Ah, very meta. You referencing Kung Fu to my referencing Farscape's John Crichton's pet name for Scorpius which stemmed from the characters love of pop culture , namely Kung Fu.
Constant referencing back to the title characters time and place of origin as well as it's pop culture and vernacular, actually was a plot staple of, "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". I had thought that Gil Gerard, (who played "Rogers"), was a former football player. But as it turns out, Browder was the only former jock.
All good, I'm well acquainted with the classics - and having grown up in a house of book readers (and hoarders) I'd already devoured works of Huxley as well as other SF as social commentary from writers such as Vonnegut Jr., Pynchon, PKD, and Kesey amongst others long before the turned up on my school reading list.
And here's another one who needs to read, (or reread), Aldous Huxley's, "Brave New World". I'm fairly sure Rodenberry must have done so.
DS9 showed a significant amount of character progression throughout the series. Watching Julian and Obrien finally become friends, Garak and Odo settle past differences and learn to appreciate humanoid risk taking and thinking, how Sisko grows as a leader, Quark's development as a hidden friend and known enemy, and best of all, the Dax/Lenara kiss!
I still think Patrick Stewart's Shakespearean pomposity was overbearing.
I'm not sure that it does. I did specifically mention DS9 as standing out from the rest of the franchises - and that is because it involves a greater serialization than the others. DS9 also features a LOT less stereotypes ( greater emphasis on alien culture, wayyyyyy less human middle-aged/old white guys running the show, less female characters going through the motions as window dressing). DS9 made a conscious effort to divest itself of the baggage that the episodic franchises seemed bogged down with which is why it is usually rated higher (at least critically) than TNG, Voyager, Enterprise etc.
I can't say that I was that keen on DS9. I much preferred Babylon 5 as the characters and stories were much better.
Me too. B5's storytelling (at least the first four seasons) was on a grand scale. It's probably no coincidence that the more revered SF series (Firefly, Farscape, B5) had both well fleshed out believable (complex motivation/interaction, considerable overlap of "good" and "bad") characters and an overarching plot that actively worked towards a conclusion. B5 had the luxury of playing out the entire planned storyline (then gilding the lily with TV movies and Crusade), while Firefly and Farscape's story were wrapped up in largely unsatisfactory manner due to a truncated movie (Serenity) and 3 hour miniseries (Peacekeeper Wars) - which probably says more about the drive-by nature of TV viewing which suits episodic series rather than serialization.
