April 20, 2010

  • Why Stargate Universe is the Suck Part 1

    I’ve been a huge fan of Stargate ever since I started watching when SG-1 first started playing in syndication. It is an impressive franchise. Probably the best science fiction on television outside of Lost. But the latest incarnation of the franchise, called Stargate Universe, hasn’t yet managed to capture my admiration the way the previous two series did. This entry is an attempt to analyze my own feelings with regard to the show and come to an understanding of why that is.

    My least favorite episode across all of SG-1 and SG-A is an episode of Atlantis in season 2 called “Trinity”. I remember this episode unsettled and annoyed me almost to the point that I wanted to stop watching Atlantis altogether. Fortunately I didn’t, but the bad taste in my mouth that that episode left me with has never left me.

    To understand what I mean I have to give you a basic rundown of what happened in that episode. You see in “Trinity”, there are two separate subplots. In, the minor plot Teyla and the somewhat new character Ronon go to some random world and do something largely irrelevant to the overarching plot. However, what I recall about that is that during the course of the events Ronon betrays Teyla is a manner that greatly angers Teyla. Tayla ultimately accepts and understands Ronon’s reasons for the betrayal but threatens Ronon so that he will never betray their trust again.

    At the end of this tension filled trip, Ronon and Teyla come home to find Atlantis in an even more tense and uncomfortable place. Doctor Weir can be heard berating Rodney in the background over the events of the major plot of the episode.

    In said major plot, the Atlantis crew discovered a mysterious space station that generates limitless energy from a separate dimension. The ancients developed the station and were never able to make it work but Rodney becomes obsessed with trying to succeed where the ancients failed. Nobody else believes him. And the project would have gotten shutdown only Rodney begs Sheppard to trust him and on Sheppard’s recommendation the project continues. It fails. A solar system is destroyed and Rodney loses all the trust of Sheppard and Weir and just about everyone else on Atlantis that he had built up throughout the first two seasons. Sheppard tells Rodney it will take a while to earn back his trust.

    Sounds like a decent and interesting dramatic episode right? So what’s my problem with it? 

    Well partly it’s that the episode is weirdly anti-science unlike most of Stargate. More than that, it’s sort of anti-striving. It’s almost elevating caution to a Good in itself and doesn’t really take seriously the idea that progress does indeed very frequently require the taking of risks. The show presents the idea only to tear it down brutally while taking Rodney along with it. That bothered me a lot.

    There’s also the fact that this episode was clearly a not too subtle commentary on the super colliders that are being developed here in the real world to test the fundamental laws of physics. It was likely inspired by the stories that got too much press about the possibility of creating black holes in them that were later dis-proven by the application of careful science and mathematics. That bothers me too because although I do believe science fiction can and should serve as warnings for possible risks to society that science can bring, that’s a little too heavy handed a commentary. It seems to be making a pretty clear statement that the possible rewards don’t outweigh the risks and cautioning us not to try. In effect it’s portraying scientists as being all arrogant and greedy in their pursuit of knowledge, doing it for the glory and the recognition and not a desire to pursue the truth. I think that’s utter nonsense.

    But really that’s not the heart of what bothered me about this episode. No, the real problem lies in the heavy handed supposed character “development” this episode tries to employ. The Teyla/Ronon plot feels like a forced conflict in order to give Teyla an opportunity to show that she can be more forceful and won’t let Ronon step all over her. But that struck me as unnecessary because Teyla had long since proven her mettle and toughness in previous episodes. It’s a solution to a non-existent problem.

    The Rodney subplot is worse. For some reason in this episode, Rodney exhibits all of his very worst characteristics. It feels as if he’s reverted to the way he was back in SG-1 or on his worst days in Atlantis.  He’s arrogant and condescending but in the “I’m truly a Jerk” kinda way more than the “I’m loveably annoying” kinda way he had grown into during the course of just the first two seasons of Atlantis. All that development was lost. He was just kinda a brat in this episode.

    Likewise the other characters have reverted. There’s no sense of trust or respect for Rodney that might have come from serving with him for two years and having had him save their butts numerous times even at incredible risk to himself despite his naturally more cowardly nature. Weir acts almost as if she doesn’t even care what Rodney’s opinion is and is looking for an excuse not to believe him. And I believe that distrust and lack of respect was a part of what drove Rodney to dig his heels in even more. He wanted desperately to “prove” himself. But like Teyla, why should he really need to?

