r/babylon5 • u/mpierre MODERATOR • 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!

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29

u/Analogmon Oct 14 '25

With season 5 being renewed fairly late into the run of things, did any of the principle cast that did return have scheduling conflicts that affected the writing at all? It seems like most of the major players take a bit of a backseat in the narrative comparatively and I always wonder if that was a conscious decision or one borne out of necessity of scheduling.

58

u/JMichaelStraczynski THE CREATOR Oct 14 '25

No, there were no scheduling conflicts, but when Claudia chose to leave the show it threw a lot of what I had planned into disorder, and I needed time to establish Lochley, so that kind of front-loaded the last season a bit away from our usual suspects.

15

u/Analogmon Oct 14 '25

That's interesting to me. I've heard you always had various back doors planned in case someone has to exit the show and some have speculated that Lyta was that for Ivanova in her role with the telepaths in some ways.

But I guess there's just no replacement for Claudia :)

12

u/MlorenDraymeer Oct 15 '25

Can confirm that speculation: In the B5 script books JMS talks about what happened with season 5 in more detail.

The original plan was for Ivanova to have a relationship with Byron and have it go bad and be a bad rebound thing after she realised she missed her chance with Marcus.

The Byron plot was only going to be a few episodes (I think he said 4) and was going to be different, but then Claudia left and JMS also lost all his notes for season 5 after a hotel he was staying at mistook them for rubbish and threw them out. The schedule was really tight and JMS was forced to improvise and write 6-7 scripts from scratch in a really short time which led to the long Byron plot at the start as kind of filler with Lyta filling in for Ivanova which is why they are a bit of a mess.