Stargate Universe Season 1
Executive producers: Robert C. Cooper, Brad Wright
Original air dates: October 2, 2009 – June 11, 2010
Mission briefing. The Atlantis database includes a nine-chevron address (well, eight chevrons, plus whatever the point of origin is). It’s believed that there should be a way to dial an even greater distance than between galaxies with nine chevrons. Dr. Nicholas Rush is recruited (by Jackson) to work on it, and he spends two years trying to solve the problem—in that time, his wife dies of a never-specified illness.
The Air Force embeds the problem in a videogame on the off-chance that someone will solve it. That someone turns out to be a young slacker named Eli Wallace, who is beamed to the General George Hammond and brought to Icarus base. Icarus is a top-secret SGC installation that is on a planet full of naquadria, so it has enough energy to power a nine-chevron wormhole.
Eli is brought to Icarus just as the base is attacked by the Lucian Alliance. Carter on the Hammond fights them off, as do 302s led by Colonel David Telford, but the base is compromised. The Stargate is hooked up geothermally so it can’t dial short distances without overloading (that’s why they were taken on the Hammond instead of gating), so they’re trapped. Eli has a breakthrough, Rush dials the gate using the Atlantis address, and they go through to an ancient Ancient ship called Destiny just before the Alliance destroys the base—and the planet.
Destiny is several galaxies away from Earth. The ship has been flying on a prearranged course for millions of years, and it’s not in the best shape. Its crew is long gone, and it has equipment (including a Stargate) that is millions of years behind the Ancient technology they’re all familiar with (but still quite far ahead of mainstream Earth tech). They have no control over the ship, but it does come out of hyperdrive periodically for assorted reasons; each time there’s a countdown clock indicating how long before they’ll go back into faster-than-light speeds, so the crew can periodically gate to planets (which were seeded with Stargates by ships that came ahead of Destiny) for supplies and such.
Rush, along with Adam Brody, Dr. Dale Volker, and Dr. Lisa Park, are charged with learning more about the ship. Colonel Everett Young remains in command, though he butts heads regularly with the sullen Rush, with the IOA representative Camille Wray, who is in charge of HR, but is also the IOA’s only person on the ship, and with Telford back on Earth, who uses the communciation stones that Rush brought along to occasionally show up on board and cause trouble. Also along for the ride are Senator Alan Armstrong and his daughter (and chief of staff) Chloe. Armstrong is badly hurt during the attack, and sacrifices his life to save the ship from what would be a fatal leak of air through a damaged shuttle. Chloe winds up in a relationship with Young’s second in command, Lieutenant Matthew Scott. Scott also previously knocked boots with the third in command, Lieutenant Vanessa James, which causes some discomfort for the latter (the former, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to give a damn); Scott also has a kid out of wedlock back on Earth. In charge of the troops is Master Sergeant Ronald Greer, who was in the brig for striking Telford when the Alliance attacked. The closest they have to a doctor is a medic, Lieutenant Tamara Johansen, who was about to transfer out after a disastrous affair with Young. She later finds out she’s pregnant from that affair.
They soon learn that Destiny collects energy from suns, so they don’t have to worry about power long-term. They obtain water from an ice planet, though it turns out to be infected and nearly kills the entire crew—they only survive due to time travel shenanigans. They find a paradise of a planet that isn’t in Destiny‘s database, and some folks stay behind, assuming that whatever aliens created the planet will take care of them. A bunch of tiny ticks come on board that give the crew hallucinations.
When Sergeant Spence kills himself, unable to stand living on Destiny, Rush makes it look like it wasn’t a suicide, so Young will be suspected. In retaliation, Young strands Rush on a planet to die, though he is instead kidnapped by aliens who later attack Destiny and kidnap Chloe. They manage to rescue Rush and Chloe, but the damage is done, and Rush, Wray, Chloe, and most of the other civilians (the notable exception is Eli) decide to wrest power from the military. This is a rather spectacular failure, especially when it’s revealed that Rush has a tracking device from the aliens in his body. It’s surgically extracted.
At one point, Scott, Greer, Chloe, and Eli are stuck on a planet when Destiny goes to FTL, but jumping back through various gates enables them to make contact and eventually get on board just as it’s about to go between galaxies.
Both Scott and Rush receive odd visions of Telford’s life after having exchanged bodies with him using the communication stones. That shouldn’t happen, but it turns out to be a byproduct of his being brainwashed by the Lucian Alliance using Goa’uld technology. Telford is the (unwilling) mole who gave away Icarus’s position. Rush exchanges places with Telford using the stones, and while the former tries to infiltrate the Lucian Alliance, the latter is taken prisoner by Young. With O’Neill’s blessing, Young breaks Telford of the brainwashing (which almost kills him) while Rush is captured by Kiva of the Alliance and forced to finish the work of their own version of Icarus on another naquadria-laced planet.
The Lucian Alliance succeeds in invading Destiny, leading to a tense standoff—made even more tense by Destiny being in a system with a pulsar that is straining the ship’s shields to their limit…
Best episode: “Time.” A superbly structured episode, done in the “found footage” style involving the Kino, it’s a cleverly done time travel adventure that makes use of what was established in “1969” on SG-1. The Stargate franchise has done so many time travel episodes that you want to just roll your eyes at the thought of another one, but this one works beautifully, especially the “what the hell was that?” reveal when we find out that the crew is watching footage of events that never actually happened to them. Points to Robert C. Cooper, who both wrote and directed.
Honorable mention to “Subversion,” which for a few moments feels like an SG-1 episode, with Jackson tailing Rush, O’Neill being snarky (I especially like his comment on National Security briefings to Young), the two of them arguing about human rights, and so on. Plus, it’s a tense adventure, as we find out who attacked Icarus and why Telford’s such as asshat.
Worst episode: Hard to narrow it down, as so many episodes feel like so many other episodes, and they all have generic one-word titles so I have to struggle to remember which is which, but I think I want to reserve my harshest criticism for “Faith,” in which a crew already well populated with people doing stupid things doubles down on it with the morons who think staying on that planet is in any way, shape, or form a good idea. And the tension is wholly artificial, especially since the prime agitator for staying on the planet is a character we’ve never seen before and don’t care about, and we know that nobody in the opening credits is going to stay behind.
