I've been realizing a lot lately that the only reason I'm excited for both the new Star Trek movie and the new Caprica series is because of the territory they cover. I don't particularly want any more Trek, and I think I've already hit my limit of Cylons and eye-twitching. But I desperately want more movies featuring space battles. And I would fervently greet any TV show that explores the themes of artificial intelligence and dead children (among other things) that Caprica is staking out.

I didn't actually realize until last week that Caprica didn't start its life as a BSG spinoff at all. At Paleyfest, producer David Eick explained that co-writer Remi Aubuchon had pitched the show to the Sci Fi Channel as a new show about artificial intelligence. And the Sci Fi execs thought that because of those A.I. themes, it would make a good continuation for BSG, and they told Aubuchon to work with Eick and Ronald D. Moore to revamp it into a BSG show.

Reading about that remark, I'm now dying to see Aubuchon's original pitch for Caprica, before the Adama family and the other BSG continuity baggage got shoe-horned in. If you watch the pilot, it's pretty obvious the Adama clan doesn't fit - the storyline makes a lot more sense if you take them out. In the pilot, Zoe Graystone dies in a terrorist bombing, but it turns out she found a way to scan her brain and create a virtual avatar with all her memories. And then her grieving dad strives to load that avatar into a robot body, inadvertently helping to create a super-weapon. It has a certain elegance, no? Until you shoehorn in the idea that Joseph Adama's daughter could also be restored to life, based on her Facebook page and whatever other info Google can dig up. Adding the BSG elements basically transforms this story into a giant "WTF".

And I'd be much more interested in seeing where Caprica goes - if I didn't already know where it ends up. I can only really get super excited about Caprica if I pretend I haven't already seen the saga's ending: Bob Dylan, gelatinous orbs, angels, mass shipicide, etc. I actually enjoyed the pilot a lot, but I also kept wishing it would be its own thing, instead of a prequel for a show that had already spawned a history that was way too sweeping and nonsensical.

As for Star Trek, I'm excited for it and hoping it does well - but a large amount of that excitement comes from the fact that I can count the number of space-opera movies in the past decade on a multiple amputee's fingers. There's the Star Wars prequels, the Riddick films, maybe Supernova, Serenity... and Star Trek: Nemesis. I'm reaching a bit here, and some of those films are barely space opera. (I'm thinking interstellar spaceships, ideally shooting at each other in space.)

Just imagine how cool it would be if there was a new movie about space captains venturing out into other star systems and getting into firefights with aliens or other space captains - and we didn't know what was out there, because it was a whole new universe.

So when I root for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek to do well, I'm really rooting for Hollywood to realize that there's still a market for movies about people on super-awesome spaceships exploring, fighting, emoting and defying several laws of physics at once. I'm hoping that if Star Trek makes Dark Knight money, we'll start seeing a slew of fatuous articles in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter quoting various execs as saying this proves the masses love faster-than-light travel and energy weapons. And aliens with funny heads. Please.

This is the real evil of franchises, after all: they subsume genres. Space opera is a genre, not a franchise. But these days, the only way we get to see space opera on the big screen (or small, for that matter) is as part of a franchise that someone has decided is still a cash cow. And then you have that example, where the Sci Fi Channel hears a writer pitch a cool concept about artificial intelligence - and instead of saying "Hey, this could be the next Battlestar Galactica," they say, "Hey, this could be turned into more Battlestar Galactica." Like stories about robots automatically need to be branded as BSG, or audiences won't "get" them.

Where does this stop? Do we eventually end up with just two or three franchises, with names like "Space Gloop" or "Time-Travel With Robots"? And heroes with names like "Captain Cocky Z. Valiant"? Does it eventually go full circle? Meaning, after franchises swallow up whole genres, do the franchises eventually melt down and become genres again? (I feel like this nearly happened to Star Trek already - Voyager and Enterprise managed to be utterly generic, even as they felt less and less connected to whatever Trek was originally about.) Or maybe the process will just continue, as franchises eat each other and we eventually end up with just one mega-franchise, called "Blam" or "Spow".

Anyway, consider this a plea: Continue Star Trek for another 50 years, spawn another dozen Battlestar incarnations, I don't mind at all. But please, please give us some original space opera and self-aware robot stories on screen. We'll still like them even if they're not an existing brand. I promise!

Starblazers. Desslok, leader of the Gamilons, tried to crush the puny humans over and over again, but finally lost his empire. So in season two, he decided to take revenge on the crew of the Yamato, who defeated his ambitions. He finally catches up to them in an episode auspiciously titled "Desslok's Victory," and pounds them with his gunships. Then he surrounds the Yamato with magnetic mines before the humans can fire their famous Wave Motion Gun. And then taunts his adversaries mercilessly. "Go on, take a shot." Ha ha ha ha. (I know it's sacrilege, but I actually prefer this scene in the English dubbed version.)

