11
votes
Babylon 5 S01E05: "Infection" - Episode Discussion
Link information
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- Title
- Babylon 5 | Full Episode | Infection: Season 1, Episode 5 | Beyond Infinity
- Authors
- ClipZone: Beyond Infinity
- Duration
- 43:59
- Published
- Mar 26 2026
Station Notes:
There is an Official Babylon 5 channel that may be posting their own full episodes soon. If it starts from the beginning again and/or Clipzone stops I'll keep posting rewatch threads and bump the old threads the new links, maybe stagger them until the official channel catches up.
"Infection" episode for non-Americans:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8h1hfr
This felt somewhat similar to a storyline I have seen a couple of times in Star Trek, with an ancient autonomous "intelligent" weapon system be awakened thousands of years later. While always a cool premise, I don't think the Babylon 5 version adds much new or interesting. Apparently, Straczynski also thinks this was one of the weaker episodes.
I do appreciate the plotlines in the background in this one though. What is going on on earth that we're asking about pulling back from space? Why is the Commander putting himself in danger all the time? They're both things that could have meta reasons - it's a message for the audience of the present or it's TV plot to have the leader in the action. But in B5 it's usually deeper than that.
(Maybe except the merch store/gift shop episode.)
Many of the themes of this episode feel current.
Common public good versus private for profit research projects? We can draw a parallel to our current space tech boom where governments want to discover and inspire, while private companies want to profit.
An AI system committed genocide because it couldn't tell friend from foe? In our time, an AI system recently blew up a girls' school because it couldn't tell it from a military target.
An arms race between competing factions with new technology? Right now it's drones and artificial intelligence.
Earth First and anti-alien extremism? America First and anti-Latino extremism.
But wait. Did they describe the Ikarran home world as a dead world, even a desert world? Did the weapon system not stop at eliminating intelligent being, but go so far as to eradicate all life on the planet?
Another explanation might be that the Ikarrans ruined their own world with global warming and pollution and such to the point where it required active terraforming to keep it liveable, and when they were eradicated, all ecosystems they were maintaining collapsed.
Or maybe some other alien species saw the threat of the weapon as so serious that they decided to turn the planet into a dead world.