I don't really remember enough about that show to comment, but the usual failure mode of Newtonian flight models in visual media is that they're extremely reluctant to depict a ship doing a sustained thrust in the opposite direction to its velocity vector, which should logically be ~50% of its time under thrust. They just don't trust audiences to be able to grok it.

Frontier: Elite II (the 1993 game) was the same; it was pretty hardcore Newtonian, but the autopilot would only use the front-facing thrusters to decelerate, even though the main thrusters were much more powerful. If you were under time pressure and needed an efficient flight plan, you had to do turnover and deceleration manually and by eye.