“Computer, replay morning.”
“Babel” is a fun episode I can watch over and over again (I’m quite simply flower units about it myself), though what happens is taken seriously because, at this very early stage in the game, the actors were not comfortable enough to bring the humor. Sisko, for example, was always brooding in dark places. He had to have been in a dark place after the death of his wife and re-assignment to an unprotected space station in disputed territory. Bashir was an awkward little twerp who tried too hard to ingratiate himself and served only to irritate Kira, O’Brien, and Dax. Kira was equally humorless, and she had a chip on her shoulder.
Quark was the show’s early outlet for comedy, and it was only because of his greed. Quark (and some of the people he had dealings with) was the joke. “Babel” works because the episode ignores the humor. We have a situation that is absolutely ridiculous, a terrorist virus that causes aphasia. Aphasia is the inability to communicate or comprehend language. Sisko orders a coffee one day, but it tastes terrible (he has an interesting variation on the spit-take), so he makes O’Brien drop everything and repair the replicators. In doing so, O’Brien accidentally trips a program that disperses the virus through the food, it seems, at first, but then inexplicably becomes airborne.
In the first of a series of “O’Brien must suffer” scenarios, he becomes patient zero. The entire complement of the station become infected in short order (roughly the length of a television episode). The disease causes people to become unintelligible, but from what I know about aphasia, it isn’t just the placement of words in sentences, but the words themselves that are distorted. What kind of a crazy terrorist virus is this? I mean, it’s brilliant, but it seems less efficient than a high explosive. It’s up to Kira to track down the brilliant scientist who developed the virus, and she keeps being given the run-around by people who don’t want to take credit for it.
I always considered aphasia a minor threat until I looked up some fairly alarming numbers. Every year, something like 180,000 new cases of aphasia are identified. That’s a frightening prospect. I can’t imagine anything worse than being unable to communicate in any way. Words truly become your enemy! I also have to wonder how the Children of Tama (from “Darmok”) would cope with aphasia. They make no sense stringing proper nouns and historical references together to form a meme-based language. Imagine how they would sound if all those words were jumbled together with no rhyme or reason.
Oddly enough, only Odo and Quark are spared the infection, and the only two people capable of running the station. Doesn’t Quark have a staff of Ferengi employees in his bar, or does the virus not attack a host-based on biological commonalities? Why not engineer the virus to attack only Cardassians and spare the many Bajoran prisoners and workers that were on the station at the time? Strike limits. Flame the dark true salt. Simple hesitation!
Twice a week, Star Trek Rewind explores the Star Trek universe. From Archer to Janeway, Kirk to Picard, and Georgiou to Sisko — boldly read what no one has read before!
