scribblings

The Quality of Mercy is actually not a bad episode. It's considerably higher-quality than most of S1, in terms of writing, production, and guest-star acting. It departs from the standard S1 formula of A-story and B-story for a more sophisticated 3-part structure, braiding together plotlines involving a serial killer sentenced to Earthgov's version of the death penalty, a doctor who's discovered an alien machine that can suck life from one living thing in order to heal another, and Londo taking Lennier under his wing to show him the "real" Babylon 5. 

But it still doesn't feel essential in its entirety. The machine will return later, as will the "death of personality" penalty (more poignantly, and it'll be explained again there, so it's not hugely important to learn about it here). There's some good character development for Londo and Lennier, and some more insight into the role of telepaths in Earth society. 

So if you've been enjoying B5 so far, this isn't a bad one to watch in full. I'm not sure I can put my finger on what makes me so lukewarm on it. 

Maybe it's because even though the "death of personality" concept will return and be the basis of a pretty good episode, I find it just... stupid. The conceit is that instead of executing people, the punishment in a capital case is now that a telepath wipes your mind, constructs a new, docile personality, and then this new personality is set to work performing menial labor to serve society. 

The idea that human bodies are basically hardware on which our personality software runs isn't unique to Babylon 5, obviously. The idea that you could erase a personality and implant a new one is the basis of the Joss Whedon series Dollhouse and the scifi noir Altered Carbon, and the idea that memories are what make a person is key to a lot of scifi that posits immortality via upload. There's a lot of science out there that demonstrates that the body-mind/hardware-software comparison is a bad one, but it's easy to understand why the idea of personalities as replaceable is so fascinating, given our military research into brainwashing, our prevalence of cults--and even, perhaps, our epidemic of sudden religious conversions. (As far as I know, the 1978 book Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Changes hasn't been debunked.) But as we've learned, a lot of those sudden personality changes aren't replacements of an old personality with a new one, but a change in emphasis.

In any case, accepting the paradigms B5 puts forward around this, that it is possible (although not foolproof, as we'll see later), it doesn't make any sense. Like, look, I'm not going to defend our judicial system, but at least, on its face, it's designed to punish the person it believes--or at least claims--is guilty.

I'm not sure who the "death of personality" is supposed to benefit. If what's "installed" in the perpetrator's body is actually a new personality, someone who didn't commit the crime, then forcing them to spend their lives "serving society" without autonomy, opportunity, or self-awareness seems deeply unjust and cruel. (It's basically enslavement of an innocent.) It also seems to punish the family of the perpetrator unduly, in that their family member's body is still alive, still around to taunt them, but is occupied by a stranger. Plus, the idea of creating a simple, docile, compliant, and (at least as such people are portrayed) intellectually limited or even disabled personality to serve as an unpaid laborer seems ethically grotesque. It also doesn't seem like it's designed to comfort or appease the victim or family members of the victim, given that the perpetrator isn't exactly gone--someone who was them is still walking around, basically taunting them--but they can't be angry with them because it's no longer the same person. Plus, humanity's gone to space, so it's hard to believe that automation hasn't progressed and menial labor is at such a premium that no body capable of performing it can be spared.

It seems to combine all the worst features of the death penalty with sadism toward both the family of the perpetrator and family of the victim. So it's hard to understand who would possibly push for it, let alone how it would get wide enough support to become law. 

And yet while some characters express unease with it, no one seems to hold what would seem like the rational, ethical position, which is to be like "it's a travesty that this is our legal system working as intended, both in practice AND on its face." 

So that frustration has always made it an episode I skip on watchthroughs, but if that doesn't bother you, it's probably one of the seasons's better episodes.

