Sci-Fi Adventures Awards - Season Four (2019-20)

Surprise, it's the Ray Hardgrit's Sci-Fi Adventures Awards 2019 Season Four!

You might be thinking that I'm a month late with this, seeing as most people agree that 2019 ended a while back, but it occurred to me that I'm not judging the last year of sci-fi when I do my awards, I'm judging the sci-fi I've reviewed over the last year of my site. I start publishing reviews in April and finish in January, so the awards post should logically come at the end of January.

Plus I'm actually 13 months late, as I skipped the awards for 2018. I watched more than 600 episodes of Doctor Who over that summer (in addition to everything else I reviewed), and when it came time to think back over them all and hand out some awards my brain put up a little white flag and surrendered.

It seems like this year it should be a landslide in favour of Babylon 5, seeing as it's what I've been writing about each week (from season 2's Knives up to season 3's Walkabout), but I also threw in a few other reviews along the way. Like all of Discovery and The Orville's second seasons, the first four Short Trek's, Deep Space Nine's Rivals and the the first episode of Picard. I watched a pair of movies as well: Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Trek Into Darkness! Spoiler: the one that doesn't win Best Movie is going to win Worst Movie.

There's going to be lots of SPOILERS in fact, because that's sadly inevitable when you're giving out awards for 'Best death' and 'Most shocking twist'. No Picard spoilers though, as it's a bit too new. Plus I should remind you that all winners have been chosen by me, without a whole lot of thought, for purely subjective reasons, and shouldn't be taken seriously at all.

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Most Mistreated Regular Character

I'm starting off with a brand new category: the most mistreated regular character. Perhaps some of them deserved all the crap the writers put them through, because they were terrible, but maybe if they'd been written better they wouldn't have been so rubbish! There's no regulars in the Short Treks, and Picard has only had the one episode, but the nominations for the other series are:

Babylon 5:

• Na'Toth - She was in two episodes and disappeared without explanation. They didn't even bother to write her out!
• Talia Winters - By the end of season two she only shows up to go to a fascist meeting and get a drink spilt on her. Then in her last episode she's suddenly in a relationship with Ivanova... but only to make it more tragic when she has her personality deleted. Oh plus she's allegedly been dissected off screen since then.
• Warren Keffer - Never stood a chance due to being forced on the showrunner by the network. Got himself killed by being an incredible idiot and gave the fascist Earth government an excuse to accelerate the curtailment of human rights.

Discovery: Michael Burnham got driven to tears every single episode by the extremely emotional situations she was constantly in.

Deep Space Nine: Bashir had to wear that racquetball costume.

The Orville: I dunno, maybe LaMarr could've had more to do?

Click to see who got shafted.

I wanted to give this to Burnham, but really this is Babylon 5's award by a landslide. Though the absolute winner has to be Talia Winters. She wasn't exactly the best character in season one, but by the end of the second year it seemed like the only reason her face was in the opening titles was so that people would remember who she was when she came back to die.

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Best New Regular

Three of the TV shows I covered last year mixed up their main casts for the seasons I watched, so even though Deep Space Nine was boringly consistent I've still got plenty of people to pick from. Discovery introduced our third (or fourth) Captain Pike and resurrected Dr Culber, Babylon 5 introduced Marcus Cole and promoted Zack Allan, and The Orville replaced Alara with her near-doppelgänger Talla. I suppose I could include B5's Warren Keffer, seeing as he was new for season two, but no.

Click to see the best new guy.

It's Captain Pike! Nothing against the others, there's no bad characters on this list (except for Keffer), but if I was ranking them they'd go Dr Culber, then the rest, and then Pike. Jason Isaacs left some big shoes to fill, but Anson Mount was so damn good in the role that when he left at the end of the season everyone watching the show immediately hit the internet to demand that he get his own spin-off. It seems fairly inevitable at this point we're going to get a Pike series because to not make it would be crazy; he's already got the bridge set!

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Most Impressive Looking Set

It's a bit tricky to know what was an actual room they built and what was CGI these days, but I've decided that if it was convincing enough to trick me then I don't really care, so that's simplified things.

