Sci-Fi Adventures Awards 2017

This kind of worked last year so I'm doing it again. It's the second annual Ray Hardgrit's Sci-Fi Adventures Awards!

Though this time there's some brand new categories, more TV series in the running, and less screwing around with javascript because I got all that working already. I've even spelt the text in the banner correctly so I don't have to sneakily edit it.

But the categories are still dumb, the winners are all still chosen by me for purely subjective reasons, and I'm only including things I've written about during the previous 12 months... for the most part. I'm not going to deliberately try to ruin movies or episodes for you, but there will be some SPOILERS around due to the fact that I'm giving out awards for their content, so there'll be descriptions of things and images that pop up when you click to reveal the winner. There are limits to how vague I can be I'm afraid.

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Worst Season 1

It's gotten better in recent years, but science fiction series didn't use to have the best track record when it comes to first seasons. There are a few reasons why this happened: a lot of the budget likely went on the expensive standing sets, everyone was still trying to figure out what the series they were making even was, and it seems like they were often a mess behind the scenes (which is doubly true for Star Trek series).

But the winner of this award went above and beyond to achieve the very worst first season I've had the misfortune to watch for the site this year. For some series I only actually saw one episode from it, but I'm including them anyway because I can.

So the contenders are: Babylon 5, Batman, Justice League, The Orville, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Discovery, Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis.

Click here to reveal the first 'winner' of the night.

It's Deep Space Nine!

Maybe I would've chosen differently if I'd seen SG-1's first season recently enough to actually remember any of it, but DS9 didn't just disappoint me in its first year, it bored me to the point of sketching all over the pad I was supposed to be making notes on. It set up a great premise in the pilot episode and then spent most of the next 18 episodes screwing around with Next Gen guest stars, magic imagination aliens, characters getting trapped in a board game, a magic milkshake monster etc. But then Trek's first seasons are supposed to be terrible, it's a tradition, so I can forgive it.

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Best Star Trek Series

It's Deep Space Nine vs. Discovery, and this time I'm counting all the second season DS9 episodes I've seen this year. Can the epic The Circle episode trilogy and Necessary Evil give it the edge over its slick but troubled successor?

Click to see the winner.

And The Orville wins!

The Orville doesn't have the Star Trek brand and it's not set in the Star Trek universe, but it's got more of Trek's spirit than either of the actual Trek series I watched this year. That's just my justification for why it qualifies, by the way, I'm not saying that DS9 and Discovery are bad for mixing up the Trek formula and doing something different with it. It's just that the different things they've been doing in the episodes I've watched this year haven't been as interesting or entertaining to me as the surprisingly thought-provoking sci-fi stories that The Orville has (occasionally) been telling.

(But if you don't count The Orville, Discovery totally wins).

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Coolest Looking Set

Damn, I already regret choosing this category, as now I have to decide if the Millennium Falcon's interior looks better than Stargate Command, or the Discovery's shiny bridge looks better than DS9's upgraded promenade. Or if the Klingon Ship of the Dead looks better than OCP's boardroom. At least the cartoons don't count and I haven't seen the inside of a TARDIS this year. I did see a video of them taking apart the Twelfth Doctor's control room on Twitter though and it was kind of sad.

Click to see the most incredible room in science fiction.

Yeah this is a terrible award, remind me to never do this again. In the end I had to go with the Falcon, possibly because I saw The Last Jedi recently and it's still on my brain. Deep Space Nine's promenade is a fantastic set, but it's disqualified for literally being a shopping centre, Stargate's iconic interconnected bunker is astoundingly grey, and Discovery's bridge is... well it's not the Millennium Falcon.

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Worst Costume

After writing up my 2016 awards post I decided that this year I was going to make things easier on myself and write down any contenders for awards as I watched things, so that months later I wouldn't have to think back though 68 episodes and movies and try to remember the stupid things people have been wearing. But then I forgot.