As a side note, this is the first episode, as far as I've noticed, that discusses "spacing" as a punishment (ironic given that the two scifi shows I'd cite as B5's direct descendants, BSG and The Expanse, both feature it pretty heavily). I'm always appreciative of series that remind you frequently of how dangerous space is, and given that I'm in a middle of a DS9 rewatch, I'm both amused and irritated at how chill they seem to be about toodling around in vacuum. Kira and Dax recently just flew back to DS9 in an ancient Bajoran spacecraft that separates its passengers from the void with a... metal shudder system and grate? Like it's basically a convertible and they just put the cover up, probably open the windows to get that nice space breeze. 

Ironically, while I write this, I'm watching a S2 B5 episode in which Dr. Franklin goes on a rant about people joking about spacing someone, and describes in detail what happens to a body in vacuum. I take it JMS was as irritated as I am by Trek's cavalier attitude to it.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• If a telepath finds something by poking around in your mind, it's inadmissible in court because it violates due process. (I don't remember if that's true for exonerating evidence; I seem to recall that after being convicted criminals are scanned to ensure that they're not innocent, but I might be inserting that because it seems like the minimum of what having telepaths should do to change the legal system.) I love the telepath storylines, but not because they make any sense if you think about them for more than a few minutes. 
• Franklin is using stims to keep up with his duties.
• There's a machine that sucks life from one person to give it to another.
• Earthgov has foregone killing someone physically in capital crimes for killing them mentally. 

 

This one's a two-parter, and it's a crucial arc episode, so you should watch the whole thing. Fortunately, it's one of the better episodes of Season 1.

A few things to note: Problems on Mars continue to escalate. Garibaldi was in a rocky relationship with a woman named Lise Hampton on Mars, which ended when he took the job on B5. There is growing unrest on Minbar. PsiCorps has secret training facilities.

This is the start of a string of very strong--and important--episodes leading up to the finale (with the exception of The Quality of Mercy).

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• Lurker's Guide episode page.

Eyes would probably have been an okay episode except for the guy who plays Col. Ben-Zayn. (LMAO, given what "zayin" is slang for, it translates to "son of a dick.") He overacts, and not in the fun scenery-chewing way.

What's interesting about Eyes is primarily how willing Ivanova is to throw away a spotless career in order to avoid having a telepath scan her. She talks a lot about why, without actually telling the whole truth, which won't come out until the end of Season 2.

It's worth wondering why Earthforce suddenly seems so obsessed with ensuring the loyalty of military command staff. 

It's also worth noting a thaw in the relationship between Ivanova and Talia Winters.

Most of what I've included here is the B-story, since it gives us some time to get to know Lennier, who--like his Centauri counterpart, Vir--will become a core character. 

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• Ivanova can keep telepaths out of her mind--assuming they don't push too hard.
• Mars is getting rebellious.
• Bester (from Mind War) seems to be pulling a lot of strings back on Earth.
• Several people have mentioned to Sinclair that his willingness to break the rules (and the fact that he got this posting solely because the Minbari rejected a lot of people with a lot more clout that were ahead of him in line) has made him unpopular back on Earth, and we're seeing the results of that. (A more accurate characterization, actually, is that Sinclair's able to use the rules in ways people in power don't like--whether it's to give illegally striking dock workers the money they're asking for or, as in this episode, to protect his staff from Earthgov investigation).

TKO is one of the low points in the first season--an attempt to do a martial arts movie complete with awkward dialogue, a hackneyed plot, and some Asian stereotypes that haven't aged well. It can't quite be said to be one of those martial arts movies in which a white guy learns the martial arts of an Asian culture and then is magically better at it than all of the members of the culture he learned it from, since the protagonist in this case is Black, but sub in "human" for "white" and "alien" for "Asian" and it follows the formula to a T. There's nothing significant to the arc in it, and no reason to subject yourself to it. 

The B-story, however, is pretty well done and made it one of the most memorable episodes of S1 for me. 

The plot is pretty simple: Ivanova's childhood rabbi (played by Broadway's most tenured Fiddler on the Roof star, Theodore Bikel) comes to Babylon 5 and tells her she should sit shiva for her father. She resists, because she's still angry at him. 

