“Mind War”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Bruce Seth Green
Season 1, Episode 6
Production episode 110
Original air date: March 2, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A Starfury wing tries to stop an unidentified ship. The ship doesn’t return the hail, but then energy waves come out from the ship and destroy all the Starfuries. That same ship then winds up at B5. Its occupant, Jason Ironheart, rents a room on the station and when he’s alone, suffers a bad headache that also shakes his cabin up.
Sakai exits the shower in Sinclair’s quarters and informs him that she has a meeting with Universal Terraform. She goes to the meeting—which Winters is hired to telepathically audit—and agrees to go to Sigma 957, which has indications of Quantium 40, which is used in jump gate construction (and of which there’s also a shortage). But they’re not sure, and they need a detailed survey, which is where Sakai comes in.
However, there’s a wrinkle: Sigma 957 is in territory that is disputed, and they need the permission of the Narn Regime to do it. G’Kar and Sakai discuss the matter, with G’Kar urging Sakai not to go. She, however, goes anyway, and G’Kar contacts the Narn homeworld to request a couple of ships pop over to Sigma 957.
Two Psi Cops arrive, Bester and Kelsey. They are searching for Ironheart, who was one of Winters’ instructors at the Psi Corps Academy. Winters has not seen him, but Bester and Kelsey insist on a mind probe—which is invasive and painful—to verify. Sinclair and Ivanova observe the probe—though the cops give them the option to depart, which they decline—and are completely disgusted. They’re equally disgusted with Bester’s dismissal of why they’re seeking out Ironheart: it’s need-to-know, and Sinclair doesn’t need to know.
After Winters is excused, Ironheart approaches her. He knew the cops were on him, and he waited until after they probed her to make contact.
Ironheart volunteered for an experiment to increase psi-rating. There are a very rare few who are powerful enough to not only be telepathic, but also telekinetic, but most of those are also batshit insane. They succeeded in increasing Ironheart’s psi-rating to the point where he’s a telekinetic and also a much more powerful telepath. So much so that he knows that the intent is to use him as a weapon. He expresses concern to Winters that Psi Corps is becoming far more influential with EarthGov.
His conversation with Winters is cut short when he gets another headache, and this time the entire station feels the vibrations of what Kelsey refers to as a “mind quake.” Garibaldi traces the source of the quake to Blue 16—which is now surrounded by some kind of energy field they can’t get through.
Sinclair angrily tells Bester that he really needs to fucking know now, and Bester relents, telling Sinclair the same thing Ironheart told Winters. Bester fears that Ironheart is no longer truly human. Bester also mentions something Ironheart left out of his explanation to Winters: he’s a killer—not just of the Starfury crews we saw at the top of the episode, but also of the head researcher of the procedure. The cops also can telepathically insert a safeword into Ironheart’s mind, which will shut him down.
Winters—who was able to get out of Blue 16 before Ironheart sealed it off—approaches Sinclair and drops the other shoe: Ironheart wasn’t just her instructor, they were also lovers.
Sakai arrives at Sigma 957. While she’s scanning from orbit, a ship appears briefly with her in orbit. Its very presence disrupts every system on her ship, and she loses power and her orbit is decaying. However, the ships G’Kar sent show up and rescue her before she crashes.
Ironheart meets with Sinclair, who reluctantly agrees to let him go before he completely transforms into another state of being. (His reluctance is borne of Ironheart’s murder of the chief researcher, which Ironheart insists was only because he wanted to make sure nobody else was experiment upon. I guess this guy didn’t take notes? And anyhow, what about those poor Starfury pilots?)
Bester and Kelsey intercept them, and try to telepathically insert the safeword, but it doesn’t shut him down. It does weaken him enough that Kelsey pulls a weapon on him. In response, Ironheart vaporizes her. Then Bester fires on him, and Ironheart retaliates, but since he’s played by a more famous actor, he’s only knocked out.
Ironheart escapes to his ship, which then explodes in a plume of light. Ironheart telepathically tells the B5 crew that he’s going off to become one with the universe or whatever, tells Sinclair that he’ll see him in a million years, and tells Winters he’s giving her a gift.
Later in her quarters, Winters is able to move a penny with her mind.
Bester agrees to a cover story that keeps the truth of what happened to Ironheart out of the record—it’ll just be that his ship blew up—and Sinclair won’t report Bester’s incompetence in letting the station be endangered and Kelsey killed. It’ll all be on Ironheart. Bester agrees, and apes the salute from the Village in The Prisoner and says, “Be seeing you” like they did in that show for no compellingly good reason.
Sakai confronts G’Kar, who explains (a) that no one on B5 is what they appear to be, including G’Kar himself, and (b) there are beings in the universe who are to hominid sentient life like humans and Narn as hominid sentient life is to an ant. They can no more know what those beings at Sigma 957 are than the ant they see on a flower knows what Sakai and G’Kar are.
Nothing’s the same anymore. The cops communicate silently with telepathy right up until they arrive in Sinclair’s office, at which point the commander very angrily tells them to use their voices, please, and to stay the hell out of his head.
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s disdain for the Psi Corps is, if anything, reinforced by the behavior of the Psi Cops. She’s sufficiently revolted by the probe of Winters that she offers the telepath a glass of water afterward, despite her disdain for telepaths in general and Winters in particular.
The household god of frustration. In the department of, “I’ll take Things That Have Aged Embarrassingly Poorly for $100, Alex,” Garibaldi is on an elevator with Winters and the Universal Terraform dude, and he thinks spectacularly inappropriate thoughts about (based on where he’s staring) Winters’ ass. Winters elbows him in the nether regions, prompting Garibaldi to declare that he’s in love.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar tries to warn Sakai, and does send help for her, which can be viewed as him being compassionate, or him making sure that the commander of the station’s girlfriend doesn’t get hurt, which would make G’Kar’s life more difficult.
The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We meet our first Psi Cops, and also get a notion of the telepathic ranking system. Most commercial telepaths (like Winters) are P5s. All Psi Corps instructors are P10s, and all Psi Cops are P12s. Psi Cops have much more latitude than other telepaths, and are in charge of maintaining the rules within the Corps.
Looking ahead. The beings Sakai encounters will later be revealed to be one of the older species in the galaxy known as the First Ones, who will play a large role in the overarching plotline. (The Vorlons, we will eventually learn, are also among the First Ones.) The Sigma 957 aliens will next be seen in “Voices of Authority” in season three.
G’Kar’s comment that not everyone it what they seem is meant to be prophetic, and he singles out Mollari, Delenn, Sinclair, and himself. Mollari’s persona as a clown will eventually be revealed to hide a certain viciousness, as well as a certain nobility, both of which are well buried at this point. Delenn’s being a secret member of the Grey Council has already been exposed to the viewer three times, in “The Gathering,” “Soul Hunter,” and “The Parliament of Dreams.” Sinclair’s missing twenty-four hours will expose what he hides even from himself, and this very episode begins the process of showing that there’s more to G’Kar than the mustache-twirling villain he’s been portrayed as to date.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Winters explains to Sinclair how much more immersive sex between telepaths is, way way way beyond the physical.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“I am both terrified and reassured to know there are still wonders in the universe—that we have not yet explained everything.”
