Soul Hunter (II)

The Soul Hunter is the name attributed to a character featured in the 1994-1998 science fiction television series Babylon 5. Played by actor John Snyder, he appeared in the second episode of season one, "Soul Hunter" where he was credited as Soul Hunter #2.

Biography
The Soul Hunter was an unnamed alien being who belonged to a race known only as Soul hunters. Their collective vocation was to pinpoint the time of death of an individual and extract their soul, preserving it, nurturing it and even worshipping it. One of the great prohibitions of their trade however was that a Soul hunter can never manipulate the circumstances surrounding the cause of death of the being whose soul they intend on collecting.

A renegade Soul hunter broke this credo after failing to extract the soul of Minbari leader Dukhat on the onset of the Earth-Minbari War. This failure caused him to go mad and he began murdering individuals so that he could extract their souls.

Upon learning this, a second Soul hunter set out to contain his wayward brother and bring his madness to an end. He pursued him for several months and finally caught up with him in the year 2258. The rogue hunter escaped, but not before his pursuer succeeded in crippling his ship. The first hunter was found and taken aboard space station Babylon 5.

The second hunter eventually tracked him down and contacted the station's commander, Jeffrey Sinclair. He warned Sinclair about the actions of his disturbed colleague and cryptically stated that somebody was about to die on the station. The first hunter was already causing havoc on the station and Sinclair was reluctant to trust another such creature. Regardless, he let the Soul hunter onto the station and he helped Sinclair track down the other hunter. The first hunter had been torturing the Minbari Delenn, slowly killing her through the use of his soul-extraction technology. Sinclair fought with the hunter, first shooting him, then turning his own equipment back upon him where it extracted his soul, killing him.

The second Soul hunter, relieved that the other had been brought to justice, inquired as to what happened to the hunter's collection of souls. Sinclair knew that the first hunter's collection contained the souls of several Minbari, so he replied, "Life's full of mysteries. Consider this one of them." The second hunter understood Sinclair's distate for them and knew that his kind would never be welcome aboard the station. He took his fallen brother's remains and left Babylon 5 in peace.

Notes & Trivia

 * The character of the Soul Hunter was created by screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski and director Jim Johnston.


 * Soul hunters do not appear to use or even have proper names. Soul hunters share an empathic bond with one another however and seem to be able to identify one another on sight.