***

So, look, this might not seem like that big of a deal if you're not Jewish, but I am Jewish, and I'm going to talk about it. 

There are very few scifi shows showing future worlds in which Jews exist. Oh, we get a lot of analogues for Jews--depending on who you ask, and which episode it is, Star Trek has the Bajorans, the Ferengi, and the Vulcans; Mass Effect has the Quarians and, more problematically, the Volus--but while Federation culture in Star Trek appears to be predominantly white Christian culture (they may no longer exactly practice Christianity, but they celebrate Christmas, the morality is Christian, and characters quote the Bible), and there are representatives from many different Earth cultures (O'Brien is emphatically Irish, Chekov is Russian, Picard is French), there appear to be no Jews, at least in the shows and movies. Similarly, in The Expanse, various recognizable denominations of Christianity (the Mormons, the Methodists, the Catholics) survive into the future, but even at interfaith clergy gatherings, there is no sign that Judaism is still practiced at the time the series takes place. 

For a member of a people that's survived several thousand years of people trying to wipe us out, the idea that scifi writers believe that a few hundred years from now, we'll be gone is pretty depressing. 

Similarly, while there's no shortage of Jewish characters in non-SF TV, there's very little Jewish ritual shown (unless, obviously, the show is actually about Jews, e.g. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and when it is shown, it's usually in the context of a Very Special Episode (see, for example, The Good Wife's "Unorthodox" or Law & Order's "Chosen") in which Orthodox Judaism (and by extension, Judaism in general) is treated as an exotic, anachronistic culture more like the Amish than the majority of American Jews. When Jewish practice is shown, it's generally either the parts that most resemble Christianity (e.g. a rabbi giving a sermon in The West Wing; Hanukkah celebrations because Hanukkah's just Jewish Christmas, right?; the actual burial part of a funeral) or the party after the actual ritual, usually a bar mitzvah or wedding. Maybe the main character will visit a Jewish family that's sitting shiva, but there won't be any ritual going on at the time other than the mirrors being covered and people wearing black.

What you don't see is what day-to-day Jewish ritual practice actually looks like: lighting Shabbat candles, saying blessings, celebrating holidays that aren't Hanukkah or Passover, studying Torah, touching the mezuzah when leaving the house. 

It was already a big deal that, at the end of The Parliament of Dreams, the show emphatically noted that Jews exist in its universe (and, perhaps, in all of our diversity! since that line of adherents of different religions is really long, and Sinclair calls out that the Jewish guy is specifically an Orthodox Jew). Dayenu! But we get more. The second-in-command of the station is Jewish. 

And she has possibly the most realistic relationship with her Jewishness that I've seen on TV: a fraught one. 

And--and!--like most modern non-Orthodox Jews, she's gotta figure out how to make Jewish ritual work for her (as my rabbi's fond of saying, the purpose of Jewish practice is to serve the needs of Jews, not the other way around) while making it accessible to the non-Jewish loved ones she wants to include. 

Just as beautifully, Ivanova's either not the first Jew Sinclair has considered a close friend, or when he got to know her, he read up on Judaism, because he's a lot more familiar with Jewish ritual than your average non-Jewish human. Either way, between the Orthodox man in The Parliament of Dreams and Ivanova and Sinclair's implied Jewish friends and the Jewish residents of the station who show up to support Ivanova in mourning and Ivanova's rabbi and a rabbi who collaborates with a priest in helping pass on important information later in the series, not only are Jews still clearly around 300 years from now, but they're not tokenized, and in fact, seem to be thriving.

Look, it's not perfect. The morality of B5 is very Christian (not least in its love of martyrdom--Delenn even says that willingness to self-sacrifice is a requirement for sentience), and the pressure on Ivanova to forgive feels pretty Christian to me, but that's a small quibble. 

