At one point in the series, to note the now-vanished Babylon 4, we're
going to have somebody just standing in deep background wearing a T-Shirt
that reads, "My Mother Visited Babylon 4 And All I Got Was This Crummy
T-Sh

We're a sick bunch, but we're fun.

jms

Let me just dive into this whole telepath thing, which you keep
bringing up as something that you feel doesn't belong in an SF series. I
strongly disagree (obviously, since it's in B5). The problem with most
uses of telepathy in TV SF is that it hasn't been done very well; it's
either couched in mysticism or used as a deus ex machina. Telepathy has
had a long and distinguished history as a subject of *quality* SF, right
up to and including Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man," arguably the
best book ever written on the subject.

What no one has done in TV, and what I want to do, is to ask the
next question, which is what SF is all about. Because if, in reality, we
discovered tomorrow that there actually were provable telepaths among us,
you can bet your bottom dollar that there would be laws passed about it
the very next day, in every courthouse and congress around. Questions of
privacy, of criminal prosecution, of lifestyle, of regulation, all these
and more get raised by that particular spectre. And that is something I
very definitely want to explore in B5...it's not just a throwaway, it's
something that we will discover after a while is *central* to something
that's going on in the B5 universe.

It's no more or less fantastic than jump gates and Vorlons, and there
is room to explore how we as a people would react to something like this.
And that is what SF is *for* at its best.

jms

Actually, there's very little in the B5 telepathy issue that comes
anywhere near Bester's; I brought that up only as an example of how it
can be, and has been treated well in fiction. The notion of telepaths
banding together has shown up in *lots* of different books and stories,
though arguably Bester's is one of the best. (One difference, fo
instance, cited earlier, is that in Bester's book, psi's can't testify in
court...in the B5 universe they can, but only under *very* restrictive
conditions.)

As someone with degrees in clinical psychology and sociology, I've
been noodling around with the sociological impact of psi's for a long
time now, and figure this is the place to work it out. (And no, there
won't be any instances of magic qua magic on B5. It has to be somehow
explainable; even if it's extremely high tech that *looks* like magic,
one has to be able to come up with a possible rational explanation.)

jms