Babylon 5

It came up in a few episodes. In Crusade, she was supposed to cameo as the leader and Person of Mass Destruction who destroys PsiCorp's main HQ but Ms. Tallman didn't have the time.

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

I don't recall if Lyta conclusively developed telekinetic powers, but Talia Winters did. IIRC, Word of God is that those abilities were tied to her main personality by Ironheart, and thus lost whenever her sleeper personality was triggered and took over.

Oops, I meant Talia Winters.

Optimism is a duty.

Nice to see reruns of B5 are more consistent in the UK again, with the whole series starting from the beginning again this morning.

That's great. I'm currently rewatching it on DVD. I have the complete box set.

Optimism is a duty.

Was doing the same until my DVD's started acting up. Currently watching it on Amazon Prime. Bit over midway through Season 3.

Need to get the missus back into watching the show. We made it partway into season 3 before assorted stuff came up.

Also, thinking back, I think Lyta possibly has telekinetic abilities in Season 5 during her whole Dark Phoenix Lyta phase. Bester weighs the possibilities that she has the ability to telekinetically slap him, a possibility which he finds fascinating, or if she has precise/powerful telepathic ability to simply trigger the appropriate nerves into making him feel like he'd just been slapped, a possibility which he honestly found just as fascinating.

Got to the end of War Without End in Babylon 5. The episodes themselves are fine, but the ending is... problematic. Basically it involves an old white dude (Sinclair,) turning himself into a Minbari and taking command of their forces to lead them to victory, becoming renowned as a religious figure in the process. Does anyone else see the problem here?

Not really, since the rest of the Minbari are white, too. Really, the Minbari are coded as Eastern European and have already stated that Minbari souls were being reincarnated in human bodies, which meant that the Minbari and humans were a lot closer than anyone thought. In fact, Sinclair himself was said to have a Minbari soul.

The Minbari aren't 'white'. They're Minbari. There's a difference.

And saying he has a 'Minbari soul' is like saying a white dude has the soul of a black person.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 11th 2019 at 5:17:04 AM

The Minbari are coded like space elves, if anything. They have a lot in common with Tolkien's elves. Otherworldly, highly spiritual, with somewhat of a superiority complex.

But this is nothing new to the series. B5 has always had a bit of a thing with humans being presented as special compared to other races. An early episode demonstrated Earth's religious diversity, for instance, the message being that humans don't DO dominant religions, and are therefore more tolerant than the aliens. It is also seen in the command structure, which is exclusively human, and the station clearances, with the highest being human only, excepting the ambassadors.

This show is FULL of Humans Are Special.

Optimism is a duty.

The station is built and run by Earth, hence why the command staff are humans. It isn’t the Federation.

Its setup is Earth (or, from mid-Season 3 through Season 4, a breakaway faction from Earth) providing a place for all the species to meet, have dialogue, conduct negotiations, and learn to understand each other better.

Edited by Galadriel on May 11th 2019 at 7:20:51 AM

I'm talking out of universe here — all of the Minbari are played by white actors. Mira Furlan is specifically Croatian and she said that she used her memory of the Yugoslav Wars to fuel her character's anger at the Grey Council. Even if the Minbari are space elves, they are still all played by white actors.

No, that's racist because 1) nobody knows if souls actually exist in the real world and 2) people use that as an excuse to act like a black person without being black.

In the context of the show, Jeffrey Sinclair literally has a Minbari soul inside him. The Grey Council examined him and found a Minbari soul inside him — and then they examined other humans and found that Minbari souls were being reincarnated into human bodies. This was literally one of the big mysteries of the first season. And souls do exist in the B5 universe.

So saying Sinclair has a "Minbari soul" is only telling the truth. If you don't want to accept it...then I guess you should find a new show.

Edited by alliterator on May 11th 2019 at 8:46:59 AM

Honestly, I don't care if the Minbari are aliens, nor do I care if they're played by white actors, and I certainly don't care that he has a Minbari soul. (Which arguably makes it even worse.) It's still an old white dude inserting himself into another culture, and it reeks of Mighty Whitey and cultural appropriation.

If he were inserting himself into a real culture or if the Minbari were coded as something else (like Avatar and the Na'Vi being coded as Native American), perhaps. But they aren't. He's an old white guy inserting himself into a culture made up of mostly old white guys. It's like an American going to Britain and living there and becoming part of the Royal Family-

-oh wait, that happened. Are you upset with Meghan Markle?

