Tag Archives: Stargate

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Stargate Universe is Back–Intervention

Television, , , ,

Well, the second season of Stargate Universe has premiered. For those who may have been following my blog, or had conversations with me about this show, you know that I haven’t been the greatest fan of the first season. First off, I love Stargate, and by that I mean both of the previous series Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. So I had a lot of hope for this show because I loved all things Stargate. But the first season was so flawed in so many different ways. The acting was all right, probably the only positive they had, but the writing was atrocious, and it was like they were just phoning in the whole thing. I never saw so many “let’s solve a huge conflict by going to a commercial and then coming back as if everything was solved off screen” moments in a show before. It was becoming a joke of what it could actually be.

So, when they left us with a cliffhanger for the end of Season One, I half expected them to come back and resolve the whole thing by some act of the gods that wouldn’t make any more sense than the rest of the episodes. But fortunately, they didn’t. Surprisingly, the first episode was not bad. But then, true to form, they went back to stupid resolution processes that keep causing me to pull out the few hairs I have left on my head.

The episode started out with a stand-off between the bad guys of the Lucian Alliance and the crew of the Destiny, the ship that has been the headquarters of this third installment of the Stargate enterprise (no, not that Enterprise). Anyway, the bad guy Varro ends up being a not so bad guy and saves the crew from being slaughtered but marooned on some desolute planet instead (geez, what a pal, eh?), and then he gets marooned, too, for going against the new crazy leader who takes over after Kiva dies from a gunshot during a gunfight with Colonel Telford, who also was shot in the stomach during the exchange. Anyway, the upshot is that the Lucian Alliance guys become all bad ass like and threaten to kill everyone, but Rush does a double cross, like he always does, and manages to play chicken with the Lucian guys by threatening to let some pulsar kill most of the people on board, except for where Rush and a few stragglers are holding up.

Meanwhile, TJ, who was pregnant last time we checked, and shot when Varro went nuts trying to, well, I really still don’t understand what he was trying to do when he started fighting his own people and grabbing for a machine gun that managed to kill everyone, including Elmo who was innocently recording his show at a nearby soundstage next door to the Stargate set, ended up on some planet they had been to before where they left half the civilian crew. Some aliens brought her there and it ends up being one of those situations where she’s kind of there and not there, but she’s going to be sent back, but her baby has to stay. That’s the deal. Or agreement. Or whatever. So TJ comes back, realizes that she lost her baby, because everyone on the ship thinks that she actually lost it on the ship, but in reality it’s living happily on some strange planet out in the Gamma Quadrant, or wherever it is they were.

So, here’s my thoughts. The show had some interesting action and character dilemmas. The Sergeant Grier character is becoming one of the most fascinating characters of all. He’s twisted, an asshole, but he’s so freaking loyal to Colonel Young that you have to just admire the man in his own violent way. Plus, the actor plays this character so well. I mean, I hate the character big time, but at the same time he grows on you in a pretty fascinating way.

The baby thing with TJ is completely understandable, although cowardly writing, in my opinion. They felt they had to get rid of the pregnancy, and I really think the decision was made to avoid having a baby they had to keep working with on the series each and every episode, because you know it would be that important if she had to keep it. It would be a constant set of episodes where her one defining line would be: “I have to protect my baby!” And honestly, I want to see her character grow without having to fall into such an old Hollywood, phoned in sort of characterization.

The Lucian Alliance guys bring an interesting dynamic because now we have a whole bunch of new characters who are now on the ship. Sure, they’re in lock-up right now, but you know they can’t stay there. They’re either going to be integrated into the crew, a la “the Maquis” from Star Trek Voyager, or they’re going to become further adversaries. Plus, one or two new actors might get pulled from them to become regulars, and some of them were actually pretty good, including the woman who takes over as their leader at the end. Unfortunately, they’re previous female leader died, and she could have been a fascinating character to build upon for the show.

