Babylon 5 Beeline: Soul Hunter
A crippled ship is on a collision course with Babylon 5 and the only chap man enough to stop it is Commander Sinclair! Ta da! If Sinclair is the guy in charge, why is he the one who takes a Starfury out to snag the Soul Hunter’s ship? Don’t they have Redshirts around for that sort of thing?
I get the impression that Michael O’Hare is trying his hardest to play Commander Sinclair as Captain Kirk, but without the freakishly good looks. And not enough ham (tee hee). If he wants to go the Kirk route, he needs to ham up his delivery a little bit. He’s so robotic.
There isn’t a lot to this episode. Soul Hunter shows up, wreaks havoc and is taken down by Sinclair (again with the heroics – he’s such a show off).
“Soul Hunter” is a melodramatic name for an interesting concept. Their species is drawn to death and have developed the ability to preserve a soul at the moment of death, so the individual goes on in this plane after the body dies. Soul Hunters do this only for “distinguished individuals” and are usually at odds with the races they’re trying to preserve.
As soon as the Soul Hunter arrives on B5, aliens leave the station en masse to avoid him. Apparently, this soul preservation goes against the beliefs of just about every species in the known galaxy, particularly the Mimbari. That’s the real point of this episode: to introduce the Mimbari belief in reincarnation, which gets more important as the series moves on.
Injecting the premise of immortal souls into a science fiction show was daring thing to do, but Straczynski gets away with it because he presents viewpoints from several different characters (ie. Delenn believes that Mimbari souls are recycled and Dr. Franklin thinks there is no soul at all) and doesn’t pontificate that any of them are wrong or right. It makes for an interesting discussion to have at Denny’s at 4 AM: would you face whatever afterlife you believe in or would you rather have your soul/ personality matrix stored in a marble?
And, is it just me, or does the Soul Hunter look like he has a baby crowning in his forehead?
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