This episode is the one episode I've watched more than all the others, it packs an emotional punch that never fails to land. Indeed, it is my favourite. Even though I cry every time. Faith manages!
This is one of my favorite episodes, and one I can never help but cry when watching. The question posed, the question if one would stay in the garden is one that lingers with me, even as someone seeking truth on my own path. Would we try to delay our suffering, would we take it with grace. And the truth is, I don't know.
I used this episode when I was teaching philosophy at university (and got the library to buy all the episodes on VHS!) Raised some interesting, heated debates on the rights and wrongs, identity requirements for moral responsibility and, of course, issues regarding the death penalty. This was also the episode that contained a line that kicked off a series of personal musings in my head while driving to and from work. That led to an epiphany (while stuck on the motorway in traffic) and thence to a series of books with another on the way. Thanks, Joe. Part me of me wants to hug you and the other half wants to hit you for every night I've sat in front of the computer and thought, "What the hell do I write about next?!"
Going back through the series with the new batch of RUclips and podcast reactors, I think my new B5 thesis is that The Quality of Mercy is the first season episode with the widest array of ramifications and callbacks. The idea of mindwipes, re-explored here, of course (and us oldies remember the saga of the Accidental Story Idea), but also the alien healing tech used again at the start of season two and the end of season four, the "transfer of life energy" idea used by Lorien, the idea of a doctor becoming addicted to stims, Franklin's clinic being a front for the telepath underground railroad (ultimately providing a resource at the height of the shadow war), Lennier lying to save Londo playing a pivotal role in There All The Honour Lies, even some throwaway gags about Centauri genitalia, or Lennier's gift of a marked deck of cards to Londo in Soul Mates, or Talia's comment to Garibaldi about the "terrible things that live inside us" providing dramatic irony for Divided Loyalties. Sandwiched between Babylon Squared and Chrysalis, it seems innocuous, but in many ways is more insidious than, say, Midnight on the Firing Line.
Hi Joe! Thanks for providing these to us! Your insights and descriptions of things in the B5 universe are fantastic! I am a massive fan of B5, and I happen to be totally blind. I’m very disappointed that the show does not have audio description. I would like to provide it if possible. It would be almost like someone re-watching it with me, and we would work out a script, and I or someone else would record it and insert it into the appropriate points in the show.
Death of personality is a wonderfully terrifying horror tool. It could have been used in so many more plot drops. It's the ultimate cop out from moral responsibility of individuals by the state. Psi Corps could have built Clarke, GROPOS could have been penal conscripts. More challenging, it's a treatment for ptsd veterans surviving suicide attempts, what woukd soul hunters or Minbari think is the connection or corruption of souls by personality swapping? A horrific device indeed.
my beef with the death penalty is simply: what if there was an error? you can't make it undone. Of course you can't ever make a sentence completely undone, but with death there is no compensation at all possible. Mindwipes on the other hand are to an extend reversible and while the wiped ones are serving the community they do experience joy, if only through conditioning, but still. So yes, I think it's way more humane and far superior to the death penalty.
Not really. Death of personality is still death of everything you are, and we’ve never seen even a partial restoration of personality in B5, just recovery of some memories. This isn’t even getting into how it could be abused. For instance how many of Clark’s minions were truly loyal? And how many had their minds wiped and replaced with loyal personalities like Talia’s?
Man. Brad Dourif. It's so rare to see him in a sweet, cheery (well, in the beginning) role. I just love this episode so much. Death penalty: I submit that question goes after it from the wrong end. See Robert Sapolsky's work on the prevalence of TBI (& therefore executive function deficiencies) in death row/maximum security inmates. Which, yes, is a cop-out answer. I don't have a good answer for the death penalty/mindwipe question, except it seems to me that mindwipe would be fundamentally dismissive of the individual. Not to mention the potential for abuse-witness the whole prison labor/for-profit situation we're dealing with now.
Nuanced material as is so much of your stuff. Dourif was magnificent (well yanno Dourif) & the rest of the cast were no slouches either. Over the years, I've enjoyed this episode more & more in rewatches. Tend to now think a mindwipe is more brutal than the death penalty. There will be those who know what they are & won't treat them well, while their conditioning will make them incapable of resisting the abuse. Shudder.
You got me thinking of Dollhouse. They repeatedly had their minds rewritten, but their souls shined through. Even when wiped, they were cruel or kind regardless of what they knew or thought. Would the mindwiped still be so foul as a new person? I suspect they might.
