I said I was going to meticulously go through the entirety of Star Trek Voyager and describe the many ways the show went wrong (and the few ways it didn’t), and I’ve been taking notes as I go along. But a problem has come up.

Yesterday, I downloaded a few of the Babylon 5 movies and began downloading the series proper — I already own them on DVD but AVI files are less hassle most of the time and I don’t want to rip them myself — but once I had some downloaded I made a crucial mistake: I watched one.

And another. And another.

You see, Babylon 5 is one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched. And it is unequivocally the best science fiction I’ve ever seen. So once I watched one of the movies, I couldn’t stop. The story is too good, the characters too rich, the morals too strong. And in the meantime, Voyager was busy pumping out generic episodes with generic characters and little to no character development. So, quite frankly, I can’t stand to watch that shit with the beauty that is Babylon 5 fresh in my mind.

I still plan to write up a few subsequent posts about the first half of the first season — I originally planned to write only one post for this chunk of episodes, but there’s so much wrong in there I think it deserves more than one post (I’m still not sure though) — but I’m not going to continue on my torturous little mission. I might return to it at some point — there’s too much Voyager love out there for me to just let it stand — but, for now, I’m just going to enjoy Babylon 5 all over again.

A few weeks ago, when discussing the sad fate of Kings, a high-concept low-ratings drama on NBC, I said that it was “as dead as Dollhouse.” Clearly, I exaggerated Dollhouse’s demise as Fox has picked it up for a second season.

I’m really excited about this — despite it meaning I will have to write detailed recap/reviews of each episode — because the first season was, aside from a few weak moments, really great: entertaining, funny, brave, contemplative, and so many other things.

I’ve had my gripes with Fox in the past; they canned Firefly without giving it a chance, the cancelled Futurama despite it being the funniest animated series they ever produced, and of course the brutal prolonged death they offered Arrested Development was visceral and painful to me. That said, Dollhouse was never a strong performer in the ratings — though it fared better than most of the programs Fox aired on Friday nights — and Fox is giving it another chance. So Kudos to you, Fox: you’ve regained a modicum of fanboy respect.

Lost broke my brain on Wednesday. In the best way possible. If you’re not watching that show, I don’t know what to say to you.

Apparently, Kyle XY has been canceled. Despite what you may think about ABC Family, on occasion they produce decent television. It’s astoundingly hard to find television that kids can watch to learn life lessons while staying enjoyable for older people on other merits. Kyle XY was one of these shows.

The stories centred around a family that took in a John Doe youth who has a mysterious past and no bellybutton. As Kyle learns how to live — making friends, respecting elders, all that stuff — the kids watching can get reinforcement for the virtues of good behaviour. But the characters are never saccharine, they’re not perfect little angels, and everything doesn’t always work out for them. The parents talk to their kids about their problems and when sex starts to rear its head into their increasingly complicated life it’s played realistically from both the children and the adults.

Well-written characters and intelligent plots are hard enough to come by in youth-oriented television in the world of Raven and Hanah Montana and Zack and Cody but then the show starts layering in sci-fi elements and that’s when it gets interesting for me. Kyle has no bellybutton. To a sci-fi geek like me that’s fairly self explanatory: he’s someone born from an artificial womb, which means he’s either a genetic experiment or a clone. But the show takes its time in exploring Kyle’s history and what he could be.

As the history deepens and the sci-fi elements go from implied to explicit, the show has seen declining ratings — something I hope doesn’t happen with this new season of Lost and its much more explicit sci-fi elements — and as the characters grow up the stories become more mature which could cause some hesitation from more conservative parents, but the show’s core messages remain the same. Or rather it did.