—G’Kar waxing philosophical to Sakai.
Welcome aboard. Julia Nickson officially makes Sakai recurring with her return appearance from last week’s “The Parliament of Dreams”; she’ll be back for her third and final appearance at the end of the season in “Chrysalis.”
William Allen Young, Felicity Waterman, Don Dowe, and Michael McKenzie all compete for who can be more wooden and boring as, respectively, Ironheart, Kelsey, the Starfury leader, and the Narn captain. (Dowe wins by a nose.)
But the big guest is the debut of Walter Koenig as Bester. Obviously best known for his role as Chekov on the original Star Trek, the role of Bester will continue to recur throughout all five seasons of the show.
Trivial matters. Bester is named for Alfred Bester—and will later be revealed to have that same first name as well—the author of The Demolished Man. The first book to win the Best Novel Hugo Award when the awards were created in 1953, it’s one of the definitive science fiction novels dealing with telepathy. While J. Michael Straczynski has said that it was just a tribute to Bester—who, among other things, was friends with B5’s creative consultant Harlan Ellison—and there was no other connection, the Psi Cops as established here and seen throughout the show are pretty much exactly like the telepathic police force in The Demolished Man.
At one point, Ivanova asks of the cops, “who watches the watchmen?” which is one translation of the phrase from Juvenal’s Satires, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” It’s more commonly translated as “who guards the guardians?” but the one Ivanova used is the one Alan Moore used for the seminal comic book miniseries Watchmen. Straczynski would later write two of the Before Watchmen prequel miniseries in 2012 for DC.
Winters will later be revealed to be a sleeper agent, with another personality buried inside her mind, which will be brought to the fore in “Divided Loyalties.” How Ironheart, with his suuuuuuper telepathy, managed to miss this is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I give you a gift.” This introduces two very important parts of the B5 storyline, to wit, the Psi Cops and the First Ones (who don’t have that name yet).
In particular, we’re introduced to Bester, who will go on to appear in a dozen more episodes (and was scheduled to appear in a Crusade episode, but the series was cancelled before it was filmed), and become a very important recurring character. He creates quite a strong impression here, though a big part of it is seeing a very familiar actor in a most unfamiliar role, as Bester is absolutely nothing like Chekov. Which is fabulous, as he’s a very effective villain.
Certainly more so than his sidekick, as Felicity Waterman is dreadful as Kelsey. In that, she’s matched by the episode’s primary focus, which is Jason Ironheart—a dopey name for an awful character. William Allen Young plays him with all the charisma of a dead fish, utterly failing to convey the anguish and torment the script calls for, which takes the episode out at the knees, sadly. Not that the script helps overmuch, trying to make Ironheart out to be a tragic figure and a victim, hoping we won’t notice that (a) he slept with one of his students, and (b) he committed several murders, only one of which he was able to even remotely justify. Indeed, the glossing over of the death of the Starfury group at the top of the episode is galling. And having Bester imitate the denizens of the Village in The Prisoner was a little too cutesy. (I remember one friend saying after this episode aired in 1994 that it’s never a good idea to reference a show that’s better than yours.)
The B-plot does, at least, have better acting in it, as G’Kar finally gets a bit more depth, and we’re introduced to the rather important notion that there are much older, much more powerful species floating around the galaxy that are a fair piece farther along on the evolutionary road than we are.
Next week: “The War Prayer.”
Koenig as Bester may be the first instance of something going wrong behind the scenes that makes the show better. He was originally supposed to play Knight Two in an upcoming episode (this one was filmed much later, but wound up being slotted in here), but a health issue kept him from taking the role. JMS wanted to have him on the show (Koenig was also a friend of Harlan Ellison’s), so gave him this role. And thus was born one of the show’s best antagonists.
I’m not sure how I feel about “Be seeing you.” It’s a little cheesy, and James’s friend made a good point. On the other hand, it’s not a terrible Easter egg. It hadn’t been easy to see The Prisoner in the US in the 25 years since it first ran, so a lot of viewers wouldn’t have gotten it. It’s sufficiently creepy on its own, but tying the Psi Corps to the powers-that-be in the Village further underlines their awfulness.
And not to defend the relationship between Talia and Ironheart, but we don’t know for sure that it began when she was his student. It was, unfortunately, still not completely unheard of 30 years ago for professors to wind up in relations with their grad students, and it was not at all uncommon when JMS’s cohort was in grad school. It’s aged very badly, but wouldn’t have been quite as squicky back then.
I always liked the “Be Seeing You.” To me it was shorthand for, I’m creepy, I’m spying on you, there’s a creepy conspiracy to control you that you don’t know anything about, and I’m gonna show up when you least expect me to and when you least want me. Which all ends up coming about.
The “Be Seeing You” salute will also wind up being an important visual clue for Garibaldi in early season 2. While mimic-ing the salute from a different show seems odd, it makes sense that JMS would want a very distinct salute that was very memorable, since it will come up again later.
On the subject of the relationship, I’m not sure it’s as bad as people are assuming. At the time, Young was 40 and Thompson 34, only 6 years apart, so it seems more equal than something like a college professor sleeping with a student. They said he was her “instructor” at the Academy, but it seemed to me like it was less of a classroom situation and more like something where he was assigned to train her in the “fringe skills” in which he specialized. An analogy might be something like, say, a member of a security force giving fellow members specialized training in martial arts.
I checked the script book: while “Be seeing you” is Bester’s scripted exit line, the gesture is not scripted.
Given that the role of Knight Two which Koenig was unable to accept was then offered to Patrick McGoohan, who was interested but unavailable for filming, I wonder if the reference proved circumstantially irresistable. The goal is clearly to give Bester a threatening exit line.
Hmm, not sure I agree about The Prisoner being hard to find. My father was a big fan of it, so I know it was aired on PBS and the A&E cable network at various times in the ’80s-’90s. Wikipedia says its US home video releases included a 1984 VHS collection and 1988 and 1998 laser disc collections, and I’m pretty sure we had one of the laser disc sets. (My father later upgraded to A&E’s 2001 DVD box set, which I still have.)
That VHS collection was really hard to find, though; I remember driving all the way from Kansas City to St Louis one time, because a local branch of a national video rental chain was selling a couple of their used tapes, and they were able to check their inventory system and see the St Louis store had several other episodes. (I even remember the store location… in the nest of shopping around the intersection of I-64 and I-170.)
The DVD set wasn’t much easier; I remember having to special-order it online, when Amazon was a lot smaller and less comprehensive.
(The blu-ray set is a huge upgrade.)
It wasn’t as hard to find as, say Blake’s 7 was around here, but that’s not saying much. All I remember about this episode was that it was one of those that made think that I wasn’t going to bother with this show much because if this was all that it had to offer, why bother? Ugh.
The rewatch of season 1, so far, has not been changing my mind.
It’s a pretty famous series. Nowhere near as arcane as, oh, Sapphire and Steel, or shows so more obscure yet I have a hard time naming them. The Tomorrow People. (If you’re British, and of a certain age, compensate accordingly.)
The Tomorrow People was well enough known to get a Greg Berlanti-produced remake on The CW in 2013.
It probably didn’t hurt that The Tomorrow People had a mid-90’s remake as well (or was that the version you meant and not the older original show?)
