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Data Graham posted:So is it just me, or is Crusade like, really bad. He is currently awesome on Veep and a poo poo ton of other stuff.
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Dec 10, 2016 04:14
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Data Graham posted:So is it just me, or is Crusade like, really bad.
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Dec 10, 2016 05:05
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Parts Kit posted:It's not just you. Still better than Legend of the Rangers
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Dec 10, 2016 05:17
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There were some good things about it- I remember really liking Galen the technomage (but that might have been carryover from the technomage trilogy books, which I really enjoyed at the time). JMS planned on turning the series into a whole different show by curing the plague and fighting half shadow half human hybrids by the second season, IIRC. The music sucked, Gary Cole didn't seem to be enjoying himself, but I remember at least a few decent episodes. I also don't dare go back and rewatch it.
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Dec 11, 2016 06:27
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I loved the idea of technomages because of the whole Arthur C Cuck thing -- but despite them being obviously corrupt (something the books confirmed) they were better underused. Technology as magic only works when it is mysterious and narrative violating. Keeping in mind the whole "B5 is LoTR with the serial numbers filed off", Gandolf as the Holy Spirit broke the seige because of his glory -- the rising sun was an coincidence. Technomages in B5 worked the same way. In Crusade it was more "Mage with a +5 to conjuration stat" which is hella boring.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:19
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Technomages are one of the worst parts of B5, IMO. They're fine in the episode they're in but they became boring in every other appearance and I think the EU stuff said they were experimental weapons made by the Shadows? Yeah, that sucks.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:26
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It's like everyone reads that Clarke quote and strokes their chin and goes "Hmm, I'll bet I can make an interesting plot out of that"—and it never really turns out to work.
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Dec 11, 2016 13:59
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Crusade was badly hosed over by the network (I can't recall the details, but wasn't the whole thing with the change in uniforms to do with forced reshoots?), and the music was indeed poo poo, but JMS has to shoulder some of the blame himself. It's years since I saw it, but the main thing I remember is thinking that he'd burned through all his best ideas on B5 and was now trying to make a meal with leftover scraps.
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Dec 11, 2016 14:54
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It doesn't help that I hate all these characters.
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Dec 11, 2016 15:33
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I'm still sad we've never gotten a Dilgar War miniseries. There's a reason the Narn were willing to stick their necks out for humanity as far as they did during the Earth-Minbari War and why the League were willing to unify and go to the mat to liberate Earth from Clark and the Dilgar War is it. I'd have loved to have seen the Earth Alliance be both unequivocally heroic and not just be there to get rolled by the more advanced kid on the block.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:46
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I thought the Earth Alliance were the more advanced kids on the block for that one. It'd be like watching the minbari war in reverse but replace minbari with dilgar.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:55
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Payndz posted:Crusade was badly hosed over by the network (I can't recall the details, but wasn't the whole thing with the change in uniforms to do with forced reshoots?), and the music was indeed poo poo, but JMS has to shoulder some of the blame himself. It's years since I saw it, but the main thing I remember is thinking that he'd burned through all his best ideas on B5 and was now trying to make a meal with leftover scraps. They had to reshoot the whole first episode, didn't they? I think it might've been shown out of order as well but I can't recall the details. I just remember how cheap and badly made it looked. Even without the interference from TNT it would've still been a disappointment. Going straight into the continuation of B5 directly after B5 ended was clearly a massive mistake on JMS's part. Some episodes further in the run weren't too bad, the problem was the show had such an awful start I don't think it ever really recovered. I remember the very last episode had some promise (and Dr Franklin), but it was too little too late.
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Dec 11, 2016 22:38
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Crusade was shown hilariously out of order; there are 5 orders listed on Wikipedia 
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Dec 11, 2016 22:46
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There is no episode order for Crusade that makes it worth watching. It's real bad.
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Dec 11, 2016 23:04
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It was getting less bad by the end, it may actually have been Good within the next series!
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Dec 11, 2016 23:23
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MrL_JaKiri posted:It was getting less bad by the end, it may actually have been Good within the next series! Just like B5!
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Dec 11, 2016 23:25
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The other thing about the Technomages is how it sort of lessens the manipulations of the Vorlons. The Vorlons and the Shadows have a truce of sorts and an idea: don't meddle with the younger races in the war. Well, the Vorlons started making telepaths and violating that agreement (and, could be argued, the genetics of entire species) which is one of the few things the Shadows were able to have a moral high ground on. It's one of my favorite parts from the final episode of Season 3. But it turns out that Shadows were basically doing the same things to make their own weapons.