Dishonorable mention to the “Incursion” two-parter, which makes Carter into an incompetent and fails to convince us that the Lucian Alliance is now suddenly a genuine threat after being a pathetic collection of gangsters on SG-1. Of course, it helps that Carter isn’t the only incompetent—Young manages to screw up eight ways from Sunday…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Destiny has been on a prearranged course for millions of years, and the ship’s still in working order, thus continuing the Ancients’ tendency to build stuff to last. The ship is powered by solar collectors, thus having an infinite power supply as long as there are stars. It has several primitive versions of other Ancient tech the SGC has encountered, including an early version of the repositories that nearly killed O’Neill twice (in the form of a chair that’s not unlike the control chair seen in Antarctica and Atlantis), and a Master Code based on genetics, an early version of the only-people-with-the-right-genes-can-operate-their-tech thing.
My life’s work was to be here. Rush is as brilliant as Carter or McKay or Zelenka, but personality-wise, he makes McKay look like Zelenka, as he’s manipulative, surly, and non-cooperative. Even when he collaborates with Wray to wrest control from the military, he still has his own agenda he’s pursuing without bothering to share it with his alleged allies. It’s obvious he’d much rather have Destiny to himself without all these other stupid people in his way.
You are here. Eli is a genius who never actually did anything with his life, even getting himself kicked out of MIT. It doesn’t help that his father left him and his nurse mother when the latter developed HIV from a dirty needle. He nonetheless solves an insoluble math problem (the day after Eli cracks it, he’s visited by O’Neill and Rush and beamed to the Hammond).
In our society, the military takes orders from civilian leadership. Wray is the HR director for the Icarus Base, which leads to her being the only IOA official on Destiny. She tries very hard to have an equal voice in what goes on on the ship, and mostly fails, because neither Young nor Rush take her particularly seriously. She is also the first openly gay character in the Stargate franchise, as she is in a long-term relationship with a woman named Sharon Walker, whom she visits via the stones as often as possible.
For cryin’ out loud! O’Neill is still in charge of Homeworld Security, and Young reports to him on several occasions. He authorizes Telford’s attempt to bring Destiny home and he supervises the tailing of Rush when he infiltrates the Lucian Alliance.
It might work, sir. Atypically, Carter fails in both her appearances on the show, as both times someone dials Destiny, it blows up a planet and she barely gets out alive—the second time, she loses two 302 pilots.
I speak 23 different languages—pick one. Jackson is the one who recruited Rush to the ninth-chevron project from his teaching position at UC Berkley. He also recorded a primer on the SGC for newbies, which Eli watches in “Air Part 1” and again in “Incursion Part 1.”
You have a go. In “Air Part 1,” we finally see the 304 ship that was named after Hammond, commanded by Carter, first mentioned in Atlantis‘s “Enemy at the Gate.” The ship is also seen in “Incursion Part 1.”
Wayward home for out-of-work genre actors. Universe actually set their sights either outside the genre for most of their guest stars, or among the usual batch of Vancouver regulars. Notable guests not known for their genre work include Christopher McDonald, Lou Diamond Phillips, Reiko Ayelsworth, Kathleen Monroe, Carlo Rota, and Rhona Mitra. (Many of them have at least some genre work—notably, McDonald was in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s seminal episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise“—but in general the resumés of these folks have a very tiny percentage of genre material prior to 2009.)
Trivial matters. The Stargate used on Destiny and seeded on the planets along its route are of an earlier design than the Milky Way Stargates (which makes them two generations prior to the Pegasus Galaxy ones), where the whole ring rotates instead of a moving inner ring and a standing outer one (or not rotating at all like the Pegasus ones).
Destiny is able to stay in touch via the stones established in SG-1‘s “Citizen Joe,” and which Jackson and Vala used to contact the Alteran Galaxy and alert the Ori to the Milky Way’s existence in SG-1‘s “Avalon.” The stones enable people to visit Destiny as needed, whether it’s Amanda Perry and her expertise in Ancient technology in “Sabotage” or Brightman coming on board to operate on Rush in “Divided” or O’Neill supervising Everett’s treatment of Telford in “Subversion.” They also enable people to visit their loved ones back home, as seen notably in “Earth.”
This is the first season of a Stargate show to have no scenes set at Stargate Command. All the Earth-bound scenes involving the SGC are at the Pentagon.
This season marks the final onscreen appearances of O’Neill, Carter, Jackson, and Harriman. All four appear in “Air Part 1,” and Harriman and O’Neill are also in Part 2 (in a scene only in the extended version), with O’Neill in Part 3. O’Neill, Jackson, and Carter all are in “Incursion Part 1.” O’Neill and Jackson are both in “Subversion.” O’Neill also appears in “Earth” and Jackson also appears in “Human.” We also see Lee (Bill Dow) in “Air Part 2” and Brightman (Alisen Down, last seen in SG-1‘s “Lockdown“) in “Divided”; both characters will return in season 2.
Naquadria was first established in SG-1‘s “Meridian” as a more powerful, less stable version of naquadah. It isn’t found in nature, and is exceedingly rare. (It’s even rarer after this season when two different planets that have veins of it go boom.)
Telford is brainwashed using the same technology that Apophis used on both Ry’ac and Teal’c in SG-1‘s “Family,” “Exodus,” and “Enemies.” Young breaks Telford of it the same way Bra’tac broke Teal’c in “Threshold,” by killing him and reviving him.
This is the first Stargate series to depict people having sex, and they don’t waste time, either, as we see Scott and James getting it on in a broom closet in “Air Part 1.” Park sleeps her way through the ship and Scott and Chloe wind up pairing off. Young had an affair with Johansen, and he’s trying to reconcile with his wife (a tall order when he can only communicate through the stones). Wray also gets nookie time with Walker.
