#psicop

As for theories – take “Race Through Dark Places” (not coincidentally, probably my least favorite Bester episode). We start off seeing Bester scanning that guy and getting info, then going to B5. What type of evil organization sends /one guy/ to go get at least 10-12 rogues? If we take their words on face level, some of them were weaker but got enhanced before they left (PsiCorps would surely know about that!) and apparently a bunch of teeps joining together makes them stronger. Even if Bester thought he could beat all of them in a mind war, it doesn’t actually mean that they don’t have 10 people and one wouldn’t be able to shoot him in the back as he attempts to capture the others. No, he’d have to rely on help from the B5 security staff – which he already knows he alienated fairly badly. He’s a telepath! A really, really nosy telepath! Any person with even slight familiarity with body language would be able to tell that the B5 staff is totally uninterested in helping him out, a telepath would know that VERY well, and PsiCorps would almost certainly have portfolios written up about everyone which he would no doubt review before going over to deal with them. Compare this to a typical police show – the FBI does show up and take control of the local staff, but if they think they’re running into issues, they call in their own strike teams (which we KNOW PsiCorps has). So why in the world would the Corps send one person?

In my view, the only possible explanation that doesn’t result in “wow, PsiCorps is totally stupid-evil” is that they realized the difficulty of looking through B5’s Down Below for a few scant people, especially with B5’s staff not being helpful and, in Ivanova and Franklin’s cases, with some of the staff with well-recorded histories that would  make them predisposed to help the rogues. The Down Below is infamously easy to smuggle things in and out of; I have no doubt that Garibaldi and Sinclair’s reports would have made that clear, and I have equally no doubt that PsiCorps would take a look at those reports when trying to figure out the difficulty of a mission like Bester’s. So it’s illogical to try to use /Babylon 5/ of all places to try to corner the rogues – it’s like trying to catch water in a net. Psicorp and Bester – not being dumb – would realize that.

Bester’s job, therefore, is NOT to actually capture the rogues. It’s to show up and be the big, bad, scary Psicop out for the blood of the rogues – thereby scaring the rogues into gathering themselves up together into a conveniently sized group and leaving B5. If Bester got info on the next location that the rogues were likely to go (either by scanning that guy in the beginning of the episode OR by scanning a rogue during the episode), or even if he /didn’t/, they would still be in a spaceship on their way to their next location. And Psicops work in groups of two! We see this in “Mind War” (and, for that matter, in Dust to Dust, where Bester shows up alone but meets up with a partner afterwards). So where’s Bester’s partner? Waiting outside the next stop on the underground railroad with a group of Black Omegas, ready to snap up the group of rogues which have – as mentioned – already gathered themselves up into a conveniently catchable single group. It’s much easier to toss some tear gas into a confined space like a spaceship or a docking bay than it is to scour the entire Down Below for each one individually – as Garibaldi’s regular complaints about it illustrate, it’d take an army.

So what happened in Race Through Dark Places? Bester is feeling out Talia’s responses – and he’s not really liking what he’s getting. She’s reluctant to participate, she’s clearly unhappy about the Ironheart thing – far better that she not be told about the plan and just gets sent safely out of the way. She was never supposed to be targeted (as Bester says), BESTER was supposed to be the target that was grabbed. He’s surprised by that twist, but he’s going to work with it. He still needs to get to the rogues to spring the trap – he needs to convince them that it’s either not safe to stay on B5 (because PsiCorps is coming in force) OR that they’re safe and can leave B5 in peace (because Bester believes they’re dead).

((Also, the scene of the rogues with Talia is SUPER CREEPY – they drug her, kidnap her, take her to an undisclosed location, and then – while she’s still disoriented – they pour story after story into her ear about how evil the Corps is/how sympathetic they are/how she needs to help them. This, in modern-day tactics, is called “brainwashing.” Even in real life, police sometimes use it unconstitutionally to convince uncertain eyewitnesses that no, they’re actually sure about what they say, or they convince people to confess even to stuff they didn’t do, or they convince someone to turn on their organization. Hell, to be honest, lawyers sometimes use the technique (without the drugs!) to convince someone to give evidence. IT’S NOT A NICE TACTIC. Also, the story they feed her about Ironheart? Is obviously a lie if you take what we see in Mind War as real – Ironheart explicitly says that he killed the head researcher and escaped and made his way as fast as he could to B5 to see Talia before he “became”. By his own words, he didn’t have time to pick up a whole cadre of rogues. So the whole “we worked together!” thing they say? Seems more like a lie deliberately designed to engage her sympathies than anything else. Like in police shows – “I have a daughter! She means the world to me! Just like yours! You have to help me get this bad guy before he hurts anyone else!” Person confesses/agrees to help. 5 min later: “You have a daughter?” “Nah, just said it so he’d believe me/confess.” You don’t even need telepathic powers for this to work – and if these 10 rogues are working together, they’re almost certainly using some to enhance the pathos of their stories, and there is literally nothing Miss-I’m-a-P5-and-don’t-seem-to-have-access-to-my-Ironheart-gift-except-a-little can do to stop them. I feel really bad for her here, and really pissed at Franklin – see more on that later.))