I said the 2013 show, I meant the 2013 show. I know the original had one or more prior remakes, which could be a factor in why it was well enough known to get the CW remake, though I don’t recall which or how many of the previous shows aired in the US.
Anecdotally, as late as 1992, the video store I worked at was the only one in the area to rent the full series. The folks who knew about it knew about it.
It was definitely on A&E just a few years before B5 aired, because that was when/how I first watched it.
Who’s James?
—Keith R.A. “don’t call me Jim” DeCandido
Sorry, my brain combined you and James Davis Nicoll for some reason.
I think that depicting the Psi Corps as having f*cked-up sexual politics actually helps to show what kind of an organization it is, though it might have helped if the script called attention to it.
That explanation would work better if we didn’t see Franklin start an inappropriate relationship in the next season (fortunately confined to a single episode). The show depicts this stuff without being disapproving.
The f-ed up sexual politics does get repeat appearances in later episodes. When Bester explains his marriage in relation to the Psi-Corps ‘breeding program’ is notable, as well as explaining mentor-student hook-ups being arranged by central planning.
I may be misrecalling this, but I think Bester was originally meant to be a one-off in this episode, but Walter Koenig was so good in the role that Straczynski decided to bring him back as a sporadically recurring character. Obviously the PsiCops were always going to be important, but not necessarily this particular character.
I’m glad that Walter Koenig is at least fun to watch as Bester, because everything else about B5‘s telepathy plot honestly bores me to the ground. The ending of this one is also quite possibly the lamest depiction of human apotheosis that I’ve ever seen. And I know I’ve said it before, but I really, really dislike Garibaldi.
Still, the B-plot at least manages to be interesting. It’s nice to see a glimmer of the depth and compassion that characterise G’kar in later seasons, and the Sigma 957 Entity is suitably mysterious in its first appearance.
Jason Ironheart not noticing that Talia Winters was a sleeper agent is a bit of a plothole. There’s evidence that at this point JMS already had decided that Talia was the “Control” sleeper, after having had to write out Laurel Takashima after the pilot (Takashima was originally planned to be the sleeper). JMS later said that Ironheart didn’t notice the hidden personality because he was actively trying to suppress his abilities and not use them more than he had to, because of the mindquake side effects… but YMMV on that one.
My understanding was that Talia Winters was written out of the show because of a dispute with Andrea Thompson. While the sleeper agent plot was originally conceived for Takashima, giving to Talia was a pure retcon to write her out of the series.
Which is a shame because Thompson had a bit of a point. In my recent rewatch, I kept thinking where is Talia and by the time you get to what happens in season 2, they have to speedrun her having any substantial connections to anyone.
Yep, Thompson was complaining about screen time and didn’t want to hear that Talia was going to become super-important down the road, despite all the episodes that were very clearly setting things up. And so, the very messy retcon.
That said, at least it was early enough that Lyta could be brought back and the future telepath storylines were easy enough to graft onto her dangling thread.
Given that a lengthy sequence with Talia, Kosh, and a VCR (not that kind) involves the multiple personality plot and only makes sense if Talia were supposed to be “recovered” after the second personality was revealed, it’s a stretch to claim this as a “retcon” to remove Thompson from the show. She’s being clearly set up for a relationship with Ivanova from her first appearance, too.
Yeah, I clarified what I meant in regards to what I meant by the retcon, among other things, below.
I don’t think that’s the only way that scene makes sense, particularly because if the “for the future” recording was being created for precisely the scenario that actually occurred, there would need to be some explanation for why it was never *used*.
Another possibility is that the “for the future” recording was created to control Talia if she ever became a threat – for example, if Ironheart’s gift proved to be inconveniently powerful.
For what it’s worth, my sense is that the “Control” plot line was intentionally left open so that it could be adapted as a “trap door” for almost any of the main characters, if and when it was needed. I wouldn’t call it a retcon, but I’m not convinced that JMS had fully decided that would be part of Talia’s arc in S1. That just doesn’t seem consistent with my understanding of his process (which is that the big picture plan focused on certain key story points and outcomes, but was flexible about how to get to them). I know he has said that he had that possibility in mind as early as Midnight, but I don’t think he would have hesitated to play that card differently in other circumstances.
The interesting question to me is, was this episode part of the original plan for Lyta that got shifted over to Talia, then JMS had to come up with another way for Lyta to get super powers in S3, or was there a third storyline that we never got to see because of events?
That is an interesting question, and one I’ve debated with other fans over the years.
My take is that Talia’s plot with the Psi Corps in the first two seasons was the original plan for Lyta. It just makes the most sense given when the switch took place. While JMS brought Lyta back and grafted the rest of the “station telepath” storyline back onto her, he had to find ways to make Talia’s background (powers, connections to the resistance, etc.) part of Lyta’s character as well.
The only thing is, Andrea Thompson is a much more cool and refined actress than Patricia Tallman. If Lyta had essentially the same arc as Talia, it would’ve played differently because Tallman always comes across as scrappy and vulnerable. Slotting her into this episode, for instance, would accentuate what Keith was talking about with her relationship with Ironheart being inappropriate.
I agree that it probably would have played differently, but I think it would have also played into the idea that Lyta would have been an unwitting victim/pawn, something that might have come across even more with Tallman. After all, that was a big part of her arc as it is.
Yes, disputes with Andrea Thompson about screentime were documented by JMS and probably the ultimate reason that she left at the time she did, but the “Control” sleeper was also lurking in the background the whole time given the set up they had done in episodes in season 1 (The Quality of Mercy) and 2 (A Spider in the Web). So if Takashima is out of the picture, then who else was going to be Bureau 13’s Control if not Talia? For what it’s worth, JMS also pointed out the use of mirrors in dream imagery involving Talia that was supposed to hint at Talia’s reflection/opposite.
I’m not saying I 100% believe it wasn’t just a retcon plain and simple, but this is at least what JMS said about it at the time of season 2’s airing.
Honestly, I’ve never made a connection between Control and Talia. Control seems more like an early version of the EarthGov/PsyCorp/Shadow conspiracy that JMS jettisoned as the story developed.
I think the Control situation would have still been there, but not handled at all the same way.
The next part is super spoilery for future episodes, so anyone who doesn’t know the series shouldn’t read it!
OK, so, my rough idea on how it was originally going to play out: very soon, the Vorlons make a copy of Talia “for the future”. At some point, Talia would have been taken over by Control and the only solution would be to hand her over to the Vorlons. This would have been the way that Talia would have gotten involved with the Vorlons in roughly the same way that Lyta does. Talia’s future character arc would have then been nearly identical to Lyta’s.
Changing the revelation of Control into a manner for removing Thompson/Talia altogether is, in my mind, the retcon.
That makes sense and fits. I am glad that the dispute came to a head early enough that Lyta could be swapped back in for Talia.
I have thought that if they had been able to keep Lyta from the get go, Ironheart may well not have had to come aboard to upgrade Talia and Lyta would have been compelled to go to find the Vorlons because she touched Kosh. We will never know, but things worked as well as they could have with all the behind the scenes problems.
