Skip to main content

babylon 5 - How could Talia Winters help the rogue telepaths against Bester?



In the Babylon 5 season 2 episode "A Race Through Dark Places", Bester comes to Babylon 5 to hunt rogue telepaths. The rogues kidnap Talia Winters and convince her to help them. At the end of the episode she and the rogue telepaths manage to create a false memory in Bester. They make him believe she betrayed the rogues and the two of them (Talia and Bester) shot all of them.


However, later in the season, in the episode Divided Loyalties, we learn that Talia Winters has been a spy for the Psy Corps, which secretly planted an alternate personality in her brain.


Since her true personality was loyal to the Psy Corps, why would she help the rogue telepaths trick Bester? And even if she wasn't aware of the alternate personality spying for the corps, how could she help the rogues without that alternate personality finding a way to report to the corps about the rogue telepaths still being alive?



Answer



This was addressed by Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski. In short, burrowing into the 'underground railroad' and potentially compromising their entire network was a dream opportunity, even if it meant that she would occasionally seem to be working counter to PsiCorp's interests.



JMS: The real Talia was becoming more and more disenchanted with PC, and this was in time going to pull her into resistance activities, which Talia v2.0 would only be --thrilled-- about. The self-protection mechanism only kicks in when the personality's existence is threatened.


Midwinter Lurker's Guide - Divided Loyalties - JMS Speaks



Note that her core "Control" personality only surfaces when she's directly at risk of discovery/danger. Unless ordered to do so, she wouldn't compromise herself, even to share this interesting tidbit of info.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

story identification - I'm looking for a book about an experiment a couple decided to do on their child to make him smarter

I'm looking for a book I read in the 90's...it was about an experiment a couple decided to do on their child to make him smarter. I think the child ended up being too smart or something but I remember it getting kind of scary...his brain got bigger and bigger. I know I'm being vague but I was really young when I read it and it was way too advanced for me but I'm trying to find it!