Still, I can come up with a few ideas for this one, like Shinzon's daft shiny purple suit in Star Trek: Nemesis, the Tesh and Sevateem costumes in Doctor Who's The Face of Evil, the coat apparently covered in food/ornaments from DS9's Cardassians, and the Zapp Brannigan/Sealab 2020 uniforms in Discovery.

And the worst costume is...

It's this guy's coat from Deep Space Nine! As much as I want to give this to the Tesh from Doctor Who, their daft outfits made more and more sense the more context the story gave me, while this coat is never going to make any sense to me.

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Best TV Opening Credits

This award is for the best combination of music and imagery during a series' opening titles sequence. Babylon 5's got an advantage here as I watch episodes from two seasons and it changed its titles every year, but it's up against Danny Elfman's Batman theme and David Arnold's Stargate: SG-1 theme! Though maybe I'll want to subtract points for a lack of originality, seeing as they swiped their music from movies. Stargate: Atlantis would've been a real contender as well, except the pilot episode I saw didn't have the opening titles on it, so it doesn't qualify. But Doctor Who (70s theme), The Orville, Deep Space Nine (seasons 1-3), Discovery and Justice League are also in the running.

Click to reveal the winner.

And the winner is... Batman: The Animated Series!

The animation hasn't aged all that well in places, but the music's perfect and opening tells a little self-contained story. And the story is all about Batman hitting people! Plus it gets bonus points for being so damn self-assured it doesn't even bother to flash up the title of the series. Second place is... either The Orville with its Voyager-inspired space scene montage or the very dramatic and 90s Babylon 5 season 2. Last place is Justice League's opening, which is about as dull as Deep Space Nine's title sequence and looks much worse.

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Worst Alien

There's a few contenders for this one I can think of, like the Remans in Star Trek: Nemesis, that bloke with the strip of rubber over his mouth that meant he couldn't eat in DS9's Melora, everyone involved in the Mutai tournament in B5's TKO, the zookeepers with the giant red heads in The Orville's Command Performance, Lwaxana Troi, the new Klingons in Star Trek: Discovery, the wolfman in the Star Wars cantina, and Superman.

But the winner is...

The new Klingons!

The first rule of pointlessly changing a beloved alien race that's had a consistent look since 1984 and has featured prominently in hundreds of episodes is don't make them worse. The new Klingons look ridiculous, can barely move or talk in their giant rubber heads, and even if it turns out that there's a damn good reason coming to explain what happened to their appearance, it won't be enough to justify their loss of presence and personality. Though to be fair Kol wasn't so bad in Into the Forest I Go when he was finally allowed to speak English.

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Worst Superhero

This award would've made slightly more sense if I'd got the superhero-themed Doctor Who Christmas special review written on time, but I've still all the heroes in the Justice League cartoon to consider. And Batman counts twice because I watched his cartoon too.

Click here for the winner.

It has to be Superman in the three-part pilot episode of Justice League.

The guy lasted an average of 7 seconds before being knocked down or knocked out in almost every fight he got into and that's not an exaggeration. Plus he let Metropolis get wrecked and the Daily Planet globe get destroyed, and he spent the last episode captured by alien invaders and helpless. Fortunately for the human race, Batman was around to cover for him, and the story ended with a group of heroes banding together and forming a team to compensate for Superman's utter incompetence. He got better in later seasons though.

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The "Wait, WHAT?" Award for Exceptional Absurdity

This award is for the explanation or turn of events that did the most damage to my own personal suspension of disbelief during a story. The contenders include: everything Xoanon did in Doctor Who's The Face of Evil, the USS Discovery's main science project, the infectious telepathic archive that makes people kill each other in DS9's Dramatis Personae, the long-range mind melds in Discovery, the telepathic projection in DS9's Second Sight, the two-dimensional dimension in The Orville's New Dimensions, and the Technomages in B5's The Geometry of Shadows.

Click for the spoilery reveal, if you dare.