Oh, someone dangerous becomes energy and then sends some gift to the station/ship. i’m sure i haven’t seen this before. :D
Other than that, i was scratching my face during this episode a lot, but i was happy to see Koenig as someone not Chekov and i’m even happier to read that he would return. Seems that the episode is good in building the overall backstories and the story arch, but as a single episode it’s dumb AGAIN. I’m really hoping that the series will really get better as promised, because so far I totally understand why i abandoned it back in the time I first saw it in TV. :)
People forget how bad much of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season was. The ones seared into my mind are the “Wesley will be executed for violating the law on the planet of sexy white people” and “planet of combatative black people wants their king to marry Tasha Yar.” But there aren’t a lot of stand-outs there, either. B5 manages some decent B-plots and a handful of OK to good episodes in S1, but it’s a struggle to get to S2. S2 fluctuates, mainly due to writers, but JMS dials in much better and the performances improve.
Later S2 through S4 is fantastic. S5 has issues, though I like it better than most.
I didn’t forget, i’m regularly rewatching TNG. But somehow i find most episodes less irritating in TNG S1 and there at least the sets don’t look like a home project built in someone’s garage. I still appreciate B5 for the CGI though, even though that’s dated now, i was impressed by it at that time and i still like it now. But i forgot that how terrible the interiors looked – especially if we compare it with TNG.
I think a lot of people do remember how bad TNG’s first season was, as I often hear people wondering how TNG ever got renewed for a second season. What they forget, though, is how bad most other 1980s sci-fi television was, so that even TNG’s first season seemed good in comparison, which is why it was a hit. It’s the same with B5 — season 1 looks bad in retrospect, but by the standards of 1990s syndicated genre TV, it was above average.
There is a point where the series is hitting all cylinders and you look back on much of the first season and wonder how it’s even part of the same damn series.
looking forward to that :)
The B-Plot of this episode is one of the things that I remember from my own rewatch some 15-20 years ago. The analogy with the ant was really something to me at the time and stuck quite firmly in my memory. Glad to know it wasn’t just a one-off and it’s part of G’Kar larger complexity!
I’m always of two minds about this episode. The introduction of the Psi Cops, further exploration of the Psi Corps, and spotlight for Talia is all good on paper and very important to future developments. The introduction of Bester is awesome. The subplot with Catherine and G’Kar is pretty solid, and sets the tone for some of the character revelations to come.
But this episode needed someone with a lot of range to play Ironheart, and that is definitely not what they managed to get. Ironheart continually drags this episode down, beginning to end. I’m never convinced that he had enough chemistry with Talia to sell the connection they were supposed to have made, as much as Andrea Thompson tries to make it work.
I think I like this episode slightly more than our reviewer, but only slightly.
On the plus side, the Sigma 957 B-plot works pretty well. G’Kar starts to show some more depth and we get a good dose of sensawunda from the introduction of the (unnamed and at this point enigmatic) First Ones.
The A-story is…less good. Kelsey is irrelevant and dull. Ironheart is central and dull. The latter is worse than the former, I think. But at least we get Koenig’s Bester out of it. Even in this episode, which is far from his best outing as the character, he’s a great antagonist: competent and confident, but not infallible; creepy and occasionally even menacing, but also willing to try to cooperate when it aligns with his goals.
In rewatches, my biggest problem with this episods is that it ends up leaving a lot of loose ends and gaps in the bigger picture. Why do none of the non-humans take any notice of the (literally) station-shaking “mind quakes” or show any interest in what might have caused them? One might have expected the Vorlons, in particular, to have some idea of what was happening and some opinions about it.
The episode sets up a possibility of some kind of transcendent post-human state at the same time that it introduces the existence of beings billions of years older and vastly more powerful than humans. One could be forgiven for thinking those two ideas might relate to each other. But they never do because, aside from a couple of passing references, everybody seems to forget all about Ironheart after this episode ends.
We know in hindsight that JMS originally had a different plan for Talia Winters, but he had to activate one of his “trapdoors” when Andrea Thompson left the show. (So the Doylian answer to Keith’s question about why Ironheart doesn’t seem to notice the embedded “Control” personality is that, when JMS was writing this script, she didn’t have it. That plotline was originally planned for a different character.)
In the alternate original plan, there would have presumably been more obvious consequences of Ironheart’s “gift”. That wouldn’t have made William Allen Young’s performance any more compelling in this episode, but it at least would have made it feel more connected and necessary. Oh well, spilled milk.
I will, however, offer a meager defence of the script: as I recall, Sinclair does call Ironheart out for more than just the murder of the chief researcher. Ironheart protests that the other deaths were accidental – a result of his inability to control his transformation. The on-screen evidence doesn’t directly refute that or confirm it. We mostly have Ironheart’s account vs. Bester’s as to what actually happened.
I will concede that Sinclair’s decision to let Ironheart go seems questionable. It’s understandable that he might just want an expedient way to get a problem off the station before it gets any worse, but amoral pragmatist isn’t his usual character mode.
Agreed that the high point here is the debut of Bester. Koenig was a revelation here — I never knew what a good actor he was until he no longer had the Russian accent getting in the way. I found that in this role, he reminded me somewhat of Peter Lorre, which is high praise. G’Kar’s part in the story is also a high point.
The Ironheart story is very much a sci-fi cliche, a rehash of an idea from Star Trek‘s second pilot and other similar plots. This was one of the episodes that crystallized my dislike for SF authors’ use of psionic powers as an excuse to ignore the laws of physics, to throw pure magic into a science fiction story and claim that just slapping the word “psionic” on it somehow makes it justified. Psi is too often used that way as a story cheat, a “get out of explanations free” card as well as a “get out of obeying conservation of energy free” card.
And yes, Ironheart’s killings were totally gratuitous. If he had the kind of atomic-level control he talked about, why didn’t he just disintegrate Kelsey’s gun, or make her fall asleep? Why not just make the Black Omega Starfuries’ engines conk out instead of disintegrating them? Maybe the idea was to suggest that he really was unstable, but it doesn’t fit with the episode’s effort to make him sympathetic. (Also, someone should’ve told the actor how to pronounce “serotonin.” He says it like “sah-rotten-in.”)
There are other logic issues too. If they knew Ironheart’s ship was stolen, why didn’t they impound it rather than letting him leave in it? (I guess Sinclair could’ve de-impounded it?) Why didn’t station sensors pick up that first mindquake and localize it, and why didn’t the Psi Cops sense the mental energy surge?
In Catherine’s plot, we have the cliche of a spaceship “falling out of orbit” when it loses power, which is nonsense; the Moon doesn’t have engines. Orbit is an unpowered trajectory, unless it’s a forced orbit using engines to hover or fly over a particular area, but there’s no indication Catherine was doing that. But the bigger problem is the jump gate. If Sigma-957 is this super-remote planet, why is there a jump gate within 2 hours’ sublight travel of it? JMS explained on Usenet that Explorer-class ships would drop jump gates in sectors that looked like they had potentially interesting planets, but that doesn’t work, because a “sector” would presumably contain multiple star systems light-years apart, so it would take decades or centuries for a sublight ship with remotely realistic acceleration and fuel reserves to reach any of them.
I’m also getting really tired of the cheap, ugly sets. Catherine’s cockpit looks like it was slapped together from vent covers and hardware store parts. And most of the rooms on the station are so gray and gloomy.
