#Stephen Franklin

[eusuchia]

minvember prompt 2: shame

old firestorm's son

[jadenvargen]

babylon 5 commission for @eusuchia ! thank you so much : )

[greenscircus]

old set of sketches i hadn't gotten around to posting

[itberice]

[robotshellyeah]

I'm behind on the babylon 5 rewatch but I just finished Believers. this is a great Franklin episode - he's only been introduced recently and the viewer prior to this episode doesn't have a great handle on his personality. from this episode we learn that he 1) has fantastic bedside manner: he goes to great lengths to be comforting and reassuring to the dying kid despite the parents making it really difficult (the gloppit egg bit is very cute), you get the sense that he really is passionate about helping people, and 2) his main character flaw is hubris: in a world where the existence of souls has been all-but-confirmed, how arrogant is it to really think you know better than someone else about their own bodies even though they are from a species/culture you're not familiar with at all?

when I first watched this episode in high school I 100% sided with Franklin and thought that the alien parents were so stupid. when I watched it again a few years after college (but pre-pandemic) I really sided more with the parents and thought it was not Franklin's place to use his authority to force his point of view on them against their wishes.

jms has a quote on the lurker's guide that I thought was interesting about how this situation is like the opposite of having an injured human who is "brain dead" but still has a soul in a living body. if an alien doctor wanted to operate on a human and insisted that it would be totally fine (even if the human's brain would be damaged) because the body and the soul would be unaffected, other humans would be horrified. it's absolutely within the range of possibility in this universe that there is a quality that the aliens have and can detect in each other that humans are oblivious to, and that quality would have been affected by the surgery.

on the other hand of course, watching this in a post anti-vaxxer world obviously felt different and you can't help but think of all the real life human kids in the exact same situation with parents who deny them necessary medical intervention, and in real life the ethics of that are much less ambiguous

I liked the tie-in at the very end of the A and B plots, with Ivanova's comment that sometimes a desperate gamble pays off (and Garibaldi's counter that sometimes it doesn't). I kind of feel like it leaves the viewer with the idea that there's nothing you can do other than just what you think is right, but you also just have to know that it's not always going to work out. it's too bad the B plot prevented us from hearing Ivanova's take on the situation, which I'm sure would have been spicy.

[homopessimist]

fear of intimacy

neon genesis evangelion s1e4: "hedgehog's dilemma" / black wing - "twinkling" / the living end (1992) dir. gregg araki / c.s. lewis, the four loves / league of legends game chat / babylon 5 s1e10: "believers"

[can-we-talk-socks]

franklin dosent know he’s in the oblivious corner

[dragontopaz]

Franklin + 5x07

[woodsfae]

Garibaldi: I think you should do less legal speed and sleep more. Dr Franklin: I'm going to do more legal speed and sleep less.

[bedpolls]

Stephen Franklin - Babylon 5

Please reblog for a larger sample size.

[eusuchia]

at the formal event

[atomiclena]

Dude, I am so over Babylon 5’s last season and how they treat(ed) Zack.

Garibaldi leaves, names his found family including Delenn, Sheridan, Stephen, G'Kar and "even Londo". Like...? Okay, did you forget the guy who kept your alcoholism a secret even though it could compromise his job, worked for and with you for years and was practically one of your best friends, whom you also treated like absolute ass for the whole time you were struggling? Fuck, man.

Zack essentially just being a character used to help other people's plot lines along (really, he shows up when G'Kar and Lyta leave even though that never went anywhere, complete emptiness in that one-sided 'relationship') pisses me off so much.

Londo deserved so much better, G'Kar deserved much, much better, but Zack?

Zack deserved better from the writers, not the story.

And yes, the fact that Jeff Conway had his struggles during the show could have lead to less screen-time, but it’s like they just forget that he exists in the writing sometimes. Exactly my point with the Garibaldi-scene.

[greenscircus]

concept: earthforce unisex miniskirt uniform :-P

[vanillabearcinnabear]

oh ya while im at it

[babischlong-six]

A summary of S2-3

The promo photo immediately made me think of this meme - why is it framed that way?? Why are they so short and pissed off???