“The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father” is episode thirteen of season five of Babylon 5.
This episode opens on Earth, at the Psi Corps. Bester is entering an office and Drake, the man behind the desk, introduces him to the other two telepaths, Lauren Ashley and Chen Hikaru. They are interns with P12 investigations. Drake wants Bester to show them the ropes before they are put out in the field.
Bester asks the two where they wat to start. Anywhere; they are just happy to be there. Bester tells Drake he has finished the report on the Babylon 5 situation, and they head out of the office. Chen would like to read Bester’s analysis of the situation; Babylon 5 is an unfriendly place for telepaths at the moment. Bester claims the station has an exaggerated sense of its own importance, and not everything is about Babylon 5. Elsewhere, a disturbed-looking man is rummaging through some paperwork when he comes across a leaflet about BabCom. He leaves, revealing that there is a dead man on the floor.
The first place Bester shows the interns is two telepaths doing scanning countering exercises. A field agent needs to be able to do this for at least an hour for, without this type of training, no human telepath can do a deep scan for more than 40-45 minutes. Being rated P12 is not enough for tracking down rogue telepaths. Bester is only ruthless – to telepaths – as a last resort. They are family. Next, they are watching a vid about a blip that was tracked down and brought back to the Corps when a woman enters and whispers in Bester’s ear. He ends the vid, as a situation has come up.
The situation is the dead man from earlier, another telepath. The killer was his roommate, who had apparently been acting strange recently. Sometimes this happens in training, and most get over it. Not this time. Drake wants Bester to find and bring back the rogue. Because he’s a P10, which makes him dangerous, and because the victim was one of Bester’s students.
Later, Bester is in his room when Lauren enters. She wants to know more about Bester, and is attracted to him, but he explains his heart is already taken. After Lauren leaves, there’s another knock, but this time it’s Drake. The suspect has booked passage on a commercial transport to Bester’s favourite place in the whole universe. Babylon 5.
At a briefing, Drake says that the suspect is Jonathan Harris. They don’t know why he’s behaving like this, but he doesn’t have much money. Babylon 5 may be a distraction, but Bester and his team are heading there anyway. When Chen asks about transport security stopping Harris, he’s told that, without training, mundanes wouldn’t have a chance against a P10. Plus, it’s an internal Psi Corps problem, a family matter, and it’s important that mundanes believes nothing ever goes wrong between these walls. That’s how they are kept out. Drake warns Bester afterwards that Harris is trained in attack probes. He’s a mind shredder.
Harris is on Babylon 5 and he asks to join a gambling game. If he’s a strong enough telepath, he may have an advantage. And he approaches the table with the comment that he has never played the game before, and asks the other players if they can tell him the rules. Which really should have been a warning sign. Bester, Lauren and Chen are on a shuttle that is leaving a mothership in hyperspace. One that remains there, servicing missions, only coming out for repairs. Waiting until the Corps needs it. Just like all the others. Well, that’s worrying. When they arrive on the station, Zack is not pleased to see Bester – going by the comment about him arriving to annex the Sudetenland. There are problems with Harris, because he’s more powerful than he should be. He also talks about getting ‘him’ upset.
Bester has appeared in episodes before, but this episode focuses completely on him for the first time. Of the regular cast, only Zack and Dr Franklin are seen. More is learned about the Psi Corps, and it’s definitely disturbing. Hidden warships in hyperspace and a brutal disregard of ‘mundanes.’ It’s no wonder, given how the Corps is brainwashing its members, that the Telepath War mentioned in “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars”, took place.