Second, it’s unclear to me why these travelers have to rely solely on VR to escape boredom. Whatever happened to books, music, games, and films? With everything that’s digitized now and how much memory computer chips can handle, that ship (or at least a few latops on the ship) ought to have been able to carry most of AFI’s film library plus a ton of e-books if not the entire Library of Congress, research journals and reference books, preloaded DVD sets of cable shows and TV series, music libraries, etc. And that’s not including video games, board games, a chess set or Go board, plus some poker chips, a copy of Hoyle’s rules and a few decks of cards. Why over-rely on VR?? And there’s no VR tech on board who can fix it if it goes wrong (like that would happen, considering the VR is also used for training and ship maintenance functions) — plus, we’re supposed to believe that NASA would send them out for that long without a backup doctor or med tech. NASA, for whom redundancy is as normal as breathing??? Nope, that’s just too many maguffins to suspend disbelief, and we haven’t even gotten to scientific mistakes and impossibilities yet.

Third, we get no real clues as to what might be broken in the VR system or, better yet, why someone couldn’t simply exit it by pulling off the headset. I would. That part just wasn’t credible.

Finally, it isn’t the Friday night slot per se that kills sci-fi shows on TV, it’s Friday night on broadcast TV that kills it. The cable audience may be different: BSG did just fine for years on a Friday night, as did Stargate and several other shows. And if memory serves, The X-Files ran on Friday nights for a while.

Face it: there’s so much more for folks to do now that ANY night of TV has lower ratings than it used to. And that won’t change in the foreseeable future. What needs to change, in that case, is network executives’ expectations so that they are lower and align more closely to the new reality, whereas their standard of quality needs to improve if they want to retain any viewers (translation: stop insulting viewers’ intelligence with all these nitwit unreality shows!!!). Fat chance of that happening, given how addicted TV execs are to having unrealistic expectations and programming for the lowest common denominator …