“Each Night I Dream of Home,” the fifth production episode of Crusade, sends the Excalibur back toward Earth for a secret mission ordered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Senator Jacob Redway and civilian David Williams board the ship under strict instructions to maintain radio silence and avoid stopping for any reason.
Those orders are tested when the crew receives a distress call from Lochley, who is injured and stranded in a Starfury. Although Redway insists that the Excalibur continue its mission, Captain Gideon finds a way to rescue her without technically stopping the ship. He later makes clear that he would never ignore a distress signal, recalling his own past experience of being alone in space and hoping someone would respond.
Once the ship reaches Earth, a shuttle delivers an escape pod before being destroyed. Its passenger is Dr. Franklin, who reveals the purpose of the mission: researchers need to track the Drakh plague from the moment of infection. Williams has volunteered to become the test subject, motivated in part by his desire to reunite with his fiancée, who remains trapped on quarantined Earth.
Franklin and Chambers expose Williams to the plague in an isolation lab. The virus behaves unexpectedly, targeting only critical areas of his body while leaving other biological systems untouched. Franklin concludes that it is not a conventional biological infection but an artificially created nanovirus, suggesting a deliberate intelligence behind its actions.
Williams later sends an unauthorized message to his fiancée, allowing the Drakh to locate the Excalibur and assemble an attack fleet. The assault damages the ship and compromises the medbay’s sterilization systems. Williams faces death when his isolation chamber is scheduled to be flooded with freezing air, but Franklin manages to reach him and pull him to safety.
With the ship’s external communications disabled, Lochley takes a Starfury into combat to coordinate the defense. Gideon eventually forces the Drakh mothership into hyperspace, where the Excalibur can target it with its main weapon. After destroying the enemy vessel, the crew returns to Earth with Franklin and Williams before bringing Lochley back to Babylon 5.
The episode features Richard Biggs in his final appearance as Franklin before the actor’s death in 2004. It also continues a thread involving Gideon’s unexplained past, including the distress call that would be revisited in later Crusade stories. The review notes that the episode contains important information about the Drakh plague, although its impact was weakened by the series’ cancellation and by performances the reviewer found uneven.
“Each Night I Dream of Home” was the last Crusade episode aired on TNT. The next Babylon 5 project to reach television was Legend of the Rangers, which premiered on SyFy in 2002.
Sources: Reactor.