Did you like "Crusade" the B5 spin-off?
- Thread starter Jayson1
- Start date
If you're referring to the "we have 5 years to save earth from the plague!" premise, that was just a jumping off point and just as in B5, the real story would start to kick in around the end of season 1 and the plague thing would have been over by season 3 IIRC.
All academic now of course.
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The later seasons would've involved the comet empire...If you're referring to the "we have 5 years to save earth from the plague!" premise, that was just a jumping off point and just as in B5, the real story would start to kick in around the end of season 1 and the plague thing would have been over by season 3 IIRC.
All academic now of course.
... I'd make a better joke but I never got a chance to actually watch season 2 of Star Blazers/Yamato
I FREAKING LOVE IT.
I liked this show and was so disappointed it had gotten cancelled. They killed it off just as it was getting interesting too which seems to be the normal thing for network TV.
Love the show, the characters, the setting. The ship was cool and I loved the monorail thingy that they had inside the ship. I thought that was a neat idea.
I liked this show and was so disappointed it had gotten cancelled. They killed it off just as it was getting interesting too which seems to be the normal thing for network TV.
Love the show, the characters, the setting. The ship was cool and I loved the monorail thingy that they had inside the ship. I thought that was a neat idea.
There are a couple of items in Babylon 5 itself that also could be retroactively added in to our understanding of Crusade's storylines.
JMS recently said on Twitter, after a fan asked whatever happened to the 'Bureau 13' storyline from the s2 episode "Spider in the Web", that it was part of a separate storyline that he decided was too much of a tangent to the main storyline and there were other things he would rather concentrate on, so he dropped it. He has also always said the idea for the Crusade series had 'always been there' as a tangent from the main B5 story. So by that phrasing, I take those two things to be the same tangent, and so we can say the Bureau 13 and the secret Shadow tech facility were the same thing. The project to brainwash Talia and implant mind-control devices in terrorists may have been more their doing than the Psi Corps' - B13 working with the Psi Corps and Earthforce but not necessarily a part of either of them.
We never really learned where the Knights' mind-reading devices from "And the Sky Full of Stars" came from either. If they wanted to read Sinclair's mind, why not just bring in a telepath rather than going to all this trouble of wiring him up to a virtual reality machine? Maybe because they were a different group altogether.
Obviously Crusade re-contextualizes "The Geometry of Shadows" as well, and says that Earthforce already had experimental Shadow ships at that point. The Passing of the Technomages novels also reveal that the reason the TM's were leaving was because the Shadows would want to use the fact that they use Shadow tech for their magic to bring them back in onside, and they didn't want to do that.
Then we hear about Earthforce excavating Shadow ships off Syria Planum in "Messages From Earth". We see Shadow tech fused onto Omega-class destroyers in "Between the Darkness and the Light". A short story says that Ivanova's post-B5 command, a Warlock-class ship, also had Shadow tech at its centre.
So it's clear that this thread about Earthforce experimenting with forbidden Shadow tech was bubbling under the surface all along, never really a focus but just popping up every now and then to cause problems. Crusade would have tied those tidbits together and explained everything that was going on in the meantime, revealing that Earth never stopped playing with fire even after the Shadow War, even after Clark, even after the fall of the Psi Corps, and even after the Drakh Plague.
And that would somehow tie into Bester and the Telepath War via Matheson, into the Technomages via Galen and Dureena, into the Apocalypse Box via Gideon, into the plague research via Chambers, into IPX via Eilerson and so on.
As for was it any good..... meh. Budget problems, network interference etc as everyone has said. Some nice ideas that never got the chance to breathe and develop. JMS's techniques were revolutionary in B5, but in Crusade those same techniques were now passé, unsubtle and obvious.
Could'a would'a should'a.... didn't.
.
JMS recently said on Twitter, after a fan asked whatever happened to the 'Bureau 13' storyline from the s2 episode "Spider in the Web", that it was part of a separate storyline that he decided was too much of a tangent to the main storyline and there were other things he would rather concentrate on, so he dropped it. He has also always said the idea for the Crusade series had 'always been there' as a tangent from the main B5 story. So by that phrasing, I take those two things to be the same tangent, and so we can say the Bureau 13 and the secret Shadow tech facility were the same thing. The project to brainwash Talia and implant mind-control devices in terrorists may have been more their doing than the Psi Corps' - B13 working with the Psi Corps and Earthforce but not necessarily a part of either of them.
We never really learned where the Knights' mind-reading devices from "And the Sky Full of Stars" came from either. If they wanted to read Sinclair's mind, why not just bring in a telepath rather than going to all this trouble of wiring him up to a virtual reality machine? Maybe because they were a different group altogether.
Obviously Crusade re-contextualizes "The Geometry of Shadows" as well, and says that Earthforce already had experimental Shadow ships at that point. The Passing of the Technomages novels also reveal that the reason the TM's were leaving was because the Shadows would want to use the fact that they use Shadow tech for their magic to bring them back in onside, and they didn't want to do that.
Then we hear about Earthforce excavating Shadow ships off Syria Planum in "Messages From Earth". We see Shadow tech fused onto Omega-class destroyers in "Between the Darkness and the Light". A short story says that Ivanova's post-B5 command, a Warlock-class ship, also had Shadow tech at its centre.
So it's clear that this thread about Earthforce experimenting with forbidden Shadow tech was bubbling under the surface all along, never really a focus but just popping up every now and then to cause problems. Crusade would have tied those tidbits together and explained everything that was going on in the meantime, revealing that Earth never stopped playing with fire even after the Shadow War, even after Clark, even after the fall of the Psi Corps, and even after the Drakh Plague.
And that would somehow tie into Bester and the Telepath War via Matheson, into the Technomages via Galen and Dureena, into the Apocalypse Box via Gideon, into the plague research via Chambers, into IPX via Eilerson and so on.
As for was it any good..... meh. Budget problems, network interference etc as everyone has said. Some nice ideas that never got the chance to breathe and develop. JMS's techniques were revolutionary in B5, but in Crusade those same techniques were now passé, unsubtle and obvious.
Could'a would'a should'a.... didn't.
.
Fiddling with dangerous alien technology to play God is one of the themes of The Expanse series of novels - a revival of Crusade isn't really necessary IMO.
Themes such as adopting desperate and radical ways to deal with the Drakh plague were already examined in other contexts on B5 - Deathwalker, the alien healing device, erasure and rewriting of personality for serious crimes, the extinction of the Markab race due to the Drafa plague, and so on.
Themes such as adopting desperate and radical ways to deal with the Drakh plague were already examined in other contexts on B5 - Deathwalker, the alien healing device, erasure and rewriting of personality for serious crimes, the extinction of the Markab race due to the Drafa plague, and so on.
This makes sense because the idea of disecting Talia Winters doesn't make sense of your Psi Corp and just bringing back a old spy back into the mix. Unless it was just Bester making a cruel joke.
Jason
Yeah I have always wondered if Bester was joking or being serious. Poor Talia if they really did that to her though.
I remember reading some Sci-fi mag back when this came out announcing it as the TOS of it's era. It wasn't but that gave me a good chuckle.
Crusade the first season wasn't good but neither were the first seasons of any other Sci-fi show back in the 90s beyond Stargate-SG1. I didn't like the first season of B5 either but it got a hell of a lot better. I expected Crusade would too. I guess some of us were just conditioned to wait a few years for things to get better back then...
If they had done less stand alone stuff and got more meatier episodes like the later seasons of B5 it would have been great. I liked the concept, I didn't like the idea that we might have to wait 5 years to resolve it. Awesome ship, big ass gun that takes out the power all over the ship. Geeky pleasure.
Crusade the first season wasn't good but neither were the first seasons of any other Sci-fi show back in the 90s beyond Stargate-SG1. I didn't like the first season of B5 either but it got a hell of a lot better. I expected Crusade would too. I guess some of us were just conditioned to wait a few years for things to get better back then...
If they had done less stand alone stuff and got more meatier episodes like the later seasons of B5 it would have been great. I liked the concept, I didn't like the idea that we might have to wait 5 years to resolve it. Awesome ship, big ass gun that takes out the power all over the ship. Geeky pleasure.
Loved that too. Trying to think have we seen it elsewhere? Probably in some anime.
She wasn’t just a spy. She'd also been kicked up a notch by Jason Ironheart, so she was a top-level telepath and even a telekinetic. Control would've known about that, and was fanatically loyal to the Corps. She would've probably insisted on being examined to whatever extent necessary to reproduce the process, no matter the cost.
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