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Spot of Crusade (Galen) Meta
Dec. 22nd, 2024 06:10 pmThis is a comment I posted on Jessie Gender's patreon in response to the podcast episode she did with Vera on the Crusade ep., "The Path of Sorrows." I'm not sure the review is available off Patreon (I certainly encourage joining her patreon), but the gist was they liked the Gideon and Matheson plots okay and were annoyed by the Galen plot.
Mild spoilers for Crusade (including some info on where it was headed post-series cancellation and Technomage novels)
Your readings are really well explained and make sense, yet my response to this episode is just about the opposite of both of yours. I find most of it fairly boring/okay but enjoy the Galen parts, and I wanted to share why. Personal context: I watched Crusade when it first aired when I was in my early 20s, so my core response to it is very “romantic young adult” and less sensitive to overused tropes than I would be today. (I think that’s also true of our pop culture, in general, so I give the fridging some handicap points for being from the 1990s.) If I were encountering the series for the first time today, I’d probably share more of your critical disappointments. As it is, I love Crusade, not as well-made art but like you love a flawed friend who died young but lives in your memory. What I love most about the series is Galen, so let me do a reading of his character.
Re. the bitter atheism, I am more in Jessie’s camp that this works as being in character. I’ll refer briefly to the Technomage novels, though I’m on the fence about whether I personally consider them canon. (I’ve heard JMS does, but they also contradict bits of the series, so...?) But if we sort of follow the novels, Galen in Crusade is only about thirty, though Peter Woodward was older. At roughly the time Isabel died/Galen met Gideon, he was about twenty. His experience of losing Isabel is effectively a late adolescent experience. Since her death, he has been stuck in that grief, which means his attitude toward her death—and much of his emotional life—is still rather adolescent. His slightly incoherent splice between denying God/hating God is stupid, yes. It’s an adolescent response; it’s rather Ivan Karamazovian, another “angry young man” with a big brain and a lot emotional immaturity. The point of the episode, for Galen’s character, is pretty explicitly that he’s stuck; he can’t forgive and move on. That’s a feature, not a bug in his character.
Galen’s self-construal is deeply invested in having someone to love. His sense of duty is sweeping: to find a cure for the plague, etc. But his sense of his emotional life’s meaning reduces largely to investment in the object of his love. And he keeps losing those objects. He lost his parents as a child. He next attached to Elric, who died, then to Isabel, who died. And then he attached to Gideon. Light spoilers in the next paragraph for JMS’s plans for the later show...
JMS’s plan, as I recall, was that Galen and Gideon’s friendship would break down badly. Gideon, for some valid reasons, would feel betrayed by Galen, and working through that would probably have taken a good chunk of the planned five years. This could have been, in its own way, Crusade’s Londo and G’Kar arc. This would have been absolutely agonizing for Galen because Gideon’s friendship is emotionally his reason for living.
This episode is a building block in a narrative that was never built. But just as the first half of S1 of B5 is pretty clunky, Crusade clunked but was going somewhere. Its character work, especially around Galen, Gideon, and Dureena, had the potential to be amazing.
A while back on Facebook, I was part of a thread where someone asked JMS if he’d ever share his plans for Crusade in more detail. His response was that asking him that was like asking a parent whose child died at four where they would have sent them to college, and he requested never to be asked that again. I took that to heart. We’ll never really know the story of Crusade, and I’ll always regret that and always honor what it started to try to do.
Mild spoilers for Crusade (including some info on where it was headed post-series cancellation and Technomage novels)
Your readings are really well explained and make sense, yet my response to this episode is just about the opposite of both of yours. I find most of it fairly boring/okay but enjoy the Galen parts, and I wanted to share why. Personal context: I watched Crusade when it first aired when I was in my early 20s, so my core response to it is very “romantic young adult” and less sensitive to overused tropes than I would be today. (I think that’s also true of our pop culture, in general, so I give the fridging some handicap points for being from the 1990s.) If I were encountering the series for the first time today, I’d probably share more of your critical disappointments. As it is, I love Crusade, not as well-made art but like you love a flawed friend who died young but lives in your memory. What I love most about the series is Galen, so let me do a reading of his character.
Re. the bitter atheism, I am more in Jessie’s camp that this works as being in character. I’ll refer briefly to the Technomage novels, though I’m on the fence about whether I personally consider them canon. (I’ve heard JMS does, but they also contradict bits of the series, so...?) But if we sort of follow the novels, Galen in Crusade is only about thirty, though Peter Woodward was older. At roughly the time Isabel died/Galen met Gideon, he was about twenty. His experience of losing Isabel is effectively a late adolescent experience. Since her death, he has been stuck in that grief, which means his attitude toward her death—and much of his emotional life—is still rather adolescent. His slightly incoherent splice between denying God/hating God is stupid, yes. It’s an adolescent response; it’s rather Ivan Karamazovian, another “angry young man” with a big brain and a lot emotional immaturity. The point of the episode, for Galen’s character, is pretty explicitly that he’s stuck; he can’t forgive and move on. That’s a feature, not a bug in his character.
Galen’s self-construal is deeply invested in having someone to love. His sense of duty is sweeping: to find a cure for the plague, etc. But his sense of his emotional life’s meaning reduces largely to investment in the object of his love. And he keeps losing those objects. He lost his parents as a child. He next attached to Elric, who died, then to Isabel, who died. And then he attached to Gideon. Light spoilers in the next paragraph for JMS’s plans for the later show...
JMS’s plan, as I recall, was that Galen and Gideon’s friendship would break down badly. Gideon, for some valid reasons, would feel betrayed by Galen, and working through that would probably have taken a good chunk of the planned five years. This could have been, in its own way, Crusade’s Londo and G’Kar arc. This would have been absolutely agonizing for Galen because Gideon’s friendship is emotionally his reason for living.
This episode is a building block in a narrative that was never built. But just as the first half of S1 of B5 is pretty clunky, Crusade clunked but was going somewhere. Its character work, especially around Galen, Gideon, and Dureena, had the potential to be amazing.
A while back on Facebook, I was part of a thread where someone asked JMS if he’d ever share his plans for Crusade in more detail. His response was that asking him that was like asking a parent whose child died at four where they would have sent them to college, and he requested never to be asked that again. I took that to heart. We’ll never really know the story of Crusade, and I’ll always regret that and always honor what it started to try to do.
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