Walked nine miles today. That was about two too may. So, didn’t get much else done.
Did manage to finish Netflix’s original season of Arrested Development. It wasn’t nearly as good as the first three seasons, but I wasn’t as disappointed as most reviewers seem to be. As a scriptwriter, it was interesting to see how they economized. And the intricacy of the plotting was exceptional.
But, no, it didn’t reach the original heights. As the reviewer at aceofspades noted, it doesn’t bode well for any more Firefly.
World's Only Rational Man 
Hmmm, I’ll do something controversial now. Because 1) I feel like it and 2) I can!
There was nothing original in Firefly. I’d rather say Firefly opened the door for the current invasion of totally generic scifi on TV (Halo did the same in regards to games.)
Obi Wan was black. R2 was a somewhat cute girl (okay for a white chick.) Han Solo and Luke were the same person. Chewie was still big, but with less hair and the bad guys were no longer speaking with British accents and wore basic German uniforms from WW1.
BAM! You see what I did there!
Next, shall I go on my rant why Star Trek’s “utopia” is actually terrifying and scary? 😛
Well, what made Firefly so enjoyable was the characters. They actually had character, and were memorable.
I never found the original Star Trek’s culture terrifying, just ridiculous that the Prime Directive was violated in about every episode. It was The Next Generation that really annoyed me in its sanctimony.
Watch TNG, DS9 and Voyager again.
Then tell me…
How does this Federation “president” get elected? All I see is military and appointed diplomats doing things. Nobody is ever elected. They’re all appointed by someone. Who? I have no idea. I don’t recall there ever being an election in any of the shows.
Or worse. The perfect example is the whole Maquis thing that popped up especially in DS9 and Voy. Who hunts the Maquis? Starfleet. Who arrests the Maquis? Starfleet. Who put the Maquis on trial? Starfleet. Who puts the Maquis in prison? Starfleet. Who guards the prisons? Starfleet.
Starfleet runs everything. From transporting things and science down to security and the court systems. The only time I actually remember a civilian court was in DS9, and that only because it’s a Bajoran station.
The Star Trek future is a future with no division of power and where an oligarchy of military and unelected politicians runs the show. And all for “the greater good”. It’s a totalitarian’s wet dream. Of course Picard would go on about how people work to improve themselves, blablabla. Yeah right. There’s no reward for being successful in Federation society. You have everything, food, shelter, entertainment, without doing anything. So… How can that society function? In reality it couldn’t.
Funnily enough, Starfleet’s military power is basically non existing. They only “defeat” the Klingons because of a catastrophe. Same for the Romulans. The Cardassians? Only because the Dominion pretty much takes them over and Sisko has a direct line to the supernatural creatures in the wormhole. The BORG? Against those the plot armor was as thick as I’ve never seen it before. Back in TNG one cube massacred Starfleet. Then, suddenly, the Voyager can take on multiple cubes, even wipe out the BORG. Uh… yeah…
That and it’s basically “white people are the master race in space!” Only with DS9 have they diverted from that. Every other time it’s white captains only (except the token non-white crew member or one-and-off non-white captain who appears in one episode), while all the “bad guys” are usually… not white (or at least not “Aryan”.) Seriously. How come there’s such a small number of Asians in Trek, and so many white people? There are more Asians than white people on Earth right now (and likely always have been), I don’t see that changing. So how come it’s all white people, with just a few token non-whites? I know, it’s connected to out of character, to the casting itself, but it makes zero sense in-universe.
As for the Prime Directive… See, that serves two purposes. 1) to force Federation values onto “lesser” species, and 2) to stay out of things that may cause problems for Starfleet. Janeway always hacked at Harry and Tom over the Prime Directive, but she never cared about it herself. As reward she got promoted.
What Trek does is that it completely ignores human vices and seems to put them solely into alien races. Humans are perfect all the time, except for a few black sheep, who, strangely enough, tend to see the error of their ways after the white captain holds a lengthy, horribly self-righteous speech (or get killed by the alien mastermind who made them do things.)
I started thinking of these things when I re-watched DS9 a few weeks ago and came upon the one episode where the Founders tried to infiltrate Starfleet command and one admiral tried to use that fact to grab power. It was all there in that one episode.