From: jen@athena.mit.edu (Jennifer Hawthorne)
Subject: First Impressions Review -- ST: DS9: "Babel" ** SPOILERS GALORE**
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 05:59:12 GMT

First Impressions Reviews: "Babel"

One-line opinion summary: This wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great,
and it _could_ have been.

Rating: 6 out of 10, same as "A Man Alone". 

Many spoilers below, and no ^L on this terminal, so it will have to be
blank lines.














Synopsis:  The episode opens with O'Brien working overtime
trying to fix all the broken systems on DS9, especially the food
replicators. While fixing a food replicator in the station's command
center, he causes a flare of light and a sputter of electrical
discharge, but the replicator works fine after this display and
O'Brien seems satisfied.  As he leaves, we see a shot of the
replicator from inside; there is a device attached to it which fairly
clearly does not belong there.
	Later, in Ops, O'Brien begins to complain of being hot, and
shortly thereafter begins to speak incoherently.  Kira notices and
drags him off to the infirmary. Bashir diagnoses O'Brien's problem as
aphasia but is unable to find the cause.  There is a staff meeting in
Ops where the senior staff discuss O'Brien's problem and its possible
sources, but fail to really get anywhere.  In the middle of the
meeting, Dax also goes incoherent.  
	In the infirmary, Bashir tells Sisko that he's traced the
problem to a virus that interferes with synaptic transmission, causing
the victim to be unable to communicate.  Two more victims of the virus
are brought in, and Sisko orders the station quarantined.
	After more analysis, Bashir reports that he thinks the virus
is being ingested, and that he analyzed the station's food and found
the virus in all of the command-center replicators.  But he is also
getting patients in from non-command parts of the station.  Odo
reports that this is Quark's fault, for using the command replicators
to produce food for his restaurant since the restaurant's replicators
were broken. At this point Bashir becomes worried and runs a check on
the station's air supply and finds out that the virus has become
airborne, and everyone on the station is infected. 
	Kira examines the command center replicators and locates the
mysterious device.  She identifies it as being of Cardassian make due
to its power supply.  However, Bashir's research indicates that the
virus isn't Cardassian at all, it's a Bajoran biological weapon.  The
officers conclude that the device was probably planted by the Bajoran
underground at the time of the station's building, intended for use
against the Cardassians, but for some reason never triggered.  Sisko
assigns Kira the job of tracking down the Bajoran scientist who
created the virus in order to obtain the antidote from him.  
	Meanwhile, 60% of the station's personnel have been affected,
including Sisko's son, Jake.  And some of the first patients have
taken a turn for the worse, including O'Brien.  Bashir states that
O'Brien and the other serious patients have around twelve hours to
live.  
	Kira has had little luck tracking down her Bajoran scientist;
all reports indicate he has been dead for years. However, she has
obtained a lead on an associate of the scientist's whom she hopes
might know something. She contacts the man but he is not interested in
conversation.  She tells Sisko she wants to go and meet with the man
in person; he doesn't want her to break quarantine, but Odo urges
Sisko to let her go -- "She's all you've got."  
	The station has turned into a ghost town; nearly all the
personnel have the virus by now, including Dr. Bashir.  
	Up in Ops, a serious situation develops with only Sisko and
Odo there to man the boards.  A panicky ship captain tries to forcibly
undock his ship from the station.  After failing to convince the
captain to stay, Sisko decides to release his ship from the docking
clamps and grab him with a tractor beam after he's clear of the
station. However, the captain's attempts to free his ship have damages
the clamps, which fail to release.  The damage to the ship is severe
and it is in danger of exploding and taking a good chunk of the
station with it.  As Sisko and Odo decide to try releasing the clamps
manually, Sisko begins to speak incoherently and collapses.  Odo calls
for help from anyone, and gets Quark, who transports Odo over to the
damaged ship (after playing with Odo's mind a bit.)  
	Down on Bajor, Kira locks onto the coordinates of the
associate and beams him aboard.  She demands that he give her the
antidote.  He informs her that first of all, he didn't make the virus,
and second, that as far as he knows the man who did make it didn't
bother to make a counteragent.  Kira then informs the man that he'd
better be willing to try to make one, because she has exposed him to
the virus by beaming him aboard the runabout.
	Back on DS9, Odo just barely manages to release the damaged
ship in time; it explodes a short distance from the station, shaking
DS9 but not damaging it.  
	Kira gets the associate to the infirmary, where he sets to
work on the antidote as Kira too falls victim to the virus and begins
babbling. 
	However, the associate, picking up where Bashir left off,
manages to create the counteragent in time, and everyone on the
station is saved.


