Did they make this bad on purpose?

i don't think too many will disagree with you. the constant re-use of footage, the poor storylines, & the killing off/absence of regulars was a disappointment. so too was the lack of a proper ending.

The episode where Charles (played by a British actor) and Diana marry jumps the shark.

This was around the time when UK Prince Charles married Diana as well, so the in-joke is not particularly charming...

Nice to see Diana figure it out and spin the poison scene to her advantage, but the whole marriage thing redefines "camp" and not in a good way. It plays out like a cheesy soap opera. Nice to see that some of the aliens are not wearing human skin, but one would think they'd all be in their normal lizard looks. Instead the marriage scenes come off as a rejected Buck Rogers skit...

It is a shame; the first few episodes outdo "The Final Battle" in terms of quality (easily done but that's beside the point). From episode 10 onward, they're in trouble.

Blair Tefkin didn't have much to do in the show (except be lured for another lizard to make more starchildren with highly contrived explanation, apparently) so it's easy to see why she quit.

prof Maxwell and Elias did get good leaving scenes.

The show has that unity thing and sticking together, so even the episodes leading to the marriage nonsense have some redeemable dialogue once in a while, though I agree many stories were overall lacking - particularly the final 9 or 10...

But Charles' death was shock jock inanity.

The last few episodes are really bad after Ham Tyler leaves.

[deleted]

I don't think the series as a whole was ever good. They went into Saturday morning cartoon territory. I didn't care about new characters like Nathan Bates and Kyle. Lydia was good, but she was essentially there as a bitching buddy for Diana to play off. She had more potential than that. They should have explored the lizard race a bit more, instead of having a new evil Diana plan in every episode.

I can't stress enough how much Diana's big hair do bugged me.

I enjoyed the mini-series, I liked the cast, I thought the ending was silly but no more so than Independence Day and the effects weren't terrible. Then I saw this series on dvd at Walmart for around ten bucks and thought it would at least be worth that much. It wasn't. It all seemed so rush. The characters didn't connect. The stories became sillier each episode. I would maybe have done another mini-series but it seemed like the Final Battle was enough from a story perspective.

Networks couldn't leave it alone, they saw dollar signs after the success of the mini-series and should never have made a TV series, Final Battle had a decent ending and the series just undid everything. It's called Final Battle for a reason, it was the end. The series viewed now can be fun in a cheesy "so bad it's good" way but in all honesty it's car crash TV.

The writing is abysmal, Singer and Grant are sidelined for characters we don't know or care about, Kyle and Elizabeth's romance soaks up the screen time and there's way too much Diana and Lydia. They look positively absurd with their huge 80s hair, glaring at each other like they're in Dynasty. Diana worked in the two mini-series because she was used sparingly, yes she's beautiful and easy on the eye but she's overused in the series and it reveals how bad an actress Badler is. June Chadwick isn't much better. As for Charles, he's the worst villain I've seen in a TV show, and looks like something out of a 70s Bee Gees video. It never recovered after Ironside left.