Contents: Overview - Backplot - Questions - Analysis - Notes - JMS

Overview

Sheridan clashes with the League ambassadors over G'Kar's declaration of principles. Garibaldi attempts to enlist the aid of the refugee telepaths. Robin Atkin Downes as Byron.

P5 Rating: 8.16

Production number: 504
Original air date: Feburary 4, 1998
DVD release date: April 13, 2004

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Mike Vejar

Watch For

• A spell-checker.

Plot Points

• The Centauri have been using telepaths in their military for over 300 years.
• At Garibaldi's behest, and with great trepidation, Sheridan has approved the use of telepaths as intelligence operatives of the Interstellar Alliance. Byron has agreed to supply Garibaldi with two members of his group, well-trained telepaths who will ferret out dark secrets wherever they lie.
• For the past 10 years, the Drazi have been secretly supporting raiders who attack minor worlds on the edge of Drazi space. Byron has uncovered the secret and brought it to Sheridan's attention, and now the Drazi have most likely stopped the practice.
• Lyta has been in the mind of two people at the moment of death. It's a tremendously traumatic experience; a telepath actually sees what she believes is the soul departing, and a little of the telepath's departs as well. She says Bester has scanned the dying on numerous occasions in an attempt to try to see what's on the other side -- something she says isn't supposed to be known by the living -- and his soul has been diminished as a result.
• Byron believes that telepaths are superior to mundanes, and feels that mundanes don't think of telepaths as anything but tools to be used when needed.
• Byron's telepaths, if he's to be believed, make no effort to shield their thoughts from one another. Nor do they make any effort to avoid picking up the thoughts of others around them, something Byron claims takes a lot of effort to avoid.

Unanswered Questions

• When did Lyta previously scan a person at the time of death?
• Is her story about Bester true?
• Have the Drazi stopped supporting the raiders entirely?
• How did the raider ships nearly destroy a White Star? Are they getting support from people other than the Drazi?
• Did the Enphili join the Alliance?
• Did the Drazi sign the declaration? Have they cut off their support for the raiders as a result?
• Did Earth join the Alliance? If so, who signed the paperwork on Earth's behalf? Lochley?
• What changes did G'Kar make to the declaration?

Analysis

• How did the Ranger get to the Enphili homeworld? Are White Stars routinely patrolling the territories of governments who haven't joined the Alliance yet? Sheridan did arrange for border patrols ("Rumors, Bargains and Lies") so perhaps the Enphili were close enough to the Drazi border to be within range of existing Ranger patrols.

• Sheridan has the power to order the White Star fleet into combat. Is that a power of the President of the Alliance in general, or Sheridan in particular? Do the Rangers still owe allegiance to Sheridan and Delenn personally, or will command of them pass to Sheridan's successor when he leaves office?

• Lyta's first experience scanning a dying person may be related to the secret Bester knows about her ("Epiphanies.") It might also be related to the reason she left the Psi Cop division ("Divided Loyalties.") One possibility is that she was with Bester when he had the experience she recounted to Garibaldi; if what he was doing was forbidden in some way, her secret might be guilt by association.

• Is Lyta's sympathy with Byron's cause what it appears to be? Clearly she's dissatisfied with her treatment at the hands of Sheridan and the others, and has been for some time (she complained about it to Zack in "Epiphanies.") At the same time, though, she does appear to see that her work with the Alliance is doing a lot of good, and Sheridan does appear to be appreciative of her, despite Byron's claims to the contrary.

  So the question is, what's Lyta's motivation for returning to Byron and asking to learn more about his ideas? Is she genuinely interested in joining his cause, or does she sense that he's a potential danger? If it's the latter, she might be engaging in a covert operation of her own, learning all she can about Byron's plans with the intent of reporting them to Sheridan if they turn out to be a threat to the Alliance.

• Sheridan appears to be dead wrong in his reasoning for allowing Byron's colony on the station. His assumption, stated again in this episode, is that they'll be on his side should war erupt between telepaths and normals. But from Byron's conversation with Lyta, it appears more likely that his group will be the ones to start a conflict against mundanes. It's even possible they'll find themselves at odds with the Psi Corps, since the Corps appears to prefer taking control in more subtle, insinuative ways and might view an open conflict as too great a risk.

  If Byron's group really does spark a conflict between telepaths and mundanes, it would explain the 2361 commentator's view that allowing the colony was the biggest mistake in Sheridan's career ("The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.")

• Byron promised Lyta he'd give Garibaldi two "highly trained" telepaths. Where were they trained? Are they former Psi Corps members? Were they trained by nonhuman telepaths? Did the other refugees conduct the training?

  If they're former Corps members (or even if not) the possibility exists that there are Corps agents in Byron's group. The Corps is capable of implanting hidden personalities such that extremely powerful telepaths don't notice them (e.g. Talia's implanted alter ego, which wasn't noticed by Ironheart in "Mind War.")

  That's assuming, of course, that Byron's group is legitimate at all; they might all secretly be working for the Corps, their refugee story simply a cover to convince Sheridan to allow large numbers of telepaths to gather unquestioned on the station.

Notes

• The title is from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," specifically Hamlet's speech in act 2, scene 2:

  What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

• The beginning of the second draft of the Interstellar Alliance Declaration of Principles:

  The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
  The language is not Narn or Human or Centauri or Gaim or Minbari.

  It speaks in the language of hope. It speaks in the language of trust.
  It speaks in the language of strength, and the language of compassion.
  It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul.
  But always it is the same voice.

  It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us.
  And the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.
  It is the small, still voice that says we are One.

  No matter the blood, no matter the skin,
  No matter the world, no matter the star,
  We are One.
  No matter the pain, no matter the darkness,
  No matter the loss, no matter the fear.
  We are One.

