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Babylon 5: Crusade (4 episodes in, but not in order)
I tried watching the short-lived B5 spinoff Crusade. I have terrible news: I really like it!
It was a good choice on Past Me's part to not jump immediately into the B5 spinoff material. (At this point, I've still only seen "In the Beginning" as far as the movies go.) I think if I'd watched this right after the main show, which is definitely much better, I'd have been disappointed, but now that it's been a year or so, I'm delighted! Every time main show canon gets a shout-out, I bounce a little!
I've seen episodes 1 and 9-11, for reasons I will get into under the cut.
So I watched the first episode, War Zone, and it's just ... bad. Astonishingly bad. Characters randomly appear and disappear in locations or stop to explain their motivations in detail levels of bad. I know JMS can write well (I mean, it's not just like "this TV pilot is badly written because no one in the writer's room can write"), and by this point I've read enough of the behind the scenes material to recognize the level of DGAF that this pilot represented. He was clearly phoning it in to a nearly unprecedented degree. "The network made me introduce this character so I'm going to kill him off as anticlimactically as possible" levels of spite.
So I finished it and tried the start of 1x02 and was just like ..... no ..... but I vaguely recalled that Crusade was one of those shows with a recommended viewing order, and I went and looked that up, and on that recommendation I skipped to 1x09, which apparently is the start of a run of the episodes that remain from before TNT messed with the show to the point where there apparently is no viewing order that makes sense. At least according to Reddit, you can just watch episodes 9-13 as a little self-contained viewing experience and then kind of watch the other episodes as supplemental sort-of-canon like the tie-in books, and so far I've watched three episodes from the apparently-actually-good run and dammit! I like it!
1x09 is very clearly intended to be the pilot, and it's very JMS - it drops you in medias res with the crew, you meet all of them and get a feel for their individual relationships through little set-piece bits (well, some of them anyway - I WILL say that a couple of them are heavily underdeveloped in these episodes and the reshot pilot actually gives you more of a sense of who those characters are).
Sudden surprise Daniel Dae Kim! Who gets very little to do except say "fire torpedoes," at least so far.
Galen and Dureena are far and away Fave so far. Dureena I figured I'd like; she gives Leela from Doctor Who vibes, and her backstory is a level of tragic that starts at "I'm the last survivor of a destroyed people" and just gets worse from there.
Galen I had no idea I'd like at all, but he charmed me immediately (on the second go with episode 9, anyway) - he's such an utter, utter weirdo combined with stoic iron woobie and competence magnet, who clearly cares about the crew despite his best efforts not to. And he's very dryly funny, and mysterious and far more entertaining than my initial reaction which was that I do not care about the technomages at all. I still don't care about the technomages, but I do care about Galen!
Best Scene is the sequence in the medbay with Galen at the end of 1x10, his vulnerability and his reaction when Sarah uncovers his extensive augments in the process of treating his injuries, and then Dureena walking in covered with mud with his staff, which she went back to the death planet to get, in spite of not knowing exactly why it was important to him ... OUGH. FEELINGS. Anyway, I like them best.
Max, the team's archaeologist/linguist, has all the hallmarks of someone who could have been runaway Fave after he'd gotten a season or two of character development to start growing beyond "I would sell all you people to Satan for one corn chip." He does hit my competence kink on an incredibly visceral level when he starts doing archaeology stuff.
Gideon, the captain, is just kind of there. Back on B5, I felt like I got a sense for both Sinclair and Sheridan right away, as far as who they were as a leader and what their general kind of deal was, even if we didn't know the details, and Gideon is weirdly blank. Why did they pick this guy for a mission to save Earth? Totally unclear! Was he slated to die, turn into someone totally different, and/or reveal some Deep Secret that was going to make it all clear? I guess we'll never know!
Utterly delighted to see more of the B5 universe in this show. I was thrilled when the Ranger ship showed up in 1x09. And a Minbari in a later episode! And offhand references to various aliens, or glimpses of them in crowd scenes. The inaccurate Pak'mara porn video, lololllllll.
.... except the Drakh. I am not at all thrilled to see the Drakh. In fact my visceral revulsion to seeing the Drakh is kind of funny to me. I do not love to hate them, I just don't want to see them at all! They [spoilered] my [spoiler]. Never forgive! Never forget!
They clearly have a much higher budget for ships and planets in this show than in B5, which gave me a little wistful/sad ache for a B5 in which we could have seen a bit more of locations outside the space station as something other than a single room or a CGI establishing shot.
Anyway, it's a bit sad that this never had a chance to find its feet the way the first season of B5 did. (Also, it certainly makes it clear that as much as B5 got editorially messed around, it could have been so much worse.) I would have liked a couple of seasons of this to watch, but there are still a few more episodes, and I expect I'll enjoy those.
It was a good choice on Past Me's part to not jump immediately into the B5 spinoff material. (At this point, I've still only seen "In the Beginning" as far as the movies go.) I think if I'd watched this right after the main show, which is definitely much better, I'd have been disappointed, but now that it's been a year or so, I'm delighted! Every time main show canon gets a shout-out, I bounce a little!
I've seen episodes 1 and 9-11, for reasons I will get into under the cut.
So I watched the first episode, War Zone, and it's just ... bad. Astonishingly bad. Characters randomly appear and disappear in locations or stop to explain their motivations in detail levels of bad. I know JMS can write well (I mean, it's not just like "this TV pilot is badly written because no one in the writer's room can write"), and by this point I've read enough of the behind the scenes material to recognize the level of DGAF that this pilot represented. He was clearly phoning it in to a nearly unprecedented degree. "The network made me introduce this character so I'm going to kill him off as anticlimactically as possible" levels of spite.
So I finished it and tried the start of 1x02 and was just like ..... no ..... but I vaguely recalled that Crusade was one of those shows with a recommended viewing order, and I went and looked that up, and on that recommendation I skipped to 1x09, which apparently is the start of a run of the episodes that remain from before TNT messed with the show to the point where there apparently is no viewing order that makes sense. At least according to Reddit, you can just watch episodes 9-13 as a little self-contained viewing experience and then kind of watch the other episodes as supplemental sort-of-canon like the tie-in books, and so far I've watched three episodes from the apparently-actually-good run and dammit! I like it!
1x09 is very clearly intended to be the pilot, and it's very JMS - it drops you in medias res with the crew, you meet all of them and get a feel for their individual relationships through little set-piece bits (well, some of them anyway - I WILL say that a couple of them are heavily underdeveloped in these episodes and the reshot pilot actually gives you more of a sense of who those characters are).
Sudden surprise Daniel Dae Kim! Who gets very little to do except say "fire torpedoes," at least so far.
Galen and Dureena are far and away Fave so far. Dureena I figured I'd like; she gives Leela from Doctor Who vibes, and her backstory is a level of tragic that starts at "I'm the last survivor of a destroyed people" and just gets worse from there.
Galen I had no idea I'd like at all, but he charmed me immediately (on the second go with episode 9, anyway) - he's such an utter, utter weirdo combined with stoic iron woobie and competence magnet, who clearly cares about the crew despite his best efforts not to. And he's very dryly funny, and mysterious and far more entertaining than my initial reaction which was that I do not care about the technomages at all. I still don't care about the technomages, but I do care about Galen!
Best Scene is the sequence in the medbay with Galen at the end of 1x10, his vulnerability and his reaction when Sarah uncovers his extensive augments in the process of treating his injuries, and then Dureena walking in covered with mud with his staff, which she went back to the death planet to get, in spite of not knowing exactly why it was important to him ... OUGH. FEELINGS. Anyway, I like them best.
Max, the team's archaeologist/linguist, has all the hallmarks of someone who could have been runaway Fave after he'd gotten a season or two of character development to start growing beyond "I would sell all you people to Satan for one corn chip." He does hit my competence kink on an incredibly visceral level when he starts doing archaeology stuff.
Gideon, the captain, is just kind of there. Back on B5, I felt like I got a sense for both Sinclair and Sheridan right away, as far as who they were as a leader and what their general kind of deal was, even if we didn't know the details, and Gideon is weirdly blank. Why did they pick this guy for a mission to save Earth? Totally unclear! Was he slated to die, turn into someone totally different, and/or reveal some Deep Secret that was going to make it all clear? I guess we'll never know!
Utterly delighted to see more of the B5 universe in this show. I was thrilled when the Ranger ship showed up in 1x09. And a Minbari in a later episode! And offhand references to various aliens, or glimpses of them in crowd scenes. The inaccurate Pak'mara porn video, lololllllll.
.... except the Drakh. I am not at all thrilled to see the Drakh. In fact my visceral revulsion to seeing the Drakh is kind of funny to me. I do not love to hate them, I just don't want to see them at all! They [spoilered] my [spoiler]. Never forgive! Never forget!
They clearly have a much higher budget for ships and planets in this show than in B5, which gave me a little wistful/sad ache for a B5 in which we could have seen a bit more of locations outside the space station as something other than a single room or a CGI establishing shot.
Anyway, it's a bit sad that this never had a chance to find its feet the way the first season of B5 did. (Also, it certainly makes it clear that as much as B5 got editorially messed around, it could have been so much worse.) I would have liked a couple of seasons of this to watch, but there are still a few more episodes, and I expect I'll enjoy those.
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Once you've braced yourself for how badly TNT fucked over the writing, it's quite fun actually!
DDK and his cheekbones of angsty hotness even gets part of a plot at some point. I love Dureena.
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Yeah, I went in with rock bottom expectations, and given the givens, it's a lot of fun! Definitely glad I didn't go straight into this off B5, but it's so fun to get more little bits of lore, and I would 100% watch the show that apparently this show was originally supposed to be, in which they're just wandering around in a ship poking at things in the B5 universe.
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But the characters are a lot of fun! You just kind of have to string the good bits together in a row, and forget the rest.
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LMAO, I know. I'm glad everyone's having fun on their round-the-galaxy tour, too bad everyone back on Earth is doomed but what you gonna do about it? (Oh wait! We're the people who are supposed to do something about it! Shit, we better get on that.)
It is a bit like reading (superhero) comics in the sense that the characters are fun, but what's actually happening is wildly uneven, and some of it you just have to ignore completely to enjoy the parts that are good.
But the good parts actually ARE good!
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I did not know anything about TV exec meddling with Crusade at the time, but having read JMS's autobiography, very unsurprised that he would go to killing off a character he'd been forced to include as anticlimactically as possible. XD
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Saaaaame, although in this case he doesn't really have the character development yet, and I can see they're going for redeemable jerk but sometimes they shoot right past that into insufferable asshole. I could so easily see him being my absolute blorbo-of-the-show after like 2 seasons of character development that he did not get. Alas.
I did not know anything about TV exec meddling with Crusade at the time, but having read JMS's autobiography, very unsurprised that he would go to killing off a character he'd been forced to include as anticlimactically as possible. XD
Oh, I was unclear there - it's the guy in B5 season 2 that I was referring to! (Keffer) JMS doesn't do that in this episode, but it's very much got the same attitude of "You want me to write this thing I don't want to write? FINE! HERE!" xD (I get the general impression that the now-pilot is meant to answer the question of how these people all got on the ship in the first place, but the answer in most cases is basically just "reasons.")
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When I got into Torchwood recently, there was a ton of old fic on LJ - it was just the right age to have had a lot of fic on LJ that was never imported into AO3. I did some spelunking on old LJs for B5 fic as well, but there's very little that's not also on AO3 .... I suspect that a lot of people had already written what they were going to write and dropped out of the fandom before LJ really became a thing. (Or ffn for that matter.) It is really interesting moving between fandoms of such different ages.
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All I remember from this show is DDK, Galen's mysterious box that we never find out about, and a vague sense of fondness. Oh and Dureena, but I'd forgotten even her until you mentioned her!
The B5 Cinematic Universe really did get shortchanged, but the bits we got were still hella fun.
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I desperately wish that at some point, before most of the actors died, someone had given JMS a pile of money to make a few high-budget miniseries with minimal editorial meddling about whatever aspect of the B5 universe interested him. I know that this probably would have included some dreck and at least one "oh JMS no" terrible choice, but you can tell there's just so much he would have liked to explore in this universe and either didn't get a chance to, or ended up so demoralized and burned out that he didn't really want to.
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I would love a recommended viewing order, thank you so much! :) (Though there's no need to go to too much trouble if it's hard to find.) At this point I'm 3 episodes farther along, ran into one I legitimately hated (the one where the aliens thought that humans were visiting their planet in an alien abduction way) and am now skipping around to watch any that look good, since the order doesn't seem to matter all that much anyway. But given my wild skipping around, I feel like a straight rewatch in some organized order is probably going to be necessary at some point.
Galen and Dureena remain Fave, especially Dureena, but I have now seen a couple of episodes in which Max gets to be a bit of a softie, and he would 100% have nailed my id to the wall eventually if the show had been allowed to continue, I can tell. The warning signs are all there.
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I can fix that.
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https://archiveofourown.org/works/493883
I do have a print out of her viewing order tugged inside my Crusade DVDS, but I'm travelling right now, and won't be reunited with my old Crusade dvds until two weeks or so from now.
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I appreciate the effort! No worries about not being able to track it down / have it immediately to hand. I seem to have settled into a watch order that's working for me.
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I hardly remember Dureena! I do remember liking Galen—he was the main reason that I was disappointed when it was canceled.
That was the worst acting I ever saw from Gary Cole; he was somehow woefully miscast. The part was terribly underwritten, but I felt like he could have done more with it .
it certainly makes it clear that as much as B5 got editorially messed around, it could have been so much worse
Yes. I hadn't thought of it that way!
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I enjoyed it a lot all the same, but it helped that I went in with very managed expectations and the knowledge that it had been badly messed with by the network. I think I would have been hugely disappointed coming off B5, knowing there was a new series by JMS in the same universe, and then getting this.