Babylon 5 Beeline: Deathwalker

Ambassador Kosh is a jerk and I think he has Asperger’s Syndrome. He doesn’t answer the question you’ve asked – he answers some wacko interpretation of your question, and even then, it could be days later – and he walks away before your discussion is finished. That whole Vorlon attitude of “Oh, we’re so old and above your petty squabbles, you silly younger races!” only adds to his jerkishness. However, Kosh does have a more poetic way of telling time. “We wil meet at the Hour of Scampering” sounds much nicer than “We’ll get together at 5PM”. That must be hard to fit on a watch, though.

“Deathwalker” is another morality play (which this season is full of, among other gooey things). This one involved a war criminal, Jha’Dur, who is the last of her race of genocidal, butt munch tyrants. She’s the type of person to infect an entire planet with a fatal disease just to see how long it takes them to die, but her brutal experiments have enabled her to concoct a serum that stops aging, making whoever takes it, in a way, immortal.

Do you think she could look a little more evil? Jha’Dur looks kind of like the principal at my last school:

Of course, everybody wants it and is offering Jha’Dur shelter and money for it. Except for the member planets of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds (can non-aligned people have a league? Isn’t that a kind of alignment?), who bore the brunt of Jha’Dur’s war crimes and want to try her for crimes against sentience. It’s a political and moral catfight from that point.

Really, what is the right thing to do? Jha’Dur should have been tried because to accept her discovery and benefit from it is to condone her methods. She makes that ethical choice even easier to make when she reveals that her serum has to be distilled from living beings. For one person to live without aging, another has to die.

EarthGov is OK with that and proceeds with giving her safe passage to Earth, but thankfully, Kosh and the Vorlons are jerks and act as a stern daddy to the younger races. When Jha’Dur’s ship is about to enter the jump gate, a Vorlon ship appears and blows her up.

It wasn’t because of her war crimes. It was the right thing to do to keep the younger races from destroying each other over her immortality serum. I’ve got to appreciate that from the Vorlons. They don’t care about political ramifications or offending anyone- they just act. Besides, they’re so old and powerful, who is really going to stop them?

Up next: “Believers”

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