SciPhiJournal

Alas, as someone who grew up on Voyager and Deep Space Nine, this just broke my heart. The ad nauseam moralising and posturing is worse than even in ST:Picard, which already overdosed on it. This whole stale train-wreck of a wanna-be space fantasy has little in common with the original libertarian spirit of Star Trek. 2 out of 10 for the two watchable characters who helped our household make it to the end of season 1 (where we just gave up): Captain Lorca and Empress Philippa.

A yardstick for measuring every SF TV production that came after. The experience of watching the expanded series in chronological order (Caprica, Blood & Chrome, the Pilot, the seasons with all episodes extended to directors' cut version, with the appropriate webisodes and TV movies inserted in the right places) is a journey absolutely to be recommended. Strangely, this series is well reviewed by mainstream outlets, but don't let that fool you - it is serious, even philosophical sci-fi to its chrome core.

Audacious and irreverent supernatural apocalypse fiction that had us hooked - alas, cancelled after 1 season (as many off-mainstream shows tend to be). The main characters do the compulsory moralising during the initial episodes (because it's a North American series - just skip the hand-wringing dialogue), but once they overcome their hang-ups, the badass shoot-first-ask-questions-later family becomes a joy to watch.

This series is a rate treat, and gets 10 out of 10 for audacity and sheer cussedness. Of course it was cancelled after two season (often a mark of failure - here a symptom of greater ambition that TV screens at the time could accommodate). There was a petition by fans to renew it or at least complete it with a movie, but to be honest, even in its incomplete form, if you like theological fiction with an overlay of Manichean struggle (and martial arts sequences specifically developed to model the fighting style of angels who use their wings as extra limbs) - you owe it to yourself to watch Dominion.

We subscribed to Netflix specifically to watch this series. It's almost a 9 out of 10 IF you go into it with the right expectations. It isn't properly finished (cancelled after season 2), but you can imagine what comes next. What it delivers is two seasons of good SF in the traditional Campbellian sense: the smartest and most enterprising members of mankind pitted against each other and a planetary-scale crisis. It's the kind of human ingenuity vs the forces of the cosmos story that is rarely done well nowadays. Of course it's very American, but if you accept it for what it is, it's a journey worth taking.

Awesome, a good case study for why mainstream reviews are such poor guides for hardcore sci-fi fans. One of those rare miniseries that dispense with an over-reliance on "character building" and gives centre stage to the issues that transcend individuals: scientific advancement, the collective struggle for survival, social engineering, evolution. A refreshing change for viewers tired of draggy, chatty series. (-1 point for the annoyingly PC moralising that saturates the dialogue of a primary antagonist.)