I just recently finished watching all 13 episodes of Crusade, and I must say, it had potential. I liked the design of the Excalibur(which reminded me of the rockets used in The Martian Chronicles mini-series). Most of all, I liked the main characters and some of the guest stars that were on the show.It's a shame that TNT had to be pig-headed about the show. Sometimes major networks don't know artistic freedom, integrity, quality, or originality, period. I can understand J. Michael Straczynski's frustration over the entire incident.It may not be Babylon 5, but it was a decent sequel to that show, and it had potential.Here is to hoping that, like Futurama, we'll see the return of Crusade and the crew of the starship Excalibur.

After reading the reviews from others I can say it's to bad that the series is cancelled because of different opinions from J. Michael Stracynski and TNT, since when is it more important to do what the production company wants, they have to listen more to what the public wants. And if you sell the product all over the world as in the Netherlands you have to keep in mind that there are more fans than they know. The 13th episode was the last and no renewal is in sight. A lot of the episodes were pretty good. I curse TNT for cancelling this science fiction gem. Hopefully, some day, a SMART network (like SciFi channel) will revive the show. By the way I am from the Netherlands so my English is maybe not so good then other countries but I think I made my point.

I saw this series belatedly; it's fairly good, not exceptional, sci-fi fare. Some of it's philosophic moments are more profound than usual and the intellectual level of the discussion shows that the writers actually used classical allusion; or looked up the references anyway. Apart from that the characters are engaging and the plot's the usual ever-present danger but no-one important ever gets killed stuff. The problem is that the series is unfinished, apparently pulled before being resolved; this is a problem because the essential issue was that if they couldn't find a cure within five years then the population of the Earth would die of an alien plague. The discursive way the story writers approached the central theme indicates they expected to ride this horse for about 5 years themselves. But it stopped after one partial season, 13 episodes. Which means that the Earth actually died somewhere around 2004, and no-one noticed! I always knew media barons were bad guys; but killing off the Earth on a marketing decision is too much! This habit has become almost typical of American television's approach to SF ever since, everything good gets a short run and pulled, The Chronicle and Firefly stand out as other examples. They could have made one more episode of Crusade to solve the plague and wrap it all up at least... Boo, hiss!

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?