Tag Archives: Stargate Universe

Stargate Universe is Back–Intervention

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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

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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.

Ongoing thoughts on Stargate Universe

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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.