lurkers-guide/guide/010

<h2><a name="OV">Overview</a></h2>

<blockquote><cite>
Dr. Franklin asks Sinclair to intermediate with an alien family who, because of
their religious beliefs, refuse to allow surgery that would
save their dying child.
</cite>

<a href="http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Gallardo,+Silvana">Silvana Gallardo</a> as Dr. Maya Hernandez.
<a href="http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Kaplan,+Jonathan+Charles">Jonathon Kaplan</a> as Shon.
<a href="http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+O'Neil,+Tricia">Tricia O'Neil</a> as M'Ola.
<a href="http://us.imdb.com/M/person-exact?+Lee,+Stephen">Stephen Lee</a> as Tharg.
</blockquote>

<pre>
Sub-genre: Drama
<a href="/lurk/p5/intro.html">P5 Rating</a>: <a href="/lurk/p5/010">7.74</a>

Production number: 105
Original air date: April 27, 1994
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00006HAZ4/thelurkersguidet">DVD release date</a>: November 5, 2002

Written by David Gerrold
Directed by Richard Compton
</pre>

<p>
<hr size=3>
<p>

<h2><a name="BP">Backplot</a></h2>
<ul>
   <li> Some outside influence has interfered with the Minbari religion
	in the past.
   <li> The Children of Time, a minor race with strong religious beliefs,
	would rather let one of their number die than allow invasive surgery,
	which they believe destroys the soul.
</ul>

<h2><a name="UQ">Unanswered Questions</a></h2>
<ul>
   <li> How did Ivanova defeat or escape all those raiders?  There is some
	slight evidence she's working with them (cf.
	<a href="../synops/001.html#ivanova-console">"Midnight on the
	Firing Line"</a>.)
</ul>

<h2><a name="AN">Analysis</a></h2>
<ul>
   <li> Franklin's willingness to break the rules for a cause he believes in,
	though indicative of a strong moral character, seems likely to
	get him into hot water at some point.

   <li> On the other hand, Sinclair doesn't want to be placed in a position
	in which he has to stop Franklin from doing what he believes in;
	Sinclair would rather sidestep the issue than have his hand forced.
	This is consistent with his handling of the Senator's instructions
	in <a href="001.html">"Midnight on the Firing Line."</a>

   <li> The parents' reaction when Delenn refused to help could be viewed as
	hypocritical; they were perfectly willing to ask Delenn to violate
	<em>her</em> beliefs so they wouldn't have to violate their own.

</ul>

<h2><a name="NO">Notes</a></h2>
<ul>

   <li> Kosh is aware that he was examined by Dr. Kyle (cf.
	<a href="/lurk/guide/000.html">"The Gathering"</a>.)
	When he's asked how <em>he</em> would feel if a doctor performed
	an operation on him, he says, "The avalanche has already begun.
	It is too late for the pebbles to vote."

   <li>@@@877970962 The Shakespeare corporation and the pfingle eggs are
	references to David Gerrold's novels "Under the Eye of God" and
	"Covenant of Justice."

</ul>

<h2><a name="JS">jms speaks</a></h2>
<ul>

<p>
   <li> By the way, here's something interesting: an outline got turned in
	this week for an episode which I won't identify just now.  Came in 
	from one of our writers, based on an assigned premise.  It's 
	something you've never seen done in ANY SF-TV series, and I don't
	think has ever been done in TV overall.  A very daring little story.

	<p>
	Word finally came back from our liaison with PTEN.  "Number one, this
	is absolutely against the demographics on the show.  Number two, no 
	studio or network executive in his right *mind* would EVER approve 
	this story in a million years.  Number three...it's a hell of a 
	story, I love it, let's do it."

	<p>
	This has been emblematic of our relationship with PTEN: they've left
	us alone, and are trusting us in our storytelling.  We want to go 
	right out to the very edge, and they're letting us, which is 
	wonderful.  They've been, and continue to be, terrific to work with.

	<p>
	If the end of this particular story doesn't absolutely floor you,
	nothing will.

<p>
   <li> When I developed the basic Believers story, and was looking for someone
	to assign it to, David was the first person we went to. He asked me
	at the time why him...he's more generally associated with humorous
	stuff. I had my reasons. See, lately, David adopted a young boy,
	about the same age as Shon.  So about halfway into the outline, David
	called and said, "NOW I understand." I knew that having a child of
	his own now would mean that the story would be a lot more personal.
	Especially the end scene, which I knew would have to be done *very*
	carefully. I think David did a great job, and under his guidance it
	turned into a very moving episode. And with any luck, he'll write
	more down the road.