Atheist or not, JMS, you've created one of the greatest Christian works extant with this film. I'I share it with friends. Like you, I am a former Catholic, who found the Church often (not always) lacking in true Christianity and so chose to find God elsewhere. This episode, though, presents the gold in Christianity and Catholicism - a gold that enriches all. Today was the perfect day and time to re-watch it: Good Friday, between noon and 3 pm. Aetheist or not, JMS, thanks for reminding all of us of the good power of Christianity. And for Babylon Five.
THANK YOU so much for the Commentary! I utterly enjoyed the insighfulness. I would rather like to see a remastering of the Original B5 -OR- Continuation of the Univeral chacters than a "reboot". My fear is that a re-boot wipes away the great legacy of the actors who portrayed your amazing characters. (Example: I would have prefered Starfleet Acadamey torch passing into new tech over J.J.'s Reboot that wiped out 40 years of work). As a Trek fan - I actually LOVE B5 more BECAUSE of the character growth and wide range and depth you put into it! THANK YOU for B5's legacy!!!
I have VERY mixed feelings about a reboot. On the one hand, there is so much technology today that can make a series like B5 much more impressive - N'Grath for example could be phenomenal if he was done with MoCap and it allows for a bigger range of sizes of alien species, there is much more of an acceptance of shows being less episodic, they seem to give shows a bit more prep time for training in fighting scenes. On the flip side though I really hate having this disambiguation when I go to talk about things like Batman. Which version am I referring to? It's so much better being able to talk about say Lord Of The Rings. Once you have multiple versions of the same thing it gets harder to watch one without thinking of the other. I'd be very happy to see a show that dealt with similar themes and dynamics to B5, I'm just not as keen to see something come out reusing the same names. If JMS was to do a show based on something like the PsiCorps in a different universe, I'd love that. I didn't mind BattleStar Galactica where frankly the first show was trite tripe so I'm happy to completely ignore the existence of the first version. I'd love to see someone do a reboot of Continuum where it kept a much better focus on the parts I found fascinating so I could ignore that first version. B5 feels like it deserves better. If I had one wish, it would actually be to have the old canon novels available in ebook format as I never heard about the Centauri and Psi-Corps trilogies until they became impossible to find for reasonable prices. We don't lack prayer factories, they just rebranded themselves as Scientology... I think the mindwipe thing is worse than the death penalty. You remove any hope of reform in both systems, but the mindwipe compounds that by then punishing a newly built persona - it adds a secondary injustice, and possible expose the family of the victim to seeing the person who did so much harm just moving around. With the death penalty itself I have so many different questions - the fundamental one is the possibility of error, but I also wonder about if we can ever completely decide someone is incapable of reform. IF we could be 100% sure about a crime being committed, and sure that the person was incapable of being a better person and was therefore not deserving of being returned to society, is there any point in just keeping someone alive in a box? In that circumstance is it better to kill them? On the flipside though, is it enough to say a person is deserving of release simply because they've reformed or should there always be some component of keeping them out of society as a punishment? I think everyone will come to different answers for all of those questions, I'm not even sure my answers will remain unchanged from year to year. The Gethsemane conversation for me was always one of the most rewarding parts of the episode. I was raised Catholic, went to schools where we did the stations of the cross, and yet still this episode made me think of a different way to view the events, emphasising the importance of that question of choosing to endure this for the sake of others. Things like Mel Gibson's "Jesus Christ: The Snuff Movie" just dwell on the torture and suffering part and feel like they gloss over the agency of Jesus. What I really love about this episode is the questions it raises about forgiveness (on top of what it raises about Christianity) - how difficult it is, and the value and importance of it. It doesn't dictate answers, it leaves the audience to decide that for themselves.
Death is death. Loss is void. The death penalty will never bring back a loved one, then again you have the issue of finding out 40 years later that the dead convict was innocent, to begin with! CAN a mind sweep be reversed in 40 years if the person is found innocent? Episodes and topics such as this prove to me that life in not left or right, black or white, right or wrong - too much gray. Sigh, this is one example of why I enjoy B5 over Trek!!!! More Please!
I think the mindwipe is preferable. As the mindwipe is only shown being used on unrepentant murderers the question of rehabilitation becomes mostly a moot point (I’m assuming during the psychic scan the psi-cop is able to tell whether or not rehabilitation is likely.) It also needs to be said that the mindwipe is basically killing the person anyway. With their entire personality erased the person, the murderer, is essentially deleted from their own body. The body is then repurposed for a life of service that will help those around them. For the victims and their friends and families, the person who irrevocably wronged them is gone, removed from existence, and they know they won’t be coming back. And society has fulfilled its obligation in punishing the murderer, but has not taken a physical life and has, in the place of the wiped identity, created a personality that will hopefully create a net benefit for that society.
