Some sci-fi comes and goes before it barely has a chance to begin... less than two years ago, or thereabouts there were three sci-fi shows launched on mainstream networks...

Threshold - A team implement an elaborate contingency plan to prevent the bioforming of our planet by an alien race sufficiently advanced to travel interstellar distances, master dimensions out with the regular three and to be able to "hack" our DNA with sound... yet too damned stupid to target their big shiny thing at a major population centre...

Invasion - Invasion of the body snatchers... in Florida but with all the speed and urgency of a glacier...

And Surface - Strange goings on below the seas as a new species is discovered and bad things start to happen.

Invasion was the only one of these to actually get a full season. Surface got left on a pretty major cliffhanger and Threshold didn't even manage to air all of its half season. Threshold is perhaps understandable... it was a generic production from the addled brain of beloathed Trek producer Brannon Braga. About the only thing it had going for it was Brent Spiner and even he didn't see terribly interested in what was going on. You could pretty much have made this any kind of secret cover up show and it wouldn't have made a difference and of course, there was never really any sense of progress and naturally all the clichés were trotted out. Overbearing military, people escaping and so on and so forth. Not that the idea was without merit... it was simply badly implemented in an entirely banal way... so, no surprise it crashed and burned.

Invasion was more of a slow burner. Gradual infiltration of the town... and even the people who got body snatched didn't seem to sure they weren't human any more. Still, it had a building tension in it... clearly enough to keep some people hanging around, certainly more than the other two. Really though, it focused a lot more on the personal drama than the OMG ALIENS, aspect of the story

Surface was the most interesting - kind of a proto-Heroes, actually - and presented several disparate threads that came together. A mystery that began to unfold, some good action... but nothing unrealistic or at least... not jarringly so. The characters were all understandable and true. It would be fair to say that they were quite realistic and not quite from the regular cookie cutter of sci-fi characters... we didn't have any main characters from the military or ex-military running around like Rambo... I guess we DID have the hot scientist but c'est la vie... if a scientist is female it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE for her not to be hot. Still, it presented the most intriguing multi-threaded story of the three... and yet cut down in its prime.

Naturally, had any of these had "Star Trek" in their titles, they'd have been allowed 3-4 years of rubbish episodes before fans started to get weary of them... Threshold... deserved the axe. Invasion had the potential to be interesting even if it wasn't exactly rip roaring fun... Surface is possibly the greatest loss, it had threaded together a multi-faceted stories and we had just had the mother of all cliffhangers...

Sequels are - without question - a tricky business. The easiest way to fail is to simply rehash or try and out do the original... but then it's equally difficult to succeed by making something different because you risk losing the elements of the original that made it so good. So, the fact that "28 Weeks Later" managed to - despite some pretty horrible trailers - pull it off is impressive.

Perhaps the best analogy would be to say that "28 days later" is to "Alien" what "28 Weeks Later" is to "Aliens". That is to say, "28 Days Later" relies more upon suspense and atmosphere, whereas its sequel is more about a fairly non-stop action rampage. Although, that said the opening sequence is clearly an homage to Danny Boyle and the original - in both directing style and tone.

It would have been easy for this to simply be a simple - RAGE GETS LOOSE AGAIN! There was an element of that... well, it would be a pretty pointless exercise in film making if they didn't have people running around murdering and puking and such. The way in which infection recurs is... something of a stretch but then, there are plenty of stupid people in the world. Still, you'd think that their containment procedure would be somewhat more refined given the highly communicable nature of the disease.

You won't be surprised to hear that this plays into the hands of the virus and soon the American military is making friendly fire seem like the euphemism it is. It managed to be good though - it was its own film - never apologised... For the best... not as good as the original but still good.

Star Trek is often seen as being about an inherently optimistic future... but no one seems to have noticed that The Federation seems to be some manner of inherently undemocratic organisation.

