The person playing him couldn’t act for shit though.
The problem with this idea is the one Oak mentioned. It gets very expensive. Command staffs tend to be more than two or three people, and so do Away Teams. Either you pay a buttload for actors who will complain about the lack of screen time, or you have viewers complaining about the “Redshirt of the Week” syndrome, or the lack of a consistent bridge crew. The alternative is to use your stars in both positions as a dramatic necessity. Nobody is going to watch some redshirt get blown away with any interest, or any dramatic tension. You have to involve the characters they have invested in. That’s why Kara Thrace is the best damned whatever in the Fleet. Because nobody gives a rat’s about some Space Marine hired for one show.
Well, you’d definitely have to do a little maneuvering to keep the cast down, but I think it could work. For instance, if you keep it to a small ship, you don’t need as big a command staff. Alternatively, as Babylon 5 does, you can have the top three command staff be main characters, and have no-names working the rest of C&C. If you can keep the explorers to two-three characters - for instance, have a first-contact team of three, who go out first. Then, once they’ve established safety, you can send in the grunts, without spending screen time on them. Hell, away teams already did that. Say your cast of characters is:
Command Staff:
Captain (Sisko) - Makes the bigger decisions, authorizes expeditions, but doesn’t run them. Deals with external politics.
Communications/director of first-contact team (Ivanova)- Runs expeditions, in constant contact with the team, gets reports, makes general decisions. Would have a support staff of minor characters.
Science officer (Spock) - Generalist, you could have specialists, too, but they’d just be reporting through him, not main characters.
First-contact team:
Team leader (Jack O’Neill) - Lots of tactical experience, practical knowledge, coolheaded
The Specialist (Daniel Jackson) - Ironically, is a specialist in pretty much everything. But you gotta have the one guy who solves the puzzles, right?
The Security Guy (Jayne) - Makes sure everyone else comes back, does heavy lifting.
Now, the first-contact team’s roles are just examples - depending on how much of the show focuses on the activity, and how much on the characters, they could be arranged by by personality, with their roles more or less the same. The point is, you can have a pretty small team, so they get their screentime, and six characters isn’t that many.
If you set it up that way, either you have away missions every episode, or you have little for the away team to do for ship-centric episodes. Actors and writers aren’t gona like that. If the away team has on board duties, they have to be important duties. You can’t really send the janitor and the 2nd Lt. as the field commanders on important missions, so you’re back to the command staff=away team thing anyway.
But you see, I don’t care. There was a lot of iffy acting on B5 anyway.
Hmmm… yeah, I could see that being a problem. You don’t really want them to end up as minor characters. I guess it depends on the show, and I don’t really know enough about scriptwriting and whatnot to keep theorizing without specifics. I guess I was thinking this would be a job-based show, where away teams are the job, even for the crew. So either everyone’s doing that, or everyone’s doing some non-job-related storyline.
Awhile back I posted the question of whether telepathy should be relegated to the category of fantasy rather than science fiction. The general consensus was that it’s place in science fiction is too venerable to question now. But I agree, telepathy is bordering on the paranormal.
Also, much as I love the B5 Centauries, I can’t really credit the idea of any aliens being parahuman in appearance. IF there was a planet where the equivalent of bony fish evolved, then had land-dwelling decendents, then… well, a long chain of convergent evolution later, you might have something as human looking as a Narn.
One of only a few tolerable (IMO) Season 5 episodes…
-Joe
cough Vorlon meddling cough
As for psi, life force, and souls…hell, FTL is a black-box tech that is total fantasy right now. As long as the show establishes the rules and then works within them, I’ve got no problem with traditional fantasy elements in a sci-fi setting.
The difference is that purely technical black boxes at least have the virtue of not having been tried yet. With all the ESP/soul/life force stuff, you have the issue of lots of different, often contradictory beliefs over the years - makes it a little less believable that all of a sudden, at some point in the future, we’ll figure out that telepathy does work.
Plus, on a more practical level, FTL is pretty much required for space opera - life force, not so much.
The B5 in-universe explanation for why there’s telepathy then and not now is that it didn’t exist in the early 21st century. There’s a bit more detail, but I hate to spoil anything.
The existence of telepaths is explained later in the show. The soul stuff is not necessarily presented as fact. It’s presented as the belief of a particular group. The Minbari believe the soul thing…that doesn’t mean it’s true. The Soul Hunters also do…something…but it’s left to the viewer to determine what, if anything, they do. There’s a great episode where each race on B5 does a presentation of religion…not sure which season it’s in. The human presentation was pretty cool.
Season one, I believe. I seem to recall Sinclair trying to figure out what to do (and yeah, I liked his solution).
Telepaths are done reasonably well in this show. As Oak mentioned, human telepaths are explained as to why suddenly we have them. There’s a genetic component, but most races have telepaths (except Narns, who have been ethnically cleansed of the gene). The Centauri seem to be the only race with a major tradition of prophesy though–I don’t count the Minbari, for reasons that will become apparent later.
They’re only parahuman as far as what we see though. Vir–“We have six…we have six.”
Londo, through gritted teeth: “Attributes.”
Which can be used to cheat at poker, no less…
Ivanova: “So you feel that you’re being symbolically cast… in a bad light?”
Holy crap! I just watched the episode where one of the alien races gets a plague - and it DOESN’T AFFECT ALL SPECIES. I have newfound respect for this show.
It gives a new meaning to anatomically correct 
Declan
Wait til you see the Teddy Bear ep , if you have not already seen it.
Declan
OK. That was “Confessions and Lamentations.” You are heading into the best part of the series. The last few episodes of Season 2 through the end of Season 3 are absolutely top-rate. In fact, 8 episodes from now you will watch one of the most profoundly disturbing (in a good way) episodes of TV ever (“Passing Through Gethsemane”). Lucky bastard. Getting to see this for the first time.