"Is mind-wiping more civilized than the death penalty?" No. They both end a person's existence. As has been said by others (past, present and future) for more eloquently, the body is just a shell; a vehicle that consciousness uses in order to... well, do whatever it is consciousness does. It reminds me of dodgy time-travel stories where someone decides to go back in time and change things so as to alter their present reality (, Terminator series, I'm looking at you). Whether one subscribes to some kind of parallel timeline/multiverse theory or think perhaps the redundant timelines are erased/replaced when events are changed in the past, the end result is the same: the "now" that currently and always is.... is now then not. And your former present is... well, you know the saying... "No matter where you go, there you are." Yes, I have read and re-read the above dribblings several times and they make about as much sense to the author as I imagine they do to anyone currently unfortunate enough to find themselves reading it. Just how in the hell did you end up here, anyway? :) Wait, was the question again?
It was nice to see the talented Brad Douriff cast against type…. until he wasn’t. It’s a shame you had to recap the whole concept of death of personality. It sort of gives the story away. It was introduced in Quality of Mercy and attentive fans remembered. I’m not really sold on the death of personality. You’re essentially creating a new person but saddling him with the debt of his former life, which he will gladly pay thanks to an artificially installed desire to do good. He is imprisoned and doesn’t even know it. Kinda creepy.
I'm hopeful the new B5 can happen when the ideological rot is no longer running the CW. All of our entertainment has become platforms for ideologs. We really NEED you sir and we NEED Babylon 5 to fill the void left by those who ruined Star Wars, Star Trek and now Lord of the Rings.💚
This episode is the one episode I've watched more than all the others, it packs an emotional punch that never fails to land. Indeed, it is my favourite. Even though I cry every time. Faith manages!
I had a bad day. Today is now a good day.
This is one of my favorite episodes, and one I can never help but cry when watching. The question posed, the question if one would stay in the garden is one that lingers with me, even as someone seeking truth on my own path. Would we try to delay our suffering, would we take it with grace. And the truth is, I don't know.
I used this episode when I was teaching philosophy at university (and got the library to buy all the episodes on VHS!) Raised some interesting, heated debates on the rights and wrongs, identity requirements for moral responsibility and, of course, issues regarding the death penalty. This was also the episode that contained a line that kicked off a series of personal musings in my head while driving to and from work. That led to an epiphany (while stuck on the motorway in traffic) and thence to a series of books with another on the way. Thanks, Joe. Part me of me wants to hug you and the other half wants to hit you for every night I've sat in front of the computer and thought, "What the hell do I write about next?!"
One of the most memorable episodes in the entire series.
Going back through the series with the new batch of RUclips and podcast reactors, I think my new B5 thesis is that The Quality of Mercy is the first season episode with the widest array of ramifications and callbacks.
The idea of mindwipes, re-explored here, of course (and us oldies remember the saga of the Accidental Story Idea), but also the alien healing tech used again at the start of season two and the end of season four, the "transfer of life energy" idea used by Lorien, the idea of a doctor becoming addicted to stims, Franklin's clinic being a front for the telepath underground railroad (ultimately providing a resource at the height of the shadow war), Lennier lying to save Londo playing a pivotal role in There All The Honour Lies, even some throwaway gags about Centauri genitalia, or Lennier's gift of a marked deck of cards to Londo in Soul Mates, or Talia's comment to Garibaldi about the "terrible things that live inside us" providing dramatic irony for Divided Loyalties.
Sandwiched between Babylon Squared and Chrysalis, it seems innocuous, but in many ways is more insidious than, say, Midnight on the Firing Line.
simply an awesome episode. hope the reboot goes OK Joe. Sounds promising. Keeping my fingers and toes crossed.
Such a wonderful way to watch the episode. Joe you share so many wonderful stories from the show. THANK YOU!
I watched this with my Irish Catholic mother.She loved it.We watched it several times.god bless her
The reboot would be a true gift, i’ll keep my hopes cautiously high. At least we’ll always have the original which I consider timeless 👍
Instead of a reboot, what if Joe got his hands on the newly freed Robotech Property?
@@kroberts8866 Why not both? He's got time, right?
My favorite episode, powerful and emotional, thank you sir..
Hi Joe! Thanks for providing these to us! Your insights and descriptions of things in the B5 universe are fantastic! I am a massive fan of B5, and I happen to be totally blind. I’m very disappointed that the show does not have audio description. I would like to provide it if possible. It would be almost like someone re-watching it with me, and we would work out a script, and I or someone else would record it and insert it into the appropriate points in the show.
