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

Overview

The telepath situation becomes critical and Bester attempts to take control, triggering a strong reaction by Garibaldi. Robin Atkin Downes as Byron. Walter Koenig as Bester. Leigh J. McCloskey as Thomas.

P5 Rating: 8.25

Production number: 512
Original air date: April 1, 1998
DVD release date: April 13, 2004

Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by David Eagle

Plot Points

• Byron grew up in the Corps. He was rated a strong P12, so was inducted into the Psi Cops and served as Bester's protege. During one mission, Bester ordered Byron to destroy an unarmed ship full of mundanes who were helping smuggle telepaths out of Psi Corps' reach. Byron followed the order reluctantly, but shortly thereafter fled the Corps, convinced that telepaths could build a society based on nobler principles than violence.
• To avoid being taken by the Psi Corps, Byron and the militant faction of the telepath colonists have killed themselves. The other members of Byron's group have been allowed to go free, despite Bester's objections.
• The Psi Corps headquarters on Earth has been bombed. The bombers haven't been found, but they did leave the message, "Remember Byron."
• During Garibaldi's conditioning, Bester implanted a modified version of one of Asimov's Laws of Robotics: Garibaldi is incapable of harming Bester, or through inaction, allowing Bester to come to harm. (See Notes.) As far as Garibaldi knows, the prohibition doesn't apply to all telepaths, just Bester. His inability to exact revenge has driven Garibaldi back to drinking (but see Analysis.)
• Lyta's powers include sending her senses far away from her body, scouting ahead for danger. Bester is able to project himself into someone's mind from a distance, similar to Byron's projection to Lochley in "No Compromises."

Unanswered Questions

• What involvement will Lyta have with the telepaths now that Byron is gone? Will she take his place?
• Do the telepaths still hold all the alien ambassadors' secrets? Will they be hunted by the alien races? For that matter, will the Corps actively pursue them once they're offstation?
• Who bombed the Psi Corps headquarters? Garibaldi didn't appear surprised by the news; was he involved somehow?

Analysis

• The militant telepaths made poor use of their talents in combat. They appeared to rely on verbal communication. Granted, none of them had military training (or at least, it wasn't stated) but for a group whose stated purpose was being able to make free, unrestrained use of their telepathic abilities, it's odd that they didn't do so when it would have been of some tactical advantage.

• Were all the militant telepaths really killed? Sheridan had only Byron's statement that the identicards and confessions represented all the militants. Byron didn't have any reason to want to lie, but was he able to extract confessions from all the parties responsible for the violence? All the confessions and cards were probably those of violent telepaths, but Sheridan had no way of knowing that it was a complete set, despite Byron's promise that Sheridan would have everything he needed to be sure.

• Bester had more than one reason for wanting to take the telepaths alive. Had he gained custody over them, he might well have been able to extract whatever information they gained from the alien ambassadors. He would also have discovered the information Lyta broadcast to the group while making love to Byron in "Secrets of the Soul." Of course, he might already know all about the Vorlons' actions by other means, such as the Corps' previous association with the Shadows.

• The theme of suicide as redemption for past sins has appeared before, most notably in "Passing Through Gethsemane," in which Brother Edward allowed himself to be killed to atone for his murderous past. Byron's self-immolation had a different twist, though: after he killed Thomas, he may have come to believe that the noble lifestyle he wanted was an impossible dream. Edward, though no choice of his own, had given up his past tendencies but still came to believe he needed to die to atone for them.

  Byron's personality shift after being asked to fire on an innocent vessel also echoes David McIntyre's transformation into Arthur in "A Late Delivery from Avalon."

• Byron's experience with Bester echoed Lyta's experience with the Psi Cops: she was made to do something traumatic (in her case, helping to plant images in a murderer's mind to drive him insane, as she described in "The Face of the Enemy") and decided that she had to leave the Psi Cops. She left by transferring to another division of the Corps rather than running away entirely, but the similarity of experience begs the question of how many other former employees of the Psi Cops have left under similar circumstances.

• Why didn't Lyta already know Byron's secret? If Talia's description is to be believed ("Mind War") lovemaking between telepaths involves dropping all defenses and diving deeper and deeper into each other's minds. Given how central Byron's experiences in the Corps were to his personality, and that, by his own admission, he hadn't hidden his past from other members of the group, why wouldn't Lyta have come across his memories while they were together?

