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Now I've watched Crusade, the ill-fated B5 spin-off from which I only knew a few episodes before, in its cancelled entirety. Thirteen episodes, which sounds familiar. So, thoughts, and hopefully not just ones which repeat what Andraste already said superbly in her show overview. First of all, Crusade got screwed even worse than Firefly by the network changing the order in which the episodes were broadcast. (Doing this to any show plotted by JMS is idiotic anyway, because if the man has one consistent trait, it's that he's the king of continuity.) I don't know why the DVDS didn't rectify this. However, I'd advise new viewers to watch the episodes in the order suggested here. Costume changes aside, this makes beautiful emotional and logical sense.
To use just one example of why the broadcast order spells doom: Racing the Night, originally written as the pilot episode by JMS, got broadcast as episode 9, at a point when relationship and character development had already started and the return to the crew treating each other as almost strangers would be irritating in the extreme. Unless you watch it as episode 2, after War Zone, the new pilot episode JMS had to write rather hastily (and it shows, as it did with Fireflly' new first episode). In which case it works very well, though then it becomes even more apparent that both "pilot" episodes feature a half-hearted space battle scene presumably ordered by the network, as this is something they thought viewers wold expect from a sci-fi show. But Crusade isn't about the space battles, and doesn't have them after those episodes anyway.
The character introduction works better in Racing the Night, if you ask me, especially for Galen and Dureena. In War Zone, Galen comes across as insufferable smug and the cryptic-ness annoys; and Dureena seems little more than a cliché. Racing the Night highlights Galen's dry sense of humour instead, and Dureena is interesting. In both cases, Gideon is more the archetypical heroic lead than he is in the rest of the show, but introducing him via a nightmare about the very real possibility that he'll have to kill his own people (which happens in Racing the Night) makes him more interesting than the fisticuffs offered in War Zone.
What's apparent from the start whereever you choose to begin the show is that JMS tried to do something new (within his invented universe, not within the genre), which might have contributed to the series' failure at the time. Crusade very deliberately is not a B5 copy, or B5, part II. The ensemble here is much smaller, and instead of consisting of representatives of all the major races in the B5 cosmos, it consists solely of humans and one alien. (Or two, if you count Galen as alien.) None of the characters safe Elizabeth Lochley were present in Babylon 5 itself, and she's only in three of the broadcast episodes; moreover, she was hardly an audience favourite. (I always liked her, but I know I was in a minority.) Instead of the space station, you have a ship that is elsewhere each week. And so on. At the same time, Crusade is of course set within the same universe, and this is important. The Drakh plague is an indirect inheritance of the Shadow War, and we get reminded of other Shadow legacies along the way. The company Max Eilerson works for is IPX, and wouldn't one like to know whether he ever met Anna Sheridan and Mr. Morden back in the day. John Matheson strifes so hard to be the exemplary military boy because he wants to prove what telepaths can do away from the Corps, to show he and everyone else who turned away from the Corps during the telepath war made the right decision. The entire connection between Gideon and Galen is tied to what happened at the outbreak of the Shadow War.
Would this work for a new viewer who hasn't watched B5 itself? I'm not sure; I think it would, because we get the necessary info from the charactors, but for someone already familiar with the B5 cosmos, there is just that extra resonance.
Crusade, in its thirteen broadcast episode, is not as good as say, Firefly or the new Battlestar Galactica in theirs. (My two examples of space shows which manage to start off at a kick-ass level of excellence and maintain it throughout their first season.) But it is good. As Andraste observed in her post, it is also more consistently good than the first thirteen episodes of Babylon 5 itself. If there is no Signs and Portents, there is no Infection, either. The ensemble of actors works very well together. And you don't get the impression JMS was still trying to find the voices, which you get for some of the B5 characters in the earliest episodes. (For example, very early Sinclair is written in the action hero mold Bruce Boxleitner would later do better with Sheridan, which gets abandoned in favour of the gravitas and man of thought element Michael O'Hare excelled at.)
