"The Quality of Mercy" discussion

[ruuger]

This is the discussion post for the episodes 1X21, "The Quality of Mercy". Spoilers for the whole of the series, including the spin-offs and tie-ins, are allowed here so newbies beware.

Summary:

Talia is helping with the trial of a murderer, while Franklin investigates a healer working in DownBelow.

Extra reading:

The article for "The Quality of Mercy" at Lurker's Guide.

Note! Based on the results of the poll earlier this week, I'm no longer making a 'no spoilers' posts for the episodes as no-one was using them.

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Short version: I love the b-plot (big surprise, I know) with Londo and Lennier. Hated the A-plot the first time around, though some of my issues with it don't exist anymore since I know JMS later on wrote one of my favourite episodes in season 3 which dealt with all the ethical implications and dilemmas the whole "death of personality" concept raises in a way this episode does not. (Also, when first watching, I thought the show shared Garibaldi's viewpoint, which I, being anti-death-penalty, took exception to.)

Franklin meeting a faith healer gives him some good character scenes, but all in all, the whole "saintly woman saved by evil psycho killer's (with German name, no less) life force" still sticks in my throat.

Now, the b-plot remains as adorable as ever, and not just for the slapstick gag/revelation about Centauri anatomy. (Also, hooray for continuity: the statue of the goddess Li is already shown in "Parliament of Dreams".) The Lennier and Londo combination is very funny and gains a contextual poignancy from the fact that they kept the friendship up long enough for Lennier to present Londo with a marked card set as his Ascension Day present in Soul Mates, and then later it dissolved when Londo took his long walk on the dark side. The s3 episode where Lennier saves Londo's life, is comatose for most of the episode during which time Londo talks to him and tells him lightbulb jokes, and then when waking up regrets having saved Londo's life because of what a living Londo means for others makes me sad every time, in a well-written way; and the subplot here all lays the ground for this.

[beatrice_otter]

Kind of a blah episode. The whole death of personality thing was handled much better in the later episode, though it does set up what happens to Talia. We have established here that they have the ability to completely wipe a mind and set up a new personality. From there, it's not a stretch to having a buried personality set to take over.

Confessions of a Lost in Space fan

[vjs2259.livejournal.com]

This I remembered alternately as the 'why is this here?' episode between the last three terrific ones and the upcoming Chrysalis, and as the guilty pleasure of seeing June Lockhart back in space.

On re-viewing I liked it better. It's the calm before the storm, and has lots to offer on its own. Stephen and Susan's scene at the Downbelow clinic is priceless, and reveals their similarities as well as their differences. Both will be called on to bend the rules again, and here they see they can trust one another. Londo reaches out a hand in friendship, but can't resist taking advantage. Lennier shows us more of the Minbari concept of honor and their twisty way of using and abusing the truth.

The concept of mind-wipe as a punishment I thought was presented thoughtfully with various viewpoints represented. It makes us uncomfortable and it's supposed to; there are no real good choices here. Sinclair's lack of empathy intrigued me. Would anyone be surprised that a telepath wouldn't want to walk through a killer's mind? Or is this part of the 'telepaths aren't quite human' mindset?

Laura Rosen is clearly doing what she's doing for her own purposes, but the character only intermittently shows her self-interest and obsession, which weakens the whole thing overall. I loved when she got snippy and sarcastic with Stephen. I liked the foreshadowing of obsession on career leading to drug abuse (her use of stims leading to her mistake) and Stephen self-righteousness about all this will come back to bite him. I was also slightly appalled at her judgement of the killer, and her condemning him to a painful death. Was it really necessary? Or could she have drained him to unconsciousness and stopped? Did she really want to just get rid of her own terminal disease at the end? What a temptation that would be.

Rosen says a line at the trial, which I can't remember exactly, but to the effect of 'what I did was reasonable, but it wasn't right.' That concept of taking responsibility for your actions echoes down through the arc. Londo takes no responsibility. Lennier takes responsibility for his own actions, and for Londo's, but he doesn't tell the whole truth. Not even to Delenn, and I'm still thinking about the comment he made about that. Rosen stands in the dock and is acquitted, but knows her actions weren't right, and that she must make amends.

Lots to think about, and that's the best thing about this re-watching!

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

This episode kind of feels to me like something that’s been rewritten a few too many times – there’s a couple of interesting ideas in the main plot, but they seem to get lost in a lot of other stuff.