I was impressed by Andrea Thompson’s acting in her monologue about how telepaths make love. It’s the first time she’s impressed me.
Koenig had earlier shown he could channel Peter Lorre in his portrayal of Mirror-Chekhov in TOS.
The “deorbiting” thing is clearly a case of “other sci-fi does this and I don’t understand the physics, so I’ll use it, too.” But the jump gate is easier to explain if you recall that other races (not just Earth) construct them and that the technology originated with the Vorlons. If this planet was important to the Walkers, that may have been enough to lead the Vorlons to construct a gate here; if it’s part of the network but that old, this could qualify as a “remote” system in that regard. Narn claims that region of space now, but that may not mean they built the gate.
Of course, it’s just as likely that the closeness of jump gates to points of interest is that sci-fi TV discomfort with travel times in weeks or months. Even the Expanse TV show vastly shortens travel times when compared to the books, and inexplicably so as I can’t see how that choice changes the stories. At least the B5 jumpgate being so close has some justification in terms of making commerce slightly easier; it’s unclear whether jumpgates have to orbit something or have to occupy Lagrange points.
That’s a plausible explanation, but the problem is that JMS personally explained it on Usenet as a gate left by an Earth Explorer-class ship. So that’s another illustration of how JMS evidently didn’t know enough actual science to be a good judge of what was plausible.
According to the Lurker’s Guide he also said the Narns built that gate:
But it wouldn’t be the first time JMS contradicted himself. (He contains multitudes.)
The Narn building the gate fits in best with this episode. Catherine has to get Narn permission because this is Narn space. The Narn were trying to expand their territory. The idea that until the gate is built you can’t know what is on the other side tracks, you can’t easily get there without the gate. It’s not made clear if the Walkers and others like them pass through frequently i.e. it’s Times Square, or only at certain times i.e. a rarely used State Route. In any case, you could never know when one of them was going to show up and you are dead in the water when they do. So you back slowly out of the sector and build another gate somewhere else.
The cliche of Sakai’s plight was slightly less egregious here, since the First Ones’ “bump” of Sakai’s craft could have altered its orbit in addition to damaging power and control systems.
Of course, it would have been trivial for the script to actually have a line to that effect.
Agreed that the decaying-orbit trope is a bad look for a show that claimed to aim for more scientific accuracy. The script could have easily put her in mortal peril by having the life-support systems fail in two hours, which would have left her just as dead as a crash.
Another possibility is that effective planetary surveying requires a sufficiently low altitude that the ship was already experiencing significant atmospheric drag. That’s how MIR and Skylab were deorbited, after all. But agreed that there is nothing on screen to indicate that.
Worse still, the script has the on-board computer referring to entering the atmosphere as a discrete event, followed by a cut to a VFX shot showing an immediately visible wake around the lowest extremities of the ship. It’s as if the atmosphere is a layer of jelly with a skin that can be pieced. That’s not how any of this works and, as you say, it could easily have been avoided.
I had assumed that the Walker had in fact nudged Catherine’s ship out of orbit, because otherwise it doesn’t make sense. But yeah, a line about it would have clarified the situation.
Yeah, it wasn’t explicit, but the implication was that the power loss was the reason for the orbit decay. It’s such a common cliche that I think it was probably the intent — particularly given the other hoary Trek/sci-fi cliches we’ve seen so far in the series, “psychic human evolving into godlike superbeing” very much included.
Besides, a ship being “bumped” out of orbit is extremely unlikely. A ship in orbit is moving rapidly enough sideways to cancel out gravity pulling it inward, so that it races around the planet in a loop. The only way to get it to fall out of orbit is to apply a force directly opposite its orbital motion, thus slowing it down and letting gravity pull it inward. Knocking it in any other direction will only change the eccentricity or inclination of its orbit. TV writers always get this wrong — the peril to a ship losing power is not that it will be unable to maintain orbit, but that it will be unable to leave orbit and will be trapped up there forever. As you say, a more plausible peril would’ve been her life support failing.
One of the odder things about this episode is how it’s setting up storylines that eventually get abandoned when O’Hare and Thompson leave the show, but if you’ve watched the full series you can see exactly what JMS would’ve done.
Do we know why Sakai had to be dropped when Sinclair left in real world terms? I suppose it would have been difficult to manufacture an intimate connection with Sheridan, especially given how quickly the Delenn relationship kicks in, but it seems a shame they wasted that.
I don’t see how that could’ve been made to work. You’re right that there wouldn’t have been time to establish a close bond between them. We know they both saw other people in their times apart before the series, but it would be a huge coincidence if Sakai had a previous relationship with both B5 commanders. It simply made more sense to swap out both the commander and his love interest at the same time.
Although it’s unfortunate that it ended up being the second time an Asian-American cast member on B5 was replaced by a white performer.
Yes, I think that’s what prompted me to wonder if Catherine could have been kept around. It would have definitely required some serious plot gymnastics to get to the end of season 3.
I had a hard time not seeing Chekov. No fault to Koenig or the writers. It just decades of seeing Chekov and seeing the genuinely warm person Koenig seems to be. Definitely happy to see G’kar get development. I admit I am partial to the Narn and have a hard time seeing them as the bad guys. The Centauri on the other hand… I’d be happy to see Mollari take a wrong turn out of an airlock… :)
Alfred Bester, the kind of villain we all love to hate 😃
Up until I first saw this episode, I identified Walter Koenig only as Ensign Chekhov from TOS, and what’s more I never heard his actual voice, since I watched TOS in the dubbed version, so encountering him as Bester on B5 was a double revelation, that of a delightfully evil, layered character and that of an actor who could deliver many shades of meaning through the skilled use of inflection.
I said last week that I needed to adjust my expectations going forward. Perhaps I’ve adjusted them too low, because I thought this episode was alright.
Sure, the main plot was something that I’ve seen or read plenty of times before, but I thought they could have done a worse job with it, and while I agree that Waterman was awful, I thought Young was okay, especially early on. The fact that he’s willing to kill anyone who gets in his way means he’s not as sympathetic as he was obviously intended to be, but I’m not sure how much control he was supposed to have over his powers (or his sanity), at least before he turned into…whatever he turned into, so I don’t hold him entirely responsible for his actions.
As for the secondary plot, there wasn’t much to it other than Catherine being told not to go somewhere, going there anyway, seeing something she obviously wasn’t supposed to see, then coming home. However, it was still kind of intriguing, and I loved that final scene with G’Kar.
Edit: Plus Evil Chekov! How cool is that?
It’s a very difficult part to play. What’s it like to be a telepath, first off? Then, what’s it like to be an instructor/P10? Then you’re an instructor who had an affair with a student (just the once?). And got experimented upon and acquired a massive power increase. And is turning into a transhuman energy being, but is unstable in the meantime. And you have to play that transformation in about half an hour of screentime, while establishing the character’s past as well as what’s happening to him.
And you have about a week to work it out.
I’m having trouble imagining performers who could pull this off. Maybe Peter Capaldi? You need someone who can come across as emotionally unstable at one moment and godlike at another. And while I’m all for race-blind casting in parts that’d otherwise be “default white,” Ironheart’s violent instability is hard enough to perform without adding any racial baggage to it.
