Crusade was to be the successor to Babylon 5 but it lasted just one season. The series follows on from the 4th Babylon 5 movie A Call To Arms. Servants of the Shadows called the Drakh seek revenge for the loss of their masters and their home world, Z'ha'dum. They attack Earth in 2267, intending to show how powerful they are by making it their new home. The Earth defences succeed in taking out a planet-killer weapon but the Drakh have a second string to their attack: a biogenetic plague which will take perhaps 5 years to adjust to its new hosts and mutate into a lethal form.
Captain Matthew Gideon and the crew of the prototype spacecraft Excalibur, which combines Minbari, Vorlon and Earth technology, are sent out to scour the Rim worlds for a cure to the Drakh plague. Gideon's crew includes Dureena Nafeel, a thief, Max Eilerson of InterPlanetary Expeditions (IPX) and, from time to time, the technomage Galen.
The main characters include:
Gary Cole as Captain Matthew Gideon;
Marjean Holden as Dr. Sarah Chambers, Excalibur's chief physician;
Daniel Dae Kim as telepath Lt. John Matheson,Gideon's second-in-command;
David Allen Brooks as Max Eilerson of IPX;
Carrie Dobro as Dureena Nafeel of the Thieves' Guild;
Peter Woodward as Galen, a technomage; and
Tracy Scoggins as Capt. Elizabeth Lochley, commander of Babylon 5
Season 1 – 1999
01. War Zone
The Drakh, servants of the Shadows, have contaminated Earth with a virus which will mutate into a lethal form in 5 years. So Captain Gideon and the crew of Excalibur are given the job of rampaging around the galaxy looking for a cure. Their first mission is to a Drakh ship, which crashed on Ceti 4, where the survivors tangled with an Interplanetary Expeditions team. Galen, a technomage, turns up to zap bad guys when they are getting dangerous and Captain Gideon recruits a hotshot pilot, and the archaeologist and linguist Max Eilerson from the IPX team.
2. The Long Road
There is an anti-viral mineral, which can extend human life by 15 years, on Regula 4. But the Earthforce team supporting a group of miners is being harassed by a dragon! The richest concentration of the mineral is right next to a settlement occupied by people who have given up techology. The mine is making life miserable for the locals and a technomage [Alwyn not Galen] is helping them fight back. High concentrations of the mineral, released by the strip-mining operation, have made a young girl ill so Captain Gideon conspires with the technomage to use Excalibur's weapons to destroy the mining site and make the Earthforce team do their digging elsewhere.
Note: the technomage is played by Edward Woodward, father of Peter, who plays Galen.
3. The Well of Forever
Excalibur's telepath, Lt. Matheson, has to be tested by Mr. Jones, a Watchman with an agenda from the Congressional Panel on Telepaths, to make sure he hasn't broken any of the new rules. Meanwhile, Galen wants to take the ship to the Well of Forever, which he describes as a sort of cosmic Stonehenge and 'a place where questions are answered'. Galen's objective is to deposit the ashes of a friend in an ancient burial ground and he takes control of the ship to prevent Captain Gideon from stopping him. The ship has an incident with a lifeform called the Fen. Eilerson wants IPX to plunder the Well but the records of where it is are deleted mysteriously. The thief, Dureena Nafeel, helps to stop Jones dead in his tracks and Galen assures the captain, whose life he has saved several times, that he can trust him 100% in the future.
4. The Path of Sorrows
The crew of Excalibur are supposed to be on a Crusade to find a cure for the plague inflicted on Earth by the Drakh. At their current rate of progress, the people of Earth would be well advised to spend their 5-year grace period making coffins. This episode is all about the crew rather than their mission. Visiting a planet reputed to be a 'place of healing', they find a sad-faced reptilian creature in a sphere. It makes Captain Gideon relive, in flashback, being stranded in space during President Clark's time, being saved by Galen, winning an Apocalypse Box in a card game and watching the box's previous owner commit suicide. Lt. Matheson relives helping rebel telepaths to zap a Psi Corps installation and gaining his freedom to explore the galaxy. The creature says it offers forgiveness to those who can't give it to themselves. Galen relives his girlfriend's death and nearly destroys the creature, which is dumped back where it came from. But afterwards, Gideon and Matheson find that they can sleep at night.
5. Patterns of the Soul
Excalibur is diverted from its Crusade to pick up 30 Earther colonists on Theta 49, who could have the Drakh plague. The Earthers do have the plague but they turn out to be cybernetically enhanced Earthforce experiments and they were infected deliberately. Worse, they have infected the last survivors of Dureena's species, who were stranded on Theta 49 by the Shadows. So Captain Gideon, mistrusting General Thompson of Earthforce, who is ordering him about, fakes wiping out the Earthers. And Max Eilerson, even though he was under pressure to turn a profit for IPX, doesn't tell them about Dureena's people.
6. Ruling from the Tomb
Excalibur is sent to Mars, where Captain Lochley of Babylon 5, who is in charge of security for a medical conference on the Drakh plague, isn't getting on with the natives. The conference has attracted homicidal nutters, one of whom can hear Joan of Arc talking to him. He plans to blow up Mars Dome and the conference because he thinks God wants to destroy Earth. Trace Miller, one of Excalibur's pilots, is attacked and he is able to identify the nutter. So Captain Gideon bamboozles the nutter into switching the bomb off 18 seconds before it is due to explode. Then the terrorists are taken out and Gideon gets personal with Elizabeth Lochley.