It seems that the Federation Council is some monolithic and detached government run by people in ivory towers. Willing to agree to such monumentally unpopular ideas as the DMZ after the Cardassian war which resulted in dozens of worlds being on the wrong side of the border. When Picard goes to protest the seemingly arbritrary relocation of native Americans (IN SPACE!) he's pretty much told "the Federation Council says we're doing this" and it hardly sounds as if the people were taking it lying down either.

Not to say that this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life - doubtless any sufficiently informed person could rattle off a dozen things which have gone against the collective will of the people... but these things can often be appealed and protested. Here the impression was given that the big boys had decided what was happening and everyone else just had to take it. It seems fairly obvious the move wasn't popular as the formation of the Maquis suggests.

In fact, there is perhaps no greater demonstration that the democratic process has failed to accommodate people satisfactorily than said people taking up arms... and the Maquis seemed to enjoy widespread support throughout all the worlds in and around the DMZ. While it seems likely that they were wiped out by the Dominion... the fact that people in a time so apparently enlightened resorted to such methods - and enjoyed support and even defection from more than a few high ranking starfleet officers - speaks volumes about the Federation that are never spelt out.

Perhaps this is all made rather more strange by the fact that Earth seems to be some kind of veritable paradise - and in fact, is described in just that way in DS9 - whereas the colonies are generally shown as pretty poorly developed... Not that we really get a very good idea of how things are in the Federation... still, it seems that the Federation Council pretty much runs the show... and we've never really heard talk about elections or anything like that. It seems that the Federation is run more by some people deciding what's best for everyone more than anything - although, this would hardly be the first time that accusations of communism had been levelled at the show.

It simply seems ironic that a programme which supposedly espouses such an optimistic and bright future seems so utterly devoid of the trappings of democracy - or indeed anything other than some form of benign oligarchy. That couple with the fact that the Federation has had a rather troubled history - war and conflict with pretty much all their neighbours... many more than once - and the problems of discrimination that we've seen - Data was going to be dismantled because he was initially considered property rather than a person, Doctor Bashir risked expulsion from Starfleet simply because his parents had him genetically augmented and The Doctor on Voyager was ostensibly treated as a second class citizen because he was a hologram... and he was the lucky one, the copies in the Alpha Quadrant got stuck working in mines. Taken as a whole, the Federation hardly seems like some kind of utopian ideal it's often portray was as - in fact, in some aspects it seems worse than contemporary Western society.

Science fiction has an unfortunate habit... it likes to put humanity on a pedestal. Somehow, we're just this awesomely wonderful race. Special and wonderful and just lovely. What does it mean?

Basically - humanity isn't much. People think that humanity is the greatest thing ever. Destined to heal the universe, ascend to a higher plane and so and so forth. Even Babylon 5 thought that humans were pretty amazing... despite our lack of comparative technological advancement. Not that it really spelt out all that much.

Unlike Star Trek - which went "Oh by the way, Humans are pretty much awesome and will become omnipotent!" and SG-1, which said "Humans are descended from omnipotent beings!" Hell, Star Trek had the stupidest episode ever where an act of immense stupidity - wilful exposure to a deadly virus - was expounded to make humans somehow special... especially stupid, I'd say.

Farscape was better. It liked to point out that humanity was - of the species shown - the shortest lived, the least resilient... just generally not that great. Which is somewhat ironic given the fact that 99% of races in Star Trek lived easily twice as long as Humans. Men in Black also playfully poked fun.

Dr. Who seems to be uncertain - at times, The Doctor is keen on humanity. Lauding humanity for going off and exploring, then going off about how humanity are "the monsters"... Still, given the focus of the show - especially as it is now - he pretty much has to be enamoured with humans... or the show wouldn't work.

Also, human morality - that is to say Judeo-Christian flag waving, truth, justice and the American Way morality - is the best in the universe and superior to all. Realism isn't an object, eh?

Stargate has become... in many ways the Star Trek of the 2000s... that is to say, a long running show that has spawned sequels... The little known Stargate: Infinity and the better known Stargate: Atlantis... which is to be discussed herein.