Do we ever see anything about telekinetics again? I’m inclined to write most of this off as early series weirdness.
Were viewers supposed to think G’kar was setting up an ambush when he called in the fighters? It would fit with his portrayal so far.
I remember thinking something along those lines when I first saw this episode, that G’Kar and the Narns had something to hide. That the region around the planet being unchancy (part of B5’s mythology) I considered, if only because of X-Files running at the same time.
There’s a little bit about it later on, but nothing crucial to my recollection.
Were viewers supposed to think G’kar was setting up an ambush — I would imagine so, it’s certainly what my husband thought, and this is his first viewing of the show.
A mostly standalone episode that manages to have both its A- and B-plots provide major storylines for the rest of the series is kind of a neat trick.
Young’s and Waterman’s performances provide most of the cringe, but the Psi-Cops’ melodramatic Scan Dance around Talia also stands out. I’m glad that method of TP scanning was not carried forward into later episodes.
Bester’s reaction when Sinclair wants answers about what Ironheart is (or is becoming) was interesting to watch: Koenig, using merely a few facial expressions and shift in intonation, managed to convey how little he actually cared about Ironheart or the station, and thus a key aspect of Bester’s character: he is utterly transactional, caring only to advance (his interpretation of) the best interests of the Psi Corps.
Ironheart’s final exit is visually very similar to the First One’s exit just a few scenes earlier. I wonder if that was intentional or merely a bit of ‘house style’ on the part of the VFX team. Even if the latter, it does serve as a bit of foreshadowing; at the very least, several future episodes will reference it.
As a first-time viewer, I was under the impression that Ironheart’s whole transformation story was supposed to tie in thematically with whatever it was that Catherine encountered, even if the plots never actually connected, so I would side with it being intentional.
The moment that impressed me in Koenig’s performance was when he was giving Garibaldi that challenging “come at me anytime” smile, and then when Garibaldi left, his face just fell into neutral, like he was an emotionless, possibly psychopathic man putting on a purely surface show of emotion.
Keith, you know a lot more about the industry than I do, so are better able to comment on this. But I can’t help but wonder why there were so many poor performances in this episode. If it was just one actor, that would be one thing. But you specifically mentioned five (the four in “Welcome Aboard” and then William Allen Young), so there must be something more. Is it the casting department (casting all of the roles at the very last minute or not able to attract quality talent), a production process that did not allow the actors to get into the roles (handed a script at 9 a.m. and in front of a camera an hour later), poor directional work by Bruce Seth Green (who would only direct two more episodes in Season One and no more after that), or even JMS rewriting the script that prevented the actors from truly doing their jobs. There must be a reason.
It took me two or three watches of this episode to even understand what was supposed to be happening with the B-plot. What JMS was trying to do with it failed that spectacularly.
When Sakai talks to G’Kar and he warns her away from Sigma 957, we are supposed to be thinking of him as a villain twirling the mustache he hasn’t got, spinning a Scooby-Doo-esque ghost story to try to scare her away from the valuable resources. And then we are meant to assume that his call home is hostile in intent, that he is calling in an attack on her.
And then, Surprise! he wasn’t attacking her, he was rescuing.
Two big problems prevented this from working as intended:
B5 certainly has plenty of twists, but I don’t think it usually handles them in the sci-fi TV way. I don’t think the episode wants us to think G’Kar’s sent killers after Sakai and then get surprise twisted later, it wants us to see G’Kar’s actions as ambiguous but potentially threatening to build tension early, and then resolve the tension later. That’s especially thematic given this episode is also about the uncertain and potentially threatening Ironheart as well as the unknown and potentially threatening Walkers and the unknown and potentially threatening PsiCops.
The writing can’t quite pull that off, and I’m uncertain JMS understood the acting process well enough yet to understand that actors usually need more to go on if they’re playing a one-shot part besides “potentially threatening”.
This wasn’t exactly JMS’ first attempts to write scripts. He had an established history in both live-action and animated series before he worked on B5.
That said, it’s been a while since I read the script for this episode, so I can’t say for sure how much direction/guidance was given from JMS on the page.
except, besides the last episode, most of the others ones had had G’kar being cartoonishly evil, so it’s just an indication of his nature, also a key part is that not everyone on the station is as they seem. we have seen that already but it’s just another indication of that.
This was one of those episodes that got friends to look forward on how these characters and plots would develop later on. Ivanova is god.
The introduction of Bester was definitely one of this episode’s high points. Cold, focused and interested only in whatever is going to benefit the Corps and/or himself. Not someone you’d want poking around in your mind. And as Garibaldi says, he looks at non-telepaths as if they were bugs.
The parallel with G’Kar’s comments about the ants was a nice touch.
I liked how they all sort of fitted together, the idea that the Psi Corps see themselves as above humanity, and the fact that Ironheart is so far above them, and the possibility that what Catherine encountered may be far above even what Ironheart became.
Much like last week’s Parliament of Dreams, this episode made me go “Huh, this is going in a direction I didn’t expect”. Now, that wasn’t because of the Ironheart story, the acting was bad, there wasn’t any chemistry between Ironheart and Talia and, frankly, Talia’s description of sex between telepaths wasn’t something I ever needed to hear.
It’s the G’Kar part of the story that caught my attention. We had seen glimpses that there was more to him than mustache twirling villain, but this brought it fully out. Yes, at first I thought G’Kar was setting up an ambush for Catherine, and I was interested that he had intended to rescue her. I was really impressed by his speech about the us vs the Walkers and the ants vs us. I have always loved that the reason he gave for helping her was because “it seemed like a good idea at the time” and that he noted that this is why most people do things. In a very subtle way, this is how Londo gets into such trouble. accepting help getting the Eye back seems like a good idea, at the time.
Of course, the other part of his speech, that no one on Babylon 5 is exactly what they seem, is, in many ways the mission statement for the show. Katsulas gives this entire scene a sense of gravity and makes it stand out while letting us all know that maybe this show isn’t exactly what we first thought as well.
“Talia’s description of sex between telepaths wasn’t something I ever needed to hear.”
As I’ve commented elsewhere, this show is a lot hornier than I expected it to be. However, I didn’t really mind that scene. It was at least more interesting than a lot of the other horny scenes.
Except there’s nothing in Talia’s monologue that’s really about sex, the physical act of it, aside from her initial question to Sinclair. It’s about two minds joining and reflecting each other. What she’s describing is more like a Vulcan mind meld.
That’s why I found it interesting. I mean, I think it is about sex, because it’s literally describing what it’s like when two telepaths make love, but it’s not about physical intimacy so much as mental intimacy, which absolutely makes sense. It thought it was a nifty bit of dialogue.
Yes, that’s what I mean. Obviously she is discussing sex between telepaths, but she doesn’t focus on any physical aspects of the act, so there’s nothing objectionable about her monologue. If anything, it’s written in a way that even people prudish about sex might approve of, since it focuses on the romantic notion of the uniting of souls, as it were, and leaves the bodies out of it.
I mean, I have seen more graphic discussions in fiction of sex between telepaths, involving the partners directly feeling the sensations they induce in one another and generating a feedback loop of pleasure, that sort of thing. This monologue was quite chaste in comparison.
