‘BABEL’ (DS9)
Please feel free to comment on my review.
This is an enjoyably tense ‘DS9’ episode. The space station crew and civilians get infected with an airborne virus that causes them to speak incomprehensibly. Will our main leads discover the antidote?
In the episode, Chief O’Brien becomes overworked. The space station suffers many malfunctions and it’s his job to see to all the repairs being done. How come O’Brien doesn’t have a deputy to rely upon? 😀
One of the station’s malfunctions is the food replicators. Sisko has a cup of coffee and it tastes really bad. O’Brien is understandably irritable and pretty tired after all the hard work he has put into his job.
As he manages to fix one of the food replicators, O’Brien accidentally triggers off a device that is hidden in the replicator’s circuitry. It’s some kind of booby trap caused by Bajoran terrorists years ago.
Once set off, it releases an airborne virus in the air. Chief O’Brien becomes aphasic as he speaks words out of random and becomes incomprehensible to everyone around him. This is worryingly frustrating.
Very soon, Jadzia Dax becomes infected with the virus and speaks incomprehensibly. Before long, everybody else becomes infected with the virus. A contagious epidemic occurs throughout the station.
As Sisko puts DS9 under quarantine to keep the virus from spreading, it turns out the virus also causes its victims to have this dangerously high and potentially deadly. O’Brien is first to suffer with the fever.
It then turns out that Quark has been selling food to his customers from a functional replicator in an empty room on the command level of DS9. Odo catches Quark out when he’s visiting the empty room.
This means that the food has been contaminated which has spread all over the station. At first, the virus was in the food and drink people ate before it mutated to become airborne on board the station.
Major Kira eventually finds the device which is a module inside the replicator O’Brien was working on that triggered off this virus. At first, it’s assumed the Cardassians planted the module in the replicator.
But as Bashir discovers, the virus was engineered by the Bajorans and it must’ve been during the time of the Cardassian occupation. Major Kira gets assigned to locate the doctor who had created this virus.
As Kira locates him, she soon discovers that he is long dead. But one of his fellow resistance fighters, Surmak Ren, witnessed him create the virus. Kira locates Surmak Ren at a hospital on the planet Bajor.
Upon first contact with him, Surmak refuses to acknowledge helping Kira with any knowledge he has of the virus. Kira eventually decides to go and pick Surmak up from Bajor in order to bring him to DS9.
Sisko doesn’t want Kira to break the quarantine but she reassures him that she won’t. She’ll just transport Surmak Ren up to the runabout she’s on in order to bring back to DS9. This works really well.
Once she’s picked up Matthew Faison as Surmak Ren from Bajor, Surmak protests saying that he can’t help find the antidote for the DS9 population. But Kira warns him that he’s infected with the virus too.
As most of the DS9 crew get infected with the aphasic virus, it’s only Odo and Sisko who can perform most of the station operations. But soon, Sisko gets infected and Odo may be the only one to run DS9.
But thankfully that’s not the case. In an emergency, when Odo summons for help, it’s Quark the Ferengi who answers. Quark of all people! Thankfully Quark as a Ferengi is immune to the deadly virus.
The emergency that happens on the space station involves a freighter captain, Jack Kehler as Captain Jaheel, who demands to leave to avoid getting infected. Sisko has denied Jaheel departing the station.
In an attempt, Jaheel tries to leave DS9 without clearance and with his freighter still in dock at the station. This causes a rupture in his ship’s power core and could nearly blow up half of the DS9 station.
Thankfully Quark helps Odo to save Jaheel from his ship and jettison the ship away from the space dock to explode at a safe distance. Kira brings Surmak to DS9 and he creates a vaccine for the virus. 🙂
‘Babel’, taken from the Biblical story of course ( 😀 ), is a pretty enjoyable and tense-driven episode of the ‘DS9’ series. ‘DS9’ is still in a ‘TNG’ stage aboard a space station, but this episode was entertaining.
‘Babel’ (DS9) rating – 8/10
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