by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other Crusade
episode shown last night, “Ruling from the Tomb,” delivered on the promise of
“War Zone” and proved unexpectedly intense as drama — though its strong
resemblance to the recent ISIS attacks on Paris (both led by nihilistic
religious groups with a bizarre, twisted faith in their idea of God and a
willingness to kill indiscriminately to fulfill their “spiritual” beliefs)
probably made it more moving than it would have been if I’d seen it another
time and seemed to carry parallels the writers (J. Michael Straczynski and
Peter David) didn’t imagine when they were creating it. The setting is Mars, in
and around a huge conference center in which a group of scientists and other
experts are going to convene for a big meeting on how to deal with the Drakh
plague. Just why they have to do
a face-to-face meeting, with all the intendant security risks, when one would
presume the technology of 2267 (when this show takes place) would enable them
to do the meeting electronically with the participants appearing to each other
as holograms (c’mon, guys, Skype exists already!), is a mystery, but much of
the episode is a battle of wills between Matthew Gideon (Gary Cole), the
series’ star and captain of the Excalibur, and Captain Elizabeth Lockley (Tracy Scoggins), who’s in charge of
security for the conference. The plot kicks into high gear when one of the
conference attendees is stabbed to death, and the killer turns out to be Dr.
Alain Lebecque (John Novak), one of the classmates of Trace Miller (Alex
Mendoza) when he was in seminary studying for the priesthood before Trace
bailed out and went into archaeology instead. Lebecque has bought into the
deep-ecological beliefs of the nastiest of the doomsday cults that have sprung
up in the wake of the Drakh plague, the quarantine of Earth and the whole sense
of impending doom that has gripped the human race — even those members who are
safe, at least for the time being, on other planets or in space. The whole
episode is chilling as a parable of the degree to which religious fanaticism
can lead people to great actions for good or ill; it turns out Lebecque has become obsessed with
the idea that he’s being addressed from the great beyond by no less than Joan
of Arc, and when they find his journal in which he’s recorded everything she’s
supposedly told him, all the entries are direct quotes from the real Joan of Arc as they’ve survived in historical
records from her era. I don’t know what the entire Crusade series was like, but if it’s anything like these two
shows the whole run would be very much worth watching!
