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

Overview

Bester pursues a murderous telepath, using the pursuit to train two rookie Psi Cops in the finer points of their new jobs. Walter Koenig as Bester.

P5 Rating: 8.42

Production number: 514
Original air date: April 15, 1998

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Stephen Furst

Plot Points

• Very high on the Corps' list of priorities is that mundanes believe that nothing ever goes wrong within the Corps. To that end, and because they justifiably don't believe mundane security forces would be of much use in capturing rogue telepaths, they use the Psi Cops to track down rogues with a minimum of publicity.
• The Psi Corps maintains a fleet of large transport ships in hyperspace, where they're used to ferry shuttles back and forth between jump points. Eventually they'll be used for some other unspecified purpose. Nobody outside the Corps is supposed to know the ships exist.
• Psi Corps field operatives must be able to maintain a mental block against a telepathic probe for at least one hour to ensure that they're safe against attack by untrained rogues. Even the most powerful rogues, according to Bester, can't sustain a psi attack for more than 30 or 40 minutes.
• Bester's parents were killed in an accident when he was barely a month old. The Corps found him thanks to a random DNA screening, and raised him from childhood.
• The Corps is training some of its members in offensive skills known as "mind shredding." A P10-rated shredder is a danger even to a P12-rated telepath, and a P12-rated shredder can kill a mundane telepathically in a matter of seconds.
• If a telepath has multiple personalities, each of the personalities can exhibit different levels of psi ability. The Corps' screening program doesn't detect multiple personalities.
• Even new Corps trainees are willing to act as judge, jury, and executioner for mundanes who kill telepaths.

Unanswered Questions

• What are the Corps motherships for, aside from ferrying shuttles?
• What were the circumstances of Bester's parents' deaths?
• What is a Pak'ma'ra's hump?

Analysis

• According to the Corps propaganda film, 42.5% of telepaths who leave the Corps commit suicide within nine months of leaving the Corps. How many of those "suicides" are thanks to the Psi Cops? Even if the Cops don't kill a significant number of rogues directly, the very fact that a rogue is being relentlessly pursued might make suicide or an accident more likely.

  And of course, Gordon only said that the suicides were committed by people who'd left the Corps, not rogues; how many of the suicides were telepaths forced to take sleeper drugs like Ivanova's mother?

• Why didn't anyone in the Corps communicate telepathically within their own walls? As Bester told Sinclair ("Mind War,") telepathic communication saves time. It's perhaps understandable that the Corps would want its members to speak to each other verbally while in public, to avoid appearing needlessly strange to mundanes, but that consideration wouldn't apply within the walls of a Corps training academy. Perhaps telepathic communication requires more effort than speech.

• Bester believes that to be a telepath is to be something special, and that telepaths have to stick together and protect one another, even more so than mundanes. That's very similar to Byron's philosophy ("The Paragon of Animals.")

• What was Bester doing with the mirror just before his departure for Babylon 5? Since he didn't glean any useful information from his vision of Harris, it was most likely just an exercise in intuition, a moment of deep concentration to try to figure out some reason why Harris might have committed the murder.

• The Corps motherships are perhaps not as well-kept a secret as Bester would like to think. There are probably lots of rogue telepaths who learned of them before leaving the Corps. For example, Byron would almost certainly have known about them (he had gone out on missions with Bester) and thus it's plausible that some or all of the other members of his group know as well. Since they have no particular stake in keeping the ships' existence secret, information about them might well have already leaked out.

• When Lauren mentioned to Bester that she wished there were a way to record thoughts, he said, "Give us time." Is the Corps working on such a capability? Does that imply that they've discovered a technological means for reading other people's thoughts? If so, the implications could be far-reaching, not least the possibility that mundanes could be equipped with simulated telepathy.

  Abbut's recording of Talia's thoughts ("Deathwalker") indicates that the process is possible, though perhaps not without the involvement of a living brain.

• The Corps' inability to detect multiple personalities is consistent with Talia's hidden personality ("Divided Loyalties.") Talia was in close contact, even linked briefly, with a group of telepaths ("A Race Through Dark Places") who failed to detect her alternate personality.

• If different personalities can have different psi abilities, the Corps might not have gotten anything useful out of their examination of Talia after she returned to them ("Dust to Dust.") Her Ironheart-enhanced psi abilities ("Mind War") might have been destroyed along with her original personality.