Atlantis was... an opportunity for Stargate. The opportunity was to put in a new set of characters, a different enemy and just make for something beyond the general "village on planet P3whatever" format that Stargate had built itself up on.

They did at least manage to escape the mythology aspect... but then, that was one of SG-1's strengths. Even if it got somewhat forgotten toward the end - what with people pretending to be gods being replaced with beings who actually were gods... more or less. Nope the "big bad" for Atlantis was to be diabolical SPACE VAMPIRES!

Who have pretty much disappeared since we found out about Replicators 2.0... and of course, that's in between all the RANDOM VILLAGE and RANDOM PLANET episodes that don't really have much to do with anything... perhaps the most embarrassing thing is that we have a cast that now closely resembles the SG-1 cast, the quipping commander, the science person, the strong and silent guy and the person who knows the cultures and stuff.

Rodney is probably the only truly original character, given that he got his start on SG-1... as kind of an anti-Carter. Weir also got her start on SG-1 (though played by a different actress)... but she seems to serve no real purpose. On paper, she'd seem like an equivalent to General Hammond but in reality she is far, far more irritating and possibly the worst negotiator ever. It feels as if she was put in charge of Atlantis for the sole reason of having a "strong" woman in charge and to create that ever tiresome military/civilian conflict. As it is, all she does is moan on in an irrating fashion - presumably because the writers haven't a clue what to do with her.

The Wraith also became the most quickly nerfed race ever. In the first season... they could take entire clips to take down but by the seasons two, they're going down if you look at them funny
they'd die... and then they became pretty thin on the ground once we discovered there were Replicators in the Pegasus galaxy. Of course, these Replicators are - how handy for the budget! - never evil mechano. Nope, they're just people. They're not very good Replicators!

So, only three seasons in and the show is already pretty much SG-1 - even to the point of having the same baddies... rather embarrassing that it can't stand on its own merits. Sure, the Wraith weren't exactly great but there was potential there but as soon as their civil war started, that was them consigned to the dustbin and now it seems we must dine on Replicators for breakfast lunch and dinner. They were the mid-season cliffhanger AND involved in the season finale cliffhanger. It seems to only prove that the creative team of Stargate has totally stagnated. They can provide you 40 minutes of sci-fi related life wasting but it's never really more than that.

Enterprise - the only post TOS show to get less than seven seasons...

It's been almost exactly two years since this ill fated show departed the small screen forever - managing to surpass DS9 effortlessly for worst finale ever - and it's not really surprising that it didn't last long. Much as with Voyager, it was a concept that was not beyond redemption. In fact, it could probably have been done rather well if any thought or coherence had been lent to the idea.

Naturally, it wasn't though and so even the hopelessly loyal Star Trek fans who swore death before dishonour switched off in their droves - not that the omission of the words "Star" and "Trek" from the title, for a substantial amount of time helped - and by the time Manny Cotto was given creative control over the still warm corpses of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, it was too late.

The show was a step back, both literally and figuratively. By the end of Voyager many fans were starting to feel that there wasn't much to do... TOS and TNG had done the Alpha and Beta Quadrant, DS9 did the Gamma and Voyager did the Delta - which really wasn't the case given that little of the Gamma Quadrant was explored and despite Janeway's deranged detours because of the several big jumpers

Enterprise was clearly conceived to get back to that spirit of exploration that TOS and early TNG had captured and which had so clearly been lost, so much so that in Star Trek: Insurrection Picard even comments "Can anyone remember when we used to be explorers?" Not just that but to have that... Old West sensibility that could sometimes be felt in TOS, people on a frontier... and of course, to dramatically cut the amount of treknobabble.

You can tell that they wanted to send a message that there'd be less treknobabble when in the first episode, Archer is confronted with the phrase "Temporal Cold War" and doesn't understand it. Ironically, the Temporal Cold War would go on to be one of the more problematic elements of this troubled show - a case in point that storylines should be planned out and not just made up as and when it's required.

