The Path of Sorrows

"Who Are You? Matthew Gideon, Captain. Attached to the Earth Alliance Starship Excalibur. What do you want? To find a cure to the Drakh plague before it wipes out all life on earth. Where Are You Going? Anywhere I Have To. Who do you serve and who do you trust? Who do you serve and who do you trust?"

– Galen Questioning Captain Gideon

Starring[]

Regular Cast[]

Gary Cole as Captain Matthew Gideon
Tracy Scoggins as Captain Elizabeth Lochley (Credit Only)
Daniel Dae Kim as Lieutenant John Matheson
David Allen Brooks as Max Eilerson
Peter Woodward as Galen
Marjean Holden as Dr. Sarah Chambers (Credit Only)
Carrie Dobro as Dureena Nafeel

Guest Starring[]

Co-Starring[]

Daniel Guzman as XO
Kevyn Major Howard as Officer
Matt O'Toole as First Man
Patrick St. Esprit as Captain Ross

Summary[]

On an unknown world rumored to be a place of healing, the crew finds an alien in a foggy glass ball whose curative powers are emotional rather than physical and who serves as a confessor for interstellar wayfarers.

Gideon recalls his being abandoned in space during an EVA when his ship, the EAS Cerberus, was destroyed by an odd Shadow-like ship. He also recalls his acquisition of an Apocalypse Box, which is a secret.

Matheson recalls his time as a Psi Cop and his involvement in a telepath terrorist attack on the Psi Corps Headquarters.

Galen confronts the alien that it is an emotion vampire, though it protests that it is granting forgiveness. Galen recalls a time when his lover was critically wounded, and she talks of the afterlife and how she will try to contact him if she gets there. The recall of this memory angers him to the point he is ready to annihilate the alien.

Gideon opts to return the alien to where they found it. Gideon and Matheson discuss the new comfort that they now feel, and how they slept peacefully the night before. As they leave, another alien arrives to receive comfort from the creature in the glass ball.

Galen, who doesn't believe in an afterlife, receives a garbled message that includes the words "love" and "Galen."

Episode Chronology[]

13 episodes of crusade were produced before TNT canceled the series. According to posts by J. Michael Straczynski, which are archived on jmsnews.com, TNT broadcast the episodes out of the intended sequence. The order of the episodes was then revised when they were re-broadcasted on the Sci-Fi channel, the Sci-Fi channel actually contacted Straczynski and asked which order he would prefer the episodes were broadcast. A third order was formally endorsed by Straczynski as the "true" chronological sequence of events for the filmed episode, as it appeared in The Babylon 5 Historical Database as published in Across Time and Space: The Chronologies of Babylon 5. This particular ordering supersedes Straczynski's own "preferred" sequence from a strictly chronological and causal standpoint. The original broadcast order as set by TNT was used for the DVD releases.