I'm working my way through Farscape right now. Still on the first season. It's a fucking odd show, and frankly it's kind of all over the place—it tosses out a lot of ideas without really developing any of them properly, and the characterizations often seem rootless. But there's enough there to keep me watching. I just…

It's a good ca-razy SF premise that also provides emotional poignancy.

Maaaaan, this is making me horny for a show about a human ship getting lost on the other end of the galaxy and having to appropriate more and more alien technology to stay afloat, watching it change them…

If you sort of mash up and remix the Changelings, Vorta and Jem'Hadar, you get the Cylons. Seductive infiltrators who can respawn en masse.
There are also traces of BSG's spiritual stuff in DS9's. Particularly the Prophets being Beyond Good and Evil.

Exactly! Spock's Brain (and, for that matter, The Way to Eden) are fun-bad. Since, almost 50 years on, there's an aura of camp surrounding even the best of ToS, I feel like bitching about these episodes is a bit pointless. The question is "is it entertaining, for whatever reason?" And the answer would have to be…

God, I've become an Enterprise defender.

Well, I'd argue it had the hardcore Trekkie fanbase too—I mean, Voyager did last 7 seasons, in defiance of all logic, so I think they had a pretty substantial "Pavlovian" fanbase who would support Trek specifically. But yes, clearly it dwindled as Babylon 5 and Farscape and Firefly and the rest arrived on the scene.

Tangent: I always thought it was amusing that the two head guys on DS9 were Wolfe and Behr.

Harlan Ellison would approve, if—oh, right.

OK, but I'm still not seeing how he's "irredeemable", or so bad that they had to find a more likeable character. If the dude's in jail, he must have done something wrong. Most adult audiences can comprehend this and still empathize with a dude with a shady past, but Star Trek had an unfortunate tendency to write at a…

That story isn't surprising to me at all. There was a level of apathy evident in 90s Trek, even the later seasons of Next Generation, that drove me away at the time. It's clear Berman and company saw Trek as a cushy gig with a committed fanbase that would eat up whatever crap they threw at them.

The thing is, Locarno took the fall for the rest of his crew, which I always thought showed a strong streak of nobility. I guess by Star Trek terms that makes him a kitten-stomping monster, but the idea of a guy who had honestly screwed up and was still eaten by guilt could have made for a great character…but this is…

The fact that BSG actually thought, however glancingly, about the logistics of trying to survive in that situation was what got me on board right away. It was also a big early warning sign that it was mostly going to be a better show than Lost, which after two or three episodes had the characters acting like they were…

If you're a Star Trek fan, the last two seasons are fun. And a good chunk of the 1st season is surprisingly alright.

So does that mean they had to pay whoever wrote the first episode of TNG featuring Chief O'Brien for every episode of DS9? Wait, I guess he was in the pilot…but he wasn't necessarily playing "Chief O'Brien" at that point, was he? Does that count?

Harlan Ellison would approve, if he ever approved of anything ever.

Speaking of Voyager and continuity, did anyone ever explain why Paris wasn't Ensign Locarno from "The First Duty", even though it seems like an incredibly obvious and effective way to give a character some established history and tie the continuity together?

I still say Enterprise would be interesting to write about, and it's good enough that it wouldn't be a nonstop cavalcade of "KILL ME…SOMEONE PLEASE KILL ME…"

Though I will say I liked "The Sound of Her Voice".

Yeah. On top of everything else, almost everything that takes us away from the Dominion War feels like a distraction at this point, and I remember Time's Orphan suffering strongly from that…but I don't think it would be any good in a different context, either.