The stories told in the invidual episodes contain visible set-up for which there will never be a pay-off, due to cancellation, but they're enough in themselves to get the characters across and make them interesting to the audience. As far as JMS' leading men go, Matthew Gideon benefits greatly from a) not having the initials JS and b) not being burdened with any prophecies hanging around his neck. Casting Gary Cole (directly after American Gothic), JMS managed to make Gideon come across both as more innate ruthless and more relaxed at the same time. The relationship with Lochley is refreshingly angst-free and a counterpoint to all the tortured romances in Babylon 5. (And one of the few tv examples where two adults having sex after a relatively short on screen time together aren't presented as old lovers for a justification, nor does the sex have bad consequences for either party in the next morning, nor do they suddenly stop liking each other because of it.) And as 'Draste said, I can't see either Sheridan or Sinclair watching G'Kar's porn collection out of idle curiosity or use it as blackmail. Gideon isn't always a nice guy.
Galen is our Man of Mystery and, if the few Crusade fics out there are anything to go by, like Marcus Cole the designated hearthrob of the universe. Personally, I like him better in small doses than in the episodes which are actually Galen-centric, like Path of Sorrows. I like my know-it-all-types better with they are not extremely powerful and mysterious, just smart and with obvious personality deficits, like Max Eilerson. This being said, Galen is not boring, and the hints about a connection between the technomages and the Shadow tech used by the Drakh are among the most promising set-up pieces in the show.
Max Eilerson, no prizes for guessing, is my favourite character. He's also obviously inspired by Avon of Blake's 7 fame, and one of the few Avon-inspired characters who manages to carry it off. Note that JMS didn't make the mistake of letting him be in a love/hate relationship with Gideon - therein lies the difference between good homage and imitation. Max is also a major reason why the broadcast order of episodes is a crime, because his decision to not report the discovery of Dureena's people has to come later in his development, not right at the beginning. Aside from the cynic out for profit with a gift for sarcastic one liners mold, JMS gave Max enough traits to mark him as a distinct individual, not as Avon (or for that matter, Han Solo), mark II. The dancing ability and the alien porn collection comes to mind, and of course the unique Eilerson method of rescuing his ex and his cat.
As there are at least three episodes that juxtapose Max, the most cynical person on board, with the most idealistic person, Dr. Sarah Chambers, my guess is that this would have grown into a major relationship. Not necessarily romantic in nature; I didn't see any sparks, and there isn't any build-up in this regard. But as by the end of the 13th episodes, she knows more about him than the rest of the crew and has seen him in at least two vulnerable situations, my guess is that they would have become sparring friends, with probably a major fallout once Max made a serious pro-profit decision (while I think he'd ultimately have ended up on the side of the angels, that would have taken time). Besides, it would have helped to further establish Sarah Chambers beyond the usual doctor characteristics.
If Max Eilerson is a spiritual descendant of Avon, Dureena is the most un-Vila like thief you can imagine. Indeed her flamboyance is such that you sometimes wonder how she does the camouflage thing. More about her when I get to JMS' commentary for Racing the Night. John Matheson, otoh, is the Lennier and Vir of this show - the innocent and eager character set up for a fall and plunge into guilt. Although Matheson's backstory - his helping the rogue telepath which at the same time condemns about 200 Psi Corps telepaths to death - isn't that guilt-free already. Still, I think he would have done something in the present as well. Now whether he'd have been like Vir, emerging as a sadder but stronger character from the loss of innocence, or like Lennier, breaking apart in shame and regret, I have no idea.
Standout Crusade episodes: The Memory of War, with its intriguing revelation about the technomages and the illustration of what JMS means when he calls Crusade a show with distinct horror overtones, Ruling from the Tomb (Peter David writes as wittily here in JMS' universe as he does in Soul Mates, the Max and Dureena b-plot cracks me up, and did I mention I like Gideon and Lochley together?), Each Night I Dream of Home (major discovery about the virus, plus questionable research ethics and burden of conscience alert), The Path of Sorrows (in which Matheson, Gideon and Galen take angsty backstory trips in the past), and The Rules of the Game (Max rules! - and rewrites the rules; Gideon and Lochley have fun being hunted for their lives and find new ways to deal with adrenaline), Appearances and other Deceits (your standard alien possession story, one would think, except a) this one stars John "Neroon" Vickeroy, b) it showcases Max, always a plus, and c) it does a very refreshing twist on the redshirt cliché - instead of familiarizing us with a non-regular crew member first who then gets shot as we expect, we have a guard with no lines get shot FIRST and then have Max wonder about who this guy was he didn't know any more than we did, but who saved his life because that was his job). Oh, and Visitors from Down the Street is the most 90ish thing about the show, because it's a very funny X-Files spoof if you know the show, which almost everyone back then did, but I wonder whether this will be true in the future...
Despite announcements to the contrary, one of JMS' commentaries made it to the Region 2 DVDs, for Racing the Night, the original pilot, and I am very glad it did, because he reveals several things about the planned storyarcs, most notably:
- in her quest to learn Galen's powers, Dureena would go darker and darker and ultimately head for a confrontation with him
- Gideon would have temporarily died at the end of the first season, hence the death card at the end of Racing the Night, and his consciousness would have melded with the Apocalypse Box - this is why the voice of the Box is already Gary Cole's voice in season 1 - before his resurrection; this, unlike Sheridan's resurrection, would not have been a good thing
- the cure for the Drakh Plague would in fact have been found in the middle of season 2, giving the show a very different direction; by that time, the Crusade crew while looking for the cure would have stumbled across massive evidence for the way Shadow technology - and the new data they themselves collected to save Earth - was used by Earth Military, which in turn would have made them hunted outcasts.
The last one is the biggest surprise, and not unproblematical. I mean, it was obvious that the question for five seasons wouldn't be "can they find a cure?" because due to Sleeping in Light, we know humanity survives already. But Earth is part of the Alliance, and by myself, I can't see a reason why Gideon & Co. couldn't have gone to Sheridan and the Alliance with this intel. Hm. Will have to ponder this further.
JMS in the commentary also makes fun of his own tendencies for long monologues and expositionary dialogue ("the writer, henceforth called 'the idiot', at this point went widely overboard with dialogue as happens with him in a regular basis"), praises his cast, and talks about how he wanted Crusade to have "almost a horror show feeling" at times. There are only a few digs at the network, mostly about the pilot episode thing and because they wanted Dureena's makeup changed from what had been in Call to Arms (more human-like and prettier - sigh). When he talks about the planned arcs, it makes one doubly frustrated the show got cancelled. Maybe he'll write the comic one day?
Until then, I urge you, oh fellow fen, to watch Crusade on DVD and write me some fanfic. Because I am mightily frustrated that safe one story by Andraste, none seems to exist which isn't Galen/Mary Sue or Galen/angst of his past. And I want to hear more about these characters.
To use just one example of why the broadcast order spells doom: Racing the Night, originally written as the pilot episode by JMS, got broadcast as episode 9, at a point when relationship and character development had already started and the return to the crew treating each other as almost strangers would be irritating in the extreme. Unless you watch it as episode 2, after War Zone, the new pilot episode JMS had to write rather hastily (and it shows, as it did with Fireflly' new first episode). In which case it works very well, though then it becomes even more apparent that both "pilot" episodes feature a half-hearted space battle scene presumably ordered by the network, as this is something they thought viewers wold expect from a sci-fi show. But Crusade isn't about the space battles, and doesn't have them after those episodes anyway.
The character introduction works better in Racing the Night, if you ask me, especially for Galen and Dureena. In War Zone, Galen comes across as insufferable smug and the cryptic-ness annoys; and Dureena seems little more than a cliché. Racing the Night highlights Galen's dry sense of humour instead, and Dureena is interesting. In both cases, Gideon is more the archetypical heroic lead than he is in the rest of the show, but introducing him via a nightmare about the very real possibility that he'll have to kill his own people (which happens in Racing the Night) makes him more interesting than the fisticuffs offered in War Zone.
