Babylon 5

I like Byron, actually. He was justified in his actions -- he was a revolutionary fighting for his people against a power structure that was profoundly oppressive against Human telepaths (except for the small elite of telepaths at the top of the Psi Corps, who were just as abusive to their fellows teeps under them as non-telepathic Humans were).

Sheridan had a major blind spot for his own anti-telepath bigotry, and the Interstellar Alliance should have interceded to find Byron an uninhabited planet for his folks to establish their own world on, as they wanted. Especially given the decisive role telepaths played in both fighting the Shadows and in fighting against Clarke's forces.

 

He doesn't know how blackmail works.

"I have your secrets, that you'll kill me to keep secret, so I'm going to have a hunger strike until we die of starvation. By the way, POLICE I MINDRAPED ALL THE POLITICIANS!!!!! All of them, so even though I have the Alliance by their short and curlies (Do MInbari have bone crests around their junk?) you should come down below and arrest me, or kill me, or try to kill me before I commit suicide before anyone pays off our blackmail demands, that we did not actually formalize with anyone specific, because we are going the sympathy route, hoping some one will give us a planet, as we skip meals between our 14 hour long orgies, and then kill ourselves with fire."

Way before all of that, Garibaldi said Byron was a Martyr.

That means that Byron's plan was always to inspire through suicide.

He was never going to save the day himself.

Did Byron know?

Was he surprised when he killed himself?

Was he so dumb that he couldn't see where all this was going?

Then there's Lyta.

She sold sperm to the Narn.

Endless barrels of jizz.

And they gave her a planet.

Well, an explorer class spaceship, but she wasted a lot of money on the telepath war, because she hadn't figured out what an asshole Byron was.

Lyta could have built their colony, and lived happily every after, if she just ignored her dead lovers very beautiful hair. Instead she blew up at just the right moment to make humanity relent and let her people go.

Do you think she was a literal bomb?

Concussive force?

Or could she put a "command" into the heads of a billion people at the same moment that they could not ignore. Whether that thought was "free us" or "kill yourself" really depends on what sort of day Lyta was having.

 

I suspect Lyta did not have complete individual volition from the moment she was modified by the Vorlons. After they went beyond the Rim, she was beyond their control but perhaps behavioural pathways programmed into her by the Vorlons could be involuntarily triggered by certain external events. Lyta was a Vorlon puppet - like Anna Sheridan was a Shadow puppet (sic) - and previously she was a Psi Corps conditioned puppet. Her actions were rarely her own. The same was true of Talia Winters, Al Bester, and other members of the Corps. Byron Gordon and Jason Ironheart (and the mundane Michael Garibaldi) broke free to some extent but they were always wrestling with their prior conditioning. Perhaps Byron and his followers could have instead attempted an Ironheart-like transcendence to avoid having to deal with a physical reality that just would not accept them? I find it difficult to watch those parts of season five so I am undecided if that would have been better.

 

In the collectable card game Jason could eventually be as high as P20, and Vorlon enhanced Lyta was only a P15.

The Vorlon enhancement card only raised any telepath of any level to P15.

Wait... (google)

"The characters Psi is raised to 15"

if you put a Volon enhancement on Michael Iron Hart... Does he lose 5 psi?

What does the game know any way?

They say Byron is only a p11, and how the frakk do you talk 40 people into setting themselves on fire, if you only have a diplomacy of 2?

 

If Byron's group were so "in tune" that they could effectively form a gestalt entity, like the children did in A C Clarke's Childhood's End, perhaps they would have a much higher Psi rating than Jason Ironheart even. This entity could then shuffle off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the bleedin' choir invisible. This is an ex-cult!

 

If that was possible, the Psi Corp would have looked into it.

Either it doesn't work, or if it works, there's apotheosis, and the Psi Corp has less drones to play with so they put shit in play to stop it from happening.

Telepaths were working together to take down Shadow Vessels?

But that didn't turn any of them into a group mind...

Although Minbari telepaths seem almost autistic.

The centaur emperors quadruplet wives did have a hind hive of sorts?

But it's more likely that they were made rather than born, if every Emperor always has a set of age appropriate quadruplet telepaths that don't mind having sex with him. I doubt the wives would carry over to the next Emperor.

 

I'm not sure Psi Corps even consider telepaths melding their psi abilities a danger when they believe that conditioning is sufficient to prevent that. When teeps go rogue though, it does seem to be a possibility. Lyta had sufficient modifications that she could turn herself into a bomb - she just needed the right trigger. Perhaps she could alter matter at the subatomic level - maybe by neutralising the charge on subatomic particles or converting part of her mass to antimatter.

Perhaps the Centauri emperor's telepath wives were immolated along with his body in a ritual similar to sati also known as suttee. The behaviours and rituals of alien races could disgust humans as could our rituals and behaviour disgust them.

 

Probability, even. We saw it happen in "A Race Through Dark Places" when Talia was able to help the 'underground railroad' teeps feed a false scene to Bester. One wonders if that was discovered when they dis...examined Talia after her new personality came out.

 

I'm not sure how or why Talia was able to aid Jason Ironheart and the renegade teeps, given that she was basically planted on Babylon 5 by Psi Corps in the first place. Of course, not everything was going to add up when Andrea Thompson decided she wanted to leave the series and a method was devised for her to do this. Given her actions, Lyta revealing Talia as a mole didn't really sit right.

 

Talia is unaware of the implanted personality. She can do her thing quite separate from the mole. I image some of that recurring murderer in her head imagery in Deathwalker was part of the implanted personality. Kosh was aware of it and had a back up copy of Talia's better self so to speak. I liked the idea. It fit right into the creepy psi corp methods.

 

I would have thought Bester or other Psi Corps operatives would have scanned Talia at every available opportunity to see what her non-programmed persona was getting up to - it could be valuable intel, especially if it related to rogue telepaths. So, in my book, the contrivance for removing Talia from the scene seemed a bit, well, contrived. I'll just handwave it away as Psi Corps perhaps being over bureaucratic and not very efficient.

 

Wouldn't she know immediately if she was being scanned?

 

My head canon is that either erasing her memory selectively would be part of the protocol for debriefing her or that her personality was split into an undercover mode personality with a Psi Corps loyal personality observing but not intervening and a Psi Corps loyal personality only that could report on what the other personality had been up to when this was required.

 

That seems short for a pilot assuming it is two hours.

 

Given the page count, sounds like an hour. The rule of thumb was a minute per page but one assumes that there will need to be extra descriptions for the pilot.

 

I don't think many shows get two-hour pilots these days anyway.

 

Maybe there's a lot of montages and action scenes that don't take up much room on the page but take up twenty or thirty minutes of screen-time!

Or not.

 

Zero-G kung-fu space battles! With mechas!

 

If Bester had a spy on B5, why would he expose her? She only "activated" when the password was sent telepathically. Other scanning wouldn't trigger the spy protocol.