January Meme: A big lost opportunity in sci fi shows

lightofdaye actually asked about "biggest", but I'm shying away from top accolades (or accusations), not least because there are a great many sci fi shows I still haven't watched. Also I'm aware one watcher's "lost opportunity" is another watchers "thank all the powers that be this never happened!" Case in point: Back in the Battlestar Galactica day, bnf JennyO had this theory that Laura Roslin would turn out not only to be a Cylon but the Cylon god, and "read" everything according to this. I, otoh, intensely disliked that theory; the two characters which I thought could not be revealed as Cylons without losing something quintessential to their story were Baltar and Roslin, though for different reasons, and I was incredibly glad these two did in fact remain human. Otoh a friend of mine who believed in JennyO's theory sees it certainly as a great lost opportunity to this day.

Mind you, I have my own "lost opportunity" BSG opinions, of course. Featuring both smaller and larger scale aspects and decisions of the show, gong from "good lord, someone should have reigned Edward J. Olmos in from overacting in s4" to the more serious "I wish Ron Moore & Co. hadn't improvised Boomer's post s1 storyline (in as much as she had one), because that really, really showed in the worst way. Sometimes not having a fixed plan for a character and see where the story leads you can work beautifully, but not in this case. ( More spoilery observations follow. )

Another big lost opportunity for BSG for me is that Roslin in s4 ( gets spoilerly again )

It probably comes down to the old joke about the plan neither the Cylons nor the writers had. (Though I actually liked the retcon the former gets via Cavil in The Plan.) Again, I'm not saying that thoroughly mapped out stories are necessarily the best. Ask JMS (of Babylon 5 fame) - you need to be flexible enough to accomodate for actors leaving, for starters, and for finding out whether or not your show gets another season at the proverbial last second. And then there's such a thing as unexpected chemistry, or lack of same, or the discovery of talent. Famously, Spike wasn't supposed to make it beyond the first half of BTVS, season 2, the very season that introduced him, and undoubtedly it would have been a very different show if Joss Whedon & Co. had rigidly stuck to their original plan instead of changing their minds once they saw James Marsters' performance. (Please don't regard this as incentive to restart the Spike Wars.) Farscape came up with the neural clone story without which much of the subsequent show is unthinkable relatively late in s2. And so forth, and so on.

But. On the other end of the scale, you have Chris Carter and The X-Files trying to improvise an unplanned myth arc which kept getting worse and worse and worse. And BSG was produced at a point when longer storyarcs had just taken off. Moore wasn't the sole ST (and specifically, DS9) veteran among the scriptwriters; by and large, the Domion War story had shown the DS9 team could plan and execute a story that lasted esssentially over two seasons, using seeds laid in earlier seasons. Hence my conclusion that the big lost opportunity of BSG was for Moore, Eick & Co. once both the miniseries and the first season of BSG had been a success, thus giving them the chance to plan for a longer than one season show, to map out where they wanted their various characters to go, and what the endgame of the show was supposed to be. In short, to use an expression Laura Roslin the former teacher might approve of: to do their homework. They had the talent, they had the skill. They just didn't do it and relied on winging it instead. As a result we got a show I'm actually still very fond of in all its flaws, but which never quite reached the potential it had to the full.

The other days