Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Delenn is in danger when a soul hunter, an alien who captures the souls of the dying, arrives at the station. W. Morgan Sheppard as Soul Hunter #1. John Snyder as Soul Hunter #2.

Sub-genre: Suspense
P5 Rating: 7.05

Production number:  102
Original air date:  February 2, 1994

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston

Watch For

• The Soul Hunter mentions the death of someone to Sinclair. That name will come up again.
• A fluid flowing the wrong way.

Backplot

• The soul hunter of this episode has visited Earth before.
• Minbari are trained from childhood to protect their souls from soul hunters.
• The soul hunter had a unique perspective on a significant event in Minbari history:

  [to Sinclair] "Minbari: jealous, selfish, private. We have saved only a few - very rare. The rarest of all, their leader Dukat, dying; your fault, your war; the pinnacle of Minbari evolution. We came, I, others. They made a wall of bodies to stop us! He died. And his dreams, his ideas - all that he was, all that he could ever be - gone... wasted... jealous..."

  Later he recognizes Delenn from the Grey Council, which was responsible for stopping him.

Unanswered Questions

• Why do all races but humans know about soul hunters? Since they all share the Minbari's fear of them, do most of them share the Minbari belief in reincarnation?
• Why are so many non-humans moving to Earth? They must face a fair amount of prejudice there. (cf: "The War Prayer")
• What are the "certain classes" of Minbari in which Delenn says soul hunters have always taken a particular interest?
• "Your fault, your war," says the soul hunter to Sinclair, recounting Dukat's death. Was he referring to humans in general, Sinclair in particular, or Dukat?
• "If only you could see," says the soul hunter to Franklin. Apparently he can actually observe the soul's departure from a dying body. Later we see, possibly through Delenn's eyes, a blue wispy something escape as she breaks a soul vessel. Does this mean that Minbari too can see souls?
• With a glimpse into Delenn's soul, the soul hunter exclaims, "You would plan such a thing? You would do such a thing? Incredible." He's had a long history with the Minbari - what would so surprise him? (Revealed in "Chrysalis" and "Revelations")
• Recovering in Medlab, Delenn says to Sinclair, "I knew you would come. We were right about you." Clearly, the Minbari have made predictions about him. However, Sinclair didn't really prove anything about his character by rescuing Delenn - someone else could easily have been the one to find her. Perhaps he's just fulfilled part of a prophecy, thereby confirming his role in it. (cf: "Parliament of Dreams")
• Combining the above questions, does Delenn's incredible plan involve the Minbari predictions about Sinclair?
• As the soul hunter himself challenged, why is one of the great Minbari leaders acting as their ambassador on Babylon 5? Sinclair is now wondering the same thing.

Analysis

• Delenn meets Sinclair just as he's going to check out the injured pilot, and offers to help him ID the fellow. She has a knack for being at the right place at the right time. (cf: "The Gathering").
• Sinclair did not call for backup when he encountered the soul hunter, even though there were four others nearby searching for Delenn. He has a tendency to put himself into dangerous situations. (cf: "Infection")
• During this episode there are three different stories told about the soul. Sinclair heard all three, and doesn't know which to believe. All he knows is what he saw.

  Franklin:

  There is no soul that survives the body. With advanced technology, he allows, one could preserve a record of someone's personality, but death is death.

  Delenn:

  All sentients have immortal souls. When a Minbari dies its soul merges with the souls of other dead Minbari. These are recycled into future generations, so as individuals advance their own souls, the Minbari as a whole advance.

  soul hunter:

  All sentients have ephemeral souls. When a person dies, the soul expires into oblivion. However, soul hunters have a prescient attraction to death - if they so choose they can capture and preserve a soul "for the greater good" at the moment it leaves the body. They carry with them a bag full of the souls they have "saved", each in its own glass vessel.

  For a Minbari, the soul hunter's method of preservation is true death, for it cuts a soul off from the rest and diminishes the next generation; for a soul hunter, the true loss is uncollected souls.
  These are completely irreconcilable belief systems.

