Amateur Megalomania

On occasion, television executives make a heartless decision to screw with a new series, mix up the airing order, put it in poor time slots, and then cancel it before it really forms an audience.

In cases like Firefly or Boomtown, you’re forced to question their thinking.

In a case like Crusade, you realize that some cancellations are completely justified.

Before any JMS fans start throwing rocks at me, let me say that Babylon 5 is one of the best (perhaps THE best) television Sci-fi series ever made. It has become the benchmark by which all other episodic series are measured. My love for B5 is one of the reasons I rented Crusade. So, I’ve established my JMS credentials. Now time for the dissection.

Crusade picks up in the post B5 years. A mysterious alien enemy has released a plague on Earth, infecting the entire population. Scientists speculate the population has five years before the plague finally adapts to our physiology and everyone dies. So Earthforce takes their best ship, the Excalibur, and dispatches it on a mission to wander space until they find a cure for the plague. There is your five year story arc and ticking clock.

So to find a cure to a plague, they are going to send one lone ship into deep space to start looking under rocks? Space is an awfully big place, and random wandering doesn’t seem to be a very good strategy. To top that off, in the 13 episodes of the series, the Excalibur seemed to spend a lot of time in Earth space.

Maybe if the series had lasted, this sort of weakness could have either been fixed or revealed as some aspect of the story. Or maybe it was just bad writing from the start.

The crew of the Excalibur is another problem. We have an ensemble cast as you would expect in this format, but even after watching the full series, I couldn’t give you the names of more than a couple. To be fair, the first part of Babylon 5 was rough and rocky, but this seemed even more so. Wooden dialogue, narrative dumps that didn’t fit the mood, and a lack of selling the part from most of the cast made it look like an expensive high school project.

Take the captain. Gary Cole is a fine actor. I’m sure he’s a great guy. But in Crusade, he suffers from an earlier success in his career. Imagine this guy as a powerful, blunt, charismatic Kirk-esque captain.

It’s Bill Lumbergh!

Office Space came out just before Crusade was aired. Here, Gary Cole is a victim of his own success. If, seven years later on DVD I can’t get Lumbergh out of my head, how would an audience of 1999 do it?

He doesn’t ACT like Lumbergh, but come on! I expected him to order TPS reports from his first officer.

Cole gives it a good go, but he’s completely mis-cast in this role.

On the good side, there is Peter Woodward.

Woodward plays a technomage named Galen, which completes the whole Excalibur theme with a Merlin figure. I first noted Woodward in his History Channel show, Conquest. His unique looks and diction serve him will in the Galen role, and for the few episodes he appears, he puts more heart into the performance than any other actor on the screen. When Galen talks, I suddenly start feeling the show the way it was meant to be.

Turner actually cancelled Crusade before the first episode was even aired. It never had a chance, and Crusade fans lament this as much as Firefly fans over its demise. Unfortunately, even with a fair handling from the networks, I don’t think Crusade would have amounted to much.

Sometimes shows die for good reason.

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)