Question Stargate

I've been binge watching SG1 and SGA. Yes, this is a post about Stargate. Deal with it.

I've watched it before, but I never realised how great it is as a franchise of it's own. It takes itself quite loosely even when it's being serious (but not to the same degree as the Orville or Farscape), and it has a cast of interesting and very real characters.

It also has Roswell grayskins pretending to be the Norse gods, snake-like aliens masquerading as the Egyptian gods, Atlantis as a flying city-sized starship in the Pegasus Galaxy, and a explanation for pretty much every myth possible (for those among us uninitiated to the Stargate Program). Except what the Furlings are, and when we'll actually meet them. That is one of those things we'll never actually see for reals, outside of a TV show inside a TV show.

For those who haven't watched the show, Stargate is a franchise based on the 1994 film 'Stargate'. In Stargate, the protagonists of the show cross the universe using a network of ancient alien portals called 'Stargates', which allow instantaneous travel between different planets in the universe. In the film, the Stargate is used to travel to Abydos, a desert planet inhabited by Ancient Egyptians abducted by a race of aliens known as the 'Goa'uld' to serve as slaves on their worlds. The movie ends with Dr Daniel Jackson (the protagonist (a young, discredited archeologist with travel allergies) deciding to stay behind to remain with his love interest. If you think this sounds simular to Disney's Atlantis movie, then congrats!!! You have successfully realised that Disney ripped off Stargate's character of Daniel Jackson with that movie's protagonist. Alongside, like, 40% of the plot of Stargate.

Anyway, the movie later spawned Stargate SG-1, which is about how the failed program is revived due to the threat of Apophysis, a Goa'uld who kidnaps Daniel Jackson's wife and stepbrother, and turns them into hosts for other members of his kind. This then spawned two more TV series, and two feature length TV movies which were both pretty bad. It also recently spawned Stargate Origins, a miniseries detailing the backstory of the daughter of the man who found the Stargate, and who features prominently in the series.

Anyway, who else has watched the shows, and what is your opinion on it?

I watched Stargate too...

Ya spelt "Apophis" wrong... But wow, nice thoughts!

I've got no grand thoughts on the series / franchise, though. Just "I liked it".

Origins... Haven't seen that... Thanks for the info!

I confess I came late to Stargate. That's because, well, the original movie had a somewhat weird premise... and it was a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin movie. Every time I gave this duo a chance, I went in with low expectations regarding plot... and then discovered that I had overestimated them. Again. So I didn't see the movie when it came out, and when the TV series turned up, I figured it would be really bad -- I mean, you start with a bad movie with a bad premise, you don't expect good things to come out of it.

But then a friend convinced me to give it a try. That was probably around... 6th season? The one without Daniel Jackson. Yeah, my first Stargate experience was during the Jonas Quinn season. But it was still pretty good, and soon I was hooked.

The TV series had nothing to do with the Emmerich/Devlin duo -- that's probably why it was good. A further proof: Emmerich *hated* the series, and he went around trying to sell the idea of a new Stargate movie which would ignore the series entirely and take it all in a different direction. Fortunately the rights holders didn't listen to him...

I think the Stargate franchise owes its success to a number of things. Good cast, for starters -- all the main cast are great. A sense of humor, meaning that it's not a comedy but the characters aren't humorless drones and do silly stuff like anybody else. That's probably part of why the USAF loved the series -- it portrays the military as smart, professional, dedicated, well-rounded people, not stuffed uniforms. Villains with the right balance of dangerous power and stupid arrogance -- making the Goa'uld tech scavengers with little capacity for creative thinking was a touch of genius, which gives an explanation to how the technologically inferior Earthlings manage to defeat them all the time. And even the villains get a nuanced view -- the Goa'uld have their own dissidence, the Tok'ra, who prefer to cooperate instead of dominate.

And, of course, nothing of this can hold together without good scripts. I'm not saying that the Stargate franchise didn't have its turds and stupid ideas -- but overall, they averaged good, with some really inspired episodes, and generally speaking an approach relying more on the characters than on technobabble.

What's really fun about the series is that it spanned a period of time that had major technological changes. In the beginning they were using CRT monitors on computers that used 3.5" floppy disks and over the years that progressed to LCDs, thumb drives and then laptops (I'm ignoring Stargate: Atlantis' use of Microsoft's early attempts at tablets *shudder*). Watching the evolution of cell phones is also fun.