Battlestar Galactica. It takes less than an episode for things to go south between the Galactica and the newly discovered Battlestar Pegasus. Admiral Cain decides to execute the Chief and Helo, leading to a tense confrontation complete with the whirly cam. Commander Adama shows why you don't mess with Galactica, with his terse "I'm getting my men" speaking volumes. And then the phone comes down, because the space battle is on.

Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. Star Trek pretty much perfected the art of hailing-frequencies bravado, as early as "Balance of Terror"'s Romulan Sub-Commander Tal. "Your ship is surrounded, Captain. You will surrender immediately, or we will destroy you." With Kirk responding, "Save your threats. If you board this ship, I'll blow it up. You'll gain nothing." But Trek's masterpiece of comm-taunting has to be TWoK, where Kirk keeps needling Khan's poor marksmanship, until finally he lures him into a disabling nebula by laughing at his superior intellect. "We tried it once your way, Khan. Are you game for a rematch?" The script says: "Khan's eyes bulge." And they do.

Serenity. This one's a bit different. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Operative is mournful and regretful after he slaughters dozens (maybe hundreds) of innocents to get to Mal. But he still needles Mal via the viewscreen, suggesting that all the carnage is Mal's fault. And he's successful in goading Mal to take rash action — just not maybe the action he was hoping for.

Avengers #94, part of the Kree-Skrull War saga. The Skrull emperor appears on a view screen to warn the Avengers that the Kree warrior, Mar-Vell, is creating the ultimate weapon, an Omni-Wave Projector. And then when the humans don't respond to his threats fast enough, the emperor launches Plan Delta, which sends an all-consuming fireball spiralling towards Earth.

Farscape, "Die Me, Dichotomy." In the second season cliffhanger, Scorpius takes over Crichton's brain via a neural chip, and the mind-controlled Crichton tricks Aeryn into letting him go. She chases after his module in her Prowler, leading to a harsh exchange. Scorpius asks her how the skull fracture is doing, and she threatens to shoot him down. "Make no mistake." Scorpius/John replies: "I believe you'll pull the trigger. I just don't believe - you'll hit anything." And then he goes into a dive. Sadly, this is just a few moments before Aeryn takes her chair-dive into the frozen lake.

Halo 3, "The Crow's Nest" level. The Chief and Johnson reach the Command Center and start making plans to attack Truth's army, but then Truth appears on all screens and says: "You are, all of you, vermin. Cowering in the dirt, thinking...what, I wonder? That you might escape the coming fire? No! Your world will burn until its surface is but glass! And not even your Demon will live to creep, blackened, from its hole to mar the reflection of our passage; the culmination of our Journey. For your destruction is the will of the gods! And I? I AM their instrument!" Okay, so that's not a space battle. But I love that speech.

Galaxy Quest. Jason and Sarris have many great confrontations over the viewscreen, including the first one, where Jason thinks Sarris is just acting, and the second one, where Jason calls Sarris stupid and ugly because he thinks the sound is off. But the best, by far, is the final jaw-dropping confrontation. Sarris reminds Jason that he's a General, who's seen war and death that Jason can't imagine, and Sarris won't blink no matter what. (This scene is lengthier in the original script, actually.) But Jason retorts that it doesn't take a great actor to recognize a bad one, and Sarris is sweating. And then we get to the classic exchange, "You fool. What you fail to realize is that without your armor my ship will tear through yours like tissue paper." To which Jason responds: "Yeah. Well what you fail to realize is... I'm dragging mines."

Babylon 5, "Between The Darkness And The Light. We're totally embarrassed that we missed this crucial showdown between Earthforce and Susan Ivanova, and super grateful that commenters Michael and BcBeBop pointed it out to us. I am going to start calling myself "the right hand of vengeance" and "the boot up your ass" in the same breath now:

Doctor Who, "Bad Wolf." Another one we're embarrassed we missed originally. Thanks to commenter AspiringExpatriate for pointing it out! I love how Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is just like, "No." As if it's not even worth arguing. It mirrors his awesome "No" in "The Long Game" when The Editor asks that long-winded philosophical question about whether a slave is still a slave if he doesn't know he's a a slave. I have to admit, every time I watch this scene I wonder why the Daleks don't just say, "Okay then," and exterminate Rose right then and there.

So what classic space talk-downs did we miss? Feel free to let us know in the comments, but only in the most trash-talking, mouth-running, space-taunting way possible. You fools! We're laughing at your superior intellects.