[JohnBooty]

    I see this a lot on Youtube. 

Purely subjectively, I find it way more egregious and annoying on Youtube (because YT won't monetize shorter articles) and less convenient to skim past if you don't like the structure of the video.

    You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or 
    poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited 
    for the detour, then it's done well

I was a maybe little frustrated here, but we already know the ending of the story, right? The guy did return from space. The guy did not open the hatch and kill the crew. Pretty sure we'd all remember that.

So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.