Well, still here for the episodical commentary.
Brad Dourif’s portrayal of Billy Ribbit in the film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoos’s Nest - So glad to see him again in B5.
Death of personality is a wonderfully terrifying horror tool. It could have been used in so many more plot drops. It's the ultimate cop out from moral responsibility of individuals by the state. Psi Corps could have built Clarke, GROPOS could have been penal conscripts. More challenging, it's a treatment for ptsd veterans surviving suicide attempts, what woukd soul hunters or Minbari think is the connection or corruption of souls by personality swapping? A horrific device indeed.
As long as you have human beings, there will always be punishment without forgiveness.
I like to think of Brother Theodore's order as Space Jesuits. This is one of my favorite episodes of all five series.
my beef with the death penalty is simply: what if there was an error? you can't make it undone. Of course you can't ever make a sentence completely undone, but with death there is no compensation at all possible. Mindwipes on the other hand are to an extend reversible and while the wiped ones are serving the community they do experience joy, if only through conditioning, but still. So yes, I think it's way more humane and far superior to the death penalty.
Not really. Death of personality is still death of everything you are, and we’ve never seen even a partial restoration of personality in B5, just recovery of some memories.
This isn’t even getting into how it could be abused.
For instance how many of Clark’s minions were truly loyal? And how many had their minds wiped and replaced with loyal personalities like Talia’s?
Man. Brad Dourif. It's so rare to see him in a sweet, cheery (well, in the beginning) role. I just love this episode so much.
Death penalty: I submit that question goes after it from the wrong end. See Robert Sapolsky's work on the prevalence of TBI (& therefore executive function deficiencies) in death row/maximum security inmates. Which, yes, is a cop-out answer. I don't have a good answer for the death penalty/mindwipe question, except it seems to me that mindwipe would be fundamentally dismissive of the individual. Not to mention the potential for abuse-witness the whole prison labor/for-profit situation we're dealing with now.
Nuanced material as is so much of your stuff. Dourif was magnificent (well yanno Dourif) & the rest of the cast were no slouches either. Over the years, I've enjoyed this episode more & more in rewatches. Tend to now think a mindwipe is more brutal than the death penalty. There will be those who know what they are & won't treat them well, while their conditioning will make them incapable of resisting the abuse. Shudder.
You got me thinking of Dollhouse. They repeatedly had their minds rewritten, but their souls shined through. Even when wiped, they were cruel or kind regardless of what they knew or thought.
Would the mindwiped still be so foul as a new person? I suspect they might.
Atheist or not, JMS, you've created one of the greatest Christian works extant with this film. I'I share it with friends. Like you, I am a former Catholic, who found the Church often (not always) lacking in true Christianity and so chose to find God elsewhere. This episode, though, presents the gold in Christianity and Catholicism - a gold that enriches all.
Today was the perfect day and time to re-watch it: Good Friday, between noon and 3 pm.
Aetheist or not, JMS, thanks for reminding all of us of the good power of Christianity. And for Babylon Five.
THANK YOU so much for the Commentary! I utterly enjoyed the insighfulness. I would rather like to see a remastering of the Original B5 -OR- Continuation of the Univeral chacters than a "reboot". My fear is that a re-boot wipes away the great legacy of the actors who portrayed your amazing characters. (Example: I would have prefered Starfleet Acadamey torch passing into new tech over J.J.'s Reboot that wiped out 40 years of work). As a Trek fan - I actually LOVE B5 more BECAUSE of the character growth and wide range and depth you put into it! THANK YOU for B5's legacy!!!
I have VERY mixed feelings about a reboot. On the one hand, there is so much technology today that can make a series like B5 much more impressive - N'Grath for example could be phenomenal if he was done with MoCap and it allows for a bigger range of sizes of alien species, there is much more of an acceptance of shows being less episodic, they seem to give shows a bit more prep time for training in fighting scenes. On the flip side though I really hate having this disambiguation when I go to talk about things like Batman. Which version am I referring to? It's so much better being able to talk about say Lord Of The Rings. Once you have multiple versions of the same thing it gets harder to watch one without thinking of the other. I'd be very happy to see a show that dealt with similar themes and dynamics to B5, I'm just not as keen to see something come out reusing the same names. If JMS was to do a show based on something like the PsiCorps in a different universe, I'd love that. I didn't mind BattleStar Galactica where frankly the first show was trite tripe so I'm happy to completely ignore the existence of the first version. I'd love to see someone do a reboot of Continuum where it kept a much better focus on the parts I found fascinating so I could ignore that first version. B5 feels like it deserves better.
