A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

Oh, of course, if that's the winner's desire. But the desire here was to liberate Earth, not oppress it under the weight of "all your fault, now be sorry and, oh, you're joining Minbar's new alliance whether you really want to or not". And I still don't think it could work on a planetary scale. To impose on Earth would lead to bitterness, resentment- people don't like having their destinies dictated to them by outsiders, or those they perceive as such. Look at the trouble Earth had with Mars. The IA would have had the exact same trouble with Earth if they had occupied it or tried to force themselves upon it. And I seriously doubt the humans would be happy with the idea of Minbari oversight when the Minbari tried to wipe them out only 15 years before (and they'd view it simply as Minbar giving the orders, whatever the reality). If Sheridan had tried to impose anything upon Earth following Clark's, er, removal, the humans would have resented it for decades, if not longer. It wouldn't be "the liberation" and a chance to embrace a new position in the IA, just a humilating defeat and Earth would simmer for a long, long time. And marginalizing the Earth-firsters would probably be quite difficult in that atmosphere. Not to mention certain non-human people who would take advantage of any resentment to deliberately stir up trouble and cause problems for the alliance.

Well, that's how I see it.

 

But the war you reference here (WWII) was in large part a consequence of simmering resentments and deprivations which occurred precisely because the winners of the last big war decided to throw all the blame on the losers, and inflict humiliating conditions upon them. The Nazis gained power in an environment of bitterness, resentment and humiliated national pride, as well as practical economic deprivations. If the British and friends hadn't tried the "all your fault" angle and inflicted the demands they did...well, I'm not going to say something as broad as "WWII wouldn't have happened", but there's probably a fair amount of pain that could have been avoided.

Trying to break or humiliate or abuse your enemies into becoming friends is only, at best, a short-term measure. Real friendship can only occurr when people or nations or whatever respect one another as equals. Which is what the show was going for, I think. Earth needs its pride left intact, so it can become a member of the new IA on "its own terms" (at least as the majority view it) rather than at gunpoint.

It doesn't matter how beneficial IA membership is. If it starts with Omega destroyers and Sharlin cruisers pointing weapons at cities, it will never be a truly stable relationship. People will always be popping up and trying to stir up trouble, reminders of "lost glory" and "lost pride", etc. Earth would become Centauri Prime mark two, and that's not going to be a lot of fun if the IA has to try and keep that in line indefinitely- or until the humans finally break away violently.

Again, that's how I see it, anyway.

 

Oh, there most certainly is a right way and a wrong way to go about such things. Sheridan's method, however, was obviously the wrong way. He might as well have just nuked Earth back to the stone age right then and there, given what he set in motion. It would have saved everyone 400 wasted years.

 

I certainly see what you're saying, but I'm assuming those 400 years weren't "wasted" for the generations of humans who lived through them . It could well have been a "golden age" in the end, that eventually slipped back into old habits due to- well, who knows what happened in the end to set off the "Let's play Orwell" politics? 400 years is- if you'll excuse me saying the blindingly obvious - a long time in politics. And we saw that 100 years down the line, the humans have already totally rewritten Sheridan's life and actions as they see fit. I don't really think it matters what someone did 400 years ago. 10, 20, 30, yes, as we've both acknowledged, but 400? Sheridan is just a name and a historical idea (or ideas) by then, I imagine.

But at least Earth made its own destiny- for better or worse. I guess they made the wrong choices 400 years after the Babylon project, but that's the risk you take. I still think it would have been worse to try to take Earth's self-determination from it (no matter how delusional that might be for most citizens, because I agree with you EA is...well...not a model society.

 

Babylon 5 had liberal politics, not popular front or left wing politics. The US government today approves of Truth and Reconciation commissions instead. When it invades a country it attacks unions, promotes the "free market," regressive taxation, religious parties, regionalism and every sort of social backwardness it can. The US would never break up landed property, open the banking system, promote unionism, foster secular parties and education, and all that millions of true blooded Americans hate with a fury that passes all understanding.

Sheridan is not going to revolutionize Earth society, no matter how much it obviously needed in B5's fictional universe, because a Hero is not a revolutionist, not even a top down, safely controlled by responsible people kind of revolutionist. Property is sacred, power is sacred, and nobody but the lowest ranking shooters are to suffer.

 

There's an even smaller difference between my people and the British, but we still fought them so that we could rule over ourselves. Sure, we could have just left and made a new home for ourselves in America, or Australia, or Argentina, and many of us did, but most wanted their own homeland rather than moving to someone else's.

