"Soul Hunter" is the second episode of the first season of the science fiction television series, Babylon 5. The episode concerns the arrival of a member of an ancient order, the Soul Hunters, on the Babylon 5 station; and reveals a mystery surrounding Commander Sinclair's missing 24 hours during the Earth-Minbari War. It first aired on 2 February 1994.
Title
The title refers to the Soul Hunter, a member of an ancient alien order which claims they collect and preserve the souls of distinguished people at the moment of death.
Plot
An unknown damaged ship appears through the jump gate and hurtles towards the Babylon 5 station. Commander Sinclair grapples the ship onboard the station with his Starfury fighter, and the ship's occupant is taken to MedLab. In MedLab, upon seeing the patient, the Minbari Ambassador, Delenn, suddenly enters a burst of rage, and tries to shoot the patient. She explains to Sinclair that the patient is a "Shak Tot", a Soul Hunter, a member of an ancient alien order who try to collect and preserve the souls of distinguished people at the moment of death. The Minbari despise them, considering them thieves and kidnappers, "ripping away that which is eternal". Delenn urges Sinclair to send the Soul Hunter away while he still can.
The alien population aboard the station has gone into hiding, and several ships have asked to leave the station ahead of schedule. The Soul Hunter explains to Sinclair that his order are not thieves, merely preservers. They had been prevented from "preserving" the soul of the Minbari leader Dukhat at the beginning of the Earth-Minbari War. Sinclair asks the Soul Hunter to leave as soon as his ship is repaired.
The Soul Hunter recognizes Delenn from his previous attempt to "preserve" Dukhat's soul for his collection. He identifies Delenn as a "Satai" – a member of the nine-member Grey Council, the ruling body of the Minbari people – asking her why, as a great leader of the Minbari, she is here "playing ambassador".
A second Soul Hunter arrives on board Babylon 5. He explains to Sinclair that the first Soul Hunter is a disturbed renegade. Having failed to "preserve" Dukhat's soul, he has become increasingly frustrated and unstable; and he has turned to killing people before their natural death in order to capture their souls.
Meanwhile, the first Soul Hunter has kidnapped Delenn, and starts to drain her life force. In doing so, he catches a glimpse of her hidden purposes on the station, exclaiming, "You plan such a thing? Incredible." Sinclair locates them, resulting in an exchange of gunfire. The Soul Hunter says, "Why do you fight for her? Don't you understand? She is "Satai"... I've seen her soul: they're using you." Sinclair is thrown to the ground. The Soul Hunter's soul-capturing machine, trained upon on Delenn, activates. Sinclair gets up and turns the soul-draining machine away from Delenn and trains the beam onto the Soul Hunter. The Soul Hunter cries out, and he falls to the ground, his soul being captured by the machine and transferred into a spherical soul vessel.
As Delenn recovers in the MedLab, Sinclair in his quarters does a search for the Minbari word "Satai", discovering that Delenn is a member of the Minbari Grey Council. Later, Sinclair escorts the second Soul Hunter off the station, telling him that the Soul Hunters are not welcome aboard the station. The Soul Hunter enquires what became of his brother's collection of soul vessels.
Delenn sits cross-legged in her quarters, with the Soul Hunter's soul vessels, setting the souls free one by one.
Writing and story arc significance
As Babylon 5 was conceived with an overall five-year story arc, the episode was written as both an individual story and with another level, where the hints of the larger story arc were given, such as Delenn's secrecy about her role on the Grey Council. The series' creator, J. Michael Straczynski, indicates that the episodes can be watched for the individual stories, the character stories, or the story arc.
Regarding the dilemma posed by the opposing views on the afterlife of the soul hunter and Delenn, Straczynski writes,
In relation to the question of the existence of souls, Straczynski writes, "I carefully don't address that issue in the course of the script. My job is not to provide people with answers. My job as a storyteller is to ask questions and provoke discussions and start bar fights." This also enabled motion effects which are difficult to create using models, such as the rotation of fighter craft along multiple axes, as seen when Sinclair's fighter matches the rotation of the soul hunter's spinning ship in order to grapple it; 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 and Video Toaster software, 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 Starfury fighter, which Commander Sinclair uses to grapple the Soul Hunter ship, was designed by Steve Burg as a function-driven design for a plausible zero-gravity fighter. The positioning of the four engine pods at the extremities of the craft was inspired by Ron Cobb's design for the Gunstar fighter from The Last Starfighter. The basic shape of the Starfury's wings was inspired by an earlier unused design by Burg for a military robot fighting machine, which he had originally designed for Terminator 2. This was merged with the multi-engined configuration to form the Starfury design. Burg points out that the wings/struts were not aerodynamic: they were there to lever the engines away from the center of mass.
The Soul Hunter ships were designed by Foundation Imaging co-founder Ron Thornton. He indicated, "I get away with making the [virtual digital model's textures] out of wood, and bone. As if it used the tusks of some unknown huge beast for parts."
The scene where Sinclair's Starfury grapples the spinning soul hunter ship attempts to show the fighter using thrusters to manoeuvre using realistic physics. Thornton stated that the producers "initially wanted Star Wars, there was also a lot of, '[let's] do something that Star Trek can't!' I said we could make realistic physics exciting, and make the fans happy... [Visual effects supervisor Paul Bryant] and I pushed really hard for realistic physics as we both loved 2001".
Writer J. Michael Straczynski's original intention was that Sinclair's ship was to use magnetic energy to capture the Soul Hunter's ship. The scene was animated by Foundation Imaging artists Tim Wilcox and Mark Kochinski.
Music for the title sequence and the episode was provided by the series' composer, Christopher Franke.
Commentary and reviews
Author Jane Killick writes that "Soul Hunter" was the episode where Babylon 5 started to meet the expectations of many people. She observes, "All the elements are there: a good story, strong characterization, action, pace, special effects and a contribution to the story arc."
Elias Rosner writes in Multiversity Comics, "As a second episode, you could do with much worse than 'Soul Hunter.' It's got a creepy antagonist, a personal motivation/connection for one of the characters, ... to said antagonist, and keeps its focus on the central plotline for the entire episode." However, Rosner feels that the exaggerated dramatics are a weakness which may outweigh the episode's strengths.