Stargate: Universe – SGU in Review

What follows are my summaries of the first episodes of the latest series in the Stargate franchise. All this is a precursor to the next episode, which I’ve decided is a make-or-break episode. All will be explained once you have read the following:

“Air” Part One

SPOILERS

Not really a spoiler, as this is the premise of the series, but a bunch of humans find themselves trapped inside an ancient spaceship without the ability to get back to Earth. What is a spoiler is that, one hour into the pilot, that is all there is to the show.

Aside from learning one of the Air Force guys likes to have sex, and the super-smart doctor has an abrasive personality (never seen that on TV before), there were little to no character revelations. Furthermore, aside from the cameos by the SG-1 actors, little to no humor (I liked Richard Dean Anderson’s line, “We’re here. That happened.”). And the humor and characters were the driving forces behind the first two Stargate shows.

The show has borrowed heavily on the Galactica series, ignoring almost entirely the earlier incarnations of Stargate. The camerawork is more jittery, and the CGI, while impressive, is again shown via the jittery, “documentary style” look of everyone’s favorite Battlestar. It reminded me of the most recent James Bond film. “Quantum of Solace” featured amazing stuntwork, but was shot with those same techniques, which meant I could have replicated the car chases using Hot Wheels cars with similar results.

I’ll watch part two (via iTunes) and part three (via Hulu) later today. And I’ll hope for the best. But given the first hour, I am less than optimistic. So far, the “U” in SG-U stands for “underwhelming.”

“Air” Part Two

Actually, having just watched part 2, you can throw one more series into the mix: “Gilligan’s Island.” Yes, if the S.S. Minnow had been shipwrecked on — well — a moving ship, and if the professor had been brooding and potentially sinister, it would be a close fit to this show. Eli is Gilligan. Not sure if Chloe is Ginger and Tamara is Mary Anne, or vice versa.

Also worth noting is the distinct lack of Lou Diamond Phillips. Isn’t he really the only name star in the series?

“Air” Part Three

The expansive ensemble cast (of virtual unknowns) poses the first problem I have with the series. Well, not the size of the cast, but the cast of characters. One reluctant hero can drive a story (Daniel Jackson). Two reluctant heroes can offer some diversity (Shepherd and McKay). But a room full of dozens of short-order cooks and one video game addict is just messy storytelling. It complicates the narrative.

I’ll give SGU time. Atlantis was slow to start, primarily because the villains had no character… nothing to drive them other than the need to feed. All you can do with something that one-dimensional is basic shoot-’em-up stories.

Were I running the network… well… first I’d change the name back to SciFi. But then I’d include the following notes to the producers of SGU:

1. Introduce a virus or a plague that kills off some of the dead weight. Having that many generic background characters can only lead to repeated “red shirt” scenarios where they get killed off one by one, as needed to force emotion onto a dry story.
2. Introduce more mythology, not necessarily earth-based myths, but some sense that they’re doing more than Arthur and Ford, hitching a ride on a Vogon ship. The three parter was anti-climactic because viewers KNEW the characters would survive, so taking three hours to tell us what we already knew slowed the series down right out of the gate. We now know how and what. Next we need the who and why.
3. Also mythology related, try to include something that connects this series to the first two, besides the physical gate. SG1 used Egyptian and European myths to populate its universe, and from those myths came ancient races with ties to the Pegasus galaxy, which bridged the gap (with the help of a few crossover episodes) to Atlantis. Yes, the new ship is Ancient by design, but if you choose to ignore these basic elements of the franchise, why bother calling the new series Stargate?
4. Bring the funny. The problem with beginning with a three hour desperate struggle for survival is that there is not a lot of humor to be mined from death and severe head trauma. The pilots of the first two series managed to weave more humor in the two hours than SGU did in three.

Not to beat a dead horse, but since we know this series is to take place on board the ship, we knew the ship would survive, so that eliminated the suspense/drama of the story. And we didn’t have nearly as much humor. And we had too many underdeveloped characters that we couldn’t be bothered to care about. At day’s end, the only thing the pilot did was establish the character of the ship itself. Even the cameos of the original cast hurt the pilot, inasmuch as it served to remind us that there was a series with characters and stories that we cared about, but that series is gone.

“Darkness”

First, the positive feedback:

Hurray for the return of Peter DeLuise to the universe of Stargate (both as director of the episode, and in one of his Hitchcock inspired cameos… a speaking role, no less). The non-CGI visual elements were noticeably different, less jarring, and more in keeping with how Stargate has looked in the past. He also managed to draw out some humor, mostly visual cues and stuff I’d suspect wasn’t found in the written script. Having listened to DeLuise in DVD commentaries, he tends to inject his bizarre sense of humor where other directors might have simply shot the page as-is.

Colonel Young actually became a developed character with this episode, distinguishing himself from the other SG commanders. But he did so not by visiting his ex (which was a page straight out of Weir’s failed relationship on Atlantis). Rather, by doing something in the leadership role, and proving he knew how to motivate those serving under him.

Nice that we didn’t have a music-video montage like the end of “Air.” That sort of cheese needs to stay on the CW.

Onto the constructive-criticisms:

We didn’t need to know the names of all the red shirts, particularly when the writers are foreshadowing more deaths in future episodes. I may be wrong, but I think I can not only predict which of the minor characters will die, but I see two of the central characters not long for the series, too. The primary reason this was bad move was that it further cluttered the minds of viewers. You want the leads on a series to be memorable, but tossing 20 people onto the screen makes them all sort of blend together in a mess… I’m not good with names in general, so it makes it tough to get drawn into a show when I have to keep track of so many.

