Recently watched Episodes of TELEVISION BOX offerings!

[Aeolus]

On top of Babble-on Five, I've been watching Space:1999 as of late.

I might actually like this show if apparently somebody hadn't etched "Kick Me" on the back of Moon Base Alpha because every fucking episode is the crew happening upon one huckster, space gangster, psychic atomic eating mutant, brain eating shapeshifter, ruthless botanic dictatorship, homicidal space ship, et all; after another.

At least its a far cry better than any version of Lost in Space or Star Trek Voyager in this regard.

Also occasionally popping in on Buck Rogers of the 25th Century.

Apparently, in the future, nobody reads, the fashion apocalypse has occurred, and all problems can be solved by a mildly chauvinistic middle aged white 20th century guy, his pet Porky Pig-bot, and good friend Professor Simon Speak & Spell.

[Arvis]

Have I mentioned that I'm caught up on Dragon Ball Z: Abridged?

[Hathen]

Been watching Babylon 5. I've never actually finished this show, but I decided to start from the beginning regardless. The first season of this show is pretty bad, but then this is true for a ton of space opera- a lot of these shows just spend their first ~20 episodes figuring out their identity, so what ends up happening is that you have a lot of episodes that feel either super pulpy or are basically Trek-lite. Farscape got Scorpy, TNG got Michael Piller and Babylon 5 will get its hyper political plot. I will say that out of these shows, Babylon 5 probably has the most interesting S1 in the sense that you can already spot JMS planting seeds of what he wants the show to be within the first few episodes (Garibaldi's reading a newspaper with an article about the Psy Corps influencing politics in one short shot, for instance).

Speaking of finding direction, I watched the season 2 premier of Star Trek Discovery. It looks like the intent is to turn the show more "Trekish" this season, but otherwise there's basically nothing to say about the episode. It's pretty much just them getting all the pieces in place. Will report back once I watch more.

Also watched S3 of Young Justice despite never having watched the other 2. From what I understand of the show, they definitely are enjoying the greater freedom they have from being on a streaming service, because there's some uh...pretty graphic scenes in this show you wouldn't normally see in an animated series.

[Aeolus]

Yeah, the front end of B5 can be a large turn off if you come at it wrong. Its what happened to me when the show was first broadcasting (that, and I knew that it being serialized meant that if I started missing episodes, it was going to be damn near impossible for me to follow correctly, and I was going to miss episodes due to having activities beyond school, homework and videogames in those days, especially since this was airing back in the dark days prior to the Internet/Youtube/Streaming and I was too young to operate a VCR or have disposable VHS Tapes on hand to make up the difference; I wasn't going to start taping shows I've missed until the late 90s).

Meanwhile The Orville continues to be Star Trek in lieu of Star Trek. Latest episode was a First Contact scenario, and while the Xenophobia was rather heavy handed, it was amusing watching the crew explore this strange new world and being completely bored/unimpressed by its technical/cultural achievements (normally Sci-Fi treats trips to lesser worlds like a trip to a museum or a case study of human history, rather than "Hi. We're your new neighbors. Sorry we're such a disappointment to you, but you're not exactly winning any awards for 'chosen' species either.").

[Hathen]

I still haven't finished The Orville S1 (I think I got through most of it though). It's definitely something I intend to get back to, despite a multitude of problems I have with the show. Just like Discovery I expect them to tweak the show over time though, and hopefully Seth himself takes less writing credits because I just don't think he's a particularly good writer, and Trek type stories pretty much live and die by the script.

Meanwhile, I saw Episode 2 of Discovery S2. Funny you mention how un-Treklike Discovery is, because if this is an indication of what's to come, it's a confirmation of what episode 1 was suggesting, that they're stepping back into a Trek-style episodic show with a subplot throughline connecting it all. To be honest this to me is both a good and bad thing; I think we've talked about in the past how one of the problems with some of the Trek shows is that they became to complacent in its formula (TNG being new-TOS for its initial seasons and DS9/VOY both being very TNG-like in their early days). Sticking with that can work, but obviously with the same core group of people running the show for like a decade and a half (Berman, Barga, Taylor, and even Piller) the stories eventually got tired or unwatchable. To be fair The Orville did have a handful of episodes that I think did the formula quite well, updated for modern topics (The sex-change baby one was decent, and the social media one was pretty good if you overlook how the entire problem was caused by how idiotic LaMar was acting), so maybe all it takes is some new eyes at the formula.

Anyway this episode was just banal Trek stuff done a million times. It was about a splintered group of humans who are mysteriously in the Beta Quadrant (Discovery can still mushroom-teleport everywhere, angering canon nerds everywhere), and the mystery itself is actually never solved, because that's the subplot of this season. The suggestion by the episode is that there's some kind of God-like space entity doing this, so I guess that's classic Trek stuff, but it does kinda hurt the episode's own standalone mystery. The rest of the episode was basically Prime Directive stuff that's been debated about 12 dozen times throughout Trek, with nothing really new to show for it this time. At least it wasn't at fucking stupid as Enterprise's Prime Directive episode though (Dear Doctor), or even some of Voyager's Prime Directive episodes (like Time and Again) because the Discovery crew isn't a bunch of genocidal maniacs.