Most people realize their own mortality at some stage of the game Eli. It’s not a particularly original experience. The question is, did it change you? Did it inspire you to make something of this short existence that we have?
Spoken by the character Dr. Rush in Stargate Universe episode 1.08 – Time
I’m rewatching the show. I was gifted the DVD’s last Christmas and I have some time so I’m watching them. There are hints of so many shows that came before it in the show. Star Trek: Voyager. The Prisoner. I’m reminded most strongly of the first episode of Voyager. What Paramount did injustice to in the first episode, the SGU producers spread out over a season and more.
I mean, imagine the Maquis being brought on board Voyager and not being forced into uniforms they swore to never put on again a few short years earlier. People who were the enemies of Starfleet and the Cardassians equally (Deep Space Nine) a rogue military trying to find their own purpose and justice in an Alpha Quadrant gone mad from their perspective, forced onto a Starfleet vessel due to the destruction of their own vessel, trapped in deep space an impossible distance from anyplace they might think of as home. The two hostile groups gradually growing to acknowledge the fact that they have no choice, that they have to learn to work together, a plot that progresses gradually over the course of twenty episodes.
Telling the story that needs to be told rather than trying to fit into a predefined narrative that the producers think that the fans will demand of any property that carries the name Star Trek. That is what Stargate Universe tried to be. It was a noble effort. SyFy had tried and failed to recreate the magic of Stargate: SG1 once already with the spin-off Stargate Atlantis. The show ran a respectable five years, but it didn’t survive beyond the end of SG1’s series run.
When they came up with the idea of Stargate Universe they tried to break the mold of the previous two shows and do something grittier and more real. Something more like the revisioned Battlestar Galactica but still different from that even. Maybe the producers of Voyager were right. Voyager certainly lasted longer than Stargate Universe did. For some reason I don’t think it was the writing that kept Voyager running so much as it was die-hard fans not willing to give up on their favorite show.
SG1 fans on the other hand hadn’t had to wrestle with decades of trying to get their show back on the air. It ran long enough that even the veteran actors were ready to call it quits when the show ended. They’d told their stories and the fans had gotten their fill of the Stargate universe in the meantime. There wasn’t much left to tell in that universe unless they went farther out, and Atlantis had already gone to a neighboring galaxy. What was left? Maybe explore the story of the Ancients? See what else they might have been up to when they checked out of the whole corporeal existence gig?
It was worth a shot. It’s just too bad they didn’t get a longer run before SyFy pulled the plug. It’s cancellation gave me another excuse to unsubscribe from my cable provider. But still. It would have been nice to find out more about where the Ancients were going. There is always fanfic, I guess. I won’t be reading it.
