The Corps is Mother The Corps is Father (B5)

[CareerKnight]

I don't recall much of a reason being given as to why no one wants to even sell them a planet and the good reasons to do so all come from thinking about the long term results (best case scenario they create a planet of isolationist and xenophobes). None of the alien races are shown to be any less short sighted than humanity so its a bit odd (unless SoaSE was extremely popular in the B5 universe and no one wants to create the Advent).

While those are definitely problems, I think an additional one was that no one called Byron on his bullshit. Not even Garibaldi.

A lot of people don't get called out in S5. When Lochley gives her defense of staying out of the war to overthrow Clark she gets a decent amount of applause even though her argument shouldn't really fly with most of the staff on B5 who know the fairly obvious rebuttal to her principled high horse stance of "And what about when he started using the military to massacre civilian populations and refuge ships?". Its not the military's job to change the government only sounds good (and it should since military coups are almost never a good thing) up until said government starts using the part of the military willing to go along with them (which is larger due to getting people sympathetic to their views in power before the crisis) to kill or intimidate anyone trying to use more peaceful means to get them removed from power. Its hard to argue that they have not become a "domestic" enemy that they are duty bound to protect people from at that point.

[Steve]

That would require ferrying them in jump-capable ships, though, or giving them such a ship. Someone would have to be willing to allow that.

For me the biggest issue was when Psi Corps came for them the first time. Y'know, the people who (For better or for worse) were under the protection of the President of the InterStellar Alliance? If they'd paid any lip service to the idea that, for instance, Sheridan feels unable to interfere because it could lead the EA into leaving the ISA, or some other similar political issue, that was fine, but it's just "Oh, Sheridan can't help them for whatever" (and this is before they tried to blackmail everyone, I'll add), and Lochley has to come up with a BS reason when what should have happened is, frankly, the Psi Cop bloodhounds marching in to take the telepaths and facing a wall of Rangers (including Ranger telepaths) sent by the President of the ISA to safeguard people under his protection. Maybe have Lochley and Sheridan arguing because she's following Earth Central's orders and he's interfering, even if he has the legal right to, and he counters that Babylon-5's independence was never negated (Indeed we're told later it wasn't returned to Earth control until a few years before it was destroyed) and that the Psi Corps has no legal jurisdiction on B5 save what she allows.

Although that's a general complaint with B5 Season 5. This episode was actually rather interesting, and definitely one of the best entries of the season.

[J!!]

i'm pretty sure the alliance doesn't have any authority over how member-governments conduct their internal affairs, or jurisdiction over their citizens. it's basically a large scale expansion of the babylon project, so he's got about as much real authority as the secretary general of the UN does, which is to say not much.

what the blips should be doing is petitioning for political asylum with the various alien governments. iirc, there is one episode where a teenage human telepath goes to live on minbar in order to escape the corps, so there is a precedent for that. and the narn would definitely love to have them.

[Archanubis]

I'll agree this is one of the strong S5 episodes. "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" "Day of the Dead," and the last few episodes starting from "Movements of Fire and Shadow" are some of the jewels in an otherwise ho-hum season, in my humble opinion.

[CareerKnight]

For me the biggest issue was when Psi Corps came for them the first time. Y'know, the people who (For better or for worse) were under the protection of the President of the InterStellar Alliance? If they'd paid any lip service to the idea that, for instance, Sheridan feels unable to interfere because it could lead the EA into leaving the ISA, or some other similar political issue,

I'm pretty sure they did state and or heavily imply that Sheridan couldn't do anything to help first because as J!! said the Alliance doesn't have any say in the internal affairs of its members as long as they are abiding by the charter and second if Sheridan did try and change or get rid of Psicorps all his political opponents back on Earth would use it as proof that they had been right about him all along and this was just a power grab.

[Steve]

I didn't say Sheridan is able to get rid of the Psi Corps. OTOH, what I am saying is that A) we're never told if Babylon-5's independence was actually undone or if it's part of the ISA now or what (Sleeping in Light indicates it was only returned to Earthforce a few years before they blew it up, IIRC), so the authority of the Psi Corps to do anything on it is nebulous, B) Sheridan's clearly more than just a Secretary-General of the UN given the UN SecGen doesn't have an elite force with the most powerful ships in known space at his or her disposal, and C) if he fails to do anything to protect people he stated he'd protect when they haven't given him a reason to withdraw his protection (As he later would when the telepaths got aggressive), he's weakened himself in front of everyone, and not long after he had to face down the Drazi for attacking innocent worlds (and the Drazi were only kept from ambushing the White Star Fleet due to the same telepaths that Bester's rounding up).

