Oddly enough I loved the first season. The creepy aliens in their spider ships were great and the first season had a real air of mystery about it. The following seasons dwelt too much, in my opinion, on dreary political conspiracies, etc.
I guess I’m just an unredeemed space opera fanatic at heart.
Also comes up in The Ultimate Computer and Bread and Circuses—the last one was pretty egregious, IMHO. (Unless you choose to read it really cynically, in which case it might be anti-religious, but that’s probably not what was intended originally)
I do try and give it a little slack, though. It was a different time.
Latecomer here, to agree with the aforementioned comments re: how Season 1 tends to drag with exposition and contain a lot of expendable episodes (some of them to a degree being there to make a *“See? We’re NOT like STTNG!” *point a bit too hard). It gets better (but it still has some clunkers in the peak seasons as well).
And yes, JMS should have been done with it when he was done with it. The follow-ups have tended to be weak.
On the hijack re: wanting to see a “woo woo”-free SF show, well, there’s woo-woo and there’s woo-woo.
Let’s start with the religion/spiritual kind of “woo woo”. Well, on the one hand, as Clarke said, sufficiently advanced science is the practical equivalent of magic, so a lot of what is woowooish to us could be given a non-supernatural explanation. But on the other hand, “humanity has evolved beyond religion” could come across looking as much a creator’s-pet-peeve propaganda point as was STTNG’s “humanity has evolved beyond monetary economics” to a current-time audience. As far as we can tell, there is something to the wiring of the human mind that craves some sort of systematic ordering of the relations of the components of the universe, something that ties it all togeter – “tying together” being the meaning of the root word for the Latin religio. You could posit an abandonment of supernaturalist capital-R Religion as we know it, but you would likely end up telling stories about people who embrace philosophies and ideologies as overarching life-guides (and even Objectivists fell into the personality-cult trap around Rand)(also note: in later Trek, it’s basically SOME of the humans who have given up religions. Chakotay still keeps his, and the Klingons and Vulcans have essentially built up cults, even if the Vulcans would deny it, around Honor and Logic).
On oversused SF woo-woo, well, there’s two aspects of that. One is, that once you get interstellar flight we already are positing a universe that defies our known laws of physics; so again, “soul recorders” and Psi Corps could be technological/genetic advancements. The other is the overuse and degradation of some of those devices such as Psi, Time Travel or parallel evolution. THAT is squarely upon the writers’ shoulders, and there is no reason why dismiss out of hand any application of those tropes, unless indeed the writer falls into the known traps.
A good time for a good Firefly quote:
“Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.”
“We live in a spaceship, dear.”
With the exception of In the Beginning, which tells the story of the Earth-Mimbar war. Wait until after Season 3 to watch it, though, as there are some spoilers otherwise.
Pet peeve, but it’s spelled Minbari with an N, not an M.
Thinking more along the lines of any Trek from TNG onwards.
-Joe