The whole mind-wipe thing is interesting, but the episode doesn’t do anything with the idea other than establishing its existence – it wouldn’t have changed anything if the murderer had instead been sentenced to conventional execution. Season 3’s “Passing Through Gethsemane” would deal with the idea in a bit more detail, but the idea still feels to me rather undeveloped in the series.

Mindwipes strike me as a little too high-tech for the Earth Alliance; it’s apparently not a telepathic procedure, Talia’s just there to perform before and after scans to check it worked right. Shouldn’t that sort of mental manipulation technology have had effects and applications elsewhere?

Not to mention the very, very, creepy idea that the new personality would be assigned to some sort of role in service to the community… Effectively, the EA uses them as slaves. And if you can replace people’s minds with servile personalities for service roles – well, why not use them in the military too? Why should honest men and women give their lives when there’s a ready supply of human trash who can be forced into service? What’s that? You’ve created a military programmed to be unquestioningly loyal to the government, its numbers bolstered every day by those sentenced to have their bodies used against their will by the state they opposed? Huh, how about that…

The whole idea opens up possibilities far worse than President Clark’s rather generic dictatorship…

(Of course, we can compare with the Shadow’s use of sapient beings as the core of their ships. Except the Shadows are portrayed as unquestionably evil in that habits, whereas I don’t believe either this episode or “Gethsemane” were supposed to be interpreted as foreshadowing that the Earth Alliance is rotten to the core…)

Oh, and then there’s the social implications. Just how common is mind-wiping? How likely are you to run into someone sentenced to it? I’m imagining a society where janitors and the like are treated even worse than in our culture, because everyone ‘knows’ they’re all just mind-wiped murderers and rapists. Hell, why not beat them up every now and then; not like they’re real people after they’ve been processed, after all…

Um. Anyway, the Londo plot’s fun! Setup’s a little contrived, though – is Londo really going to proudly report home that he’s improved the Centauri Republic’s diplomatic standing by taking other ambassador’s aide’s out drinking?

Minor notes:

- Hey, it’s the Centauri Regent! Same character, I wonder? He’s not as nervous as the regent is, but then, he’s never had to deal with Cartagia…

- I do like the implications that B5’s social structure is something of a rush job that doesn’t work very well in practice – they’ve apparently got a fully staffed judiciary, but don’t actually have the facilities or the funding for proper sentencing…

- It occurs to me that the odds of *any* combination of cards, be they a good hand or not, are astronomical.

- Is it just me, or in profile does Londo look uncannily like Nicolas Sarkozy?

- I hadn’t realised until a long shot just how long Londo’s… appendages are meant to be… the deck of cards is right across the table from him!

- So who exactly designs a tool for capital punishment that comes complete with a control that reverses who gets killed by it?

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Good thoughts on all the possible implication of the EA using mindwipes on a regular basis, and by good I mean creepy, as they should be.

Is it just me, or in profile does Londo look uncannily like Nicolas Sarkozy?

Arggh, why did you have to say that? Now I cannot unsee!

I hadn’t realised until a long shot just how long Londo’s… appendages are meant to be… the deck of cards is right across the table from him!

Well, she said in a very serious tone, presumably they expand and shrink like the human variety, and he finds cheating at cards very stimulating.

[amatara.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaargh! I just lended my S1 boxset to a friend (whom I'm trying very hard to convert to B5-dom) so there's no way for me to rewatch these now... Which is torture, since I do want to see Londo cheating at cards and saying "touch this" and him and Lennier sitting sheepishly in Sinclair's office and all that other stuff and get fannish about that! :'-(

Anyway, as far as memories go: I just realized I hardly remember anything about the A-plot, so guess it wasn't a good one. Also, I wasn't really a fan of Franklin's character at that time, due to the general preachiness, so that might've had something to do with it. Plus, that whole thing with "doctor-looks-at-pretty-girl-and-they-fall-head-over-heels-in-love-and-have-sex-and-then-never-see-each-other-again", which they repeated several times of the course of the show... was kind of "meh" even the first time they did it (which was here, I think).

I hadn’t realised until a long shot just how long Londo’s… appendages are meant to be… the deck of cards is right across the table from him!

Aren't they supposed to be somewhere in a pouch, um, down there? Seems horribly impractical, having to drag 6 metres of appendages with you without somewhere to put them (even when you're wearing these really high trousers like Londo does)... I wonder: is that why there are hardly any skinny Centauri around? That it's not that they're all fat, just that they're all really... virile? I can see why Cartagia would be the skinny type, then! :-)

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really a fan of Franklin's character at that time...