What's apparent from the start whereever you choose to begin the show is that JMS tried to do something new (within his invented universe, not within the genre), which might have contributed to the series' failure at the time. Crusade very deliberately is not a B5 copy, or B5, part II. The ensemble here is much smaller, and instead of consisting of representatives of all the major races in the B5 cosmos, it consists solely of humans and one alien. (Or two, if you count Galen as alien.) None of the characters safe Elizabeth Lochley were present in Babylon 5 itself, and she's only in three of the broadcast episodes; moreover, she was hardly an audience favourite. (I always liked her, but I know I was in a minority.) Instead of the space station, you have a ship that is elsewhere each week. And so on. At the same time, Crusade is of course set within the same universe, and this is important. The Drakh plague is an indirect inheritance of the Shadow War, and we get reminded of other Shadow legacies along the way. The company Max Eilerson works for is IPX, and wouldn't one like to know whether he ever met Anna Sheridan and Mr. Morden back in the day. John Matheson strifes so hard to be the exemplary military boy because he wants to prove what telepaths can do away from the Corps, to show he and everyone else who turned away from the Corps during the telepath war made the right decision. The entire connection between Gideon and Galen is tied to what happened at the outbreak of the Shadow War.
Would this work for a new viewer who hasn't watched B5 itself? I'm not sure; I think it would, because we get the necessary info from the charactors, but for someone already familiar with the B5 cosmos, there is just that extra resonance.
Crusade, in its thirteen broadcast episode, is not as good as say, Firefly or the new Battlestar Galactica in theirs. (My two examples of space shows which manage to start off at a kick-ass level of excellence and maintain it throughout their first season.) But it is good. As Andraste observed in her post, it is also more consistently good than the first thirteen episodes of Babylon 5 itself. If there is no Signs and Portents, there is no Infection, either. The ensemble of actors works very well together. And you don't get the impression JMS was still trying to find the voices, which you get for some of the B5 characters in the earliest episodes. (For example, very early Sinclair is written in the action hero mold Bruce Boxleitner would later do better with Sheridan, which gets abandoned in favour of the gravitas and man of thought element Michael O'Hare excelled at.)
The stories told in the invidual episodes contain visible set-up for which there will never be a pay-off, due to cancellation, but they're enough in themselves to get the characters across and make them interesting to the audience. As far as JMS' leading men go, Matthew Gideon benefits greatly from a) not having the initials JS and b) not being burdened with any prophecies hanging around his neck. Casting Gary Cole (directly after American Gothic), JMS managed to make Gideon come across both as more innate ruthless and more relaxed at the same time. The relationship with Lochley is refreshingly angst-free and a counterpoint to all the tortured romances in Babylon 5. (And one of the few tv examples where two adults having sex after a relatively short on screen time together aren't presented as old lovers for a justification, nor does the sex have bad consequences for either party in the next morning, nor do they suddenly stop liking each other because of it.) And as 'Draste said, I can't see either Sheridan or Sinclair watching G'Kar's porn collection out of idle curiosity or use it as blackmail. Gideon isn't always a nice guy.
Galen is our Man of Mystery and, if the few Crusade fics out there are anything to go by, like Marcus Cole the designated hearthrob of the universe. Personally, I like him better in small doses than in the episodes which are actually Galen-centric, like Path of Sorrows. I like my know-it-all-types better with they are not extremely powerful and mysterious, just smart and with obvious personality deficits, like Max Eilerson. This being said, Galen is not boring, and the hints about a connection between the technomages and the Shadow tech used by the Drakh are among the most promising set-up pieces in the show.
Max Eilerson, no prizes for guessing, is my favourite character. He's also obviously inspired by Avon of Blake's 7 fame, and one of the few Avon-inspired characters who manages to carry it off. Note that JMS didn't make the mistake of letting him be in a love/hate relationship with Gideon - therein lies the difference between good homage and imitation. Max is also a major reason why the broadcast order of episodes is a crime, because his decision to not report the discovery of Dureena's people has to come later in his development, not right at the beginning. Aside from the cynic out for profit with a gift for sarcastic one liners mold, JMS gave Max enough traits to mark him as a distinct individual, not as Avon (or for that matter, Han Solo), mark II. The dancing ability and the alien porn collection comes to mind, and of course the unique Eilerson method of rescuing his ex and his cat.
As there are at least three episodes that juxtapose Max, the most cynical person on board, with the most idealistic person, Dr. Sarah Chambers, my guess is that this would have grown into a major relationship. Not necessarily romantic in nature; I didn't see any sparks, and there isn't any build-up in this regard. But as by the end of the 13th episodes, she knows more about him than the rest of the crew and has seen him in at least two vulnerable situations, my guess is that they would have become sparring friends, with probably a major fallout once Max made a serious pro-profit decision (while I think he'd ultimately have ended up on the side of the angels, that would have taken time). Besides, it would have helped to further establish Sarah Chambers beyond the usual doctor characteristics.
