Greatest Sci-Fi Saga of the '90s Continued

First things first. Get COLLECTION before you get this. Possibly saying that was unnecessary, but one never knows. BABYLON 5 episodes are not stand-alones, like many STAR TREKs. Get things out of order, and you're in danger of not knowing what is going on.

MIND PROBERS contains the Season One episodes THE PARLIAMENT OF DREAMS, MIND WAR, THE WAR PRAYER, AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS, DEATHWALKER, and BELIEVERS (episodes #5 through #10). Each episode is, in its own way, another J. Michael Straczynski masterpiece.

MIND WAR was the episode that originally sold me on this series, as it weaves together two ideas which eventually become dominant themes in this five-year "novel for television." The first is the behind-the-scenes scheming of the highly secretive Psi-Corps, who are not above experimenting on human beings in efforts to create and increase telepathic and telekenetic powers. (Recall from Episode #1, MIDNIGHT:this outfit's treatments drove Susan Ivanova's mother to commit suicide, distilling in her a scathing hatred of them that colors all her subsequent actions.) In this case, Jason Ironheart is the experimentee. He had escaped from the clutches of the Psi-Corps, only to discover that their experiments on him had given him powers he cannot control or cope with. A distressed Jason tells Sinclair, "I look at you, Commander, and I see not a man but a galaxy of subatomic particles I could pull apart with a single thought! It is a power we were not meant to have!" (By the way, playing the evil Psi-Cop Bester is none other than Walter Koenig. If you're thinking, "that can't possibly work," I assure you that it does, and extremely well. Bester will be back with more mischief!)

The other major theme in MIND WAR is the excursion to Sigma 957 taken by Catherine Sakai, Jeff Sinclair's on-again, off-again girlfriend. She had been warned by G'Kar, the Narn Ambassador, not to go there. "Sigma 957 is not a healthy place. Strange things happen there." She had dismissed him as having ulterior motives. But when she gets to the planet, she has an encounter ... and we see another example of the brilliant visual effects the BABYLON 5 crew is capable of. Having been rescued, Ms Sakai again confronts G'Kar, wondering what that was she saw. G'Kar's reply: "There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all it is as ants, and we have about as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us.... They are a mystery, and I am both terrified and reassured that there are still wonders in the universe, that we have not explained everything yet. Whatever they are ... they walk near Sigma 957, and they must walk there alone." This sequence really does invoke one's sense of wonder at the unknown!

Watchers of BABYLON 5 know that we will see and hear from incredibly old and advanced races of beings again. To put it mildly.

There is, of course, much more. Each of these episodes develops one or more of the BABYLON 5 characters or fleshes out some previously-obscure detail of the wonderful BABYLON 5 universe. There is plenty of thinly disguised commentary as to the fundamentally destructive nature of racism in both THE WAR PRAYER and AND THE SKY FULL OF STARS (anti-alien equals anti-immigration? ). The latter probes a bit more into whatever happened to Sinclair during those mysterious lost hours during the Battle of the Line.

BELIEVERS, the last episode in this set, raises a somewhat different question: should a doctor's advice (e.g., that of Dr. Stephen Franklin) override the religious beliefs of the parents of a patient? Should he perform an operation forbidden by those beliefs, even to save the patient's life? This is a textbook dilemma in medical ethics. The question is raised here in a more forceful way than we'll find in any ethics textbook. Warning: the end of this episode will haunt you for a week no matter what you believe about Western medicine! (BELIEVERS has a fringe benefit in offering up one of the Vorlon Ambassador Kosh's most interesting lines: "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.")

I could go on, but we've got space limits here. Safe to say, this is important science fiction. Two episodes per tape make all of these exceptionally good buys, and the only grounds for waiting is that we know they'll eventually all be available on DVD--very likely in widescreen versions.

Lastly, the soundtrack by Christopher Franke (ex-Tangerine Dream) is again worth its weight in gold.

Correspondence to: SAYatesinSC@cs.com