Notes

• Dr. Franklin arrives on the starliner Asimov, which we see again later.
• Dr. Kyle is on his way to a new assignment working with the president. He's much needed there what with "so many aliens migrating to Earth," as Franklin puts it.
• The average human lifespan is almost 100 years.
• Ivanova conducts a simple funeral with these words: "From the stars we came, and to the stars we return, from now until the end of time. We therefore commit this body to the deep."
• The soul hunter tells Sinclair his opinion of the Minbari: "pale, bloodless, look in their eyes and see nothing but mirrors, infinities of reflection..."
• When Delenn is recovering in medlab at the end of the episode, she's attached to a machine that should presumably be pumping blood back into her body. But the fluid is flowing out of her instead. The shot was played backwards so the director could get the camera movement he wanted.

jms speaks

• Well, I just saw a cut of the episode that's going to air second, the one guest-starring Morgan Shepherd. Oh, man...on the question of Did you learn anything from the pilot...this thing *moves* like a sumbitch. It's a very unusual, very *creepy* episode in many ways. And filled with character stuff...and a good bit of background about some of our characters rendered in active ways. I'm really dying to see what people think of this one when it airs. It manages to take what would normally be considered a science *fantasy* issue, and deal with it from a science fiction perspective, without compromising on the latter at all. It's a very, *very* strong episode.

• Who's right, the soul hunter or the minbari?
  Yes.

• We leave the question open: Is he actually taking souls, or simply encoding the personality matrix and, in essence, creating an artificial version of the individual's personality?

• The various characters take their own stands, which vary. Franklin only considers the possibility of cloning someone's personality matrix, for instance. And again, it depends on how you *define* soul. The Soul Hunter defines it not as something supernatural, but as the collection of thoughts, personality, feelings and the very essence of the person that dies with the body. That definition is broad enough to encompass just about anything. Then you get into the more specific ideas of what a soul is.

  One person at a post production house we've used has indicated that he has "theological problems" with working on that episode; not because it's *against* what he believes -- he's worked on horror movies and stuff with devils and the like -- but because it takes a point of view he doesn't much like...in that he has to sit and defend the whole *context* of his ideas...meaning, it's making him think. He can just poo-poo the stuff against what he believes, support what he does believe in...but he isn't quite sure where this show comes down, or where it makes *him* come down. I've had any number of problems with people on a show before, but this is the first time I've run into a theological problem.

• What the soul was, who's right, and even whether this is SF or Science Fantasy, was it explained enough to merit one over the other ... how can I put this...? I don't want to spoon-feed stuff to people. What I want is not to hit someone with a MORAL, or a message, or "This is what a soul is," or "This is what makes it an SF series," I want to start discussions. Arguments. Preferably a bar fight or two.

  We present an issue. Here are the sides. Now...what do YOU think about it? I want this show to ask, "Who are you? Where are you going?" That's half the fun. Some of my favorites pastimes in college were sitting in the commons, or the library, arguing this stuff from every possible angle. You think I'm gonna tell you what to think? What it means? No. The goal is to provoke discussion. Preferably passionate discussion.

  Otherwise I might as well just start renting billboards and putting up signs.

• Re: why soul hunter #1's ship was out of control...the second soul hunter comments that they've been tracking him, and caught up with him a few days ago. They attacked, "and he escaped, his ship damaged." That is what brought him here...and led his pursuers to this place as well.

• Will we see more soul hunters?
  Eventually.

• And yes, humans would probably have *heard* of Soul Hunters, distantly, as a legend. I see no reason why they would believe they existed, particularly with a title like that, unless and until actually encountering one.

• Re: Sinclair's actions toward the Soul Hunter...the device he uses was trained on Delenn. It was spiraling up to full power throughout the scene. Just as Sinclair's thrown, you see it starting to come to critical mass...it's shooting at Delenn. There isn't/wasn't time to sit there and figure out how it works, and shut off the right button. He turned it so that it faced away from her...and the Hunter was caught in his own machine.

