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Missing (Score:5, Funny)
Stargate SG-1 is missing from this list.
Re:Missing (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus Space Above and Beyond, Farscape, Lexx, Quantum Leap, etc.
There were more but I won't bother listing them. I know you guys have a limited length to the list but why THREE Star Trek series? Damned trekkies. ST: Voyager is a waste of space in the list.
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Re:Missing (Score:5, Interesting)
And I know that there were a couple of TNG episodes where Picard kicked ass, but usually it was very unusual circumstances that prompted it, like in, "Starship Mine," when he was the only one of the crew left aboard when some terrorists tried to steal something explosive from Engineering and he was forced to think outside the box to stop them.
Re:Missing (Score:4, Insightful)
I totally agree - the writers (or producers) way overcompensated when it came to Janeway. It wasn't enough she was a female captain - she had to be MacGyver on steroids.
Funny thing is... I think Kate Mulgrew did a pretty good job, given the role she was handed.
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Even the way Kirk was written, as a captain that left the ship far too often, didn't generally work on engineering-related problems or science problems, he left those to his engineering and sciences staff.
Kirk was the classic, popular cinematic protagonist: a brave, rule-bending, action hero who could think on his feet. His abilities were optimized in a pinch.
This character worked very well on the Ship during the many gunslinger-like confrontations with hostiles. I agree his frequent visits off the bridge were a bit much for a Captain. It seems more likely he'd delegate such tasks... but to be fair, we allow some wee bit of cinematic license to keep the regular characters in the storyline.
IMHO, the grea
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Instead we ended up with ultra-evolved Paris and Janeway gettin' it on, and a
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Don't forget what they did to Q!!
All the rest I can overlook, because we can all just put it out of our minds and pretend like the USS Voyager never existed. Barclay, Riker... even fucking up the Borg, OK whatever. Hive mind cyborgs are a cool concept and it sucks to see them ruined, but no huge damage to the legacy and meaning of the work.
But they retconned Roddenberry's single greatest character creation, the lynchpin of the whole damn TNG series and all that came after, into some weird sitcom character f
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I suppose that they could have made ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:VOY one entry as each was spawned off of the next and there were crossover episodes an
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Stargate had more than seven seasons.
Re:Missing (Score:5, Funny)
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Always kind of liked Time Trax. Had an interesting premise, though the execution was a bit flawed. The show didn't last long.
Guess it's not quite Sci Fi, but I always enjoyed the Highlander TV series as well. Not Sci Fi but appealed to nerds all the same. Though the show went way downhill when Richie became an immortal.
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So did STTNG.
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It is easy to tell you are a Trekkie.
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Everything you listed sucked. In fact sucked worse then voyager.
When anonymous coward says everything suck
Is like sound of one hand clapping
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But most of Stargate SG-1 was aired in the 00-ies.
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pronounced like "naughties".
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It's missing because it's about 90s scifi.
Re:Missing (Score:4)
Stargate SG-1 started in 1997.
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I don't know why you were modded funny, SG-1 was pretty damn good at times. Far from perfect, but it did a lot of stuff right. Interesting characters, and good long story arcs which really built on what had come before instead of hitting the reset button after every episode. Earth slowly built up technology and knowledge, formed alliances and became a major player.
There were big ideas too, and some interesting science from time to time.
Later series suffered from a lack of money, like many sci-fi series. It'
real answer: x-files (Score:3)
joke answer: earth 2
Re:real answer: x-files (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quantum Leap (Score:2)
If only it had been able to run for at least one more season. The ending was better than for a lot of other cancelled series, but from what I've read as to where the writers would have taken the series, one more season would have been welcomed.
Yaz
MST3K! (Score:2)
not listed: Mystery Science Theater 3000
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Gristle McThornBody
Syndication and a bit obscure... (Score:2)
But does anyone else remember Time Trax [wikipedia.org]? Cute show...don't know that I'd call it a "best" show but I liked it.
Lexx (Score:2)
What the hell was Lexx? I don't know, but I liked it.
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Lexx is what happens when a bunch of Germans and some Englishmen get drunk in a Canadian bar.
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If it had been 80's (Score:2)
It would have been Max Headroom.
"This is Edison Carter, Live and Direct".
And it certainly looks like we are heading that way...
First season only (Score:4, Insightful)
Sliders, Seaquest and SG-1 were all awesome in the early season(s) before they turned into boring war things. Deep Space 9 actually pulled off the transition.
