Mike Sussman was a big fan of his vampy Hoshi and actually wrote a Star Trek novel that continued her adventures as Empress. It's less a bone thrown to her and more he genuinely liked the idea.

…she was just kinda there really. You see why Denise Crosby was deeply frustrated and wanted to leave.

Shran was almost a regular on Enterprise. The plan was to make him a regular in season five.

I agree with you on Voyager and I think people hate it not because it's flat out terrible but because it always felt like it could have been a much better series than it was content to be. That was the fundamentally frustrating thing about Voyager, especially compared to Deep Space Nine.

I disagree. I've rewatched Next Generation's first four seasons in HD over the past two years… and while the first season is flat out bad, and the second season overall isn't good either (though it has more individually good episodes than it is sometimes given credit for) seasons three and four are packed full of…

"I hate Betazoids."

Not necessarily. Telepaths are an interesting sci-fi staple, you just need an idea of their limitations. B5 mostly went with ethical and political limitations and was generally more interested in the social consequences of telepathy than Star Trek, Star Trek basically just had them unable to read some alien races and…

Oh man now I want to watch Betazoid Borgen.

Deanna "Face Of The Enemy" Troi.

I feel 1) is important because it emphasizes the scope of the war. When it comes down to it, if the Dominion actually win the war, the Alpha Quadrant is 'theirs' in the same functional sense the Gamma Quadrant is, even if they really leave the Romulans alone the Romulans will be no serious threat to whatever their…

@avclub-fa3a6526569956b7e39960592bf0e30d:disqus To be fair, Rowan Kaiser's reviews of Defiance were very good and generally as positive as the show merited, and reading his reviews and then the subsequent discussions were half the fun of watching it. Part of the reason I hope the reviews recur is to see what he says…

A statement you could apply to Deep Space Nine as a whole, especially when you compare Deep Space Nine to its most direct progeny, Battlestar Galactica.

That's actually an extremely apropos Voyager episode to use as a comparison.

Precisely so. Hell, ignoring quality TV for a moment, look at the landscape of sci-fi TV in 2013. There are decided shades of grey to Orphan Black's protagonist, who starts as a thief, Continuum has basically a cop from a totalitarian corporatist regime as its hero, Revolution has an ex-general of a brutal…

I'm going to go the middle ground here. It was important that Roddenberry's strictures were challenged and some of them went too far (like a kid being unable to show grief.) But the broad outlines of the Roddenberry Box allowed Next Generation to be an unusual series in its strident optimism and moral conviction, and…

To be fair that is what Worf was originally meant to be, and if you watch the first seven episodes of the first season (when Roddenberry had his most control over the show) Worf is barely there. Roddenberry just wasn't quite getting that the writers and the audience had really gelled on this Klingon character, who had…

Which is relevant as another character played by Brock Peters, Admiral Cartwright, went too far in his pursuit of the Klingons.

Happy Life Day and the New Year, @avclub-285910f5ff9f9eddf129c46fc2bc5982:disqus

Betazed honestly felt like a bad choice. It's like the least significant planet people would actually know. Obviously it can't be Earth because Earth is too big a deal, but really the only people who care about Betazed are the franchise's two Betazoids, one of whom had already done her last DS9 episode and the other…

The weird thing about Marina Sirtis' accent is that when her alien mother shows up in the first season, Majel Barrett doesn't even pretend to have an accent, so Sirtis wanted to know where supposedly she got this accent (IIRC Roddenberry said her human father… though when we eventually 'saw' him that didn't pan out…