This episode is interesting for lots of reasons, all but one to do with culture.
There's the fear of other cultures, as embodied in Malcolm and the Home Guard. Then there's the respect for cultural traditions as evinced by Londo in his initial refusal to consider helping the two young Centauri lovers (and I adore our first glimpse of Londo's three wives, Plague, Famine and Death, heh!), and then there's the enlightened (in this instance anyway) contribution of Minbari culture, as embodied by Shaal Mayaan, which is eager to interact with and learn from other cultures and can even take the very negative experience she has in this episode with certain sections of human society and turn it into something positive.
In fact, cultural flexibility and the willingness to adapt and subtly alter traditions, is also how Londo ends up solving the problem of the two young people. Having been badly bruised by inflexible cultural rules in the past, he finds it in himself to have enough compassion on the two youngsters to find a third way for them.
Malcolm himself turns out to be not much of a threat. He completely misjudges Ivanova and Sinclair and is easily fooled by them, but he and his unpleasant cohorts are a great, big stonking warning sign that all is not well with the Earth that created Babylon 5.
The other important point raised in this episode is the whole business of Kosh and the poisoning through the encounter suit from the pilot episode. When I first saw this episode, I was beyond impressed that this seeming gaffe had not been buried and that the sudden departure of Doctor Kyle of and Lyta Alexander was to be made a plot point rather than smoothed over as if those two characters had never existed, because B5 was the first time I saw this kind of joined-up thinking in TV sci-fi.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-03-08 09:14 pm (UTC)There's the fear of other cultures, as embodied in Malcolm and the Home Guard. Then there's the respect for cultural traditions as evinced by Londo in his initial refusal to consider helping the two young Centauri lovers (and I adore our first glimpse of Londo's three wives, Plague, Famine and Death, heh!), and then there's the enlightened (in this instance anyway) contribution of Minbari culture, as embodied by Shaal Mayaan, which is eager to interact with and learn from other cultures and can even take the very negative experience she has in this episode with certain sections of human society and turn it into something positive.
In fact, cultural flexibility and the willingness to adapt and subtly alter traditions, is also how Londo ends up solving the problem of the two young people. Having been badly bruised by inflexible cultural rules in the past, he finds it in himself to have enough compassion on the two youngsters to find a third way for them.
Malcolm himself turns out to be not much of a threat. He completely misjudges Ivanova and Sinclair and is easily fooled by them, but he and his unpleasant cohorts are a great, big stonking warning sign that all is not well with the Earth that created Babylon 5.
The other important point raised in this episode is the whole business of Kosh and the poisoning through the encounter suit from the pilot episode. When I first saw this episode, I was beyond impressed that this seeming gaffe had not been buried and that the sudden departure of Doctor Kyle of and Lyta Alexander was to be made a plot point rather than smoothed over as if those two characters had never existed, because B5 was the first time I saw this kind of joined-up thinking in TV sci-fi.