For the sixth time in Stargate, a female castmember’s pregnancy had to be accounted for. While Amanda Tapping’s and Lexa Doig’s were written around, Alaina Huffman’s was, like Claudia Black’s, Rachel Luttrell’s, and Vaitare Bandera’s, written into the plotline. The original script for “Faith” called for a random background character to be pregnant, but when Huffman revealed her own pregnancy, it was decided to write it in, and establish that Johansen became with child after her tryst with Young.
Chevron seven nine locked. When SyFy picked up Stargate SG-1 in 2002, it immediately became the channel’s biggest hit. Then in 2003, they aired a Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which was followed the next year by a regular series, and Stargate wasn’t the top show anymore, though it was a very close second.
After Atlantis came to an end following its fifth season, the channel wanted a new show in the franchise. It’s unclear what the impetus was for making Universe so much like Galactica—whether or not it was Brad Wright and Robert Cooper who wanted to do Stargate: Galactica or if it was a directive from the network—but whoever’s idea it was to make the show visually dark and filled with shaky-cam visuals and play at being more mature and have characters who are morally ambiguous and stuff, it was a really really stupid idea.
There are elements that work. I have no objection in theory to the darker, shakier visual style, it’s actually in keeping with the desperation of the circumstance.
But overall, it’s carrying a neon sign that says, “LOOK, WE’RE JUST LIKE GALACTICA, SEE? LOVE US!” and it comes across as pathetic.
Galactica‘s crew were not the best of the best—they were the failures who were sent to the clapped-out ship being retired because they weren’t talented enough to be on the good ships. That was part of the point, that the last survivors of Caprica were the losers and ne’er-do-wells. Universe‘s crew are also not the best of the best—which makes absolutely no sense because the SGC is a top-secret program that only has the best of the best. If they aren’t the best, they aren’t going to be let into the super-secret club where they get to go to alien worlds and get shot at by megalomaniacs with snakes in their heads and energy vampires who look like Trent Reznor. It makes no sense, none, that someone as spectacularly incompetent as Young would be anywhere near the Stargate program.
Galactica had a civilian woman thrust into a position of power over her head. Ming-Na Wen does the best she can in the role of Wray, but she’s mostly stuck in the middle of the Young-Rush conflict, which doesn’t do the character any favors. (She’s actually more interesting when she goes back to Earth to see Walker—seriously, the gleeful casualness of Wray’s lesbianism is a triumph, particularly in 2009—and verbally fence with Carlo Rota’s magnificently smarmy Strom.) Either way, she’s a pale copy of Laura Roslin.
And Galactica has a scientist with a secret agenda. But Baltar has a secret agenda because his secret is, basically, treason and it involves the Cylons. They try to make Rush out to be more complex than he really is, and it helps that an actor of Robert Carlyle’s incredible talent is there to sell it, but far too often the scripts just make him out to be a dick not because the character as a person calls for it, but because the character’s pigeonhole calls for it. Rush has his moments, mostly due to Carlyle—the bit in “Human” when he laments to Jackson that an uneducated videogame-playing kid figured out in five minutes what he couldn’t figure out in two years is beautifully delivered—but he’s ultimately a type rather than a character.
All of the above could possibly be forgiven or at least overcome, but there are two other fatal flaws that sink Universe. The first is an unconscionable cast bloat. You may notice that above there are only three sections for characters from this show, despite there being eight opening-credits regulars and more than half a dozen recurring characters (Wray was bumped from recurring to regular in “Justice”). The problem is, there are too many of them. When I first watched the show six years ago, I simply could not keep track of everyone—not aided by the fact that the characters weren’t interesting enough for me to care. But just from a storytelling perspective, the show doesn’t need Young and Scott as military leaders. It doesn’t need James and Greer as secondary military folk. It doesn’t need Rush and Volker and Eli and Brody and Park as the people who do science. And it doesn’t need Chloe at all, particularly since Elyse Levesque mostly just stands around with her mouth slightly open and whines a lot.
The second problem is even harder to overcome, and the show was never able to: Louis Ferreira is just awful as Young. He has almost negative charisma, and the character’s incompetence as a military leader is matched point for point by the incompetence of the actor playing him. His arguments with Rush have no spark, no bite. To make matters worse, they keep pairing him up with Richard Dean Anderson, who—even in the much more subdued role of head of Homeworld Security—has more charisma in a single smirk in “Subversion” than Ferreira can cobble together over twenty episodes. His line readings are flat, his characterization nonexistent. Even though Carlyle gets top billing, his character is written as a loner, avoiding others where at all possible. The true head of the ensemble is Ferreira, and an ensemble (especially one as big as this) lives or dies on the charisma of its leader. It’s why Babylon 5 was so much better when the bland Michael O’Hare stepped aside for the much more dynamic Bruce Boxleitner, and why Blake’s 7 suffered terribly from the loss of Gareth Thomas.
A third issue doesn’t really come up until the final three episodes of the season, wherein we find out that the bad guys who started this whole thing by attacking Icarus are the Lucian Alliance. SG-1 tried and failed to make these guys a credible threat, and Universe doesn’t do any better. These are galactic thugs who happen to have access to Goa’uld tech, and in the wake of the Goa’uld, the replicators, the Ori, and the Wraith, make the world’s most unconvincing and uninteresting threat. Hell, the only reason they are a threat is because Young is so incredibly bad at his job…
It’s not all bad. Ming-Na, as I said, does quite well in the poorly written part of Wray, Jamil Walker Smith plays a very stereotypical but quite realistic military dude in Greer, and both characters address a particularly appalling lack in the Stargate franchise up to this point, to wit, a lack of non-white, non-heterosexual characters. Haig Sutherland is particularly impressive as Sergeant Hunter Riley, imbuing a lot of character into a tiny role (he also did some of the Kino webisodes that were done as supplements), Julia Benson does likewise with the role of James, and Alaina Huffman continues the Stargate tradition of female medics whom you underestimate at your peril.
And of course we have David Blue’s Eli, a character who’s not from Galactica but rather from Lost—Eli is, pretty much, Hurley, the overweight everyman who cuts through the crap and is often the conscience of the ship. Blue inhabits the character magnificently, practically the only character on the show who regularly engages in Stargate‘s trademark humor, an element sorely missing from this version of it.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Dragon Con over Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, doing a crapton of panels, as well as an autographing, a reading, and a practical self-defense workshop. His full schedule is here.
