Once upon a time, a prominent YouTuber released an entire video rant about the fan backlash he was receiving.

He had spent years building up his channel and producing quality content of a very specific type. He had almost a million subscribers, and he was previously received very well.

Then one day he decided to spend months producing and releasing content of a closely related – but different – type. At first it was mostly received well, but it ultimately wasn't what people wanted from his channel. And it just kept coming.

Enter the rant. The short of his argument was that he was producing quality content with high production value. And that should be good enough for his fans.

But it wasn't. Because it wasn't the content that they wanted.

And he kept going. So his views went down. And his subscribers went down too. And he got so frustrated that he ended up just walking away for months.

This week's episode of Strange New Worlds was objectively good. It was well written and well performed.

But I still squirmed through it. And if I hadn't suspected that it might be very important to the long-term plot, I probably would have just skipped it altogether. I'll certainly skip it on any rewatch.

And that's okay. We're allowed to like some things and not like others. Strange New Worlds seems to be on a path du jour, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But when people give a simple star rating, they aren't leaving a professional review. They aren't considering production value. They're saying they liked it, or they hated it, or something in-between.

From IMDB instructions on leaving ratings:

Our ratings are on a scale from 1 - 10. 1 meaning the title was terrible and one of the worst titles you've seen and 10 meaning you think it was excellent.

That's it.

That's why you're seeing those one-star reviews. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Frankly of the 19 episodes released so far, this is the only one I can say that I really didn't like. All in all, I think that's a pretty good average.