  Here, gathered together in common cause
  We agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule:
  That we must be kind to one another.

  Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us,
  And each voice lost diminishes us.
  We are the voice of the universe, the soul of creation,
  The fire that will light the way to a better future.

  We are One.

• The text of Franklin's letter to the Ranger's parents:

  Your son served with honor and died bringing us news that may help to save the lives of literally thousands of people, people he did not know, but whose lives mattered more to him than his own.

• When Franklin is composing the letter to the Ranger's parents, the words "Spell Check Online" are visible at the top of the screen.

• Byron's comment that telepaths have to concentrate on songs or other distractions to keep from inadvertently reading the thoughts of others may be a reference to the novel "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester, in which the protagonist, seeking to shield his thoughts from telepaths, forces himself to concentrate on a catchy tune.

• The name of the new race being harassed by the Drazi, Enphili, sounds almost identical to the name of a Minbari cruiser in "Shadow Dancing." In that episode, Sheridan ordered the Minbari cruiser Imphili to protect a group of Drazi ships.

• Continuity glitch: Sheridan handed a copy of the declaration to the Hyach ambassador (the orange-skinned alien with the large cranial lobes.) Immediately afterward, G'Kar passed copies of the declaration out to everyone, including the Hyach ambassador, who no longer had the one Sheridan gave him. Of course, it's possible Sheridan took the scroll back.

• Continuity glitch: During Lyta's time in the mind of the Ranger, as he's dying, he approaches the door and is casting a shadow on the equipment to the left of him, just inside the door. There is a cut to Lyta, then back to the Ranger, and his shadow has disappeared. Most likely the actor was digitally added to the picture in the final shot so he could be made to stretch into the distance, while he was actually standing on set before the cut to Lyta.

jms speaks

• About Kim Strauss
  He does tend to play Drazis a lot, primarily the ambassador, for purposes of continuity, unless he's not available.

  Re: Hamlet...one of the wonderful aspects of Shakespeare's work is that it lends itself to reinterpretation and reinvention; cynical lines can be read with hope, and vice versa, and somehow, the darned thing tracks. One recent version of Hamlet mounted by Joseph Papp starred a woman actor in the title role, and it worked beautifully.

• What were Sheridan and Delenn drinking at dinner? Did Delenn's transformation enable her to drink alcohol?
  Nonalcoholic wine, at worst...I sometimes have it myself, since I don't drink.

• I like the declaration a lot.

• The funny part of it is...the editors made a point of dropping in my writing credit just when G'Kar says his muse is talking to him....

• The declaration didn't say anything about rights.
  That's fine, if this were a constitution or something based on coming out from under an opressive government, as the colonies did. This is an incremental process; get the principles in place, and then build the laws and the constitution on that. Get them on board for one thing they can sign, and then use that as a platform to get them to sign the more restrictive stuff. And bear in mind you only heard part of it; the full thing would go on for many many pages.

• Byron's feelings about mundanes comes out later in more detail...I wouldn't call it a hatred. A resentment, yes, and certainly there's a sense of having been mistreated...but he's surprisingly not a violent person, as we'll find.

• "I wouldn't be surprised to see Byron realize that the mundanes have talents that teeps generally do not."

  Clog dancing...?

• "Quick question: regarding what Byron said about the amount of effort it takes to block out the thoughts of mundanes, I was wondering--have any non-teep humans given thought, time, or effort to creating any sort of artificial 'shielding' device to keep their thoughts to themselves? Is it impossible, or just not something they would bother with, figuring it's up to the teeps to deal with it?"

  Some of them have trained at it a bit, and learned little tricks that can help...one such tries it later this season.

  "As for Lyta, I felt like she was sort of an abused child, always looking for that benevolent authority figure."

  Yep, that's what she's doing, looking for someone to believe in.

  "I don't know if I buy the idea of death of the soul, but if it explains Bester, I guess I can swallow it."

  Bear in mind, though, that Lyta also said that that's the mind's only way of interpreting what it's seeing, not that it *is* what she's seeing, so it doesn't necessarily validate or invalidate the notion of a soul.

• About the shot of Lyta looking into the council chamber
  The Lyta-outsider view was to further reinforce her on the outside of the group.

• Why enlist only human telepaths?
  Remember though that the purpose of the teeps is to gather covert intelligence. There are two operative words there: covert and intelligence.

  Intelligence against whom? Logically, this would involve in part keeping tabs on worlds not in the Alliance...and some that *are* in the Alliance. If you think the Drazi are up to something, and you have Drazi telepaths on your team...are they going to cooperate against their own government? If you leave them out, won't they find out if they're in the company of the other teeps on a daily basis? The covert part also goes out the door.

• "But if the hypothetical Drazi teeps are Rangers, would they have loyalty to the Drazi government, or to Entil'zha?"

  Maybe they would..one hopes they would...but why take that chance if you're in Sheridan's shoes, trying to make this thing work?

• Yeah, I'm sure that some Minbari teeps could be trusted...but would they function well in a covert situation? They're mainly out in the open.

  One other thing I forgot to mention in my note to Nancy...if you put out the word that you want 2 teeps from each world...that kind of kills any chance of putting together a group of telepaths that's going to operate IN SECRET, a covert unit, yes...?

• About the word "Enphili"
  Coincidence.

• White Stars are not invulnerable. If they saw what they were told were a friendly fleet coming in, to join them in an offense, they would have their defenses down. And a full-scale Drazi fleet would also somewhat outnumber the White Stars. A Pearl Harbor style attack on White Stars would effectively decimate the fleet before they would have a chance to respond.

Last update: May 27, 2024