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Dec 11, 2016 23:32
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We made it to The Coming of Shadows the other night. If there's any specific point at which you can say everything finally gels and B5 becomes a legitimately great TV show, that's the one I think.
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Dec 12, 2016 05:18
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Did they just have a scene with the ship getting literally humped on-screen by a giant space jellyfish
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Dec 12, 2016 15:25
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I think I remember in my original run-through that I started liking Crusade towards the end once they got their heads out of their asses and started with some episodes where they actually did something and started building to something.bobkatt013 posted:Still better than Legend of the Rangers That's damning with faint praise.
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Dec 12, 2016 19:31
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If memory serves, Crusade was essential dead on arrival with TNT because it was in the complete opposite direction tonally from where the network wanted to be. They kept loving with the running order, art design (those uniforms) and other aspects in the hope of turning it into more like the rest of their shows and that worked about as well as you'd expect. It was part of the package deal with the final season of Babylon 5, and I infer that the plan was to try and pick up the sci-fi audience with B5 and then expand on it by transitioning over to something with more mass market appeal in Crusade. Given the stakes in the negotiation from JMS' point of view, I am not entirely surprised that there was some miscommunication (either willful or not) about exactly what they were going to make with Crusade.
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Dec 12, 2016 21:26
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Crusade was worth it for The X-Files episode.
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Dec 12, 2016 21:54
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It added some interesting cards to the CCG
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Dec 13, 2016 00:11
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Data Graham posted:Did they just have a scene with the ship getting literally humped on-screen by a giant space jellyfish Apparently added as a passive-aggressive response to the network wanting more sex in the show. There's a lot of Crusade that's basically JMS and the network screaming "gently caress YOU!" "NO, gently caress YOU!" instead of actually making something coherent and/or watchable.
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Dec 13, 2016 10:27
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Angry Salami posted:Apparently added as a passive-aggressive response to the network wanting more sex in the show. There's a lot of Crusade that's basically JMS and the network screaming "gently caress YOU!" "NO, gently caress YOU!" instead of actually making something coherent and/or watchable. Keep in mind that this is the same JMS who killed off General Hague because the actor playing him had a scheduling conflict (as a guest star in a two-parter, pretty big deal) with Deep Space 9. Not saying it wasn't fun to do, but JMS does not always take the high road when it comes to the business of making the TV sausage.
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Dec 13, 2016 18:15
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kaynorr posted:Keep in mind that this is the same JMS who killed off General Hague because the actor playing him had a scheduling conflict (as a guest star in a two-parter, pretty big deal) with Deep Space 9. Not saying it wasn't fun to do, but JMS does not always take the high road when it comes to the business of making the TV sausage. Well to be fair that bit of the story was the culmination of General Hague's plot arc, he didn't really have much to do story wise afterwards. And killing him off gave the story a bit more punch - "Important vital guy who's going to fix everything WHOOPS he dead"
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Dec 13, 2016 19:49
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Well to be fair that bit of the story was the culmination of General Hague's plot arc, he didn't really have much to do story wise afterwards. And killing him off gave the story a bit more punch - "Important vital guy who's going to fix everything WHOOPS he dead" The B5JMS resource isn't searchable as far as I can tell, but if memory serves he made a post or two at the time which was very much "Want to go be on Deep Space Nine? gently caress you, I'm god and I say you're dead now." Can't say I wouldn't do the same thing in his position, but it provides some context for later clashes with TNT over Cruade.
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Dec 13, 2016 20:07
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kaynorr posted:The B5JMS resource isn't searchable as far as I can tell, but if memory serves he made a post or two at the time which was very much "Want to go be on Deep Space Nine? gently caress you, I'm god and I say you're dead now." From the Lurker's guide: quote:We had booked Foxworth long in advance. Later, out of the blue, a rep for the actor said that by accident he'd been double-booked on B5 and DS9 for the same period...and even though we had prior claim, because the other was a two-parter, more money, they went for that. One can only wonder when the other offer *really* came in....