They introduced the alien race (the one that saves TJ and keeps her baby) again, which means that they may have a much larger focus in the series. If not, they’re a bad plot save device. I’m hoping there’s something more going on because they hint that they’ve been paying attention to the Destiny crew and only jumped in when they had to do something to save TJ from death (she was dying from the gunshot would in the crazy machine gun spray by Varro’s bizarre heroics).

Rush is becoming a very conflicted character now. Before, he was trying to take the Destiny. Now, he’s sort of on the side of the good guys, so who knows where his loyalities and his motivations will lie for the future. I don’t think they ever really played out the end of the conflict between Rush and Young. Saying they’ll work together “for the sake of the crew” is okay, but logic dictates that there should have to be more to it than that.

Complaints: They’re still doing the last minute saves by Deus Ex Machima, and that’s getting on my nerves. Grier and Lt Scott were in one of those no win situations where they were stuck outside the ship, unable to get to a hatch to get back in before the pulsar hit. Even the annoying kid Eli couldn’t save them, so they were presumed dead. Then out of the blue they are safe, and they state that they were lucky enough to be shielded from the pulsar by where they were located. OH GREAT! No, that’s stupid. Don’t set up an imminent death moment and then say, oh we were saved because the pulsar just barely missed us, letting all of this happen off camera. This is continuously bad writing, and I was hoping they had fired all of those bad writers from the first season.

Unfortunately, those types of writing moments are what continue to bring down what can be a good show, because the season premiere was not bad. I enjoyed it. I just need them to be a bit more consistent and realize that the audience is not a bunch of teenagers who are constantly fooled by coin tricks.

Overall, I’m hoping this is a sign of better things to come this season, and even with reservations, I’m going to continue watching…for now.

LOST Goes Out As It Should…With Answers and a Sense of Purpose

Television, , , , , , ,

The finale for LOST was last night, and even though I’m not one to stay up that late these days, it was well worth the staying up. (spoiler warning for anyone reading further….) Right up to the last few minutes, I found myself thinking, wait, we’re about to go out with a nice ending, but I still don’t feel I have any answers. And then they sprung it. Just like that. And I was thinking, wow, that works. Sure, there was a lot of fighting against that thought, but in the end it really worked, and just like LOST, it waited until the last moment to just subtly explain what it’s all been about. That’s so much like LOST.

What I thought was so profound is that one of the obvious clues had been staring us in the face all along. We knew the character’s name from the start, but it was one of those shell games where you just never looked at that person’s name to realize how significant it really was. It took Kate actually just saying it out loud, in almost disbelief, for me to realize how this process of puzzle making was so well done in this show. The bizarre thing is we always knew the person’s name, but no one ever bothered to just say it out loud, all together. That one clue would have really been enough if we realized how significant it was all along. I mean, every character in the show had a significant name (well, most at least), including John Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Jacob, Faraday, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever get another show like LOST ever again. We’ve lost some of the greatest written dramas on television over the last few years, including Battlestar Galactica, which like LOST took a few years to really get its groove.

I’ll admit it. I’m a big fan of good television, but unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good television to find. The big shows right now are a lot of reality TV stuff, like Dancing with the Stars. I can’t watch any of that. The few good dramas are few and very hard to find. Instead, we get really trashy television like Grey’s Anatomy. I really hate that show, even though I love Heigl, even though she’s slowly becoming an enigma on that show. But I hate the stupid premise of that show, and the few times I tried watching it in the beginning completely turned me off of it.

So what do we have left? Surprisingly, one of the more innovative shows became a victim of its own success. Actually, a few did. There was Heroes, which had a GREAT first season and then imploded on itself with the cardinal sin of television (it thought it was more important than it really was). This same cardinal sin is happening to a lot of early shows, like Fringe, FastForward and V. But they didn’t even allow themselves a chance to become important before they turned into jokes of themselves right off the start. Another show that had promise, just for the intriguing writing it was doing in the beginning was one you wouldn’t suspect, and that was Desperate Housewives. And then it turned really stupid, as if it only had to rely on its great first season to make it great by name alone. It’s difficult to watch, so I stopped.

