From the only reliable source of news on the net, the Onion. I have never understood people who can get wrapped up in some silly TV show. How juvenile! Now I have to run. My blue ray copy of Star Trek Season 3 that just arrived in the mail is calling to me.
Are "Lost" Fans Annoying?
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Confession: I have never seen a single episode of this show.
Haha!
Yeah they will be more annoying and thats what I told that guy who I knocked over in walmart to get the last copy of the final season of Battlestar Galactica.
Never watched it. What’s it about?
Donald, when I posted on Lost a couple weeks ago, I was positive that a sci-fi guy like you must be a fan… whoops. 🙂
1. Lost
2. BSG (reimagined)
3. X-Files
4. ST:TNG
That’s my ranking. ST:TOS is too far behind to make the list. 🙂
I actually like Lost though I usually don’t have time to watch. So I have to wait until it comes out on DVD and rent. Then watch over several weekends. Builds patience waiting for the DVD.
My list Chis:
1. Star Trek original series
2. Star Trek Enterprise
3. Babylon 5
4. Star Gate
5. Star Gate Atlantis
6. Star Trek Voyager
7. Battle Star Galactica (new)
8. Star Trek Deep Space Nine
9. Eureka
10. Wild Wild West (The show was steampunk 20 years before the genre.)
I’ve never seen Lost, so I do not have an opinion on the show.
I find Lost is like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I haven’t an IQ high enough to figure what is going on.
Go easy on yourself Art Deco. If you followed Lost from the beginning you would have soon realized that even the writers had no idea what was going on. 😉
Donald,
ST:TNG didn’t even make your Top Ten? I’m a bit surprised!
I see you have both Stargates ahead of BSG (new)… can I ask why? Just curious… we don’t have cable, and it was only when a friend very generously got us a year’s subscription to Netflix for our anniversary last summer that I checked out BSG on dvd, and I absolutely loved it (and so did the wife). As my list indicates, it knocked X-Files out of my #2 spot, and did so quite handily.
Rick, Rick, Rick… ye of little faith. 🙂
Darlton have promised us that when the finale airs in May, we’ll see how the mythology was basically mapped out from the beginning.
Everyone — including them — agrees that things got a bit wobbly in S2 and the start of S3, but that’s because there was no end date, and it’s hard to write a story that is meant to move along every episode when you don’t know how many eps you have left. Once the end date was set, it was full-speed ahead.
The Next Generation was a bit PC and preachy for my tastes, although I liked the Q episodes.
I have greatly enjoyed Stargate and Stargate Atlantis. Great characters, good plots and a fine mixture of dramatic and comedic elements.
I’ve never seen one single episode of Lost.
One of my friends tried to justify watching it by saying that you need to be pretty intelligent to watch Lost.
This is the same guy who attends an independent chapel only recognized by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and is a pre-Tridentine Catholic.
Stargate Atlantis has been surprisingly good, BSG (new) was awesome except for the flimsy whimpering out in the final six months. Angels that have sex? No explanation of why cyclons are monotheistic?
Star Trek Enterprise is the best of the bunch after the original Star Trek.
ST:TNG is like living in Saul Aulinsky’s mind, simply unsustainable and false.
But I have to agree with Don, Q was the only thing worth watching. And I am still surprised that they never made a movie with his character, a la Khan and Start Trek II. I think it would have saved the movie franchise for TNG, but oh well.
Sci-Fi shows?
1) Doctor Who (will always be #1)
2) Babylon 5
3) Prisoner
4) Blake’s 7
5) Deep Space 9
6) Star Trek: TOS
7) Firefly
8) Star Trek: TNG
9) Red Dwarf
10) though not really Sci-Fi and just something to round out the ten, Angel.
Or I would include Wild Wild West as 10. Tie with Angel. Donald is right, great show — the movie just failed in every way possible.
Henry K.,
Firefly!
Forgot about those guys. Great series and even better movie.
Unfortunately I don’t think there are anymore in the works for the future.
Would that be the real Doctor Who or the new one? Or both?
Darwin:
They are one and the same; it is the same series, but one which has always been capable of great change through the years. I do find RTD’s era to be mixed, but so have the eras of other producers. He gave some good stories and some poor stories of his own, but we also got some great tales by other authors (Moffat, Cornell and Shearman esp). I do have problems with his sexual mores and how boldly he put them into the show; but the show as a whole is still my favorite of all time (and I include the Big Finish audios with Davison, Baker, McCoy and McGann in the mix; I’m hoping with the rebranding udner Moffat, they will be allowed to do Tennant audios, since I expect he would do them — he was doing audios before he was the Doctor).
To show how much of a geek I am: as a junior in high school in 1991, I dressed up as McCoy at a local convention, and the year after, started to make a Tom Baker scarf (it was completed by my mother). I’ve been to four conventions (1991 and 1992 in Indy, 1992 and 1993 in Chicago), and met most of the old crew that way (1993 for the 30th anniversary was a big convention). I still am a fan and partake of Doctor Who boards, though I don’t go to conventions anymore.
Tito
While you are probably right about Firefly, I would say he should push on for a sequel. It sounds like Whedon is about to have a series on FX. I don’t see why he can’t make a series continuing after Serenity, using new characters and those who would like to return in it. It could be set several years after the events of Serenity.
Henry,
I know there is a large fan and active fan base and Whedon hasn’t ruled it out, though he hasn’t been pushing for it as far as I can tell.
