Episode 1 – Racing the Night
I have to tell you that I LOVE the 13 episodes that we have of this series. It’s an entirely different series and its hero is more anti-hero, I expect, though we will never know for sure.
I have written many, many Crusade fictions, many of them smutty PWP but I have also done a few more detailed stories. You can find them here:
http://www.ofelvesandmen.com/AlexCat/Menus/Babylon5.htm and here is my best one, I think:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/1413751/chapters/2969197 I get to shamelessly promote myself since I’m doing all the recaps! ;)
We open with Gideon dreaming of how he came to be on the
Excalibur, Sheridan had the ship built and chose him for the mission, to find a cure to the Drakh plague. A group of aliens is arguing with a General and Captain Matthew Gideon, saying they don’t want to give him passage trhough theuir space because they don’t want to Drakh plague. Finally they offer Gideon a terrible deal – they will allow him to fly anywhere for 4 years and if in that time, he has not found the cure, he will spend the last year shooting down any ships that try to escape Earth as the plague’s time comes near. Gideon takes the deal.
He wakes and Dr. Sarah Chambers calls him on a comm and tells him to come to the planet.
He goes down to a dead planet where the crew is doing all sorts of excavating.
Unknown to Gideon, a crew member is accosted by an unseen foe and it cuts him down through the middle, killing him.
Max Eilerson, archeologist and linguistics expert, is translating some files. He tells Gideon he’s found formulas to cure disease, fuel ships, etc but that only the first part of the equations are there. Gideon tells him that they are there to find a cure, nothing more. Max says IPX (yes, that IPX) could make millions off this stuff.
Gideon tells him they don’t have time to worry about profits. Max says good business is good for everyone… and he doesn’t even look like a ferengi!
Dr. Chambers tells Gideon that she has found DNA from at least 30 races in her soil samples. Gideon wonders if the planet is a source of knowledge like the library of Alexandria and Sarah says it doesn’t fir or make sense. She wonders if the people died off, then where are their bones? She also asks Gideon where Galen is. Gideon says a technomage only appears when you want him least and need him most.
Sarah tells him Dureena has gone exploring.
She is crawling through a tunnel and she finds bones then she crawls farther until she sees a great device of some sort and caverns that go on and on. She calls Gideon but he tells her she needs to come right away, that someone has been killed.
Sarah is examining the body and says most of his organs have been removed.
The ship calls and John Matheson tells them they have detected some movement on the planet. Gideon rides a speeder type machine to distract the little ships while his people get away. Soon he is rescued by Galen in his little black ship.
Galen. Gideon and John are talking about the ship, saying that the ships stopped movement when Gideon stopped flying. Galen suggests they are an automatic defense grid type thing.
Galen notes how the crewman died and goes to his ship for something.
Dureena is in the tube with Galen and he tells her again, it seems, that he will not teach her what he k knows. He tells her she cannot use it for revenge.
“When you have reached the end of the road, then you can decide whether to go to the left or to the right, to fire or to water. If you make those decisions before you have even set foot upon the road, it will take you nowhere. Except to a bad end.”Galen sends a humunculous down to the planet, though it seems more a replica of himself than a miniature. The humunculous attracts the attention of whatever took the crew member who died. It slices him open and takes him inside its ship to be processed. When it goes inside one of the buildings, we see a sea of ships from all over the galaxy. Galen says that the facility ois a lab to collect specimens for research.
Dureena finally tells them about the bodies she found and about the generator. Gideon has them scanned and they pick up billions of life signs – all in cryogenic stasis. A fleet of fighters come out of the planet and some sort of field holds the ship in stasis. They are being drawn out of their orbit and down toward the planet.
Gideon has the ship turned to face the planet and fires the main guns, destroying the gravity generator.
They are being scanned and a suddenly a hologram appears. It is an alien from the planet. He tells them that a thousand years ago, the shadows came and asked to put a base o the planet. When they refused, the shadows unleashed a plague on them. After they had not found a cure in 3 years, they put their people in stasis and appointed one keeper for every to wake and watch every two years. They set up a research facility to catch and dissect aliens for a cure. He tells Gideon that they will continue their research and will give him any info they glean if he will do the same.
Max says it’s a fair deal.
Gideon refuses the deal. And blows up all the planetary defenses, telling the man that they’ll share the cure and hold them accountable for what they’ve done.
They leave.
We see them back on the ship.
Dureena and Galen talk and again he refuses to share his knowledge with her, but tell her there is always hope.
”There is always hope, only because that is the one thing no one has figured out how to kill. Yet.”A Ranger gives them a list of places to check and asks Gideon where he got the intel for this planet, Gideon says he has his sources.
He goes into his room and takes the Apocalypse Box from his closet and tells it that it gave them a wrong lead. And asks where to next.
*
Quotes: Max Eilerson:
Nations rise and fall. Planets live and die. But corporations go on, through good times and bad, because it's all about profit.Galen:
In the end, it's all the story of Job, isn't it?Gideon:
Some days, it feels like our faith is being tested, same as his.Galen:
Where do you put your faith, Matthew? In science? Your luck? This ship?Gideon:
I haven't decided.Galen:
Well, then, if this is the story of Job, a great deal of people are being inconvenienced for your benefit. Hope you appreciate it.Expect me when you see me. Galen, borrowed from Gandalf, and also used by G’kar.
*
Discussion:The lead in was:
"Who Are You?
Matthew Gideon, Captain. Attached to the Earth Alliance Starship Excalibur.
What do you want?
To find a cure to the Drakh plague before it wipes out all life on earth.
Where Are You Going? Anywhere I Have To.
Who do you serve and who do you trust?
Who do you serve and who do you trust?" – Galen Questioning Captain Gideon
And this was the underlying theme of the show interspersed with moral dilemmas. I liked it. A lot. While this was JMS’ pick for the first episode, this is not how TNT chose to show them. The show has only 13 episodes though several more were scripted and a couple of those have been published somewhere. I think that the entire series would have been great – the search for the cure was not the real theme, according to JMS, but we’ll never know all the details for sure.
1. What did you think of the characters? Fave so far?
2. Matthew never answered the question proposed to him by the alien on the dead planet that he would do the same thing, given time running out on his planet. What would you do?
3. Why did Sheridan choose Gideon?
4. Galen – love him or hate him?
5. Max – love him or hate him?
Sources:Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5:
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/509.htmlIMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0551020/quotes/?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_quSadgeezers Cult Scifi Portal:
http://sadgeezer.com/Crusade-Season-1-01-Racing-the-Night.htmWikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(TV_series)
The Babylon Project:
http://babylon5.wikia.com/wiki/Racing_the_NightWikiquote:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Crusade_(TV_series)#Racing_the_NightCap-that.com:
http://www.cap-that.com/b5/crusade/109/?page=1![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
