big thing that brought this up for me is that the cult in "Grey 17 is Missing" survive just by siphoning a bit of water and power. And I realized that no matter the deck,(unless it's Brown Sector, aka Down Below) the lights are always on. So, essentially, there's an entire area that's heavily automated and left alone, even by the homeless population there, except for this one cult, who seemed to exist since before the Santiago assassination(judging by the newspaper trash in their area).

That's 2 to 3 years of no one noticing them being there, just occasionally feeding people to the Zarg, and making their own food and enjoying the station's power and water. So, it seems like Grey Sector, as long as you don't break something that station maintenance will have to come fix, will be left alone. Meaning that one could make a hidden community there if one wanted.

[Yukaphile]

Pshaw! If only Saber could have appeared on B5, that would have made the episode gone to a 1000 on a scale from 1 to 10.

[FaxModem1]

Pshaw! If only Saber could have appeared on B5, that would have made the episode gone to a 1000 on a scale from 1 to 10.

Saber? I don't get the reference.

[Yukaphile]

Fate/Stay Night. Female King Arthur. SHE'S AMAZING. And has a fairy tale romance with Shirou.

[CharlesPhipps]

But yes, I actually like the idea that Babylon Five is an intricate and advanced enough station that a bunch of people could live there without anyone noticing or caring.

Then again, I really liked the Followers of the Apocalypse quest in Freeside (Fallout: New Vegas). One of them has murdered an NCR soldier and is in hiding. When you track him down, you find out he's done this to cover up the fact he's been stealing water for the locals to help with their crop grow. NCR has been giving out humanitarian aid freely but they are suffering supply shortages now and the Freesiders don't trust them anyway.

It's a very dark and ambiguous story.

[G-Man]

It's more looking back at the assumption of the show that the future is just the nineties of America writ-large, that homelessness is something that the government just tolerates for its citizens. It's a cultural issue that reflects the values of the time. Because while a Star Trek utopia doesn't have to be depicted, it makes a very specific statement about what sort of world our heroes live in that they can build a 5 mile space station and yet still have people without basic living standards met.

That's something that you can argue about the world they live in, but I don't think it is fair to say that it shows negligence by Sinclair and Sheridan; they don't have the power to change everything by themselves.