Firefly bores me...

[jester47]

I can't stand star trek post TNG. TOS was in my mind the best. I really hate the future utopia sociological crap that gets put up there now. What TNG called a moral delima was nothing compared to what Kirk and Spock had to deal with. The technology that bones had was good but it couldn't fix everything. That was cool. The Borg is an almost direct rip off of the Cybermen. I am surprised that they did not rip off the Daleks. Perhaps they did and I just didn't see it. TOS was cool. TNG was cute. The only thing cool about TNG was picard, and somtimes data. B5 would be cool if it was not CG and cardboard sets. It just looked really fake to me.

Firefly kicks that touchy feely liberal utopia into the engine.

I really don't understand why all the sci-fi has to have that "star trek crap" as Lister calls it. DS9 got better, but not enough.

Red Dwarf, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, The New Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, these are sci-fi

A.

 

[Rackhir]

What's with the hate on squeaky-clean Star Trek? Are we that cynical that there is no such thing as utopia these days, or at least try to think about it?

Or they lack Rimmer?

This is a whole nother thread just in and of it's self. If you REALLY want to get into this, I'd just start a new thread.

The Borg is an almost direct rip off of the Cybermen. I am surprised that they did not rip off the Daleks.

I always thought they were a rippoff of Captain Power and the soldiers of the Future. They also had a lot of equipment hanging off them for no good reason.

 

[Nellisir]

Hm. I'm just the opposite. I personally find modern colloquialisms to be dreadfully annoying in my far-future sci-fi. I can accept that the basic language needs to be the same for me to understand it, but I would prefer there be some coloring to make it clear that it isnt' exactly the same time.

What counts as a swear says a great deal about the culture. If it's a different time, it should be a different culture, and thus different foul language.

One of the great things, IMO, about Farscape were the English idioms that were creeping into the aliens' language. It slowly escalated over the seasons, and was clearly deliberate.
Cheers
Nell.

 

[Umbran]

One of the great things, IMO, about Farscape were the English idioms that were creeping into the aliens' language. It slowly escalated over the seasons, and was clearly deliberate.

Yes, and it was a two-way street, as the human certainly picked up the alien idiom quickly enough. In this case, at least, the contemporary idiom had a reasonable source - a contemporary man. If Chriton had not come from today's Earth, it would have annoyed the heck out of me.

 

[Mallus]

Red Dwarf, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, The New Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, these are sci-fi

How, exactly, are you defining sci-fi?

Red Dwarf was a parody of SF (albeit a great one that occassionally did SF better than supposdely serious shows).

Cowboy Bebop was arguably more more about music and French New-Wave cinema's take on American film-noir than traditional SF themes... but it did a good job creating a hodge-podge post-William Gibson SF universe...

Firefly is SF only because it takes place in space. It couldn't care less about any of the major SF themes. If its about anything, its an examination of several stock adventure fiction characters re-imagined as actual human beings...

New Galactica looks good. And its about 4 hours long in the States, so I'm not entirely sure what its about yet. But it is probably SF...

Dr. Who was on for how many years? Sure its SF, and just about everything else...

 

[jester47]

How, exactly, are you defining sci-fi?

Red Dwarf was a parody of SF (albeit a great one that occassionally did SF better than supposdely serious shows).

Cowboy Bebop was arguably more more about music and French New-Wave cinema's take on American film-noir than traditional SF themes... but it did a good job creating a hodge-podge post-William Gibson SF universe...

Firefly is SF only because it takes place in space. It couldn't care less about any of the major SF themes. If its about anything, its an examination of several stock adventure fiction characters re-imagined as actual human beings...

New Galactica looks good. And its about 4 hours long in the States, so I'm not entirely sure what its about yet. But it is probably SF...

Dr. Who was on for how many years? Sure its SF, and just about everything else...

You know, I don't think I ever really finished that sentence... Now I am having the devil of a time remembering what my thought was when I wrote that...

Hrm. Well, I will just say that I meant: --List of shows-- are sci-fi shows that are not so annoyingly optimistic about humanity, and as a result come off as more interesting.

I find "Hard" sci fi to be very boring. I find space adventure (cowboy bebop, Firefly) and space fantasy (Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica) to be much more interesting.

Aaron

 

[Beretta]

An excellent show. It's airing in Australia now (didn't think it would make it since it was cancelled; considering the fact that it's on at 12am I guess it may as well not have).

Watched the DVDs in one sitting - and I'm glad I did. A good dose of humour, action and character development. It's a bloody shame that it got cancelled, and I'm very much hoping that it gets box office success so that more tv series are made.

As for Sci-Fi/Westerns - not huge on either. The only Star Trek I watched was the original. Didn't watch B5, Farscape etc.

But this show struck a chord with me. It was like a book where I wanted to see what happens next. I wanted to know more about the characters. Particularly the Shepard after the encounter with the bounty hunter in the last episode. I knew there was something about him from the beginning, and was waiting for the other shoe to drop throughout the entire thing. I was pretty steamed that I might not find out what was going on there when the final episode finished.

I think the best thing about Firefly was that they were more concerned with themselves and their survival over any moralistic b/s (mostly - train robbery the exception). If you crossed them you got kicked into an engine intake, potentially ejected from an airlock etc. It had a 'dark' undercurrent which came off almost like anti-heroism. It was a refreshing change of pace from the usual Good Guys vs Bad Guys that seems to run at the core of most other tv shows.

 

[Umbran]

I find "Hard" sci fi to be very boring.

I have a hard time tinking of even a single TV series that could really be classified as hard sci-fi. The problemwith the hard stuff is that it's a pain to write, in that you really need someone checking your science.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

Mark me down as one big "meh."

You a masochist Joe? Bashing Firefly amon geeks like us? You must want to be flamed and told you're wrong.

 

[WizarDru]

I have a hard time tinking of even a single TV series that could really be classified as hard sci-fi. The problemwith the hard stuff is that it's a pain to write, in that you really need someone checking your science.

I can think of one (but only one): the BBC's much-overlooked and throughly excellent StarCops, one of the few series that actually seemed to understand the ramifications of technology, and showed a logical progression. The main characters handheld device "Box" was highly predictive of PDA/cell-phone convergence devices. Not bad for 1987.

Overall, though, most shows cover their butts by setting show far enough in the future that they can claim super-science, and let it slide. Babylon 5 tried to stay reasonably close to real-world physics and science, with a few noticable exceptions (such as Psionics). Generally, 'Hard' SF is extremely hard to do, and even harder to make interesting to non-wireheads.