Definitely a YMMV situation.

Many episodes that may be described as ‘filler’ are ones that have side adventures or character development. Farscape isn’t rigidly serialized. Just because it’s not moving the main plot narrative doesn’t mean it’s filler.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is very much more realistic in tone than the movies that take place later in the continuity, including the two you’ve seen.

It takes place before the earlier movie Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019).

It might be worth checking out even if kaiju aren’t usually your thing.

Another episode that hits right to the last beat.

Did anyone expect that result? Even after what was highlighted in the recap?

Unintended consequences seem to be the legacy in every generation.

Keiko seems to be the only one with the ability to foresee the potential risks and outcomes , but she’s also the one who, due to her own risk taking, spent more than half a century in Axis Mundi.

Coming back to add that, if you like character-driven stories, but have never thought that kaiju might be your thing, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters now in its second season on AppleTV might be for you.

The show takes place in the middle of the Monsterverse continuity that currently has the licence for Toho’s Godzilla monsters. It’s an entry point nonetheless. You needn’t have ever seen anything in this continuity or others to get into it.

It’s less focused on fighting Titans than on the mystery of understanding them, the weird science fiction efforts humanity uses to share a world with them, and most of all the characters whose lives are intertwined with the mystery.

Babylon 5’s is great if you like serialization. The first season is very weak due to a major health crisis in the principal character that occurred between the shooting of the pilot and the launch of the series. The story was adjusted so that a new station head and actor could take on the lead.

Farscape is an absolute gem and a wild ride. It really picks up after the first 12 episodes. It’s so incredibly influential on so many science fiction shows in the streaming era that it’s worth watching just for that alone. Be aware that the show was canceled before it could wrap up its full arc. A limited series was made later to wrap up the storyline — make sure you’ll be able to be able to get it.

I’m a fan of many of the old 1960s and 1970s shows but watching them really depends on your tolerance for older production styles and scripting. Space 1999 is worth tracking down for sure.

In terms of more recent shows, three serialized shows that involved time travel that actually stuck the landing are Continuum, Travelers, and 12 Monkeys. All are very good, with strong ensembles, but reflect the darker sci-fi trend of the 2010s.

Amazon took on another 3 seasons of The Expanse with about 130k, Netflix did an additional full 20 episode season of *Star Trek: Prodigy with 35k.

More than that, 32.5 k is a lot for one of these petitions in this amount of time. We don’t know what it will level off at.

The rate of signings is accelerating, with nearly 5k in the past 24 hours.

I wished they’d used an official image. It’s really odd.

But it was the first petition up so it’s the one with traction.

Cool. I think I’ll be supporting this one.

I’ve been having fun getting new and interesting games through kickstarter campaigns.

My partner is finding this eye rolling, as I’m roping them and one of our teens into play testing. But, I look forward to taking some of these to our regional gaming convention. It’s nice to be able to offer some fresh games with licensed media.

Meh

As a Canadian, I’ not going to rate that highly as an apology.

It’s rather a sorry, not sorry, let’s be buds and talk some (unspecified) time

But it may play differently in a US cultural setting.

It’s interesting that he felt he needed to do that though.

Let’s compare this to Tarantino, Sussman, and many others that have made pitches on the film and television side over the past decade.

They’ve all felt they had a great idea, they’ve been quite public about having pitched it, and they’ve attempted to build up fan interest and momentum.

If Weir had just done the same, I don’t think there’d be any adverse effect. Likely, the opposite in the current environment.

Instead, he took his moment in the sun not to pitch his idea to the public, or say that he had an idea that wasn’t viewed as fitting with where the franchise was then but perhaps it might be reconsidered: He took his moment in the sun to retaliate.

Why would a producer want to risk hearing a pitch from him in future?

I would argue that very little good science fiction tries to have nothing to say about humanity or the human condition.

There is some very intellectual and intelligent science fiction that takes on and speculates about advanced science and mathematics concepts but these are rarely mainstream and not at all the kind of thing Weir writes.

Some science fiction can be just fun science, engineering or math speculation stories told in prose, but if doesn’t have something to say about ourselves, it’s value isn’t much more than diversion — although diversion and entertainment are valuable in themselves.

Setting aside for now Weir’s rather sour grapes criticism of Star Trek, and stipulating the fact that Star Trek has, from its earliest episodes, had a recurrent pattern of including very transparent and heavy handed allegories to current social and political situations and controversies, let’s consider the general question of what is science fiction for.

Science fiction can be and has been a means of allegorical storytelling, and of pondering the human condition at the individual and the societal level. It tells us about ourselves as much as it tells us about a broader universe.

Huxley and Orwell did this with their dystopias. However, so did hard science fiction greats like Arthur C. Clark. Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey were as much about who we are now as what might be out there.

More literary science fiction authors explored themes in psychology and human consciousness from the mid twentieth century on, and high quality science fiction took up those questions in films like The Forbidden Planet.

I didn’t find this kind of reaching about the human condition in either of Weir’s books. I did find them fun rides, the kind of pop fiction that used to be described as “airport” novels — the kind of book people pick up in airport kiosks before a long flight, that are often make into “popcorn movies.”

The science elements in his books are ok, but not astonishing. The level is really middle school, which is why The Martian was reissued in a ‘school edition’ cleaned of the swear words. My own first contact with Weir was our youngest’s ‘school edition’. It wasn’t an overly challenging book for a bright grade 6 student.

What I found in Weir’s writing was a repeating pattern of a lone-wolf individual male hero making some incredibly daft decisions after a catastrophic event that set up his opportunity to MacGyver himself out of the situation. It’s a trope.

It’s not definitive of the genre and it’s not conducive to the ensemble problem solving needed for more complex STEM work in science fiction. And unfortunately Weir’s short fiction has shown that he hasn’t yet mastered the skill of telling stories on a broader canvas.

Fun ride episodes, shows and movies belong in Star Trek and other science fiction too. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be there. One of the franchise’s strengths has been that it can incorporate the full range of styles. But it’s never been only fun rides and individual heroism or individual MacGyvering. I think we’d see as much scathing criticism if shows tried to be just that.

But back to Weir’s attitude and tone, speaking in his moment of success.

He could have let his work speak for itself, and focused on promoting his film.

Instead he chose to prop up himself by putting down others. I don’t respect that. I don’t see that as having integrity. I see that as being a jerk, and it validates the sense that I got from his books that he doesn’t know himself how to work well with others so he doesn’t write what he doesn’t know.

He didn’t have to shoot his mouth off when baited. Instead, he chose to weigh disingenuously into the ‘culture wars’ by claiming to be above having a message.

He could have chosen at some future moment to drop a mention that he, like many writers had pitched spec scripts to the Star Trek franchise that weren’t taken up for movies or television, that weren’t seen as a fit in the strategic plan of the franchise at the time. That would have likely garnered a lot of positive interest from across the Trek fandom.

Instead, he chose to use his moment to trash the creations of others and, implicitly, the part of the fandom that those shows were written for.

He won’t be getting my money.