Life in a Time of Plague

Anyway, so: the middle five episodes of Crusade. There are a couple more here I remember from when the series actually ran in the UK, but they are not the best examples of the series. Then again, none of the episodes I’ve seen so far have honestly been what I could call great, just memorably weird (and not intentionally either).

In Visitors from Down the Street JMS delights us by taking up his Sledgehammer of Comedy (TM) as the Excalibur encounters a drifting Flying Saucer and takes it on board. From it emerge two aliens wearing 90s-style suits with some sort of leguminous tuber growing out of their heads. From the design of the suits and the fact that the female alien’s tubers are a strawberry blonde colour, it is instantly clear that a not-terribly-subtle parody of another well-known fantasy series will soon be underway. And so it proves, with very obvious jokes about Roswell, an appearance by an evil Cigarette Smoking Alien, and characters starting lines of dialogue with ‘The truth is…’ before doors are slammed in their faces.

Stop it, Joe, please. Oh, my sides.

It is, for one thing, not nearly as clever or funny as any of The X Files’ own comedy episodes, and 1999 is at least two years too late for an X Files parody to be genuinely topical or strictly relevant. The general air of the thing is not helped by the heady aroma of raw sewage apparently drifting through the ship (there is, believe it or not, a B-plot about the ship’s plumbing being on the blink).

In the end, loveable Captain Gideon opts to reveal the truth about alien life to Mulder-alien and Scully-alien’s home planet. Lt. Earnest Telepath, the first officer, makes the reasonable point that some might say that they are meddling in a foreign society. Gideon shares his response to this in detail: ‘Screw ’em.’ I still find no reason to like this character whatsoever.

Oh well, on to The Well of Forever, which at least has Galen in it. There’s not much more to be said in its favour, as the plot concerns a trip off to a special place in Hyperspace and Galen effectively hijacking the ship to pursue an agenda of his own. Normally you would expect Captain Grumpy to have him shot for this sort of behaviour, but the format demands everyone be friends at the end.

There is an inconsequential B-plot about Lt. Earnest Telepath having an assessment to make sure he hasn’t done anything interesting with his psychic powers, but the most interesting scene is one of the weird ones: the Excalibur encounters giant space jellyfish and one of them starts dry-humping the ship. Wacka wacka.

Each Night I Dream Of Home is a real everything-but-the-kitchen-sink episode, featuring, in no particular order, a battle with the nasty Drakh, revelations as to the nature of the Five Year Flu, a slightly creepy storyline about deliberately infecting someone for medical research purposes, a guest appearance by Richard Biggs, and a non-guest appearance by Tracey Scoggins which nevertheless feels like one as she’s in the series so infrequently. Plenty going on, obviously; probably a bit too much, to be honest.

We’re back in the Land of the Knocked Off Trek (or so it certainly feels) for Patterns of the Soul, in which a mission to forcibly relocate some colonists takes an unexpected turn, as always tends to happen. Every time a gruff senior officer packs the protagonists off to do something to some colonists which looks ethically dubious, you just know the colonists are going to turn out to be in the right and the plot will revolve around the captain coming up with some sort of clever wheeze to con the evil old brass. There’s a B-plot about Ship’s Thief, whose main talent seems to be climbing up things in tight leather trousers, finding a colony of her own people on the same planet, but zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The Path of Sorrows features an ancient vault which can only be opened using tears of sorrow, and which contains an ancient being which feeds on forgiveness. Clearly this is one of those episodes into which the series’ scientific advisers at JPL had a great deal of input. All that basically follows is the ancient forgivenessovore offering Captain Grumpy, Lt. Earnest Telepath and Galen a chance to articulate their various backstories in some detail. Now, this is by no means unwelcome, but it’s not exactly subtly handled. The alien suit is rather good, and parts of it approach creepiness, but on the whole it feels lumpy and primitive. Not only is it not very good, this series isn’t even consistently weird.