  There was nowhere else to go with the machine.

• In "Soul Hunter," Franklin notes that the average human life span is now about a hundred years. It's quite a bit longer for the other races; G'Kar is about 70 or more, but is considered mid-range, equal to a human in early 40s, among Narns. Delenn is in about the same position, equal to 30s-40s in her terms, but in years a bit older. They are a pretty long lived people. Centauri aren't quite as long-lived, but they do a bit better than the Narns. The Vorlons......are.

• To the question about a Soul Hunter's strength...yes, it is *very* considerable. Even with one arm he was able to slam the hell out of the commander, pick him up and again slam him against a wall before throwing him about 10 feet across the room. Had he not been stopped, and stopped good, yes, he would've torn Sinclair to ribbons.

• Delenn was shattering the soul globes in order to let the souls escape, rather than playing with them. Look on the floor around her, and you'll see shattered globes. There should also be a sound of them breaking in her hands, the light goes out, and something escapes....

• Was Delenn only releasing Minbari souls, or all the souls?
  It would be any and all so imprisoned.

• You're most definitely welcome; it was something we did to honor Asimov, who determined the shape of this genre for many writers.

• Why is part of me tempted to decide that around the year 2223 the most revered figure in Earthforce Command was General Ira Asimov, a brilliant strategist for whom the liner was named....?

  There are certain benefits to a design-your-own-future universe....

• I deeply admired Asimov. Harlan Ellison, this series consultant, was as dear a friend to Asimov as anyone could be. I named the starliner after Asimov shortly after his death, because I will personally miss him, and for Harlan, as his friend.

• In your complaints regarding the commander flying off on occasional missions (and he only does it about 3 times out of 22 episodes, so I hardly see this as a problem), you are forgetting several other *realities* of military life. If you're a pilot, even as a commander, you have to log in X-number of hours flying time per month in order to continue to qualify for flight pay. This is a *requirement*. And it doesn't just mean flying around the station a few times.

  Second, many commanders -- as recently as Vietnam and afterward -- did and continue to go out on missions and sorties because it is rather expected of them, and because it maintains the respect of the rest of the squadron(s).

  Third, and possibly most important, Earthforce is the same as the contermporary Air Force in one important respect: promotion up the ranks is tied *directly* to combat experience and, in this case, combat flying. That's why women fighter pilots and helicopter pilots have been fighting so *vigorously* to be allowed to fly combat missions; they know that they can't be promoted fully up the line without that. Sinclair has no desire to be a commander all his life, he'd like to move on. Hence it behooves him to get in combat time whenever possible.

  Your statement that it "doesn't wash" has nothing to do with how the military *actually* works, and everything to do with the skewed and inaccurate portrayal of the military that you get from Trek. This is absolutely legitimate, and the B5 mailbox these days is partly crammed with letters from vets thanking us for getting this part right.

  I suppose I could mention this in passing in dialogue, but then it becomes a matter of sticking in dialogue not because it's important to an episode, but because some folks would like things explained to them. I don't think that's my responsibility.

• I answered you elsewhere here on this topic earlier this evening. To just nit for a moment, to say that Sinclair picks up "every derelict ship" seems a little unfair...he's picked up *one*, and only one, and only picks up one this entire season. Why him? A) Because he's good at it, B) he could use the flight pay, C) it'll look good on his record, and D) because as he says as he leaves, it's a potential first-contact situation. (NOt to mention E, that he has a death-wish.)

  I would submit to you that this is NOT the same as having one character do a zillion different jobs on the station. I think that you're reacting to something you've seen on Trek, and are assuming based on an example of one that we're doing it in B5 as well. We're not. Also, in "Purple," Garibaldi sends a different team out to handle the gunfire, so there are others who do things. Question becomes, how many new and recurring characters do you want to introduce? There are currently *14* regular and recurring characters on B5, and there are many folks who are saying that's too many. As it is, we do introduce an aide to Garibaldi who takes care of some stuff for him. Just as Sinclair delegates to Ivanova, and Ivanova delegates to the observation dome techs.

