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Babylon 5: The Road Home (2023)
Loved it
Great to return to the b5 universe. Loved the choice to use animation to return to characters from the show we know and love. Hope this is the first of many new animated adventures in the b5 universe.
Movie was a callback to War Without End. Appreciated the story was new, but still anchored to the past in a way - instead of creating a new time travel/parallel universe story line disconnected from previous stories/lore. Would have loved to have heard some chistopher franke music - felt like a missing presence.
The focus was on Sheridan and story was pretty self contained. Hoping we get future entries that utilize other characters more. Overall - felt like a great first entry and almost refresh or recap of a key storyline in b5. Ready for more warner bros and jms.
Star Trek: Picard: Penance (2022)
Feels Like Badly Written Fan Fiction
The dialogue, plot, and characters - feel like a poorly written fan-fiction. It was a challenge to make it through to the end of this episode. I'd rewatch Sub Rosa 20 times before i'd watch this episode again. The show tries to be dark and gritty - but adds in clunky dialogue, goofy comic relief in tense moments, and frantic action sequences. I find the more they try to make the technology look advanced, shiny etc in these new star treks - the less tangible and real it feels. The relationships and chemistry between characters feel forced - because there's never any real dialogue or character - it's a story that hurdles forward and characters are just plopped into it. Seems like some people like it, so perhaps im just a crab apple. But overall, this episode was a challenge to get through and highly disappointing.
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
Star Trek: Dissapointing
Poor writing and over-the-top production make this is a challenging show to watch. Every episode feels like a Michael Bay or JJ Abrams film - overdone, intense, and lacking strong story and characters. There's so many challenges with this show, I will just summarize:
Little to no character development for anyone not named Burnham - but even Burnham's development is an unpredictable and inconsistent rollercoaster. It's a shame to have so many characters, and do nothing with them consistently. The plot
The season long storylines generally feel long, drawn out, and lacking in payoff. Spattered in-between season long story arcs are episodes that just feel like filler. Season 3 was particularly challenging for this reason - and the final payoff...lets just say that would have been a great episode or maybe a two parter early in the season, allowing the story and characters to move on.
The action sequences are difficult to follow and watch. It just brings flashbacks from trying to watch Transformers.
The Burnham whisper has reached the level of Shatner pauses.
Overall, it feels as if this show was written by a group of high school kids. It's incredibly disappointing that after 3 seasons, they still haven't settled in and improved the writing and flow. Season 3 had a moments that looked promising, for example the episode they visit Trill. But it keeps coming back to the same tropes. What this show needs, is to divert the money away from production and into writing. Take the hint - this style of Star Trek hasn't been successful. Since Nemesis the Trek brand feels like it is ashamed of what it has been, and has unsuccessfully been trying to reinvent its image into something cool and sexy.
Star Trek: Picard (2020)
Great example of awful writing, production, and character development.
This show can be very painful to watch at times. The writers seem to have simply recycled the same plot as season 2 of Discovery - but they just added in borg.
Characters for this show are not developed or well written. Everyone is a caricature of a person. Raffi - no nonesense, says it like it is alcoholic. First time we meet her, we get a classic..."you got a lot of nerve" scene (by classic i mean completely overdone and cliche).
Rios when we meet him, has a random piece of metal in his shoulder and no shirt on. No sign of damage. No mention ever made again. He is docked at Earth - again another cliche. Every time he pops a cigar. Cliche.
Pacing is a terrible mix of slow and too fast. The whole show is building to a big "mystery" one that you already basically wrote in season 2 of discovery. Just a few small changes. There is nothing subtle about the story or development of story - writers spoon feed you everything slowly or just write everything to be so contrived and on the nose. Example. They literally wrote the Rikers a son and killed him off with an incredibly rare disease - just so they could have Deanna say "real isn't always better."
They killed of Hue. That's fine. But with about 2 minutes of screen time what was the point of even having him? I bet they thought they were really clever when they killed him, having Elnor (who represents absolute candour and honesty) square off against the villain (who represents misdirection and manipulation) and oh - he was deceived. Hue dies...in a scene with zero emotional weight because the writers didnt provide us any interactions between Elnor and hue, didnt build up to it at all, and didnt demonstrate how it impacts Elnor.
Sloppy writing. Awful editing and production (looks like a Michael Bay and JJ Abrams love child.
The writers managed to even make Picard himself unenjoyable to watch on screen. The casting and character development is an absolute tragedy. Generally the strength of Trek series is the chemistry between the cast and character driven stories. We have no chemistry and the characters seem to exist only
to advance the plot - which makes them very unenjoyable to watch.
I wish producers would stop giving their incredibly loyal fanbase the middle finger with overproduced and poorly written series.