You know what this reminds me of?
Babylon 5 had finished and they did a movie called "A Call To Arms". It's set 5 years after B5, and the Shadows, an ancient race that tried to turn the universe into a war-driven chaos, have left known space. In it, the B5 crew discover that some of their less advanced servants, the Drakh, still have some of the Shadows' technology, including a cloud that is essentially a death star with missiles. And they intend to use it on Earth. The crew discover that the Drakh only have one of these clouds. They get the cloud near Earth, but they are, of course defeated. However, just as the Drakh are defeated, they launch a plague onto Earth. The Drakh plague is 100% contagious, and 100% terminal, and in 5 years, everyone on Earth will be dead. Earth is placed under quarantine. The most advanced ship in the galaxy, the prototype Excalibur, has a new crew and they go out to the stars to search for a cure with the help of the other races.
This movie sets up the spin-off series Crusade which chronicles Excalibur.
Now, JM Straczynski started doing the episodes for TNT and his first episode was them on a deserted planet, desperately searching for a cure. This isn't a 'pilot' in that we see the crew meeting for the first time. We never see that. The crew isn't in A Call To Arms. Two recurring members of the crew, an alien thief and a techno-mage are small parts in the movie. But the captain and all those guys aren't in the movie, only the ship. The idea is we jump straight into the action. And in the first episode, we discover the Captain made a deal with a lot of alien races so he could get free passage through their space to speed up the search; if after four years he hasn't found the cure, the Excalibur spends the fifth year in Earth's orbit shooting down anyone who tries to break the quarantine - and he accepts the deal. The episode is brilliant.
TNT said, "Hey, we need a pilot."
JMS, "We've got A Call To Arms. It's sets up the plague, the Excalibur, and the whole premise. We don't need an episode where they just all meet up."
TNT, "But A Call To Arms will have aired like 3 or 4 months prior to the first episode to Crusade. Everyone will forget."
JMS, compromised and wrote a 'pilot' episode where they all meet up and it's just filled with exposition and it's crap. JMS admits it's crap, but he was forced to do it.
So TNT air the pilot episode, then, the following week, air A Call To Arms.
I am as infuriated and baffled by this Crusade fiasco as I am about Ultimate Galactus' delays.
It's ****ing ridiculous and makes no kind of sense.
