Binge watched this a while back while sick, and I found it easily the best Stargate incarnation and honestly a damn good scifi show that at least attempted to take a more realistic and hard scifi angle.
Some of the early episodes involved finding water, minerals to use to fix the CO2 scrubbers, etc. There was a lack of rubber forehead aliens, they encounter some obviously non-sentient aliens(water sucking “flies” and large arachnids) and toward the end of the first season some intelligent aliens but I liked how they handled it.
I absolutely HATED the goddamn communication stones, what is the point of stranding your protags in another galaxy if they can go back to earth every episode by switching bodies?! It ruined the premise.
Kind of sorry this was cancelled.
EDIT:It definitely got more like the rest of the franchise near the end, the woman who was pregnant and worried? Don’t worry the baby will rapidly age and become a saviour child. But the first season was damn good.
I liked how they took a bunch of actors I hadn’t really seen in much before and got some great performances out of them. The one I had seen, Alaina Huffman, I had only seen as Black Canary in Smallville, and I just hated her in that. Must have been the makeup or the way they did her superpowers. Also great seeing Robert Carlyle in a lead role.
And, yes, generally good SF, except for all the Deus Ex Machina… “Aaaah, we’re all about to die… oh, wait. No, we’re good. Darn those pesky Ancients for not leaving a manual around…” I don’t know if it really counts as DEM if you go into the series with the premise of “The ancients were (literally) one step short of becoming gods, so their tech can do anything.”
I kinda liked the episode where they are low on fuel, all of a sudden the ship heads straight for a sun and everyone is panicking and drawing lots to see who gets to go on the shuttles…and the ship just skims the sun and opens scoops to suck up hydrogen?
I was like uh duh guys isn’t the ship more than a million years old and automated, how exactly did you think it was refueling this whole time?
Would have been perfect if the people who left were flat stranded lol!
I liked it just fine. The Stargate creative team has never been afraid of freely borrowing from other sci fi stories, but the “dark & edgy” theme seemed like a really gratuitous copy of Battlestar Galactica. The communication stones had a lot of potential and could have been fun, but they didn’t use them that way.
Agreed on all counts. The stones could have been a decent plot device if they used them once or twice a season, like on Atlantis where they only opened a gate to Earth every once in awhile. The whole love-triangle-across-the-universe had me rolling my eyes so hard I was falling over and then they just kept milking it with those stupid stones and I really started to lose interest.
Honestly can’t even remember who the villains were, or even the names of the main characters, and I don’t usually forget details like that. Definitely not a good sign of a quality show. I remember every other Stargate series character like clockwork and can remember character names from a lot of shows I didn’t care much for, but nothing registered for me with SGU.
I totally agree with grude on that bit with the ship refueling by skimming along the surface of a star being the most memorable moment though. That was so cool I actually got goosebumps. Shame it was all kinda downhill from there; I really thought the show had potential after that episode.
Kinda reminded me of BSG or even Lost: initially really intriguing but degenerated into a lot of hackneyed quasi-religious deus ex whatever melodrama instead of quality storytelling and stellar exploration.
