STARGATE: UNIVERSE
February 15th 2010 00:23
Category: Videos, Television
Imagine if you will a vast ancient starship hurtling through the celestial void between stars and galaxies within realspace, a vessel accelerating ever closer to lightspeed and not going through the time honoured sci fi convention of hyperspace. Now picture this vessel having within its hoary depths a Stargate, a device which can create an artificial wormhole and result in literally instantaneous travel. This is the setting for the latest Stargate television series to make its way onto the idiot box. Strangely though this series did not make its debut on free to air like all other previous television incarnations of the Stargate franchise, instead it was first shown on pay TV. Is it a shape of things to come, free to air networks declining to take sci fi shows as they’re either a) too nerdy or b) they haven’t the slots to put them at an ungodly hour as they’ve already been taken up? The shape of things to come one wonders although I have to admit in the case of this series it might not be such a bad thing.
Coming in at just eighteen minutes over two hours this extravaganza of a pilot covers effectively the initial three opening episodes of the series. Frankly I couldn’t make it to the close of the first episode, for me it was essentially a story that seemed to be populated by a cast of whiners, whinging about events out of their control and engaging in placing the blame on everyone else but themselves rather than trying to do something constructive about their situation. And after about twenty minutes straight of this even the most diehard or jaded fan in my opinion would find things hard going, if not yelling at the screen “Get over it moron!” Certainly I felt like this along with wanting to get my money back and wondering if I could somehow get a team of ninjas to go to the studio and rearrange the furniture in revenge.
But hang on there GL; doesn’t SG: Atlantis have a crew comprised of civilians involved in its drama? Certainly it does but there is a rational reason for them being there. The expedition that was sent to Atlantis was a joint military and civilian enterprise; there was distinct rationale for civilians being involved. In SGU it seems as if the writers and producers were looking for a way to get the drama rolling and settled for the cop out of, ‘Hey let’s have the cast flee through the Stargate and end up on this weird big ship’. I thought the makers could have done a far better job of bringing this series to light considering their previous track record. In fact I don’t see why they just didn’t go with a small team going through the gate and getting stuck, then having the base get attacked and take events from there it would probably work just as well in fact better than what they did run with.
Naturally it would be easy to say to me, aha but shouldn’t you have watched the whole thing, and you know to a certain degree you are right. Sad to say though, after thirty minutes I felt that I was going to lose just over two hours of my life to something that at the end of the day wasn’t worth losing that amount of time to. There were better things I could have been doing, such as washing my hair, having a shave or sitting back and enjoying a glass of fine amber fluid, perhaps even cutting my toenails. Trying to watch this was a chore, and frankly watching something be it a movie, a television program or a DVD should not be a chore, if it gets to that stage its nor worth watching. After thirty minutes I could well and truly tell it was a major chore.
Stargate: Universe is a big disappointment, what the makers were thinking when they came up with this piece of tripe is a mystery probably better off left unanswered lest it shatter the very cosmos. It makes you think that they would have better off not bothering in the first place, which is a sad thing to say considering the effort that has been put into making the other two series. Somehow I don’t think SGU is really going to catch on, it’s no longer being aired on Channel Ten, which was the free to air network that had started screening it on a Monday nights at a fairly reasonable time slot. And from what I can gather is that it hasn’t been relegated to a midnight time slot, so either it had an extremely short pilot season or Ten just didn’t think it was worth it. Has to be possibly one of the few times I am likely to agree with a major commercial network on something if that’s the case.
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