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What's your Sci-Fi unpopular opinion?

It's a slightly click-baity title, but as we're still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?

My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. I've tried watching it multiple times and each time I have absolutely no patience for the pointless little scenes which contain little to no depth or meaningful plot, all coalescing towards that 15 minute "journey" through space and series of hallucinations or whatever that are supposed to be deep, shake you to your foundations, and make you re-think the whole human condition.

But it doesn't. Because it's just pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. Planet of the Apes was released in the same year and is, on every level, a better Sci-fi movie. It offers mystery, a consistent and engaging plot, relatable characters you actually care about, and asks a lot more questions about the world and our place in it.

It insists upon itself, Lois.

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  • Honestly bsg's ending wasn't amazing, it didn't end anywhere near as strongly as it started. But I didn't hate it and I was invested enough in the characters that I wanted to see what happened to them all. I also found the overall series, world building, characters etc. far out weighed the ending itself for me.

    I often find endings to series, like got, are lacklustre. Finding a beautifully crafted series from beginning to end is so rare.

    • I guess that depends a lot on your perspective on narrative and the world in general

      [SPOILERS], I guess, I don't see a content warning tool in this editor, but someone let me know if I'm missing something and I'll edit this.

      I happen to be an atheist. Non-beligerent, definitely not an "internet atheist" type, but I just don't believe in a supreme power, so it's always jarring when a narrative thing ends on a note where they assume that of course in this years-long debate between mysticism and reason the figure matching the Christian deity is the right answer.

      It's not even annoyance at there being religious people or anything like that. It's just in my world when somebody raises "well, it could be God intervening in our lives", that is obviously the wrong answer unless you're in a show where Christian mythos is explicitly established as a fantasy trope (say, Supernatural or Buffy or whatever). If you just spring that stuff on me in the finale you're already losing me, even before you use it as a plot device to deus ex machina all the garbage and loose ends you couldn't figure out during the show's run.

      So yeah, I'll take "we'll make the omniscient hemiplegic kid kid and the cool dragon lady a nazi because the outline says so and we have better stuff to do than wrap this up" over "God hates robots and that's why all this happened, I dunno".

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