Some of the other promising shows are on the Sci Fi channel, strangely named Syfy these days. Except they’re screwing up those as well. Stargate Universe has taken a great franchise and tried to become Battlestar Galactica, which it is not. Stargate was always light, fun and entertaining. Stargate Universe is boring, tedious and another one of those that sees itself as important without doing anything to become important. I think when they went to the “let’s put our heroes into an inescapable plot in one week and then have them just walk through the stargate unscathed WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION the next week” is what has finally destroyed the show. They keep trying, and every now and then there’s a glimmer of hope, but it’s close to being thrown on the “don’t watch” list.

However, in July a bunch of the good shows from Syfy are coming back, and that might be really interesting. Eureka, a weird, light show, is coming back. Warehouse 13 is also coming back during that time. I’m not sure when Caprica is coming back, but that’s also on the backburner of a lot of people for one of the better shows out there, even though it’s just a spinoff to Battlestar Galactica, told some decades before the events of BG erupt.

One of the other decent shows, especially decent over this last season, is Smallville, and it is going to be producing its 10th and final season, which has a lot of people going through pre-withdrawals. But this means we should finally get to see the Boy of Steel become the Man of Steel, which has always been the end game for this series. Sure, they could make a Superman TV series, but I just don’t think it would be as great as the premise for Smallville always was. The origin story is such a unique animal in fiction, and we already know how it’s supposed to turn out.

Which leaves the rest of us wondering what are we supposed to do now that LOST is gone? There are no other shows that can replace it. Sure, a lot of networks are going to try to duplicate it, but they will continue to fail because they so want people to think they have the next LOST, which is impossible to do when you are trying too hard. That was one of the beauties of LOST. It never came out and said it was great. It just was. It trodded on, telling its story as it wanted to tell it, and they didn’t fall back on stupid shark jumping tricks to keep the fans happy. But the fans were happy, and they kept viewing.

Shows just don’t do that these days. And that’s what we’ll probably miss the most.

Do Superpowers Recognize When They’re Losing Their Significance?

Politics, Television, ,

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a citizen of France at the end of the first World War when it can be argued that the French Empire was finally no longer the superpower they once were. Almost overnight, the German war machine built itself up and rolled right over the forces of France, forever destroying their ability to posture like…well, like the French. At the same time, I also wonder how a British Empire citizen must have felt when he or she realized that the imperial power of the once great British Empire was no longer significant. Some might argue this happened right about the time the American colonists kicked them out of the colonies, but it’s quite possible that this demise was coming sooner than that, and that it may have taken a bit longer than 1789 to finally occur.

But what gets me wondering is how those citizens must have not believed that it was possible their empires were no longer the behemoths they once were. Having said that, I start to wonder if the United States might not be in the same boat today, having once been the emergent superpower in the world, but now somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Oh sure, like most superpowers, we’re still up there at the top of the list, but at the same time I don’t think we evoke the respect and fear that we might have had maybe 50 years ago. Look at how nations like Iran react to the United States today. In the 1960s, a country like Venezuela would never have dared say half the things Chavez says on a daily basis. His country would have been invaded, and he’d be sharing a prison cell with Noriega. Remember that guy?

But not today. Today, the US is seen as one of the most powerful countries in the world, but it’s not seen as the hegemony that it tends to think it is. At one point, in response to 911, we invaded Afghanistan and then for any number of irrational reasons, we invaded Iraq. But then we got bogged down in those stupid wars and we really don’t have a way out. I don’t even think we have a rational reason for why we’re still there, other than “we’ll leave when everything calms down”, which is a pretty scary thought because these are areas that have never really been calmed down, at peace or even stable. Well, Iraq was, but we wiped out the guy who stabilized it, and well, who knows?

During the Cold War, it was probably okay to be one of the main hegemonies in the world, but we were directly at odds with the Soviet Union, and today, I’m not even sure what it is our point is any more. We keep building up a huge military to fight against some mysterious enemy that doesn’t exist, although Russia keeps seeming to want to become the enemy it used to be, even though there really doesn’t seem to be a rational reason to let them do so. There’s nothing about Russia that is really a problem for the United States other than the idea that they’re the “other” hegemony, but in reality aren’t really powerful enough to be just that these days.

