You won't be disappointed!

That was an excellent one.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

I never saw Babylon 5, but Crusade was an excellent show, good plots, great actors, quality sets. I own it and watch it over and over again. However, the "music" that accompanied the show was kind of weird and this may be a very good reason it wasn't popular. But it's a lousy reason, I will forever miss the fact that there was nothing beyond nothing after the 13 episodes. Loved it, still do!

For some reason, the spit and polish of the established Babylon 5 theme wasn't translated into Crusade. Star Trek accomplished this with DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise... on any of those series the "look" was not a major hindrance. But Crusade launched feeling as if it was a completely new creation, almost totally devoid of the feel of it's Babylonian mother. The first ax against the show truly was the music. The battle sequences were devoid of the martial themes, background chatter, and (implausable) sound effects. Instead we get some neo-classical claptrap whose rhythms and peaks in no way mate with what's on screen. The second ax is in the writing. Episodes 8-13 show that they were trying to fix that, but by god, I'll never watch episode 3 and 5 again. I nearly stopped right there. It should have been an adventure show with a little mystery, but the only mystery it presented us was where was the adventure?

I think the real problem with this show was that it was more like Star Trek than Babylon 5. It saw everything as good or bad - no gray area in between, and certainly no need to think about it.In B5, everyone had their motives. People acted out of their own self interest. So even though a character might do bad things, he was still sympathetic. That's what really seperates more "adult" shows from the dim-witted preachiness of Trek, where everything is either good or else it is bad.For instance, in one of the first episodes of Crusade, they come across a planet where everyone is infected with the plague. The whole population is in suspended animation, while one person captures any ships that pass by in order to investigate if they might have some cure for the plague. Now this poses an interesting question: if your whole race is infected, how far would you go to find a cure? But, it's not interesting as far as the writers are concerned. The question isn't even asked, much less mulled over. These people are bad - bad bad bad. It's the sort of crap you'd expect from Janeway on Voyager. Apparently the folks on the Excalibur would rather have all of humanity die before they'd resort to murdering a few aliens. Or should I say, it's the sort of thing they don't allow themselves even to think about. Too bad, it might have made the show interesting. They created a desperate situation as the premise, then populated the show with people who aren't even able to contemplate desperation.

After B5 finished, I wondered how JMS & co could top that show. Well, Crusades duly came along and it did just that. We should all bow down and pay homage to JMS for bringing us shows of this calibre. I could lament at what a tragedy it was that this series was killed off so quickly. Thing is, it wouldn't be the first time and most likely won't be the last that near sighted studio execs("the suits") will scuttle a show with such great promise. Think back to the original Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica and Logan's Run. All cancelled before there time. Such great promise, so little faith. Out of all the shows that I've mentioned, only Trek was resurrected. Even that took 10 years of badgering by the fans for a feature film to be made and after a further 7 years, we finally got TNG. The trouble with anything thats got the scifi tag is that it will always be regarded as niche and will be seen as a somewhat more risky venture than something more mainstream. This doesn't bode well for a resurrection of Crusades. It would be great to be able to get Crusades on DVD. We can only hope the WB will do the decent thing. Such great promise, so little faith....