But what's going to win? The flashy new Enterprise bridge first seen in Discovery's Such Sweet Sorrow, Part I? The new war room introduced in Babylon 5's Ship of Tears? Maz Kanata's castle cantina in The Force Awakens? The toilets from Divided Loyalties? There's an actual chance I might give it to the mess hall in The Orville just because of how much better it looks since they put the proper tables in.

Click to reveal the best looking set I saw last year.

It has to be the promenade on Deep Space Nine! Two floors, an 80 foot radius, and it contains the infirmary, the security office and Quark's Bar (which is pretty massive on its own). Babylon 5's interconnected Zocalo/custom's area/docking bay set is pretty impressive as well, as is The Orville's two storey spaceship interior, but I couldn't really say they're the best looking.

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Best Robot

There were no robots that I can think of in Deep Space Nine or Into Darkness, but Discovery was all about AI in season two so something there probably counts. Not Airiam, she turned out to be a RoboCop-style cyborg, however Control had its drones and it seems likely that the Enterprise had unpiloted robots working to repair it. Star Wars always has plenty of droids and my Force Awakens review brings C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 into the running. Plus The Orville has Isaac and his many robot friends, and I watched Picard as well.

Click to see which robot wins.

It's Harcourt Fenton Mudd! Though I'm not sure which one. I guess the one we saw most of, though it doesn't matter as they're all identical; designed solely for the purpose of keeping their captor fooled long enough for the real Harry Mudd to make a getaway with his own bounty.

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Worst Costume

I can't think of a lot of bad costumes this time around, probably because a year is a really long time, so I'm just going to say it's Admiral Marcus's Section 31 uniform from Into Darkness and move on.

I really hate that uniform!

Second place goes to Bashir's racquetball costume in Rivals.

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Most Hateable Villain

There's no shortage of candidates for this one. Discovery had Leland/Control, Into Darkness had Khan and Admiral Marcus, Force Awakens had Kylo Ren and Snoke, Orville had the Kaylon leader and evil Dr Phlox, and Babylon 5 had Bester, Julie Musante, Lord Refa, Mr Morden, President Clark, Security Guard #1, and Londo Mollari. Shame I didn't pick a DS9 episode with Dukat or Winn in so it could compete as well (though that reporter from Picard is definitely in the running).

Click to see the baddest bad guy.

It's Alfred Bester! Babylon 5 has many villains, but he's the only one that Ivanova made a genuine attempt to assassinate because she hates him so damn much. When he's on screen he spends most of his time trolling the regulars, and when he's off screen they can only guess at how much of their misery has been engineered by him. Walter Koenig clearly had fun playing him, and Bester clearly has fun playing with everyone else.

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Biggest Damn Space Hero

I could be here all night trying to decide which are the best characters in general, so I've decided to narrow it down to just the best space hero.

This award is for the characters that get all the fight scenes, continually throw themselves into danger, take the big risks, and save the day. On the Star Trek side there's Michael Burnham (who seems to have made herself the lead of a Trek ensemble through sheer stubbornness), Christopher Pike (two of them), Spock (two of them), James T Kirk (Chris Pine edition) and Jean-Luc Picard (retired edition). There wasn't much space heroics in the episode of DS9 I watched, but Sisko and Dax did shoot a roomful of balls. In Star Wars there's the core trio of Rey, Finn and Poe, but also guest star Han Solo. Plus Babylon 5 has Sheridan, Marcus, Garibaldi and Ivanova, and The Orville has Mercer, Kelly, Bortus, Talla and Yaphit had his moment too.

Click to see who'll save every one of us.

Well it definitely wasn't going to be Kirk.

I was torn on this one because Poe Dameron is basically nothing but a pure space hero in The Force Awakens and Han Solo just walks into the biggest enemy fortress ever constructed in cinema history like it's no big deal. Again. But I've got to give it to the Archangel Michael Burnham, who is the answer to all mysteries, the core of all plots, and the saviour of all sapient life.

