S01E06 “Mind War”

[1994.03.02] A rogue telepath with exceptional powers takes refuge on Babylon 5, and two PSI Cops arrive to capture him. Catherine Sakai heads to Sigma 957 to survey it for Quantium-40, ignoring G'Kar

“Who watches the watchmen?” Lt. Cmdr. Ivanova levels Juvenal’s question at a pair of PSI Cops as an accusation as they throw their weight around aboard Babylon 5. But as the episode unfolds, it seems to come by way of Alan Moore rather than Ancient Rome. That’s because the PSI Cops are tracking telepath-turned-telekinetic who is slowly turning into an all-powerful transcendent being able to manipulate matter at the molecular level. The episode bears the trappings of a crime procedural, with obvious bad guys in shiny black uniforms, but the introduction of a comic-book scale problem makes the invocation of Watchmen more appropriate.

I see Hugo Boss is still doing well.

Arms Race and Ascension

The name of the episode, “Mind War,” is pretty on-the-nose when we find out that Jason Ironheart—a former instructor and lover of the station’s telepath Talia Winters—volunteered for an experimental program to enhance his abilities. He learned too late that he was essentially part of an arms race to create telekinetic assassins, but it had the side-effect of allowing him to see the workings of reality itself. He discovered the PSI Cops’ plot to orchestrate a silent coup on Earth using mind-reading as blackmail and won’t allow himself to fall into their hands. In the end, he transforms into a being of light, granting Talia the gift of telekinesis before venturing into the cosmos.

When your headache can collapse matter.

Sinclair is able to successfully blackmail Bester into covering up the Ironheart affair, leveraging Bester’s earlier secrecy and the death of his collogue, but opts to keep the information about a coup to himself. Maybe this will play out in later episodes. Maybe he just doesn’t think he stands a chance against superior force.

No One Is What They Appear

The theme of transcendence carries over to the B-plot. It’s short, but it carries forward another of the Babylon 5’s thematic throughlines: “No one is exactly what he appears.” G’Kar pointedly says this to Catharine Sakai, naming all of the main players in his warning.

G’Kar’s warning can be read as a nod to the intrigue that has been v-e-r-y slowly building so far, but it also nods to something else Babylon 5 seems to be doing. Sci-fi and cinema have a tendency to telegraph heroes and villains visually, with attractive heroes and odd and sinister-looking villains. But they also tend to subvert that trope with equal heavy-handedness: the femme-fatale or the various “with a heart of gold” types. Babylon 5 appears to be subverting both tropes and trying to remove the viewer’s ability to rely on these kinds of visual cues altogether.

Extraterrestrial orchids and ominous warnings

In this episode, the PSI Cops appear in shiny black uniforms with more than a vaguely fascistic demeanor. Walter Koenig, best known as the affable Chekov from Star Trek, plays against type here as the cold, authoritarian Bester in a bit of casting that turns a familiar face into someone menacing. In an earlier episode, the beautiful slave Adira was staged to be a femme-fatale but was revealed to be genuinely kindhearted. Yet her handler was as ugly as he appeared. The Soul Hunter looked appropriately garish but the rest of his species turned out to be caring and spiritual. The designs of the major alien races all have ambiguous presentations. The Centauri appear goofy but with sharp teeth. The Minbari visage is almost structurally unreadable. The Narn look the least human, but affect a genteel air.

Always a Higher Rung

Catherine travels to Sigma 957 anyway and encounters something beyond her understanding. Her ship is disabled, but G’Kar sends rescue. When she returns to the station, she seeks answers to both. G’Kar plays her rescue off as a calculatedly uncalculated gesture, reminding her that no one is entirely what they appear. As to the other phenomenon, he draws a larger hierarchy, saying their species are to the thing Catherine encountered as ants are to them. This loads onto broader questions about hierarchies and power balances that have been simmering under most of the episodes we’ve seen so far.

Don’t stare directly at godlike entities.

The ostensible purpose of the Babylon 5 station is to provide a place where equals hash out their differences, but this episode reveals that there is always a higher rung on the ladder. If transcendence keeps revealing new hierarchies—telepaths above mundanes, energy beings above telepaths, cosmic entities above them all—then equality becomes a polite fiction. Pluralism assumes a level playing field, or at least one that can be leveled through effort. What happens when it’s not about who has more ships, but about who exists on a fundamentally different plane? You can’t negotiate with a god. You can only hope they’re benevolent.

Moving Money

A final note: In the closing scene, Talia is seen using her new telekinetic gift to move a penny across a table. The penny is a wheatback, and with the recent announcement that the U.S. will no longer be minting new pennies, by the 23rd century, it must be worth a small fortune.

Forget Bitcoin. In the 23rd century, this penny pays for the station.