A VERY interesting line that foreshadowed a future storyline.
Jason: “Telepaths make the ultimate blackmailers.” Which is exactly what happened in Season 5’s “In The Kingdom Of The Blind” when Bryon tried blackmailing Sheridan and everyone else.
Which goes over about as well as you might expect.
Like most people have said about this episode, the stand outs were Koenig as Bester, which gets better when he constantly come back, and the b plot with Sakai and G’kar. Unfortunately, Ironheart’s actor just does not do a good job he, but I will keep coming back to this episode for G’kar’s ant speech. it’s such a good analogy
I seem to be the only one who found William Allen Young unobjectionable as Jason Ironheart. Okay, his performance was a bit one-note and formal, but he had a quality about him that fit the nature of his character, a rarefied being a step removed from humanity. He didn’t really establish the character’s human connection with Talia, but I think that was kind of the point, that he was growing away from that connection. It’s not dissimilar to how Gary Lockwood played Gary Mitchell in the later acts of the second Trek pilot, though at least we got to see Lockwood playing the more friendly and human side of the character before he became godlike and distant. (Well, by the standards of an era where a roguish womanizer was seen as endearing and fun rather than creepy — cf. Michael Garibaldi.)
I also had no objections to Felicity Waterman as Kelsey, but that’s probably because I found her really beautiful and was paying more attention to her eyes than her performance.
Really, though, I was always of the opinion that B5 tended to cast a lower tier of acting talent than the Trek shows did, with exceptions like Jurasik, Katsulas, Furlan, Koenig, and the various big-name guest stars they landed. I guess mediocre performances don’t stand out from the pack in this show.
In terms of their overall affect, i somewhat agree that Young and Waterman felt OK; I can see why they were cast. But they seemed to convey the character points best when not speaking, which is kind of a problem. Too often they seemed (to me) to be delivering lines—or, worse, Dramatically Delivering Lines–rather than inhabiting characters. The contrast with Koenig’s ability to more naturally work with a pedestrian script was stark.
I’ve noticed in revisiting older TV shows over the last few years, that, generally speaking, through the mid-1980s there was usually a fairly steep drop-off in acting quality between opening-credits actors and guest stars (except of course when the guest star was already an established “name”). To me the trend started shifting in the late ’80s, but to no one’s surprise it showed up earlier in higher-profile, bigger-budget shows like ST. The mediocre performances throughout these first few episodes were par for the course for a low-budget show in 1993-94; but as others have commented regarding various aspects of B5, it can be jarring to see it when you know that much better work exists in its later seasons.
That’s a good point. I didn’t factor in the fact that Ironheart was slowly mutating into something different and beyond human. That might have influenced the actor’s performance. It’s well known that Straczynski B5 scripts are packed with little details to guide the actors.
I said the same thing about Young in my initial comment. I don’t think he deserved an Emmy or anything, but he was okay. I certainly didn’t think he was “wooden.”
It’s a been a while since I watched B5 but I’m pretty sure the “Talia is now a telekinetic” plotline was never referenced again and that’s something that shouldn’t have happened.
Without getting into spoilers, just in case, there is reason to think that it would have come up as an important plot point had Talia stayed on the show. It was referenced in at least one future episode, so it was something we were supposed to keep an eye on, but Talia was off the board before that thread could be capitalized upon.
I believe there’s one episode that shows her practicing, but that’s it for the TK part. I believe the “modified by Ironheart” part comes up in at least three episodes and is plot-vital once. So this episode isn’t a “throw-away” episode.
Note the Black Omega insignia on the Starfuries.
Macaulay Bruton, who portrays the security guard who first meets Bester and Kelsey, makes a couple more key appearances in Season 1. In And the Sky Full of Stars, he discretely obstructs the investigation of Sinclair’s disappearance. In Chrysalis, he shoots Garibaldi in the back.
Even deadly telekinetic attacks can’t penetrate Plot Armor.
Not sure Narn can be classified as hominids, as it’s explicitly indicated that they’re marsupials.
Whether Felicity Waterman or Don Dowe has the worse performance I suspect would depend on whose accent grates on your eardrums more. For me, hands down it’s Kelsey, She Wolf of the Psi Corps.
Now for some riffable moments:
(during the first mindquake)
Diarrhea is like a storm raging inside you
“Do you know what it’s like when telepaths make love, Commander?”
Profoundly disappointing.
“The Psi Corps is dedicated to one thing, Commander.”
Waffles.
Just realized something. This was filmed before Star Trek Generations. Koenig was still playing Chekov during that period.
You don’t get the impression from this episode that Bester is going to become such a memorable recurring antagonist (or just how much he’ll become a thorn on Garibaldi’s side). Koenig certainly makes a good first impression, but the script itself doesn’t do a lot to develop our two Psi Cops beyond creepy/attack dog mode. This is much more focused on Talia and Ironheart. And it comes with its own set of problems because of that.
Being the first real look the into Psi Corps, it feels as if Straczynski wanted to make a point that telepaths are inherently dangerous because of their abilities (even when they are well-meaning people), thus justifying the need for the Psi Corps to regulate teep behavior, while at the same time showing us that the Corps itself is slowly but clearly becoming a fascist organization. In short, he wanted to keep things real and complicated, a morally grey world so to speak.
That could have worked had Ironheart been played by a better actor. Sadly, we get…. not that. A better actor might have been able to sell the idea that Ironheart had to murder people in order to be free of the Corps. But neither him nor the script do enough of the legwork to justify the context (EDIT: that might have been intentional, given Ironheart’s current state of ‘evolving’ past humanity).
I have zero problems with the Talia/Ironheart relationship. Given what we later learn about Psi Corps regulations, it actually makes a lot of sense. Psi Corps telepaths don’t have the freedom to choose their relationships. Any potential mates are selected by the Corps itself, based on genetic testing. Marriages are arrangements. Telepaths are not allowed to choose the people they fall in love with. We can infer from that that both Ironheart and Talia were being groomed to be with other people. And it’s not hard going from a professional relationship – as they were – to a personal one. They should follow their heart’s calling. And Thompson certainly sells that pain.
One detail I adore is Ivanova offering Talia that glass of water. The first real indication that something might develop between them. And I always laugh out loud during the elevator scene – it’s pretty clear by this point that Garibaldi is an idiot in situations like that (like his “favorite thing in the universe” speech during “Midnight”).
Also enjoyed Sakai’s first independent storyline quite a bit. She was clearly meant to become a bigger player, had Sinclair not been replaced. Love the Sigma 957 plot, and out first look into the First Ones. G’Kar’s speech is one of his better ones – it says a lot about people and never to expect things to be so simple (which also plays into Stracynski’s intent of keeping things real and complicated).
I don’t think I agree about G’Kar’s speech. It’s fine to write a show where nobody is quite who they seem, but if you have a character actually come out and say “nobody here is quite who they seem,” that’s really hamhanded. It’s not nuanced if you loudly announce how nuanced you are. It would’ve been better to just let G’Kar’s unexpected actions make the point implicitly, to show rather than tell.
