• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Babylon 5

I think it's debatable whether JMS doing as much of the B5 writing as he did ultimately did the show a favor or hindered it to some degree.
If the seasons were shorter, then he probably would have had a much better result.

My gut tells me that he has some control issues.

But I do like Jeremiah more than I like B5.


You can see the trend again, where he wrote most of the episodes.
 
Plus JMS really needed to get away from his trend of, "there are ancient evils out there". It worked fine for B5, but it feels a little underbaked here because we don't learn much of anything about them, and then he does it again in "Legends of the Rangers".

It's why I'm glad his Star Trek reboot proposal never went anywhere.
It's like he threw B5 and Crusade in a blender and that's what he came up with.
It's also the reason I'm glad he didn't end up as Dr. Who's showrunner.
 
It's why I'm glad his Star Trek reboot proposal never went anywhere.
It's like he threw B5 and Crusade in a blender and that's what he came up with.
It's also the reason I'm glad he didn't end up as Dr. Who's showrunner.
Dean Devlin is still my choice for Dr. Who showrunner. But I doubt it'll happen.
 
But I do like Jeremiah more than I like B5.

Damn, there really are a lot of stories where a virus wipes out all of the adults, we have this and the comic was based on, the British/New Zealand TV series The Tribe, the Italian book and TV series Anna, the comic The Orphan Age, and I'm pretty sure there are others I've come across I can't remember right now.
 
I'm amused that even Bruce Boxleitner on the commentary track refers to "John Nuke-'em Sheridan" after the events of this, "Z'ha'dum" and the Black Star incident. JMS could do some amazing writing, but he also could have an unfortunate ability to fall back on certain tropes.

Hey, if it works, why stop doing it? If anything I was always annoyed when a tactic employed in a sci-fi gets used once successfully and then never again. And at least "Nuke 'em" is a tactic that makes sense and doesn't require technobable to solve the problem. It does make me think that he wouldn't fare so well in Stargate (which had at least three examples of nuking something making the situation far worse IIRC).

It's also the reason I'm glad he didn't end up as Dr. Who's showrunner.

Last I heard he was aiming for winning the tender. Did he drop out of that, or has someone else won the bidding?
 
Hey, if it works, why stop doing it? If anything I was always annoyed when a tactic employed in a sci-fi gets used once successfully and then never again. And at least "Nuke 'em" is a tactic that makes sense and doesn't require technobable to solve the problem. It does make me think that he wouldn't fare so well in Stargate (which had at least three examples of nuking something making the situation far worse IIRC).
I don't have an issue with it in-universe, but out-of-universe it does feel a bit silly.
 
If the seasons were shorter, then he probably would have had a much better result.
The Babylon 5 story is too nuanced for 10 episode seasons. We can see in season 4 what happens when 2 seasons get compressed. Far too much story and we see feel large chunks are missing.
 
The Babylon 5 story is too nuanced for 10 episode seasons. We can see in season 4 what happens when 2 seasons get compressed. Far too much story and we see feel large chunks are missing.
That wasn't the case. Only a few episodes got shifted as per Joe's comments in the script books.
 
That wasn't the case. Only a few episodes got shifted as per Joe's comments in the script books.
Everything i read has said that the shadow war was compressed so they could free earth, also in a compressed timelines. That season 5 had to be re-created because large chunks of it were pushed into S4
 
Everything i read has said that the shadow war was compressed so they could free earth, also in a compressed timelines. That season 5 had to be re-created because large chunks of it were pushed into S4

This corresponds with much of what i had heard too, that 4 would deal with the Shadow War and 5 would be focused on Earth and the ISA
 
That season 5 had to be re-created because large chunks of it were pushed into S4
That scratches the surface of season 5's setbacks. JMS's outlines and notes were lost at the same time Claudia Christian quit, which was only a few weeks before production was due to start, so he had to come up with a new captain character practically off the top of his head, along with pumping out scripts from memory as fast as he could (which is why Byron continued to be English, long-haired, and pretentious, even though the reasons behind him being Shitty Marcus became obsolete with Ivanova being written out of the show; JMS didn't have time to think about how else he could be). TNT kept telling him the arc he wanted to explore with Sheridan having to figure out how to establish the Alliance as an authority without becoming authoritarian and undermining the reasons it was founded should be left for "Crusade," then decided "Crusade" should actually totally be different and not use any of those elements in its premise.
 
The back half of Season 5 was actually good in my opinion, it was just the first half that was a little weird and like many others I didn't really gel with the telepath story. But the Alliance vs Centauri war arc was well written and comes full circle with "In The Beginning", tying it all together. The final three episodes are a sort of extended farewell, culminating in Sleeping in Light" which is lovely and bittersweet (I know it was originally filmed as the S4 finale).

Plus who'd want to leave out the final parts of the G'Kar/Londo story. It's gold.
 
Last edited:
Last I heard he was aiming for winning the tender. Did he drop out of that, or has someone else won the bidding?

Before RTD was brought back in 2023, JMS contacted the BBC about succeeding Chris Chibnall as the programme's Showrunner.

As far as the current Tender goes, I haven't heard anything specific about JMS putting his production company and himself in the running, but, as I've said elsewhere, I'd personally very much support a JMS-run Doctor Who.
 
Among the many reasons I don't like the idea is his saviour syndrome. He believes he's the guy who can save Star Trek. He believes he's the guy who can save Doctor Who. His track record doesn't convince me. He worked on Twilight Zone, which was a series created by someone else, but it was an anthology series. He hasn't done anything like reviving a classic franchise on hard times.

He's 72 years old, has had some health problems, and hasn't made any TV series in the UK or for an organization like the BBC.

I also don't like most of his non-B5 work that I've read or watched.

And what happened to that B5 reboot?
 
The Shadow War still would have wrapped up early in season 4. The season 4 cliffhanger would have been Intersections in Real Time. The civil war arc would have lasted 4 or 5 episodes into season 5. JMS speaks about this in volume 8 of the script books.
I posted about the season 4/5 changes a bit back in this thread. They weren't as drastic as as many believe. You can read about it volume 8 of the script books.
 
I think it's debatable whether JMS doing as much of the B5 writing as he did ultimately did the show a favor or hindered it to some degree.
I'm in the camp of it being a good thing. There's something to be said about having a show have a clearly defined vision by its creator.

Having said that, having a couple other writers to help with a 22 episode season might have helped him slightly. He wrote every single episode of seasons 3 and 4... though to be fair, that was peak B5 to me. (At the very least, take a little pressure off in terms of executive producer duties.)
 
I love B5, appreciate JMS, but I'm a lifelong Spider-Man fan, and I HATEHATEHATE what he did in his Spidey run.

I liked everything except Brand New Day, and that's not on him. It's on Joe Queseda's incompetence.

I'm in the camp of it being a good thing. There's something to be said about having a show have a clearly defined vision by its creator.

Having said that, having a couple other writers to help with a 22 episode season might have helped him slightly. He wrote every single episode of seasons 3 and 4... though to be fair, that was peak B5 to me. (At the very least, take a little pressure off in terms of executive producer duties.)

I think my main problem is that JMS kept chickening out on some plotlines that seem like they're going somewhere morally ambiguous but always goes back to "Nope, the main characters are always in the right and any chance they could be wrong is zilch!".
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top