#Stephen Franklin

[jadenvargen]

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

[mylittleredgirl]

everyone very correctly lauds the talents of the actors playing the alien ambassadors in b5, creating these enormous and iconic and weird personalities that then define an entire alien culture. but i really want to shout out richard biggs, because he's so good as doctor franklin that it doesn't even seem like a performance. you can miss it because it's so excellent. never once in the entire series do i think "oh that's a guy who's acting." and it's genuinely from minute one!! with none of the shaky steps i expect from actors at the start of a sci-fi series while they figure out how big to play it and how to interact with the future world. he lands in the character so solidly and never blinks. starring doctor franklin as himself. truly a "if you do something well enough it looks like you didn't do anything at all" situation. richard biggs. goddamn.

[can-we-talk-socks]

Babylon 5 text posts part 3!!

john sheridan is a lesbian now, this was a collective decision.(🧪)

[greenscircus]

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

[itberice]

[nerds-yearbook]

The series finale for babylon 5 aired on November 25, 1998. It had been filmed the previous season when they weren't sure if there was going to be a season 5. When season 5 was green lit, this episode was held back and a new season 4 finale was made. The episode took place 20 years after the events in the regular series and went from December 28, 2280 through January 20, 2281. It dealt with the decommissioning of the Babylon 5 station (creator J Michael Straczynski played the worker turning off the station) and the second death of John Sheridan. Before his body gave out, Sheridan met with friends and visited Babylon 5 before it was set to be destroyed. Mysteriously, Sheridan's body vanished from the starship he had taken his final journey on. ("Sleeping in Light", Babylon 5, TV Event)

[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"

[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.

[thethirdromana]

I wrote my first Babylon 5 fic! And it's Marcus/Franklin smut, which wasn't what I was expecting to find myself writing either.

1.5k words, explicit.

[can-we-talk-socks]

babylon 5 textposts part 4!

ft. sinbaldi + a bonus franklin

[greenscircus]

concept: earthforce unisex miniskirt uniform :-P

[thezocalo]

1x02 Soul Hunter