Ah, Stargate: ‘B’ Ark.
This is a show that happened. Yup. It happened and now we have to live with it. Erm… Yeah.
So what is the “rewatch” switching to after you’ve done this?
Hated this show. Haaated it. It didn’t feel like Stargate at all, and more like SyFy’s desperate attempt to fill in the void left by Battlescar Gattaca.
Plus the characters were using other peoples’ bodies to have sex without consent. How is that not RAPE!?
[Naquadria] isn’t found in nature, and is exceedingly rare. (It’s even rarer after this season when two different planets that have veins of it go boom.)
I’m not clear how it can be not found in nature if there are veins of it on planets. (I admit, I’m reading these reviews having only scattershot-watched the franchise.) Is this a matter of “the veins were seeded,” or maybe “naquadria is naquadah that’s been modified and these planets have had that happen”?
Just popping in purely to say that Brian J Smith is one of the most desperately beautiful men ever born.
Am I the only one who actually like it? At least… well, at first it seemed to me as cheap SG – Galactica as well, but then I rewatched it… I just like the sense of really great distance, the far away galaxies, the really alien aliens… it all could have been done better, yes. But it is something unlike any other sci-fi in this.
J.Z. Belexes: the stones were consistently used with consent and were mostly planned ahead — certainly visits home were. So I reject your assumption that it was done without consent. These were mostly military officers who used the stones knowing full well what it meant. Certainly, as a for-instance, whoever switched with Wray would know full well that she was going to be sleeping with Walker.
scifantasy: It was established that a Goa’uld named Thanos created naquadria, but it was done by altering naquadah that was already in a planet — we know he did it on Langara (the world Jonas Quinn was from) and he or some other Goa’uld did so on at least a couple other worlds.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Bleah. Did not like. I watched maybe the first couple of episodes and gave up.
Can someone with more of a clue than me tell me if this is even remotely realistic?
KRAD, THANK YOU for devoting an entire paragraph to the black hole that was Louis Fererria’s performance as Col. Young. It got so bad that at one point in the episode where they dock with the seed ship, I accidentally swapped Lou Diamond Phillips and Fererria’s roles in my mind and that improved the scene by 1000%. That said, based on behind the scenes pictures I’ve seen, Fererria might not be totally to blame – in those pics, he seems to be a lively prankster, but I guess he got directions to play the role as low key and dour as possible. That might’ve worked if they’d established Young’s “my whole SG team died” backstory in the pilot instead of “I had an affair with a subordinate.”
That said, I’m surprised that you didn’t point out that, aside from the decision to dial Destiny when Icarus was blowing up, Rush was always right. He was literally the single most competent and effective crew member when it came to solving their problems, plus most of his decisions actively benefited their long-term survival. It always pissed me off when the others would go “can we trust Rush/should we listen to him?”, because they kept screwing things up or not doing anything.
However, I think the biggest waste of an opportunity in this season was setting up James as a leader of a third faction early on in the show, one that didn’t trust any of the leadership. They ditched that for a lame “civilians vs military” conflict that only happened because Col. Young was a terrible leader who had his cronies do everything and generally didn’t care about the civilians.
Also, you’re spot on about the Lucian Alliance, although their involvement is mindbogglingly stupid once they find out that Destiny is so far behind the tech they have. The only way that plot could’ve been salvaged was if a Baal clone was behind it all, since setting up his own empire far away from Earth would be a valid reason to take over something as broken as Destiny.
I feel that SGU was flawed but still interesting. I’m not much of a fan of the Galactica reboot and its self-conscious darkness, but I did appreciate the attempt to do something really different with the Stargate universe, so to speak. Maybe Wright and Cooper were asked by the network to do something darker, but I had the feeling that they were bored with the standard SG idiom and welcomed the chance to do something more adult and more grounded.
In particular, I always felt that Wright and Cooper brought a lot of respect for science to a franchise that was initially quite fanciful and silly, and this show took that to a new level. There was a lot of solid, plausible science here, with SF novelist John Scalzi on board as the show’s scientific and creative consultant. We got to see a more exotic variety of planets instead of just more products of the Vancouver Intergalactic Terraforming Corporation (although we got a few of those too), we got nonhumanoid (well, slightly humanoid) CGI aliens that didn’t speak English, and in season 2 we got a storyline for Rush that involved some pretty deep physics ideas. I appreciated those elements a great deal.
I also felt the cast was pretty good overall. I didn’t have a particular problem with Ferreira, though he wasn’t a favorite. My main problem was with Greer, but that was mainly because I didn’t like the stereotype of casting a black actor as the angry sidekick to the clean-cut white hero.
Keith, wasn’t there some justification for the Destiny‘s occupants not being the best and brightest? IIRC, they weren’t the team that was supposed to board the ship, the ones trained for the mission; they were just the staff of the base where the experiment was conducted, along with some visiting dignitaries, and so they weren’t trained or qualified for a mission of this importance. Sure, SGC personnel are all supposed to be the best, but the person who’s the best and brightest at being a base cook or maintenance tech isn’t likely to be the best and brightest at exploring strange new worlds or surviving on a damaged spaceship.
An offworld base is still an important assignment, and one that never should have been given to someone as spectacularly awful as Young. (Telford didn’t exactly light the world on fire, either, though we can blame most of that on the Lucian brainwashing….) No, they weren’t prepared for this assignment, but neither would anyone else have been. But SGC personnel are supposed to be trained to be better than that and able to think on their feet better. That’s why we saw all that stuff they had to go through in “Proving Ground.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
#5, Nope. I liked it as well. I’m assuming I’m the target demographic or something. I was kind of crushed when the show was cancelled. I was (and still am if anyone reading this is thinking of a sequel) intrigued by the Destiny’s mission of finding the start of the universe. And REAL freakin’ aliens, com’mon!!
Rush and Eli (and so by extension the kinos) are easily the best part of the show. And the Servicemen (Airmen?) are the people we loved to hate. Having no clear leader in the team did kind of keep things from getting done, however. Is there any way that could have been intentional?