The main flaws with the show were really more general... its place in continuity, the characters and the plot...

Its place in continuity is rather precarious... Shortly before the formation of the Federation and a couple of generations before Kirk would take the helm. You'd think THE first Captain of a big fancy ship who goes out, does some exploring and saves Earth a few times would be as big a legend as Kirk... oops. Then of course you have the fact that many species introduced in Enterprise - Denobulans - are never seen or heard of again... which makes the already overpopulated Trekverse even more so. Then of course, there was the fact that instead of the Earth/Romulan war we got the Earth/Xindi war... if you could CALL it a war. More like a quest... a pretty dull quest.

Next we have the characters... initially we were promised characters who were "rough around the edges". To be honest, there was no real reason for that... NASA crews aren't rough around the edges... it's not hard to get a ship to be crewed by professionals, after all. As it was - they were all bland... Phloxx was happy and easy going, T'Pol wore a jumpsuit and was stuck up... Archer shouted "REPORT!" a lot and generally taking the moral high horse only when it suited him and the rest just blended together. This was an obvious mistake... TNG could sometimes pull off what wasn't really that great an episode because of the strength of characters... and even in Voyager you could at least relate to the fact Janeway was a crazy bitch or that Tom Paris was irritating.

The plot was problematic - in that it hadn't really been thought through. You'd think that if you were doing a prequel, you'd want it to fit in with the existing stuff... and hence, plan carefully but no... we got a lot of dull episodes. Enterprise was a good chance to establish more precisely how the Trek universe ticked and how the Federation came to be... they ran so low on ideas, they had to have a Borg episode. Then there was mess of the Temporal Cold War... which never really felt it was going anywhere... and of course, the Xindi War... which admittedly had its moments but was problematic in that Archer seemed fairly capable of just switching off his morals - most likely making him an ancestor of Janeway.

The potential for success was there but they made a real fudge of things. The technology was too advance - transporters? Grav plating? And so on. Sure, it wasn't the button pushing ease of Voyager but it still felt better than TOS and that was always going to be a problem. They also totally failed to instil any sense of awe or wonder. It was pretty much the regular "what's going to happen at this planet"? And so on and it all came at a time when Trek couldn't afford such mistakes. The new film looks set to be readying itself to not learn from history.

Sci-fi gets to its most embarrassing when it pretends to have an actual basis in fact.

It's often notable that the best sci-fi steers itself clear of any real talk of science... Heroes doesn't have people trying to explain the superpowers - people express amazement that they violate the laws of physics with such ease but no one ever starts using big made up words to try and explain it. Neither did Farscape or Babylon 5... and Battlestar Galatica hasn't either. BSG never really tries to explain anything. Hell, they had an episode where their never explained FTL drive got broke and all that was involved in fixing it was pretty much like changing a fuse.

Star Trek... well, as it progressed - it just got embarrassing. By Voyager the script was just dominated by meaningless Treknobabble... some of it actually impossible... expressing the power output of something in Dynes? Wasn't that show supposed to have a science advisor? It seems unlikely he had more than a subscription to New Scientist... although the closest they probably got to reading it was using it as a coaster. Furthermore, beyond simply becoming a significant proportion of the dialogue, the jargon actually became a plot point that allowed the writers to avoid any kind of thinking or originality. Bad guys got you down? Get one of your bridge staff to reel off 15 nonsensical science sounding words and BAM! You killed them.

Of course, it's clear that they did actually learn from their mistakes in this case because Enterprise was clearly a setting envisaged to avoid the kind of babbling previous treks had become synonymous with. Of course, that meant there was only about half as much dialogue in there and they had to introduce the obligatory catsuit in the first episode. More on that later.

Stargate SG-1 became increasingly guilty of treknobabble as it got more worn out. Was there any need to have Carter spout out gibberish every so often? Actually, there was... that's about all she said... and given that the format of SG-1 dialogue was generally:

O'Neill - flippant comment.
Carter - treknobabble.
Jackson - simple summation and conclusion.
Teal'c - Indeed.