If I had one wish, it would actually be to have the old canon novels available in ebook format as I never heard about the Centauri and Psi-Corps trilogies until they became impossible to find for reasonable prices.
We don't lack prayer factories, they just rebranded themselves as Scientology...
I think the mindwipe thing is worse than the death penalty. You remove any hope of reform in both systems, but the mindwipe compounds that by then punishing a newly built persona - it adds a secondary injustice, and possible expose the family of the victim to seeing the person who did so much harm just moving around. With the death penalty itself I have so many different questions - the fundamental one is the possibility of error, but I also wonder about if we can ever completely decide someone is incapable of reform. IF we could be 100% sure about a crime being committed, and sure that the person was incapable of being a better person and was therefore not deserving of being returned to society, is there any point in just keeping someone alive in a box? In that circumstance is it better to kill them? On the flipside though, is it enough to say a person is deserving of release simply because they've reformed or should there always be some component of keeping them out of society as a punishment? I think everyone will come to different answers for all of those questions, I'm not even sure my answers will remain unchanged from year to year.
The Gethsemane conversation for me was always one of the most rewarding parts of the episode. I was raised Catholic, went to schools where we did the stations of the cross, and yet still this episode made me think of a different way to view the events, emphasising the importance of that question of choosing to endure this for the sake of others. Things like Mel Gibson's "Jesus Christ: The Snuff Movie" just dwell on the torture and suffering part and feel like they gloss over the agency of Jesus.
What I really love about this episode is the questions it raises about forgiveness (on top of what it raises about Christianity) - how difficult it is, and the value and importance of it. It doesn't dictate answers, it leaves the audience to decide that for themselves.
Death is death. Loss is void. The death penalty will never bring back a loved one, then again you have the issue of finding out 40 years later that the dead convict was innocent, to begin with! CAN a mind sweep be reversed in 40 years if the person is found innocent? Episodes and topics such as this prove to me that life in not left or right, black or white, right or wrong - too much gray. Sigh, this is one example of why I enjoy B5 over Trek!!!! More Please!
So That is how you pronounce it!
I think the mindwipe is preferable. As the mindwipe is only shown being used on unrepentant murderers the question of rehabilitation becomes mostly a moot point (I’m assuming during the psychic scan the psi-cop is able to tell whether or not rehabilitation is likely.)
It also needs to be said that the mindwipe is basically killing the person anyway. With their entire personality erased the person, the murderer, is essentially deleted from their own body. The body is then repurposed for a life of service that will help those around them. For the victims and their friends and families, the person who irrevocably wronged them is gone, removed from existence, and they know they won’t be coming back. And society has fulfilled its obligation in punishing the murderer, but has not taken a physical life and has, in the place of the wiped identity, created a personality that will hopefully create a net benefit for that society.
Hello
I see no clear distinction between the death of personality and capital punishment.
"Is mind-wiping more civilized than the death penalty?"
No. They both end a person's existence. As has been said by others (past, present and future) for more eloquently, the body is just a shell; a vehicle that consciousness uses in order to... well, do whatever it is consciousness does.
It reminds me of dodgy time-travel stories where someone decides to go back in time and change things so as to alter their present reality (, Terminator series, I'm looking at you).
Whether one subscribes to some kind of parallel timeline/multiverse theory or think perhaps the redundant timelines are erased/replaced when events are changed in the past, the end result is the same: the "now" that currently and always is.... is now then not. And your former present is... well, you know the saying...
"No matter where you go, there you are."
Yes, I have read and re-read the above dribblings several times and they make about as much sense to the author as I imagine they do to anyone currently unfortunate enough to find themselves reading it.
Just how in the hell did you end up here, anyway? :)
Wait, was the question again?
It was nice to see the talented Brad Douriff cast against type…. until he wasn’t.
It’s a shame you had to recap the whole concept of death of personality. It sort of gives the story away. It was introduced in Quality of Mercy and attentive fans remembered.
I’m not really sold on the death of personality. You’re essentially creating a new person but saddling him with the debt of his former life, which he will gladly pay thanks to an artificially installed desire to do good. He is imprisoned and doesn’t even know it. Kinda creepy.
I'm hopeful the new B5 can happen when the ideological rot is no longer running the CW. All of our entertainment has become platforms for ideologs. We really NEED you sir and we NEED Babylon 5 to fill the void left by those who ruined Star Wars, Star Trek and now Lord of the Rings.💚