<p>
   <li> There's some small amount of blurring that goes on in this show; a
	freelancer turns in a script, and things get added.  For instance,
	there was a need to really tighten up the story in "Believers," 
	which could best be done by bringing in a small B story, which would
	allow us to streamline and intensify the main story.  So I wrote the
	B story and slipped it in.

<p>
   <li> Today David Gerrold came by the set to watch some of the shooting 
	on his episode, "Believers."  Unlike many shows, which basically
	throw the writer off the set, our writers are welcome to hang around.
	It's not only okay, it's *expected* that the writer will be there at
	some point, to be a part of the process.  David was quite ebullient
	about the whole thing; he thinks that this is the best script he's 
	ever written, and it's being filmed exactly as he'd hoped, if not 
	better.  So there he was, getting autographs, muttering something 
	about somebody named "Hugo...."

	<p>
	What was interesting was one comment he made, which echoed almost
	verbatim something D.C. Fontana said when she came by the stage: that
	the atmosphere on set, with the crew, the cast, the production people
	is exactly the same as it was on the first season of the original
	Star Trek.

<p>
   <li> I know from pfingle eggs...I let David have the reference because...
	well, I don't know anymore...I think water torture was involved.

<p>
   <li>@@@885407465 <em>Who wrote Kosh's line about the avalanche?</em><br>
	That was Gerrold, as I recall.

<p>
   <li> <em>Similarity between "Believers" & a DS9 novel?</em><br>
	A couple points.  1) When "Believers" was written, Peter's book hadn't
	yet hit the stands.  2) Peter likely got his notion of the sick kid
	and the religious parents from the same basic source we did: the
	headlines.  This has been an ongoing problem in real life for some 
	time.  So he took that real premise, and did one story based on it, 
	and we did another extrapolation.  This notion did *not* originate in
	the Trek universe....

<p>
   <li> And yeah, TV generally doesn't do this kind of ending. Which is
	why we did it...and our liaison at Warner Bros. deserves a lot of
	credit for letting us do it.

<p>
   <li> It was important to tell David to pull no punches because in TV, most
	producers *want* you to do so, and he had to know going in that this
	was the way the story would go.  David's a great writer, and David's a
	professional...meaning he understands where the general limits of TV 
	are.  If you're going to move the lines around, it behooves you to  
	tell your writer that.  Knowing the rules, he went out and did a 
	bangup job on the episode.

<p>
   <li> I view Delenn's comment about "suffering the interference of others"
	in regards to matters of the soul in "Believers" to be a reference to
	the Soul Hunter.

<p>
   <li> What happened to Ivanova when she encountered the raiders? She
	got away by long-distance firing as she retreated as fast as she
	could, taking shots as she went. It wouldn't look real exciting in
	the long run.

<p>
   <li> How Ivanova got away from the Raiders was taking advantage of her
	lead to run away, occasionally firing backward to deter pursuit,
	until she got to the jumpgate.  It wasn't really anything dramatically
	interesting, and at that point you would start distracting from the
	main plot...and that couldn't be allowed to happen.  There's really
	no place in the rest of the act where you can cut in without destroying
	it.  And in the tag there's no room for the pursuit, only the arrival.

<p>
   <li> Excuse me....

	<p>
	You don't think that "Believers" was SF.  Tough.

	<p>
	No, it didn't have warp gates, or tachyon emitters, or lots of
	technobabble...it was about people.  And the dilemmas they face.

	<p>
	Part of what has screwed up so much of SF-TV is this sense that you
	must utterly divorce yourself from current issues, from current 
	problems, from taking on issues of today and extrapolating them into
	the future, by way of aliens or SF constructs.  And that is 
	*precisely* why so much of contemporary SF-TV is barren and lifeless
	and irrelevant...and *precisely* why such series as the original Star
	Trek, and Outer Limits, and Twilight Zone are with us today.

	<p>
	Like Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry and Joe Stefano and Reginald
	Rose and Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin and a bunch of other writers 
	whose typewriters I'm not fit to touch, my goal in part is to simply 
	tell good stories within an SF setting.  And by SF I mean speculative
	fiction, which sometimes touches on hard-SF aspects, and sometimes 
	doesn't.  Speculative fiction means you look at how society changes, 
	how cultures interact with one another, how belief systems come into 
	conflict.  And as someone else here noted recently, anthropology and
	sociology are also sciences; soft sciences, to be sure, but sciences 
	nonetheless.

	<p>
	It's been pointed out that TV-SF is generally 20-30 years behind
	print SF.  This whole conversation proves the point quite succinctly.
	In the 1960s or so, along came the New Wave of SF, which eschewed 
	hardware for stories about the human condition set against an SF 
	background.  And the fanzines and prozines and techno-loving pundits
	of hard-SF declared it heresy, said it wasn't SF, this is crap.  And
	eventually they were steamrolled, and print SF grew up a little.  Now
	the argument has come to settle here.  Well, fine.  So be it.

