Which was exactly the point, of course. You're supposed to hate him, and Walter Koenig does a very good job of producing that emotion.<br /><br />Bester is a dangerous, dangerous person and no normal person should trust him. Frankly, few telepaths should trust him either, although he firmly believes he is looking out for their best interests. He is the sort of person who believes the ends justify the means, and who fully enjoys feeling his superiority over "mundanes". He genuinely believes in the Psi Corps -- "the Corps is mother, the Corps is father" -- and he believes that telepaths are fundamentally superior to mundanes. He enjoys tormenting mundanes, especially when he can get away with it legally, as in "Dust To Dust" when he convinced a criminal that he was reading the criminal's mind, even though he'd taken the sleeper drugs to temporarily suppress his talent. He enjoys sparring with Garibaldi; this is probably why he ultimately chose Garibaldi as the Corps' secret weapon. He is extremely condescending to people, especially mundanes, and he has very few scruples. Despite all this, he truly loves the Corps and cares deeply about other telepaths. In his own twisted logic, he feels this obliges him to hunt down and even kill "blips" (rogue telepaths).<br /><br />There's a wonderful trilogy of B5 novels about the rise and fall of Psi Corps. It skips over the Telepath War entirely (events which would have followed soon after Season 5; presumably if Crusade had gone on long enough, they'd have gotten to the telepath war). That was the biggest disappointment to me. But in the second and third books you get to know Bester, what makes him tick, why he's the way he is, and by the end, you *almost* pity him. The last book in the series is a classic tragedy, with Bester as the tragic hero. (Remember, heroes aren't neccesarily good guys. In literary terms, the hero is merely the protagonist, whether good or evil. In a tragedy, the hero is often a bad guy -- co <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>
A video made by me about space and the loneliness in the universe
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact
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