Red Dwarf (Score:5, Insightful)
Should at least be on the list.
Space Rangers (Score:2)
Space Rangers [thetvdb.com]!
Nah, just messin' with you. B5 all the way. No contest.
Seaquest (Score:2)
That was actually a great show.
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Vote worst, not best (Score:2)
Look, a poll for "best" gets too many people riled up. Let's vote on worst show. I nominate "Space Above and Beyond". Or Babylon 5 Crusade.
Space: Above And Beyond (Score:2)
Space: Above And Beyond was a fantastic show that unfortunately ran on Fox and was therefore killed off far too soon.
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The network I watched it on played it out of order and in different timeslots so I didn't see the whole thing. Prime time to midnight after a football show that sometimes ran an hour over time.
Bathroom (Score:3)
B5 had a bathroom.
It had Earth invaded by an alien fleet lead by a human. And Earth was the bad guys.
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they simply found pak'ma'ra toilet habits to be utterly repulsive
Ah, so the pak'ma'ra used German toilets then.
Sliders (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really cared about quality of story, characters, etc. Sliders was by far the best. It doesn't hurt that it's science was some of the best too. Most items on this list are melodramatic space opera.
Red Dward/Lexx (Score:5, Insightful)
I voted B5, but I think Red Dwarf would be my favourite (start in late 80's but most episiodes were in the 90's). Lexx also should have been on the list because it was just so original and weird.
I vote (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm sorry, Dave, but Red Dwarf was an 80s show. You smeghead arsehole.
Wrong again Rimmer
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
... aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1993 and from 1997 to 1999, and on Dave in 2009 and 2012
X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:2)
Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek ver N+1? Easy choice, Bab5 wins hands down.
But X-Files was why I had a TV in the first place. We'd had an old Amiga monitor and VCR to watch movies, which eventually got replaced by a TV/VCR combo, but my wife saw X-Files when she was staying at a hotel for a conference, came home and rented all the available videos at the video store (remember video stores?), and then one day I came home and there was a coax stretched down the stairs from the cable jack, and I was told that if I d
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:5, Interesting)
And as much as B5 was revolutionary in its use of CGI, that CGI has not aged well, and the physical models and film-capable special effects of ST:TNG. On top of that, they didn't keep the files so they can't spruce-up and rerender the scenes in newer versions of the software for higher resolution and alternate aspect ratios, so it'll never look better than it did as-recorded in the nineties.
If Michael O'Hare hadn't been forced to leave with no good explanation at the time (I have heard about his mental illness subsequent), if Mira Furlan hadn't gotten tired of being a Minbari and forced them to write a way for her to have her hair again, if the show hadn't gotten cancelled at the end of Season 4 and also saw both Claudia Christian and Jason Carter leave, and if a whole lot of loose ends had gotten tied up (like making a point of recording Talia Winters but never making use of that after she was de-fugue-stated by the Psi Corps), then perhaps it would have had more of a chance up against ST:TNG, but it just had too many off-set problems and those issues affected what we saw.
Don't get me wrong, I like the show and plan to introduce my wife to it once we get the TV movies and the other miscellaneous bits that aren't in the five individual-season boxed sets, but it's far from perfect.
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Why really compare them - both Star Trek and B5 were good in their own way.
Considering the CGI of B5 - it was at the time good - and did shock some. Now it looks dated, but there are more modern CGI that actually is worse even if it has finer details. Just because you can have 1000 times more polygons today than when B5 was made it's not worth crap if you don't get the perspectives right or get strange artifacts.
As for the 5th season - it's not as sharp as the beginning, but it do bring some closure and bri
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And as for why I compare them, that kind of is the point of the poll and the associated discussion.
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Wrong - on an Amiga. That's what B5 used if the rumors are right!
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Wrong - on an Amiga. That's what B5 used if the rumors are right!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Visuals
"In anticipation of future HDTV broadcasts and Laserdisc releases, rather than the usual 4:3 format, the series was shot in 16:9, with the image cropped to 4:3 for initial television transmissions.[77] Babylon 5 also distinguished itself at a time when models and miniature were still standard by becoming one of the first television shows to use computer technology in creating visual effects. This was achieved using Amiga-based Video Toasters at first, and later
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TNG sucked ass for the first two seasons. You only really need to watch those seasons once to develop, deconstruct, and then rebuild your impressions of the characters, and after that, you can focus your watching and rewatching on seasons 3 through 7.
Also, Q was used far less frequently than you might think, and those episodes tended to be some of the best of the entire series.