(Also, he literally becomes part-Minbari due to the same process Delenn became half-human. Are you upset with Delenn that she became half-human? She's inserting herself into another culture!)

Edited by alliterator on May 11th 2019 at 8:59:32 AM

Again, they aren't 'white guys'. They're Minbari. Actor ethnicities be damned, they are Minbari.

Not until you brought it up, but you actually raise a good point there.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 11th 2019 at 11:00:43 AM

No, they aren't. Minbari don't exist. They are a fictional race of aliens.

And if you are going to try to say they exist within the universe of B5, then so does Sinclair having a Minbari soul. You can't accept one without the other.

Edited by alliterator on May 11th 2019 at 9:01:26 AM

They're still another culture that Sinclair is inserting himself into and taking charge of.

And I didn't say I don't accept it. I just don't care for it and think it makes the whole matter that much worse.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 11th 2019 at 11:02:29 AM

They needed a leader during a war. Napoleon was born in Corsica, but he became the Emperor of France. What's the difference?

Napolean wasn't turning himself into another race.

But he inserted himself into another culture.

Also, I find it weird that you see this as cultural appropriation. Generally, cultural appropriation is when a dominant culture appropriates from a more disadvantaged minority culture. The Minbari are definitely not disadvantage or in the minority — they, in fact, are clearly superior in technology to humanity. They are the dominant culture and were thisclose to wiping out humanity until they found that humans were being born with Minbari souls.

So I'm not even sure this would count as cultural appropriation. Sinclair has a Minbari soul, he changes into half-Minbari, and then goes into the past to become a great leader for him. If anything, you could probably compare it to transgenderism — say a trans woman becomes the leader of a feminist movement. Is it any different? (Well, okay TERFs wouldn't like it, but they can go to hell.)

Edited by alliterator on May 11th 2019 at 9:09:43 AM

...

You know, I think at this point we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Mighty Whitey is bad because the character is like, so better than the minority at their arts and culture but is still white. All those characters "raised by Indians" or "raised in the jungle" - just an excuse for studio execs to cast a white lead.

Sinclair is an example of assimilation - he learning the Minbari language and culture and became one of them in body. And this was a plot point.

Spoilers for a 20 year old show - the whole Minbari soul thing and human DNA in the Minbari - was because Sinclair's transformation wasn't complete. He went into the past 99% alien.

A real example of appropriation (to make fun of or belittle) is in the episode with the gift shop: Ivanonva confronts a human wearing an alien mask. Of course JMS also plays this for laughs - she soon talks to what she thinks is a human but is really a Drazi wearing a human mask (he even asks her if the shop gift wraps!).

A long time ago I was in Youngsan ROK staying at US Army-run hotel. While there I had the best Mexican food evar! Turns out the staff was all Korean contractors. Cultural appropriation? No, they were just being respectful and had studied and trained to meet a need (studied really well, I'm for real it was delicious!).

All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48

Pedantically speaking, Sinclair was a very young white man who assimilated himself into their culture, etc. etc. considering that he wouldn't be born for nearly a thousand years after he did it.

And really, this raises the far more interesting point that the Minbari don't seem to have ethnic groups in the same way humans do for some reason. They all look like humans of European descent wearing skullcaps and head pieces. I mean, presumably they have races and such, they just don't vary by skin tone any more than races among humans vary by the number of limbs we have. It sounds weird, but so does the fact that we didn't see a black Vulcan until 1995.

As for the overly-simplistic presentation of alien cultures on Babylon 5, I like to point out that The entire show is presented in the series finale as a Show Within a Show produced by ISN, so some ethnocentrism by an Unreliable Narrator might be a given.

Also, Delenn turning herself half-human ended up getting her a lot of flak in-universe from both Minbari and humans for various reasons. She almost gets attacked by a group of Gropos over it. One presumes Valen faced similar problems even with the Vorlons in his corner. IIRC, in the Expanded Universe, he catches even more flak when he ends up marrying an alien, a temporally-displaced human named Catherine Sakai, which caused quite the scandal for a time among the somewhat uptight Minbari.

Edited by AFP on May 11th 2019 at 11:22:01 AM

I mean, she was the woman he was engaged to marry pre-Minbari, so it makes sense that he would want to marry her post-Minbari. But yeah, I bet marrying a non-Minbari didn't go down well with the rest of the race or the religious movement he had become a part of.