For what it’s worth, I remember really enjoying the series as I was watching it. I wasn’t blind to the BSG influence, but BSG was off the air at that point–wasn’t it?–so this more or less filled that niche for me in its place, in terms of tone. Also, I didn’t find it as unrelentingly bleak as BSG, a show that got me so down and depressed watching it that my wife (then fiancee) almost forbid me from watching it.
@5. Tessuna & 11. Rannin
I’m with you guys. I liked the more serialized approach, as well as the reality of having to struggle to work around a ship that wasn’t always agreeable, or fully functioning. Young never bothered me, as a lot of characters in show commented on the very things that are touched on in the rewatch. It wasn’t Ferreira’s acting, it was the character. Telford remarked often that Young wasn’t fit to lead, and he was right. Young wasn’t. Yet, there he was.
Over all, I think SGU gets a lot more hate than it deserves. The old Stargate formula was wearing thin, and everyone knew it. It was time to try something different.
I remember vividly the fan hate, though. Blaming SGU for the cancellation of SG:A, and actively trashing the show at every turn. It’s amazing how quickly fans will turn on something they claim to love, just because something slightly different is being tried to fend off stagnation.
Was SGU perfect? Nah. It tried something a little different, and for the most part, as far as I’m concerned, did a decent job of it. It was better than no Stargate at all, which is what we have now. I guess to some, that seems a fair trade.
We should also bear in mind MGM was going into bankruptcy about this time, so the “failure” of SGU isn’t even it’s own, no more than it is to blame for the lack of the planned movies, despite what some have tried to claim in the past. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that didn’t help SGU.
Who knows what it could have been.
I watched the two seasons over the course of a week or two on netfilx a few years ago. It was a pretty unpleasant show lacking most of the charm of the original stargate series with characters who seemed to intentionally not get along even though they were pretty much stuck on a ship where cooperation would be the best way to survive.
I also disagree with your inclination to believe that the military personnel who were hosts for the people using the traveling stones would have agreed to be sexual surrogates.
I vaguely remember a few characters talking about the limits of behavior that people using the stones should follow. Using other peoples bodies to have sex with significant others was not something they were supposed to do.
In the case of the Wray she becomes so disenchanted with life of the ship she stays in the host body for a much longer time that the scheduled meeting which is basically kidnapping.
The whole use of the stones may have been written realistically but it had some very questionable applications which is pretty true to how people would behave.
Never was able to catch the show, but I did see all of Air and one or two other episodes on hulu. I get the impression that while there is some good stuff, on the whole I wouldn’t like it as much as the other shows. I didn’t even like the new Galactica that much, so making Stargate like it probably just wouldn’t sit well with me.
I’m 100% with you on the Lucian Alliance, and would’ve almost preferred a minor Goa’uld who escaped the Replicators, or one of the Trust’s Goa’ulds–as old as that might seem.
Actually, at the end of Air, it looked like the senator’s shuttle flew away, and I was hoping it would turn out he was a Goa’uld spy who survived the suffocation.
Maybe after this you could do the (not considered canon) Stargate Infinity cartoon, and see which one gets a worse reaction.
Oh, didn’t I mention? I’m doing Infinity after Universe….
—KRAD
@16/krad: Assuming you’re not joking, shouldn’t Infinity have come a lot sooner in the chronological sequence? Everything else has been in order of release.
@13:
As a Stargate fan who actively took part in some of the anti-SGU communities and talked about SGU on general scifi forums, the problem people had wasn’t that SGU tried to do different things. It was that they did a terrible job of executing a lot of the ideas they had. For example, it seems like someone on the staff read about desaturation theory, which is best applied sparingly, and had the editors desaturate everything in post, which made everything feel lifeless or depressing, and it washed out all the details in the sets & CGI if you watched the show on Hulu. Almost all the character conflicts felt forced and pointless, because the writers did a terrible job of setting up the characters and their relationships before tossing them into the main action.
A lot of the serialization felt like the writers decided to stretch out subplots & arcs that could be dealt with in an episode or two in previous shows across multiple episodes, which is probably why KRAD had a hard time distinguishing the really bad episodes from each other. (Ironically, it seems like SGU foreshadowed the problem some of Amazon’s series are having with poor implementations of serialization). And worst of all, consequences were being ignored, despite that being part of the pitch Stargate fans got before SGU started. I don’t think there’s a more outrageous example than when Eli, Scott, and Chloe get stranded on that alien planet and Destiny starts flying off to another galaxy, only for them to somehow get back to Destiny, which was hundreds of light years away (at minimum), in the beginning of the next episode.
@krad:
Why did you have to resurrect the specter of SGI? The only Stargate thing that’s worse is Bill McCay’s novel “Retaliation,” which is full of character assassination and incompetence on par with SGU.
I watched most of the original Stargate series. I watched most of Atlantis. Then Universe came around and I had the impression that Universe’s target audience was a decade younger than that of SG, while I had aged about as much in the meantime.
And then the premise of the plot. A group of castaways on the Voyager Destiny, struggling to make their way home. Something could have been done with it. But what did they do? Invent communication stones to tie Earth back into the plot. To me it looked as if they had an idea and then didn’t dare to pull it off.
@krad in 10, you have to remember how big the Stargate program has become on Earth. We’re no longer talking about a gate under the mountain and a few squad-sized SG teams. They’re building at least half a dozen Daedalus-class ships, hand some of them to Russia and China in exchange for other tech, operate dozens of off-world bases — there would be hardly an Air Force and Army personnel who haven’t done off-world tours. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
I know I’m breaking the chronological sequence by doing Infinity last, but that’s because it was a last-minute decision based on the cartoon’s Netflix availability, and I figured, “what the hell!” May as well be complete about it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Did anyone else watch it and think, “this is Wormhole Extreme” ?
@21
Actually, most Stargate fans compare it to that “hipper, sexier” Stargate clip from 200.
No, Wormhole Extreme looked to be fun in its campy awfulness. SGU was something was a Wormhole Extreme wannabe show that only captured the awful.
