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Wierd, they remade the end of The Deer Hunter, music and all. Obviuos effect of the show having a full run is that we get filler episodes, well no, they could go for more of a protracted story arc, which might improve upon the throwaway feel the show is showing signs of.

I think maybe Pegasus was handled better in the original, it feels a bit wierd it still hanging about. Its supposed to be lost again, leaving this strange sense of wander as to whether it was really there in the first place. A kind of ghost ship. Having it still there takes the edge off the show, the whole concept. It may however send the show in a new direction. We should have at least seen the Pegasus this week, let us get comfortable with it being there. I also find that the shows sense of realism often drops off when it has guest stars, Adar was a bit flat. If anything though this shows how excellently handled the main characters are. This show is so good that sometimes the filler episodes lower the whole tone. Its good that it got a full season length run because it gives us reason to get out of bed in the morning, but imagine how high quality it would be if it were still restricted to a thirteen episode run. The president surviving? a bit of a cop out perhaps, although it was in many ways more suprising than her dying. It would be a shame to lose the character but it seemed part of the whole direction the show was taking, her survival somewhat underscores the beautifully handled scenes between her and Adama as she was quite clearly nearing her end, we kind of got the sense he was falling in love with her. Its rare that a show can actually make you care for the fate of characters in this way. We need to be shaken up soon, or the show may loose its edge. I have faith that it has not failed us yet.

Hah! Maybe its a homage to a very similar situation in one of the earlier episodes of Buck Rogers. It turned out later that he was in fact saying 'funking'. Now that's an idea, lets remake Buck Rogers too, another Larson classic. It would be excellent, it could be total smut.

It's because his eyes are too close together and he makes high pitched noises and is English, and he does move a bit like a monkey. A kind of psycopathic Galen. I wonder whether he's as well endowed as Roddy.

By default it may have to be 'Spaceball' in Galactica 1980, in that it is quite clearly the worst episode of what is often regarded as the worst scifi show ever. Otherwise I might have to pick something from the final season of Sliders, but there is not really one episode that stands out, or maybe something from Seaquest season 2. I recall that the most notoriuosly regarded episode of Star Trek is 'Spock's Brain." Any thoughts?

I suppose that First Contact best equates to Wrath of Khan, as both are gritty films which personify the best of both cycles, and again Insurrection parrallels Star Trek V, in that they are both largley forgettable but sometimes it is pleasant to remember that they exist. Nemesis should have been an attempt at making a film on par with Star Trek VI, with, say, some wide ranging political intrigue, using the Romulans, perhaps in a post Dominion war context that could easily have been explained to those that had not seen DS9. But no, for some reason, they went for doing a 'khan' like movie again, which they'd already done, the crew were too worn out for that, whereas Undiscovered Country took the crew's haggeredness and embraced it. Even Data's death, somehow just didn't cut it when the whole crew just seemed so tired. The strength of the original films was that they had continuity between them, even though The Voyage Home was for the most part farce, it was still a classic on account of the odd scenario, flying home to face trial in a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey with a wacked out resurrected Spock was excellent, the film really benefitted from the removal of the Enterprise. In contrast the Tng films are made weak by running alongside TV series, with no real chance of the sort of continuity seen between films 2 and 4. I simply cannot overstate how bad the'Worf thing' is in reference to this, it only worked in First Contact, where it instead just made DS9 look bad for not really aknowledging the events (I believe a planned explanation to First Contact/battered Defiant was planned but dropped due to its potential to confuse audiences) By the later fims it was just a joke, and made the scenario of each film seem unnatural. Worf should have just stayed in one place, probably never being in DS9, which was strong enough without him

Getting some new dude in could work well if he's writing new characters, unlike what happened with Nemesis, where the new guy managed to sap the life out of the well established characters, hell they should have got Frakes to do Nemesis, it may have allowed some humanity to be present. I think they got spooked by Insurrection and decided that film about a random planet and some TOS-like story was not enough to hold audiences, thus they needed a return to overstated-threat to Earth style plot and get someone totally unfarmiliar to balls it up. I think in retrospect that Insurrection is somewhat underrated and should not be forgotten, it had nice old-school location filming and plot ideas, see it as TNG's 'Final Frontier' as a slice of well spirited Trek true to the show's original intentions. The real thing that really does let these films down however is the 'Oh Hi Worf, nice of you to drop in.' thing which just got ridiculous, the films were a little stifled running alongside the timelines of multiple TV series. New film idea sounds good, if it can create characters whose fates we actually care about, then putting them in the unique position of being killed off at random, this could be difficult, observable in the response to Serenity, those that had loved the series were glued to there seat in shock at the very real sense of vulnerability generated by the unfortunate fate of certain characters, wheras those who had not seen the series were perhaps somewhat indifferent to what happened to who, this shows that even with decent characterisation it is difficult to make people care about characlers that are 90 minutes old. Trek could take some inspiration from Serenity, if a DS9 film had been possible, they could have simply killed off a couple of the characters for effect throughout and the movie would have had bite. A film like this could still work, if maybe an eclectic mix of characters from the 3 24thc series were brought together in a not to exaggerated way, they could just kill characters off and keep us glued to our seat, its not like any of these characters are ever going to be used again for anything anyway.

