If J. Michael Straczynski is the dreamer behind Babylon 5, John Copeland is the man who brings the dream to life.

A tall, handsome man with longish graying hair, he greets us in an office packed with airplane and spaceship models, silly photos [including one of Sheridan being tortured, with the words "It's not my fault! JMS made me say those things!" coming out of his mouth], and more marginalia than can be noticed in the hour he grants to us.

What does he have planned for Season Five?

"A lot of things blow up. It gets quiet for a little bit, then more things blow up," he says with a grin.

Well, I said I didn't want spoilers!

"[Today] you got to see what we lovingly prefer to call 'the iron lung': the interior of the Minbari fighter set, which is new.

One of the things we're doing this year is exploring different facets and areas that have been touched on briefly in past seasons because they're going to kinda like pave a way for us, not only story-wise in establishing things in the universe of Babylon 5, but also production-wise and visual-effects-wise. Because what we want to do, where we want to go, is film."

As for new stuff: "Harlan has been kinda needling Joe for a coupla seasons to step to the side, and tell a story from the side, rather than from our hero's point of view. 'A View from the Gallery' is the perception of two outsiders of how our heroes act. That's a very different way of looking at stories. We've not been afraid to play with the franchise. Last year it was 'The Illusion of Truth'. 'And Now for a Word' was a news broadcast, where you're taken out of context and misquoted, the normal thing. 'The Illusion of Truth' was taking things a step further: it's how propaganda is created.

"Or 'Believers'; it's a really different type of storytelling, and it takes a risk with the story. Most shows would opt for the 'just before the stroke of midnight, turn into a happy ending'. In this one, the doctor screwed up, he's not infallible, he's not god, and he kills this kid. The person's who's to blame there, is the doctor. Once he crossed the point of 'I know better than anybody else does', he sets himself up for the same things that tripped up all the Greeks. It comes down to hubris: pride comes before the fall."

"In the Second Season, ... we deal -- 'Confessions and Lamentations' -- with the death of a race. Had it been Star Trek, at the climax Franklin would've figured it out, they would've got there -- maybe not in time to save everybody, [but] the people would've survived.

"The thing that has been a constant theme with Babylon 5 is about taking responsibility for our actions. You made a choice, you live by what your choice was. You don't try to duck the blame, or try to take credit where the credit wasn't due."

Nor is responsibility the only challenge stressed.

"We have had ... in Season Three and Season Four, where the Shadow War really heated up to its greatest conflagration, along with what was going on back on Earth -- as soon as one was solved, the other one had to become solved. And now, people perceive that 'OK, all the problems have been solved' when they really haven't."

"I know from what I see from the folks in the UK: they feel that 'OK, the Shadow War's over, they've taken Earth, they've started this Alliance. Eh, what else have they got to do?' Well, there's plenty to do. A lot of our viewers are 20-somethings. They don't know about the Berlin Airlift, about going toe-to-toe with ICBMs, they don't know about that. Or the quest to get out there, to get into the High Frontier. Whenever something is done on a large scale, when a force of opposition is removed, there's a power vacuum, and that's somewhat what we're dealing with. ... The allies of the Shadows are going to come, eventually. And that's what starts happening -- very literally -- in the Fifth Season. But no one has that point of view."

So for now, they return to the "characters in transition": where they've been, where they're going.

Take one example: "G'Kar was conniving, provocative, argumentative, Machiavellian -- after his agenda, and certainly he had a large chip on his shoulder with the Centauri. But all of a sudden, he has come through with a major epiphany about himself, about the relationships of other races to each other, where his people are, and is becoming Something Else.

Or Lyta: her friends could take advantage of the fact that she was malleable, that she had been trained within Psi Corps to always do what she was told. Without question. And that finally crumbles around her, and she changes.

"Delenn has probably had the greatest physical change, which has brought about a great internal change. It started from Season One into the physical change, but then all of the things that were manifested as a result of that were manifest as a result of that, to being not trusted by either side for a while, trying to chart her way through that.

Then there's Sheridan.

"He has become Hero. He has had the true Hero's Journey as defined by Joseph Campbell -- even gone to the Underworld! I read Campbell in college, even has a seminar in Myth and Symbol, and figured that I had it. But Joe has also read Campbell, and a lot of Babylon 5 is contemporary myth, which we have very few of these days. We don't know how to tell those stories.

"For the longest time, Westerns fulfilled that for America. But ever since the end of the 60's and the early 70's, with us using political assassinations as way of selecting leaders, with Vietnam and Watergate, it has messed us up a little bit as a culture. The world has broken down into very obscure, hard-to-understand or even -grasp motivations, ... it's why people don't read newspapers anymore. It's because [the world] is too hard to fathom: all of the weird factions, troublesome worrisome news ... it makes Americans turn inside, instead of turning their eyes outside. We've forgotten how to look at the horizon, and how to look at the stars. That's why the meaning of Myth, the benefits that it gives a society, that's why those things are extremely important.

"It's easy to make a social commentary, about Man and the world around him, when you're not using a contemporary setting. But I think the immediate goal was to make an extremely entertaining show for people to watch, and the rest of the stuff just comes along as you're doing it. It's trying to straddle the line of making something that will be commercially successful, and entertaining enough that you have enough viewers that they want to bring you back."

As for the newest season, "We've used this at the start of this Season to pick out the old yardstick and see where the characters are, and allow our viewers a chance to kinda get re-acquainted with where they are, where their heads are at, and as they get into this year -- and some of the characters are going to go through intense personal crises this year."

"Nothing in the universe of Babylon 5 is as it appears to be. Some very calamitous things happen here at the end of the season, which will also set us up to propel us into the spin-off, as well."

Although he won't say anything about Crusade -- "I haven't seen a Press Release" is all Copeland will say -- he does say that "you still have to plan for tomorrow, whether it gets here or not."

Nor does the story of Babylon 5 stop at Season Five.

"The story of Babylon 5 doesn't end. You have to remember that Joe has described the story of Babylon 5 as a novel. Eventually, you get to the end of the novel ... then you pick up the next book. It's been done in such a way that, yes, there is a tying-up of loose ends. But not in such a way that there is not an opportunity to go on and do stories in the Babylon 5 universe as feature films, or as additional TV movies ... there is plenty of room left. Viewers will feel satisfied when they see the last episode, they won't feel like this thing has just ended. But it's not going to be like the end of M*A*S*H, the last episode of M*A*S*H where everybody goes home after the end of the Korean War. It's not going to be like the last episode of The Fugitive, where he gets the one-armed man.

"We've tried to improve it [from season to season]. We also tweaked the way that we tell stories, from year to year. The way the stories were told in the First Season was significantly different from the Second Season," and so on.

"There's quite a bit of passion that all of these people have, that's shown up on screen. I think we can always do better. It's an assembly line. ... You have to work on it onto a certain point, and then ... they say 'Art is never completed, it's only abandoned. I think at the stage we abandoned these episodes, they were pretty darned good. I don't think there's an episode that we have done where i feel like we could not have done maybe 1 or 2 things better. But, for the most part, think all of us here tend to be our own harshest critics. But i'd prefer us to be [that] than the rest of the world be our harshest critics.

"I don't think that this is ever a business that you can rest on your laurels, and also feel like you have reached the pinnacle or that you have learned all that you can learn. There's always new things every day!"

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