@20/krad: I half expected you to be joking about doing Infinity. But I guess it makes sense to break chronological order, because it is non-canonical and thus should stand apart. (Also it takes place in 2032, so it would go last by in-story chronology anyway.)
I think SGU had a lot of potential, but I had problems with it from the beginning due to the unlikeable and painfully stupid characters (when someone yells “clear the ramp,” you CLEAR THE FRELLING RAMP!!).
One thing I would’ve done differently is establish an alliance –I would’ve had Icarus base be a joint Tau’ri, Jaffa, and Tok’ra facility, with all three factions represented among the Destiny refugees. This also would’ve made a neat subversion of the BSG model, which is largely built on post-9/11 “Us vs Them” paranoia; this time, the alien/foreigners are explicitly on our side.
And I actually liked the idea of the Lucian Alliance becoming this utterly unforseen planetary-level threat –as noted, they’re thugs, but thugs who’ve been scavenging Goa’uld (and possibly Asgard and Ancient) tech for years and are crazy enough to use it without understanding it (which also makes them an ironic twin of the SGC itself).
@25/Cybersnark: I agree — there’s no reason the Lucian Alliance couldn’t have become a credible threat. A lot of people wouldn’t have considered al-Qaeda to be a serious global threat before 2001. And a millennium earlier, few in the prosperous, civilized Mideast would’ve considered those backward, feudal Europeans to be a threat worth taking seriously. And a millennium before that, the Romans didn’t think a few Christian cultists were likely to amount to anything. It’s a mistake to assume that only the powerful elites can have an effect on history.
Plus, as you point out, it took the Tau’ri less than a decade to become a major interstellar power and destroyer of ancient empires. And we did that without the incentive of centuries of resentment toward Goa’uld oppression. When the oppressed and embittered gain power, watch out. There was every reason to believe that the Lucian Alliance could have become a truly serious threat. If they came off as unimpressive, that’s more a flaw in execution than in concept.
@13, I still wonder what might’ve happened if Atlantis had gotten a Season 6 and ran alongside Universe’s freshmen year.
A big problem for the Atlantis fans was the perception their beloved show was cancelled to make way for the new kid. I think they all expected it to pull an SG-1 and run for more years. SG-1’s longevity was sheer luck and they didn’t grasp how expensive it is to keep a show on the air as time goes on (especially sci-fi).
@26, I like to think the Lucians’ jump in threat level between “Bounty” and this series was (as with so many things) SG-1’s fault.
Netan’s stewardship in Seasons 9 and 10 was basically incompetent; the Ori invasion didn’t help. By taking him out, they opened the door for a more effective leader/faction to take over.
This is the only show I have ever hate watched and for 2 seasons. It was hopeless. The crew was depressed and desperate with very little hope of ever getting home. There was no one to follow neither Rush, Telford or Everett were good leaders being in turns depressed, murderous or untrustworthy. I liked Scott and Eli. I found Greer to thuggish to be likable. Ming Na and Huffman worked great with what they had there characters had room to grow. To be honest I can’t remember their character names nor who was who of the others. Carlyle is great but Rush is a completely untrustworthy guy. You never find out what he wants or needs. He found the bridge and never told anyone else about it. I always thought of him like Todd with out the sense of humor, but Todd has a clear end game involving his hive and the Wraith in general. I understand enlightened self interest. Speaking of the bridge it took 25 EPISODES TO FIND IT. The pacing on this show drove me crazy it was so slow. In summary no hope, no laughs no show.
I forgot to mention one other thing. I HATE the Lucian Alliance. I don’t care if the writers think mob movies are cool the Lucian Alliance is STUPID. I don’t know why they were on the ship to begin with they lived at least two if not more galaxies from where ever the 9th chevron led to. Even if they stole the ship how would they get it home again I don’t think any of the people on Destiny were pilots. Rob Knepper did die in an interesting fashion. Michael Dopud showed promise, but didn’t the writers kill off all the Alliance people anyway? This made them twice as pointless.
@27/Mr. Magic: Yeah, I’m pretty sure Atlantis would’ve ended anyway, with or without Universe. In point of fact, The Sci-Fi Channel/Syfy has never had an original show that ran for more than five seasons on the network. Sure, SG-1 ran ten seasons, but only the last five of those were on Sci-Fi. Eureka was spread out over seven broadcast seasons (spanning just under six years, since the last one aired early), but that was actually five production seasons with seasons 3 and 4 being split in half and aired over two years each.
@30, Exactly.
If the Extinction film had gone through as planned, that might also have cooled fan tempers.
It also didn’t help that the Atlantis characters or continuity was basically ignored in Season One (barring mentions of the Database and ATA gene and, of course, the Control Chair prototype).
I to disliked this series. It’s failure to live up to the what had been built up before it was a disappointment. Many of the elements of the show were handled in a way that was out of character for the series, for the audience base, and for people who do not want the sex appeal of “Game of Thrones” thrown into a show that before it could be viewed by a whole family.
Dispite that I hope the network tries again. I would like a show called “Gate Runners” about a team that gets lost in a galaxy far far way and they make enemies and friends but their goal is to get home. I’d tune in for that.
SGU had promise but was ruined by characters that were very difficult to like. If an explosion occured on the ship I would have loved it we were reduced to David Blue’s Eli, Wray, Greer, Riley, and James. Greer was straight forward and cool, Eli did bring humor to the show and I was cheering for him to end up with Chloe even though her character was weak. Wray was played by Ming-na and she is a solid actress well deserving of the credit she has received. I would have loved for Riley and James to end up together. The other characters including Rush even though played by a wonderful actor would go and especially Young. It would have been good if Young realized he was way in over his head but he didn’t. With those characters out of the way and the red shirts left the show might have gone on longer
I agree with those who liked the show, although it should be noted that this is a S1 rewatch of SGU. The first season was definitely a mixed bag, and I think many reviewers felt the show only started to hit its stride in S2, a view I agree with. I’ve noted over the years that folks seem to fall into several distinct camps in terms of sci-fi, and I’m in the grittier/harder-edged camp myself. I loved BSG (well, apart from the finale ….) and I came to love SGU as well, being as it did borrow several elements of the former show. I tried watching a few episodes of SG1 once and found it laughable and juvenile, but that’s only my opinion. Eli grated on occasion, being the stereotype of the laughable fat guy/comic relief character, but he did grow the role considerably. Looking back, Young’s decisions were often pretty silly, but I did like the genuine sense of malice between him and Rush. Robert Carlyle is a superior actor that I’ve loved since I saw him as Scottish psychopath Begbie in Trainspotting, and he was superb as the driven scientist who’d chanced onto his ultimate research fantasy on Destiny. The backstories of many of the other cast members were perhaps a little overwrought, but as the action picked up in S2 I forgave the sometimes clumsy characterisation. That final scene with Eli on the viewing deck is a poignant one.