• Lauren's visualization of the attack/block exercise had a subtext she probably didn't recognize: the attacker was probing with spikes not dissimilar to the spines on a Shadow vessel, while the attacker was encased in what looked like shards of ice, not unlike the ice surrounding Sheridan's vision of the Vorlon in "Into the Fire." Vorlons created human telepaths and the Shadows wanted to destroy or undermine them, which is consistent with that imagery.

Notes

• The love of Bester's life is Carolyn Sanderson, who is most likely still in stasis awaiting removal of her Shadow implants ("Ship of Tears.") Whether or not she's still on Babylon 5 isn't clear; Sheridan mentioned transferring her to Earth for further medical study ("Rising Star") but that might not have happened yet.

• "Prisoner"esque signs on the walls at the Corps academy (not a complete list yet):
  • The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father
  • Protect the Family.
  • Obey
  • Trust the Corps
  • Maternis, Paternis (this also appears on the Psi Corps logo during the training film)

• Babylon 5 uses its sword and shield logo even on its commercial sales literature.

• Text of the cover of the Babcom brochure:

  Stay in touch with
  family and business
  alike with state of the
  art communications and
  delivery services. Let
  us be your new partner.

  BABYLON 5
  FOR THE
  BUSINESS
  OF TODAY
  AND THE
  HOPE OF
  TOMORROW

• One of Harris' documents, visible when Bester examines them, is dated 2264, even though the episode takes place in 2262. (See jms speaks.)

• Bester's childhood was recounted differently in comic "The Psi Corps and You." The official Corps propaganda about Bester is that he entered its ranks at age 10.

• Bester keeps his disabled hand gloved even when he's home by himself.

• The rogue's name was Jonathan Harris. That name might be familiar to some fans; another Jonathan Harris played Dr. Smith on the original "Lost in Space" TV series, which also starred Bill Mumy (Lennier) as Will Robinson. However, that's not the reference here. By coincidence, Jonathan Harris was the name of the winner of a raffle run by the B5 Fan Club at a convention (the 1997 Worldcon in San Antonio.) The raffle's grand prize was the winner's name appearing in an episode.

• One of the interns, Chen Hikaru, shares a name with Hikaru Sulu of the original "Star Trek." Sulu was a colleague and friend of Chekov, played by Walter Koenig (Bester.)

• This is the third episode directed by Stephen Furst, who also plays Vir. All three of his episodes (this one, "The Illusion of Truth," and "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars") are told from the points of view of people other than the series' main characters.

• The title sequence was changed for this episode: instead of the "Babylon 5" title, a Psi Corps logo with the words "Trust the Corps" was substituted. The B5 logo was moved to the back of the station in the closing FX shot, and JMS's name was displayed as a normal credit.

jms speaks

• About TNT's decision to postpone the episodes the ones following this one until the fall of 1998
  Re: the schedule...it was brought to our attention that the NBA coverage would lead to episodes being shunted around and pre-empted for a number of weeks. Obviously this concerned us, and would concern viewers, so we discussed it with TNT, and they came back to us with the notion that we would continue new episodes until hitting #100, break for the NBA games, then come back (starting with another possible half-hour special) afterward at the same time to finish the season.

  It was either this, or get shuffled around the schedule due to the NBA, and the former is infinitely preferable.

• Bester is NOT a nice guy...but not everyone sees him in that light, which is why I did one episode from inside the Psi Corps this season, to show how others in the PC see him....

  Even Hitler painted roses.

• Shouldn't the other Psi Cops have been afraid of Bester?
  I don't consider it a mistake at all...you never heard much of other Psi Cops talking about Bester, and they would have more knowledge of him than anyone else. As with Dirty Harry, some of the other officers above and below him liked him...and he scared the crap out of others. Same here.

• What is a Pak'ma'ra's hump?
  I was thinking that the hump is where their mates are...they're symbiotically bonded, and the female is much smaller than the male, reflecting similar disparities in the insect kingdom.

• About the oddly-dated document
  One of his personalities was a Time Lord.

• And let us also remember, about this guy getting the date wrong on what he was writing....

  HE WAS A NUT.

  thankyew

Last update: June 17, 1998