Best Sci Fi on the Telly

Hi there,

Another day another meme and this time it's scifi shows on the telly ... Bit of a late post because I've been catching up after going in to Motorsport Manager again for a little while tonight !

I'm pretty sure I've done this one before not all that long ago but even though it's an older meme it still checks out. No Star Wars in here though because a) haven't seen The Mandalorian and b) other scifi is just better ... Although the Clone Wars animations were actually pretty good.

So - Top 10 in no particular order except for how they pop out of my brain.

Firefly ! It had far too short a run and was ended well before its time. There were many more stories to come from the universe of Firefly as well as Serenity and her crew. It was fun, tense, interesting, emotional and you never really knew what was coming. It didn't always go the way of the crew although they usually found a way to come out on top.

Next up is Doctor Who. This has been a highlight for pretty much all of my life and a fair few people in the UK would say that as well. At least those who watch the show. It's perhaps suffering from script fatigue again but apart from rolling out the old enemies time and again, there's usually some handy variation in each series. Enemies like the Family Of Blood, the Mummy Child, the stories where the Doctor and People have to recover an impossibly lost situation.

They're still doing ok with it.

Star Trek is another I grew up with and the choice here will be incredibly divisive : STAR TREK DISCOVERY ! There. I said it. Best Star Trek ever. HA ! The various other series had their highlights but they also had inconsistencies and just plain filler. DS9 had the best arc ... hid it behind Ferengi filler. ST:TNG mostly predated story arcs. Voyager ... best of the rest. TOS was also incredibly inconsistent. Enterprise was messed about with too much. Picard is ... good but feels stretched and is just going over old well trodden story arc ideas. Discovery is just better.

Why Discovery ? Because season 1 was a masterpiece in setting up story arcs early and with immensely impressive subtlety. There were things set up in the early episodes that didn't pay off until right near the end of the series. It was interesting, mysterious and extremely well made. Season 2 wasn't as strong but Captain Pike played by Anson Mount was a huge, huge highlight.

Wait. Wrong Gene Roddenberry invention.

Next up is the universe of Gerry Anderson and I'm going to go to Captain Scarlet here. Why that one ? Because you never knew what was going to happen in that series. Usually the main characters win. Not in Captain Scarlet, sometimes the Mysterons would win. And the various series were very well made too, in their own style. It's a shame Space 1999 didn't get the scripts but UFO was a fun one too. Thunderbirds managed to inject far more drama into a puppet show than anyone would have thought possible.

I really enjoyed Farscape too. If a series ends its run with you jumping out of your chair and shouting NOOOO at the telly, it's done something right over its run. I'd never done that before or since. It's the story of an astronaut who is flung through a wormhole into far off unknown space and then brought on board a ship full of escaping mismatched convicts. Will he survive ? Will he find his way home ? This is also the series that introduced the amazing Claudia Black.

The list that inspired this has The Prisoner on it. A favourite choice of a fair few. I watched this a while ago and was wondering what was going on with it. It challenged so much around its time. Possibly too clever for its own good but very well made and the questions it asked are still relevant today. Perhaps even more so in this time of plague and isolation.


Battlestar Galactica old series. Yes. This was daft and silly. But it also had drama mixed in with the fun. Especially original Starbuck. This was probably the first attempt at doing a long running plan for a series. So much of the special effects were reused, over and over again. Didn't matter. The modelling worked great.

Popping in a Blakes 7 too. This was made in the days when BBC were still getting away with actually being a bit subversive.

I loved the ship, the Liberator, partly for its just plain silliness in how it looked. The design appeared in games too later. When it originally came out in 1978, I was definitely probably too young to really understand what was going on with this series. But I loved it and it almost certainly set me along the path to happy scifi addiction.

Last one to write (cheated a bit with B5!) about is The Expanse. This one is set in a reasonably distant future where humanity has spread throughout the solar system. There is no Space Magic, outside of the mysterious stuff from forerunner species. It's a series about the people again. I did like the character of Miller and I especially identify with the pilot, Alex Kamal, probably because that's the part I'd see myself playing in that universe.

I've read up to book 8 and watched the first 4 series. The telly version is probably better than the books, because it's cleaned up some of the messier aspects of some books that were probably too drawn out. On the other hand, the books get a chance to breathe more with a timeline that lets the story have a chance to tell itself. I'd thoroughly recommend watching the books and reading the series. Or is it the other way around. I'll be reading the books again after the series is complete.

But the last and best in its time has to be Babylon 5.

Not just for the 5 year story arc that introduced a new universe, built the scenarios and then exploded into a most spectacular epic. No, the big strength of Babylon 5 was in the characters. The interplay between Sinclair and Garibaldi. Pretty much everything Garibaldi did. And G'Kar. Humble Zack and Dr Franklin. I'm mentioning all those who were played by actors who are lost to us now but the rest of the cast were amazing too. Like Sheridan and Delenn. Ivanova is a legend, Lennier was as tragic in his own way as Londo. And there has been no character more alien than the enigmatic Kosh. All of them.

Babylon 5 will be my favourite for quite some time just because of those characters and how they amplified how good the story was. It looked incredible for its time as well. Work of genius.

Other mentions to :
Stargate - Atlantis. Not SG-1 because O'Neill is actually kind of a scumbag in that series overall. Universe was curious but was infected by the grimdark scifi trend.
The Mandalorian is supposed to be amazing. But I'm not intending to sign up to the Baby Yoda Channel to watch it.
Battlestar Galactica new series. No. It gets most of its core ideas from the 1978 series. Its thing was to expand upon that but ... it started up the grimdark phase of scifi which I was most definitely NOT a fan of. It also spectacularly lost its plot after New Caprica and the writing massively suffered after that.
Dark Matter was one I was massively enjoying ... but it also got cut off before it really kicked off. Perhaps they took too much time to get to that point. Perhaps it would have been worth it.
Ulysses 31 - an animated series that was doing the long series arc even before Babylon 5 brought that in ... Need to watch this again. Actually, most of the animated series were doing the long arcs before they came to normal telly.
Space Above And Beyond - I was immediately caught in this one from the very nicely done pilot. However, it was another one that didn't get the chance to tell its story.
Defying Gravity - again, lovely setup but stopped too early.

That's it for me ! Sleep well, be safe and ...

Nite !