1x05 Babel

[6.3/10] It’s an odd thing, watching “Babel” in 2021. Plague episodes are nothing new to Star Trek. (In fact, this episode is loosely reminiscent of “The Naked Time”, of all things.) But it’s particularly jarring, amid what is (good lord please) hopefully the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, to see a community threatened by an airborne pathogen which threatens to tear them asunder.

It’s almost eerie, then, to see Quark skirt the rules for what counts as an “essential business” and inadvertently set off a superspreader event. Watching an antsy captain try to break out of quarantine due to his commercial interests, only to put the whole station at risk from his haste and recklessness, is sadder now than I suspect it was in 1993. And watching loved ones suffer from the illness, laid in rows in crowded, makeshift wards, has a poingance in the here and now for something that was blissfully hypothetical when “Babel” was written.

It’s a shame, however, that for all it’s salience, Babel actually isn’t a very good episode. The first half falls into an unfortunate trend for Star Trek writ large: mysteries where the answer is already obvious to the audience. The second half puts its cards on the table with the source of the plague, but becomes rushed, jumbled, as the remaining heroes strive to solve it via questionable tactics.

More to the point, the gimmick of the episode goes to waste. There’s something cool about the high concept premise of the aptly-named “Babel”. What if a virus caused the residents of Deep Space 9 to not be able to speak to one another, not write to one another, not have the meetings of the minds that are the lifeblood of Star Trek? It’s a unique obstacle, and the notion of connecting the virus to aphasia, a real life condition, helps give it the veneer of plausibility so essential to the franchise’s sci-fi ethos.

But in the end, the unique effects of the virus amount to nothing. Rather than prompting a “Darmok”-like series of events where our heroes have to learn to reach one another in other ways, they all just shuffle off to sickbay as soon as they start talking nonsense. The cause could be any virus: one that makes people pass out or sneeze uncontrollably or otherwise be unable to perform their duties. The fact that it’s a speech disease is incidental beyond the “Oh no!” moments when one crewman or another starts talking nonsense. “Babel” has nothing to say about community or communication, or the intersection of the two, beyond “Gee, talking sure is important, huh?”

That might not be so bad if “Babel” didn’t waste a lot of time spinning its wheels on our heroes discovering the source of the virus. The audience sees Chief O’Brien drinking coffee from a replicator with a mysterious beeping device on it right before he starts speaking strangely. The why isn’t clear, but the how is. So watching Sisko and company puzzle over the virus’s spread as we watch more folks on the station chow down on bites Quark sourced from the same replicator is an exercise in tedium.

Once the team pieces everything together, business picks up. But by then, there’s only half an episode left, and so “Babel” has to rush through all the major developments to get to the end of the hour on time. Sisko losing crewmember after crewmember to the virus, to the point that he has to rely on Odo and even Quark to get the station to function, is an interesting angle. Kira hunting down the Bajoran Underground operatives who may have set the virus is an interesting angle. Dr. Bashir and a Bajoran doctor searching for a cure is an interesting angle. But there’s not enough time any of them breathe or develop to have a real impact.

To the point, we don’t see much of Sisko or others struggling with the reduced staff. There’s the one late-breaking, station-threatening issue of the cargo ship captain who wants to break away from his moorings. And it is neat to see Odo and Quark have to work together in unfamiliar roles to save the day. But we don’t see enough of the struggle of attrition to make the people working out of place seem as novel or challenging as it should be.

Likewise, the cure just sort of happens. There’s not some sort of key insight or discovery about the virus which spurs Dr. Bashir or the Bajoran physician’s synthesis of an antidote. They just sort of technobabble their way out of the problem, which is assuredly not a first for Star Trek, but which weakens the story when there’s no unique solution to a unique ailment.

But the worst element of all is Kira’s search for the Bajoran operative responsible for the virus (or at least someone who can help). She comes upon fast answers to complicated questions all too easily, which retroactively undermines the thorniness of the problem. There could be intriguing wrinkles to Kira having to mine her old contacts to figure out which of her countrymen might have done this, but there’s not enough time to dig into it, so the dominos just fall her way.

More to the point, there’s a really interesting moral question here that goes almost entirely unexplored. Kira breaks quarantine, kidnaps a civilian doctor who was in the Underground for about five minutes, deliberately exposes him to a virus, and strong-arms him into working to save the station so he can save himself. Her actions are, to put it mildly, pretty hardcore.

But “Babel” doesn’t explore whether they’re justified under the circumstances or an ethical violation no matter what’s at stake. None of the other characters question Kira’s methods or debate the lengths they’d be willing to go to save those aboard the station. We’ve ostensibly learned something about how far Kira will push things to get the result she thinks is justified, but given the episodic nature of Deep Space 9, I’m doubtful that the show will really unpack her choices here in future episodes. Instead, it’s all just A Thing Kira Did One Time:tm:.

I don’t mind characters making extreme decisions, but the show has to engage with the why, with what it says about that person, with how the other personalities around them react to it all. There’s just no time for that in “Babel”. Like Chief O’Brien in the most enjoyable part of this one, the episode’s simply spread too thin, having to attend to too many things in too short a time.

The truth is, as folks living through a pandemic have found out, you could do a whole season’s worth of stories about the consequences of them. “Babel” grazes many of these ideas. The pain of watching loved ones suffer from something you’re powerless to stop. The way commercial interests blanche at having to shut down for the public good. The struggle to operate when short on manpower with the ever present threat of you yourself succumbing to the illness. The moral questions of how and how not to operate in the midst of a viral threat. These are all worthy veins to explore that, as we can attest in the future, contain plenty of emotion and hard questions worth investigating.

Instead, “Babel” only dives into a shallow (and oft-dull) depth. Sometimes, the most frustrating Star Trek episodes aren’t the worst ones, but those that feel like a missed opportunity. This outing of Deep Space 9 isn’t bad, but particularly in the shadow of current events, it’s easy to see how it could have been great and poignant given its subject matter. Unlike Quark’s level of assistance at ops, “good enough” doesn’t cut it.