And it's not like Babylon 5 was a safe-haven for telepaths, Bester was going to show up in a month to deport them all back to Earth. And they weren't allowed to leave the station because technically they were under quarantine and Lochley told them not to leave. Byron either had to act himself to save his people from being imprisoned by the Psi Corps or put his trust in a captain that didn't want him on the station in the first place. He chose to act peacefully and hoped that his people would support him. He was wrong.

The important question is if that was intentional or not. If it's part of a point that JMS was making that military officers don't make good political leaders then I'll have no problem with it. But if Sheridan is supposed to be a great President when in fact he is not, that could be a problem.

On this we can all agree.


The Ragged Edge (***½)

So Garibaldi falls back on alcohol, gets his friend killed, gets the informant killed, screws up his mission and almost screws up the galaxy, but at least he... I guess there's nothing positive to say about him this time. At least I finally got to see the Drazi homeworld, that was nice. The Drazi are fun, I didn't think they were going to be such a big deal when they first appeared, but now they're possibly my favourite alien race on the show. The idea that they design their streets to be small so that they're difficult to invade is interesting, but how did they commute before the invention of the hover-car?

Meanwhile, G'Kar continues his descent into being a Jesus figure, except Jesus probably never snapped a book on one of his follower's faces. Score 1 for G'Karianity. This story is a bit of a stretch, but it's fun and it's nice to think that the Narn will move away from hating the Centauri because of G'Kar's wise words, so I wont complain.

Back in the other meanwhile, Garibaldi returns and after finding a button he figures out that the Centauri are somehow involved in whatever it is that's going on. This was a huge shock... except for the fact that I already knew that. It's nice to see G'Kar showing some concern for Londo, I think they might just like one another.

In a completely separate meanwhile, Franklin is once again asked to take over from Dr Kyle, so he's going to move back to Earth in six months. This makes Sheridan upset for some reason I don't understand. Isn't he supposed to be moving to a new ISA headquarters on Minbar soon?

Scott Bakula: 70

 

More that Sheridan had to learn how to be a political leader. As with most things on B5, it's about the process he had to go through to become effective as a leader of a large-ish federation of disparate species.

Jan

 

You mean besides the not so minor detail that one group can read the others' minds? I'd call that a bloody appreciable difference!

Now see, we had the opposite problem; we had a country we didn't like so we went and tried to nick everyone else's.

As for Byron, he's right in that as a people, (human) telepaths have never had a homeland of their own, unless you count the Psi Corps ghetto in Geneva called Teeptown.

Subway tunnels perhaps? Which they probably still use since Drazi (or humans for that matter) don't have hovercars...yet. That police hover-thing you saw was just the Drazi version of a helicopter.

He becomes a great President. It's a learning process and it'a still early days yet. Plus of course like anyone else he's far from infallible. As for this incident, you may recall the scholars in 'Deconstruction' mentioned that later in life Sheridan all but admitted this was the biggest mistake of his career.

More like Mohamed or Gandhi I'd say, at least in the sense that he's held as a living prophet, not a divine messiah. The Narns do actually have a history of following prophet figures, G'Quan being the one G'Kar himself happens to follow.

Always remember on this show: "No one here is exactly what they appear." Also remember that when JMS lets you know something before the characters know it, it's usually out of context and you never get the full shape of things until he wants you to.

I think it's a case of reality setting in. Now it's not just him and Delenn leaving, the whole gang's breaking up.

 

Fun fact: There are 6.2 million people living on the island of Ireland. There are 36.2 million Irishmen living in the USA.

But really, being a telepath isn't like being Irish. Being a telepath is like being gay. The Irish culture and ethnicity both developed on Ireland over thousands of years due to relative geographic isiolation, just like every other culture and ethnicity. Telepaths arise almost randomly from the mundane population. They have no culture of their own and no ethnic identity. Rather, they possess the culture and ethnic identity of their parents.

Adoption notwithstanding, a couple of English parents are not in any danger of having an Irish child. Likewise, a couple of Irish parents are unlikely to ever conceive an English child with each other. On the other hand, a mundanes have telepathic kids all the time and two telepaths can potentially conceive a mundane.

(Which makes you wonder what they'll do with the normal kids on the planet of the Supermen.)

Furthermore, there isn't any drug that I can take to make me Irish, but there are drugs that can turn a mundane into a telepath, albeit temporarily. And there isn't a drug that you can take to stop being Irish, but there are drugs that can make people stop being telepaths (though they do have horrible side-effects).


The fact that telepaths don't have a culture or an ethnic identity is what makes Byron look like a cult leader instead of a hardcore nationalist. He's essentially engineering a culture out of wholecloth, one centered around the worship of him as some sort of infallible demigod. That wasn't his intention, of course, but it was the inevitable result. His followers had no other gods to worship, after all.

