and then actually turns to speak to him (the first time he's spoken to Londo, of his own free will, post-Cartagia)
Yes! I hadn't thought about it in so many words, but Londo has initiated all of their interactions for ages, both assassination plots included. The last time G'Kar went looking for Londo, he was telepathically off his face. And this time he goes looking for him to make an alliance on his own terms when Londo has clearly given up the hope of it happening—he's just drunk his own drink when G'Kar arrives. So it's even more breathtaking.
It could be anything from wanting Garibaldi and the B5 crew to suffer more as revenge for Carolyn, all the way to having become creepingly fond of them and not wanting to leave him in an unrecoverable state, or even because it is, this time, the actual morally right thing to do; we simply don't know. (And maybe, neither does he.)
I like the idea of Bester himself not knowing: it would fit his curious mix of cold-eyed self-awareness and totally unexamined acceptance of the system in which he's embedded. One of the reasons I find the suborning of Garibaldi so painful is that on some level it feels to me totally unnecessary. Despite the widely shared conviction that a war is coming between the two strains of humanity, I am actually willing to bet that if Bester had come to Babylon 5 with news of a Shadow-tech virus tailored to exterminate/subjugate any human with the genes for telepathy—which incidentally involves a far greater proportion of the population than the active expression of telepathy which is the Corps criterion for membership—he could have gotten their support to work the thwarting of Edgars into the rest of their two-pronged war, not merely as a matter of preserving a valuable resource against the Shadows but because everyone in the room would have recognized the viral solution to the telepath problem as obscenely wrong! (Just get Lyta to Mars with that information and she'd take care of the mission herself.) Or if the timing was too tight to involve Babylon 5, once he found Garibaldi in Earthgov custody and slated for reprogramming by the Shadow-infiltrated Corps, Bester could have made him a deal instead of counter-brainwashing him! Whatever his feelings about the Psi Corps as an institution or Bester personally, Garibaldi in his right mind would not hear a story about a genetically engineered holocaust and just shrug. There were potential allies in play, not just tools. And it's so clear that none of these possibilities occur to Bester, despite his previous occasional team-ups with the B5 crew. Facing the apparent first strike in the long-feared mundane-telepath war, he can't even let himself think about trusting a mundane. And so he says that he used Garibaldi because he had no other choice, but he actually did! He probably had choices I haven't thought of! He just couldn't see them. I love him as a fictional creation and as a person he drives me up the wall.
(We already know that ICN is the puppet voice of the administration, but just, ow.)
Yes. It is very striking to me now how much the depiction of Earth's descent into fascism pulls zero punches of it couldn't happen here.
(I was actually just coming back to this comment to explain that while driving home from an appointment this afternoon, my brain bothered to show its work that the PJ Harvey/Strange Days connection was Juliette Lewis covering "Hardly Wait.")
no subject
Yes! I hadn't thought about it in so many words, but Londo has initiated all of their interactions for ages, both assassination plots included. The last time G'Kar went looking for Londo, he was telepathically off his face. And this time he goes looking for him to make an alliance on his own terms when Londo has clearly given up the hope of it happening—he's just drunk his own drink when G'Kar arrives. So it's even more breathtaking.
It could be anything from wanting Garibaldi and the B5 crew to suffer more as revenge for Carolyn, all the way to having become creepingly fond of them and not wanting to leave him in an unrecoverable state, or even because it is, this time, the actual morally right thing to do; we simply don't know. (And maybe, neither does he.)
I like the idea of Bester himself not knowing: it would fit his curious mix of cold-eyed self-awareness and totally unexamined acceptance of the system in which he's embedded. One of the reasons I find the suborning of Garibaldi so painful is that on some level it feels to me totally unnecessary. Despite the widely shared conviction that a war is coming between the two strains of humanity, I am actually willing to bet that if Bester had come to Babylon 5 with news of a Shadow-tech virus tailored to exterminate/subjugate any human with the genes for telepathy—which incidentally involves a far greater proportion of the population than the active expression of telepathy which is the Corps criterion for membership—he could have gotten their support to work the thwarting of Edgars into the rest of their two-pronged war, not merely as a matter of preserving a valuable resource against the Shadows but because everyone in the room would have recognized the viral solution to the telepath problem as obscenely wrong! (Just get Lyta to Mars with that information and she'd take care of the mission herself.) Or if the timing was too tight to involve Babylon 5, once he found Garibaldi in Earthgov custody and slated for reprogramming by the Shadow-infiltrated Corps, Bester could have made him a deal instead of counter-brainwashing him! Whatever his feelings about the Psi Corps as an institution or Bester personally, Garibaldi in his right mind would not hear a story about a genetically engineered holocaust and just shrug. There were potential allies in play, not just tools. And it's so clear that none of these possibilities occur to Bester, despite his previous occasional team-ups with the B5 crew. Facing the apparent first strike in the long-feared mundane-telepath war, he can't even let himself think about trusting a mundane. And so he says that he used Garibaldi because he had no other choice, but he actually did! He probably had choices I haven't thought of! He just couldn't see them. I love him as a fictional creation and as a person he drives me up the wall.
(We already know that ICN is the puppet voice of the administration, but just, ow.)
Yes. It is very striking to me now how much the depiction of Earth's descent into fascism pulls zero punches of it couldn't happen here.
(I was actually just coming back to this comment to explain that while driving home from an appointment this afternoon, my brain bothered to show its work that the PJ Harvey/Strange Days connection was Juliette Lewis covering "Hardly Wait.")