Expert: Steve John Perkins - 5/23/2004

Question
Having watched and loved the series for a long time, I recently took the opportunity to "relive" the series through DVD.  As I did so, there were two questions that were nagging at the back of my mind that I never seemed to get a satisfactory answer to - and JMS has been extraordinarily thorough in everything else he produced. Is there something that I missed?

Question 1:
We all know that Babylons 1-3 were destroyed or sabotaged shortly before operation - but has anything ever been said about why and by whom? (Apart from some mysterious "someone" or "something"?) Eg Was it the Minbari warrior caste who didn't like the humans? Was it Psi-corp by Santiago to stop "sharing" Earth's new found secrets? etc There may not have been a reported answer but I'm just curious whether JMS ever attended to this?

Question 2:
We know there are there no Narn telepaths as they got killed after the last shadow war (the one 1000 years ago) Why were they killed? And for what reason? What happened to them? Who killed them?

Thanks for reading this....

Answer
answer 1:

the early babylon stations it wasnt said exactly what happened, it appears that some were down to human error, bad engineering etc. its not an easy thing to create, and yes other factions like you mentioned could have been involved. however babylon 4 was attempted to be destroyed by the shadows before it was taken through time and used against them. the episode involving "jinx" and the holy grail, if really the only reference to the other stations blowing up or disappearing when he elft the station, and they all got to almost complete status, and there werent ships involved so was either sabotage or errors.

sinclair says to delenn in one of the first episodes that the other stations all blew up, and each time they remade it better, however this wasnt the case with babylon 5, as babylon 5 was a much cheaper version of babylon 4, and much smaller, and babylon 5 was partially funded by the minbari.

answer 2:
the telepaths were a threat to the shadows as we discover in season 3, and also they are of vorlon creation something despised to the shadows. the shadows had a base on the southern continent of the narn homeworld before the narns were space faring, and this is when they killed all the telepaths and their families, and the DNA was never strong enough in any survivors to breed another, strangly the vorlons never did it again in the following 1000 years. and later the sahdows decided to use telepaths in their machines to stop telepaths being problems against them, hence their connection to the psi corp.

im glad you purchased the series on DVD its certainly one to keep and treasure as yet unmatched in sci-fi though farscape came close.

if you have any further questions or woudl just like to talk B5 email me at sperk80070@aol.com or use this service again.

in valens name

steve