And the fact of the matter is that Byron's followers were in an extreme minority amongst telepaths. Most telepaths don't identify themselves as telepaths first and humans second. Most identify themselves as human first, as a member of their birth culture second, and as a telepath a distant third. The exception is those who are raised in the Psi-Corps from an early age, and JMS is rather clear that that level of isolation and indoctrination is badwrong.

As for the threat of Bester. That rings hollow due to one simple fact. Byron was boning Lyta Alexander. Attempting to deport Byron would be like attempting to deport Superman's boyfriend, if Superman dated men with pretentious hair and kind of liked killing people. It's not something that would end well for the police.

Lyta, if she really wanted to, could unleash a telepathic attack that would make Bester's brain explode. She could make his entire squad commit suicide. She could turn the entire station into a apocalyptic cannibal sex orgy if she really wanted to.

Lyta held back because Byron wanted to hold back and she desperately wanted him to fill the Kosh-shaped void in her life. If he gave her the go-ahead to take the gloves off it wouldn't have been a matter of blackmail, but one of "yes, ma'am; whatever you say, ma'am".


And last but not least, there are empty planets in areas of space not claimed by any race. The jumpgate network is big, they don't need to be donated a planet, they could just pick an out of the way world that no one is using. But that brings us to another problem. It isn't just that they didn't hack a planet, they didn't have infrastructure. They'd need a fully developed colonized world, not jsut a random lifeless rock. That means displacing millions of people from their homes just so that Byron can have his homeworld.

It's only an appreciable difference if you don't legalize Dust. If Dust was sold over-the-counter at your neighborhood pharmacy, then you'd be able to mind-rape anyone, too.

 

You seem to be confusing culture with genetics and I assure you, the former is far more divisive then the latter. A pair of Irish parents can absolutely have an English child simply by having and raising that child in England. I know this because I went to school with several of them.

And as for those "36.2 million Irishmen living in the USA." They're not Irish, they're Yanks with Irish ancestry, just like I'm an Englishman with Welsh, Swiss and we're pretty sure Norman and Nordic ancestry (among a great many others.)

Now when it comes to B5's telepaths, the separation between teep and mundane isn't at all genetic because the telepath gene is present in most if not all humans, it's just latent in most cases (that's why dust works.) The difference is entierly cultural. telepaths perceive the world around them in a fundamentally different way that mundanes cannot comprehend and by which they automatically feel threatened.

 

Who says they're not both? Actually I can assure you that'd be the case. You'd be surprised the number of Irishmen, famous Irishmen, born in the United States or Great Britain (for example: Eamon De Valera, one of Ireland's more notorious and enduring statesman, was born in New York to an Irish immigrant mother and a Hispanic father. James Connolly was born in Edinburgh.)*

Mary Robinson sort of hit it on the head when she used the word 'diaspora', as much as I wince at using a word borrwed from the Jews and originating in the Greek. Ireland's everywhere and nowhere; as the result of centuries of perpetual exile and emigration (from the flight of the Earls - the end of the Gaelic nobility - to the exodus following the Great Famine... to hell, right bloody now with the economic crisis.)

Point is: Identity - cultural, racial, national, whatever - can be pretty fluid.

*Er, these are famous in Ireland, that is. Sort of. Damned if I know if kids these days would know what the heck I'm talking about.

 

Totally agreed. In fact that was sort of the point I was making. hyzmarca asserted that English parents cannot have Irish children and visa-versa, which of course they absolutely can, as can any number of combinations of nationality, cultural or religious backgrounds. It can however depend on how you define being a member of said groups.
Of course the fact that said children can be raised as culturally separate from their parents doesn't mean they will. As you say; fluid.

Were digressing a bit I think by getting caught up in the real world analogies so to just reassert what I previously stated; there is absolutely an appreciable difference between B5's teeps and mundanes that is entierly cultural in origin.

 

My biggest problem with Byron is he preaching a level of seething, red-faced separatist hatred, and then seemed genuinely surprised that it led to violence. His blackmail-for-a-planet ploy was destined for failure, to the point that I think his eventual martyrdom was his plan from the beginning, because, as others have said, he ran a cult.

 

Byron overestimated his leadership skills and wrongly assumed that he had successfully converted his followers to his own pacifist beliefs. When push came to shove, he was unable to keep his people in line. And blackmailing the Alliance was a bad plan to begin with (born out of rage rather than a rational assessment of the situation). He was a bad leader, probably even worse than President Sheridan during the whole Byron affair.

Subconsciously anyway. I doubt that it was deliberatly planned though.

