Lost cause: Crusade

This little known gem I dug up as a boxed set some time last winter. Funny, when it was on the air, I couldn't give a rat's ass about Babylon 5. And forget any spin-off material. Fact was I was simply too young to appreciate what B5 and its brethren turned out to be: smart science-fiction entertainment in a world of television where you were either Star Trek, or you just weren't gonna make it. At the time I was busy criticizing how unrealistic the primitive CGI FX were, prefering the art of the physical models and slick camera-trickery of The Next Generation.

It was only a couple of years back I started to catch the daily reruns of B5 on Space channel. Every evening after work, I'd sit down with my dinner in front of the boob tube (something my parents frowned upon; "dinnertime is for eating," they'd say, "not for watching television!"). And I'd digest the intricate mythos unravelling about the politics of a distant future Earth... it was amazingly well done.

Anyway, at one point I decided it was time to get the whole thing proper so I started collecting the DVD sets of the complete series. And when Crusade came out... well, you know me.

Crusade is a puny little 13-episode set; it took me 11 months to watch the damn thing. The weirdness is that while I had forgiven the oddball look of the B5 CGI universe. I found I had trouble making the same concessions for the spin-off show (which in actuality was more like a sequel than a spin-off, since it directly takes place in the time frame after the events of the war depicted in B5). I held the fact that it was a cancelled (read: "failed") TV series against it. I watched a couple of episodes when I first bought the box. Then I let it sit for a while. In fact, I let it sit about 10 months and 3 weeks.

I just figured out what it was missing at the front-end of the set: a tie-in element to B5. Yes yes yes, it's a spin-off. The technology is the same, the cast talks about the same fictional alien races, the characters all have ties to the same military world as the B5 cast of characters... but... I don't know. J.M.Straczynski wanted to differentiate it from B5, in his own words he wanted to avoid making Crusade "just a variation on a theme." Well, he did it a little too well.

But this last weekend, I got started on the second disc and suddenly the show changed. The crew hooks up with a character from Babylon 5. They actually visit the B5 space-station in another episode. Suddenly the show became part of the B5 family to me and I greeted the following episodes with open arms. Right up until the sad final 13th episode (which ironically guest-starred yet another B5 regular character)... *sigh* it was fun while it lasted.

On a somewhat related note: I read today that "Legend of the Rangers" will be out on DVD March of 2006... But the thing is I've read conflicting information: that it'll be a UK-only release, that it'll be a Region 1 (North American) disc, etc...