Counterexample here. I found B5 season 1 compelling (and liked O'Hare fine, though I have no problem with Boxleitner aside from how it messed up the time travel plot), where I gave up on Crusade a few episodes in.

DS9 certainly has the most space-opera-like characteristics. It's got the escalation (from quiet frontier station to local great power intrigue to interquadrant conflict to battling space gods), the scope (two quadrants, no waiting), the scale (the plot to blow up Bajor's star, blockading an entire solar system,…

The Silver Age was widely variable. Julie Schwartz was an old school SF fan and loved putting scientific details into books like the Flash and others. (E.g., Adam Strange always had to intercept a Zeta Beam from somewhere in the southern hemisphere, because they came from Alpha Centauri and that's not visible in…

His super-powers are different (though they map roughly to the 1938 Superman), and the lead vulnerability has been so downplayed as to be nigh-nonexistent except for very rare plot demands.

Which suggests they're a warlike and possibly imperialist monarchy, like many societies that practiced chattel slavery (along, to be sure, with the occasional constitutional democracy).

There's no hard and fast definition for space opera, and the term was originally derisive. But I think it calls for a scale of conflict that TOS didn't really approach. E.E. Smith's Skylark and Lensman books are the prototypical space opera. Star Wars is a space opera. B5 is a space opera. Trek generally isn't. …

More of a Mon-El shoutout generally— his name has been Lar Gand in the comics since his first appearance.

Krypton was basically good (give or take one big blind spot, and with the usual run of bad guys to cause trouble) from 1938 to 1986. Then it was retconned into a cold dystopia, and since it's been one flavor or another of bad more often than not.

Superheroes are always very low on the scale of science fiction hardness. This is the same genre where Ray Palmer was able to carry a chunk of white dwarf star material home to study it and the entire universe can be patrolled by 3600 Green Lanterns. (Though I always like when people try to make that "realistic" by…

For a while during the Byrne era, it was invisible: Superman's eyes would glow red, and the target would glow red-hot, but there would be no beams running between them.

they really should have made Kevin Sorbo's character King Ol-Vir instead of stealing Mon-El's own real name Lar Gand.

Nit: Daxam isn't a fascist state (as far as we've seen), it's a traditional hereditary monarchy. (Probably an absolute monarchy since we haven't head anything about a parliament or nobles, but we haven't seen enough to really know.)

AFAIK, Wally's speed is increasing faster than Barry's is, which led Barry to believe that Wally could be faster than him by the time of the confrontation with Savitar. But I don't think Wally has surpassed Barry in the present.

I think Hollywood economics make it hard to do a live-action series with a rotating cast like that. (Though I agree it's a great idea if it could be managed.)

I would really much rather see Barry and Kara light up the screen as friends every time they meet than become the subjects of a CW relationship roller-coaster.

I kind of wish Mon-El had been Halk Kar. Or Ranar (who was AFAIK only a one-shot, but who was actually the arrogant prince of a slave kingdom despised for generations by Krypton, who was bent on marrying Kara). But as you say, that ship has long sailed.

Very little about Mon-El has remotely followed the comics. (Things Mon-El has in common with his comics counterpart: 1) from the planet Daxam; 2) dark hair; 3) ??? I hope they at least give him his comics costume at some point.)

Oh, I think Lyra's status as a mammal is… not in doubt.

Naming his dad Lar Gand mildly annoyed me in much the same way that their other random reapplications of names (Vartox, Jemm, Starhaven) does. If feels like misaimed fanservice, bringing up the name of one thing that only they will recognize to apply it to something else.

Exactly. In most other origins, Jor-El is desperately trying to get space travel started at the last minute. I'm not sure why recent treatments (Man of Steel is another) have them with longstanding interstellar travel capability, given how that undercuts the central narrative reason for Krypton's existence.