Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father” Bester and two Psi-Cop interns arrive on Babylon 5 to investigate a murder… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on May 26, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father”Written by J. Michael StaczynskiDirected by Stephen FurstSeason 5, Episode 13Production episode 514Original air date: April 15, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… At Psi Corps HQ (which has apparently been reconstructed—or moved to a new location—since it was bombed), Bester meets with Director Drake, who introduces him to two new recruits, Lauren Ashley and Chen Hikaru, who are both big fans of Bester. Drake assigns them to shadow Bester. A telepath named Jonathan Harris is muttering to himself while reading a brochure for B5. He gets up and departs, leaving the corpse of his roommate behind. Bester is showing his two ducklings around, including observing a training exercise in blocking a psionic attack and then to an inspirational video/propaganda piece recorded by a happy telepath. The latter is interrupted by the body of Harris’ victim being found. Bester is summoned to the scene, as Harris was a student of his. Ashley stops by Bester’s quarters that night: she’s traumatized by seeing her first dead body, and asks Bester if it gets easier. He says it gets easier when it’s mundanes, but never when it’s fellow telepaths. Ashley also makes a pass, but Bester politely declines. Drake then shows up and gleefully informs Bester that they have intel that Harris has gone to Bester’s favorite place: Babylon 5. In addition, Drake informs Bester that Harris was trained in attack probes, a “mind shredder.” Bester, Chen, and Ashley head to B5, as they don’t trust Earth Alliance forces to handle this. On B5, Harris joins a card game in downbelow. He has no knowledge of the rules, but he wins in pretty short order. After departing the table, one of the losers approaches him and accuses him of cheating (which he did; using telepathy to win games is illegal). Harris’ personality changes and he uses his mind-shredding abilities to kill the guy. This is witnessed by a man named Bryce. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Bester learns that a Drazi gave Harris a fake identicard. He also learns the location of Harris’ quarters from a surface mind scan. While Bester goes to report this to security, Chen decides to show initiative and go to the quarters in question—where he finds a dead body. Allan isn’t thrilled to see that Bester’s arrival heralds corpses on the station, but Bester tartly points out that the body has been dead for two days, so he was killed before they arrived. Franklin’s autopsy indicates a manner of death that had to have been caused by a telepath, specifically a P12. However, Harris is only a P10, and a P10 can’t do that. Franklin suggests that maybe he was misdiagnosed as a P10, and Bester arrogantly explains that that doesn’t happen. There’s another body, and this one happened after Bester’s arrival: the other gambler. Telepaths aren’t allowed to gamble, or kill people, so the situation is really bad. Bester tells Ashley to keep an eye on security’s examination of the items in Harris’ quarters, while he has Chen go to downbelow to find other places where Harris might be gambling. Bester assumes (correctly, as it happens) that Harris is trying to get enough money to get passage off the station and far away from Earth and the Corps. Chen sees Harris in downbelow, but before he can contact Bester to tell him, Bryce kills him. The Babcom terminal Chen was about to use recorded the killing, but all they can see of the killer is his hand, and his skin is lighter than Harris’ and also tattooed—which means there’s another killer on the station. Security found handwritten notes in Harris’ quarters—written in more than one different style of handwriting—and also some recordings, in some of which he’s raving at his roommate and talking about Jonathan Harris in the third person. Bester realizes to his shock that Harris must have what is these days referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder. One of his personalities must be a P12, which explains the murder that a P10 couldn’t have accomplished. They track Harris and Bryce and a firefight breaks out, but Bryce is subdued, and Harris kind of collapses on his own. Security releases both men to the Corps’ custody. In hyperspace, Bester allows Ashley the “honor” of shoving Bryce out the airlock, murdering him in cold blood. This is a rite of passage for new Psi Cops, spacing mundanes. Ashley continues to fangoober Bester as they head home. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Apparently, Psi Corps keeps a giant mothership in hyperspace that nobody knows about. It’s not really clear what the ship’s purpose is, since the smaller ships that dock with it have to be able to enter a jumpgate and travel through it to get to and from the mothership, but whatever. No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Ashley hits on Bester more than once, but Bester declines. Apparently his feelings for Carolyn are strong enough that he won’t cheat on her. (Though he did cheat on his wife with Carolyn.) Welcome aboard. Back from “Phoenix Rising” is Walter Koenig, making his final on-screen appearance as Bester. (Koenig was also set to guest star in an episode of Crusade, but the series was cancelled before the episode in question was filmed.) Dana Barron and Reggie Lee play Bester’s ducklings, Vince Riotta plays Bryce, and Dex Elliot Sanders plays Harris. And this week’s Robert Knepper moment is the welcome appearance of the great character actor Mike Genovese as Drake. While he has had many roles over the years, to me, Genovese will always be Lieutenant Garfield on The Flash series from 1990. Trivial matters. For the second time this season (after “Secrets of the Soul”), none of the five primary leads appear in the episode at all. The only opening-credits regulars who appear are from the “also starring” section of the opening credits: Richard Biggs and Jeff Conaway. This technically ties this episode with “Intersections in Real Time” for the one with the fewest opening-credits regulars, though in this case both those appearing have lines of dialogue, which Mira Furlan didn’t in the earlier episode. This is the third and final B5 episode directed by Vir actor Stephen Furst. Amusingly, all three episodes—“The Illusion of Truth,” “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,” and this one—have the theme of alternate perspectives from a normal episode of B5. He will go on to direct two episodes of Crusade. Telepaths apparently can’t detect alternate personalities, which retroactively explains how Talia Winters’ embedded personality that came to the fore in “Divided Loyalties” went undetected by several different intense telepathic experiences she underwent (bonding with Ironheart in “Mind War,” being recorded by Abbut in “Deathwalker,” etc.). Viewers may have thought that the character named Jonathan Harris was a tribute to the actor who played Dr. Smith in Lost in Space alongside Bill Mumy, but it was, in fact, the prize in a B5 fan club raffle held at the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio. The echoes of all of our conversations. “You’re an optimist. Thank you—I’d almost forgotten what one of your kind looked like” —Bester to Franklin. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “We don’t often see a sense of humor in Psi Corps.” After four-and-a-half years of being gleefully evil every time he showed up, Walter Koenig gets rewarded with a spotlight episode of his own. It’s always fun to get a different perspective in an episode, and when B5 does it, it generally works, and this episode does indeed generally work. The notion of a telepath with multiple personalities is an interesting one, though it’s pretty much just a plot device here. There’s a lot to explore that the episode doesn’t bother with, unfortunately—including nary a mention or indication that Psi Corps HQ was bombed just a couple of episodes ago… Dex Elliott Sanders does a nice job with Harris’ multiple modes. Bester’s ducklings are not quite as successful. Dana Barron is adequate as a Bester groupie, but not much more than that. Her eagerness is a little too underplayed, and Koenig winds up acting her off the screen every time they’re together. Reggie Lee is even less adequate, but at least he has the good graces to be knocked off. Though that points up the major problem with the episode. One of the things that we’ve been told about the Psi Corps from jump is that they care for their own, seen most recently in the conclusion to the Byron storyline. This entire episode is predicated on the Corps being the ones to take care of Harris rather than let EarthForce authorities or B5 security handle it. But then Chen is killed, and it barely even registers. There’s no outrage, no expressions of grief, no ramping up the hunt to take care of a mundane who dared kill a telepath. It’s just the next step in the mystery, a redshirt who’s killed but barely acknowledged after that. The way Barron plays Ashley, it feels like her only thoughts on the death of her colleague is that he’s out of the way so she can flirt more aggressively with Bester… It’s also a missed opportunity to have Bester on the station and deny us any interactions between him and either Sheridan or Garibaldi. Still, this is a nice little change-of-pace, showing how insular and awful the Corps is. Notably, Chen and Ashley’s demeanor is classic member-of-a-cult behavior, thus accomplishing in one episode what never came together in multiple episodes of Byron and his gaggle of rogue telepaths…. Next week: “Meditations on the Abyss.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father” appeared first on Reactor.