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wish that they hadn't brought him into DS9 or Voyager. It was a rather naked attempt to boost ratings by doing it, but it didn't work very well and there wasn't a lot of reason for him to show up there. To me it made more sense that he would continue to torment the same people repeatedly (ie, Picard and company) than to find a specific other set of humans to torment.
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The first season of TNG was terrible. I think the first regular episode was a reused plot from TOS... seriously? But the first season of B5 while was more interesting with its foreshadowing, wasn't nearly as good as the rest of the show from both a production and acting standpoint. I still love both shows, though.
Anyhow, the first season of most things is relatively crappy. Television executives want money and viewers now now now... thus shows that show promise get cancelled after half a season all the time
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This here is one of the biggest reasons I like to watch Japanese stuff. Their concept for how shows are made is different. There you pitch an idea and it is booked for the duration of that idea. You need 13 episodes you get 13 episodes. You need 24 you get 24.
It has some side effects in that generally the pacing at somepoint is poor. Either too fast or too slow. But you never ever get that situation of a show you are watching being cancelled mid way through.
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:4, Insightful)
The first two seasons of TNG were pretty bad, but after that they improved. The big issue they overcame was breaking away from the original series mold.
In the early episodes you can really see how they tried to take original series roles and divide them up among a new crew (Riker as the stand-in womanizer for Kirk, Data as the stand-in for Spock, etc.). It also uses a LOT of the conventions of the old show trying to get ahold of that remnant original series audience. We can look back on the omnipotent Q abducting people and making them fight dog-faced Napoleonic soldiers and cringe at how hokey it is. We can look back on the relatively-omnipotent Excalbians abducting people and making them fight Kahless and Genghis Khan with a little help from Abraham Lincoln and get a giddy little thrill. The difference is that TOS had a shoestring budget was aimed at a more forgiving youth audience, and TNG had a respectable budget (but still hokey scripts) and was aimed at those same people after they grew up in to sophisticated adults.
It took two seasons, but they eventually got over that hurdle and turned into their own show. When asked when he first knew that they "had something" in the show, Patrick Stewart said it was while shooting "the Measure of a Man" (s2, ep9). If you think of the question a different way -- "at what point did you realize the job wasn't necessarily shit?" -- then the answer says a lot about the quality of the preceding 33 episodes.
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Part why early TNG episodes felt like TOS episodes is that some were essentially unproduced TOS scripts reworked for the new characters, or were originally created for Phase II [wikipedia.org]. Decker and Ilia stories were adapted into Riker and Deanna stories.
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But X-Files was why I had a TV in the first place.
Bah. The X-Files was for people who couldn't handle Twin Peaks.
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LOST is more of the same. All setting and no plot.
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Sorry to disappoint you, but I prefer series that don't get chopped off cold just when things are starting to get interesting.
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Farscape (1999)
I watched Babylon 5 for the first time including all the later movie/miniseries content last year. When it first aired it failed to hold my interest but so many friends have told me to watch it, I finally did. I cut it major slack for effects given the time it was done and it was nostalgic seeing the Amiga/Video Toaster rendered SFX. Speaking of nostalgia, anyone else think Sinclair sounds like Robert Stack (12 O'clock High, The Untouchables, Airplane!)?
But the biggest problem with B5 was n
Re:Farscape (Score:2)
My local cable company didn't carry The Sci-Fi Channel until just about when Farscape went off the air (idiots! This is Silicon Valley, what did they *think* we wanted to watch? ESPN?) so I never saw enough episodes to really catch on, but it was kind of fun. And ST:TNG happened during the years I didn't have TV, so the few times I saw it were always the same annoying episode with Q in it for some reason.
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Part of B5's problem was that they were told that season 4 would be the last, so they had to compress 2 seasons worth of story arc into one season. Then at the last minute, the execs said "just kidding!" and they had to come up with another season.
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Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek ver N+1? Easy choice, Bab5 wins hands down.
But X-Files was why I had a TV in the first place. We'd had an old Amiga monitor and VCR to watch movies, which eventually got replaced by a TV/VCR combo, but my wife saw X-Files when she was staying at a hotel for a conference, came home and rented all the available videos at the video store (remember video stores?), and then one day I came home and there was a coax stretched down the stairs from the cable jack, and I was told that if I didn't like it I could move the fuck out.
Right up until there, our parallel world's were identical.
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So how many seasons of B5 did you watch before saying something totally stupid like that?