Babylon 5 is a series written by an agnostic that is fascinated by the same questions human religion is designed to explore (less interested in the how of things than the why) and that is comfortable leaving mysteries unsolved. A lot of scifi seems annoyed that it has to deal with religion at all, or uses it as a shorthand for the primitive irrationality that human beings retain, even in the future. For all its Christian morality, B5 seems to view religious practice itself much the way my Jewish community sees it: as less interested in answering questions about God than cultivating wonder and exploring what it means to be human). 

As the rabbi says, nes gadol. 

***

So, anyway, skip the A-story, enjoy the B-story. 

It's perhaps most significant in that Ivanova, who up until this point has been pretty private and buttoned-up, finally is willing to recognize that her crew cares about her and be vulnerable around them.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• Ivanova's mother's suffering, as a telepath who wouldn't join PsiCorps, was even more intense than we've heard about previously.
• Ivanova joined Earthforce against the wishes of her father. 
• Sinclair is willing to walk right up to the line of forcing people under his command to take leave if he thinks their emotional health is at stake.
• Ivanova and her rabbi have a nice discussion about whether an alien form of fish is kosher, which is the sort of question that Jews have enjoyed debating since the possibility of space travel became a thing (there was even a long-running thread on how to determine whether you can eat an alien, which, alas, I'm having trouble finding). 

 



Watch this one in full. 

The B-story, with Londo and G'Kar wrangling, provides some good character moments for both. 

The A-plot is one of Season 1's better written, directed, and acted. It's an old-fashioned union story, and a good glimpse of Babylon 5 functioning as both a trade hub and a military base--and the potential conflicts of interest that entails. It was written by JMS's wife, Kathryn Drennan, after some pushback from JMS, who didn't want to give the appearance of (or engage in) nepotism. Fortunately for everyone, she won that argument... and delivered. While it doesn't exactly provide any *details* that are important to the arc, it sets the stage for B5's often-contentious relationship with EarthGov. 

The most obvious ancestor to The Expanse is Battlestar Galactica, but BSG arguably owes more to B5 than the various Star Treks, even given Ron Moore's work on DS9. This episode (and the upcoming two-parter Voice in the Wilderness in its exploration of Mars' rebellious relationship with Earth), with its working-class space residents versus privileged Earthers, show some scifi DNA that skipped a generation and went straight from B5 to The Expanse.

The Rush Act, incidentally, is named for Rush Limbaugh, a characteristically sly dig that probably dates it (when was the last time he was relevant?) but is fun nonetheless. 

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Like Mind War, And the Sky Full of Stars is an episode that only just misses being on my watch-in-full list. It fills in key details of what happened to Sinclair during the Battle of the Line, a mystery teased starting in B5's terrible pilot with Sinclair being told "There is a hole in your mind."

But while Sinclair's flashbacks are well done, the mechanism for getting to them involves an awkward plot and a lot of overacting by a guest star. It also involves a lot of Garibaldi trying to locate and rescue Sinclair. That's all well and good the first time you watch it, but it's really just filler, and while the flashbacks are key to one of the main mysteries of Season 1, the logic of how the Knights get them falls apart fast (if they DO have Earthgov's backing, why not just have a telepath scan Sinclair instead of engaging in this elaborate plot which A) doesn't actually get the info they came for and B) is dangerous enough to them that it renders one of them a vegetable and alerts everyone in the station's command structure to what they were doing?) So watch the flashbacks and skip the rest, unless you're already invested and want a few more episodes to add to your watch-in-full list.

Plot synopsis:

There's no B-story to this one. The storyline is that two mysterious figures, known as Knight One and Knight Two come to Babylon 5 and kidnap Sinclair. They've got some pretty significant funding behind them, and might be part of a secret Earthgov initiative to root out traitors among the command staff of various Earth colonies and installations. They hook him up to a machine that lets them manipulate his mind, and force him to remember what happened during the Battle of the Line:

Sinclair's unit was decimated by a Minbari warship. While attempting a suicidal ramming run at it, Sinclair was capture and interrogated by the ruling body of the Minbari, the Grey Council, which included Delenn. They wiped his memory and returned him to his ship, after which they surrendered to Earth, despite the fact that they'd been winning the war by a wide margin. 