Though I may sound like it won’t happen, like you, I still hold out hope for it to continue in whatever manifestation, ie, a movie, or a new series on FX/SyFy/etc.
It’s a good show with a well-thought out universe.
Chinese and English being the lingua franca and vestiges of religion still proselytizing the world combined with great scifi effects and a solid story line got me hooked.
But I started backwards. I saw the movie and then rented the series (free on Hulu.com for a time).
Well worth the viewing!
It seems to me like there was enough of a reload on the character and backstory of the Doctor that you kind of have to think of them as two different shows.
Still, I’m clearly less dedicated, and I could never really get into the new show. Some of the classic Doctors (Pertwee, Tom Baker, and McCoy) I really enjoyed, though obviously with a near thirty year run the show had its low stretches as well.
I don’t know if I’d try to compare it to other SF shows, in that Doctor Who was always a bit of weird creature, all its own. (Among other things, it didn’t generally even try to do any coherant world building.)
For best SF show, I’d clearly have to list Babylon 5 — though it got gradually weaker in the last season. And it rang true in human terms in a way that Trek shows seldom did.
But then, a lot of the shows listed above (Enterprise, Firefly, Battle Star Galactica, X-Files, Stargate) I never even saw.
Darwin,
Firefly and Battle Star (new) are highly recommended. It grabs your attention from the get-go and highly entertaining!
Darwin
You might not have seen this:
While there were changes, the show has had a history of them (the first regeneration; the revelation of the Time Lords; the Doctor’s stay on Earth; the Time Lord society as it emerged in Deadly Assassin; the McCoy “Dark Doctor” era; etc); the show is always capable of changing and having all kinds of recon work happening throughout all its years. But there were also true connections between the show (Sarah Jane– Davros even remembering her from when he created the Daleks, etc). It’s the same show, but like the Doctor, always mutating.
Finally, some common ground with American Catholic 🙂
I love Lost. I can spend hours poring over the most arcane and complicated theories (then again, I spent much of my teenage years on elvish genealogy!). But I have no clue what is going on!
I also love BSG and Firefly/ Serenity. More recently, and to a lesser extent, I enjoy Heroes, Flash Forward, Fringe, and V (basically, sci-fi is all I really watch anymore).
I used to be a big Star Trek fan. Enjoyed TNR at the time, and especially liked DS9. Pretty much gave up on Voyager and never gave Enterprise much of a chance.
Yes indeed, some common ground with MM!
MM:
Enterprise is worth a shot, especially the third and fourth seasons. It had just worked up a head of steam and was cancelled. A lot of very well-done nods to the original series. Fair warning: the series finale was truly bad and a sour note.
Also, since you are a BSG fan, don’t forget Caprica the Series starts tonight at 9. Almost no advertising for it, so it went under my radar until yesterday.
I’ll have to give V another shot. I liked the first episode, but couldn’t quite get into it. Hopefully the planned hiatus helps. That, and another time slot.
When I made out my list I forgot about Firefly. I love the show, especially Adam Baldwin as Jane, a truly brilliant comedic turn! Much of it is in questionable morality, but I love the post-Civil War West translated into Space theme. It would have been at the third position on my list.
Some of the classic Doctors (Pertwee, Tom Baker, and McCoy) I really enjoyed, though obviously with a near thirty year run the show had its low stretches as well.
The writers during the Sylvester McCoy era were doing a wretched job. Its cancellation in 1989 was a mercy killing.
The best of the Doctors was Patrick Troughton, followed by Tom Baker and Peter Davison. Nicola Bryant was the most engaging companion.
To my mind, the writing had gone pretty seriously down hill by the latter half of the Peter Davison period, and was generally wretched under Colin Baker. I felt like under McCoy things improved again — though it was spotty and in some ways I thought they were trying to take the series in directions it wasn’t good at going.
Looking at the episode list, though, it looks like I only saw two episodes out of McCoy’s first season (both pretty poor), saw all of his second (which was mostly pretty good, though at times very weird) and one episode out of the third, which was okay but not great. (I was watching them as they came out in Britain, and the only way we got copies was through a fan friend who had a Brit format VCR who would make grainy copies of tapes mailed to her by a friend in the UK.)
I think my personal favorite was actually Pertwee, though Tom Baker was also incredibly good. I’m not sure I ever managed to see any episodes with the first two doctors.
Colin Baker got to travel the universe with Nicola Bryant. What do you mean the writing was ‘wretched’? His version of the Doctor had attitude.
The Pertwee years were dominated by the presence of Jo Grant, surely the most annoying companion to date.
I’ve always been a Roger Delgado fan myself.
Hmmm. I don’t remember finding Jo all that annoying, though she was definitely a screamer. But Pertwee has such style, and he spent the first half of his career paired with The Brigadier, who was just awesome.
Our PBS station only ever showed the Trail of a Time Lord season of Colin Baker, which was one of the few story lines that I disliked so much I would just not watch after the first time through. Though to be fair, my prime Dr Who watching period was aged 10-18, so my judgment may not have been perfect. Of the ones I saw, Colin Baker was my least favorite.
Also, since you are a BSG fan, don’t forget Caprica the Series starts tonight at 9. Almost no advertising for it, so it went under my radar until yesterday.
I totally forgot about this. Thanks for the heads up.
We’re in the midst of watching the Firefly series… I love Fillion (we’re big Castle fans) and Baldwin (now on Chuck).