FABIO wrote:

I thought it was due to, after a certain point, every single episode following some grand plot arc that you didn't have any hope of following unless you'd caught the past twenty episodes. Okay something about the Zingy race and their ultimate weapon....reptillians? Some monologue spewing race of Odo lookalikes babbling about timelines and spheres? Who the fuck knows anymore.

Same thing with a ton of current series: Stargate SG-1, Alias, etc. Who can follow all this shit? Whatever happened to self-contained episodes? Is Law & Order the only non-sitcom series that still has these? You could jump in at any point in TNG and the only backstory you needed to know was "Data is a robot". I actually liked the couple of self-contained Enterprise episodes that I saw (the creepy automated repair station, the creepy hostile race that told them to surrender or die using spliced footage of the captain), despite having some of the worst side stories in the history of fiction (what's the chief engineer's favorite food?).

FABIO wrote:

You can tell how much a sci-fi show sucked previously by measuring the amount of time it took for them to run out of interesting ideas and start going with the "big mysterious evil race comes out of nowhere and everyone must unite to stop them". TNG and Babylon 5 didn't pull out the borg or shadows until a couple seasons in (and even then the Borg weren't brought out that often). They found out pretty quick in DS9 that nobody gave a shit about Bijorian religious disputes and introduced the dominion. Enterprise jumped into the ultimate weapon thing almost right out of the gate.

FABIO wrote:

Having the gayest opening song ever didn't help either.