Jumpgate #125 – Crusade: Ruling from the Tomb
Added 2024-12-17 14:00:14 +0000 UTCThis week on the Jumpgate podcast, Vera and I dive into Crusade's "Ruling from the Tomb" – an episode where Babylon 5's Lochley is back yet again... even though it also somehow seems to be her first time here? Who needs continuity? Meanwhile, the show decides, once again, that the real crusade is being angry at God. Come commiserate with us as we unpack the chaos of space plagues, inconsistent timelines, and a healthy dose of existential frustration.
Comments
Your readings are really well explained and make sense, yet my response to this episode is just about the opposite of both of yours. I find most of it fairly boring/okay but enjoy the Galen parts, and I wanted to share why. Personal context: I watched Crusade when it first aired when I was in my early 20s, so my core response to it is very “romantic young adult” and less sensitive to overused tropes than I would be today. (I think that’s also true of our pop culture, in general, so I give the fridging some handicap points for being from the 1990s.) If I were encountering the series for the first time today, I’d probably share more of your critical disappointments. As it is, I love Crusade, not as well-made art but like you love a flawed friend who died young but lives in your memory. What I love most about the series is Galen, so let me do a reading of his character. Re. the bitter atheism, I am more in Jessie’s camp that this works as being in character. I’ll refer briefly to the Technomage novels, though I’m on the fence about whether I personally consider them canon. (I’ve heard JMS does, but they also contradict bits of the series, so...?) But if we sort of follow the novels, Galen in Crusade is only about thirty, though Peter Woodward was older. At roughly the time Isabel died/Galen met Gideon, he was about twenty. His experience of losing Isabel is effectively a late adolescent experience. Since her death, he has been stuck in that grief, which means his attitude toward her death—and much of his emotional life—is still rather adolescent. His slightly incoherent splice between denying God/hating God is stupid, yes. It’s an adolescent response; it’s rather Ivan Karamazovian, another “angry young man” with a big brain and a lot emotional immaturity. The point of the episode, for Galen’s character, is pretty explicitly that he’s stuck; he can’t forgive and move on. That’s a feature, not a bug in his character. Galen’s self-construal is deeply invested in having someone to love. (He's a lot like Spike in Buffy that way.) His sense of duty is sweeping: to find a cure for the plague, etc. But his sense of his emotional life’s meaning reduces largely to investment in the object of his love. And he keeps losing those objects. He lost his parents as a child. He next attached to Elric, who died, then to Isabel, who died. And then he attached to Gideon. Light spoilers in the next paragraph for JMS’s plans for the later show... JMS’s plan, as I recall, was that Galen and Gideon’s friendship would break down badly. Gideon, for some valid reasons, would feel betrayed by Galen, and working through that would probably have taken a good chunk of the planned five years. This could have been, in its own way, Crusade’s Londo and G’Kar arc. This would have been absolutely agonizing for Galen because Gideon’s friendship is emotionally his reason for living. This episode is a building block in a narrative that was never built. But just as the first half of S1 of B5 is pretty clunky, Crusade clunked but was going somewhere. Its character work, especially around Galen, Gideon, and Dureena, had the potential to be amazing. A while back on Facebook, I was part of a thread where someone asked JMS if he’d ever share his plans for Crusade in more detail. His response was that asking him that was like asking a parent whose child died at four where they would have sent them to college, and he requested never to be asked that again. I took that to heart. We’ll never really know the story of Crusade, and I’ll always regret that and always honor what it started to try to do.
Arwen Spicer
2024-12-20 06:09:11 +0000 UTCAlso, this episode was written by Peter David, not by JMS, and to my knowledge, JMS is an atheist, but he used to be in a cult. I think we're seeing some trauma reflected in his worst writing.
Becky Sparks
2024-12-17 22:17:34 +0000 UTCHahah it's the only episode I actually hate
Becky Sparks
2024-12-17 14:36:20 +0000 UTC
