“Infection” is episode four of season one of Babylon 5.
The episode opens with a Starfury leaving the station and, onboard, a reporter, Mary Ann Cramer of Interstellar Network News, is asking Garibaldi when Sinclair will be back. It seems he was in the Starfury and Cramer thinks that Sinclair is avoiding her. It’s the second anniversary of the station’s activation and most of the network’s viewers didn’t expect the station to survive. Lloyds of London had odds of 500-1 against the station lasting a year.
Dr. Franklin is in med lab when someone speaks to him; Dr. Vance Hendricks (David McCallum!), a former university professor of Franklin’s, but an archaeologist, not a medical doctor. Dr. Hendricks wants Franklin’s help with something and offers him an adventure.
A customs guard is examining something that a man has brought onto the station. The guard says that the container looks as if it might have a hidden compartment; the man denies it but, when he sees there are no witnesses, kills the guard. When Dr. Franklin is called he says it appears that the guard died of natural causes, a heart attack, but he intends to have an autopsy to make sure.
Back at the med lab, Hendricks introduces Franklin to his assistant, Nelson Drake. Who is the man who just killed the customs guard. Hendricks was on a corporate-funded dig and found some artefacts in a vault hidden deep below the surface of a dead planet. When Drake opens the box containing the artefacts, Babylon 5’s systems pick up an energy spike.
Hendricks wants to find out what the artefacts are and tells Franklin to put an artefact in the med scanner. The scanner shows that the artefact is made from living tissue – organic technology, something Earth doesn’t have yet, although the Vorlons do and the Minbari may have.
With them being organic, the artefacts should have been quarantined. Dr. Hendricks says that they were, but not on the station. Which is not true. Whether Hendricks knows that this is a lie or not isn’t revealed, but he does look suspicious.
Hendricks wants Franklin’s help to reverse engineer the technology. Cracking organic technology will be a big deal. And valuable. That evening, Drake opens one of the items and gets hit by an energy bolt that throws him across the room. He isn’t dead, but something is happening to the skin on his arm. Which is spreading.
Drake is being affected quite badly by the organic technology, turning into what looks like the organic technology equivalent of a Borg. Certainly an unstoppable weapon, and one with a specific goal. Even if the goal isn’t known. Perhaps the artefacts were that deep for a reason – and perhaps the world is dead for a similar reason.
And Commander Sinclair still needs to give that interview.