That’s the problem right there. We seem to exist to counter a great enemy somewhere, but there is no great enemy anywhere any more other than ideological ones, like the concept of terror. But how do you counter a concept? You really can’t. You can talk about it, scream at it, and claim you will stop it, but it’s an idea, not an actual enemy. It’s like declaring a war against smoke but not recognizing fire as an enemy but something to be coddled in hopes that it will make smoke go away. That’s why I hate these concept wars, like the war on poverty.

But what no one wants to face is the possibility that the United States really has no meaning any more. Think on that for a moment. If someone was to ask you what the United States stands for or means, the usual answers of “freedom” are pretty limiting because “freedom” exists in many places, some of which have more of it than the United States. The idea of the “melting pot” also comes to mind, but in reality it’s more a fantasy and a promise that we don’t actually live up to any more. If you go to any major city, you’ll find more people interested in ethnic and racial separation (within those ethnic and racial identities) than you’ll find that are interested in “melting”. In the old days, the melting pot metaphor was useful because when people melted into society, they still tended to look a lot alike and didn’t seem to want to fall back into their identity separations. But not today. Nowadays, we spend a great deal of energy with politically correct dogma that requires us to work on separating ourselves from each other by color and creed, all in the name of this bizarre fantasy that somehow this will make us all want to live together in harmony. Something really wrong happened in this country, and people are too scared of being branded racists, bigots or haters to want to do anything about it, when in reality the people who want cohesiveness and racial harmony are the ones who most often have least chance of achieving it. It’s pretty hard to advocate for racial harmony when there are people who owe their entire political careers to making sure those separations never go away. Sorry, but that’s a sad sate of our current affairs.

But back to the thesis of this post, and that’s that what we don’t seem to realize might be exactly what is happening all around us: The entire foundation of what makes America “America” has been falling apart for many decades now, and no one is doing anything about trying to bring things to a better place. Instead, every time someone talks about “fixing” America, it ends up being someone who wants to do things that make America that much worse, doing stuff like creating barriers to immigration, forcing English on the population, or just making it so that more and more people hate each other all in the name of some ideal that no one really intends to emulate.

Sadly, most people won’t realize there’s a problem because the fantasy of America is much stronger than any reality can ever be. It’s because of this that we can rack up a massive deficit that is reaching proportions we may never be able to repay. And instead of deal with it, we just stick our heads in the ground and figure that it will all fix itself, or we’ll all live long enough to die before we ever have to deal with the consequences. Well, I have a feeling that many people in the numerous republics of the Soviet Union were probably thinking that nothing bad could ever happen even as the warning signs started appearing in the 1980s, not realizing that in a decade the whole foundation would collapse on itself.

As a huge fan of Stargate SG1, a sign of my eternal geekdom, I have to say that I’ve always been a fan of the one dialogue they kept bringing up, where they’d talk about their main plan, and then realize that if it doesn’t work out well, they’ll have to fall back on Plan B. And in the show, one of the running gags was that they never really had a Plan B, but they’d always just keep running until things worked themselves out. Well, that’s the United States today. Plan A is to hope for a miracle that no one is actually working towards. Which means Plan B is already in place, and we’re running forward, hoping that the evil aliens don’t end up killing us and destroying everything we believe in. Fortunately, in the TV universe, they usually came out ahead. Let’s hope that fantasy is somewhat based on a sense of reality. Otherwise, we might be in a whole heap of trouble, and there’s only so many “To be Continued” episode endings we can use before the network finally realizes it has to cancel the show.

Ongoing thoughts on Stargate Universe

Television, , ,

Okay, I’ll admit that my personal jury is still out on this show. Most of the first part of the season was pretty crappy in my opinion, but I was giving it the benefit of the doubt because I figured they had to build some kind of backstory and character development. But it really felt like it was just treading water most of the time, right up until the mid-season finale, which was actually the one HUGE moment in the show. So, I thought I’d wait until it came back after the mid-season break and see how things are going.