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Dec 13, 2016 20:10
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One thing that Crusade is good for is illustrating how quickly the state of the art of CGI was changing at the time. The visual style of the show itself couldn't really change from what it had been doing since 1994, so they were kind of locked into a certain look and feel, where ships and space battles that had looked incredible five years previously now looked plasticky and fake and could never coexist with organic out-of-doors shots or real actors, and even though they had technology that had come on by leaps and bounds, the best they could do with it was stuff like making the black smoke that shoots out of the shuttle as it takes off from the planet surface ("Patterns of the Soul") billow out realistically from the engines. It looked great, but it was only one of the few things that they could put into the show without it sticking out like a sore thumb against how everything else looked. We were only a couple of years away from stuff like this being on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpIySM5Qgvk I remember seeing that when it was new (particularly the telephoto camera shot nose-on on the reaver ship that I think was before the beginning of this clip) and thinking, holy hell, they can make TV nowadays that makes theatrical films of ten years ago look like trash. But because Firefly was starting from scratch with a whole new visual style and nothing anchoring it to prior continuity, they could take that huge cinematographical leap forward where JMS's team couldn't. I don't know, I just enjoy seeing this stuff from an archaeological perspective
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Dec 13, 2016 20:11
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JMS is kind of a big whiny baby that repeats the same general plot points in whatever medium he's working in. I'll always love B5 but I've really soured on his output afterwards.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:55
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Well to be fair that bit of the story was the culmination of General Hague's plot arc, he didn't really have much to do story wise afterwards. And killing him off gave the story a bit more punch - "Important vital guy who's going to fix everything WHOOPS he dead" Additionally, with General Hague out of the picture, that allows it to make a bit more sense that Captain Sheridan becomes the head of the military rebellion. kaynorr posted:The B5JMS resource isn't searchable as far as I can tell, but if memory serves he made a post or two at the time which was very much "Want to go be on Deep Space Nine? gently caress you, I'm god and I say you're dead now." You seem a bit angry about an actor's character getting killed off. Weekly TV is a production with a schedule like any other. There are always several shows at various stages of production, from story to storyboards to set construction to filming to post-production. They can't always just hold everything up and snap-produce a new episode while they wait for an actor to become available. Look at "A Sky Full of Stars". JMS wanted Walter Koening for Knight Two, but he was sick and not available. They couldn't hold up production, so they used a different actor instead.
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Dec 13, 2016 22:00
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:You seem a bit angry about an actor's character getting killed off. Nah, the new guy filled the exact same role in the story and in the grand scheme of Babylon 5, that doesn't even register compared to the departure of, say, Michael O'Hare. I only bring it up on the context of an apparently antagonistic relationship between creative and production in Crusade. Like I said, I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes.
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Dec 13, 2016 22:37
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I imagine JMS was probably particularly salty that he was losing him to DS9.
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Dec 14, 2016 03:10
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hangedman1984 posted:I imagine JMS was probably particularly salty that he was losing him to DS9. We are lucky that he did not decided to walk it off. Maybe with a long walk. A long, dull, pointless, boring walk. Across America. That he won’t finish.
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Dec 14, 2016 07:07
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Data Graham posted:One thing that Crusade is good for is illustrating how quickly the state of the art of CGI was changing at the time. quote:We were only a couple of years away from stuff like this being on TV:
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Dec 14, 2016 11:41
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Dirty posted:Gideon's hover-bike chase and the Homunculous were particular low points, but I think they'd have looked bad in any series around that time period - they were both overambitious. I get that the homunculous wasn't supposed to be photoreal, but I assume was also supposed to not look laughable. One of the peculiar things that stands out to me in B5 CGI is the Omega-class warship. In Season 3, they have this bright red docking bay - like B5 itself has. But in Season 2, 4 and 5, they don't. I always wonder about that.
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Dec 14, 2016 11:51
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Milky Moor posted:One of the peculiar things that stands out to me in B5 CGI is the Omega-class warship. In Season 3, they have this bright red docking bay - like B5 itself has. But in Season 2, 4 and 5, they don't. I always wonder about that. I never noticed that, thought they were always lit red. My mind has been retconning.  Also, related, I guess we all know by now that the Omega is a substantial nod to 2010's Leonov?  
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Dec 14, 2016 14:00
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Does someone wanna please explain to me what the gently caress is up with the music over the credits in "Ruling from the Tomb"? I mean the music's pretty unbearable normally, but I was not ready for dog barks, baby squawks, phones ringing and other random poo poo from a Spike Jones record
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Dec 14, 2016 18:08
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Dirty posted:Gideon's hover-bike chase and the Homunculous were particular low points, but I think they'd have looked bad in any series around that time period - they were both overambitious. I get that the homunculous wasn't supposed to be photoreal, but I assume was also supposed to not look laughable. There was still a sizeable gap between Crusade and Firefly going to air. I think a better comparison might be Farscape, which actually debuted the same year as Crusade and pretty much outstripped it on every level, especially visual effects.
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Dec 14, 2016 23:28
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Yeah, for some reason I thought that reaver chase scene was from one of the first Firefly TV episodes, don't know what happened there.
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Dec 14, 2016 23:38
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