Most of TNG is rather good but episodic and DS9 has a much less well developed plot and setting. As for Voyager it was boring like hell.
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you *tried* watching TNG lately?
That show did *not* age well. Each episode feels like a corny gospel story or pantomime in pajamas or something, tight to the point of ridiculous, mechanical and predictable. You can *see* the actors acting.
It's still my fave on the list though, for what it contributed to culture. I loved it to bits at the time. Gospel stories aren't a bad thing, but they're certainly not high literature.
B5 was experimental and quite low-budget. It more than once had to deal with looming cancellation stress which was revoked mid-season, leading to some real challenges in story pacing. The writing was apparently sometimes last minute; I met a guy who worked on set and he told me that one time he watched J. Michael Straczynski due to some sort of unexpected deadline pressure have to come up with a script in a couple of hours on the day shooting for that episode had to start. And did it. The guy wrote more 90% of all the episodes. That's pretty unique in sci-fi. You don't often get such an undiluted vision.
It was also on the vanguard of attempts at telling a very long story with a highly involved time line. Watching out of order makes it a much lesser experience, almost pointless. TNG did have an evolving story world, and DS9 more so, particularly near the end of its run, but by comparison, B5 was far more intricate and deliberate in its story objectives, and it met all of them.
B5's actors were a mixed bag of awful and wooden, and competent and engaging. They were all archetypes though, which worked perfectly for that kind of story. (In Greek myths, you don't bitch about the acting; you care about who did what to whom. And there was vastly more opportunity for character development granted to them than most Star Trek characters could ever hope to see due to the constraints of the production system. -With a few notable exceptions, if you were serving on the Enterprise, your range of personal challenges had to be completely buttoned up in 45 minutes or less, (realistically, in only about 10 minutes since TNG often worked in groups of 2 or 3 mini-stories told concurrently.)
In the end, the same thing that allowed TNG to be amazing comes into play with B5. -You just need a pinch more of it. And that's the ability to slip into the world and allow it to become 'real' to your mind.
When it comes down to it, even the best produced Sci-Fi is unbelievably childish and cheesy if you look at it without being in the 'zone'. Even Star Wars had storm troopers banging their heads and plenty of other dumb stuff which nobody noticed for the first 20 years.
B5 takes more deliberate zen to click with, but when you do, it's actually very smart; sort of a Lord of the Rings in space. It's self-contained and doesn't violate its own physics and internal rule systems the way a contract written, chopped up story world like TNG did every few episodes.
I'm not trying to convince you to watch it, but saying "It sucks" is just silly and self-limiting. All sci-fi pretty much sucks if you go in grumpy enough.
The thing that prevents me from watching a sci-fi series, so long as the production values are within the competent range, comes down to how intelligent the script writer/s are. J.M.S. was no dummy, not by a long shot, and he'd probably be a fun guy to chat with.
I'm glad he got a chance to put such a big story all the way through production, and despite its warts, I thought it was a remarkably rewarding ride.
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Yeah.
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Gospel stories aren't a bad thing, but they're certainly not high literature.
Uh, what?
Great literature is nothing BUT morality plays in various guises.
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Gospel stories aren't a bad thing, but they're certainly not high literature.
Uh, what?
Great literature is nothing BUT morality plays in various guises.
This is the problem with English not being written in math. He said A is not contained in B, you said B is contained in C.
A (gospel stories) at least intersects with C (morality plays in various guises), but that doesn't mean that A (gospel stories) is contained in B (Great Literature or High Literature, and taking those to be the same thing which they arguably are not).
The Gospels were good for their time. Today we have better fiction, it's just that we have to be more discriminating to find it.
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"Original Series. But Picard."
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:5, Funny)
B5's stories were too deep and complex, spread over long arcs. STNG fans can't cope with anything that doesn't have a patronising explanation at the end of each episode that invariably resulted in reconfiguring the deflection shield(s), plus an awful lot of spunk was fapped while pausing Troy's cleavage shots.
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell did troy have a seat on the bridge? A psychic psychiatrist on the bridge...
Yea, right? I mean, what military commander/diplomatic ambassador would want to have a bitch who can read minds sitting shotgun? How useful could that be?
Jackass.
Re:X-Files vs. Bab-5 - ouch! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would have been useful if her powers were used or well defined enough. Instead each writer for the show went his or her on way. Does telepathy work through a video screen? Depends on which episode of TNG you watch. At least the writers realized they were being idiots by the later seasons and stopped doing that stuff.
