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Babylon 5 still a great show, but cant stand Susan Ivanova in first season

U

urrutiap

Captain
Captain
Especially when she still goes on and on about how her poor old mother got hopped on drugs to handle her telepathic abilities.

watching episode 17 Legacies and as usual Susan was butting heads with that one Psi Corp blonde gal when they met that younger girl theif that discovered her telepath ability.

Just because Susan's mother was a complete mess anyway doesnt mean she had to go and butt heads with Talia Winters all the time
 
While talia rarely deserved Susan's scorn personally, the Psi Corps definitely did. Then again, when Season 5 comes around I find it hard to not side with the Psi Corps, but thats down more to terrible character writing in season 5 and hoping that the Psi Corps could save the show from it :lol:
 
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kirk55555 said:
Whnile talia rarely deserved Susan's scorn personally, the Psi Corps definitely did. Then again, when Season 5 comes around I find it hard to not side with the Psi Corps, but thats down more to terrible character writing in season 5 and hoping that the Psi Corps could save the show from it :lol:
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I think the only character that suffered from flawed writing was Lyta Alexander.
 
Ivanova was a pain in the ass in season 1. always telling a new young telepath to stay away from the Psi Corps. She should have just minded her own damn business and let the new young telepaths find out for themselves if joining the Psi Corps is a good thing or a bad thing to help the out with their new telepath abilities. She kept blaming the Psi Corps for her mother being a druggie
 
Says who exactly?

also Sinclair was a bit of a nosy creep when it came to the Vorlons and the ambassador in the pilot episode. He was curious if they kiss on the first date etc. No offense but Earth humans are pretty much worse than aliens like the Centauri or Minbari or any alien species.

in Star Trek, humans especially from Earth theyre still bigots and racists when Klingons, Changelings and Vulcans are around. Archer and his gang were aholes when trying to deal with the Vulcans thinking Vulcans were keeping secrets and were giving TPol a hard time every episode. It was frankly really annoying

Steve Roby said:
Psi Corps are bad guys on the show. Ivanova's backstory is one of the ways we viewers learn that Psi Corps are bad guys.
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That the Psi Corps like dressing up in Hugo Boss-like uniforms, utter propagandistic mantras, and plaster their bold symbology everywhere suggests that they are up to no good. They don't even need to say "Are we the baddies?" out loud.
 
urrutiap said:
Especially when she still goes on and on about how her poor old mother got hopped on drugs to handle her telepathic abilities.

watching episode 17 Legacies and as usual Susan was butting heads with that one Psi Corp blonde gal when they met that younger girl theif that discovered her telepath ability.

Just because Susan's mother was a complete mess anyway doesnt mean she had to go and butt heads with Talia Winters all the time
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Rolf from The Sound of Music, later during the war, got a job sorting gold teeth at Auschwitz.
 
urrutiap said:
Ivanova was a pain in the ass in season 1. always telling a new young telepath to stay away from the Psi Corps. She should have just minded her own damn business and let the new young telepaths find out for themselves if joining the Psi Corps is a good thing or a bad thing to help the out with their new telepath abilities. She kept blaming the Psi Corps for her mother being a druggie
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It's been a while since I watched B5, but from what I can remember, I'm pretty sure there was no question that a telepath joining the Psi Corps was always a bad thing.
 
Yeah, anyone that watches the show and is under any doubt what Psi-Corps is all about clearly isn't paying attention.

Mind you I've lately seen people complaining how both 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek' have "suddenly" gotten political, so I may have to recalibrate my expectations to account for the subtextually myopic.
 
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JD said:
It's been a while since I watched B5, but from what I can remember, I'm pretty sure there was no question that a telepath joining the Psi Corps was always a bad thing.
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It was also required by law, IIRC. If they didn't acquiesce to joining, they were given regular "sleeper" drugs to shut off their powers.

Ivanova's mother was a low-level telepath. The taking of these drugs led to severe depression and her eventual suicide, which is why Ivanova was so insanely hateful of PsiCorps.

Understandable, honestly, if she'd want to prevent the same thing from happening to others.

Be seeing you! ;)
 
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urrutiap said:
Ivanova was a pain in the ass in season 1. always telling a new young telepath to stay away from the Psi Corps. She should have just minded her own damn business and let the new young telepaths find out for themselves if joining the Psi Corps is a good thing or a bad thing to help the out with their new telepath abilities. She kept blaming the Psi Corps for her mother being a druggie
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Ivanova's mother was NOT a druggie. She was forced to use telepath blocking drugs, by law. Her only other options were joining the Psi Corp or prison, but she didn't want to be away from her family, so she opted for the telepath blockers.

They had the unforrunate side effects that Ivanova described, especially after taking them for years and years. Everyone has a breaking point, and Ivanova's mother reached hers and took the only option she felt she had left... suicide.

Given the things we saw the Psi Corp do with regular people and their own telepaths, and what Susan went through, I completely understand why she has such an intense hatred of the Psi Corp.

They were the bad guys, through and through. I think the only decent members of the Corp we ever met were Jason Ironheart and Harriman Gray. (Outside of Lyta and Talia, and Talia ended up essentially dead once the 'sleeper personality' took over.) Every other member of Psi Corp was a bad guy... especially Bester.


Side note: one thing that made Bester such a great character was that if you look at it from the angle of someone going to extreme lengths to protect his 'race', he's not a villain. In a way, he's almost a softer version of Khan Noonien Singh... he looks at non-telepaths as inferior, just as Khan looked at non-augments as inferior. The difference being Bester was more about protecting telepaths and staying seperate from mundanes... with Khan, it was make eveyone his slave or they die.
 
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