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Best Fight Scene

Into Darkness had a few fist fights, all involving the super-strong superhuman Khan, but Force Awakens had lightsaber fights. Meanwhile Babylon 5 delegated most of its fighting to Marcus and his extendable rod in season 3, but Garibaldi got into a battle so fierce that the actor broke his arm. Twice. Discovery was also bringing the violence, with Geogiou and Burnham kicking people all over space in season 2. Nothing from Deep Space Nine this time though.

Click to see who wins.

I'm giving this one to Discovery, specifically to the fight between Georgiou, Nhan and Control in the corridor with the gravity failing (in Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II). It wasn't particularly impressive as a fight, in fact it was mostly just people getting thrown to the ground, wall and ceiling, but I loved that they actually built a rotating set for it. I was amazed that it was even happening in addition to everything else that was already going on in that episode. It was the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.

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Most Irritating Music

I've created an award just to complain about comedy music some more! Babylon 5 should really knock it off already. I mean I thought it had, but then Ceremonies of Light and Dark happened. That episode also featured "Dry Bones" being sung by a deranged murderer in a way that took me right out of the episode. In fact it almost took me out of the room.

Meanwhile Walkabout had Franklin go to a bar, sit down, and listen to the band for two whole minutes, which makes it almost equally as bad as the average season 2 episode of The Orville! Okay maybe it was only two or three Orville episodes where that happened (and they used those Billy Joel and Dolly Parton songs pretty well I thought), but I can live without hearing "Singing in the Rain" and "As Time Goes By" ever again.

Also Short Treks had that disco version of the Discovery theme for The Escape Artist which I hated.

Click to reveal the worst use of music.

I was tempted to pull a swerve and give this to Deep Space Nine because of its bland sonic wallpaper, but the winner is... everything I just mentioned. You're all winners! Congratulations. Now stop it, please. No more obnoxious comedy music, no more scenes of characters performing or listening to an entire song with nothing else going on, and absolutely no disco covers.

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Cleverest Use of Trickery or a Loophole

It's a shame I haven't reviewed any Doctor Who this year as this award is basically made for it. It's also a shame I probably forgotten some really obvious examples, but the tricks that jumped to mind include:

Babylon 5: Abraham Lincolni, Sheridan using the chain of command to arrest most of Nightwatch, Sheridan faking a radiation leak to lure the rest of them out into an ambush.

Discovery: The Talosians tricking Leland with an illusion, Control tricking Georgiou into killing Gabrielle Burnham, Georgiou tricking Control into getting into the box.

The Orville: Setting up a fake star to trick an astrology driven culture.

Short Treks: Harry Mudd using androids to continually collect the bounty on himself.

Deep Space Nine: Quark donating to charity to manipulate Bashir into playing live racquetball, then trying to drug him so he'll lose.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Spock arming Khan's torpedoes before letting him have them.

Click here for the cunning victor.

It's Spock arming the torpedoes to blow up Khan's ship! Sure it's just a cover version of Kirk using the Reliant's prefix code in Wrath of Khan, but it was just different enough to work for me.

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The "Wait, WHAT?" Award for Exceptional Absurdity

This award is for the most blatant and baffling use of absolute bullshit in a story, so it's a shame Doctor Who's not around for this one either. These examples didn't just make me go 'huh?' they broke my suspension of disbelief and kicked me right out of the story.

Discovery:

• The crew murdering Burnham to lure her future self from across time.
• The miraculous blast door on the Enterprise.
• Culber's body being rebuilt in the mushroom dimension after his energy travelled there through Stamets.
• A space suit that can travel in time and across the galaxy, that can also relocate entire churches and generate pulses that can be seen instantly across the entire galaxy, which was invented by Burnham's parents before the series began.

Short Treks:

• The alien queen who can go invisible and is also a super scientist, who believes she's literally her planet's sister.

Force Awakens:

• A planet-sized gun that eats stars and shoots multiple world-destroying projectiles across the galaxy that can be seen in the sky on other planets instantly.

Babylon 5:

• Jack the Ripper? Seriously?

Deep Space Nine:

• The probability-altering game spheres.

