I think that possibly over the last couple of weeks I’ve given the wrong idea about how I feel about Stargate Universe despite my positive opening review.  It’s been hard to say nice things about the show since.  So this week it will possibly come to a surprise to some that I’ve got mostly positive things to say about the episode Light.

Mostly.

As always this is your second call for spoilers, those wishing to avoid spoilers should vacate immediately or at the very least go read my top five movie posts!

So this episode picks up on last week’s moderately improving episode Darkness and follows the trend with improving on that episode.  The Destiny is about to plunge into a giant sun and everyone is going to die – gasp!  I know I know, we have to put our heroes in peril to make good drama but was anyone out there under even the slightest amount of tension or angst over the whole sun thing?

We all guessed it last week, so the whole danger of the episode was really a going through the motions affair and so we turned our attention to the characters themselves.

I beg them to drop the keno ball diary room shtick that they’ve got going so the characters can tell us that they are developing rather than us just seeing the character developing!!  I really hate that they did the ‘we have a lesbian character’ announcement using the stupid keno ball.  It’s 2009, we’re intelligent viewers, we’ve encountered lesbians before, it’s great you’re embracing diversity, just don’t make a big deal out it.  (I might be reading too much into it to be fair).

Jerk of the week awards:

• bald guy heckling who got punched out by Greer (last fortnight’s jerk of the week), military discipline mean nothing to you??  I’m glad Greer decked him.
• Chloe/River – “I feel really close to you man and I think this could be our last night and you know this is the new sexier Stargate… wanna do it?”  ”Oh hi Eli, how’s World of Warcraft going?  Sucka!!”
• the writers for trying to make out like Rush who wasn’t a jerk for 3/4 of the episode suddenly becomes a jerk at the end in the worst written scene so far.

Creep of the week:

• Dr Rush because pretending you knew the ship was going to dive into the sun to recharge makes you a creep, of course it doesn’t help that you have jerks writing that scene.

Things we learnt this week:

• Greer who wants to go out in a Blaze of Glory listens to Bon Jovi WAY too much.
• Greer also wants to go out nakid
• Spit lines are gross when two people are kissing on high definition with the sun in the background… GROSS
• Eli’s flashbacks are pretty much as boring as mine would be, sleeping in, can’t find dream job…
• Sometimes you’ve got to do something just to appear that you are doing something – 15 people are not going to get rescued on the other side of the universe and they are sure as shit not going to be rebuilding the human race but if you don’t at least put it out there they will think you’re a bastard.
• HR people think they are important enough in a survival situation to get picked over military types with training in survival.
• Math boy always comes in last… in love.

I do wonder if there will be some kind of fallout from the rest of the crew towards the ‘people with lines’ lottery winners who got to go on the shuttle, I suspect bald guy is going to have to dropped out an airlock.

Again enough with the keno balls – almost the least interesting piece of technology possible on the ship getting a lot of air time.

I also worry about how Dr Rush is going to get iTunes updates.

This was a much more watchable episode this week, certainly perfect and far from excellent but I didn’t hate it as much as I hated the desert episode, I expect next episode to be a good one, they are due.