Over the past two weeks we’ve examined the first two of three unproduced Crusade scripts that J. Michael Straczynski wrote after TNT cancelled the show. “To the Ends of the Earth” established the shadow hybrid mythology and introduced the concept of an “opposite number” mirroring the Excalibur’s mission. “Value Judgements” brought back Alfred Bester and forced the crew into a moral compromise that revealed how far they’d go when the plague clock was ticking.
This week we close out the series with “End of the Line”—the third unproduced script, written by Straczynski himself. If the first two scripts were about establishing threats and testing the crew’s ethics, this one is about consequences. Everything the season has been building toward arrives at once, and the result is the most ambitious of the three scripts—and the most revealing about where Crusade was ultimately headed.