Into Darkness:

• Using 'cold fusion' to freeze a volcano, thus removing all danger of the pressure building up to explosive levels.
• The Enterprise being underwater with no explanation (actually I was fine with this one).

Click to see which is dumbest.

The winner is the probability sphere in Deep Space Nine's Rivals! Okay it may seem a bit tame compared to some of the other things on that list, but it's been bothering me for a lot longer.

Star Trek has a lot of fantasy in its sci-fi, with its godlike beings, telekinesis and transporters etc, but a machine that alters probability can only work if luck is an actual thing (or there's a tiny godlike being inside manipulating everything with telekinesis and transporters) and that's a big step into outright superstition that just doesn't suit this fictional universe.

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Best Spaceship

I like this award as it means I don't have to strain to remember anything, except for what spaceships are disqualified for winning already. In 2016 Picard's Enterprise D took second and the Enterprise Refit came first, and in 2017 it was the Agamemnon, Tardis, Enterprise E, X-Wing, and Millennium Falcon. So they're all out of the running now.

I'm keeping it simple this time, only one spaceship can win, and it's going to be one of these:

From Babylon 5: The two kinds of Starfury, the Shadow vessel, the Minbari War Cruiser and the White Star.

From Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline Enterprise, the Original Timeline Enterprise, the Vengeance (it's not going to be the Vengeance), Discovery, the Klingon D-9, the Section 31 ships.

From Star Wars: The Star Destroyer Finalizer, the First Order TIE Fighter, Han's new freighter.

Plus the USS Orville.

Click to see a spaceship.

It's the Original Timeline Enterprise, as seen in Discovery's If Memory Serves!

Funny thing is, this isn't even Pike's version of the ship from The Cage, it's Kirk's version, so I get to give the award to the real deal. I don't hate the look of Discovery's reimagined version, but I do think it was a dumb idea to reimagine an iconic ship that looked great to begin with. The Kelvin Timeline Enterprise got away with it because it's in another timeline (though I still like the look of the original ship more).

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Best Death

Not everyone survived all these stories unfortunately. We lost a lot of high-ranking Starfleet officers, including Admiral Cornwell, Admiral Pike, Admiral Marcus and Captain Kirk (though Kirk got better), plus Airiam and those poor souls that got blown out of the hull of the Enterprise in Into Darkness and Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II. Seems like a lot of people die when Starfleet and Section 31 clash. Meanwhile in Babylon 5, Keffer went and got himself blown up by a Shadow vessel, Talia got her personality overwritten and Kosh was murdered by the Shadows!

Click to see the winning dead guy.

Han Solo getting stabbed through the gut by his own son in Force Awakens. He can't come back as a force ghost you jerk!

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Most Shocking Twist or Reveal

Time for the hardcore SPOILERS.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Harrison is Khan! Marcus is evil! (This one's not going to win).

The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren is Han and Leia's son! He kills Han!

Picard:  REDACTED 

Short Treks: Discovery will end up abandoned thousands of years in the future.

Discovery:

• Saru's race are predators!
• Control has been impersonating Section 31's leaders.
• The ship has to be trapped in the future forever.
• Burnham isn't the Red Angel!
• Burnham is the Red Angel!

Babylon 5:

• The evidence against Clark doesn't work and the station splits from Earth.
• Sebastian was Jack the Ripper!
• The Vorlons are First Ones!
• Kosh is an angel!
• Talia is a sleeper agent!
• They couldn't cure the Markab in time and the entire race goes extinct.

The Orville: Isaac's people killed their creators and are going to kill everyone else as well.

Click here for the shocking reveal.

The Babylon Project was the last, best hope for peace. It failed

Probably wouldn't feel like a huge deal for someone watching the series for the first time in 2020, but after years of comfortable Star Trek the idea that a TV show like this would let the heroes fail this hard blew my mind. By the midpoint of season 3 the entire known galaxy is at each other's throats, Earth has fallen to fascism, and Babylon 5 station is at war with its own homeworld. It's a bit of a change to the status quo.

