a. She wasn’t necessarily a volunteer. She was drawn to the Vorlon homeworld, but IIRC it was never said she willingly became their…what she became.
b. She’s a telepath. That alone would make her feared, especially one of her power.
c. She isn’t a “war veteran” any more than a lurker in Downbelow is. Yes, she helped out. But she wasn’t Earth Force.
d. Her rent was paid by the Vorlons. When they left, so did her ride.
Heck, all of the telepaths. They wanted a homeworld, by golly they had earned it, and by the end of the war there were a few habitable but uninhabited planets available. So why not let them have one? Other than “because the plot requires otherwise”, of course.
See “feared and not trusted” above. Governments never take the easy way out with people they fear who also aren’t in a position to destroy them. Besides, why should they get a homeworld? If you give them one, you have to give everybody one. Unless you just dump them off with no resources, which I think the telepaths would pick up on.
I think the first Kosh had become sympathetic much earlier. Refer back to the episode where he dies, and the dream he sends to Sheridan right before the Shadows come for him, where he appears as Sheridan’s father. I think his time on Babylon 5 had left him with strongly paternal feelings towards humans, and turned him against the “chessmaster” ideology that was driving his people’s endless string of proxy wars with the Shadows.
As for giving the telepaths their own planet, there’s no way EarthGov would ever go for that. Giving them their own planet (even if you don’t give them anything else) means giving them their own tools to become an interstellar power in their own right. EarthGov is already distrustful of telepaths when they’ve got them directly under their thumb. The last thing Earth wants to do is create a situation where there’s the remotest possibility of a fleet of warships crewed entirely by telepaths someday showing up in the Sol system.
I think it’s more a PsyCorps issue.
That one drug was produced solely as an attempt to create more teeps. They have internal breeding programs to produce stronger teeps. Humanity is their playground and their toy, and their big giant teet to keep feeding from.
Bester kinda expected that there would be a Telepath War, but between Psycorps and the Mundanes. One he expected to win, and from there, to control Humanity for the benefit of the Telepaths.
The power of the Corps was in numbers, and they clearly didn’t feel they had enough. No way they were going to open the doors and allow anyone and everyone who wanted to leave to do so.
No they didn’t. At least, the human telepaths didn’t. It was the alien telepaths (Minbaris mostly) that did the heavy lifting during the war. I don’t recall seeing human telepaths at the final battle. Earthgov and PsyCorps didn’t help at all.
Don’t know what Byron was doing during the war, but you don’t get hair that shiny by fighting. Why Byron, and his sad group of useless wankers, felt entitled to a homeworld, I’ll never know.
Hate that guy.
Didn’t Earth sit the Shadow War out?
Re the telepaths and Earth and the Shadow War:
[spoiler] They recruited Blips, runaway telepaths, to help fight the shadows. We just didn’t see most of them in action for whatever reason (to be fair, we only saw the minbari telepaths do anything like once or twice, the rest of the time the telepaths were offscreen doing their thing).
Sheridan being a douche is actually kind of in character for him, see above, re: redirecting military readiness funds because he didn’t want to pay 50 credits a week for rather spacious quarters. Mind you, his positive qualities vastly outweighed those negative traits of his, but they were there. Like pretty much everybody else on B5, Sheridan was a flawed person.
As far as how they treated Lyta, yeah, that was pretty bad, and I think mostly just the result of some sloppy writing. I guess the long-term point they were working at was that Bester (and later Byron) were both right in a way about feeling that the best interests of telepaths did not align with the best interests of the Mundanes as the Mundanes saw things. The way they both went about things was flawed in various ways.
Earth (or at least, the higher echelons of EarthGov after Clark consolidated his power) was aligned with the Shadows during the war. Presumably the idea was for the Earthers to get into things attacking the younger races (and presumably even the Centauri) after Clark had managed to whip up enough xenophobic fervor with his propaganda.
PsiCorps was similarly allied with the Shadows along with the rest of EarthGov, something that ended up leading to Bester and Sheridan team up (talk about strange bedfellows). Bester didn’t like what the Shadows planned to do with “his” telepaths, and took action to stop it. Once the war was concluded, he went back to antagonizing his good friends on B5.
