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Babylon 5 did a decent job of this with their telepath problem. Sure, non teeps often felt sympathy for the telepaths. But they didn’t trust them for reasons that were obvious.
I really enjoyed the B5 episode from the perspective of the telepaths, The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father. But late in the show they promised to explore the Telepath War, which would have been a fantastic opportunity, and then they didn’t deliver. I wonder if it turned out to be harder than they thought.
Agreed. Season 5 generally fell flat. But I thought S1-S4 treatment of telepaths felt real and interesting (it wasn’t obvious how to deal with telepaths even if most people felt sympathy for the telepaths)
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...I agree, and Babylon 5 rightfully gets a lot of love from sci-fi fans for it's well-realized characters and world building which stand in stark contrast to it's special effects. ;-)
Edit: to be clear I say that with affection.
The special effects aren’t great. But B5’s biggest problem is acting (with the exception of G’kar and Londo of course)
Most of the regular cast was at least decent. The guest cast was ... more flawed. Just the opposite flaws, too, weirdly. The worst of the regular cast were too flat / wooden, but some of the guest stars just egregiously hammed it up, like they'd just been yanked from stage acting to screen acting and couldn't stop themselves from overacting hard enough to make sure the cheap seats didn't miss anything.
I think B5's biggest problem is the combination of a consistent arcplot with inconsistent episode quality. You can recommend someone watch the best 60% of TNG and they'll get a really good show; with B5 you want to watch 95% of the episodes to get backstory and track plot threads, but still maybe only 60% of the episodes were really good, and worse, the weaker ones were disproportionately up front in season 1...
Straczynski kind of lost the run of himself in latter years, but I will always admire him for being able to stitch together anything coherent after the first season and his main lead dropping out of the show (God rest Michael O'Hare, I loved his Commander Sinclair), which torpedoed a lot of plot already written and some scenes that had been filmed, and he had to write a new male lead, cast them, rejig the plot, and incorporate the already shot and now redundant old plot with the former character into the new version of where the show was going. He really managed it extraordinarily well, all things considered.
I think the show got too successful for its own good, and ran at least one season too long. I liked the subtle development of how a cult of personality was developing around Sheridan, and how he was heading on a course that was a bit too "if you're not with me, I'll use my alliance with the Minbari to crush you into dust" at times, and there definitely was an element of fanservice that crept in (the character of Elizabeth Lockley was never quite fully developed to my mind). The funniest part about the run-up to the Telepath War, such as it was, was all the rogue telepaths had amazing hair and I could easily believe that the climactic (bathetic) explosion happened because all the hairspray they were using caught fire 😁
But it really was a great effort and a milestone in TV SF.
Dunno where you get "at least one season too long"; season 4 was the best.
The first half of season 5 was weak filler, but that's supposedly because they were expecting to get cancelled after Season 4 and had to push most of their original climactic material up. And yeah, the most impressive thing about JMS wasn't the story he wrote, it was the tree of stories he wrote just to have one that managed to coincide with the actors they lost and the regular threats of cancellation, in such permutations that he had to rewrite some of those branches on the fly and still mostly make them work. Even when thinking about final seasons, "You're not cancelled after all." was a much more mitigating surprise than GRRM's "a decade goes by so fast, doesn't it?", and JMS at least pulled out half a season of good material.
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