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Greatest Moment

This one's a bit of a challenge for me, as 57 episodes and 2 movies adds up to about 2400 minutes and that's too many moments for my brain! But a few scenes have jumped to mind:

Babylon 5: Vir's wave to Morden. G'Kar's speech after being removed from the council. Delenn rescuing Babylon 5 in the White Star. Sheridan standing up to Kosh and getting him to take action.

Discovery: Stamets drilling into Tilly's skull while singing "Space Oddity". Pike freaking out after seeing his future, then carrying on anyway. The last shot of Such Sweet Sorrow, Part I with the music building up as they look out at all the ships they have to fight.

Force Awakens: The Falcon's escape from Jakku. Han and Chewie returning to the Falcon for the first time in 30 years.

Into Darkness: The whole damn prologue with the volcano.

The Orville: Yaphit leaping on a Kaylon and killing it.

And the winner is.

Stamets indulging in a bit of trepanation karaoke in An Obol for Charon. So many fantastic moments from legitimately great episodes and this is what I'm going with.

It was just such a beautifully weird moment in an already trippy episode that it's been etched into my brain. I mean metaphorically.

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Funniest Moment

This one's just as bad! I've come up with some moments but I bet there's loads I'm forgetting:

Babylon 5: G'Kar and Londo in the broken transport tube. Garibaldi vs the Post Office. Corwin being invited to Ivanova's quarters. Sheridan's awkward dinners with Delenn.

Discovery: Stamets and Reno on drugs. Reno saying or doing anything.

Short Treks: "If I had any money, I'd be sipping jippers on a beach somewhere".

Deep Space Nine: Bashir's poses as he's warming up for racquetball.

Force Awakens: BB-8 giving a thumbs up with his welding torch. Stormtroopers pulling a 180 and walking away when Kylo Ren throws another fit.

Into Darkness: Chekov being told to put on a red shirt.

The Orville: Bortus's porn fantasies. Bortus's moustache. Bortus and Klyden addicted to cigarettes, Isaac in his y-fronts.

Click here for the objectively funniest moment.

It's Bortus finding all of Klyden's hidden cigarettes in Lasting Impressions! Yeah I picked this over G'Kar going "I can hear you!" while trapped in a lift.

The worst thing about The Orville is that I love half of it but I can't stand the other half anymore, so if I want more Bortus I'll have to put up the rest (or just watch the clips on YouTube).

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Best Shootout

There were lots of people running around with guns in the stories I watched last year. Well, not so much in Short Treks, but everything else made up for it. Kelly and Bortus escaped prison and defended a colony, Georgiou went up against Control, Khan gunned down squads of Klingons, Han, Chewie, Finn and Rey took on Stormtroopers and Sheridan ambushed the Nightwatch.

Click to see what I picked.

I'm going to cheat and say Han, Chewie, Finn and X-Wings vs Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters. Granted the X-Wings are doing most of the shooting, but it's such an awesome looking sequence.

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Best Opening Credits Sequence

There's only really four shows in the running for this one as as Short Treks is just a short riff on Discovery's opening. So it's between:

• The Orville's very Star Trek: Voyager-inspired montage of space exploration.
• Deep Space Nine's very Star Trek: Deep Space Nine montage of boldly spinning around on the spot.
• Discovery's new titles with their season 2 appropriate imagery.
• Babylon 5 season 2 (Sheridan voiceover).
• Babylon 5 season 3 (Ivanova voiceover).
  
• Star Trek: Picard season 1.

Click for the result.

It's Babylon 5 season 3! I love that B5 changed its title sequence and music each year, and this is the bleakest and most dramatic of them so far. I'm not sure there's even any trace of the original theme in there now as it's just the sound of bad things happening. It loses a couple of points for the cheesy images of characters looking at the camera at the camera at the end perhaps, but hey it was the 90s.

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Worst Visual Effect

This is another category that makes more sense when I've reviewed a few Doctor Who episodes, but fortunately there's always Babylon 5. Sebastian tortured Sheridan with a Photoshop filter plastic wrap effect, the station was threatened by a berserker probe covered in a rubbish procedural texture, Michael York was trapped in a terrible black and white dream dimension, Lyta floated out of Kosh's ship and Kosh floated up as an angel to catch Sheridan when his train exploded.