We're still left with the mystery of why the Minbari surrendered and what they learned from Sinclair. 

Sinclair manages to escape, but he's having trouble telling the difference between his flashbacks and reality. He keeps attacking random people in B5 because he seems them as Grey Council members. Delenn approaches him and it appears that he's going to shoot her, but instead, he shoots Knight Two, who had popped up behind her and was going to shoot either her or Sinclair (I can't tell). After he recovers a bit, Sinclair denies remembering anything to Delenn, even though he does.

In a nice, subtle bit of worldbuilding, newspaper headlines in this episode both provide epilogues to previous storylines and foreshadow new ones:

• Is there something living in hyperspace? (foreshadowing)
• Narns settle Raghesh 3 controversy (follow up to Midnight on the Firing Line)
• PsiCorps in election tangle (foreshadowing)
• Homeguard leader convicted (follow up to The War Prayer)

While this might not seem like a big deal today, when TV shows pay so much attention to detail and worldbuilding that they hire linguists to create entire languages for them, when shows like Lost can expect that people will freeze-frame them and analyze the tiniest bit of set dressing for clues, when we've seen entire transmedia franchises built off clues in movie posters, at the time it was so freaking cool. And while I'm sure there were other shows explicitly catering to analysis-obsessed online fan communities by throwing out these sort of hidden clues, I can't think of any offhand.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways: 

• Whatever the Minbari learned from interrogating Sinclair, it caused them to suddenly surrender in a war they were decisively winning.
• Delenn is definitely a member of the Grey Council, Minbar's ruling body, so it's weird that she's posing--or at least serving--as an ambassador to this experimental space station. 
• While Garibaldi believes that Sinclair has a death wish due to trauma from the war, Sinclair's willingness to sacrifice himself by ramming the Minbari cruiser suggests that the death wish may have already been there. 
• IS SOMETHING LIVING IN HYPERSPACE!??!?!

I almost included Mind War as a must-watch episode. It introduces my favorite B5 frenemy, Alfred Bester (named for a scifi author I love). He's played by Walter Koenig, best known as Star Trek: The Original Series' Chekov. Bester joins Ivanova, Mollari, and G'Kar as a character whose actor immediately grasped the tone that's most effective for your average B5 scene: a bit arch, a bit sly, and willing to tear into the scenery with gusto, taking the Shakespearian melodrama up to 11.

It also gives us the first episode to really bring PsiCorps to the forefront, rather than just dropping ominous hints about them.

I didn't include it as a full-watch episode, however, because every bit of the main plotline that isn't Bester is very, um, Season 1. The actors are all doing their best, but there's really no way to deliver Ironheart's dialogue that's not going to look and sound ridiculous.

Plot synopsis:

In some ways, Mind War is a perfect follow-up to The Parliament of Dreams. If TPoD had a largely positive view of the search for transcendence, in the form of religion, Mind War is a dark mirror reflecting the inherent cruelty of commodifying such a search. (Capitalism, yo. It wrecks everything.)

Two PsiCops, telepaths charged with hunting down telepaths who've gone rogue, arrive on B5 to apprehend a telepath named Jason Ironheart. He was one of Talia's instructors at the Academy. They were also shtupping. They interrogate her, after which Ironheart contacts her. He informs her that he's been subjected to experiments designed to create a stable telekinetic, which has long been PsiCorps' white whale. The experiments seemed to have worked, but it turns out PsiCorps wanted a telekinetic for nefarious purposes. However, Jason's powers have continued to grow. He's having trouble controlling them, and he's also transcending his human form. The PsiCops eventually confront him. He accidentally kills the non-Bester PsiCop and becomes some sort of giant non-corporeal star-man. He gifts Talia with telekinesis. Sinclair rather testily orders Bester off his station. Bester gives him an odd salute and smarms, "Be seeing you."