7. The Rules of the Game
Excalibur takes a trip to Babylon 5 to negotiate a landing on a Brakiri world, Lorca 7. Captain Gideon wants access to technology belonging to a species which has died off, possibly from something like the Drakh plague. The Brakiri, who have subsequently colonized Lorca 7, don't want Earthers on their planet. Meanwhile, Max Eilerson's ex-wife is being stalked by a loan shark, who kidnaps her cat. Eilerson pays him off but that's not good enough for the loan shark. The Brakiri/Lorcans on B5, who are full of their own purity, decide they have to bump off Gideon to deflect him as he is not inclined to take no for an answer. Dr. Chambers bashes the loan shark and Eilerson bamboozles him with alien technology. And more Lorcans arrives to reveal that their 'oh, so pure' representatives on B5 have been selling off their alien technology and they are afraid of being exposed as hypocrites if Excalibur vists Lorca 7.
8. Appearances and Other Deceits
Excalibur is saddled with an EarthGov propaganda unit, which wants to redecorate the ship and jazz up its crew with new uniforms to make the panicking people on Earth feel better about them. The ship comes across a recently wrecked ship containing one life sign and lots of bodies after what looks like mass-suicide. In an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens starts taking over the crew until Captain Gideon orders a lock-down. The aliens want to be released on a planet and they threaten to kill crew members until they get what they want. But the captain decompresses their decks, tricks the aliens into crowding into the body of a brain-dead crewman, whom they'd shot, and spaces the lot of them! And Gideon thinks that the new uniform made him look like a bell-hop.
9. Racing the Night
Excalibur finds a deserted alien world and inscriptions giving equations for propulsion systems, energy creation, making alloys and all sorts of useful stuff, to Max Eilerson's delight; but no medical information. One of the crew is murdered and gutted, and Dr. Chambers finds DNA from 30 different alien species, which have visited the planet over the last 50 years. Galen saves the captain from hostile drones, Dureena finds an underground control centre and Excalibur gets into a shooting match. The inhabitants of the planet are in cryogenic suspension as they were infected with the Drakh plague by the Shadows 1,000 years ago. They made their planet into a trap for visitors, hoping that a species which has found a cure for the plague will drop in. Eilerson thinks doing a deal with the aliens would be a good thing but Captain Gideon doesn't approve of the aliens' policy of testing for the cure by killing visitors.
10. The Memory of War
In the fourth month of quarantine, there are riots on Earth. Excalibur reaches a planet where everyone was killed off 100 years ago but the technology is intact. Galen advises Captain Gideon not to go down to the surface. The people were killed by a Technomage virus, which becomes active at night. Galen sacrifices his staff to zap the Technomage machine which activates the virus; but Dureena gets it back for him. And Dr. Chambers finds that she can use the virus to give time-limited protection from the Drakh plague. And at the end, the captain's Apocalypse box tells him not to trust Galen.
11. The Needs of Earth
Max Eilerson accidentally gives the captain some alien porn at the start of this episode! A Minbari Ranger tells the captain that Natchok Var, a criminal member of the Mordari, has copied his race's archives and put them up for sale; but Gideon will have to break a lot of rules to get them and venture into territory which is not part of the InterStellar Alliance. Var is a prisoner of bounty hunters on Praxis 9. Gideon and Dureena bust the alien criminal out of captivity using Eilerson's porn. Mordari pursuers ambush Excalibur. The alien chooses to surrender and he is killed; but not until after his data has been copied. Only he has made copies of his world's culture: its music, literature, etc. and nothing medical [cf. Fahrenheit 451]. But Dr. Chambers decides that the data provides hope, which Earth need until science can provide an answer to the Drakh plague.
12. Visitors from Down the Street
This is another episode which is irrelevant to Excalibur's mission. Captain Gideon rescues a couple of aliens, who speak English and dress like Earthers, from a drifting life-pod. Then another alien turns up wanting to execute the fugitives. But it turns out that the government of his backward planet is denying the existence of superior aliens all around them in space and covering things up. So conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Making Earthers into scapegoats for everything that goes wrong has deflected the normally warlike inhabitants of the planet and they haven't had a civil war for 200 years. So Captain Gideon tells all of the aliens to get the hell off his ship and bombards their planet with the truth.
13. Each Night I Dream of Home
Back to the mission for the final episode of Crusade. Excalibur returns to Earth orbit on a secret mission but Captain Gideon insists on picking up Captain Lochley of Babylon 5 on the way as she is stranded, adrift in space in a fighter and injured. Dr. Stephen Franklin, sometime chief medical officer of B5, arrives to infect a volunteer with the Drakh plague to help identify it. The man [Vir Kotto from B5 without the fancy hair-do] is a plumber who wants to return to Earth to marry his fiancée. The Drakh picked up a message, which he sent to her to tell her of his intentions, and arrived in force. Meanwhile, Dr. Franklin finds that Earth is suffereing from a Zipped-up nano-virus which might have a hive mind. Franklin saves the plumber from being burned to a crisp by a faulty fail-safe mechanism, Lochley takes charge of Excalibur's fighters and Gideon zaps the Drakh mothership before giving Lochley a lift back to Babylon 5.
And that's it for the Crusade.
Note: Three further scripts were written but never taped – "Value Judgements" by Fiona Avery featuring the return of the evil PsyCorps telepath Bester, and "To the Ends of the Earth" and "End of the Line" by J. Michael Straczynski, both dealing with a mysterious ship seen in Episode #4, The Path of Sorrows.
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