I'm not willing to let Moore off the hook with that mushy "everything's gone to hell since the golden age [of my youth]" stuff. Exhibit A, to my mind, is J. Michael Straczinski. While he's not a print author who's transitioned to TV--he's always written for the tube--JMS is a fine writer by the standards of any genre, a craftsman who'd never cop out the way Moore did. Just the opposite: When his planned fifth season of Babylon 5 was cancelled, he rewrote the story arc to preserve its integrity in a shorter form, complete with a meaningful true-to-the-story ending.

And the B5 story itself provides another telling contrast. It began with a seemingly-stark conflict between good and evil, personified by the Vorlons as shining angels versus the insectile Shadows. What could be clearer? Yet four years into the story the climax was the repudiation of the elder races pulling our strings and a determination to stand on our own and make our own decisions ("...and get the hell out of our galaxy!" for good measure).

Quite a contrast with BSG's flaccid surrender of free will to yet another bloodthirsty deity How many billions had to die to fulfill this god's whackjob plan?

I guess one silver lining of all this is that JMS's reputation is intact. I was almost ready to replace him with Moore on that pedestal. Silly me.

Was SF TV really better in our youths? We should be careful about selective memory. How many truly awful shows have we blocked out of our minds? Hasn't SF, at least on TV, been more of a set decoration and costume specification than a style of writing? Moore wrote a religious fable that happened to be set aboard a starship; Roddenberry wrote Westerns set aboard a starship. (I can see the disciple taking the guru's idea to an extreme now that I know Moore is "Star Trek-trained"; Roddenberry downplayed the importance of scientific accuracy and consistency, Moore went all the way and tossed them out the window.)

Maybe what we need to do, for the sake of our own peace of mind, is just declare that what Moore and too many other people are doing is a genre of its own, and stop comparing it to the real science fiction. I came across an appropriate name just recently: "syfy". Same as the new name of the lamentable "SciFi Channel" that's perpetrating it. Appropriately symmetric, eh?