I think that all the criticisms and praise that folks have expressed here have a point to one degree or another. Especially the criticisms, as far as S1 is concerned. I remember it being a chore when I watched it. S2 is a different matter.
@9
Christopher, I agree with you that it was great to actually feature non-English speaking and alien aliens. The hardest-working people on any Trek franchise must be the ones who create a new bony eye-ridge for whatever ‘alien’ they’ve stumbled across this week.
As for the character of Sgt Greer, I think it’s a damned if you do/don’t scenario. IIRC, when RDM BSG came out there was a bit of an outcry that one of the few black characters, Col Tigh, had been reimagined as white. But I suspect that the producers knew they would cop a large amount of grief if they featured a black character as a surly alcoholic with a failed marriage. I thought there was enough nuance in Greer to overcome the ‘angry black dude’ image. He was certainly more interesting than the gormless Lt Scott.
I just wish they had let Greer romance a white woman (or man) – aren’t white people and black people ever attracted to each other? They dutifully wheeled out the Asian lady aka the Swiss Army knife of on-screen romance, due to their ability to handle any racial permutation.
Ah, Colonel Young. The guy that had me watching the screen and shouting, “MUTINY! MUTINY! JUST MUTINY! I don’t care who takes over, JUST MUTINY!” Poor decision and lousy leadership after poor decision and lousy leadership.
I also hated the stones, but mostly because of the pointless things the show kept doing with them. “YAY I HAVE TAKEN OVER SOMEONE ELSE’S BODY BACK ON EARTH YOU KNOW WHAT I SHOULD REALLY DO? GO CLUBBING.” I’m not saying that the Destiny crew didn’t need a bit of relaxation/fun, but it was boring to watch. And while yes, I realize that the SG personnel had given consent to having their bodies used by other people, I thought the sex was really over the line – it might not have been rape, exactly, but I found it icky, especially the Young/Telford switches.
Plus, I really wanted all of the characters to stop having sex and just remove Colonel Young from leadership already.
@32/EriK Dercf: I don’t think “out of character” is a problem here. It’s not unprecedented for different series in a franchise to take different tones. Doctor Who is a family show whose spinoffs included the very adult Torchwood and the more kid-oriented The Sarah Jane Adventures. The DC Animated Universe started with Batman: The Animated Series, which was aimed at early to mid-teens, but also had the younger-skewing Static Shock and the older-skewing Justice League. Heck, the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show spun off the drama Lou Grant. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe has had films ranging in tone from the dark spy thriller Captain America: The Winter Soldier to the action-comedy Ant-Man.
The Stargate TV franchise did one thing for a dozen years. I don’t think it was wrong for them to try something different. Indeed, I think it was a bold and admirable decision, to strive for something new rather than just clinging to the same old formula. It wasn’t as successful as it could’ve been, but that’s the risk of trying something new. I respect creators who are willing to take such risks.
@35/Biff: Tigh becoming white bugged me too at first, but in retrospect I think it was balanced by casting a Latino actor in the lead role and by the more diverse ethnic mix overall — Grace Park, Kandyse McClure, the half-First Nations Tahmoh Penikett, the Chinese-Italian Alessandro Juliani, Rekha Sharma, Rick Worthy. They could’ve stood to have more diversity in the core cast, but they had a good amount in the supporting cast.
Overall I liked SGU albeit with many of the reservations other commentators have listed, particularly Rush’s and Young’s characters. Both were tortured sterotypes in positions where that just wasn’t good enough, yes there were other sterotypes like Scott, Greer and Chloe, but they weren’t in such critical positions in the cast; I was frustrated that so many of the women characters barely made it beyond sterotype in the time they had. I would have liked to see more done with the civilians that weren’t scientists or arm candy.
@38: You have no idea how badly I want to post 4chan’s (/tv/, specifically) breakdown of how godawful the handling of female characters was in SGU. The only reason I’m not posting it now is out of respect for anyone following these rewatches and is racing to see SGU S2 before KRAD does his article.
@35/@ChristopherLBennett: Greer is a weird case where the character was originally going to be white in the original casting call (IIRC), with the same personality, so they accidentally wound up pigeonholing Greer in the “crazy/angry black man” stereotype by not bothering to tweak a lot of Greer’s lines & actions in the pilot. It didn’t help that Greer didn’t get a lot of character development in season 1 – if he’d been more like season 2 Greer a lot earlier, it wouldn’t have been as big a problem.
@37, Yeah, the formula was wearing out its welcome by 2009.
We’d had 12 years of back-to-back episodes and I think there was the same sense of over-saturation Star Trek had during the mid-90’s and 2000’s.
Greer got character development in season 1, it just wasn’t very interesting — a bog-standard abusive-father plot that was notable only for the hilarious afro Greer had before he enlisted. As I’ll discuss next week, he was much more interesting in season 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@37
Christopher, re Tigh I meant that the reason the role was cast with a white actor was because of the fear of a backlash for presenting a black character with domestic issues, perhaps being perceived as reinforcing negative stereotypes of racial minorities. What I want is colour-blind casting, where the skin colour of a character doesn’t matter to the type of character portrayed. In this sense, and knowing that the Greer character was initially intended to be white, I was gratified to see a black actor in the role.
Let’s be honest here – most characters presented in drama tend to be stereotypes to a greater or lesser degree, this being necessary to the furthering of the plot and character growth. What you want to see are wrinkles on those stereotypes, something that is not the usual black and white depiction of characters, no pun intended.
