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Rating:  -
I always enjoyed the Babylon 5 programs,and I wish they would have done an ending to Crusade instead of just leaving us hard core B5 fans just a hanging.
The entire series was always well done,and the special affects were always excellent.
Rating:  -
Babylon 5 had a sort of grandeur to it, in the sweep of the story, the relationships between the characters, the social issues that were skewered or commented on, and the galactic peril that developed as its main story arc. It was hoped that Crusade could succeed Babylon 5 for another five successful years, carrying on the history of humans after the Shadow War and the formation of the planetary Alliance.
Crusade was, so to speak, murdered in its crib. It never got much of a chance to grow. It never had all the strengths of its predecessor, and it suffered a few weaknesses as well.
Briefly, what I liked about the series: Galen, the enigmatic techno-mage, who was probably the best actor and got the best speeches. Dureena, the alien thief whose sass was entertaining and whose courage got the Crusade team out of a pickle or two. As the series progressed the crew were starting to develop a sense of family and camaraderie, like the Babylon 5 team. The Excalibur was a pretty ship, and quite a few interior sets were built to show different parts of the craft.
Weaknessess: The special effects of ships in orbit and in battle were good. The special effects of planetary landscapes looked cheap. The musical score wasn't as weighty or as appropriate as the music for Babylon 5. Gary Cole's Captain Gideon is a more flawed and somewhat less heroic figure, compared to B5's Cap'n Sheridan. In a way that makes him more interesting, but he also seems to have a dangerously headstrong or capricious streak. (To say nothing of his questionable tactic of getting advice from an alien machine called an "apocalypse box" that has a tendency to give false information.) The lack of a great story arc to tie the episodes together was somewhat of a weakness. Whereas B5 dealt with interplanetary conflicts between whole races, and the war between two super-powerful ancient alien powers, Crusade's plots were narrowly focused on one spacecraft and its mission to find a cure for a planetary plague. The scale is somehow smaller.
After watching all 13 episodes, I find myself overlooking a lot of the ways that it fell short. I'm quite fond of it, and will watch it again from time to time. But it falls short of the standard set by Firefly, or even B5.
Rating: -
CRUSADE is the only spin off of BABYLON 5, but one that never really got off the ground. Part of the problem is that it never really developed much in the way of compelling internal arcs and part of the problem was that it never was given much time to do so. BABYLON 5 was a series that was very, very slow to develop. The first two seasons were quite static and almost dull as various plot elements were slowly dropped into place. Eventually there was a pay off, and a big one at that. But the truth is that it was just really slow to develop. CRUSADE likewise was very slow out of the gate. Would it have become as good as B5? There is no evidence of that. There seems to have been very, very little in the way of long arcs developing, though even in the case of B5 some of the arcs can be seen on reviewing early episodes, but were hard to detect on first viewings. But the brute fact is that CRUSADE was, through the 13 completed episodes, simply not very exciting.
Just because CRUSADE was not terribly good as executed doesn't mean that it wouldn't have gotten better. This was not a show without potential. It did not have the jaw-dropping brilliance that FIREFLY displayed over a comparable number of episodes (which will always ignite the debate over precisely what FOX was thinking when it cancelled that gem), but it nonetheless had potential.
A slowness to develop wasn't the only problem the show had in its short run. The use of the cast was astonishingly inconsistent. Now, B5 often would run for several episodes without opening credits characters putting in an appearance, but that was only after they all were firmly established. CRUSADE might lose a character for three straight episodes. The only character guaranteed to appear in each episode was Gary Cole. Tracy Scoggins was an opening credits character but did not finally appear on the show until several episodes into the season. Peter Woodard, who as the technomage Galen may have been the show's most compelling and fascinating character (certainly he was the only one I wanted to know more about), appeared in only about two-thirds of the episodes. He tended to be dominant in the ones in which he did appear, but that merely reemphasized his absence in the ones in which he did not. We did not even begin to scratch the surface of the main characters. For instance, it appears that Galen was probably a self-created cyborg. In the last episode in which he appeared we learned that his eyes had been replaced by ocular implants and a brief look at his bare back revealed that he had a number of mechanical implants of one kind or another.
Ultimately, this is a show that simply never came out with all guns blazing. We'll never know if it had more potential or not. There were some good individual episodes, as well as some fun ones. I enjoyed seeing Peter Woodward and his father, the Equalizer himself, Edward Woodward. And there was a fun late-series episode that was a great parody of THE X-FILES. The Excalibur finds an alien life pod in open space and picks them up. Inside are two conspiracy-minded aliens dressed very much in the style of Mulder and Scully. The female's head tentacles, which resembled hair slightly, were red like Scully's hair and she wore high-heeled shoes under her slacks in the best Scully fashion. The two accuse the humans of constantly abducting people from their planet and of being involved in a conspiracy with a mysterious man who bears more than a little resemblance to the CSM (that is Cigarette Smoking Man, for non-X-Filers), a resemblance that was cemented when he pulls out a cigarette and lights up as he departs Excalibur. All in all it was fun.
One thing that they might have done to generate more interest in the show was to have more guest appearances by members of the B5 cast. Although the show had been set up by A CALL TO ARMS, the series itself was generally devoid of B5 cast members apart from Tracy Scoggins's Captain Lochley. But I think that more of an attempt to bring in familiar faces would have helped. Apart from Scoggins, the only B5 regular to even appear on the show was Richard Biggs as Steven Franklin.
I can't really recommend this series to anyone except BABYLON 5 completists. If you feel the need to watch absolutely everything connected to B5, go for it. It seems appropriate that one of the very last scenes on the show occurred when Excalibur was taking Captain Lochley back to B5.
Rating: -
I am a big fan of the tv series Babylon 5 and I liked the series Crusade that followed and I only wish it had lasted longer. I have always been a big Sci-fi fan and I liked the fact that both shows focused on the stuggle of good versus evil and the betterment of mankind and all other beings while trying to have interesting stories that were set out in the vastness of space. Some place that I would like to explore.
Rating:  -
If you are a fan of the whole series of Babylon5 movies, you will like the feel of this series.It gives you all of tech & magic that Babylon 5 gives you accept the series was cut short of really getting into some heavy stories. I got this only because I am a big fan of the B5 series.
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