  It's possible that Lyta was so much more powerful than Byron that her memories drowned his out; she did warn him that the experience might be overwhelming.

• If Lyta does take Byron's place and become a champion of rogue telepaths, she may be vulnerable to blackmail by Bester. In "Epiphanies," he claimed to know secrets about her that she wouldn't want revealed. Whatever those secrets are, they may still hold some sway over her.

  On the other hand, Lyta implied she'd received secrets from Byron, so she may be able to counter-blackmail Bester just as easily.

• Bester claimed that all races dealt with telepaths through laws, religion, or extermination. That contradicts Garibaldi's assertion in "The Paragon of Animals" that Centauri telepaths "can do whatever they want." The Minbari treatment of telepaths ("Legacies") might arguably be religious, but it's really more cultural: telepaths are treated with respect and are expected to devote themselves to serving others. It's unclear how other races treat their telepaths, though, so Bester might be right in most cases.

• What does the departure of the telepath colony do to Garibaldi's plan to use some of its members as Alliance spies ("The Paragon of Animals?") They only helped Garibaldi at Byron's behest, and with Byron gone, it's not clear they'll feel any obligation to make good on the promise. If Garibaldi does lose his telepathic spies, the whole exercise was largely a waste of his time; the only piece of information he's received from the telepaths was the warning about the Drazi fleet in "Paragon," and that happened before he started spending time training operatives.

  It's possible, in fact, that Garibaldi's training sessions will end up working against him: if his two trainees were among the telepaths who left the station, and they're working on their own now, their training makes them more dangerous to everyone involved.

• Does Garibaldi's conditioning prevent him from revealing its presence to people who might be in a position to either remove it or take revenge on Bester for him? He appeared to be having some difficulty asking Franklin about circumventing it. Could he, for example, tell Lise about it? If not, how will he explain his return to the bottle?

• Garibaldi's return to the bottle might not be quite what it seems. It's possible that "alcohol" is the answer to his question, "Are there any drugs that can suppress a telepathic block?" In that case, Garibaldi faces a choice between confronting his alcoholism once again and being powerless to take revenge on Bester.

  Using alcohol to nullify mind control has precedent: Londo used it to evade his Keeper in "War Without End part 2," and the Regent, also Keeper-encumbered, was said to have taken up drinking in "In the Kingdom of the Blind." Alcohol only puts the Keepers to sleep, though; it doesn't actually stop them from taking control while they're awake. So the precedent is an imprecise one at best.

• While he was describing Asimov's Laws to Garibaldi, Bester said that "pre-ban cyberneticists" on Earth had built them into their machines. That implies that at one time, Earth had intelligent robots or machines of some kind, but later decided to put an end to them. Why? Was there a problem with the machines? What happened, and when?

Notes

• The hostage scene was foreshadowed in "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars," but it wasn't previously clear who was shot.

• Byron's song was the same one sung by the telepaths in "Strange Relations."

• Asimov's Laws of Robotics are:
  1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  Garibaldi's programming only includes the first law, not the first two as Bester claimed (though arguably Bester was referring to the two rules contained in the first law.)

  It's also possible Bester implanted the second law but didn't quote it to Garibaldi. In that case Garibaldi would have to follow Bester's orders. There's a slight hint of that possibility in Bester's mocking request that Garibaldi turn out the lights when he leave (though that could just as easily be simple baiting.)

• The phoenix of the title probably refers to the birth of a new telepath movement following Byron's death by fire.

jms speaks

• How would the Byron story have been different if Claudia Christian hadn't left?
  It's no secret that I would've had Ivanova becoming somewhat linked to Byron romantically (she would see him as a character like Marcus, which is why there are certain similarities, and she would take a chance only to find it wrong this time, underlining that she'd missed her one major opportunity thus far for a good relationship). This was expressed to Claudia toward the last part of S4, so she knew at that time that her latent ability would be coming out, and that she'd have a big part in S5.

  In this scenario, Lyta would have become a devoted follower of Byron's, much as she has, but it would have been more love from afar: protective, somewhat unrequited but hoping for more...so that when he met his fate, Lyta would end up right where she is now, just by a different road.

Last update: May 27, 2024