Review
------
I had a seriously mixed reaction to this episode.  On the one hand the
plotline was basically good and intelligently handled, and there was
some character development I really enjoyed. On the other hand, I came
away feeling unsatisfied (at least partially because of the abrupt
ending) and wondering exactly what story they were trying to tell
here.  Perhaps it's the direction at fault; as I'm not completely
versed on who is responsible for what portion of a television show
(beyond the obvious) I have a little trouble assigning blame to any one
quarter.  

The story I was hoping they'd tell (and which I did see a little of,
to be fair) was the one centering around two points: first, how much
we depend on our ability to communicate with others, and how
terrifying it is to lose that ability, and second, what it's like to
be stuck in the middle of a plague.  They keep saying DS9 is going to
be grim and gritty, and I can see how they're trying, but they had an
opportunity here to get truly grim, and they backed off.  I would
guess they don't trust their viewers to like Star Trek that is
genuinely grim, which is a shame.  Being trapped in a plague is an
absolutely terrifying situation to be in, and that never came across.
They paid lip service to it with the panicky ship captain, but then
turned it into an excuse to have a last minute violent threat to the
station.  Like the virus wasn't enough of a threat? More like it
simply wasn't nearly as visually interesting a threat -- "Scenes
of people lying around being sick are boring; let's throw in an
explosion."  

None of the staff seemed worried enough about the situation to me.
What I would have liked to see was a lot of tightly controlled
surfaces with terror coiled underneath, and maybe the occasional
intimate shot of the mask of control cracking and letting the fear
come through to let us know that these people _are_ scared, but are
fighting their fear to keep from being incapacitated by it.  I was
particularly disappointed in the way the young doctor was shown
dealing with the situation, though I don't know if it's the actor's
fault or the writers' (some of both, maybe.)  If he's fresh out of the
Academy, this is probably the first plague situation he's been in, and
he's (apparently) the only doctor on the station.  Let's see the
strain!  The only time he ever looked anything other than perfectly
groomed and together was as he as coming down with the virus himself,
where he did in fact look almost as exhausted as I would expect a
doctor vastly outnumbered by his patients to look in such a
circumstance.  They've been portraying the doctor as cocky, still sure
he can do almost anything medical; this would have been a perfect
opportunity to see some development and growth on the character's
part.  People he's responsible for are getting sick all around him;
he's found the cause but he can't find a cure, and it's only a matter
of time before he gets it himself and becomes completely
incapacitated.  And then his patients start dying, in large numbers,
with more likely to follow.  Welcome to fallibility -- the real world
can be a very nasty place, and this is no Academy simulation.

But no, we were shown none of that.  There were times when I saw faint
hints of what I wanted to see in the actor's performance, times when
he said "I don't know" and sounded frightened by this fact, but not
nearly often enough.  This really got driven home for me in the scene
between Sisko and Bashir as O'Brien lies on the table in the
infirmary, extremely ill.  Bashir makes a comment about how the virus
is a work of genius. What the heck kind of a comment is that to make,
especially in the presence of a man who son is ill with that same
virus?  A damn callous one, IMHO.  And Bashir really didn't seem all that
concerned about O'Brien's condition either.  If this is supposed to be
part of the character, I'm going to stop liking him very quickly.
Coming off as sounding callous because one says the wrong thing at the
wrong time I can accept (I've done it myself), as when Bashir made his
comments about "frontier medicine" to Kira in the premier, but
true callousness is another thing entirely, and that's what this came
across as.   His attitude toward his research on the virus came across
more as "Gee, something new to play with, a challenging puzzle" rather
than "I had better find a way to nail this thing before it starts
killing people". I wouldn't mind the former being present as long as
it was tempered by at least some of the latter, but, again, I didn't
see it.   I was cheering Sisko on when he cut off Bashir quite sharply
when Bashir started going on about how he'd figured out whose creation
the virus was.  