  I just feel that you're leaping to a conclusion based on a paucity of evidence, built upon your experiences with another show. We're simply not doing this.

• Normally, I don't tend to respond to negatives, because I don't generally want to get in the way or be perceived to be getting in the way of criticism. I don't. But I feel I have to respond to some of this. If the show is open to criticism, then it seems to me that some of the critiques should be open as well. And some of these I think are quite unfair.

  1) When did they move the jump gate (re: the time required to get from the gate by Kosh's ship, as opposed to the Hunter ship). They/we didn't. Once again, and I wish people could remember this, Kosh's ship BEGAN TO DECELERATE the instant it emerged from the gate, in order to dock with B5 without smashing into it. The Soul Hunter ship was out of control, careening in at full speed. (This was a widely discussed reason why the Vorlon fleet got to B5 so quickly as vs. Kosh's ship. They were moving fast to get into striking position.)

  2) The Hunter's ship was on autopilot, set to come out of the first gate it came to.

  3) There was still time for the station's defense grid to blow the ship. Yes, pieces would have continued onward, but a hell of a lot of its inertia would've been taken out by the incoming fire, and any remaining pieces would've either been taken out as well, or would have been so small as to not damage the hull (which is *very* thick at that point) given its blast-enforced deceleration.

  4) Yes, Sinclair would've gone up with it. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

  5) There was no "the Earth is going to explode" story here; you have a ship colliding with the station, that has to be stopped. It has to be stopped within the period between when it emerges from the gate, and the time it would collide. You want to know how much time you have to work in. Maybe it's a dramatic device, but it's also exactly what you would do. What would you prefer? "Lieutenant Commander, how much longer until impact?" "Uh...I dunno...can you hang on a second?"

  6) Re: the "funny forehead" comment...it was not what I've understood the FF syndrome to mean...a regular head with a little treatment on the front. This was a whole-head prosthetic, covering the entire back of the head. So wrong on that one. And re: n'grath having 6 legs rather than 4...who're you to say that? Ever seen a praying mantis? Do all insects all over the galaxy have to have six legs to qualify? You don't like minimal makeup, you don't like full-body prosthetics ...you understand that this comes out as "nothing will please me except a real alien." You tell me where to find one in Central Casting, and I'll hire him.

  7) Okay, here's my biggest gripe: the note that the soul aspect was Trek and "katra." Let me be clear on this: I don't give a damn what Trek has or has not done now, long ago, or will do in the future. We can't be constantly looking over our shoulder, limiting our universe because of another show. If your only frame of reference when it comes to discussing the soul is Star Trek, then that's profoundly disappointing, but it's got nothing to do with me. The basic concept goes back to the beginnings of civilization (that your soul can be captured somehow). Further, there were no soul hunters in ST, it was placement of one's spirit in another body. I'm getting real tired of the notion that if Trek did something, nobody else ever can do it. Like the person who said that Trek invented nanotechnology, and thus when we used it in the pilot episode in the nanotech machine G'Kar swallows, we were just copying Trek's nanites.

  I refuse to surrender creative control of this series to the ghost of Star Trek's used notions. From time to time, we'll cross into areas they have also touched. We'll touch it differently. Deal with it. But please don't put a Star Trek (tm) tag on the soul, and the history of the soul.

  8) You say a guard's gun was taken *twice* in this episode. Where is #2 (if #1 is the medlab guard)? I see a guard being attacked from behind, but not his gun being taken.

  9) Re: the second soul hunter's makeup being "inferior" to the first: they were essentially exactly the same...same material, same design, minus the stone, which varied...I'm sorry, but they were made, applied and used in exactly the same way.

