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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2509654" data-attributes="member: 14159">For the prior utter lack of character and setting development between episodes in TV sci-fi, I'll definitely have to put the blame on Star Trek, but only because Star Trek was never designed back in the 60's to really tell an ongoing story, it was meant to be a pseudo-anthology."The Making of Star Trek", a very fascinating book in that it was made during the 2nd season of the show as a guide to writers wanting to break in to the industry, has a lot of production notes and very candid statements from the production staff of original Star Trek, the sorts of honest things that are now glossed over.One was the fact that before Star Trek, TV science fiction was always an anthology.  You had the Twilight Zone as the peak of sci-fi, and the Outer Limits as well was also sci-fi.  You might have some old serial or giant monster/alien invasion movie on TV occasionally, maybe, but there was no real setting or character development there.  Anthologies were expensive though, since you had to start from scratch every week.Star Trek started out as just an anthology, a show that would depict a different Earth-like world and it's problems and stories every week, with a framing device of a Starship that goes from planet to planet visiting. That way, you save money with a regular cast, and standing sets, and making all the planets Earthlike means you can go to stock props and costumes as often as possible (Miri, Piece of the Action, City on the Edge of Forever being most notable like this).  That's also why there were so many inconsistencies about Earth history and things like who operated the Enterprise (Space Central, Space Command and United Earth Space Probe Agency were mentioned on screen before Starfleet Command became accepted), or what the current year was (the original writers guide just said "in the future" and refused to set a year), they thought it would never come up, the show was about the planet.  Later in the show, these things started to become more relevant, so they started to nail things down a little.However, the shows that came afterwards followed strongly in Trek's mold, a new planet/adventure every week, with the show being a pseudo-anthology of visiting new worlds or some strange quirky adventure.  The later trek series (except DS9, and it did it sometimes too) were just like that, so was 70's BSG, Buck Rogers, and generally all TV Sci-Fi until the 90's.Within the mainstream of TV Sci-Fi, Babylon 5 started to break the mold by having a predefined plot arc and significant character development and setting changes.  DS9 tried that too, but it was too different from trek for many trekkies.  Too many trekkies bought into the promotional/public relations mantra of "Trek is popular because it presents a positive future", when it was the first even somewhat seriously written, halfway decent TV Sci-Fi ever done with recurring characters and setting.  It had a lot of flaws, but it was still a long stretch from anything before it.New BSG has utterly shattered the mold, in many ways being utterly unlike original BSG in tone.  Each episode having major character developments, setting changes, characters with major flaws, and a vast rarity of Earthlike worlds so the cop-out of "here's a new planet, let's go down there and adventure" isn't there, so far after a season and a quarter, they've only found Kobol, which was always part of their mythos.  Old BSG was happy & cheerful, the 12 colonies are destroyed, so the Galactica and the fleet immediately goes to a Disco Casino Planet, and visits a long series of planets having adventures there with the local humans who just happen to live there with the Cylons trailing behind them (the Wild West planet, the Neo-Facist planet, the Ice Planet, and so on).  It was about Apollo and Starbuck as larger than life heroes saving the day.  Old Starbuck was James T. Kirk as a starfighter pilot, and the arrogance and womanizing we see as disadvantages now were played as strengths then.  Even as a kid I thought it was weird that they fled their homeworlds as almost all the human race is extinct, and a huge fleet is chasing them, but they always have time to stop on some tiny planet and help some nice farm family with a nasty local villain, or their biggest worry is making it back from the battle in time to play in the sports championship that night.  I was watching reruns as a kid and thinking it was unrealistic.New BSG, as well as B5, 4400 and other Sci-Fi TV shows of our decade have finally begun to step out from Trek's shadow and move away from the standard model it established almost 40 years ago.  Interestingly enough, Enterprise, which was generally just a continuation of that same model, was cancelled.  I wonder if audience's tastes are changing to really prefer continuing stories over episodic TV in TV Sci-Fi.</blockquote>

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