And the winner is the USS Discovery's displacement-activated spore hub drive!

The drive utilises mushroom spores to move the ship along a network of mycelium roots that have grown throughout subspace, allowing instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy as long as the correct path is calculated by a pilot that's been genetically spliced with giant alien tardigrade DNA to allow them to speak to mushrooms and has ports embedded in their forearms to allow them to interface with the hardware. What the fuck?

If I'm ever contacted by time travellers who offer me the opportunity to change just one thing about Star Trek: Discovery, I'll choose to drop the mushrooms, no hesitation. I hate the mushrooms so much that I will risk breaking the spacetime continuum just to get rid of them. No more mushrooms for the writers of Discovery. Then maybe we can go fix some of the bigger problems in the world later if the time travellers aren't too busy.

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Worst Regular Character

This award is for the worst character to get a spot in a TV series' opening titles; the one who added the least to their episodes and usually just took up screentime that could've been given to a much better character... on the occasions where they bothered to show up at all. Here's a few possibilities for this one: DS9's Jadzia Dax and Julian Bashir, B5's Warren Keffer, Na'Toth #2 and telepath Talia Winters, Stargate: Atlantis' Aiden Ford, Cadet Tilly from Discovery and John LaMarr in The Orville.

Click here for disappointment.

The winner has to be Babylon 5's crack Starfury pilot Warren Keffer; a character so hated that even his own creator couldn't stand him. It definitely wasn't going to be Tilly; I like Tilly!

Keffer is like the Poochy of season two, except no one ever talks about him when he's not around. He just turns up every three or six episodes, hangs out with the command staff like he's their old friend they've known all along, and then vanishes without a trace. Not that it's unusual for B5 characters to be absent a lot of the time, but the dialogue he's given is generally as bad as his acting, so I'm always left wondering why he keeps coming back. What is he adding to this series? I mean I know why he's there, the network wanted a hotshot pilot on the series, but why is he there?

It's a shame really, as they could've given his spot in the titles to a real hero, like Lou Welch, Zack Allan, or Tech #1.

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Best Spaceship

Oh it's this award again. Last year I gave it to both Kirk's USS Enterprise refit and Picard's USS Enterprise D, because with the amazing choices I had I couldn't pick just one. And I didn't even watch a Star Wars movie that year! I think this time I'd better make it a top five, just so there's some doubt of what's going to win.

So the nominees for the five 'Best Spaceship 2017' awards are:

From Babylon 5:
The Starfuries, the EAS Agamemnon, the EAS Cortez, the Minbari War Cruisers and the black alien spider ships.

From Star Trek:
The runabouts, the USS Enterprise E, the USS Shenzhou, the USS Discovery, the next gen Romulan Warbirds from Nemesis and the Klingon Ship of the Dead.

From Stargate:
Ra's pyramid ship, the death gliders and the puddle jumpers.

From Star Wars:
The X-wings, the Y-wings, the Star Destroyers, the TIE fighters, the Millennium Falcon, that Corellian corvette and Dash Rendar's Outrider (it's on screen in the distance for a few seconds).

Plus the USS Orville and the TARDIS.

Click to see my top 5 list.

5. The EAS Agamemnon

These Omega-class destroyers are like a big ugly train in space but it's a cool look I reckon and I like the spinning section in the middle they use to generate fake gravity (even if it's not quite scientifically accurate and it's totally stolen from the Leonov in the movie 2010).

I'm only at the halfway point of Babylon 5's second season, so the Agamemnon hasn't had time to do a whole lot, but All Alone in the Night gave an adequate demonstration of what she can do when there's a spaceship in front of her she doesn't much like the look of. She can't quite dart around like the Millennium Falcon, she's a mile-long carrier/destroyer not a light freighter, but with all those guns she doesn't have to.

