I know it's unfashionable in today's socialist dystopia, but I still regard unemployment as a badge of failure

Watching: Deep Space Nine, after realising that I hadn't seen the original first season since the early 2000s. The pilot episode was a fantastic bit of set-up that defined the Roddenberry mantra of hope for the future a lot better than TNG did, as it has a main character who's essentially without hope after losing his soulmate and moves on from this partially by realising he has a series to run, but mainly because his son figures so prominently in his space-trip with Aliens From Outside Time that it sinks in that your life is not always just about you. There's some teething trouble in episodes like Storyteller which is a bit poop, but otherwise, there's some attempt to do something with the typical Trek monoculture* by making Bajor's surplus of religious fanatics with access to space-fertiliser and lasers a problem in the long run for Commander Sisko's plans to drag the fuckers into civilised society again whether they want it or not, and I like that he's essentially a guy who doesn't want to be where he is and it occasionally gets to him to the point he becomes a bully.
Apart from the pilot, though, there's about two actually decent episodes in this first season and they're both right at the end, which is a bit of a poor average for anything but still better than TNG managed.
Also watched some Castle episodes... not sure about this show. Kind of liked it before, but not so much now, though Nathan Fillion has begun to fill out a bit and I think it really suits him as a guy who's supposed to be a cool dad and a writerly type rather than just an identikit scrawny get.




*Trek and TNG usually had monocultures as a weekly feature of stories because Enterprise or Voyager or whatever are basically America and the monocultures represent various countries in Space Age form, the tales each week being about the clash of modern American sensibilities and values with older cultures, though I just liked that Captain Kirk shot anything he couldn't fuck and things worked out okay - that's my America. Not this TNG shit where psychiatrists in boiler suits travel the galaxy espousing socialism. In my day we called that Communism. And we knew it was bad.