In fact, the only thing the doctor seemed to be good for in this
episode was for a lot of technobabble-loaded plot exposition.  I was
not impressed.

The only one who got anything across to me of the terror of the
situation was Avery Brooks, and then only in spots.  A few of the
scenes with Jake were very well done, as when he first finds out the
boy is sick and he takes his son's face in his hands and pulls him
close;  but the later one about "I'm not going to lose you" fell flat.
Suggesting to a sick kid that he might even _possibly_ be lost is a
very bad move; kids are highly suggestible.  

This is my major gripe with the episode; that they failed to deal with
the specter of plague in any real depth.  Take a look at the terror
that the thought of AIDS engenders in people today -- and AIDS is
extremely difficult to contract.  They could, and should, have done
much more with this. Throw out the exploding ship plot; keep in the
panicky captain, but simply have his ship blow up quickly without
endangering the station, to show that panic leads to even quicker
destruction.  Replace it with some high potency scenes of what the
virus and the fear of it are doing to the people on the station.

And NOT A SINGLE PERSON DIED IN THIS EPISODE.  Even the panicky ship's
captain was pulled out of harm's way by Odo.  No one died of the
virus. Not a single person.  

"Grim and Gritty"??? Not by half.

There were other things that bothered me about the episode, such as:
Gee, Odo can practically run Ops by himself, can't he?  Where'd he
learn that?  And the ending was unbelievably abrupt: no, there's no
antidote, and I'm not the person who invented it, not even a real
geneticist, but we'll just pick up Bashir's notes and poof, a
counteragent exists and everyone is cured! Yeah, right.  

All of that having been said, was there anything I liked about the
episode? 

Well, yes.  One thing I like very, very much was all the wonderful
(and wonderfully delivered) repartee between Quark and Odo.  I can't
say enough good things about the scenes the two of them had together,
all the way through.  Both characters went up a couple of notches in
my estimation (as Bashir dropped by about the same.)  The transporter
bit at the end was lovely, as was "Rom's an idiot. He couldn't fix a
straw if it was bent."  

The scenes of overworked O'Brien in the opening were well done, too,
as was his no-so-good-natured grumbling; I really felt sympathetic for
the character, and we got to see that the station really is not
working properly -- not in any major way, but in the very true-to-life
sort of annoyances that equipment breakdowns cause to the people who
depend on them.  Like the people trapped in the airlock; no major
danger to the station, no real danger to the people in the airlock,
just the simple frustration akin to being stuck in an elevator.  I
could stand to see little fifteen-second scenes like this become a
running gag for the series.  

We got to play "Where's Odo?" again, and again I completely failed to
guess where he was.  I'm going to have to start being very suspicious
of all the inanimate furniture in any scene without Rene Auberjonois
in it if I'm going to up my batting average on this score. 

The scene with Kira and the scientist's associate toward the end was
very good; for just a brief moment I really felt the horror that Kira
would have been feeling in that situation, when she realizes the man
can't simply pull the antidote out of his pocket and give it to her --
"I went through all of this, and there's no antidote? And he doesn't
think he can make one?"  -- but it was all ruined with the arrival of
the associate on the station and the quickie fix.  If this scene had
come five minutes earlier, and they had had to do something more to
get the antidote (and we could have seen them feverishly working at it) I
would have been much happier with the ending.  Come on, guys, let's
see some DESPERATION!