4. The TARDIS

The TARDIS fails the 'Would I want a little model of it?' test, as I'm not all that keen on police boxes, but the tiny massive ship has really won me over in the half-decade I've been watching Doctor Who. It's not the most reliable ship on the list, but it's got a lot of personality (literally) and can take you from one side of the universe to the other in less time than the Millennium Falcon's navicomputer needs to make the calculations for the jump to lightspeed. Though it'll likely take you to where you need to be instead, which is good too. Always nice to be needed.

3. The Starship Enterprise

This is Captain Picard's movie-era stretched out neck-less USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E to be precise.

I've always liked the basic shape of this starship and I appreciate that the designers had continued to resist the allure of Star Wars and didn't 'Millennium Falcon' up the smooth hull with pipes and greebles, but I reckon this needed a little more time in development for them to work out all the details. To be honest I think she kind of looks like a plastic model kit at times and the switch to CGI didn't fix that. I still love the thing though; the vessel deserved better movies.

2. T-65 X-wing Space Superiority Starfighter

I love this starfighter's iconic x-shaped wings and the way it gets around when it dogfights... but in the end I had to choose the X-wing over it. Sorry Starfuries, you're good but you haven't taken down a single Death Star yet. Though to be fair the X-wings needed an assist from the Millenium Falcon to pull it off.

1. The Millennium Falcon

And first place goes to Han Solo's scruffy looking freighter, but then you likely knew that already. It was pretty obvious that the TIE fighter's natural predator had to end up at the top of the list.

The Millennium Falcon was built for last-second rescues and improbable journeys through narrow tunnels, which enable it to effortlessly win the hearts of everyone who wasn't already sold on it after seeing the comfy sofa and built-in holographic game table. Plus it seems entirely immune to becoming technologically obsolete, despite the fact that it looks like it's an ancient piece of junk constructed from even older pieces of junk (that the production crew brought from a scrap yard). I'm really really glad Space 1999 came out and inspired the filmmakers to change the design of the ship to what we got in the movie, because what they ended up with is perfect.

And now I want to watch the end of The Last Jedi again.

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Funniest Time a Robot Did a Thing

Oh oh, I've finally reached an award that Dark Matter has a chance of winning! Or it would've done if I'd reviewed any of it at least. I did write about Star Wars, Star Trek: Nemesis and The Orville though, so I do have some comedy robot moments to pick from. Plus that Batman episode I watched was full of great robots.

And the funniest robot moment is...

The time that Isaac cut Gordon's leg off in his sleep as a joke in The Orville! Even Gordon eventually came to see the funny side of it.

But seriously if I'd reviewed any Dark Matter this year that would've likely won instead. The Android in that series was a load-bearing character who kept many episodes from collapsing into mediocrity.

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Best Movie Soundtrack

This one should be easy as I only saw four movies this year, Star Trek: Nemesis, Stargate... RoboCop... Star Wars... damn. It would've been a lot more convenient for me if I hadn't chosen movies with such fantastic, memorable scores. Even Nemesis's soundtrack isn't terrible, though it doesn't feature Jerry Goldsmith's best work.

Click for the result.

Fine, I'll give Star Wars another award.

Basil Poledouris's score for RoboCop is iconic and perfect, but John William's Star Wars score is just a little more perfecter. Sure it's a bit derivative at times, but it works.

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Worst Visual Effect

Last year I wrote that I should watch some classic Doctor Who to give me some conspicuously terrible effects to choose from next time. And then I did! So Doctor Who's The Face of Evil has to be the favourite in this fight. But Babylon 5's season 2 CGI is still looking a bit ropey and the Stargate movie has some nasty looking model shots, so it's not a sure thing.

Click to see the worst effect.

Oh sorry, did I say that this was an award for the worst visual effects? Sorry I mean it was for the best visual effects, which makes Doctor Who's The Face of Evil the clear winner. The visuals are so bad that they flip around and become amazing. It helps that it's a story about people with ray guns shooting at giant floating faces; you can't really pull that off in a way that doesn't look hilariously weird.