	<p>
	I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that SF is anything I point
	to and say, "That's SF."  Go pick up a copy of "A Canticle for 
	Liebowitz," one of the real singular masterpieces of the science 
	fiction genre, and it won't fit the narrow criteria you've set up for
	what qualifies as SF by your lights.

	<p>
	There is a tendency among the more radical hard-SF proponents to stamp
	their feet and hold their breath until they turn blue, to threaten
	that unless the book changes or the field comes around or the series
	cottens to *their* specific, narrow version of what SF is -- and that
	definition changes from person to person -- they'll take their ball 
	and their bat and go home.  Fine and good.  And the millions who come
	to take their place in the bleachers and on the field will get to have
	all the fun.

	<p>
	Some of our episodes will fit your definition of SF.  Some will not.
	This worries me not at all.

<p>
   <li> The area that cannot be opened is the chest area, primarily; a nick or
	cut or scratch really doesn't count; it's puncturing to the body 
	cavity wherein the soul is housed.

<p>
   <li> No, the parents were not charged with murder.  When a species on the
	station acts against one of their own kind in a particular way, and no
	other species is affected, they are judged by the laws that apply to 
	their own species and culture.  In their culture, what they did is not
	a crime, so they received no punishment.  Had they done this to a 
	human, then yes, they would have been charged with murder.

<p>
   <li> I'm not quite sure if we're talking about the same thing; the
	two parents never said that the kid would die if he underwent the
	surgery, only that his soul would escape. This would leave him
	"soul-dead," for lack of a better phrase. And how are we to tell that
	they weren't right? I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as you
	seem to present. (And again, they were acting very much out of their
	real beliefs of how the universe operates. If someone here is
	injured, and declared brain dead, most folks think it's okay to pull
	the plug...even though one could make the argument that there's still
	a living soul in the body. This is the opposite situation; one may
	argue that there is still a mind somewhere in the body, but the soul
	is dead or gone.  The phrase they use is that they put the shell out
	of its misery. To their mind, he was dead already.)

<p>
   <li> Actually, I disagree when you say that the doctor was right.  Says 
	who?  Not the parents.  Not the episode.  Nobody was really right, 
	when you come down to it, except maybe Sinclair, who made the correct
	call.  You say the boy was okay at the end...the parents didn't think
	so.  Who's to say if there was or wasn't a soul inside?

	<p>
	I think David's script walked a very fine line and really didn't
	endorse either side.  (I've had people send me email upset because we
	showed that the parents were right, and others because we said the 
	doctor was right, and others because neither was right and the 
	ambiguity bothered them.)

<p>
   <li> Of course the surgical scars would've been a dead giveaway that
	surgery had been performed.  Also, lying to them would have also been
	a violation of medical ethics.  This was not a story about easy 
	solutions.

<p>
   <li> There's a wonderful scene in "Fiddler on the Roof" where Tevya is
	caught in an argument between two Rabbis.  The first one makes a 
	point. "You're right!" Tevya says.  The second Rabbi makes a
	contradictory point. "You're right!" Tevya says.  A third Rabbi,
	looking on, says, "Wait a minute, they can't *both* be right."

	<p>
	"You know," Tevya says, "you're right too."

<p>
   <li> A lot of our episodes are constructed to work as mirrors; you see
	what you put into it.  "Believers" has been interpreted as pro-
	religion, anti-religion, and religion-neutral..."Quality" has been
	interpreted, as you note, as pro-capital punishment, and anti-capital
	punishment.  We do, as you say, much prefer to leave the decision on
	what things mean to the viewer to hash out.

	<p>
	A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the
	occasional bar fight.

<p>
   <li>@@@844403513 The thing about "Believers" is that, really, nobody's
	right, and in their own way, from their point of view, everybody's
	right.

<p>
   <li> "The concept of loving parents being able to kill their child for
	their religions seems to be unrealistic."

	<p>
	Funny...I seem to recall this little story in the Old Testament about
	how a good and wise man was asked by god to sacrifice his own son, to
	himself kill his own child, and he was willing to do it, and was only
	stopped by god saying, in essence, "April fool."

<p>
   <li> On the "predictable" argument...I can only shrug.  The kid has a 50/50
	chance...he'll survive or die.  And guessing the end isn't, for me, 
	the key; this isn't a who-dunit; it's how our characters react on the
	way there, and what it *does* to them, I think.

