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  • My two-cent hot-takes on that list of shows:

    • Stargate: For the time, it did the Trek format incredibly well if not better. First season was rough, but oddly found its feet when SciFi took over (weird, right?) Good characters, great villains, fantastic arcs. The show "ends" multiple times, with the last few seasons being less than fan favorites. That said, if you love the characters by the end you may find yourself putting up with late season plot devices. Atlantis is good too, but shorter with slightly less compelling plot hooks. The short-lived SGU sequel/spinoff is has this man-v-man flavor not unlike DSC season 1, but doesn't stand on its own lore-wise.
    • Babylon 5: The even more grounded DS9. But like the oft-compared Trek series, the production values are a 1990's time-capsule, which (today) has a kind of charm to it. The story arcs center around diplomacy, subterfuge, spycraft, and interstellar war, all told in a universe that is delightfully consistent and charts its own territory. Characters play off each other incredibly well once the series gets going.
    • Galactica: I'm going to assume you mean the reboot. This is a gripping serial epic with very few filler and bottle episodes. Characters grow and evolve, allegiances change, motivations shift, ethics are challenged, and whole personalities get re-written. You can slap "space opera" on the box and be correct, but you can't describe more than two character arcs without filling your mouth with crazy nonsense. Yet somehow, it all works brilliantly and draws you in over and over again. It stands apart from the source material, but has lots of nods and references to the original so that the old farts in the audience are enthused.

    ( The original BSG is a hot mess of amazing-for-the-time effects, cool characters, great concepts, and bad studio interference. Best enjoyed using mind-altering substances because that's clearly what the writers were doing)

  • Not necessarily the level of the nacelles falling off the ship

    I feel like "catastrophic" would be at least that, or maybe at the level of a warp core breach; basically losing chunks of the ship that are required for crew survival. Other categories should just work backwards from there.

  • While I know this is done for humor's sake, I really love this critique.

    Similar to the Bechdel Test, this comesvery close to perfectly illustrating the Mako Mori Test:

    The requirements of the Mako Mori test are that a film or television show has at least one female character and that this character has an independent plot arc and that the character or her arc does not simply exist to support a male character's plot arc.[2]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mako_Mori_test

  • I would love to see what the fan edit looks like. I (re)watched it just last week and the theatrical cut is... a mess, to put it gently. There's almost too much going on, with not enough focus on the elements that make the story tick. But there's lots to work with here that would make a very high-production-value 50 minute Trek episode.

    Scotty and Uhura's flirting was cute, but it doesn't go anywhere so it's dead weight film-wise. But without it, the characters have even less to say in an already crowded story. It's just sad.

    One moment that stuck out to me was the bar fight. Kirk just tosses a Catian stripper, over his head, into a literal "pool" table and she's rendered dead/unconscious floating face down in the water. Either she has bones like a baby bird or Kirk is on 'roids. I can't make sense of that edit unless there was a longer fight that got chopped down somehow. It makes zero sense.

  • They make a nod to this on Lower Decks. The higher ranking officers have access to an entirely different replicator menu, suggesting a distinction in quality overall.

    Imagine eating the 140p food

    I would get tired of steamed bananas real quick. The guac and chips look okay though.

  • We need a “Star Wars Despecialized Editon” of Enterprise where the only thing they change is the theme song.

    If it helps at all, this was originally supposed to be U2's "Beautiful Day", but they couldn't get the rights to use it. It's still an abrupt shift in sytle and tone, but it fits the intro really well.

  • I like this take. Use him like you'd use a stunt coordinator, or a pyrotechnics specialist. Have a complex action scene that needs to convey action, chaos, high-stakes, and fireballs, for 12 straight minutes? He's your guy.

  • I'll add that this didn't start with the SW prequel movies either. The various essays on the topic typically focus on The Phantom Menace to make this case (see: Red Letter Media); we do love to hate on that movie. But if you look to early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie script, it's clear that it took a village to make it more than B-movie material. Also, the making-of stories are complete with every kind of move-making person improving and adding to our producer's vision, right down to salvaging the whole mess in the editing room. It's been a problem the entire time.

    Now I wonder if THX-1138 and American Graffiti have similar war-stories behind them.