The obvious change when Ben Browder came onboard was this.

Mitchel: pop culture reference.
Carter: treknobabble.
Jackson - simple summation and conclusion.
Teal'c - Indeed.

SG-1 probably thinks that because they acknowledged that their treknobabble was frequent and gibberish - generally by O'Neill raising his eyebrow and looking like he'd rather be in a vat of boiling acid. That doesn't change the fact that they became increasingly Voyager like in its usage... transiting from explanation to plot point.

It probably isn't coincidence that the shows that babble on and on about pseudo-science nonsense are those of inferior quality aimed at dullards who will watch anything with tight tops and explosions every thirty seconds and those that don't tend to be the more critically acclaimed and just plain better.

Babylon 5... a name that will set the pulse of sci-fi fans the world over racing.

It seems that only a decade later that something has surpassed it - and that's Heroes... which is a wholly different proposition in its attitude, setting and style... so for the moment, let us focus on more "pure" sci-fi. Just why is it that Babylon 5 didn't lead to more "video novel" style shows?

It would be fair to say that the only things that really came close to B5 were Farscape and BSG.

Farscape took a while to get up and running - though, it could be argued that this was the case with B5... but really, even the pilot was setting up plot points for the future - but when it did, it actually became something approaching a serial. Of course, then Sci-Fi went and axed it... despite it being their highest rated show. While the show still had plenty of "oh no! A PROBLEM!" the bit before and after that tended to impart quite a lot of character and drama. It seems clear that there was some kind of envisioned plot... which unfortunately had to be wrapped up rather quickly in Peacekeeper Wars.

The show was certainly esoteric but what made it enjoyable was that the characters - and cast - evolved and changed over the seasons, more than almost any other comparable show... and unlike some shows, where the introduction of new characters felt jarring - a somewhat ironic example being Farscape's own Ben Browder hammered into SG-1 -in Farscape it generally felt natural... but then Farscape seldom conformed to the sci-fi norms. Few other shows have only had one human as a regular character... and TWO weren't even humanoid. Plus, we didn't have any of the "praise truth, justice and the American way!" or "humans are unique and special!" either... In fact, it seemed that the show often went out of its way to point out that humans were pretty rubbish compared to all the other species portrayed.

Still, it had a direction and a continuity that only grew as the show developed. Some have bemoaned it being a soap opera... but really, that's just whinging fanboys who think that any interaction between characters that doesn't involve technobabble or CGI is soap opera and the way the different characters interacted in Farscape was almost certainly what made it such a popular show. Sad that rubbish like Smallville, SG-1 and Voyager gets to run for years and an innovative show like Farscape gets the chop just because it's not cheap... but regardless it maintained a solid narrative that made it a far more interesting proposition than hundreds of cookie cutter episodes.

Battlestar Galactica is interesting... in that it seems to have started out thinking about itself as directed and focused and then lost its way somewhat. Certainly with seasons two and three it felt as if the story episodes had been written and then some generic drama had been introduced. It remains to be seen whether the show can manage to pull itself together to give a more coherent story.

While it may not quite be a B5 or even Farscape in that respect, it does have continuity. It's not a case of Voyager where half the ship is destroyed one week and then next week it's back to normal... resources do tend to be a problem for Galactica and the ship has really taken a pounding. The start of season 3 marked one more or less continuous storyline but then after that it was more... things to be attended to.

Regardless of some of the greatly inferior work that JMS has gone on to do since B5 - and Legend Of The Rangers is enough to make anyone raise an eyebrow - there is little doubt that B5 was all alone until Heroes rolled around... and possibly did the concept of a video novel better than B5 itself.

Still, you have to wonder why no one even attempted it again... certainly, B5 wasn't a massive success but it was good television. It is is quite possible that it was simply the force of will and creativity that JMS represented. Perhaps it is simply the difficulty of the feat. Sad that... because episodic pap like Star Trek just spoils it for everyone.