I think it was reffered to as the 'scant' or something like that. It was one TNG's more overt examples of wanting to suggest that values had changed over the chronological leap since the original series. They ditched it quickly because it looked stupid. One has to admire the boldness but its still pretty lame. I mean, if they'd really wanted to go for it they could have had Picard -or maybe Worf in a dress, this would have been absurd, and shows that the idea was throwaway at best.

Mr Kyle wasn't who I thought he was, who was the recurring helmsman who never really did anything? Anyway, it goes Something like This:

Maybe he had some stolen moments of passion with Mr Kyle when they were both off bridge duty, perhaps they got caught and Kyle was transfered to the U.S.S. Reliant and they became (literraly) star crossed lovers. Maybe Sulu went on to have a secret relationship with the head of Starfleet and threatened to expose him if he didn't give him the Excelsior. It was, after all, a quick succession to Captaincy -and for such a big ship also. And what about the lovely Demora Sulu? Maybe she was born through artificial insemination, or she could have been the first changeling to infiltrate the Alpha Quadrant. Someone should write a trilogy of crappy novels on the subject. Please forgive me.

So what were these disagreements over? I'd love to know.

What about meeting an alternate federation like force at the edge of the Beta Quadrant that believes that the prime directive is utterly callous to the fate and suffering of undeveloped cultures that leads to bitter conflict with the federation with regard to the treatment of less advanced planets in its area of influence. This could create a show with some kind of unsolvable moral uncertainty, it would also be able to present the federation in a questionable moral light without creating a dystopian world of collapse and rebuilding, like Andromeda, which Rodenberry supposedly was set in the distant future of the Trek universe in all but name. This would make any post Federation series a bit confused, Any such show would surely concern a crusade concerning the restoration of traditional moral values, like some of Trek's attempts at a darker tone. A truely insightful look at irreconcilable ideologies of which neither is clearly superior would give Trek the boost it needs.

Would have to go for Seven by default. For some reason Deanna could never affect me, thus appreciate TNG on entirley unsexual level, with a few exceptions, take 'Justice' which was really quite exciting. I mean Beverly was better than Deanna, and even stranger, she became more attractive the more dangerously old she got, especially after she lost her mophead drunk widow look of the first season. Otherwise it would have to be Nova. "DO you love me, I wonder? CAN you love, I wonder? Are you sleeping with the studio boss I wonder?" (Which in fact she was)

The best thing about Videodrome is that the videotapes were Betamax, god rest its compact, still-paused, optional backward playing soul.

How many Russians does it take to change a light bulb? 25 million and 1. 1 to change the bulb, and 25 million to die pointlessly in the attempt.

I hate DVD's, by the time I've inserted the disc, sat through the multi-language copyright warnings and navigated the nonsense menus I've lost interest. I even rip and compress stuff I actually own to avoid this.

Without a doubt he was the lamest character in any Trek series, if he has any asset it is that he makes you re-evaluate Kim and Paris and realise that they weren't that bad, at least they had quirks, paranoias and ideosyncracies. I was always hoping they'd kill him off, it would have been a good way to emphasise the chaos and destruction of the xindi arc, but his funeral would have been awful, no one would have had anything to say or they all would have forgotten his name or something. Bsg/Firefly had more convincing characters by half way through their respective half seasons, Enterprise has had some great moments but allowing for a character as pointlessly useless as this one suggests that maybe the show was built on slightly shakey foundations. But hey, better to have a couple of lame characters and 5 reasonable ones than a few interesting ones and a load of mediocre ones like Voyager did.

The general theme was not a bad idea, the detatched perspective was a good idea for ending a show that's getting cut short, the holodeck idea created a clever sense of historical ambiguity and makes good of the whole prequel idea. It kind of felt like the last episode of the fourth series of Babylon 5 which jumped about time periods and also featured simulated recreations of the characters, but did it all much better. They should have done something like that episode and given it a more omnipotent feel, having gotten all the emotional stuff out of the way in the previous episode. It was a nice touch to set it on the Enterprise-D but maybe they should have just put it on Enterprise-E, and we wouldn't have had that dodgy trying to make people look older or younger business which seems to end most Star Trek series. Trip can act though, as demomstrated in the last two episodes, certainly better than anyone since DS9, he pulled off a chilling, genuine sense of fear when they get accosted by the batty aliens, Trek needs someone like Ron Moore at the helm to actually make good of this, it could be thriving right now.