  10) Why drain her of blood? Why the hell not? In some countries, that was used as a means of execution. Bleeding was also used (in theory) to heal. Okay, let's say he used poison. "Why use poison?" you probably would've asked. "Oh, it was the old poison gag, and they find a convenient antidote." There's no difference.

  11) How did the hunter relate his sense of death to a wall map? I ask again...why not? If you can buy it happens at all, why not? How is that any different than walking through a hall, or being drawn to a planet? This is strictly a straw-man example, as is much of what you cite.

  This, frankly, is what I find so offensive in your note. You take things that as a matter of opinion you might have done differently, and then try to hold it up as a fault. You set up straw man arguments that could be just as easily turned around on anything, mischaracterizing something in order to take a cheap shot.

  12) Why didn't Sinclair link in when he found the hunter? Because he only "found" the hunter when he was being SHOT AT. And at that point you don't want to raise your voice because you'll be shot at again.

  13) You complain that the soul globes seemed to wait until the moment Sinclair freed them to act (as though it were the bag that had been holding them in). Sure, they could've emerged...and floated. A lot of good that would've done them. What they needed was someone who could stop him, and that was Sinclair's task. They were able to distract the hunter long enough for that to happen. Minus Sinclair, what were they supposed to do, bedazzle him to death?

  14) Re: shining things into the camera = NBC Mystery Movie. See point 11a above. I'm not responsible for your cultural reference points.

  I don't mean to yell, but thing is, I don't mind genuine criticism, if we specifically do something that is objectively *wrong*. If you don't like something, that's also fine. But I'm tired of people who confuse opinion with fact, and that if it isn't done their way, then it isn't somehow *right*...and the notion that Star Trek has invented, patented and qualified for sole claim on whole aspects of our history, literature, culture, theology and language, and that anybody who touches on these areas is just doing Trek stuff.

  As far as I'm concerned, the Trek-soul-katra thing treated the soul as little more than a misplaced pair of sunglasses. Here we tried to get into the issues *behind* the soul...where does it come from, where does it go, does it survive the death of the body, or does it go on ...to give some mystery and beauty to the notion. To have it dismissed as just another riff on katra is offensive and insulting and narrow. And all of those issues just seemed to flit by without comment.

  I don't mean to get angry, but this is one I'm very proud of, and to see it sideswiped and mischaracterized and straw-man'd to death in this fashion is just something that I had to respond to.

• Re: your statement that the headwear of the S.H. is "stolen" from the Ferengi...may I be so bold as to respond to your rather loud note with some volume of my own? To wit: watch something other than Star Trek, and maybe spend a little time learning stuff about your own world. The headware is based upon the kind used in various african and aboriginal tribes. Trek didn't invent it; we have photos of its use through history, as well as sketches going back further. As it happens, the costume designer has never seen "DS9," doesn't watch TNG, has no idea what a Ferengi is. Neither do I intend to not do something, based in real history, just because some other show has done drawn on that same background.

  You clearly think that if something appeared in ST, then ST must have invented it, and that if it appears anywhere else, it must've been influenced by ST. Wrong on both counts. I would suggest that you have been watching too much ST, and not nearly enough of the Discovery Channel.

• Re: the medical tools...we brought in a medical science consultant, who helped us design our instruments. His sense was that we're moving more and more toward light as a system of treatment, non-invasive procedures, that sort of thing. No, there aren't anything like those devices in today's operating rooms...but this is 250 years from now. In any event, it *is* based on the latest info we're getting on new science from our medical advisor.

• I would not describe n'grath as a "Mafia boss," since that's a very specific term. Nor is it really any kind of organization. He's a fixer, somebody you go to when you need something...a bodyguard, forged identicards, what-have-you.

• Garibaldi is quite aware of n'grath...and knowing that if he just vanished, somebody'd take his place in five minutes, prefers the trouble he knows to the trouble he'd have to track down.

Last update: October 27, 2000