http://bluejacket.com/usn/images/sp/ss/ssn21_seawolf_interior.jpg
Doesn’t look too bad.
I was in a weird spot with SGU. When I was watching it, I enjoyed it immensely, but when I’m not watching it I couldn’t give two shits about it. I stopped trying to keep up with it the moment I heard it was canceled.
I don’t think they were necessarily wrong to make it a darker, character-driven show, but when you want to showcase the characters, you need to make them likable. I understand that one of the aims the creators had was to make a show where nobody is perfect and everyone has a dark side, but mostly it just ended up that all but a few characters were Jerkasses. Some, like Young, you could identify with, but even he was a Jerkass I didn’t really care for. The only two characters that were genuinely likable were Greer and Eli, and Eli got shat on every damn minute. I wanted to shoot Chloe out an airlock for being both utterly useless and being an unnecessary point of frustration and stress for Eli. I could only care less about Scott if he were part of the background lighting.
The military/civilian thing pissed me off too. The civilians just came off as whiny power-grabbers.
It did have its moments of brilliance, and Rush was a very compelling character (at least until he started diving into Crazy Jerkass territory after he found the bridge). Not to mention I could listen to Robert Carlyle talk all day. But when you spend most of your time watching the show wishing that half the crew was dead…yeah, it’s not so compelling.
It didn’t have hardly any likable characters, and it was constant character drama drama drama and they were all annoying. The only ones we kind of liked got screwed over all the time. We quit watching when Eli’s girlfriend got killed (which means we stuck with it for a long time!).
I’ve never watched Universe, but I have watched the other Stargate shows.
Yes, the stones are an established technology. However, they were used rather sparingly, as they were Ancient technology that humans didn’t understand very well, and it was really hard to switch people back.
While I missed the tail end of Atlantis, I’m pretty sure they were only used once in SG1. And, at that time, thw switch was only one way and hard to revoke.
That’s what those shows did right: new, possibly story breaking technology was never overused.
The stones were used, I believe, only once in SG1. That was to kick off the start of the Ori arc in season 9. The problem with the stones in SGU was that apparently all they were used for was intergalactic booty calls, as opposed to constantly having a team of experts on the ship at all times.
This is a bad thing?
And you know, that always bugged me. It always seemed like some sort of rape- I’d certainly feel violated if I found out that someone used my body to get laid while I was getting work done. I wonder how many SG members suddenly found themselves with an STD or pregnant?
Oh yeah, to me it was a huge problem that was just ignored. I’m pretty sure using someone else’s body for sex without their consent is a horrifying thing to do, and yet it was treated as fine and dandy. Sure, it’s just fine to use Scheming Asian Woman’s body for sex with Rush, she won’t mind, even though she’s a lesbian!
I had high hopes when I started watching the series thinking that it would be adult, dark and unpredictable.
I thought with all of an unknown universe before them it would be imaginative and thought provoking, with the feel of real danger.
As opposed to S.T. where you knew that everyone except for the new security bloke would be all right in the end, and everyone lived in a shirtsleeve, fluffy even, environment.
But it turned into a squabble fest, all the dangers of the unknown surrounding them and they spend the majority of their time arguing and playing politics .
More of an extreme Soap then good S.F.
This about sums it up for me. It’s the same reason I stopped watching Lie To Me and why I probably wouldn’t like House. I don’t like watching assholes who get their way when they should be booted. I get sick of assholes especially when I have a choice. Granted, in SGU they didn’t have a choice, but I did and I don’t want to watch these jerks.
I agree only Eli and Greer were sympathetic and likable. I wanted to agree with the civilians but after their coup, I couldn’t. They turned out whiny and wanting more than they should. It can’t be like at home because this isn’t home!
However, I really agree that when I was watching it, it was great. But sometimes, to get the motivation to watch it, was really tough. I found that if I waited three episodes and could watch that much in a row, it worked well. However, at the end of my viewing, I had five episodes and when I heard it was canceled, I deleted them all with no problems.
There’s one of those Kino feed webisodes that basically explains that anyone who volunteers to use the stones (on both sides) does so knowing that the person on the other side basically has free reign to do what they want.
Dude, that is just not good enough. Not blaming you, but that’s a rotten rationalization. “I have to switch bodies in order to perform a highly technical job that no one else in existence can do. But on my off time I’ll go have sex with someone who my host hates, or who may well have an STD.”
Well, it’s a two-way street, each side can do that.
Here’s the vid I was talking about:
http://stargate.mgm.com/view/content/2104/index.html
Red Dwarf was way ahead of Stargate in that case.
That doesn’t mean each side would want to. And in the original series, that wish would have been respected.
The series seems more like Stargate: Torchwood than a spiritual successor to the original.
So, two wrongs make a right then?
Do you watch the video? Is a volunteer thing, and the people who do it know that they’re switching with someone who is going on a personal visit. They consent to their bodies being used for various activities, including sex.
But they’re doing that because it’s In The Script, not because it’s an ethical and realistic thing for human beings to do. My problem is with the scriptwriters who came up with the idea in the first place.
And I’m convinced they did it for the scene where
Lou Diamond Philips ‘loses carrier’ and shows up, for a moment, in mid-coitus, with a stranger.
You just know it was all built up for that. But I must admit it was a convenient plot device to explore how
true relationships are and just how quick ‘gold digging boyfriend’ moved onto the next girl
Huh, SG:Atlantis had similar skeevy sex issues with that one (or two?) episodes with Richard Kind playing a guy who gets women to sleep with him via a magic potion. This was presented as fun and high-larious, and not like date rape via roofies like it actually was. From what I remember from fansites, etc, the producers of the show could see no problem with this and thought fans who protested were overreacting.