Click to see the worst effect.

I was going to pick the clip of the Original Series Enterprise from In Memory Serves again, as it's from the 60s and suffers from severe generation loss due to the compositing. But it's not as bad as this shot from Passing Through Gethsemane, it just isn't.

The texture on Kosh's ship and Lyta sliding out towards the camera would be bad enough on their own, but combine them both and you get some really nasty looking television.

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Flashiest Effect

Now that I've been mean to visual effects artists I'm going to point out times where they were awesome as well. But this award comes with a catch: it can't be a space battle. That gets its own award.

Discovery loves its holograms but I think my favourite use of them was Burnham talking to Tyler, with the ship on one side of the frame and Qo'noS on the other. Discovery also had the asteroid rescue at the start and Burnham's time travel at the end.

Short Treks had fun with holograms as well, with Craft dancing with Discovery's computer on the bridge.

The Force Awakens had Maz Kanata walking around, along with all the CGI aliens planted among the actors and animatronics in her cantina.

Into Darkness had Kirk searching through a frozen moment of surveillance footage.

Babylon 5's pretty dated, but it did well when they blew up a model corridor, and Londo's reflected horror during the bombardment of Narn holds up better than I expected.

And The Orville's got effects all over the place, but nothing impressed me more than when they turned the sprinklers on and made it rain in the bridge. That was totally convincing! Also Yaphit the blob alien is pretty well done I suppose.

Click to see the best effect.

It's Burnham's time travel adventure in Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II!

I've seen so many wormhole, warp drive, hyperspace and time vortex effects now in Star Trek and other series that breaking the laws of time and space is kind of dull to me now. But Discovery's blend of trippy visuals effects and practical sparks took me completely by surprise. I wasn't expecting to actually care about Burnham's first trip through time! They brought back a sense of wonder to Trek that hasn't really been that bothered about since The Motion Picture, and they managed to do it without boring me to sleep in the processs!

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Best Looking TV Series

Doctor Who won this in 2016 and Discovery took it in 2017. Not much chance of Who walking away with it again, seeing as I didn't write about the series this time, but Discovery's second season is definitely in with a chance. Though The Orville can bring the visuals when it wants to and Deep Space Nine was a damn fine looking series for its time. Plus Babylon 5 also exists.

And the prettiest TV show is...

Sorry, it's Discovery again. I was really tempted to give it to The Orville because of its beautiful cityscapes and space scenes, but Discovery even looks good when they're on the sets! Picard looks even better at times, that was a beautiful first episode, but it wasn't impressive enough to take on all 14 episodes of Disco's second season.

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Best Space Battle

I'm in season three of Babylon 5 now, so the White Star has been out kicking ass a few times, plus Severed Dreams happened, so it's a definite contender. Though Discovery and The Orville each brought a contender for the most spectacular and elaborate space battle ever seen in TV history in their latest seasons, and their effects are a little more modern.

But they're up against two blockbuster sci-fi movies, with Into Darkness featuring the Enterprise getting a beating and not fighting back and Force Awakens having that bit where Poe steals a TIE Fighter and gets blown up... wow, not a lot of proper space combat in those films now that I think about it. Maybe the TV shows can win this after all!

Click here to see who wins.

I wanted to give this to Severed Dreams, because of how amazing it was at time and how epic the events are in context, but really this came down to Discovery's Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II vs Orville's Identity, Part II, and Disco's battle pretty much took up an entire episode. Any other year Orville's incredible space battle would've walked away with this, but Discovery went just a little bit crazier.

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The "I Know That Actor From Somewhere" Award

Sometimes Michael York will show up on Babylon 5, or main characters from (at least) three different sci-fi series will have blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances in The Force Awakens before they're famous. This award is for the best time that happened.

Click to reveal.

Victor Garber, Marina Sirtis, Tony Todd, F. Murray Abraham, Ted Danson, Ron Canada and Kelly Hu, all in one episode. I think The Orville episode Sanctuary wins this year. (They would've won last year as well, when Charlize Theron, Rob Lowe and Liam Neeson showed up).