<p>
   <li> Since I suggested the ending to David, right down to the candles, I
	suppose I'll take the rap...but the question you're raising isn't the
	issue.  There are only two possible results: the kid lives, or the kid
	dies, there ain't much in-between.  You ask, "Who on earth is going to
	side with people who kill their own child?"  The audience isn't being
	asked to *side* with anyone, there IS no easy solution, and no one is
	100% in the right.
	<p>
	There is a wonderful short story, which we adapted for Twilight Zone,
	called "The Cold Equations," where a small shuttle is going from point
	A to point B.  There is enough fuel for the shuttle, and one pilot, 
	and no more.  The ship is bringing medicine to save 500 colonists.  A 
	young girl has stowed away on the ship to see her brother.  She's 
	discovered.  If the pilot does nothing, the ship won't arrive, and he 
	and the girl will die, and the colonists will die.  If he sacrifices 
	himself, she won't be able/won't know how to guide the ship to its 
	destination.  The only way out is to ask her to enter the airlock so 
	he can space her and continue the mission.  And that's what happens.
	You can't argue with math.
	<p>
	Sometimes, there are no-win scenarios.  And what matters then is how
	your characters react, what they do and say, and how it affects them.
	That, really, was the thrust of the episode.  And to go back to your
	question, "Who on earth is going to side...."
	<p>
	The operative word in your question is "Earth."  No, no human is going
	to side with them (although I'd point out in the Bible that there is
	the story of Abraham, who was quite willing to murder his own son at
	god's request).  They're not humans.  They have a wholly different
	mindset, cultural background and belief system.  People ask for ALIEN
	aliens, then judge them by human standards, and feel it's wrong if
	they don't behave like humans.  These didn't.  That's who and what 
	they are.   If humans side with them, or accept them, doesn't enter 
	into it.

<p>
   <li> The choice *had* to be either/or.  That was the point; to put the
	characters in a situation of conflict and see how they handle it.
	Sometimes in life there are ONLY two choices, neither of them good.
	Your message comes from a position of trying to avoid the hard
	choices.  But the episode is ABOUT hard choices.  It *has* to be 
	either/or.
	<p>
	To support your thesis, you bring up the "Cold Equations" alternate
	ending of the pilot cutting off both his legs to make up the weight
	differential.  Lemme explain something to you.  I was there.  When we
	turned in the script, by Alan Brennert, MGM went nuts.  "You can't 
	have a sympathetic young woman commit suicide!  It'll kill the 
	ratings!"  So they (the studio exec) suggested various "fixes."  One
	was that instead of stepping willingly out the airlock, the pilot 
	shoots her and has to deal with the guilt.  (This by them is a 
	*better* idea?)  The other was the notion of the guy cutting off his 
	legs to make up the weight.
	<p>
	First and foremost, it was a dumb idea because he'd be in no shape to
	pilot the ship.  Second it wouldn't be enough weight.  And finally, 
	the very *nature* of "The Cold Equations," what the very TITLE means,
	is that there are some occasions in which the choices are stark, and
	there is NO way around them.  If the ship has X-weight, and the fuel
	is for Y weight, and Y is less than X, then you've got a problem that
	can only -- ONLY -- be resolved by someone walking out the airlock. 
	(And yes, they tried dumping things, but the ship is lean, not much 
	to get rid of.)   That's why it's the COLD equations; not the LUKEWARM
	equations.
	<p>
	I fought like hell to retain the original ending, and won.  (You
	probably read about this, btw, in my articles for TZ Magazine.)  This
	is studio-think, let's find a nice, unthreatening, safe, middle-ground
	where we can resolve this without anybody being upset, threatened or
	offended by the story.  I'm sorry, but life sometimes hands you hard
	choices, there ARE either/or scenarios, in which nobody really wins,
	and SF should be exploring those as well as the fuzzy feel-good 
	stories.  It's time SF grew up a little, damn it, and started
	confronting hard questions that can't always be resolved by reversing
	the polarity on the metaphase unit.

<p>
   <li> Afterthought: I just wandered into the kitchen, still ranting (as I 
	am wont to do), explained it to Kathryn...who brought me up short (as
	*she* is wont to do) by pointing out the antecedent to BOTH stories.
	The ultimate "hard choice" example in SF-TV is of course "The City on
	the Edge of Forever," fromST.  There are only two choices, both hard:
	either Edith Keeler dies, or the Nazis win WW II.  Kirk *has* to let
	her die; there's no other choice.
	<p>
	It is, at the same moment, gratifying and annoying to have someone
	around who's smarter than I am....

<p>
   <li> There were no changes in dialogue made in "Believers" subsequent to
	the first airing.

</ul>