Remember, a couple of tapes ago, when I was delighted that I had a tape of Buffy episodes that followed directly on from the last ones I’d looked at.
Today, not so much as we skip from the middle of Season 4 to the middle of Season 5 of Babylon 5 with A Tragedy of Telepaths. Don’t let the fact that this tape number is one less than yesterday’s – by this time in my database, I was adding tapes to the database as I was digitising, so the ordering is even more random.
The episode opens with a ‘previously on’ disguised as a sort of ‘Captain’s Log’ with Captain Lochley setting the stage. A large group of telepaths, wanting a safe homeworld, have welded themselves into Brown sector. People outside are rather angry about the telepaths, thinking that they know all their secrets. So it seems as if the telepaths are probably all going to die at some point. But at least they all have great hair. It’s definitely the nineties.
Meanwhile, on Centauri Prime, Londo and G’Kar are getting on, now that the war is over. But G’Kar discovers his former aide Na’Toth has been kept prisoner in a cell for two years, and nobody knew.
Lochley gets into the sector where the telepaths are, and meets with their leader whose name escapes me because he was so boring. (iMDb tells me it’s Byron.) He and Lyta Alexander tell Lochley that they expect to die soon.
Meanwhile, the Alien races keep finding evidence of attacks from other alien races. During the council session, there was a Gaim, one of the aliens that was based on (and named for) Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Bester of the Psicorps arrives to deal with the telepath problem. He’s always good value.
But this is a bit of a scene-setting episode, preparing for a confrontation. The next episode is Phoenix Rising. Bester has brought his men to the station, and they’re tracking down the few telepaths who aren’t locked into Brown sector.
But the rogue telepaths seem to be more effective than Bester is expecting.
Garibaldi tries to get Bester to make a confession about what he did to him and Sheridan (I can’t remember the details of that, since Bester did a lot of bad things). But Bester has implanted an ‘Asimov’ block that prevents Garibaldi harming Bester, or allowing him to come to harm.
Byron tells Lyta about his past. He’s a strong P12, and was being trained by Bester as his protege, and helped to destroy a ship full of ‘mundanes’. This was what made him leave the psi-corps. Incidentally, Byron is played by Robin Atkin Downes, who had a prior role in the previous season – as a Minbari in Atonement. Yet another tiny but weird coincidence.
After some hostage taking and negotiation, Byron finally finds there’s no way out, and blows himself up.
Garibaldi is not taking the news of his inability to kill Bester well, lapsing back into booze.
Next is The Ragged Edge. The Alliance members are boycotting the council until something is done about all the attacks on their ships. They get word about a human pilot who might have witnessed an attack, on the Drazi homeworld, so Garibaldi is sent to investigate. Trouble is, he’s just started drinking again, so things go wrong when he and his contact get plastered, then his friend is attacked but persons unknown, then Michael is attacked by Drazi he doesn’t know. It’s all getting a bit out of control.
G’Kar arrives back at Babylon 5 to discover all the Narn there have now read the book of G’Kar, and he’s now being treated like a religious leader.
Finally, Franklin announces that he wants to leave Babylon 5 to become the head of xenobiology at Earthdome.
The final episode on this tape is The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father and for a change, we’re at the Psi-corps headquarters on Earth.
Naturally, Bester features in this episode, which actually focuses on him, as he mentors a couple of telepath interns, and has to travel to Babylon 5
It’s an interesting change of pace, but sometimes I do think that these Psi-Corps episodes would be awful if it wasn’t for Walter Koenig.
I’m assuming, from the plethora of these bumpers, the Friends was returning to Channel 4 this week.
After this episode, there’s a short film called The Beast. It’s about a chimpanzee that speaks through an electronic device.
Roscoe Lee Brown plays a judge.
After this, there’s the start of an episode of Reality on the Rocks, the physics exploration presented by Ken Campbell. The tape ends shortly into this episode.
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VHiStory 