Some of the best moments in this episode come from Claudia Christian, fairly seething with dislike for PsiCorps and facing off against an archly superior Bester. "Good old Psi Corps. You guys never cease to amaze me. All the moral fiber of Jack the Ripper! What do you do in your spare time, juggle babies over a fire pit? Oops, there goes another calculated risk!" It's awkward on the page--as someone who's written and edited a lot of VO dialogue, I'm sorta wincing looking at it--but Christian makes it work. 

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• PsiCops are a thing.
• PsiCorps is dabbling in undetectable telekinetic assassinations.
• PsiCorps can "program" telepaths with a code that, when another telepath sends it into their brain, causes them to fall unconscious. 
• Ivanova really, really hates PsiCorps.

Infection is an episode I remembered as unwatchably bad, and a lot of it is. Heck, JMS himself even cites it as a low point in S1. It was the first episode written for the season, a year apart from The Gathering, and it shows.

That said, the parts of it that aren't terrible actually accomplish a considerable amount of worldbuilding, which is why I've included 13 minutes of it. A big part of it is establishing Babylon 5's somewhat fraught relationship with Interstellar Network News (ISN), and through it, with the public.

I love Star Trek, but one of my main gripes with it is that we rarely get much of a sense of humanity outside of Starfleet. Star Trek's various captains and commanders may have to worry about what Starfleet thinks of them, but they don't often have to deal with opinion polls, conflicts between the military and civilian government, or social media. (Similarly, one of my main gripes with DS9 in particular was that I never really got a feel for station life outside the experience of the main characters and their families.)

Infection's A-plot is cheesy and so inconsequential that I'm not going to even bother rehashing it. The only important part is that there's a company called Interplanetary Expeditions, which will come back in the future. It seems to be mainly about archaeologists digging up ancient alien ruins, but Infection notes that it's basically a front for bioweapons research. It will, in the course of the series, unleash something even worse.

The B-plot, however, which focuses on an ISN reporter who's come to B5 to do a feature on the place, does a fairly good--and subtle, since it's a B-plot and mostly treated as humor--job of easing you into the larger universe of human politics.

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's analysis and review at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode page.

Main takeaways:

• There doesn't seem to be much faith in B5 from the general public. 75% of them predicted it would fail immediately, and Lloyd's of London put the odds of success at 500 to 1.
• Babylon 5's leadership is somewhat of a collection of people who didn't work out elsewhere (much like the West Wing crew). Sinclair may not have the confidence of the military, and hasn't covered himself with glory in interviews past. Garibaldi's been fired like a million times. No word, as yet, about Ivanova.
• Garibaldi is one of Sinclair's few close friends, and he's worried that Sinclair's war experiences have given him a death wish. He's keeping an eye on him for self-destructive behavior. 

Soul Hunter is an interesting episode of B5, and an ambitious one. I can't think of many TV series in the 1990s that were ready to wrestle with questions like whether the soul exists, and who has a right to possession of it, in their second episode. Especially when the only success in their genre at the time was Star Trek, and the network didn't have a lot of faith in them. 

A lot of shows would have played it conservative in those circumstances, and B5 did color within the lines in the sense of mostly doing self-contained episodes for its first season, slipping in touches of serialization in the form of character moments that would be referenced in future episodes, foreshadowing in newspaper headlines and TV news onscreen in the background, and continual teasing of the ongoing mystery of what happened during the Battle of the Line. But thematically? It wasn't conservative at all. And that makes for some ambitious choices even early in the series, which I find really interesting.

However, interesting isn't the same as good.