I mean look at it! This one screencap justifies my site's existence.

But now I'm all out of classic Doctor Who to write about for next year. I'm sure I'll find something else though...

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Best Looking TV Series

Last year I didn't bother keeping people in suspense over what the best-looking series was, as the recent season of Doctor Who was obviously the winner. But this time around I haven't written about any modern Who, and Discovery and The Orville are both in the running, so it's an actual contest! Well, kind of.

Click to reveal the prettiest series.

I really wanted to say that it's Deep Space Nine this time, thanks to some fantastic looking episodes like Necessary Evil, but I have to give it to Star Trek: Discovery. The Orville has its moments too for sure, but it's too committed to its Star Trek: The Next Generation-style cinematography and beige corridors to beat Discovery's general slickness.

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Best Space Battle

Hey, a category that Star Trek: Nemesis stands a chance in! DS9 had a pretty good starfighter battle too, though most of it took place in atmosphere now that I think about it, so I guess that's disqualified. That leaves Babylon 5, Discovery, The Orville... and Star Wars. Is it likely that Star Wars is ever going to lose a space combat fight? You'll have to click the button to find out!

This is the button to click to find out.

Wow, Star Wars won, big shock.

The Star Destroyer chase at the start and the Millennium Falcon turret scene are alright, but the main event is this epic Death Star assault in the final act. It's still fantastic even in an edited clip without the sound playing (though I think they were smart to stick an amazing John Williams score and Ben Burtt's sound effects over it for the actual movie).

Second place goes to the epic battle of the superweapons in Discovery, mostly because of how hilariously one-sided it is, and how the drama is more about the people inside the ships trying to hold on long enough to come out the other side of it.

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Best Fight Scene

Oh look, another award for Star Wars to walk away with. Wait, the lightsaber duel in the first movie wasn't actually all that spectacular. Okay, maybe the TV series actually have a chance here. My first thought was G'Kar vs. a corridor full of people in Babylon 5's The Coming of Shadows, but last year I said I was disqualifying fights where I can see the walls wobbling so I guess that's out. I remember Burnham doing some fighting in Discovery though, and Sisko really went to town on that Bajoran officer in DS9's Dramatis Personae. Plus there's that Kurt Russel fight in Stargate, which earns bonus points for the terrible one-liner at the end.

And the winner is...

The gropos vs. pilots bar fight in B5's GROPOS!

It's got a dude hanging from a chandelier, duelling roundhouse kicks, a civilian taking out a trained soldier with her shoe, a short first-person sequence... it's pure cheesy low-budget 90s magic. And I didn't see a single wall wobbling for once.

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Best Thing I Watched This Year But Didn't Write About
(AKA the 'I want to give The Expanse an Award' award)

I've seen a lot of science fiction this year, much more than what I've reviewed on Sci-Fi Adventures, and most of it was great! Well okay, Dark Matter never quite managed to figure itself out, but I really liked Killjoys, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Legends of Tomorrow's recent seasons (and Red Dwarf's still alright). Plus I saw two Star Wars films: Rogue One and The Last Jedi, along with Justice League and Spider-Man: Homecoming, and they were all better than I expected. I still haven't gotten around to Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 yet, though I've heard they're pretty watchable. But really I'm just putting this award in so that I get to talk about how blown away I was by The Expanse when I binge-watched the first two seasons over a couple of days. It's a really good TV series, even if it has ruined every other sci-fi show for me with the way it portrays space physics and the problems with living off Earth.

Click to see what wins.

Crap, I just remembered Rick and Morty.

It seems weird to me, putting Rick and Morty season 3 over The Last Jedi, as I'm not one of the people who disliked the film, but when I think back I have to say I probably liked the cartoon just a little bit more overall. It's real smart, real funny and had... stuff happening in it that I am not going to spoil. Plus The Ricklantis Mix-Up has to be one of the best episodes of anything I've ever seen ever.