Franklin's really the only character I never entirely warmed to. I don't know if it was intentional - there is the whole bit with him going walkabout and meeting himself, and himself basically saying "You're a dick and I don't like you" - but even knowing he's meant to be kind of unsympathetic, I still don't find myself particularly interested in him...

And B5's generally very good about not having characters having one-off romances that are never mentioned again, so it just seems to stick out even more when Franklin has so many.

That it's not that they're all fat, just that they're all really... virile?

Yeah, that makes sense to me - I mean, six several meter long appendages have to go *somewhere* when not in use!

[marphilly.livejournal.com]

Eh, I'm not crazy about this episode. It feels utilitarian, like it's only there to introduce some plot points to be re-visited later like the alien machine.

[widsidh.livejournal.com]

I agree with the general feeling that this is chiefly a scene-setting exercise; it puts a number of Chekhov's gun type elements on the table, to be picked up again when needed without then being new.
(I must admit I only picked up on the stim reference this time round).

There were also repeated referernces to the question of what is right vs. what is lawful, not only in the courtroom at the end. This will of course become important at the point when B5 severs its links with EA, clearly illegally, but we are all encouraged to assume it is the right thing (and through Corwin, we get to consider it again at the time)

It seems at times as if the A-plot is just there to string these things together, although I did like it more now than when I originally saw it (notwithstanding Passing through Gethsemane having been my introduction to the B5 Universe).

Needless to say, though, the B-plot was divine :-)

BTW, has anybody noticed the similarity of laura Rosen's name to Laura Roslin of BSG....

[imhilien.livejournal.com]

I thought it was an OK-ish episode, but we can't always have the Big Arc(TM) episodes every week.

After this episode, we probably know more about Centauri anatomy than we needed to. Now, where's that brain bleach... :-p

[lazulidragon.livejournal.com]

I...I had a whole comment typed out, and LJ ate it. Ugh. Here we go, from the top:

As others have said, the "death of the personality" concept was never really explored to the fullest extend of its creepiness, which is a shame. Stephen seems to equate death of personality to actual death, and the guy in "Passing Through Gethsemane" also believes it's wrong, but everyone else seems surprisingly normal about it, which I find to be rather squicky. When the Psi Corps reprograms dying people and inserts sleeper personalities into their own, it's universally horrifying, and everyone is suitably horrified. Yet somehow, doing the same thing to murderers is a-okay? It just seems like an odd choice, especially considered the way a lot of normals feel about telepaths in general. I mean, half the reason Psi Corps exists is because non-telepaths are afraid of having their minds violated, right? Because even if you have nothing, nothing else, you still have your thoughts. And yet they have a procedure--no idea how common it actually is, but from the way Talia talks, it certainly isn't uncommon--where a person's thoughts aren't just read, they're eradicated. I guess I don't quite swallow that a people so divided over psi issues thinks this is a good idea.

Also, is there no such thing as an insanity plea anymore?

On a mostly unrelated not, I wonder what happens to the judge/court system after B5 breaks from Earth?

Holy hell that woman is scary when she flips the switch on the machine. I feel like some of her guilt after the fact probably stems from, not that she killed someone, but that she did it with such...verve?

Stephen goes through a lot of women over the course of this show. I guess it stands out against the variety of longer-lived relationships everyone else on the command staff seems to have.

Oh God, Londo saying "touch this" and gesturing to his midsection, I did not catch that before!

I love it when Lennier just wipes the floor with people in fights. He may not be warrior caste, but his self-defense training was obviously pretty vigorous. It also makes his eventual success in the Rangers a lot more believeable.

Hey, the statue of Li has little indentations on the back for the female genitalia! I didn't catch that before, either.

Apparently Minbari count the same way hobbits do? Eleventy-whatever. Huh.

A part of me wonders how Londo managed to pick up cards with that tentacle, but another part just really, really does not want to know.

Despite the weirdness of the A-plot, I actually liked this episode. There were some nice character moments, and of course Londo and Lennier completely stole the show. I think I had more to say, but I've forgotten it all by now.

[shapinglight]

I've only just managed to watch this episode and have to say that I found it largely forgettable. Which is not to say it didn't contain some fun/intriguing things. The Londo/Lennier scenes are a joy and I do love the way so much that was set up here will be used again later, like the alien machine and the death of personality.

Mostly, though, I can't get over the actor who plays the Ombuds being the same actor who plays Bishop Brennan in Father Ted.