VindictiveJudge

I was thinking maybe a seahorse kind of thing.

I dunno, having Yar's baby momma show up and drop off a kid would have been a challenge to write in the late 80s / early 90s.

It's always been both, just with our current problems offloaded to aliens for scrutinization. That they're no longer using aliens for commentary is the problem.

True, but most of the episodes with guest writers were in season 1. The uneven tone of the season was part of why he took over full writing duties.

The first season is rough. That first season still has some gems in it, hints of a greater plot building in the background, and a strong season finale that brings that plot to the foreground. It also has a cheesy electric guitar sting, some questionable makeup, a lead actor that was secretly struggling with schizophrenia, and writers that weren't really clear on the concept or where the show was going. The second season starts strong and the show just gets better from there until the season 4 finale. Season 5 is weak in the front half due to production issues, but strong in the back half, ending with a series finale that is, in my opinion, a strong contender for best sci-fi finale ever, competing with TNG's "All Good Things..."

Despite the show's rock-bottom budget resulting in some very cheap looking sets and costumes, the strong writing and acting carry the show, with Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar and Peter Jurasik as Londo being particular standouts. Seriously, this is a show where Mira Furlan is not guaranteed to be the episode's highlight performance. The show had an entire five season plot sketched out in advance, then it was modified on the fly with "trapdoors" that showrunner J Michael Straczynski put in just in case real-world issues caused problems (such as the lead actor leaving the show due to the aforementioned schizophrenia) with the changes done so seamlessly that they feel like they were always planned. Except for the Season 5 problems, anyway.

As you can probably tell from the rest of my post, I highly recommend the show. As I said, season 1 is very hit-and-miss, but B5 is one of my favorite shows. It's also still one of the only shows to actually have planned anything more than one season in advance, which was particularly impressive in that it was one of the first shows to have a pre-planned structure at all. If you decide to give it a try, do not start with season 1 episode 1. Instead, start with "The Gathering," which was a made-for-TV pilot movie. Much of season 1 references events from the pilot, so it's important to watch.

Something I would have liked to have seen is Vidiians being assimilated by choice on the basis that being part of the Collective had to be better than suffering from the Phage. Instead of them just being enemies, they should have really leaned into how horrible it would be to live with that plague hanging over their heads. It's also implied in an episode or two that there are uninfected populations somewhere, probably under quarantine, which would have been interesting to explore.

I'm still impressed McNeill was able to say, "Yes, ma'am, his army of evil," with a straight face.

M'Benga still wears blue. Chapel wears white, but she's also a civilian contractor in SNW and hasn't joined Starfleet yet, so how her uniform color interacts with everyone else is unclear.

Firmware updates fix some bugs and introduce others.

There’s so much internal monologue in Dune, how else are you going to represent it? The Scifi Channel and Villeneuve both seem to just kind of like, leave it out.

The miniseries doesn't leave it out so much as work it into conversations that sound like they could have been part of the book, or have the characters wear their hearts on their sleeves more, which is why miniseries Paul seems like he's always on the verge of a meltdown.

There are actually differences in the Prime and Kelvin timelines that happened before Nero's incursion. For instance, Kirk's date of birth is off by several months. They tried to justify that afterwards by saying something about the event sending shockwaves through time to change things before it even happened or something like that. The real reason probably lies in that interview where JJ Abrams admitted he never liked Star Trek, but you could argue that the removal of various down-stream time travel events, like the events of "The City on the Edge of Forever" likely not happening in the modified timeline, could actually cause retroactive changes to the timeline.

But anyway, the Kelvin timeline already diverges before the Kelvin-Narada thing, because reasons.

Note that Q and Q are not the same person.