Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

The Excalibur is sent on a top-secret mission and faces an attack by the Drakh.

Production number: 105
Original air date: September 1, 1999
DVD release date: December 7, 2004

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Stephen Furst

Plot Points

• 12 members of the Senate were offworld when the Drakh attacked Earth. They now act as Earth's official representatives.
• The plague isn't a virus, but rather a nanotechnological device. It appears to be able to coordinate its actions across wide distances, and may even have a sort of hive-mind consciousness.
• The plague has already started killing people on Earth. It is constantly reshaping itself, and sometimes happens to find a lethal, but not genocidal, configuration. The five-year time limit is based on the rate of deaths so far; even if it never discovers a single 100% deadly configuration, after that long its experiments will have wiped everyone out.

Unanswered Questions

• Aside from the fact that both are nanotech-based, is there any connection between the technomage virus ("The Memory of War") and the Drakh plague?

Analysis

• The plague may have some goal other than killing off all life on Earth as quickly as possible. Its level of sophistication -- being able to differentiate between vital and non-vital organs in the human body and navigate the bloodstream as it sees fit -- suggests that it has already figured out quite a lot about human biology. Something as simple as introducing large amounts of chemical waste into its host cells would be sufficient to kill any Earthly organism.

  One possibility is that it's acting as a research mechanism, designed with the intent of fully exploring the host ecosystem's biology and reporting its findings back to the Shadows.

• If the plague is intelligent, can it communicate with other lifeforms? If so, it might be possible to convince it to stop its experiments, eliminating the threat without physically removing the plague itself.

Notes

• Continuity glitch: Gideon and Lochley appeared to have no more than a friendly familiarity with one another in this episode, inconsistent with their earlier contact in "The Rules of the Game" (which was produced after this episode but aired earlier.)

jms speaks

• Was Gideon's "Life goes on" line added after you knew this would be the last episode, or was it just a coincidence?
  Another Babylonian synchronicity.

Last update: May 27, 2024