Onto the central characters, someone took a page from Padme Amidala when they fashioned Chloe. Even with the death of her father in the three-parter, she handled herself with strength, but in “Darkness,” she became a whiny, scared little brat (a la Amidala in SW: III). Clearly this series is written by guys… from the old school. Seriously, a grown woman scared of the dark? And, while I generally applaud gratuitous nudity (or near-nudity) of attractive women, the shower scenes (technically two, one before the lights went out and one after) were contrived. Even I, the reigning king of sexist bastards, saw this as a horrible thing to do to a female character. A guy throws a tantrum, he can be teased about it. Once a woman has a hissy fit, you can’t. It is an unworkable double-standard. Eli could have had a fear of the dark (though, hopefully, not during a near-nude shower scene) and, by nature of being a guy, his character could easily recover. Eli would have been teased by the other guys about it, but you can’t tease Chloe. At least not in the stereotype land of SGU. To add insult to injury, the least masculine guy of the cast (Eli) rides to Chloe’s rescue.

The small ship/probe/whatever that flew off of the Destiny at the end of “Air” wasn’t referenced in this episode. Looking ahead at future episode descriptions, I see where they’re going, but not even a “Hey, I thought Bob (or whomever) made it through the gate with us… huh, wonder what happened to him?” I’m hoping they take a cue from “Babylon 5″ and have a well-thought story arc, as opposed to making it up on the fly with whichever writer is on salary. It makes me nervous.

There has to come a point when we accept the fact the ship is their new home and we set about discovering what this strange and potentially exciting new universe has to offer. As stated previously, the ship will survive, and we know that, so we don’t need to be inundated with storylines about whether the ship will be destroyed: It won’t. Move on.

Last but not least, don’t be like JJ Abrams. Don’t feel compelled to end every episode with a cliffhanger. Don’t be that guy. Nobody likes that guy.

“Light”

Little did anyone know that SGU stood for Shirtless Guys Undressed.

Praise all that is holy, they finally have a working ship! Now, in the name of all that is holy, can they begin to actually tell a story? Any story? About anyone?

First drafts of post-Roddenberry Trek scripts contained the following: [TECH]. It was a reference to the technobabble one of the characters would say to explain the half-assed solution to a deadly problem. Example:

Riker: Captain, the Borg are closing in fast, we have no weapons, and
our engines aren’t powerful enough to outrun them.

Data: It may be possible to outrun them, but only if we [TECH] the [TECH].

Picard: Make it so.

Later drafts filled in the technobabble, in a lame attempt to convince viewers that the script hadn’t been a steaming dog turd. In the end, Data would be the hero of the episode, and the Enterprise would live to… well, not fight another day, since they only fought in season finales. In yesterday’s episode, the writers didn’t even bother with the technobabble. There was no hero. The ship just fixed itself, which lends additional evidence to my prior claim that the Destiny is the only well-defined character on the show. The ship took one look at the empty heads populating the hallways and said, “Well, these mouth-breathers aren’t going to do anything, so I guess it is all up to me.”

They ratcheted up the intensity by creating a situation wherein nearly everyone would die, in a desperate and pathetic attempt to make viewers care about the characters. Guess what? It worked. Seriously. I did wonder who would live and who would die. But when it all turned out to be nothing, I, as a viewer, felt like I’d been cheated – like I’d been forced to care about characters who, it turned out, were perfectly safe all along. I’m not saying somebody should have died. What I’m saying is that it is disingenuous to fake out the viewers in a cheap attempt to garner sympathy for the characters.

In last night’s installment, Eli actually said, “Why am I watching this on television?” My feelings exactly. Out of five episodes so far, every one follows the basic story of:

• Ship in trouble
• All going to die
• Ship out of trouble
• Not going to die
• … yet

Even “Star Trek: Voyager” had a more diverse first season than this. I want the next two episodes to follow any other format. Being on the verge of death/destruction is not the only story available to them. Some diversity in the scripts doesn’t seem out of line after a month’s worth of episodes.

I think I’ve been more than generous waiting for characters and the story arc to develop. I’ll even go further, given the 10 seasons of SG1 and five of SGA I’ve watched, and give them two more episodes to hit their stride. But, so far the franchise is, if I may, going down with the ship.

“Water”

I’m beginning to think the one word titles to each episode aren’t really titles at all. I’m beginning to think they represent the totality of each episode’s script. Either that, or it is some kind of Stargate Mad Libs:

The Stargate crew needs NOUN or the SOMETHING IMPORTANT will VERB. A(n) MILITARY RANK gets in trouble and only SOMEONE’S NAME can help.

The Macguffin (or non-Macguffin) of this week’s story was that, even though they stated last week that the star they passed through had completely recharged the ship, this week we quickly learn they had misspoken, and they didn’t have enough power to dial the stargate back to Earth. That seemed to me like whoever wrote the previous episode had accidentally created a great, big box of Hamdingers (a little reference for the MST3k fans out there) that the showrunners failed to notice, then had to fix in the subsequent episode (or else the series would have been over). From there they segued to water, or the lack thereof. And the next Macguffin, or the lack thereof.

It was nice to see the character of TJ move to the center ring, not because her character is better than any others, but because the actress who plays TJ is attractive, so there was at least something to look at.

Not wild about their choice of villain in this episode: Dust. And viewers of “Stargate: Atlantis” thought the wraith were devoid of character. How, exactly, does one make dust emote?

There was a little bit more humor in this episode, which was far too long a time in coming. One episode left for the series to wow me.