Hey, I used to know a great place like that. It was right next to the place that sold signs with catchy, grossly one-sided messages to protesters.

Personally I feel like the 2005 series started out with a heavy dose of self-parody (the initial Auton story, then the Earth's destruction story right after were both loaded with this - "New Earth" and the space station from "The Long Game" were pretty heavily loaded with this as well), and it's mostly just in the Matt Smith years that it's emerged from that. Some of that in the Tennant years was just holdovers from Eccleston (like "New Earth", Cassandra as the ultimate expression of plastic surgery gone too far, the Slitheen and Captain Jack, etc.) but there was a lot of "wow that's a goofy alien name"-type stuff and "veiled commentary on a contemporary thing" stuff (Adipose, for instance)

For sure there's a lot of the Eccleston and Tennant years that I enjoyed quite a lot, but to me season 5-6 with Smith is the best the new show's been. I think the show grew up a bit at that point, and developed into a better show with less reliance upon parody.

Mike Nelson did a good impersonation as well...

You sound like the guys from The Department of Temporal Investigations.

Don't know what's to complain about. I like when time travel stories have weird paradoxes. The Doctor was able to free himself from the Pandorica because he'd been freed from the Pandorica. :)

Yeah, Susan was cool, at least when she got to be "Smart" Susan and not "Susan in Distress"...

How do you even pronounce an asterisk??

I think Rory really developed nicely, actually. If you look at his first adventure away from home, he's kind of like, "Why the hell am I here in this crazy place?" But later on we have some nice "crowning moments of awesome" like Rory the Roman, his time with Flesh Jennifer and his involvement in the raid on Demon's Run. He probably was never entirely comfortable going on dangerous adventures, but he learned to deal.

The 1990s X-Men animated? I loved that show. When they showed the first episode, then left us waiting for like six months before showing us anything more, I watched the first episode over, and over again. Then when the series finally landed I gobbled it up. Well, I kind of got tired of it after a couple years, and lost touch.

I rewatched the whole series recently. It was kind of painful, actually. Any time Gambit or Storm started talking, I immediately wanted them to shut up.

Don't forget, this supernova was threatening the whole galaxy!

I hate to admit it, because this kind of weakens the argument that one can make a good sci-fi movie work in theaters...

But I never heard of that movie.

I love the old Star Trek films, but a lot of them are kind of crap. I mean, there's a lot I like in those films but a lot that I think just went really painfully wrong, too. I love how "Star Trek: The (Slow-)Motion Picture" tried to give us a little 2001 vibe and put the crew against something so vast as to be almost incomprehensible - but it was the recycled "Nomad" story, with too much wanking over the (admittedly beautiful) new model, and various problems due to production time running out or whatever... Trek 2 was pretty solid but "super-intelligent" Khan couldn't read through the simplest of secret codes, and they copped out on Spock's death before they even got to the credits. Trek 3 was like Trek 2's leftover baggage getting resolved, Trek 4 was like a big series of self-deprecating jokes, Trek 5 was.. I don't know, just kind of painful, I thought. And Trek 6 had its strengths but also a lot of stupid stuff - and the crew was getting pretty long in the tooth by this point. "Generations" was kind of dull and a bit unfocused, broken up into a bunch of sub-plots like a TV episode, featured the unnecessary return and then re-death of Kirk, and then the Enterprise getting brought down by a Klingon BoP of all things... (With the same BoP footage they'd been reusing since Trek 3!) - though it's got some pretty nice Galaxy-class eye candy (if you can look past the 4-footer dressing applied to the 6-footer) First Contact couldn't decide which of two movies it really wanted to be, and lowered itself to some action movie catch phrase moments... Insurrection - I'd have to see it again. And Nemesis, I think it's fair to say it wanted to be another "Wrath of Khan" rather badly. A lot of motivations didn't seem to make any sense, and... more telepathic rape. Yay. It is impressive how Ron Perlman can throw himself into all these roles without need for much make-up, though.

If the best one can say about Trek 2009 is that it's better than that sorry lot, then that's really unfortunate.

I frankly wouldn't know one style of sword-fighting from another. But they did go out of their way in the dialogue to bring up fencing...

Sulu: "Let me go on this awesome suicide mission. I'm trained in hand-to-hand combat."
Kirk (later on): "What kind of hand-to-hand training did you have?"
Sulu: "Fencing."

Somewhere close enough to Vulcan that you can see it clearly with the naked eye, but far enough away that it doesn't get drawn in and destroyed when Vulcan turns into a black hole...

I think they made the whole "reboot" thing way too literal, and that IMO hurt the movie. The story doesn't really work the way it's told, "Nero goes back in time, changing history and that's why everything is different now" - it's just excess baggage that gets dragged around for the whole movie.

No, it really wasn't. Almost every Star Trek movie ever has been deeply flawed, admittedly, but I don't consider the Abrams movie to be any kind of exception.