Hober Mallow wrote:
I just never liked the idea of alternate earths at all, the implication being that earth's biological, political, social, religious, scientific, and technological evolution is inevitable everywhere given earth-like conditions and enough time. Even on a limited budget they could have been more imaginative than that.
It's not a problem that went away with the later series, either; they just gave their humanoids bumpy heads and called it good.
The idea of running into humanoids speaking Standard American English is already stretching things beyond the realm of probability.
Science Fiction, in most cases, isn't really about imagining truly typical examples of alien life, but rather alien examples of typical (human) life.
It's allegory, it's morality tale, it's anthropological thought experiment. It's not a scientific projection of evolutionary probabilities regarding distributions of sentient species.