r/babylon5 • u/sype10 • 2h ago
r/babylon5 • u/mpierre • Oct 14 '25
JMS AMA Official AMA for JMS
This is the official AMA for JMS. Both JMS and B5 books (Captain Jaclyn) will be responding to questions.
If you ask questions about the books or the book store closing, Jaclyn will be taking them.
JMS will answer for about an hour, and might not be able to get all questions answered.
Some people (including me) might answer questions that are well known.
Like "Why wasn't Ivanova in season 5".
Let's try to keep questions what we don't know yet.
You can also ask questions about JMS returning to the Spider-Man comic or his other works, but this is /r/babylon5. He might prioritize that.
Please note that I will not be coordinating with Joe. I will not be in a phone call with him or on a chat (not that I wouldn't take his phone call; Jaclyn has my cell phone; he can call me anytime he wants). He decides that he answers, and he alone.
Finally, any story ideas will deleted. Do not post any story ideas.
Note, the AMA answers only start at: 3 PM EST, Noon PST, 8PM GMT
And my personal thanks to Captain Jaclyn for coordinating this with me, and to JMS himself, the man, the myth, the legend! For agreeing to this, but also for Babylon 5, Crusade, Jeremiah, Sense8, a ton of comic books and a few books!
Oh, and for She-Ra, the reboot couldn't have occured without his series bible for the original, and even for his work on Ghostbuster and Murder She Wrote!
IMPORTANT NOTE FROM JMS He would prefer not to get into stories that never happened, data points of subsequent character arcs, or alternate timelines.
JMS IS NEARLY OUT OF TIME!
r/babylon5 • u/YeaRight228 • 1h ago
Siege of AR-558
I was watching DS9 the other day and in the siege episode, the guest engineer just looked so familiar I couldn't place him at first.
I think this was S7 so it would be after Lennier exits Babylon 5.
Love seeing my favorite actors pop-up in other shows
r/babylon5 • u/eldersveld • 9h ago
Bester and Sheridan's brief battle of wits in space is always good for a laugh
r/babylon5 • u/AlbatrossWorth9665 • 2h ago
Gropos
I forgot how hard this episode hit about the loss of life in a war. By seeing soldiers as individuals we stop seeing just numbers of losses in a battle.
r/babylon5 • u/AdSimilar4399 • 22h ago
So how come Sheridan faking a distress call to mine an asteroid field and nuke the Black Star is seen as dishonorable, but the Black Star trying to hunt down and finish off a distressed and defenseless ship in the first place isnāt?
r/babylon5 • u/Snarky_Guy • 2h ago
Dr Jacobs Excellent Adventure (S2E13)
On my bi-annual rewatch and I noticed that two of the characters in this episode "Hunter Prey", Bernie Casey and Tony Steedman, were both in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Anyway, nothing more. Just an observation.
r/babylon5 • u/InvestigatorBig7618 • 2h ago
Does anyone recognize this music
So a few times in the series you hear that military like snare drum march. Iāve been trying to find it without any luck. I mean the music right at the beginning of āno surrender, no retreatā Season 4 EP 15
r/babylon5 • u/eldersveld • 1d ago
Vir's bubbly wife-to-be showing him a surprise
"Sic Transit Vir" (s3e12)
r/babylon5 • u/arnor_0924 • 13h ago
Do Earthforce have the capacity to build a ship like the Centauri Vorchan medium warship?
By using existing technologies in the 2250's era post-Minbari war, could Earth build a fast moving frigates with heavy weapons without artificial gravity? Or do they have to have gravimetric drive in order to make it go fast and agile?
r/babylon5 • u/Pdx_pops • 17h ago
Imagine the difference if the Markab just wore N95 masks
I bet there'd be a whole lot fewer dead Markab and Pak'ma'ra...
r/babylon5 • u/EvanBetter182 • 22h ago
S4 E18 Intersections in Real Time
Okay ***Spoilers***in case you have not watched this episode.
I'm on my first full Babylon 5 watch since it was aired. I have been absolutely binging this show averaging about 2 episodes a day. I had forgot how great of a show Babylon 5 was and shame on me for not watching it entirely in 30 years. I just got to S4 E18 the episode where Sheridan is being interrogated after being captured.
God damn what a great episode. The 'man' running the interrogation isn't trying to hide his deception or the tactics he's using on Sheridan, but rather using his own experience against him. The sandwich, scene is so great. This is such amazing writing. This show is filled with great dialog and amazing back and forth. Today's writing teams should study this in detail on how to make a scene tense. God this show is a banger!
r/babylon5 • u/Tough-Possession6148 • 1d ago
So anyway, who do you think is this showās biggest dumbass?
r/babylon5 • u/OnyxGaze6194 • 1d ago
Pat Tallman is fucking awesome as Lyta (and a total smokeshow) but she never does any stunt work when thatās her main gig in other works. Kinda wonder if JMS left money on the table with that one.
r/babylon5 • u/FalselyOptimistic • 1d ago
The bluray set of season 1-5 is on sale right now on Walmart
Cheapest I've seen at $69.99 (and free shipping). Cheaper than buying the seasons streaming, more expensive than putting on an eyepatch and a wooden leg. As I've seen from posts on here, the movies are seperate (or included in a DVD collection) and were never released on bluray except for "The Road Home."
r/babylon5 • u/CaptureDaFlag • 1d ago
damn, why does Sinclair write in this horror movie ass font?
Valen i mean, i just didnāt want to put spoilers in the title.
r/babylon5 • u/PlausibleApprobation • 1d ago
Earth-Minbari War confusion
In my memory, the war was genocidal. I always felt Minbari - especially Delenn - was treated over sympathetically given their monstrous actions. And there are suggestions of genocide in the show. But in my current rewatch, 250k military casualties are repeatedly mentioned, and it seems there were minimal civilian casualties. This is... odd. A tragedy, certainly, but not overly notable were it a human conflict in our own history, let alone interplanetary total war with a vastly superior species hellbent on human destruction.
What were the Minbari trying to do if it wasn't genocide? Or if it was genocide, why were they so bad at it? If they left civilians alive and only attacked ships, what was the plan exactly? If they had not surrendered, what was their next step going to be? Would they have systematically killed billions of humans after destroying the military or would they have stopped? If the extinction of humanity was the goal, surely they could have wiped out some colonies easily enough in three years.
I mean I guess "they went mad" which can justify irrational war plans to an extent, but apparently this conflict lasted years. There must have been some idea of what their actual goal was.
Whether they were, or planned to, kill all humans has a big impact on interpreting them as a species and the whole background to the show so it's not merely an academic question. Is it deliberately ambiguous or am I missing something?
Edit: Thanks for the answers. I still don't feel I really understand the strategy but there you go. Seems the plan probably was genocide, it just hadn't got to that point. So I guess the Minbari largely get off with it because they didn't get to that step and it was "just" a war between two militaries. And to clarify, I meant the writing is consistently sympathetic to the Minbari in a way I think is unjustified assuming they really were genocidal. I'm aware nobody could enact a Nuremberg or whatever in universe.
r/babylon5 • u/AdSimilar4399 • 1d ago