Posts Tagged ‘Atlantis’
… the thought of another Stargate season of filler episodes (I’m looking right at you Stargate Atlantis ). I think if you left the Stargate fold because of weak stories or just plain exhaustion this might be a good place to jump back in and if you’ve never seen any Stargate then don’t be afraid, check SGU out!
So if you’ve seen it I’d love to hear what you think and where you think it might go, try and keep spoilers to minimum but if you haven’t seen the show yet you might …
Tags: Atlantis Pilot SG1 stargate Stargate Universe
As I write this I’ve just come off a couple of hours marathon of Stargate SG1 where I finally finished revisiting the entire ten seasons. That’s a lot of Stargate let me tell you! But ultimately it was worth it because prior to watching it over I didn’t really care for SG1 all that much and mistakenly had written it off as a planet-of-the-week show. It handled over arcing story lines quite well and even corrected mistakes it had made in the earlier episodes (three shots and you disintegrate…). So I’m feeling a little bit of a Stargate expert, having now recently watched all of SG1, Atlantis and even sitting through three episodes of Stargate: Infinity.
I thought I might make some guesses then about the upcoming Stargate Universe show based purely on the trailers and footage I’ve seen:
- Lou Diamond Phillip’s character is going to die within the first season if not the first couple of episodes – the precedent here is probably Robert Patrick’s role in Stargate Atlantis, a kind of big genre star playing an irritant military guy who is too gruff to live in the Stargate world.
- The ship that they’ve been transported to is falling apart or something, I suggest that they’ll have the majority of the falling apart aspects sorted by the tenth episode and then the damage to the ship will only rise up as a plot device every once and a while when they want to save money by filming entirely on set.
- Friction between the military and the civilians/scientists… yawn. It was kind of a theme every once and a while on Atlantis, it never really interested me but conflict means drama.
- The brilliant geek guy with the hoodie will solve problems at the last minute just because one of the military types will yell at him to do it even though it’s impossible… I know I’m really shooting fish in a barrel with that one. But I figure it will probably be the idea that the ship can’t stop so they only have a finite amount of time on each planet, he’ll find a way to override that when it’s convenient to the storyline.
- One alien joins the crew, somehow some alien dude or woman will be introduced to the recurring cast, maybe not even in the first season but at some stage an alien will join the crew. But only one, it won’t be a group of them or refugees or another ship, too hard to integrate into the show which is a shame because change can be good.
I know these predictions are all mainly negative observations/guesses but I am approaching this show with a huge amount of caution. Atlantis really burnt me towards the end with its five fillers and then one good episode policy and I think they missed what could have been some really interesting science fiction. I’m also noticing the shadow of Star Trek Voyager floating around, it’s hard not to compare the two and I hope the writers pay attention to the problems that show faced in its narrative.
Oh and I also think that the whole darker, grittier, more political, bleaker Battlestar Galactica formula has also been peeked at and not necessarily for the better. Oh yeah that’s right I don’t think BG is the greatest science fiction show ever, not by a long shot!
But I am hopeful, cautiously hopeful that SGU will be awesome and I’m happy if none of these predictions come true, more than anything I’d love them to surprise me.
Bonus sixth prediction: Flashbacks, lots of flashbacks.
So what are your predictions for Stargate: Universe?
At what I consider to be the absolute lowest point of the Stargate Atlantis filler episodes there was a story which when broken down was pretty much about three people who fell in a hole. In the second week of Stargate Universe we have people wandering around Tatooine… ahem I mean a desert getting thirsty and cranky.
Oh and something happens at the very end to remind you that it might be worth while sticking around even though you’ve already seen Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek Voyager and SG1/SGA.
If you didn’t notice the spoiler warning in the title then you should consider yourself warned now.
It’s not that Air Part 3 (I’m confused at this stage if I refer to this as the second episode or just charge ahead with third?) is a bad episode, it’s just a neutral episode or as I commonly refer to a LOT of non SG1 Stargate episodes, a filler. So what do we get in this episode:
- some backstory on Matthew Scott in the unique and fresh way of dying man in the desert seeing flashbacks
- twister alien or as I like to refer to it the whirlywind alien
- Dr. Rush getting kicked
- Roland Greer kicking Dr. Rush
- Roland Greer generally being a psycho jerk that no one wants to sit next to
- Eli getting sunburned
- Two people I don’t care enough to find out their names getting stranded on another planet… let’s call them redshirt one and two (I don’t even remember if they got rescued now)
- Science guy getting shot by Roland Greer
- Colonel Telford being a jerk
- Chloe Armstrong went to tell her mother that her father died… I went to the bathroom and got something to eat whilst this was happening so I can only assume…
- The scrubbers were repaired and a song talking about breathing was played subtly over the montage of everyone enjoying air again… I liked the scene in Total Recall better, it had mutants.
- In a mind blowing scene that will be discussed for days around the water cooler the hatch finally opens and… oh sorry um a shuttle flew away from the Destiny.
I think that about sums up what I took away from the episode, a lot of the crew are jerks and some people got sunburned in the desert.
Sigh.
