Sunday, October 4, 2009

Stargate Universe Series Premiere Review

Last Friday night I watched the series premiere of Stargate Universe (SG-U), the third series in the Stargate franchise. On Saturday I was sleeping most of the day. I did flip lightswitches use the refrigerator and use my computer a little bit to be mechallal shabbat though. XD And, today I am reviewing.

I love science fiction. Science fiction delves into possibilities of what humanity can face in the future, and it displays humanity at its best, when people solve their problems in ingenious ways.

At first, I thought that the entertainment value of Stargate Universe could go both ways because the advertising for it annoyed me. Two different commercials actually.

One was when the actress bashed the character development in the previous 2 Stargate series, which in my opinion had perfectly fine character development; and then went on to say that Stargate Universe has good character development for the given reason that it's more sexy.

This got me to start questioning the quality of the stories and whether or not the series was going to sell itself on girls alone. I was thinking like, OMG, Star Trek never had to sell itself with a pair of boobs, and Star Trek wrote EXCELLENT science fiction.

Gladly, this was an overreaction, and the series premiere was about science fiction.

To digress for a moment, I am not writing as a purist. Girls and maybe even sex or sex-like scenes are fine ... as long as they advance the story. Girls should never be a device to make up for bad writing, it's a cheap way of getting attention, and when people see sci-fi, I imagine that people expect to see possibilities with regard to the human condition in the grand scheme of things. To end this digression, the series premiere was not bad writing. It was decent.

The second commercial that annoyed me was the commercial that the U.S. air force was gonna get a kid (Ely) to go and help them. However, what annoyed me was that the commercial failed to make the case for why the U.S. air force already equipped with alien high technology needed a kid from Earth for assistance. The series premiere gladly did cover this issue and the kid is a math whiz from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's plausible enough.

While the premise of SG-U is similar to that of Star Trek Voyager in that humans are cast far away from Earth, SG-U began differentiating itself in that not everyone in the SG-U team gets along like a big happy family. In the Voyager story, everyone got along. Also of course, in SG-U the ship does not belong to the humans but rather to the Ancients. In Voyager, the ship belonged to the humans.

The series premiere of SG-U was similar and different to the series premiere of Stargate Atlantis. In SG Atlantis, the expedition entered a cityship that was submerged in water and ready to implode under the pressure. In SG-U the stakes of the series premiere were high and the oxygen on that very very old Ancient ship is gonna be depleted unless they get the lifesupport working. In Stargate Atlantis, the away mission knew what it was looking when going off world to solve the problem of the cityship being underwater and its shields almost about to be gone; and in SG-U, the away mission to solve the life support problem does not know what they are looking for. In Atlantis, the protagonists are better prepared; in SG-U, the protagonists seem quite unprepared though it's no fault of their own.

It was nice to see some of SG-1 in the series premiere. Jack O'Neil was cool with his neat sense of humor as usual. It was nice to see him, Samantha Carter, and Daniel Jackson. It was neat how they made Jackson more of a ghost character in video recordings that briefed Ely on aspects of the Stargate Program. Apparently, the Lucian Alliance still has a grudge against the Earthlings from the SG-1 days ... it would be cool for the SG-U series to feature a retaliation against them in the near future.

The overall jist of the series premiere of SG-U is not completely original, I'm sure that the writers were aware of this while writing it. The premiere does make an effort to take it into a different direction and that convinced me to continue watching the show for the time being.

1 comment:

Shmendrik said...

"Girls and maybe even sex or sex-like scenes are fine ... as long as they advance the story. Girls should never be a device to make up for bad writing"

You are a misogynist ass. Half of the world are "girls". Let me rewrite that for you:

"Guys and maybe even sex or sex-like scenes are fine ... as long as they advance the story. Guys should never be a device to make up for bad writing"