All I really wanted was to have something where Sheridan outright says that if he directly intervenes, it could cause the EA to leave the ISA, and that he's not willing to take that risk unless he has no choice, and thus Lochley's last minute "they have to be in quarantine" solution relieves him of having to call in the Rangers to protect people that he, y'know, said were under his protection. All we got was, as I recall, some hand-wringing.

[Steve]

All that said... yeah, the telepaths were idiots for not moving on to Minbari or Narn space.

Also, as much as one might dislike the Lyta/Byron romance, apparently JMS originally planned for Byron to romance Ivanova. Claudia Christian's departure from the show may have saved us a bullet.

[J!!]

B) Sheridan's clearly more than just a Secretary-General of the UN given the UN SecGen doesn't have an elite force with the most powerful ships in known space at his or her disposal,

the rangers don't work for the I.A., or its president; they live and die for The One. using them to supplement and support the I.A. is one thing, using them to to violate the laws of a member-state is completely different. if sheridan were to abuse his position as a minbari religious leader in order to overstep his lawful bounds as president, it would invalidate everything he said at the end of the civil war about being there to liberate, rather than conquer, and validate the xenophobic policies and propaganda of the clark administration.

beyond that though, every other member-state in the I.A. would take notice, because if he'll abuse his power and force his personal whim upon his on homeworld, he can just as easily do it to any of them. there's no way they'd stand for that, sheridan would either be impeached (assuming he didn't decide to use the rangers to prevent that), or the alliance would simply crumble.

[Nessus]

I don't recall much of a reason being given as to why no one wants to even sell them a planet and the good reasons to do so all come from thinking about the long term results (best case scenario they create a planet of isolationist and xenophobes). None of the alien races are shown to be any less short sighted than humanity so its a bit odd (unless SoaSE was extremely popular in the B5 universe and no one wants to create the Advent).

This. So very, very much this. S5 spent it's entire runtime NOT explaining this underlying premise that literally that entire arc was hung on. All we ever got was an occasional vague allusion to teep colony = inevitable race war... somehow? I didn't get it, and I didn't buy it. Without an actual train of logic to nail that down, it seemed to me there were a thousand different ways that could go, with the vast majority being mostly a factor of how you treated said colony on a diplomatic level. So for me it read like ALL the mundanes were so totally certain they'd fuck it up in the biggest way possible by treating the teeps like dirt that they were willing to treat the teeps like dirt to prevent it?

And if they're just being isolationist, all you need to do to avoid a war is to leave them alone. You only need to worry if they start getting outwardly violent. My best guess is that the writers thought it was a given that the teeps would always be lead by violently xenophobic nutters no matter what anyone did, but I don't see how that's a given at all.

And it seemed like the teeps had options anyway. Like others have said, the Minbari and ESPECIALLY the Narn would've been happy to help them. And push comes to shove, they could go stealth: form a shell company to buy a "Mundane" colony charter as Space Amish or whatever might give them a legal excuse for being arbitrarily picky about who can emigrate/visit, and start passing around out fake passports.

I feel like had some of that been brought up, Byron would've had some BS excuse about how it wouldn't work (based on a house of cards of assumptions), or how it didn't fit with his "perfect" ideology in some way. That man was as much their millstone as he was their unifier. His rigidly held and poorly justified BS was was what made them feel super cultish to me, more than anything else. It came to a point where I was legit expecting him to start up the classic free love>harem>pedophilia cult leader arc at any moment.

[DanteC]

Byron and his hippy cult were annoying, but they had valid points. Been ages since I saw that season, but I do remember them demanding a planet, which to be fair, is pretty unreasonable. In any case, they'd have no way to defend themselves against hostile aliens, or even the Psi Core without a sponsor.

Though why Sheridan didn't just talk to Drahl and see about giving them somewhere in on Epsilon 3 to stay.