I've always thought, were I to go back in time and be invested with the powers of an executive producer at Paramount in the early-to-mid 90's, that I would have made First Contact a movie about Sisko and Picard.  As much as I loved Alfre Woodard in that movie, and she was great, it would have had so much more…

@avclub-fd172dda9796767557675385e915cab4:disqus  has got it nailed.  Franklin is likable, spirited and intelligent, but all of his stories excluding Walkabout feel like they were co-written by the Season 8 TNG tumblr.  He's just not that integral to very many stories, whereas Bashir eventually became the beating,…

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but there was.  And it was so bad that Eva Green taking her clothes off every other episode couldn't save it from being a stinker.  I mean, that's not "Straight dudes, talkin' about genre tv"-level fanservice.  That's the nuclear option of fanservice.  Still couldn't fix the turd of…

. . .I suppose it would depend on where they fought.  Ordinarily, I'd say cavemen, but give the astronauts a rudimentary lathe, and it's all over.

+1, most definitely.  If I had a genie to grant me three wishes, I would have used one of those to remake Voyager, and at least one of the characters on my show would be a Farscape-style puppet.  The ability of those puppeteers to convey something that is at once so thoroughly alien in appearance yet so human in…

The most interesting thing about this week, at least from a story-structure perspective, is how differently DS9 and Voyager use similar storytelling devices to propel the narrative.  Voyager, as is usual, comes off the worse of the two.  For instance, if you look at the climax of Children of Time, it's a narrative…

"Taking the Stone" holds a unique status in the pantheon of bad sci-fi for me, as it was the only episode so bad that I actually watched it again on the assumption that I had to have missed a scene or a moment in the show that revealed it to be some kind of existential masterpiece.  Turns out . . . no, it was just…

Yeah, without giving any of the plot away, I just watched the last episode of Season 5 the other day, and I think that may be the best season ending cliffhanger since Best of Both Worlds.  Better even than The Jem'Hadar.

@avclub-0c3e626d1a287cdc48c77515c8dcc243:disqus

Disagree strongly.  "Caretaker" was a good idea (and with a few tweaks it might have been brilliant), but its structure was muddled and confused, and its introduction of the characters was sub-par.

When I went back to re-watch the series about two years ago, I discovered a recurring pattern in the show.  Each season after the first two (which were almost uniformly bad), the first five or six episodes would be really good, innovative stories.  After those five or six, I only needed to watch the teaser to know…

Babylon 5:  "Passing Through Gethsemane".  It's a quiet episode with only a fairly tangential relation to the arc of the series, but I always thought it was the perfect meditation on the value and power of faith.  And it makes me sob every.  single. time.

Agreed, although I thought it particularly gave Martok the chance to shine.  If he were a stereotypical Klingon, Martok would be confined to the three B's of Klingon life:  booze, babes and battle.  And he would regularly confuse them in his thinking.  And yet, in one subtle move, they completely undercut that…

Indeed.  I've heard him referred to as an evil Spock, but I personally prefer to think of Scorpius as Tywin Lannister with a command of, and appreciation for, soft power.  It's not just that he's cultured, urbane and intelligent that make him so scary.  It's that he has a point about the value in what he's doing, and…

I can see how you get there, but I always saw it as TNG reviving an interest in (and proving the commercial viability of) sci-fi, which was followed by a fascinating series of riffs on the general idea.  Where TNG has the barest modicum of in-show continuity, DS9 went in for a mix because instead of warping around to…

Actually, it's fascism, with an m.

To be fair to Natalie Mendoza, she was incredibly good in the film The Descent.  She was able to flip from terrified to badass in seconds in a way that was so convincing that she reminded me of that scene in Superman where Christopher Reeve does nothing more than shift his posture and switches from Clark Kent to…

Well, to be fair to Farscape, the show never tried to explain its tech or mine drama from the technical details.  They have two standard speeds (Starburst and regular), they get where they get at the speed they get there, and they can't outrun certain enemies like a Peacekeeper command carrier outside of Starburst or…

You just replaced Jimmy Carter as history's greatest monster.

Indeed.  I was actually hoping that RJS would show up and put beat to a verse from the Song of the Great Tribble Hunt.