Actually, I liked all the B5 movies.
In the Beginning was the only good one. The rest ranged from "forgettable" to "God, there isn't enough whiskey in the world to make me forget it."
In the beginning was the best of them. If you are going to do a prequel, that's the way to do it. River of Souls was probably the weakest. It was not top-notch B5, but still <shrug> I liked it.
Coto makes an effort, but so far he hasn't shown the chops for the job.
How so? He's bridged the gap between ENT's earlier depictions of Vulcans and TOS' depiction of them, found a way to effectively plant the seeds for the Romulan Wars and the Federation, and is about to provide an explanation to the differences between TOS Klingons and TMP Klingons.
Well, he gets you from point A to point B, but its a very wooden trip. He seems too wrapped up in gimmic guest stars and and stale plots.
Did you ever have any doubt that the Vulcan villain was a Romulan? He overacted more than Willian Shatner pretending to be his own dark half. Didn't you predict that T'Pol's mother was going to die the instant you first saw her? Does every character we meet from here on out have to be related to someone we saw on TOS? (Was there any reason for the enhanced humans to mention Kahn, except for the fact that they were doing a lead-in story for Space Seed?)
Then take this recent Romulan war prequel. I'd quibble with your use of the word "effective" when describing this story. The Romulans were just standard stock TV villains. You've got the guy with the secret project who pushed ahead before he was ready, and whose superior is going to have him killed if he fails. I've seen these exact same two characters a thousand times. I can quote their lines before they say them. And were they Romulan at all? Seriously, the only thing that made them seem Romulan were the ears. They'd have looked more comfortable with black cloaks and tophats, twirling large moustaches and demanding the rent from a helpless widow. Meanwhile, the main good guys get locked into an improbable duel to the death, which you saw coming a full 40 minutes before they themselves figure it out.
There is only one story I've seen this season that seemed like an attempt to tell a good story rather than just to flesh out something mentioned in TOS, and that was the one with the inventor of the transporter device. I enjoyed it. The only problem was, even it borrowed too heavily from The Ultimate Computer in creating the character of its "villain".
Coto's Trek needs something. Perhaps it needs better writers. Perhaps it just needs a chance to be a TV show that isn't on the brink of cancellation, so Coto could relax and build a good pre-TOS mythos. But it needs somehting and that something was never in this season's cards. And that's a shame. Tucker, Reed, and Hoshi had the makings for great characters. (Sorry, I like Baccula, but not Archer, and T'Pol served as little more than eye-candy.) Now these characters have been wasted.
I'd like to see JMS's take on Trek instead.
-S'Cipio