"Infection" is the fourth episode of the first season of the science fiction television series, Babylon 5. "Infection" was the first script written for a regular Babylon 5 episode, and involves the arrival aboard the station of an extremely powerful ancient bio-weapon created by the Ikarrans, a long-extinct alien race.
Plot
Dr Vance Hendricks, a former college lecturer of Dr Franklin, visits him while he is checking on the cause of recent death of a Babylon 5 customs worker. Hendricks tells Franklin that while excavating the long-dead planet Ikarra VII for the corporation Interplanetary Expeditions, they had come across some artifacts that they determined were organic in nature, and something that humanity has been trying to develop themselves. Hendricks has Nelson, his assistant, bring the artifacts in, but Franklin expresses concern that they have not been properly put through quarantine; Hendricks assures him that they were processed prior to arriving on the station. As Nelson prepares the artifacts for examination, he is hit with an energy surge emanating from one of the artifacts. Over the next several hours, his body starts transforming, and unseen by the others, takes one of the devices and attaches it to himself.
The station staff, still investigating the sudden death of the customs worker, start to detect energy spikes on the station. Franklin and Hendricks realize that the Ikarra artifacts have infected Nelson and are transforming him into a weapon. Franklin studies the remaining artifacts to learn that the Ikarran people had developed these bio-weapons to fend off invaders to their planets, telling them protect the planet from anyone that was not a "pure" Ikarran. While the weapons held off the invaders, this instruction caused the weapons to turn on the Ikarrans since there was no such thing as a "pure" Ikarran. Nelson has now been transformed into one of these weapons, and will rampage through Babylon 5, gaining power over time.
Franklin explains the situation to Commander Sinclair while the station is being put into lockdown. Sinclair decides to face the weapon alone, explaining how they had wiped out their creators because they could not determine what a pure Ikarran was. The weapon pulls off the device from its armor and crushes it before collapsing, returning Nelson back to normal. Back in medbay, Franklin assures Nelson is fine, but confronts Hendricks knowing that he had instructed Nelson to smuggle the Ikarra artifacts aboard and that Nelson had deliberately killed the customs worker to do so. Hendricks is arrested, while EarthForce personnel arrive to acquire the weapons for their own bioweapons division.
Security Chief Michael Garibaldi confronts Sinclair about recklessly risking his life for the third time this year, saying that a lot of people who fought in the war came out without a purpose – looking for something worth dying for because they cannot find something worth living for.
An ISN news reporter finally gets the interview with Sinclair she had been waiting for, asking him whether – with what he's been through – humanity's continued presence in space is worth the effort. He replies that, when one day the sun will grow cold and go out, all of humanity's achievements and culture would end, unless humanity manages to go to the stars first.
Writing
Straczynski, who wrote this episode first out of all the Babylon 5 scripts, felt that the episode was possibly the weakest episode in the season. As nearly a year had passed since the pilot episode had been filmed, he felt it was difficult to find the "fingerprints" of the characters again. Straczynski writes, "As on show, it takes a while to get up to speed once you hit series. That was the real problem, and there wasn't any real way to get past it except to write it, re-acquaint myself with the characters, and move on. I probably would have opted out of doing it had we had more scripts on hand, but we didn't. And oddly, many on the production team the script quite a lot, and kept saying it had to be done."
Production
Cast and filming
This episode was the first Season 1 episode to be filmed – as it was the easiest one to shoot – in the Babylonian Productions premises, which was being converted from a warehouse into a studio.
Visual effects and sound
For its visual effects scenes, Babylon 5 pioneered the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) scenes – instead of using more expensive physical models – in a television series. This also enabled motion effects which are difficult to create using models, such as the rotation of fighter craft along multiple axes, or the rotation and banking of a virtual camera. The visual effects were created by Foundation Imaging using 24 Commodore Amiga 2000 computers with Lightwave 3D software and Video Toaster cards, 16 of which were dedicated to rending each individual frame of CGI, with each frame taking on average 45 minutes to render. In-house resource management software managed the workload of the Amiga computers to ensure that no machine was left idle during the image rendering process.
The Babylon 5 makeup department involved in this episode – consisting of Everett Burrell, Greg Funk, Mary Kay Morse, Ron Pipes and John Vulich – would win the 1994 Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Makeup for the next episode, The Parliament of Dreams.
Music for the title sequence and the episode was provided by the series' composer, Christopher Franke. Franke developed themes for each of the main characters, the station, for space in general, and for the alien races, endeavoring to carry a sense of the character of each race.
Commentary and reviews
A Dream Given Form: The Unofficial Guide to the Universe of Babylon 5 comments on the interesting nature of this episode's monster-of-the-week format, in that one of the monsters is the press, embodied by abrasive ISN reporter Mary Ann Cramer, and the ISN flying drone cameras. The authors note the development of the characters of Franklin, Sinclair and Garibaldi. Franklin is depicted as a workaholic. Garibaldi is revealed as having been fired five times in different jobs for unspecified personal reasons, with the ISN reporter saying that Babylon 5 was his last chance to make good. Sinclair is called out by Garibaldi for again recklessly risking his life, as if trying to prove himself. Garibaldi suspects it is related to Sinclair's PTSD, one of the first occasions where PTSD and battle stress were elements in science fiction television. The authors continue, "At the end of 'Infection', the viewer is left with three dedicated, talented men whose heroism is matched by their frailty, and with an early education in Straczynski's own mastery of character as a driving force of storytelling. In Babylon 5 the stories are 'real' because the characters are.
Kaiser also highlights out the scene where Dr Franklin and Ivanova discuss the rising xenophobic sentiment on Earth, followed by a confirmation of their fears: EarthForce security arrives to confiscate the organic weaponry for its own bioweapons division. Kaiser writes, "Even though 'Infection' is a Star Trek-like episode, with a patriarchal captain solving a violent situation through diplomacy and application of logic, there's still a moment where Babylon 5 builds its darker, more serialized universe a tiny bit."
Rosner sums up, "The politics of Earth start to catch up to Sinclair, a weapon based in eugenics is unleashed, and the corporations rear their ugly head. Welcome my friends. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations."