Revisiting Crusade

Last week I talked about rewatching Babylon 5 and I mentioned the follow-up series, Crusade.  It aired for 13 episodes on TNT in 1999 before it was canceled.  It's a similar situation to Fox's Firefly but I don't think people rant about bringing it back nearly as often.

The premise for the show was actually established in a TV movie called Call of Arms.  In that the Drahk, an ally of the evil Shadows from the B5 series, attack Earth.  When their attack is thwarted they spread a plague across Earth.  In 5 years at most the plague will destroy all life on Earth--unless a cure can be found.

So that's where the show picks up.  Captain Matthew Gideon (Gary Cole) of an explorer ship is chosen to take a new ship, the Excalibur, and search for anything that might lead to a cure.  The first episode then has him assembling a crew.  Some like his telepath first officer come through regular channels while others like an alien thief and a brilliant archaeologist named Max come along through less conventional means.  And stalking them is a "technomage" named Galen (Peter Woodward, son of original Wicker Man and Equalizer Edward Woodward) who uses technology to simulate magic.  (There was an episode about them in the second season of B5.)

While comparisons between B5 and Deep Space Nine were obvious, Crusade takes more of a classic Star Trek or Next Generation approach in that most of the episodes have them visiting a strange new world, seeking new life and new civilizations--that whole thing.  They even do one of those Trek mind fuck episodes when they run into a disabled alien ship and some evil alien hive mind tries to take over the Excalibur.

This was the sort of show where it could have worked if the network had given it time.  It just needed some time to gel and to work up the characters.  And more Galen!  He's only in about half the episodes but he's funny and generally awesome.  And they needed more space battles.  The Excalibur has this awesome "main gun" like the SDF-1 in Robotech but they only use it like 3 times in the whole series, once on a ground target and twice against the Drahk.  Still, it's wicked cool so they should have used it more.

One drawback is the special effects looked pretty lame.  Most of the time they looked like something from a PC game of the era like Wing Commander or whatever.  Which is probably one of the reason they didn't have more awesome space battles.

I'm sure J Michael Straczynski had a whole 5-year plan for the series but I always think a concept like Crusade is somewhat problematic.  Either they're going to find the cure in year 5 or as happened they'll get canceled before that and leave an unsatisfying ending.  It was like on Voyager you knew they weren't going to find a way home until the series was either canceled or voluntarily quit--the latter being what happened.  For that matter you know they can't really find a safe haven from the zombies in The Walking Dead until the show is over--if then.  But I just think when you have such a specific goal it can limit the drama.  Maybe if there had been a more open-ended goal (like classic Trek or TNG) it would have worked better.  Probably not.

Something that might also have worked against the show was they cast Gary Cole in the lead role and that was not long after Office Space came out, where he played the infamous Bill Lumbergh.  Obviously the two characters aren't much alike (though that would be a hilarious parody) but maybe it was hard for some people to take it seriously.  And unlike The Orville, Crusade pretty much played it straight, with the exception of one funny episode where they run into aliens who are parodies of Mulder and Scully from the X-Files.  It's funny how everything in that is turned upside-down with the humans as the mysterious beings who are supposedly controlling this alien society.

Anyway, unlike Babylon 5 this wasn't on Amazon Prime so I had to buy the DVDs for like $10.  One annoying thing is there are 13 episodes and 4 discs that they split 4-4-4-1.  And there aren't that many special features to warrant just one episode on the final disc.  I'm just saying.