I've been working downstairs a lot just lately and wanting to put something on, I started at the beginning of Stargate Universe, and this then led to review all 40 episodes of this short lived (by Stargate TV Series standards anyway) and I began to think about why the popular franchise stopped with this iteration.
Stargate Universe (or SG:U) was the third series based on the moderately successful 1994 film and premiered in 2009. The previous series, Stargate Atlantis (SG:A) had ended its run at the end of its fifth season earlier in the year, a lot of fans were unhappy about this as they probably felt it had been ended prematurely, I wasn't one of them. For me SG:A had never really developed into its own series, the beginnings had been promising but some highly questionable plot decisions, characters being killed off, hilarious deus ex machina plot resolutions had left me cold. I even stopped buying the DVDs as I had lost interest in it. Gateworld (big,big Stargate fan site) has an interesting article regarding why it was cancelled and if interested you can read that here.
The premise of SG:U initially sounded more interesting, a crew stranded on an ancient vessel they can't control far from Earth. Now initially this sounded a lot like SG:A, in that you had a crew in a stranded city far from Earth and I knew how that had gone. However, the producers were promising that this would be an altogether "darker, grittier" take on the genre. Often mentioned in the same breath as SG:U was the also recently ended reimagining of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and in a lower voice, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9). From 2.3 million viewers at it's premiere to 1.1 by the last episode, SG:U had a rough ride both in the ratings, schedules and with the critics.
Before I start I just want to make one thing clear, I am a fan of the series and still mourn it's cancellation in a way I never did with SG:A.
1. "So is it Battlestar Universe of Stargate Voyager?"
The producers were obviously going for a BSG vibe with this, that's clear from things like the character setup, the way the sets were lit, the faux handheld nature of the visual effects (which BSG "borrowed" from Firefly before it, etc. As the website, io9, pointed out, watching parts of an episode you could easily mistake it for BSG. In trying to carve out a separate identity from what had gone before it, I would argue they followed the BSG template a little too rigidly. The first two series in the Stargate line had been bold, brash and loud adventure series, SG:U was not. It was dark, introspective and bogged down in it's own conflicts.
2. "Where are the white hats?"
All tv series have a protagonist, someone you can root for through good times and bad, SG:1 had Jack O'Neill, SG:A had John Sheppard, BSG had Commander Adama, etc. SG:U had Nicholas Rush (described as a 'machiavellian' scientist and Colonel Everett Young. These two would spend the majority of the first season butting heads and I'm still vaguely surprised Young never put a gun to Rush's head and pulled the trigger. It reminds me of the Kevin Costner film, Waterworld where the main character is a just a dick to everyone until the last act of the film and we're just mean't to buy this miraculous change of heart. Rush, lies, deceives and (inadvertently) causes the death of some of the crew. Overall he's a hard guy to like. Young comes across as weak, he's just had an affair with a fellow officer that his wife knows about and seems to be basically counting down the days until he gets out. Another discussion point had been the desire to appeal to a younger demographic (which would to the series being dubbed Stargate 90210 in the early days) and this was born by some of the casting and some the relationships that would develop between them. Make no mistake, this was a messed up crew, but that was the point, an unlikely crew thrown into an impossible situation. Maybe that was the problem, they were too busy bitching at each other when previous series had been going doing adventuring type things. Most characters never got any substantial back story, Rush, Eli Wallace, Camille Wray all had moments where we learned a bit more about them, we got odd snippets for some of the others but these were mostly forgettable (with the exception of Greer's).
3. "Where are the black hats?"
Every tv series has some kind of antagonist, someone to give the protagonist grief. Comparing as before, SG:1 had the System Lords and the Replicators, SG:A had the Wraith, BSG had the Cylons, etc. Now SG:U didn't really have one, and this was by design, in an interview, the producers, wanted to get away from the "latex faced aliens" of the previous shows. Character conflict is not bad thing as we saw to great effect in both BSG and to a lesser extent, DS:9 but they both had strong antagonists so no matter how much the characters wanted to kill each other, they would always unite against a common foe. SG:U had conflict but mostly character based and nearly all of it between Rush and the rest of the crew (which would culminate in Young abandoning Rush at the midpoint of the first series). The series did feature opposition, from the blue glowy aliens of the first series to the machine drones of the second but neither was a strong character force in the same way that either the Goa'uld or the Wraith were.
3. "Everybody brings something to the party."
One of the best aspects of DS:9 were the incredibly rich and detailed supporting cast: Gul Dukat, Elim Garak, etc. The B cast of SG:U (mostly scientists and a couple of soldier types) developed into (by the end, as always) as equally compelling and interesting characters as the majority of the main cast. Not in every episode but often providing some light relief when needed.
As I said at the beginning, I was a fan of this, through the rough to the good. It was also the last tv series to regularly feature a spacecraft as a regular setting. SG:U was a bold, high concept that, I think anyway, initially missed it's mark but had found it's way by the end of the second series which was, of course, too late to save it. The promised movie to resolve the story never happened (as did neither the similarly promised SG:A movie also) and the franchise has laid dormant since then.
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