Crusade
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Crusade is an American spin-off TV show from J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. Its plot is set in AD 2267, five years after the events of Babylon 5, and just after the movie A Call to Arms. The Drakh have released a nanovirus plague on Earth, which will destroy all life on Earth within five years if it is not stopped. To that end, the Victory class destroyer Excalibur has been sent out to look for anything that could help the search for a cure.
Where to Watch Crusade
Crusade Ratings & Reviews
- RichardOctober 18, 2025It was the Babylon 5 spin-off that never got a fair shot. Set in 2267, five years after the Shadow War, Earth is infected by a Drakh nanovirus. The destroyer Excalibur is sent to scour the galaxy for a cure. The setup was solid, J. Michael Straczynski’s world building, a new crew and a ticking clock. But the network meddled. Episodes were aired out of order, scripts were rewritten and the tone got muddled. Still, it had moments. Gary Cole as Captain Gideon brought quiet authority and Peter Woodward’s Galen was pure techno mage mystery. The Amiga-powered graphics were still kicking, LightWave 3D doing its thing, even if the budget was tighter. Too bad they went the way they did, 13 episodes, no closure and a show that deserved better.
- flavo43November 21, 2025Crusade, the spin-off from Babylon 5, has always left me with mixed feelings. After several seasons of B5 that kept growing stronger and more ambitious, I think I was subconsciously ready for a genuine ending, not a new beginning. Crusade arrives almost too quickly, asking you to invest in a fresh crew and a new quest while the emotional dust from the Shadow War and B5’s finale is still settling. The concept—a desperate mission to save Earth from a lethal plague—is solid, but the execution feels uneven. The computer graphics, which once felt groundbreaking, were already starting to look stale, and that undercuts some of the show’s intended scope. It’s easy to imagine that if they’d waited another couple of years, with better effects and a bit more distance from B5, audiences might have been more ready to embrace it fully. As it stands, Crusade feels like an intriguing but premature epilogue.