 

It should also be remembered that Byron was at his core an idealist. The man was raised by Psi Corps but somehow, despite the best efforts of mentors like Bester he retained a sense of personal conscience and left the only life he'd ever known rather than become like those he had once respected. Now up until this point he had still lead a pretty sheltered life and while the last four or five years on the run would still have opened his eyes somewhat to the realities of the big wide galaxy, he's still somewhat naive.

Of course he has to be a little naive to be that charismatic and inspiring. Any hint of true cynicism and I don't think so many would have followed him for so long. It wasn't so much that he underestimated his leadership abilities so much as he overestimated how much of what he taught had sunk in. Some of those blips weren't raised by the Corps like him, some were just ordinary people who were essentially kidnapped from their parents as young children or teenagers. They got a chance to live in the real world for a time before the Corps got hold of them and so it's natural they'd regard Byron as somewhat out of touch, no matter how well meaning.

 

Ah, like Archer. Except planned in advance.

And we'll never forgive you for it.

Worldwide there's around 70 million people in the so-called diaspora, while the highest the population ever achieved on the island was 8.5 million back just before the famine. Between the 1840s and 1960s the population of the island was in an almost continual decline as people emigrated to other countries. Sadly, that could be about to happen again due to the economic crisis.

But the Corps is mother, and the Corps is father. Many telepaths are taken away at a young age and forced to live within the Corps, and in the Corps they are taught that they are different from mundanes. They live different lives from the rest of us, and within the Corps they have formed their own culture. It's not right that this has happened, but it is what happened and now there's a large group of telepaths that do feel they are their own ethnic group. Some of them want their own homeland where they can administer themselves rather than living under rules imposed by a majority that fears them.

That depends. Some people have moved here over the years for a variety of reasons, and they have lived here for so long that they have become Irish by culture if not legally. It happens all the time with people moving to America and eventually becoming Americans. And let us not forget that the most famous Irishman of all, Saint Patrick, was British.

If they just picked a planet at random to settle down on, what's to stop the Drazi coming along one day to claim the planet and force them out. Star Trek already dealt with this sort of situation with the Maquis, so clearly Bester was a closet Trekkie. To feel secure on any new world they would need to have a legal status guaranteed by the other races.

The government, that's who! To be an Irish citizen you either need to be born here or one of your parents has to have been born here. You can apply for citizenship if one of your grandparents was born here, but you have to apply for it and submit various certifications. After that, you're disqualified.

But not to worry, soon you'll be able to pay our government for the privilege of owning a certificate that says you're of Irish descent. Order now and you'll get a free toaster with a picture of Joe Dolan on the side. This offer is too good to pass up!


The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father (***½)

Welcome to the new Babylon 5 spin-off show: Trust the Corps. This show follows everybody's favourite fascist, Bester, as he travels across the galaxy capturing rogue telepaths. Part of the purpose of this show is to show all the viewers that Babylon 5 isn't the centre of the whole universe... but every episode will involve Bester travelling to Babylon 5 because that's where all the most expensive sets are. Accompanying Bester is his cute young assistant, Lauren, who has a thing for shortish men with a vaguely Russian accent. She's trying to get into Bester's pants, but will she succeed? You'll have to watch to find out. Each week they will be accompanied by a minority character that will be killed during the course of the episode.

In this pilot episode, Bester is forced to travel to Babylon 5 again to retrieve a telepath that has gone crazy and can shred people's minds. Turns out he has multiple personalities and he's using his power to gamble. Bester and Lauren are accompanied this week by an Asian man and his method of death is being stabbed through the heart. Bad luck, old chum. The plot's not amazing but as a pilot to a police procedural series it's not bad. The real heart of this show is the characters. And by that I mean Bester, not Lauren. It's also quite interesting to see Zach from a different perspective, he almost seems like a jerk.

As I watch this show I'm going to count the number of characters that are played by Dean Stockwell.

Dean Stockwell: 2
Minority Characters Killed: 3 (1 for each of the rogue telepath's personalities)

 

And with that we said goodbye to Bester.

 

It's now been three days since I watched Byron blow himself up and I'm still glad to be rid of him.

 

Trust me, that feeling never goes away.

 

I thought and still do that "The Corp Is Mother" is one of the better episodes of season 5. The procedural story itself might not be terribly interesting, but really it's all about Alfred Bester front and centre for an hour. As I observed upthread it was just easier to root for Bester then his often bland telepathic adversaries, and that's doubly true here.

True, but I read in the Irish Times a few days ago the government is considering (and/or going to) implement some sort of officially Irish certificate for those with Irish descent.