Byron, IIRC, was a PsiCop, one of Bester’s right-hand men, in fact. So during the War, he was either doing the Black Omega thing or he was on the run as a Rogue Telepath. Given his lack of love for the Mundanes and their political interests, he seems unlikely to have taken a side in the Shadow War. Mostly he wanted a homeworld for the telepaths because he wanted a place where they could be alone from the Mundanes, free to use their powers freely amongst themselves without having to constantly use self-restraint and actively block out everybody else’s thoughts.
He wasn’t looking for a reward for helping out, he was looking for compensation for being victimized. But yeah, aside from his legitimate concerns, Byron was an annoying jerk. I assume he got hair that shiny from using Centauri haircare products.[/spoiler]
Have been going through season 5 with only a few episodes remaining and I didn’t think it was as bad as I had been expecting. Maybe it was a good thing that I was expecting the worst as it actually turned out okay. Even Byron wasn’t as bad as expected, although I agree he was getting on my nerves. Especially the kumbaya moments when they were holding hands and singing. (Actually put it on mute!)
Only a few more episodes to go and something strange is going on in the Centauri Republic. By the way, I’ve heard them call it the Centauri Republic a few times, but found it a bit odd that there would be an emperor in a republic. Although that’s not a nitpick, just an observation considering we have similar situations even today; put in “Great Leader” instead of emperor, (or in this case dictator), in places like the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).:rolleyes:
As a rule of thumb, you can always tell if a country isn’t really democratic or a republic if they go out of their way to point out that they are (as witnessed by the classic modern example: The Republic of Korea (AKA “South Korea”, the democratic one) and The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (AKA “North Korea”).
As for the Centauri Republic, it’s a parallel to the Roman Empire, so I guess the assumption is that they went from Republic to Empire without wanting to pay to change all the stationary. There are also references to the Centaurum, which I presume is their republican voting body (though whether it is representative of all of the Centauri, or merely the wealthier/more powerful houses, is never indicated.)
And there’s always something strange going on in the Centauri Republic. That’s just kinda the nature of the place. 
Slightly off-topic, I did buy some of the books - chiefly, the Centauri Prime boooks, the Bester books, and To Dream in the City of Shadows .
The technomage books have a problemk - I can’t find the last book in the series. It’s out of print and costs $22. It’s not worth it to me.
To Dream in the City of Shadows was worth reading, though it did drag a bit at times, but it’s good to see the relevance and where things come from.
Of the books, (IMO) the Centauri Prime stuff is the best AND the most important. The Bester books are second best and important, but not as critical. The technomage stuff wasn’t that good or that important to wrapping things up.
And back when I was looking for them, the second and third Centauri books were impossible to find and cost like $50/per. I assume that was some sort of weird market thing–the DVDs had just come out, so that might have been a factor.
But once she became it, she didn’t have to participate and she didn’t have to particpate willingly in the war. She turned on the Vorlons (and even tried to probe Kosh II, with horribly painful results) for the good-guys and risked quite a bit. She could have just run off.
By who? Not Sheridan and Garabaldi–and they’re the only two who matter in this context (Garabaldi to get her a job, Sheridan to let her keep an apartment).
Neither was Sheridan at that point. Earth Force was irrelevant-they’d broken away two, three seasons back, remember–she wasn’t Earthforce, but B5 hadn’t been either since like early S3. She was a full member of Sheridan’s task force and, outside of Sheridan himself, and maaaaybe Delenn, the single most critical person to actually winning the Shadow War. That should have bought her at least a little consideration from Sheridan written in character.
Hey, hey, hey, I have a joke for you guys.
Q. How many Centauri does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Just one. But in the great old days of the Empire, hundreds of servants would leap to do it at our very whim!
Sigh. I’m such a nerd. No one else will ever get that joke except my nerdy friends. I wish I knew more nerds in real life. 
Hey, at least we got it. Hell, I’m surprised it didn’t show up on the show.
Actually, Londo tells it to Lennier when lennier is in the hospital from saving Londo’s likfe. 
That’s where I got it.
And that’s why it sounded familiar! :smack:
I’ve finished season 5! It really wasn’t as bad as I had expected, especially after Byron killed himself.
Have to say I thought the last two episodes where not that great. It was slow and weepy goodbyes. I think episode 20 as the last would have been fine.
Still it was good to see Ivanova again in the very last episode.
Have also watched the various movies per Raguleader’s view order recommendations in another thread.
Will be starting the Crusades next. Am I going to be disappointed? Or pleasantly surprised?
Disappointed. Crusade was a poor concept that was badly executed.
Congratulations! And we have sucked another one in.