First off, I’ve already said this before, but I HATE MID SEASON BREAKS. It’s one of the stupidest things a television show can do for its survival. If you really want to piss off your audience and cause your audience members to watch another show, that’s the way you do it. You go halfway through your season, take a LONG FREAKING BREAK and then pray that your audience decides to come back and watch your show that they’ve completely forgotten about because it wasn’t all that great to begin with. This is why the shows Fringe, Fastforward and Heroes are all failing. Okay, that’s not completely correct. Heroes is failing because it’s being written by two year old monkeys with typewriters, but that’s another story.

Anyway, back to Stargate Universe. The characters are somewhat okay. I had reservations in the beginning because here’s a run down of your main characters:

The leader is a boring colonel who might be in love with one of the boring women who is on the boring ship. The second in command is either some egomaniac, brainiac scientist who cares only for himself, or it might be some teenage kid who succeeded in getting to a final level in a FREAKING VIDEO GAME, so the Air Force recruited him to be their scientist problem solver. Really? Anyway, then there’s some somewhat attractive Asian chick who is third or ninth in command, who wants to overthrow the leadership so she can fly home and meet up with her lesbian lover back on Earth. Is this Stargate, or are we watching the third attempt at creating Melrose Place? Then there’s a whole bunch of other interchangeable characters who may or may not be regulars, including some lieutenant who is either in love with some girl that was the daughter of a senator who died in space, or he might be in love with the woman that the boring colonel might have gotten pregnant before they left for space, or maybe he’s in love with some strange sand alien that shows up every now and then to remind us it’s a science fiction show.

The plots tend to be something like: “Okay, they’re lost in space on this really old space ship, and they’re running out of food, water and air. So let’s argue about whether or not the really smart guy can trick someone into sitting in a chair that might cause instant death. Or we can change that plot out for one where we use these rocks that we’re carrying on the ship to switch our minds with people back on Earth so Lou Diamond Philip can get some screen time because we accidentally hired him to be a cast member but forgot to put him on the ship that’s lost in space.”

The plots really seem to be geared around the central idea of “how can we make being lost in space any more annoying to our audience?” But even with that being said, every now and then they manage to lull me into a sense of thinking there’s more to this show than what I’ve described before. Like tonight’s episode. They found this planet in the middle of nowhere that can sustain life. And there’s this HUGE obelisk that was obviously built by the smartest alien race that has ever existed in the universe. So, I’m intrigued. But then they had to leave because their flight was on stand by in that solar system and now is somewhere else where that obelisk planet is no longer accessible. But it might still be relevant. Or not.

Next week, everyone’s favorite Stargate character has a cameo, and of course I’m talking about Dr. Daniel Jackson played by Michael Shanks. I am all excited, but of course, I’m trying not to think about the fact that Dr. Daniel Jackson, like Lou Diamond Philip, is on Earth and has no idea where the Stargate Universe spaceship might be, so that means he’s probably going to be hopping on board by holding a stone in his hand which brings us back to that horrible method for producing episodes with actors who aren’t normally on the show.

All in all, I can’t shake this feeling that Stargate Universe is essentially Star Trek Voyager but in the Stargate universe. It’s a ship, lost in space, and everyone is trying really hard to get back home. You know what’s funny about that? The first sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation was Deep Space Nine, which was about a space station instead of about the travels of the main ship. The first sequel to Stargate SG1 was Stargate Atlantis, which was about a space station instead of about the travels of the main ship. So, should I be surprised that the second sequel (which in Star Trek was Voyager, about a ship lost in space with a crew trying to get home to Earth) is Stargate Universe, which…wait for it…is about a ship lost in space with a crew trying to get home to Earth. I’m seeing a bit of a trend here.

But I’m still going to watch the show because as much complaining as I’ve done here, it’s still far better than 90 percent of the rest of the crap that’s on the other stations.