If Max Eilerson is a spiritual descendant of Avon, Dureena is the most un-Vila like thief you can imagine. Indeed her flamboyance is such that you sometimes wonder how she does the camouflage thing. More about her when I get to JMS' commentary for Racing the Night. John Matheson, otoh, is the Lennier and Vir of this show - the innocent and eager character set up for a fall and plunge into guilt. Although Matheson's backstory - his helping the rogue telepath which at the same time condemns about 200 Psi Corps telepaths to death - isn't that guilt-free already. Still, I think he would have done something in the present as well. Now whether he'd have been like Vir, emerging as a sadder but stronger character from the loss of innocence, or like Lennier, breaking apart in shame and regret, I have no idea.
Standout Crusade episodes: The Memory of War, with its intriguing revelation about the technomages and the illustration of what JMS means when he calls Crusade a show with distinct horror overtones, Ruling from the Tomb (Peter David writes as wittily here in JMS' universe as he does in Soul Mates, the Max and Dureena b-plot cracks me up, and did I mention I like Gideon and Lochley together?), Each Night I Dream of Home (major discovery about the virus, plus questionable research ethics and burden of conscience alert), The Path of Sorrows (in which Matheson, Gideon and Galen take angsty backstory trips in the past), and The Rules of the Game (Max rules! - and rewrites the rules; Gideon and Lochley have fun being hunted for their lives and find new ways to deal with adrenaline), Appearances and other Deceits (your standard alien possession story, one would think, except a) this one stars John "Neroon" Vickeroy, b) it showcases Max, always a plus, and c) it does a very refreshing twist on the redshirt cliché - instead of familiarizing us with a non-regular crew member first who then gets shot as we expect, we have a guard with no lines get shot FIRST and then have Max wonder about who this guy was he didn't know any more than we did, but who saved his life because that was his job). Oh, and Visitors from Down the Street is the most 90ish thing about the show, because it's a very funny X-Files spoof if you know the show, which almost everyone back then did, but I wonder whether this will be true in the future...
Despite announcements to the contrary, one of JMS' commentaries made it to the Region 2 DVDs, for Racing the Night, the original pilot, and I am very glad it did, because he reveals several things about the planned storyarcs, most notably:
- in her quest to learn Galen's powers, Dureena would go darker and darker and ultimately head for a confrontation with him
- Gideon would have temporarily died at the end of the first season, hence the death card at the end of Racing the Night, and his consciousness would have melded with the Apocalypse Box - this is why the voice of the Box is already Gary Cole's voice in season 1 - before his resurrection; this, unlike Sheridan's resurrection, would not have been a good thing
- the cure for the Drakh Plague would in fact have been found in the middle of season 2, giving the show a very different direction; by that time, the Crusade crew while looking for the cure would have stumbled across massive evidence for the way Shadow technology - and the new data they themselves collected to save Earth - was used by Earth Military, which in turn would have made them hunted outcasts.
The last one is the biggest surprise, and not unproblematical. I mean, it was obvious that the question for five seasons wouldn't be "can they find a cure?" because due to Sleeping in Light, we know humanity survives already. But Earth is part of the Alliance, and by myself, I can't see a reason why Gideon & Co. couldn't have gone to Sheridan and the Alliance with this intel. Hm. Will have to ponder this further.
JMS in the commentary also makes fun of his own tendencies for long monologues and expositionary dialogue ("the writer, henceforth called 'the idiot', at this point went widely overboard with dialogue as happens with him in a regular basis"), praises his cast, and talks about how he wanted Crusade to have "almost a horror show feeling" at times. There are only a few digs at the network, mostly about the pilot episode thing and because they wanted Dureena's makeup changed from what had been in Call to Arms (more human-like and prettier - sigh). When he talks about the planned arcs, it makes one doubly frustrated the show got cancelled. Maybe he'll write the comic one day?
Until then, I urge you, oh fellow fen, to watch Crusade on DVD and write me some fanfic. Because I am mightily frustrated that safe one story by Andraste, none seems to exist which isn't Galen/Mary Sue or Galen/angst of his past. And I want to hear more about these characters.
