Agreed that it was badly executed. I don’t think they put 1/4 of the thought and planning into Crusade as they did B5, and it shows.
In MY world, the last Babylonverse episode of any kind was “Sleeping in Light”.
I’ll go with jayjay’s view. Not nearly as well mapped out and badly mangled by the network. Then there’s also the fact that we know how the mission will end. If so, then we need a strong compelling reason to keep watching and it only occasionally did that.
Readers of this thread should really check out this other thread. Especially post #104.
Dooo eeeeet! NOW!
I was like why, that argument is bor - WHOA!
Sooner or later, everyone comes to [del]Babylon 5[/del] the Straight Dope.
Well, we are the last, best hope for peace, after all.
We failed. But in the years since 1973, we became something more: The last, best hope for fighting ignorance.
Bizarre.
I once mentioned Mitch Benn in a post and he appeared about four posts later to plug his album. It was vaguely creepy.
(And if you’re still obsessively Googling yourself, Mitch, love the podcast but no plugging the new album here, dammit.)
Exactly. I feel like the time The Perfect Master[sub]TM[/sub] dropped into a thread and posted something in response to me. Just gob-smacked awe.
Well, not sure what to say now that JMS has made his presence. But what do I care.
Babylon 5 was great, but the Crusades sucks! I mean I went through five episodes and then I gave up. Couldn’t watch any more. So that’s it for me.
Yeah, the Crusades were horrible, especially the Children’s Crusade.
Now, the TV show, Crusade (singular, no The), I think suffered from a lot of internal conflict between JMS and the networks, and from the typical growing pains that any show goes through in the early episodes. Not all of B5’s early episodes were Hugo material either. From what I heard of the plan for the show, it was going to become very interesting after they cured the Plague and moved onto the meat of the show’s plot.
Crusade was too dreadful to watch, and I give a lot of dreck a chance.
If you still have an opportunity to watch Crusade, watch “Visitors From Down the Street” (which is fairly near the end of the filmed series - episode 12 I think). Although it’s a bit dated now it’s a pretty funny X-Files parody.
The rest of the series you can safely ignore.
Anybody else disturbed by the implications of the final episode of season 4? The Rangers allowed, or forced, earth to degrade into some kind of medieval nightmare just so they could change it to fit their goals. That’s just beyond fucked up.
Uh, no. The Rangers preserved technology and knowledge during a time of widespread trouble. What makes you possibly think the Rangers would have the power to prevent or allow such a thing?
The did? Is this a common interpretation?
For one thing: the Rangers are a galactic superpower. It’s pretty clear in the episode that the head honcho monk is talking to someone through a video communicator, presumably with someone in orbit. He asks someone (ranger) to leave gasoline and generator for the dupes to find and fuss over. All the while he’s talking about how they’ll eventually mold earth for the better. Sounds to me like they’re manipulating earth for their own purposes. Now you might say the Rangers have no particular obligation to help earth, and I could agree with that. The problem is that the Rangers seem to be actively preventing anyone from getting to earth. Surely earth has colonies that want to help them rebuild, or at least people that managed to escape from the calamity in space ships. So where are they? The only thing that makes sense is that the Rangers are actively preventing people from sending help, or trying to communicate with earth. It seem inconceivable to me that, in the age interstellar space travel, earth could revert so far back without massive outside interference by some kind of galactic power.
Well, you’re the only person I’ve ever encountered who saw it that way. That particular subplot is a nod to the classic sci-fi story A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller. I promise you, the Rangers are not deliberately subjugating Earth. And Earth could revert further back than that given any number of different circumstances: major world war, massive climate change, etc. Our civilization is not so solid as you believe, IMO. And the Rangers are not a superpower. They are a clandestine operations group.
This is the first time I have ever heard this theory. I disagrre with it completely. So does JMS.
*Interesting aside…for the last 6-8 months, I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into medieval England, especially the medieval church, for a play I’m writing (which may become a novel if I’m not careful). Dumped several hundred dollars on a massive order from Amazon.com back a few months ago to fill out what I needed. That was what tangentially led me into the post-Burn sequence in “Deconstruction.” My brain has been full of monks for the last 8 months or so, and knowing the role they played in maintaining secular knowledge from about 500 AD and for some time thereafter, that seemed the perfect route to go that would also resonate with the look of the Rangers and the religious caste Minbari and the whole feel we were setting up.
It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, “Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored.” And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn’t make that work realistically…who’d be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who’d have the resources I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little “abbeys” all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn’t even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
Anyway…at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I’d gotten there on an independent road, we’d already had a number of monks on B5, and there’s been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle…Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others.*