My wife and I are rewatching The Next Generation and just finished Measure of a Man, the episode in season 2 in which Data’s personhood is legally debated and his life hangs in the balance.
I genuinely found this episode infuriating in its stupidity. It’s the first episode we skipped even a little bit. It was like nails on a chalkboard.
There is oodles of legal precedent that Data is a person. He was allowed to apply to Starfleet, graduated, became an officer and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander with all the responsibilities and privileges thereof.
Comparing him to a computer and the judge advocate general just shrugging and going to trial over it is completely idiotic. There are literal years and years of precedent that he’s an officer.
The problem is compounded because Picard can’t make the obvious legal argument and is therefore stuck philosophizing in a court room, which is all well and good, but it kind of comes down to whether or not Data has a soul? That’s not a legal argument.
The whole thing is so unbelievably ludicrous it just made me angrier and angrier. It wasn’t the high minded, humanistic future I’ve come to know and love, it was a kangaroo court where reason and precedent took a backseat to feeling and belief.
I genuinely hated it.
To my surprise, in looking it up, I discovered it’s considered one of the high water marks for the entire show. It feels like I’m taking crazy pills.
Soap operas were doing serialized storytelling for decades before your examples. Maybe not good serialized storytelling, but still.
Yes there were soap operas. But was anyone doing it in prime time? Another commentor mentions how syndication was big at the time. Also you did have the concept of a “mini series” which was a popular term at the time, which implied the distinction.
Batman ended every episode with a cliff hanger. Sometimes literally hanging batman off a cliff. Then they’d resolve it within the first 10 seconds of the next episode.
Soap operas were incredibly addictive. Some of them have thousands of episodes.