Becca’s Take on Episode 4: “Babel”
Usually, I can find some common ground with the characters of DS9 (usually through their character development) but this episode felt more like daily life than most. The episode starts by focusing on poor O’Brien being called on to fix, well, everything. This tracks with my current theory for season one where each character will have an episode where they are sort of the focus. This one focuses on O’Brien and his work, and it is one of my favorites so far. O’Brien is becoming a fast favorite for me, and I want to see more of him and his wife and the school she runs.1
Heading back to the plot of this episode, we see Chief O’Brien fixing the food replicators. My initial assumption was that eventually they would run out of food and need to eat tribbles2 but those fears were quickly quelled as he fixed the replicators, and replaced with new, worse ones.
When I was younger, I watched an episode of House where a man with a brain injury had aphasia, and I’ve been afraid of that ever since. This episode took our current circumstances (a world marked by quarantine) and one of my worst fears and combined them into one terrifying thrill ride that shouldn’t have been as scary as it was to me. Logically I knew it had to have a happy ending,3 however this one gave me a scare, especially after Sisko contracted the virus.
I kept seeing parallels between this quarantine and the one we have been facing for about a year. This is especially apparent in Quark’s behavior. It just takes one mistake to spread a virus uncontrollably fast. He definitely didn’t mean to cause a massive outbreak, but by not following the rules, he played a huge part in the spread and evolution of the disease to an airborne virus. The delay in symptoms were also strongly reminiscent of COVID-19, where you don’t know you have it and are potentially spreading it until it is way too late to tell anyone. Though of course that station is much smaller than the world (or the United States) the panic and decay of infrastructure was similar as the disease spread throughout the station.
Moving on to a less depressing subject, I thought the acting in this episode was absolutely PHENOMENAL. It must be very hard to convey such deep emotion while saying such utter nonsense, and having to remain serious while doing it. There’s one scene where a diseased Jake is talking to Sisko and, even though I had no clue what he was saying, it broke my heart. It must have been really fun to write this episode, and I can’t help but wonder if the word choice mattered – did the writers pick specific nonsense for each character? Did they let the actors go off-book and say whatever four words popped into their heads? I don’t know, but I want to find out!
Signing off – Ensign Becca
1 I am also quite excited to see a Dax-centric episode!
2 For context, please watch Star Trek: Short Treks “The Trouble with Edward.”
3 We are only four episodes in after all.
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