There's a lot of scenery-chewing here, and a lot of awkwardness in line readings (and, to be fair, line writing). I often talk about how, if you're familiar with The West Wing, it's interesting to watch A Few Good Men, because while that movie is full of Hollywood A-listers, they aren't native Sorkinese speakers the way the WW cast is, and while they give it their best, they don't quite have the rhythm down. The B5 cast, at this point, hasn't mastered JMSian.

Watch for Claudia Christian (Ivanova)'s line readings--like the rest of the cast, she's still stiff here, but she does have enough of a sly twinkle to her, and enough willingness to get her teeth around the Shakespearean melodrama of it all, that you can get hints of what the show will sound like when everyone gets comfortable with its style. 

Episode synopsis (scenes included in summary video are described in bold):

• Dr. Stephen Franklin, the station's new chief medical officer, arrives on B5 and is greeted by Sinclair and Ivanova. He replaces Dr. Kyle, who was transferred back to Earth, supposedly to work directly with the president, after being the only human to see a Vorlon out of its encounter suit. (Included as a major character introduction, and for a key tease about the Vorlons.)
• An alien ship of unfamiliar design, apparently damaged, is on a collision course with the station. Sinclair gets in a Starfury (small single-pilot ship) to attempt to intercept it, while Ivanova readies the defense grid to blow it up if he's unsuccessful. He succeeds, and the ship's unconscious occupant is taken to MedLab for treatment. (Partial inclusion as an Ivanova character moment.)
• Delenn offers to help identify the ship and occupant, since the Minbari are familiar with some alien species humans haven't had contact with.
• Dr. Franklin admits to Garibaldi that he's not sure if the alien is stabilized since he's not familiar with its physiology. Upon seeing the alien, the normally calm, helpful Delenn begins shouting in Minbari, grabs a weapon, and attempts to kill the alien.
• Later, Delenn explains to Sinclair that the alien is a Soul Hunter, a thief of souls that can sense impending death. Soul Hunters collect souls, preventing them from continuing on their journeys, something that the Minbari consider evil. They especially attempt to collect the souls they consider extraordinary--famous leaders, artists, etc.
• Three scenes are intercut:
  • Sinclair, Ivanova, and Garibaldi discuss how news of the Soul Hunter's presence has gotten out, and alien ships are departing the station, and alien station residents are hiding in their quarters.
  • A man cheats at a game of chance in Down Below, the station's low-income area, triggering another player to stab him.
  • The Soul Hunter wakes up and narrates the man's death to Dr. Franklin.
• Sinclair talks to the Soul Hunter.
• Ivanova and Franklin fire the body of the dead man into a nearby star and hold a brief funeral for him. (Included as an Ivanova character moment.)
• The Soul Hunter escapes from MedLab and kidnaps Delenn. Another Soul Hunter arrives on the station and informs Sinclair that the other Soul Hunter has gone rogue. 
• The Soul Hunter begins draining Delenn's blood to kill her and take her soul. 
• Sinclair rescues Delenn. While he's fighting the Soul Hunter, it says a few cryptic things about Delenn. (Partial inclusion for ongoing plot arc.)
• In MedLab, a barely conscious Delenn tells Sinclair, "We were right about you." In his quarters, Sinclair queries his computer as to what "Satai" means. (Included.)

Deep dive:

• Rowan Kaiser's review and analysis at the AV Club.
• The Lurker's Guide episode entry.

Main takeaways:

• Delenn is more than she seems.
• The Minbari are somehow using Sinclair.

If you like scifi, are interested in the evolution of TV storytelling, or just like good TV and aren't put off by dated production values, you absolutely should watch Babylon 5.

I won't go into a ton of detail about why, since that ground has been covered masterfully by Rowan Kaiser at the AV Club. Read her review of Babylon 5's pilot, The Gathering--which you absolutely should not watch unless you're a fan or morbidly curious, because it is terrible, and even for fans it's more of a morbid curiosity piece than something enjoyable--for an excellent discussion of B5's place in TV history.

