“A Race Through Dark Places”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 2, Episode 8
Production episode 207
Original air date: January 25, 1995
It was the dawn of the third age… Sheridan and Ivanova are having a budget meeting. To Sheridan’s annoyance, due to less revenue for the station, Earth is giving the captain and commander two choices: move to smaller quarters or pay thirty credits a week in rent. Sheridan is beyond outraged, digs his heels in, and makes it clear that he will do neither of those things, and neither will Ivanova.
On Mars, Bester interrogates a fellow telepath about an underground railroad for unregistered telepaths, performing a sufficiently deep scan that it kills him, despite his attempts to resist. Bester gets the information with his dying thought: that the waystation for the railroad is B5.
Sheridan is ranting and raving to Franklin about the crew quarters thing, with Franklin pointing out that he’s probably going to lose this fight, which doesn’t even slow Sheridan’s outrage down a little. Then Delenn comes by and asks Sheridan to dinner. She’s trying to be a bridge between human and Minbari, but she has realized that she doesn’t know much about humans, beyond work-related stuff. So she wants to share a meal with Sheridan and talk about non-work things.
Bester arrives at the station and meets with Sheridan, Ivanova, Garibaldi, and Winters. Bester explains the situation, then he and Winters leave the three EarthForce officers to discuss the matter. As far as Ivanova is concerned, Psi Corps can go hang and the underground railroad should go merrily along, but Garibaldi is duty-bound to uphold the law and this railroad is criminal. Sheridan agrees, and orders Garibaldi to assist Bester’s investigation.
While discussing the matter with Winters, Bester telepathically overhears someone thinking, “MURDERER” in his direction. This confirms to him that the railroad really is here.
That telepath goes to downbelow to meet with the other rogue telepaths on the station. They agree that they will need to kill Bester.
Bester invites Winters to breakfast. For her part, Winters remembers what happened when Bester was last at the station. Bester has scanned her at least twice, but doesn’t seem to know that she’s telekinetic now. She mentally tosses a penny into a bulkhead to remind viewers that she’s telekinetic, since that’s something that hasn’t come up at all in any of her other appearances since “Mind War.”
Delenn and Sheridan dine at Fresh Air, Delenn wearing a human dress and looking very fetching indeed. They have a lovely dinner, after which Sheridan goes back to his quarters, only to find himself locked out. Ivanova shows up, saying the same thing happened to her, and she’s already tried all the ways of getting into their quarters. They have to pay rent, or they’re screwed. Sheridan stands by his refusal, and he and Ivanova instead bunk in the captain’s office.
The rogue telepaths gather weapons and ambush Bester at his breakfast with Winters. Bester senses them in time to keep from getting shot, and manages to kill two of them. However, they kidnap Winters in the confusion.
Franklin goes to Sheridan, saying he’s been contacted by the leader of the railroad, who wants to meet with Sheridan, alone. No harm will come to Winters regardless, as she’s not a hostage. And she isn’t: instead, the telepaths are all telling Winters their stories. One had a brother who took sleepers rather than join the Corps but was later murdered because he kept speaking about against the Corps. Another was raped and forced to have a child with another P11 and then had the child taken away from her. And one came to the station with Ironheart a year earlier and had also been experimented on the way Ironheart was, and is now a P12 or P13.
Sheridan goes to the meet, only to have Franklin join him. Turns out that Franklin is the leader of the railroad. He first heard about mistreatment of and experimentation on telepaths through the medical grapevine on Earth. The free clinic he established down there was done in part to facilitate processing the rogue telepaths.
Garibaldi reports to Bester that he’s determined that the two telepaths Bester shot and killed lived in the same area of downbelow. He’s assembling a team to go down there, and the idea is that Bester will join the raid in an hour.
Bester, of course, goes down ahead of schedule. He arrives to see a gauntlet of telepaths—including Winters with her gloves off—who join hands and try to attack Bester telepathically. But then they realize that Winters is fighting them. Suddenly Bester and Winters are able to kill all the rogue telepaths. Satisfied that the railroad is broken, Bester leaves, telling Winters to do likewise. The pair of them can’t be connected to this massacre.
As soon as he leaves, Sheridan and Franklin walk into the room with all the telepaths still joining hands. Collectively, they were able to insert a scenario into Bester’s mind, which he will think is real. None of them could have done it individually, but their combined telepathic might was enough to fool him into thinking that the railroad is toast.
Sheridan says that he can’t have this continue on his station, and Franklin and the telepaths agree to take it off-station.
The leader of the telepaths tells Winters that she was the reason why the trick worked. Bester still can’t tell how powerful she really is, and she’s the future.
Winters sees Bester off. The Psi Cop asks Winters to keep an eye on Sheridan, as he isn’t comfortable with how lackluster his support was for the investigation.
Ivanova is shocked to learn that she can access her quarters again. Sheridan has diverted 60 credits a week from the station’s military budget to his and Ivanova’s rent, justifying it as a “military readiness” cost. Thrilled not to be bunking down in an office with a snoring captain, Ivanova goes to her quarters. However, before she can get to sleep, Winters shows up with a bottle and two glasses. She’s starting to come around to Ivanova’s position on the Corps and wants to commiserate. Ivanova agrees, but only if Winters takes off her Psi Corps badge.
Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan absolutely refuses to pay rent on quarters he should be granted as a captain in EarthForce, has a lovely dinner with Delenn, tells really bad jokes before going to bed, and snores.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova is obviously not happy about Sheridan’s notion of passive-aggressive resistance to budget concerns, but follows orders like a good soldier.
The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s first suspect in managing the railroad, unsurprisingly, is Ivanova, because he’s at least moderately good at his job. However, she’s innocent, despite being sympathetic. Garibaldi is also able to trace where the underground is likely hiding out.
If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn shocks Sheridan with her dinner invite, and shocks her further with her outfit and her sense of humor, all things he never expected to associate with a Minbari.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. There’s quite a large number of rogue telepaths out there trying to escape Psi Corps—with reason, as pretty much everything they do is awful. And we’re also reminded of Winters’ telekinesis, which has been a complete non-factor since “Mind War.”
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. We see the true beginnings of the Sheridan/Delenn relationship, as well as a further thawing of the Ivanova/Winters relationship. One of them will actually go somewhere.
Looking ahead. B5 being used as a waystation for rogue telepaths will happen again in season five.
Welcome aboard. Walter Koenig officially establishes Bester as recurring with his return here from “Mind War.” He’ll be back in “Dust to Dust.” Meantime, the various rogue telepaths in downbelow are played by Apesanakhwat, Brian Cousins, Diane Dilascio, and Gianin Loffler. Loffler previously appeared in “Chrysalis.” In addition, William Allen Young is seen in flashbacks to “Mind War” as Ironheart.
Trivial matters. The rogue telepaths’ method of resisting psi scans is to think of the song, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” This is likely a tribute to Alfred Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man, the novel that J. Michael Straczynski used as the template for his portrayal of telepaths in general and the Psi Cops in particular (and also the source of Walter Koenig’s character’s name). In that novel, the protagonist uses an earworm—in this case, a commercial jingle—to screen out telepathic scans.
This episode was filmed prior to “Soul Mates” and was intended to be aired before it. On the original DVD release (which is what your humble rewatcher is using), “Soul Mates” comes first, but on some delivery systems for the show, this episode airs first.
Franklin’s free clinic in downbelow was established in “The Quality of Mercy.”
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“We took away every right they had and shoved them into a big black box called Psi Corps. Now look at them: black uniforms, jackboots, giving orders.”
—Garibaldi discussing the irony of the evolution of telepaths on Earth.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Mary had a little lamb.” One thing I’d like to address before I get to the episode proper is the airing order. While there are reasons why this episode should, perhaps, come before “Soul Mates,” especially given Winters actually considering Stoner’s proposal to quit Psi Corps, which may seem more logical coming after this episode, the fact is that, as far as I’m concerned, “Soul Mates” absolutely must come first for one simple reason: there is absolutely no way, none, that Delenn would have been able to get her hair done for her dinner with Sheridan before Ivanova taught her about hair care in “Soul Mates.” Case closed.
Anyhow…
Walter Koenig’s return as Bester is quite welcome, and this time he has a much better story (and better fellow guest actors) to work with than he did in “Mind War.” The awfulness of Psi Corps is front and center throughout the episode, as we get multiple accounts of their horrific acts elucidated by the various rogue telepaths in downbelow. Plus, of course, there’s just Bester’s very existence. The first thing we see of him is his murdering a fellow telepath just to get some information, an act of sociopathic depravity that Koenig plays beautifully.
Later, when he tries to show Garibaldi his “nicer” side by saying that he has a wife and kid with whom he goes on picnics every Sunday, it’s hilariously ineffective. It’s impossible to think of Bester as anything but a monster. Koenig’s delivery of this attempt to get on Garibaldi’s good side is magnificently false. Bester can’t even fake sincerity.
It’s good to see the scales fall from Winters’ eyes, though the scattershot way it’s been shown has been frustrating, more so knowing the character’s fate later this season. It’s especially maddening to see her using her telekinesis long enough to establish that she still has it (which is good, since—as I’ve pointed out repeatedly in this particular entry—there’s been zero evidence of it since “Mind War”), but to not actually use it in the episode. What was the point of giving her this super-power if she’s never going to use it?
The three leads’ reactions to Bester’s arrival is very instructive. Sheridan is open to the Psi Cop’s presence, neither resistant nor fully accepting. He’s got no history with the Corps or with Bester to influence him. Ivanova is, of course, completely against the notion of Bester being given any assistance. Most telling is Garibaldi, who obviously detests Bester and everything he and the Corps stand for—but he’s also sworn to uphold the law, and so his response is to track down the railroad and shut it down, because that’s his job.
And in the end, Bester wants to keep an eye on Sheridan, and only because he wasn’t enthusiastic enough about helping Bester—just to remind us that he’s still a monster.
The subplots are entertaining. Delenn is a complex character, but a big part of her persona is her considerable charm—which is why she makes such a good diplomat—and that charm is on full display here in her first date with Sheridan. It’s even more fun to watch their dinner together knowing where this particular relationship is going. And Sheridan and Ivanova’s fuck-you response to the bean-counters is well played. I do like that doing a two-step with the budget has been the go-to solution to a crisis on the station twice now (the other was in “By Any Means Necessary”). Of all the ways that creator J. Michael Straczynski promised that this show would be more realistic, using budget tricks to solve a problem is probably the way he fulfills that the most…
Next week: “The Coming of Shadows.”