So let’s go to the last scene. Bester is offered help of a real taskforce by Garibaldi (which would be useful in actually catching the rogues, his stated goal) but obviously goes down ahead of time. Again – he’s a telepath cop in an organization that specializes in telepathy. If PsiCorps is even remotely competent – which it’s implied that it is – then surely they’ve created systems in place to test your perception of reality. If Bester is as strong as he’s supposed to be, why not let them get into his head and put in an illusion? It goes with the plan – he’s strong enough to resist enough that they only get down far enough into his head to put in the illusion, not to look through his mind, and possibly he’s even able to shield the knowledge that this is a trap from them. But even if he was actually convinced – as he’s walking away, he puts his gun away. He feels the muzzle of his gun as he does. If he just shot 10 people, it’d be hot! A perfect, easy, impossible to fake way to test if the gun was fired. He could check the number of shots he has left (assuming that they don’t have endless ammo, which is impossible, it doesn’t matter if he went down from 100 shots to 90 or from 10 to 0, he’d still notice that the count was off). If I were running the investigator training in an institution dedicated to hunting down people capable of implanting illusions in someone’s mind, I’d make damn sure there are some ways to physically verify if something just happened or if it was an illusion, and these are some pretty easy ways. So there’s virtually no way an actually competent Bester (even one dealing with the after-effects of having 10 people banging around in his head) would NOT know that he was just “duped.”

At which point, he leaves the station. This is SUPER weird. The show tries to play it off – “oh, he withdrew his complaint” – but this makes no sense. Zero. Zip. Garibaldi was going down there in an hour, wasn’t he? Even if Bester HAD believed that he’d just shot 10 rogues dead, Garibaldi goes down there (so what if Bester tells him not to? He just had some guys shoot up a well-populated area in his ship, and we KNOW what Garibaldi feels about people bringing guns onto his ship, much less using them where people – families – are having brunch). Are we really supposed to believe that Bester honestly believes that Garibaldi would go down there, find 10 dead bodies lying around, and NOT immediately haul Bester in for questioning? Even if he can’t hold him, he’s damn well going to question him about what he knows. But Garibaldi is going to go down there and not find anything. So he’s not going to protest Bester leaving (actually, he probably would regardless because he’s a paranoid bastard and we love him that way, so Sheridan must have told him not to). Which by itself should be enough to tell Bester that the rogues aren’t dead.

The only explanation: he knows they’re alive. He knows they’re leaving the station. He knows where they’re going next, and he’s going to get them there. Also, he knows that the B5 command staff is not to be trusted (someone on the command staff helped get these people on board, and either Garibaldi knows about the rogues or someone above him – Sheridan? Ivanova? – ordered him not to stop Bester from leaving. Not to mention if he was able to sense Sheridan and Franklin’s minds just standing right there…) And – unfortunately – he also knows that Talia can’t be trusted any more. All those weird pauses, those weird glances he gives her – those can all be interpreted as him trying to give her a chance to confess. He’s a cop, he’s PsiCorps – if she’s a good little Corps member, she should find him. Tell him what happened. Tell him she had no choice, they forced her, they’re still alive. At which point he could tell her the real plan, because there’s no risk she’d tell them, and he could apologize that she got involved, because that wasn’t supposed to happen. But she doesn’t tell him. She plays it off super-cool. She’s choosing not to tell him. He doesn’t have time to stick around to find out why or let her work out some of that trauma – he has rogues to catch! – so he leaves. He’s very disappointed in her, but he’s going to give her a chance to make a phone call later. He’ll wait to see if she’s really going rogue, or if she’s just traumatized and doesn’t want to talk about what can very easily be interpreted as a mental and emotional rape. This interpretation makes him a lot more like a real human being – sure, he’s evil, but that doesn’t mean he has no understanding of how people work – and makes him come off as a lot more intelligent and emotionally astute.

((And just as another point – Sheridan, who is supposedly fairly pro-government and who Bester has been explicitly told will be more sympathetic than Sinclair was, goes anti-PsiCorps really fast in this episode, and for no immediately apparent reason. I know he was literally just following in Sinclair’s footsteps – this episode would’ve made sense with Sinclair there, because he already has reason to distrust Bester personally and PsiCorps generally, but Sheridan? Nope. We at least needed a reason for him to suddenly totally disregard everything that the person with actual authority to deal with these issues tells him, even if Ivanova ominously tells him to “look up Bester’s history”. Actually, especially if Ivanova tells him that, because Ivanova has a notorious history with disliking PsiCorps to the point of irrationality, which he personally is aware of as we know from their conversation. And it’s not like Sinclair actually recorded “Mind War: Psicop showed up, mislead us, then the guy blew up, don’t trust Corps” in his notes or anything – the agreement at the end of Mind War is explicitly that they’re not going to talk about what they perceive as Bester’s misdoings (I don’t actually think he did anything wrong in Mind War, but that’s another rant!) and they’re also going to delete all info about what happened with Ironheart. There’s just no way for Sheridan to learn all of that so fast, and NO reason for him to suddenly decide that standing around and letting a person – any person – get mind-raped into not perceiving reality is A-OK. Not to mention how sketchy it is for Franklin to be OK with it, given his supposed dedication to the Hippocratic Oath…or help smuggle guys with guns onto the ship, knowing they might, say, start shooting up a crowded restaurant…or the fact that where did they get drugs capable of knocking out a telepath? Surely not from their contact, conveniently a doctor with access to all of medlab’s supplies? No, that would actually make perfect sense. Franklin comes off as a truly awful person in this episode, and I hope Garibaldi goes and punches him later off-screen for what he’s done, but I doubt it. This show just makes everyone totally OOC when it comes to PsiCorps, except for Ivanova who is completely in character at being totally irrationally anti-Corps, but that doesn’t excuse anyone else.))