I'll quote a bit of it here:

I say this with love, as this is a TV series that shaped me, and that I still return to frequently: a lot of Season 1 is excruciatingly bad. Almost unwatchably bad, unless you're already a fan. 

Unfortunately, one of the very things that makes B5 great also makes it hard to skip most of the first season. While B5 isn't a fully serialized show like Game of Thrones--where if you miss an episode, you won't have any idea what's going on in the next one because almost every scene is tied to other scenes in other episodes--its ambition to be a "novel for TV" does mean that even standalone episodes tend to slip in important bits of information or foreshadowing. And some of the worst episodes contain some of the best character moments. 

That makes it hard to do with B5 what a friend did for me with ST:TNG, which is provide newcomers with a handful of episodes from the first season to watch and simply skip the rest. 

So I've decided on a hybrid approach. I'll provide a handful of episodes to watch in full, and edited highlight reels of the important bits of the rest, to save you from most of the excruciatingly bad first-season stuff and get you into the second season (where things really get good) as painlessly as possible. 

Kaiser also does a bit of analysis that I haven't seen elsewhere that I think is really helpful in understanding B5 from a structural perspective (at the cost of some sort of abstract/high-level spoilers):

Babylon 5 is often considered to be one story told across multiple seasons—the show’s marketing as a “televised novel” encourages that concept—but it’s not so. Babylon 5 is really several dozen intersecting plots, which range in length from half a season to a little longer than a season. The stories go roughly like this:

• The mystery of the Battle Of The Line (the first season to the start of the second)
• Rising Human nativist sentiment/general feeling of Earth being bad (the first season, changing after Santiago dies)
• Narn-Centauri tensions (from the start of the series until “The Coming Of Shadows”)
• Return of an ancient evil (the first third of season two)
• Gathering of evidence against the conspiracy on Earth (early season two to early season three)
• The Narn-Centauri War (latter two-thirds of season two)
• Zack and the Nightwatch (mid-season two to early season three)
• Narn Resistance (end of season two to ?)

This isn’t entirely comprehensive: the telepath issues, for example, exist throughout the series. But it is a good way to understand how Babylon 5 gets its big events so right when other shows don’t always connect. In the case of “Severed Dreams,” there are four different stories which have been with the show for months.

Essential episodes (accompanied by highlight reels):

-Midnight on the Firing Line
-By Any Means Necessary
-Signs and Portents
-A Voice in the Wilderness
-Babylon Squared
-Chrysalis

If you decide you don't want to do the highlight reels (why are you here, then?), are okay with watching a few whole episodes that have sections that are vital to the plot but have some pretty clunky inessential scenes, and are okay with missing out on some minor plot points and character moments, you'll want to add these:

-Mind War
-And the Sky Full of Stars

For spoiler-free analysis (assuming you don't read ahead to episodes you haven't watched yet), behind-the-scenes tidbits, and cogent summaries, I highly recommend the old Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. 

Episode summaries and highlight reels:

1. Midnight on the Firing Line - Watch in full
2. Soul Hunter - Watch excerpts
3. Born to the Purple - Watch excerpts
4. Infection - Watch excerpts
5. The Parliament of Dreams - Watch excerpts
6. Mind War - Watch excerpts
7. The War Prayer - Watch excerpts
8. And the Sky Full of Stars - Watch excerpts
9. Deathwalker - Skip
10. Believers - Skip
11. Survivors - Skip
12. By Any Means Necessary - Watch in full
13. Signs and Portents - Watch in full
14. TKO - Watch excerpts
15. Grail - Skip
16. Eyes - Watch excerpts
17. Legacies - Skip
18. A Voice in the Wilderness (Part 1) - Watch in full
19. A Voice in the Wilderness (Part 2) - Watch in full
20. Babylon Squared - Watch in full
21. The Quality of Mercy - Watch excerpts
22. Chrysalis - Watch in full