A Niner Watches Babylon 5 (NO spoilers, please)

I told you. Didn't I tell you?

 

Oh absolutely though somehow it manages to weave the derivative stuff with plenty of it's own ideas to create something unique in it's own way. Just like Star Wars drew from western hero mythology and Japanese cinema and B5 drew from sci-fi and fantasy literature (Lensman, Foundation, Lovecraft, Tolkien etc.)

Exactly, a soundtrack is supposed to seamlessly support and compliment the visuals. Even noticing the music is usually a bad sign.

Though I do like the show, it's very uneven - no matter which order you view it in - and there are some moments I find genuinely cringe worthy. It has all of the problems most shows have in their first season without the subsequent four seasons to counterbalance them. Still there are some legitimate high points and the cast is, I think, very strong. Dureena, Max, Gideon and yes, Galen, are all very well acted and (for the most part) well written. Max is a personal favourite of mine in a Kerr Avon meets Rodney McKay kind of way.

Trivia time: Carrie Dobro (Dureena) did make two small appearances on B5 prior to Crusade. Once as of of Franklin's staff in 'Exogenesis' and again as that crazy Brakiri woman in 'Racing Mars'. Oh and be forewarned, a part of the behind the scenes back and forth meant that Dureena's hair make-up design alters quite a bit from one episode to the next. The forehead piece changes at least twice and they kept having to fiddle with her contact lenses. Nothing as drastic as Delenn's or even G'Kar's change from 'The Gathering' onwards, but it is noticeable. Personally I think her look in 'A Call to Arms' was the best.

Your clairvoyance is astounding. I shall be reporting you to Psi Corps very soon.

 

I don't think I've aired my pet peeve for a little while: There was no Pilot for Crusade. Pilots are used to *sell* a series, it's not another term for 'first episode' although a pilot often does become that. "A Call to Arms" wasn't a Pilot, either. Crusade was commissioned without there ever being a pilot episode made.

Jan

 

I can't believe you guys don't like Galen. He's awesome.

 

^
He's completely insufferable and self-righteous and smarmy. He's got some of the traits that I dislike in JMS's writing (which is sometimes more then a little smug), bottled up as his essential character thing.

That said, yeah, I rather liked Max Eilerson. He's the Londo Mollari of Crusade, to give him high praise that also illuminates exactly why he works. JMS is always better with his rakes then his heroes... but I disgress.

 

Crusade is not something I would recommend to anyone. There's only 2 episodes out of 13 that I would call good.

Could it have gotten good? Possibly, but it was a really weak start. Inexcusably weak, for a production team that just came off the experience of a 5 yr show. Part of the blame surely belongs to TNT, but I think the majority of the problem was with JMS & co.

Even without TNT interference, it would have been a very weak start. And shows cannot afford to start that weakly.

 

I'm not sure anybody really understands the level of TNT interference. It should become more clear when the upcoming Crusade script books come out.

But then, I disagree that it was as weak as Hyperspace05 does. 'Course, I've got all of the drafts of the scripts to compare...

Jan

 

Crusade's first season was better than Babylon 5's (which is not saying much) and it had a better sense of the environment it's set in than Legend of the Rangers (which is saying even less).

Mostly I found it passable space opera; with a couple of bad episodes, some mediocre, one or two good. Ignoring the behind-the-scenes reasons for the show's failures; an over-reliance on cliched writing or occasionally dodgy efforts at humour were in my opinion two of its main failings; and I don't think any of its attempted arcs were cohering well at all (the entirely jumbled order of the series is probably the fault here.)

 

True, pilot generally refers to the episode that sells the series, but people still use the term for a first episode and Joe himself used the term "pilot" when referring to "Racing the Night". However, he said that A Call to Arms was a Babylon 5 story that set up Crusade, not a Crusade story.

Joe went from *ZERO* interference on B5 to TNT sending pages and pages of notes for Crusade. They shut the show down between episodes 105 and 106 and wouldn't let the production go on until Joe gave in to their notes. Any of the black uniform episodes in Joe's words "have TNT's fingerprints all over them."

 

You know that always bothered me somewhat because I like the black uniforms better than the grey ones.

As for TNTs interference, to give an idea of it's degree, JMS did post a relativity small sampling of the back and forth correspondence they had to deal with. A lot of it includes spoilers for upcoming episodes so for TGB's benefit, I'll paste in the stuff relating to 'War Zone' here: -

It's all rather academic of course as JMS found out years later that by the time the show had gone into production, TNT had already decided they didn't want the show any more and used this tactic of intentionally confounding and infuriating the production staff so they could cancel the show without being done for a breach on contract. Basically they were intentionally pissing them about.

Apparently they had hoped to increase their viewership with B5 and Crusade, but after the figures for B5 season 5 came in it became apparent that the people who normally watched their other programs didn't watch B5 and conversely those that watched B5 didn't hang around for their other programs. In short, Crusade was doomed before the cameras even rolled. Given all that it's a wonder Crusade was any good at all. And to think how the Browncoats whinge on about how poorly Firefly was treated.

 

Honestly, I don't care how many shots there were, I thought "Warzone" was incredibly dull. I remember the first (and only) time I watched it, I started zoning out, and came back in halfway though the space battle. And my reaction was, "Wait, when did a space battle start?"

 

I thought they wanted JMS to turn Crusade into a lowbudget Tribune show? So they were trying to cancel it from the beginning instead.

Weird.

 

Exactly. They wanted to make it impossible to comply with their demands in order to have an excuse to break their contract.

 

Indeed. It's weird I remember JMS not defending this, because the quotes posted are his usual trenchant self. I wouldn't call "War Zone" slow per se but it's nothing more then one long torturous info-dump.

 

Well, by contrast, Joss Whedon's philosophy is that the first three or four episodes are all sort of pilots, in that they all need to sell the show to the viewers and contain enough exposition to bring people up to speed if they missed the very first.

 

I think what Jan is getting at is that the term 'pilot' is often misused. Pilots are single episodes commissioned to try and sell a show and if successful, often end up being the first episode which is why some people (including Joss Whedon apparently) have come to assume the concepts are one and the same.

What would you have expected him to say? "Yes I know it's crap. I never wanted to write the damn thing in the first place."
Put it in it's proper context; that memo was written during post-production of 'War Zone' and while they were still deep into shooting and writing the show. He's clearly trying to make sure the episode is the best it can be, given TNT are the ones that asked for it in the first place. The only professional way to behave is to address their notes one point at a time and approach it as reasonable as possible, however, given the kind of nonsense they're coming out with (also keep in mind this is by no means the first such exchange) it's clearly becoming increasingly impossible to address there supposed concerns.
If you read it, you can see they're clearly contradicting themselves; one minute they're complaining "Gideon doesn't seem to have an understanding or a rapport with his ship." and the next they're complaining that he knows where the conference room is...the one that's like five paces behind his chair...

 

Not 'look at all these scenes! It's revolutionary!'; that's for sure.

 

"It is, frankly, the most ambitious and fastest-paced episode we've ever produced, rivaled only by 103, which is in your hands now, and which is anything but slow."

^Maybe I'm getting old and my eyesight is failing because I don't see where he says, or even implies any such thing. The pace of the episode is indeed very fast, it's the flow that's the problem, mostly due to the clunky introductions and and "whack you over the head" exposition that TNT insisted on.

It might be worth keeping in mind that this is all about a cut of the episode we've never seen and the one we did see was finished after these exchanges.

 

^
I was referring to also:

He minces his words more delicately then I put it ('something' of a record can mean anything), granted.

 

Unless you know for a fact that he's factually incorrect in his assertion (I certainly don't, one way or the other), I'm not sure what your point is. He doesn't mince words at all, he's being very direct and to the point; They're saying the episode is slow to which he basically says "how can it possibly be slow with this number and variety of scenes in a 40 minute show."
At no point is he saying the episode is "revolutionary" as you put it, all he does is directly address their notes. Since we can be fairly sure now that TNT were deliberately spewing nonsense, I think it's all rather academic.