And the plot was well constructed; no gaping holes that I could see,
and no conspicuous smaller ones, either.  The explanation for why the
device was there, what it was doing, and why it went off _now_ instead
of earlier all held together nicely. The fact that it was an old piece
of sabotage led to a nice plausible complication -- the people who
would know what to do about it are dead or difficult to locate.
(Unfortunately as I've said ad nauseum, they didn't play up the
desperation that should have engendered as much as they should have.)
The pseudo-biology of the virus even held together pretty well. I have
some more details to add about the show's biological pseudoscience,
but to spare the people who couldn't care less, I've put it all in a
special paragraph down below where it can be easily skipped.  My one
real quibble with the plot structure was the way they threw in those
two deadlines right at the end: twelve hours before O'Brien dies, and
fifteen minutes before the ship explodes.  Why do we need this to make
the ending come off? Why not a much more reasonable sort of deadline
to generate the required tension?  For example, make it a race to get
the scientist back to the station before Kira collapses; that makes
much more sense. [Forget the exploding spaceship entirely.] If Kira
fails to return, everyone in the station will just slowly die, a much
more horrific thought (to me at least) than the twelve hour limit (the
thought of a station full of sick people, completely isolated, the
medical staff also down with it, slowly dying over a period of days,
is a great deal more horrible than the twelve hour deadline.)  Have
Kira start to show symptoms of the virus, but have her succumb more
slowly, due to her genetics or just her sheer stubbornness, and show
her fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by the virus before she
gets the scientist back to the station, then collapsing just after
getting him there.  

Trek Biotech commentary: (Note: I'm a molecular geneticist by trade,
so I can't resist commenting on all of this scifi biology.)  Much to
my surprise, this is actually pretty good. Not perfect, naturally, but
I don't expect that.  There were none of the glaring "protein breaking
down into DNA" errors like in "A Man Alone."  Someone has been
coaching both El Fadil and the guest scientist on their pronunciation
of technologese; they got a number of jawbreakers out perfectly.  And
if anyone has access to the show's production people, I'd love to know
where they're getting their biological computer graphix; they're nice
quality.  Obviously real biological graphics programs, not fakes.

I was a bit ambivalent about the virus itself and the way it was
portrayed.  I can accept without a problem that it hits different
people at different rates and with different severity; that's a real
life phenomenon largely based on genetics and the person's physical
condition.  I can buy that it hits a large variety of humanoid races
in a similar fashion, especially since it _didn't_ hit Odo and Quark
(they didn't show if it hit the other Ferengi.)  They were a trifle
inconsistent with what exactly the virus' effects on the victim were,
though -- for example, when O'Brien typed the gibberish into the padd,
he didn't seem to realize it was gibberish, but when Bashir saw the
computer spitting back his gibberish at him, he caught on.  And I was
never clear on whether or not the victim could understand what was
being said to him; for example, when O'Brien first started babbling,
could he understand what Kira was saying to him, or did he hear her
babbling just as she heard him babbling? If he heard her clearly, then
he should have been able to figure out that he was speaking gibberish,
even if it sounded okay to him.  If he didn't hear her clearly, why
wasn't he trying to drag _her_ to the infirmary?  

The idea of the virus messing up synaptic transmission is basically
sound, but why was it specific to the language centers?  If it messed
up synaptic transmission, one would think it would interfere with
other functions like walking, talking and breathing.  But I can
forgive this as the virus was really just a plot device, and a
multitude of sins can be covered under the aegis of the virus having
been designed, not evolved -- "It was built that way."  This is also
the only good explanation for why the virus conveniently mutated to an
airborne form -- it was built to do so.  It wouldn't be capable of
doing so naturally in so short a period of time, if it were capable of
doing so at all.  (We haven't seen any airborne varieties of AIDS or
polio, after all, have we?  Thank God!!) I could also pick minor nits
with the scriptwriters word choice in a couple of places -- for example
I don't think they'd really refer to the virus counteragent as an
"antidote" -- that generally is used for poison counteragents.  They'd
be more likely to call it a "cure" or, as I did, a counteragent.  But
that's getting really nitpicky, and I'm sure they used that word so
that the general audience would get the idea.

Next week:  The iguana man from "The Last Starfighter" comes to DS9
:-)  

Jennifer Hawthorne