To answer the original question: There is no absolutely correct order in which to watch the existing Crusade episodes, for various reasons.
1) The original plan was to start the series five or six months into the mission, with everyone already knowing everybody else. (More like ST:TOS than TNG.) Dialogue and flashbacks would fill-in the missing details. "Racing the Night" was episode 1.
2) After 5 episodes were filmed TNT Atlanta took over supervision of the show from TNT L.A. (Which had worked with Babylonian Productions on all the TV movies and all of B5 S5.) They changed the sets and the uniforms. They also stipulated that they wanted a new "introductory" episode. This created a writing problem. There would now be one episode that started right after ACtA, then a five or six month gap until the next episode. Scripts in process were altered so that some of the "missing time" would be filled in.
3) TNT further, and irrationally, insisted that even the episodes that took place earlier in the story should use the new, black, uniforms. Instead of everybody being in grey and red for the first eight or nine episodes, then changing to black for the rest of the series, they now had to start in black, change to grey and red for five episodes, then switch back. More re-writing followed.
4) Like B5, Crusade was broken down episode-by-episode early on, and script assignments and production slots set so that the production could be as efficient as possible. Thus episodes that were going to be FX-heavy were scheduled early, to allow extra post-production time, even if they would air late. (The classic example of this was "Chrysalis", the B5 S1 cliff-hanger, which was shot in the middle of the production order - episode 11 or 12 - even though it would air as 122.) So when the production was shut down in January of 1999 there were unproduced episodes and even unwritten scripts that were planned to go in between the episodes actually filmed.
5) In the end TNT decided to air all the "black uniform" episodes first, continuity be damned, and cut-off funds for things like additional looping or reshooting to work out the remaining kinks in the filmed shows. They even tried to halt payments for post-production on the first five, but Warner Bros. drew the line at that. This resulted in such wonderful things as the crew using the nano-shield before Chambers invented it, and Gideon and Lochley acting like they barely knew each other several weeks after rutting like minks on B5.
JMS's "Sci-Fi" order is the best compromise he could come up with short of burying every print of "War Zone" in a landfill. It isn't perfect, but simply ignoring the uniform change and trying to keep the character arcs reasonably straight was probably the best way to go.
"War Zone" was the only episode written to TNT's exact specifications, but they offered notes and forced changes small and large in all of the black uniform shows. The hot-shot pilot character was added to placate TNT, for instance, and references to B5 were reduced to a minimum. (Thus Sheridan isn't even mentioned by name in "War Zone" when Gideon is given his mission, although he is in the flashback that opens "Racing the Night")
Some of it was just silly. The uniforms and sets were changed because the TNT Atlanta people, with almost no experience in TV production, thought there wasn't enough contrast with everything being grey. The uniforms and sets blended into each other, and everything was too dark. None of them understood that they were watching lo-res digital editing files, not film, and that these are inherently dark and of limited contrast. The grey uniforms and original sets looked just fine on film and in the final color-corrected broadcast tapes. They shut down the production, paid tons of money for new costumes and sets (to replace the ones they had originally approved) and created untold writing and continuity headaches to correct a problem that didn't actually exist. If one of them had been smart enough to admit their ignorance and had simply asked, "Why does everything look so dark?" much of this could have been avoided. /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif
Regards,
Joe