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Worst Season (Up to This Point)

This is between Deep Space Nine season 2, Babylon 5 seasons 2 and 3, Discovery season 2 and The Orville season 2, so there's no terrible first season here to make it easy for me. Oh hang on, Short Treks was in its first year wasn't it...

And the winner is...

It's Short Treks season 1! Four tiny episodes didn't give it much time to win me over, so it had a tough job, but at the end of the day I just didn't like it very much. Runaway was my least favourite episode of anything (oops, now I can't have a 'Worst Episode' award), Calypso was highly regarded by everyone else but not very interesting to me and The Brightest Star felt like a set of deleted scenes showing a flashback you could sum up in a couple of lines. The Escape Artist with Robot Mudd was the only one I really enjoyed.

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Best Season (Up to This Point)

Same deal as the last award, except on the other side of the scale. I quit watching The Orville so you can probably guess it's not going to be that, and it's definitely not Short Treks, so that leaves DS9, B5 and Disco.

Click here to see what won.

Babylon 5: Season 3!

Discovery's second season found the fun that was missing from the first year and the production values are so high that you have to clean up all the money that dripped out of your TV after watching it, but Babylon 5 is just better at telling a coherant serialised story with sensible stakes and compelling villains. I mean sure every race in the known galaxy is under threat from nightmare aliens from the dawn of time, but that seems pretty reasonable by comparison to whatever Discovery's doing. And even better, it makes any kind of sense.

If Discovery season 3 is built on stronger foundations with a clear blueprint it might be a serious threat to B5's fourth year, but it really does have to get better scripts if it wants to take on a sci-fi TV titan.

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Best Episode

No point in giving out an award for 'worst episode', I already spoiled that one, but I don't think I've given away what my favourite episode was yet. I mean you'd probably guess it's a Babylon 5 story, but it might not be! Maybe I really liked that Harry Mudd Short Trek.

Click to reveal my favourite episode.

It's B5's Severed Dreams!

This is one of my top ten episodes of anything ever, so chances of it being not being my favourite were pretty slim. My 2016 pick was B5's Signs and Portents, my 2017 pick was B5's Chrysalis, and this can take them both on.

Second place is Discovery's Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2, which takes the Rise of Skywalker approach of having so much happening all the time that you don't have a moment to question how stupid it is. Though I did question how stupid it is and I ended up loving it anyway. Third place, maybe Picard's Remembrance.

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Subjectively Greatest Movie

This is the last award I'm giving out this year and seeing as I only reviewed two movies this year you've probably guessed what's going to win. It's either J.J. Abrams' disappointing Star Trek sequel Into Darkness or J.J. Abrams' triumphant Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, and whoever loses gets to be the worst movie by default!

Click to reveal the final winner.

I like Into Darkness, but c'mon it's got to be Force Awakens. It's a bit derivative of the first movie but it brings back the fun and character that the prequel trilogy was missing and as an action movie it's much more of a ride

Sorry Into Darkness, you're the worst movie.

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It's finally done, I've finished it, all the words have been typed, it's over... though maybe I could write a second article featuring all the awards I failed to give out last year! Man, I can't even joke about that right now, I'm exhausted enough as it is. Though, on the other hand, if I don't do there'll always be a hole in my site, bothering me...

Okay fine, here's the short version of my Sci-Fi Adventures Awards 2018:

Click to reveal.

• Worst episode: Classic Doctor Who - The Web Planet.
• Best episodes: Discovery - What's Past is Prologue, Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour, Classic Doctor Who - City of Death.
• Worst season: Sylvester McCoy's first year as the Seventh Doctor.
• Best season: Discovery season 1.
• Biggest damn space hero: The Doctor.
• Most mistreated regular character: Peri.

Right, now I'm going to take the next two months off from writing about science fiction. Hopefully you'll come back in April for more Babylon 5 recaps and whatever else I end up reviewing. Or better still, you could go over to Super Adventures to see what I think about video games instead for a bit.

Thanks for reading! Sci-Fi Adventures will return.