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Absolute Worst Episode

But there are bad things in this world as well and sometimes they even happen during an otherwise decent enough season of television. Fortunately, I scribbled down my personal episode ratings somewhere, so I should be able to tell you with a reasonable degree of accuracy which episode of Discovery, DS9, B5, The Orville, Doctor Who, SG-1, Atlantis, Batman or Justice League provided me with the nadir of television this year.

And the worst episode is...

DS9's Dramatis Personae!

It was a close thing between this, Invasive Procedures and B5's TKO, but those other stories felt like missteps to me, while this was more like one long gag played on anyone who still held out hope the series would actually start doing anything with its premise. I mean I'm sure everyone involved had the best intentions, but with almost the whole crew basically possessed all episode it's a story about a group of people we don't know playing out a drama that doesn't matter. A drama that actually plays up the tension between Sisko and Kira that existed in like one episode before disappearing, except they're not really them, and it's all pointless, and none of it means anything.

But hey at least Sisko got a clock out of it.

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Best Episode

But just because Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine have given me hours of misery this year, doesn't mean they didn't redeem themselves. In fact, they've both contributed to my shortlist of top episodes, which includes: B5's The Coming of Shadows and Chrysalis, DS9's Duet, In the Hands of the Prophets and The Circle, Discovery's Into the Forest I Go, and The Orville's About a Girl, Firestorm and Cupid's Dagger.

It's not hard to tell that it's an even better set of episodes than I ended up with last year, but choosing my favourite is going to be tricky. Can The Orville actually win this? Is that actually possible?

Click to reveal my subjective choice for Best Episode.

It's Babylon 5's first season finale Chrysalis!

Babylon 5 had been fairly episodic up to this point, with the main story all wrapped up by the end of each week, even if there were a couple of threads left over. But Chrysalis doesn't build to a resolution, it builds to catastrophe. It's like a car crash in slow motion, where the heroes are always a couple of steps behind the events in motion and are ultimately too late to prevent anything. By the end of it two major attacks have taken place, a main character is in critical condition, another has chosen to sacrifice who they are, and everyone else is left in shock. The series that comes out of Chrysalis is pretty different to the one that entered it, for the better.

I really liked those other episodes in the list too, like I said it was hard to pick a favourite, but I think the runners-up have to be B5's The Coming of Shadows and DS9's Duet. The new series, Discovery and The Orville, have been more consistent than the 90s shows were in their first seasons, but they're not quite reaching as high yet. In my opinion.

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Subjectively Greatest Movie

The final award I'm giving out this year is 'Subjectively Greatest Movie', for the film I personally liked more than other films, for my own personal reasons. But before that, I'm going to give the award for Worst Movie to Star Trek: Nemesis! Congratulations Nemesis, you finally won something.

That leaves Stargate, RoboCop and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope in the running for my favourite film, and let's face it, it ain't gonna be Stargate.

Click here to reveal the ultimate winner.

Wow, it's that old fantasy movie from the 70s with the comedy robot double act and the laser swords!

For me choosing between Star Wars and RoboCop is like choosing between oxygen and gravity: I'd rather keep both of them if I can help it. I do like Star Wars more, because spaceships, but both movies have a special place on my DVD shelf... right next to RoboCop 2 and one of the Star Wars prequels.

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Right, that's 2017 done with then. It's a good thing too, because I'm so tired and worn out right now I can barely keep my eyes focused. You should consider yourself fortunate this all makes as much sense as it does.

I did end up growing that season two beard I promised to grow at the end of the 2016 Awards though, so there's that. I'll leave it up to you to decide if it led to a substantial improvement in my writing over the last year. I'm still a few months away from Sci-Fi Adventures Season Three, but my goal for next season is to fire the writing staff and bring in new people with a better understanding of character and a strange dislike of anything resembling a melody in the soundtrack. Or was it season 4 where Next Gen's music turned beige?

Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year once again, and may all your comments be insightful and witty.