History records that he picked time-travel. But did you know that one of the first companions (as in, there were three original companions and this was one of them) was the Doctor's own semi-telepathic grand-daughter?
She got dumped from the show when the writers decided they didn't like the character/the actress thought she wasn't getting any character development.
I mention this because I just saw the Babylon 5 episode "All Alone in the Night," which ends with Sheridan & Co. founding a conspiracy against EarthGov. EarthGov is supported by the Psy Corps, which is made up of telepaths.
So I have two questions: how long can that conspiracy possibly remain a secret, and two, why do writers keep throwing telepaths into their stories? (And three: why does my spell-check not seem to want to make up its mind about whether or not "telepaths" is a real word?)
This post will focus on the second question, because, well, I haven't seen the entire show and I'm not entirely sure how my spell-check works, so I'm not qualified to answer either of the others.
If you're doing a series about an evil, intrusive police state (and B5 is certainly setting EarthGov up as that), then having evil, intrusive mind-readers seems like a good idea. Nobody wants their private thoughts scanned, after all. But then you start your heroes off on their quest to overthrow the government, and eventually you're going to get to a point where the audience is asking, "hey, how come the telepaths aren't catching that one?"
Yes, it's a cliche of writing that the Evil Empire needs to be big and bad and scarily efficient... until it's hunting down the good guys, at which point it's staffed entirely by graduates of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Or that the Overlord's plan goes off completely without a hitch... only he overlooked one tiny technical detail when he was building his giant Death Star. Or that an evil Empire with enough resources to build two Death Stars couldn't bother to repeat its trick in the first film of sticking a tracking device on one particular ship to lead them right to-
Okay you get the point, moving on.
Any audience is smart. A science-fiction/fantasy audience, which has to take into account all sorts of new rules that don't apply in our world, has to be even smarter. They are going to spot the loose thread at the edge of your carefully-constructed tapestry... and if it's a big enough thread, they're going to pull the whole thing apart. (To go back to Star Wars again, how could a hyperdrive-less Millennium Falcon get from one star system to another in Empire before the cast aged to death? Or insert-logical-contradiction-from-the-prequels-here.)
Bluntly, telepaths do not work in conspiracy stories. Yes, yes, JMS set this thing up about how "deep scans" - the useful ones - are technically inadmissible as evidence. Like that's going to stop an evil government run by a man who assassinated his predecessor.
Now I'm gonna pivot and dissect "All Alone" a bit more. The A-plot is what I'm gonna call Standard Sci-Fi Schlock - the same sort of thing we saw last season in, say, "Infection." The idea of taking representatives of different species and making them fight either just for the evulz or for the purposes of launching an invasion has been done just a few times before. And given all the balls in the air already, I'd be kind of surprised if we saw those folks again.
The B-plot sees Delenn being kicked out of the Grey Council and replaced by a member of the Warrior Caste. This is bad because it signifies that the Grey Council is getting more militant and reactionary. The militant thing isn't necessarily bad, but they kinda do need to make an alliance with the humans in order to win the Great War that the opening narration has been promising us all season. So yeah, this is very much significant to the overall story... problem is, Delenn's accent just makes it hard for me to take her seriously when she's supposed to be making a desperate, impassioned argument. That's just me.
Oh, and Lennier agrees to get his career permanently stalled because really, the poor guy is
And in the middle of his story, Sheridan gets some sort of vision that'll probably pay off.
And then the last five minutes finally reveal why Sheridan's been kind of a jerk so far this season. (What do I mean by that? Compare the amount of stuff he delegates to Ivanova and Garibaldi to what Sinclair did.) He's been watching them to determine if they're loyal. At least, I assume that's why he's been doing it. Cuz otherwise he's just this guy who wants to make his second-in-command do everything while he goes off in his starfighter to have adventures.
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