That’s easily said from the perspective of 30 years later, after B5 completed its mission as a successful, groundbreaking show. It’s also the kind of thing you can leave unsaid in the subtext of a single novel that is being published. But at the time Mind War aired, there were no guarantees that there would be more seasons. If all everyone saw to this point was G’Kar being a one-note villain, they would just write him off, and become that much less interested in the show as a whole. It would just be like all the other shows on the air in the early 90’s. You can be as nuanced is you want, but at some point you have to meet the audience halfway and spell some things out (something that Twin Peaks never did, for example, and suffered for it) if you want that audience (who might not be tuning in every single week, might not have a VCR or be inclined to use it) to come back often enough to catch the references and see the bigger picture.
And for what it’s worth, “No one here is exactly what he appears,” was considered an important enough line summarizing the characters that it was put into the collage of dialogue from the first four seasons featured in the opening titles of Season 5.
I think you misunderstand what I’m saying. I don’t object to the plot of G’Kar’s motives turning out to be less villainous than we were led to suspect. On the contrary, I’m saying that plot was more than adequate to make the point that no one was what they seemed without having G’Kar underline it by literally saying “No one is what they seem” in as many words. That speech feels less like Ambassador G’Kar saying something to Catherine Sakai and more like J. Michael Straczynski using G’Kar as a puppet to announce his mission statement to the audience. It implies a lack of trust in the audience’s ability to understand the point of the story without having it typed out in big bold capital letters.
It’s a basic writing rule: show, don’t tell. The story already showed us that we shouldn’t trust our first impressions of people, so it was gilding the lily to have G’Kar actually tell us not to trust our first impressions of people. It was like JMS was still stuck in the habits he learned on He-Man where every episode ended with a tag scene of the heroes restating the episode’s moral to the kids in the audience.
The episode, while it did set up some long-term story arcs was just kind of meh for me.
While he is best known for Star Wars, Bester is the role that Koenig was born to play.
I dunno, he was pretty good as an Eagle pilot in Space:1999.
But he really wowed them with his role as a Shocker heavy on Kamen Rider.
That’s the one with the sandworms, right?
Known for Star… what now?
“Ah, yes, the Force. It was inwented in Russia!”
So I have never thought that Ironheart’s not catching on to Talia’s buried personality was a plothole. Telepaths are rigorously indoctrinated and trained to not just go joy-riding in other people’s thoughts. He has trouble controlling his powers, but when he is in control, he still defaults to respecting people’s privacy. He doesn’t consider Talia a threat, so he doesn’t go digging through her mind.
His destruction of the Black Omega squadron did strike me initially as an issue, but later knowledge alleviated that. Black Omega pilots are Psi-Cops. They would be able to shut him down the same way Bester and Kelsey were planning to, so eliminating them to remain free makes sense, although again, that is mostly in hindsight. On a first viewing, you don’t even know that they are associated with the Psi-Corps.
Garibaldi’s creep in the elevator scene is just cringe-inducing at this point. It is only tolerably watchable now if you are aware of the behind the scenes relationship of Doyle and Thompson. That they effectively made this a running gag is one of those things that just makes me hang my head watching it now.
And speaking of less than admirable parts of the show, this episode begins the tradition of Talia being abused or violated in some way when she gets an episode focus. Here it’s the deep scan by Bester and his partner (and I suppose the relationship with her instructor, which they will do again). It will be an uncomfortable trend with her character that she winds up being victimized in some way all too often, up to and including her final appearance.
One last point, you might want to keep an eye on the security guard who meets and then escorts Bester and his partner to Sinclair.
Odd. Once I learned that Psi Corps was after him, I always just assumed the Black Omega pilots were sent by Psi Corps, that that was why they were trying to stop him and why he killed them.
But Bester and Kelsey did go digging through Talia’s mind, so why didn’t they spot the sleeper personality?
As for the fighter squadron, I think he said he loses control if his concentration is broken, so that his powers ran amok and he vaporized them by accident. Although that may have been a lie, given that he certainly seemed to make a conscious choice to vaporize Kelsey.
“On a first viewing, you don’t even know that they are associated with the Psi-Corps.”
I dunno… They’re all-black fighters with a prominent Greek-letter logo, and a few minutes later we meet a couple of enforcers in all-black uniforms and a Greek letter (albeit a different one) in their name. And both are pursuing the same guy. It stands to reason that they’re connected.
In hindsight, seeing how connected Bester was to the corruption of EarthForce, and how he has a powerful influence in Psicorps, it makes sense that he would know about the second personality. He is also a secretive man, and wouldn’t go and reveal to anyone if he didn’t know about it and discovered it here. he would keep it in his back pocket
“But Bester and Kelsey did go digging through Talia’s mind.”
Yes, but the question was why Ironheart didn’t clue in to the buried personality, not (as Keith has already noted) why the Psi-cops, who are on the same team as the people who put it there, didn’t reveal their other secret project to people they didn’t want to reveal their secret projects to, even if their non-superpowered scan was enough to find it in the first place.
And yes, the hints that Black Omega and the Psi-cops are related are there, and obvious in retrospect, but I will admit that I don’t always pay that close attention to such details or properly link them up in my first viewings.
Assuming Bester and Kelsey were not already aware of the sleeper personality, why would they do anything to reveal it if they discovered it in situ?
My belief is that that no one on B5 is exactly what they appear to be is an extremely important line, as this is demonstrated through the series. G’Kar and Mollinari are the index cases, but JMS seems to take great delight in setting up expectations and then kicking them to flinders. The later Puppet Masters area great example, or his (fulfilled) vow to never have a cute child appear without killing them by the end of the ep. Everyone’s character arc brings them somewhere far, far from their start.
Except Sinclair, by the way. Sinclair is exactly who he is right to the end.
The existence of Psi Corps has always disturbed me. The Earth Alliance is described as a democratic republic, with free elections and a free press, probably a kind of USA projected into the future and not an authoritarian state like todays Russia (at least at the beginning of the series). I find it difficult to understand why a fascist organisation like the Psi Corps exists in such a free society (with the black uniforms of the Psi Cops as an obvious allusion to the SS). How can there be laws in such a society according to which people gifted with special abilities are completely deprived of their freedom to live their lives according to their own wishes? In which they are either forced to join an authoritarian organisation and submit unconditionally to its rules, go to prison for life or take obviously harmful drugs to suppress their telepathic abilities? This is so clearly contrary to any charter of fundamental human rights that one wonders how it is supposed to fit in with a free and democratic society.
Apart from that, Walter Koenigs portrayal of Bester was always one of the highlights of Babylon 5 for me.
Even a democratic republic can have fascist elements within it. That’s how fascism takes hold — not all at once, but a little at a time, with society rationalizing a limited surrender of rights as necessary for security, which opens the door for surrendering a little more, and so on. B5 is a saga about the rise of fascism, so it’s no surprise that that gradual growth of oppressive institutions is already well underway at the start of the series.
And really, for most of American history, the fundamental right to live according to your wishes has historically been granted to certain groups while being denied to others on the basis of sex, race, orientation, religion, etc. So it’s hardly unrealistic for a nominally democratic society to deny rights to a minority group.
The origin of Psi Corps is probably a lot like how mutant registration went in the Marvel Universe — politicians playing on people’s fears of those who had strange powers, convincing voters they were a threat that had to be contained, that the danger they posed to others justified putting limits on their rights.