@42/Biff: That may be, but the Stargate franchise did have an unfortunate tendency to cast nonwhite actors as certain cliched types — exotic aliens, noble warriors, angry young men. Even if it wasn’t intentional, it was a troubling pattern. (The lead scientist character on Atlantis was supposed to be an original black character, but they dropped him and used Rodney McKay instead.)
As for Tigh, I never heard that about the domestic issues. I figured it was colorblind casting, or a result of the different demographics of Vancouver’s talent pool.
@43, I totally agree with your thoughts on the franchise’s problems with nonwhite casting; Teyla especially is an egregious example.
Regarding Ingram, to be fair to creative team, they admitted the had trouble casting the part of Dr. Ingram and time was running out when David Hewlett walked in to aduition.
With “Rising” about to shoot, I can”t blame them for taking the easy route and deciding to just make Ingram McKay and bring that face over from SG-1. It’s the nature of the industry and deadlines.
It’s also impossible to imagine Atlantis without Rodney. He really was the breakout character and I don’t know how Ingram would’ve been received. It would’ve made for a different dynamic, sure, and I can only imagine what impact it would have had on the show.
About the usage of stones for sex: I didn’t mind people having sex while in a borrowed body (SG-1 pretty much established that you usually don’t notice that it’s not your body), because I assumed like krad that the lenders had consented to that, under certain conditions.
What I found way more disturbing was the lack of reaction from the significant others – after all, they’re essentially having sex with a stranger. I would think that the physical appearance would play a much larger part in a sexual relationship than in a professional field, and the writers seemed to completely ignore this.
Like many others, I thought S2 was much better than S1. That being said, I didn’t mind the show as much as others probably did. A few comments about this season:
As a lifelong arachnophobe, I was not thrilled by the enormous spiders in Human and Lost. Surely there could have been some other way to cause a cave in?
MeridethP @7 – While I don’t have firsthand experience, and I can’t speak to specifics, I would not be the least bit surprised if some entity, governmental or private, has embedded a problem that they couldn’t solve into a videogame (or submission puzzle/contest for that matter) and used the successful solving of the problem as a recruitment tool. As an example, in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing uses a particularly difficult crossword puzzle (completed within a set time limit) to recruit codebreakers for his team. Whether or not that happened in real life, or if it was made up for the movie, it’s another example.
KRAD @6 (and others) – Normally, I would agree with your analysis regarding expectations and use of the stones. However, isn’t there an instance where the stones glitch out while Young and Telford are swapped, and Young is being coital with his wife in Telford’s body? If I remember correctly, Telford gave him quite an earful about that the next time they were actually able to have a conversation with each other. This suggests to me that there was a line that Young crossed there.
And also Keith, while I’m sure others suggested it, I think I did first (and you may well have planned to use it on your own anyway), but I’m pleased to no end that you used my suggestion for the Eli category (You Are Here).
Torvald_Nom: Actually, the subject of how “it’s you but it doesn’t look like you” came up at some point between Wray and Walker, though that may have been in season 2….
JamesP: Yes, there was an instance where that happened, but that was because they didn’t realize that the stones go on the fritz for a second when Destiny comes into or out of FTL. Telford, however, did not give him an earful about that, but on other subjects instead (and keep in mind that Telford was a brainwashed Lucian Alliance mole at this point).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@47: Ah, that’s possible; I watched season 2 only intermittently.
I think it should have been one of the first things discussed in the affected relationships, and the show really didn’t help itself by having the switched person portrayed by the controlled mind (instead of the physical appearance) on a regular basis.
@48/Torvald_Nom: Except that convention had already been established in Stargate SG-1‘s episodes involving the communication stones, and has been used in other shows and films involving body swaps, including Quantum Leap and Dead Like Me. Not only does it make more sense to use your lead actor to play themselves than to sideline them in favor of some guest star, but it’s easier for the audience to remember who they are.
Personally, I remember hating that they’d brought the Stones back at all. I felt they should have just taken a page from Atlantis and had them cut off entirely at fist instead of giving them a form of instantaneous communication.
It just always felt like a cheat to bring in familiar faces from the older shows even though they were billions of light years from home.
Maybe I need to go back and rewatch to see if I can notice more of the flaws discussed in this review. I loved SGU. I’ve been trying to think back about what it was that I initally defended so fervently against a lot of the hate. I think I’ve pinpointed it after watching a few clips of things.
Despite all of the character drama and the attempt to Galactica-ize their other big franchise, I think SGU managed to capture a sense of wonder that the shows had lost a little bit. Villains and saving the world had become old hat for SG-1 and SGA by the time they went off the air. This crew was made up of a lot of people that never wanted this level of responsibility. They were thrown into extraordinary circumstances and I think for every not great episode, there would be a stand out like Darkness and Light that, to me, embodied what a show like Stargate could be. The scene of everyone making peace with their deaths and then watching the confusion and hope come back in their faces while the ship recharged in a star is one of my favorite moments of any sci-fi series.
One other counterpoint to your critique about duplicated roles, I personally found having a full team of scientists that bounced ideas around refreshing compared to just having one or two people.
I found this show to be the best of the stargate shows but then I found all the other shows to be incredibly silly, boring, and unrealistic. The idea that the “best” and the highest in military commands would be pure and all morally righteous was always ridiculous which is what made Babylon five one of the best sci-fi shows in recent memory (a rewatch of that would be great). The idea that the people on Galactica where morally flawed and that is why they were on Galactic is silly. ALL humans are morally flawed. Star Trek and the Original stargate shows are incredibly ridiculous in that regard.
Still the other comments you make are ridiculous. Show was not nearly as well written as Galactica and it did suffer from cast bloat. Did not give the old fans what they wanted and wasn’t going to bring in new people who might have liked the more realistic gritty tone fast enough to replace them.
Hey folks! SGU season 2 should be going up today, and then next week I’ll be doing Stargate Infinity, which is out of sequence, but I figured I’ve covered everything else, I should cover the animated series, too.
After that — well, you’ll see. *evil grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido