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Crusade timeline

Elric

Regular
No, not another question about what order to watch the episodes in, but rather the timeline of events that would have happened if the show had continued.

I am writing something for the B5 RPG and some of the events are really important for my story, so I want to make sure they are as correct as they can be. The two main events I am interested in are:

1. When was the cure to the plague found?
2. When did Gideon and his crew go renegade?

I have just flicked through my new Chronologies of B5 book and all I can find is that the cure was found sometime prior to 2270 by the crew of the Excalibur. However, I recall reading somewhere (possibly on this forum but couldn't find the post) that the cure would have been found in the second season, which would have been 2268.

Nothing about the crew going renegade is mentioned in the Chronologies book - if not a date, does anyone know if this would have happened before or after they found a cure? My instinct tells me that this probably would have happened after the events of "End of the Line" as it would be a logical result of what happened in the cliff hanger, but that's just my opinion ;)
Edit: Now I think about it, it would probably be more likely they went renegade AFTER they found the cure. Looking for the cure would be much more difficult if they cut their ties with Earth.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
 
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If I remember JMS' postings correctly, I think he said that the cure woudl indeed be found around midway through S2, but that the cure itself wouldn't be what everyone thought it was and no one within the Earth hierarchy would listen to the Excalibur crew when they tried to explain. It was after this that they went renegade.
 
Ah cool, that sort of fits in with what I had planned. Thanks :)

Spoiler for unfilmed Crusade finale:

I think that the fact Techo-mages use Shadow tech (which would have been revealed at the end of season one), would be somehow related to finding the cure.
 
No, not another question about what order to watch the episodes in, but rather the timeline of events that would have happened if the show had continued.

I am writing something for the B5 RPG and some of the events are really important for my story, so I want to make sure they are as correct as they can be. The two main events I am interested in are:

1. When was the cure to the plague found?

The real cure (not the false cure that was worse than the disease, worse than death)? Mid-2268.


2. When did Gideon and his crew go renegade?

Spoiler for End of the Line:
Probably very early in 2268, after Gideon "recovered" from being fatally shot. The Apocalypse Box would have been involved, sort of like McCoy was the storage vessel for Spock's consciousness after Spock died in "The Wrath of Khan."


Nothing about the crew going renegade is mentioned in the Chronologies book - if not a date, does anyone know if this would have happened before or after they found a cure?

That's because it was in none of the filmed episodes or unfilmed scripts. JMS mentioned it online. It should be in JMSNews.com.

Spoiler for End of the Line:
Sometime between Gideon being fatally shot in the Season 1 finale (December 2267), and mid-season 2 (mid-2268) when they found the REAL cure, Earthforce would have found a false cure which enslaved the infected to shadowtech BUT kept them from dying. Earthforce would have accepted the false cure, possibly not knowing all of the negative effects, and then Gideon and the Excalibur crew would have been on the run from Earthforce, looking for the REAL cure. After all, shadowtech wouldn't want them finding the REAL cure and being free of the shadow programming. ;)


That's my take on it. Maybe it'll be in the Crusade Scriptbooks, if they ever come out.
 
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Ooh, this gets more interesting. First I've ever heard about the false cure.

So you reckon they would have gone renegade BEFORE finding the (real) cure. Logically, it makes sense either way but since my story covers both events I am determined to get to the bottom of it ;)
 
Ooh, this gets more interesting. First I've ever heard about the false cure.

So you reckon they would have gone renegade BEFORE finding the (real) cure. Logically, it makes sense either way but since my story covers both events I am determined to get to the bottom of it ;)

They went renegade in order to find the REAL cure. I went looking through JMSNews.com, but have been unable to find substantiating JMS posts except for the following:

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-1113


I'm certain he got more specific than that, but I can't find it on JMSNews.com. The trouble is, you have to remember the correct key words that were in the post. Maybe it wasn't in JMSNews. Maybe the Usenet search engine is flawed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing up. Maybe the collective consciousness of Usenet made it up. Maybe a post got deleted. Dunno. What I do know is that this is damned frustrating. :mad:
 
Ok wait a minute...please..I am confused here...can you re-explain in smaller sentences?? and type s-l-o-w-e-r for me - I am not up on my jms.com thingys....

Ok from the top of my confusion:

Crusade wan't picked up, so you are saying that JMS posted the ending of Crusade online at his online spot?

This is the first I have heard that there was a cure found...I only watched the series, don't have the books and blogs knowledge you do.

Please explain more about how they found this 'cure' or if you know more...??

I was really disappointed it wasn't picked up again for another season. :(
 
One minor correction: Crusade wasn't just not picked up for another season, it was cancelled in the middle of the first season before any episodes ever aired.

No, JMS didn't post the end of Crusade but he has let us know a few things. One is that the show we started watching was very different from the show it would have become and another is that the cure for the plague would have been found (iirc) some time by the end of the second season.

In addition, there were three completed scripts ready to film at the time TNT pulled the plug. Two were by JMS and one by B5 reference editor Fiona Avery. They posted them online for fans to read for a while. Synopses can be found here. One of them was the season finale which was quite a cliffhanger.

Eventually, when JMS publishes the Crusade script books he's said that he'll let us in on what his plans were for the show. His career is still riding high on his having sold 'Changeling', though, so it'll probably be a while before he gets to writing the Crusade introductions and commentaries.

Jan
 
Eventually, when JMS publishes the Crusade script books he's said that he'll let us in on what his plans were for the show. His career is still riding high on his having sold 'Changeling', though, so it'll probably be a while before he gets to writing the Crusade introductions and commentaries.

Jan

When is the truth about JFK assassination supposed to be revealed/unsealed? The Crusade scriptbooks will probably come right after that. :rolleyes:
 
When is the truth about JFK assassination supposed to be revealed/unsealed? The Crusade scriptbooks will probably come right after that. :rolleyes:

Dunno, nobody's said that they plan to do the former while JMS has said he plans to do the latter. I don't imagine that anybody'd ask JMS to postpone making a living while his star is high, would they?

Meanwhile, I suggest you investigate Minbari meditation techniques. :p

Jan
 
Crusade wan't picked up, so you are saying that JMS posted the ending of Crusade online at his online spot?

No, JMS never posted the Crusade ending online, or anywhere else, thus far. Crusade was supposed to run for five seasons (story time: January 2267 thru December 2271). Instead, TNT cancelled it before even one episode was aired. (See here for the reason why. http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17127 ) Also, by their constant meddling, TNT made it impossible to put the existing 13 Crusade episodes in a correct order. Storywise, there's no order in which you can put the episodes and have it make perfect sense. Any way you look at it, there will be errors, e.g. Uniform errors (grey-red vs. black), continuity errors, etc. When it comes to screwing things up, TNT is full of pros.

Quote from http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17127
JMS: Well... the comics. The books (shared universe-Distant Worlds and the Quote Book) um...(Jan: DVDs.)

Oh! Yes, DVDs. Well, we've finished up the commentaries for the set of movies that are coming out. And we're working currently on the Crusade DVDs. The hiccup we have hit on the Crusade DVDs...And by the way, they're selling great. I've heard that they've netted - netted, mind you, over 70 million dollars just from the first three and a half seasons. (applause) When they said, do you want to do the Crusade commentaries, assuming of course that we get the rest of them (something), I said "Absolutely." (they said) What do you want to talk about?" JMS: "I want to say what happened." (they stutter) "What do you mean?" JMS: "The TRUTH!" I want to put the truth out there. We are now on our fourth (something) of Legal Affairs. "He wants to do what??" "The TRUTH!" I have another conference call scheduled on Thursday with Legal Affairs. We're running out of time for the DVDs. I said, "Look if I can't get the truth out, then I don't want to support the DVDs."

Audience: I can see some big-ass disclaimers over that one.

JMS: I want the real truth to come out. Including the fact...I ran into some guys who worked for TNT about two years after Crusade went down. And they said, "Did you ever hear the rest of the story?" JMS: "What rest of the story?" TNT guys: "We found out, we did a research survey, a five year long study of our ratings. This was just after Crusade got going. And, we found out that the audience for B5 came for B5, then left afterward. And the TNT regular viewers didn't stick around for B5 and went away and came back. B5 wasn't adding to our viewer base." So...they decided to pull the plug on Crusade for that reason and use the money to buy another show. But they couldn't say that because they'd be in breach of contract with Warner Bros. So their job was to make it impossible for us so they could then say, "We aren't getting the show we want, our notes aren't being dealt with, therefore we aren't responsible, we're canceling the show, this is your nut Warner Bros., you take care of it." That is why all the notes became so egregious. If I had given them everything they wanted, they still would have pulled the plug. They just wanted out. Yeah, I want that information out there. (Audience: We'll take care of that) On the DVDs. You all heard the tenor of the notes? (agreement, requests for JMS to tell some anyway) That's all right. Other questions... Yes, sir.

See also:

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17090

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-781

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-1139 (This was thought to be the reason for Crusade's cancellation, until http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17127 came out.)


JMS gave us tidbits about where the story was going, online in the moderated Usenet Newsgroup rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, and probably also at conventions he attended. As Jan said, at the time Crusade went down, there were three unfilmed scripts that were completed ("To the Ends of the Earth" and "End of the Line" by JMS, and "Value Judgements" by Fiona Avery). The latest script in that group of three was "End of the Line" which was the Crusade Season 1 finale (i.e. story date: December 2267.). One of the tidbits JMS told us was that first the false cure would have been found, and then the real cure would have been found, the latter in mid-Season 2 (i.e. ~June or July 2268). Other than that, we don't know much about what would have happened from mid-2268 to the end of 2271.


This is the first I have heard that there was a cure found...I only watched the series, don't have the books and blogs knowledge you do.

Please explain more about how they found this 'cure' or if you know more...??

The cure had to have been found because Dr. Franklin was on Earth when the plague was released, and he was infected (Crusade: "Ruling from the Tomb" and "Each Night I Dream of Home"). We see Dr. Franklin on Mars. having just come in from playing tennis with Michael Garibaldi's and Lise's daughter in 2281 (Babylon 5 "Sleeping in Light"). Dr. Franklin later attends Sheridan's party on Minbar. The Drakh plague kills in 5 years, and it was released on Earth in early January 2267. If the plague hadn't been cured, everybody on Earth, including Dr. Franklin would have been dead by December 2271.

Obviously, a cure was found. We knew that going in. The story would have been how they found the cure, what they found along the way, and what was revealed about the Earthforce Black Projects (Hinted at in Crusade "Patterns of the Soul."), especially those involving shadowtech, and what was revealed about the Technomages. The book trilogies "The Passing of the Techno-mages" and "Legions of Fire" reveal some of the information about the Technomages that would have been revealed in Crusade.
 
Dunno, nobody's said that they plan to do the former while JMS has said he plans to do the latter.

IIRC, the truth of the JFK assassination is to be revealed once everybody who was alive at the time, is dead.
 
IIRC, the truth of the JFK assassination is to be revealed once everybody who was alive at the time, is dead.
In terms of the actual shooting, I think we've already got everything that there is to get.

Anything new would be behind the scenes connections to Oswald or Ruby (or both).
 
Dunno, nobody's said that they plan to do the former while JMS has said he plans to do the latter. I don't imagine that anybody'd ask JMS to postpone making a living while his star is high, would they?

The thing is that the Crusade scriptbooks keep getting pushed off, and will keep getting pushed off. By the time they finally come out, there may be very few people who still care about and want those books, due to the utterly dead nature of the Crusade story. Hell, even MY interest is waning. :wtf:



Meanwhile, I suggest you investigate Minbari meditation techniques. :p

Cyro-tube might be more appropriate.
 
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The thing is that the Crusade scriptbooks keep getting pushed off, and will keep getting pushed off. By the time they finally come out, there may be very few people who still care about and want those books, due to the utterly dead nature of the Crusade story. :wtf:

What would you choose if you were JMS? A private publishing project that nets a few bucks or writing a lucrative movie dream project script for a studio that can enhance your career for years to come?

We already know that the Crusade books are likely to sell less well than the B5 books because we know there were a lot of people who simply never watched Crusade or bought the DVDs due to its limited nature.

And it's not as if it's only the Crusade books that have been delayed. Remember? The entire 14-volume series was only supposed to take a little over a year to complete and it took about three.

Never mind, we've had this conversation too many times already.

Jan
 

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