With B5, no problem. A single guy made all the important decisions (and wrote more than half of the episodes), and any "superpowers" were very well defined. This allowed B5 to have arcs that extended across entire seasons.
DS9 tried to emulate this, but the sheer number of filler episodes and the acting and writing not being up to par with the later seasons of TNG really hampered it.
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If I had to pick an anime series I would have picked Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
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That was a long series. I liked the first two-thirds of it or so, but in the end almost everyone dies to no real purpose. Kind of a downer.
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Have you ever watched Legend of Galactic Heroes? Do you even know what Seinen is?
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So you either don't know the difference between kodomo, shounen, and seinen works or are just trolling.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes was done for a more mature audience than Star Wars that's for sure.
I guess seinen hentai anime with nudity and rape are for kids as well in your perspective.
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Watch Jin-Rou and then tell me it is a kids show.
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Jin-Roh.
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Nudity by itself is not a problem. But things like rape (and that is sometimes the least of it) are a problem for kids to watch.
In fact the whole reason this segment even exists in Japan is because of the hard restrictions they have on pornographic content.
Still if you think Jin-Roh and Ghost in the Shell are for kids just because they are animated you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about. For example Jin-Roh is 'R' rated while a lot of movies you guys think are for grownups are PG rated.
If y
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Ugh. Here in Portland, Oregon they showed the first ThunderCats season twice, then showed the new characters coming on board in movie form (The five-part "Thundercats Ho!" series.) Then as it was getting interesting, they suddenly switched to SilverHawks. I didn't find out about the second ThunderCats season until I was in my thirties on the Internet.
It was KPTV's move to SilverHawks that made me hate the series at the time, but I came to appreciate it. Still, I'd much rather see Mumm-Ra wreaking havok on t
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I saw some of it and recognized the artists and actors, but it didn't grab my interest. If only they could have seen into the future and the Internet, they'd realize fish occupy a very small corner of the furry pantheon.
"What? No, I don't think we're going to get many viewers excited by 'Sharktara' or whatever..."
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I was thinking the same thing. Compared to DS9 TNG is cliche and simple, compared to B5 DS9 is simple.
TNG had an amazing actor and some really good ones. DS9 had a couple of good ones. DS9 had more involved story arcs, but most of the individual episodes were simply less profound--making the show too much about the story and less about exploring the human condition actually costs it something, even though it's a little more fun in some ways. That being said, it's not like TNG didn't have its major weak spots. I think Marina Sirtis had one good episode, for example--she was excellent in Face of the Enemy
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Something is wrong with the respondents! (Score:2)
Also, 5% of people picked Voyager. That's the only time I've ever felt someone should be banned from Slashdot.
I mean, I suppose someone could pick it based on one or two episodes, but as a whole the idea that it could be better than Babylon 5, DS9, TNG, and the X-files is really damn near unforgivable. I mean, it's not war crimes, but it's not good.
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In my opinion Voyager is by far the better of the Star Trek versions. Followed by DS9, then TNG. Voyager had a compelling stroyline from the start until the end. They had a purpose, and that gave all 7 series a linked and common plot. And Seven was hot.
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It wasn't bad until they got rid of the elf chick because the actress playing her started to demand speaking part money. Then there was the amphibian sex episode which should have had nobody able to look at Paris of Janeway without smirking for the rest of their lives - a massive reminder that Trek has almost zero continuity. I'd had it with Trek at that point. I heard that they even had some sort of cuddly pet Borg after that which would have been a truly epic jump of th
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:)
Ah, Seaquest was fun. Not in the same league, but it was so ambitious it was kinda cute.
Re:Something is wrong with the poll results! (Score:4, Interesting)
B5 had epic music, epic storyline and 3 crappy actors.
Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas were phenomenal, Stephen Furst was really good and most of the others were good enough.
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B5 was developed before DS9.
First season of DS9 aired before B5, and was a transitional Star Trek single story / single episode show.
B5s influence on DS9 can be seen from season 3 in DS9, where they desperately search for a viable long story arc.
It's a production type not a genre over there (Score:2)
Even with the kids stuff - do you accuse people of being mentally underdeveloped for seeing "The Lion King"? That's Kimba on stage, renamed Simba for copyright reas
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If you're counting X-Files, which did not even include the minimal science Star Trek does, and was also a monster-of-the-week show, why wouldn't you count Buffy?
Despite all attempts to create one, there really isn't a sharp dividing line between Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It's more of a spectrum.