    The reason they did all this is obvious. The writers wanted to establish the closeness of Rodney and Sheppard by having Sheppard be the only one who trusted him and vouched for him. And they wanted to use that tension created through Rodney’s failure to live up to that trust and needing to redeem himself as a plot hook for future seasons. And that’s fine. It’s just that the way it’s done feels really clunky. It doesn’t feel true to the characters as developed so far.  You’re seeing their distrustful arrogant prideful ambitious and angry bad sides throughout the episode and little of the nobility and courage we’ve seen throughout the rest of the series. None of the character come across looking good in this episode with the possible exception of Sheppard. I almost found myself hating them all. Everybody just feels kinda wrong. The end result is discordant. It feels like we’ve been listening to a brilliant guitarist play song after song only to find he plays the last song with the guitar way out of tune and with a string snapping at the end. It’s jarring. Unsettling.

    Stargate Atlantis later redeemed itself several fold over. No other episode that I’ve seen really left you with this kind of discordant feeling about its core characters and their relationships with one another at least. The characters grow together over time and become a deeper more close knit family in spite of their earlier travails.

    And best of all they managed to make use of the plot events from “Trinity” as the basis of one of my favorite episodes in the entire series: “McKay and Mrs. Miller”. The ways in which that episode is brilliant are numerous and would take too long to explain here. But it suffices to say that it is an episode that ADDS to the characters development and depth in a seamless way rather than a heavy handed stripping bare of the characters like what occurs in “Trinity”. Even though characters do make serious mistakes in “McKay and Mrs. Miller”, the overall tone of the episode doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable. Indeed you’re left with an overall good impression. Mistakes were made but through team work, ingenuity, and a little bit of self exploration catastraphe was averted. Really, that’s what I might label the Stargate Method. Because it’s how so many of the problems throughout both series are resolved. But not in “Trinity”.

    So what does all this rambling have to do with Stargate Universe? Well, it’s simple. In my experience, almost every single episode I’ve seen of Stargate Universe feels like that episode “Trinity”. They are ALL similarly heavy handed attempts at forced character development through stryfe.

    Maybe one or two episodes like this could be justified in the course of a larger story in order to build dramatic tension and create an overall darker tone for the series, but having EVERY episode like this is incredibly draining. I feel as if while I’m watching this show I’m adrift without an anchor. There’s nothing in the series grounded enough for me to let myself care about it.  Every single second of every episode I’m waiting for the next character to betray someone or make it clear to me how unlikable they are.

    I can’t stress enough how very different this is from the Stargate I’ve come to know and love. SG-1 was literally ALL about the close knit family like grouping of the four major characters and their leader Hammond.

    The chemistry between these characters was so important and so endearing and compelling that when one of them, Daniel Jackson, left and was replaced the fandom launched a huge campaign to get him to return to the series. The wording of the plea was revelatory. The first two bullet points on the Save Daniel Jackson campaign were:

    * We believe in the Stargate SG-1 team as a family of four disparate individuals deeply bonded by their shared history as they explore the universe.

    * We believe each of these individuals has a singular character, personality, knowledge, belief system and experience that makes them utterly irreplaceable, their interpersonal chemistry making the team greater than the sum of its parts.

    Those ideas of seeing the group as a family and stressing their interpersonal chemistry I think was indeed essential to the quality of the show. Whether you like or don’t like Jonus Quinn it’s hard to dispute that he didn’t fit into the group very quickly or as well as Jackson did. They had to build up new interpersonal relationships between him and the other characters slowly and create that sense of respect and family bond. It never quite stuck in the minds of many fans.

    With the later loss of Jack O’Neill in the series they faced a similar problem. They solved it by bringing in not one replacement, but TWO who were both established skilled actors and had worked together on the same show and already had a kind of on screen chemistry that helped blunt the impact of the loss of of O’Neill from the group. In addition, they also wrote it into the story that one of those two characters, Cam Mitchell started with an extraordinary amount of knowledge and respect for the three existing characters. He effectively saw them as his heroes. That pre-existening respect made it easier for the characters to work together. Lastly the other of the new characters Vala had previously appeared in an episode where she interacted directly with Daniel Jackson and that knowledge of each other carried over into the series.

    Even with all of this you can find many fans declaring the SG-1 effectively jumped the shark with the loss of O’Neill. That’s how big an impact he had on the show and the fanbase. It just wasn’t the same without him. But it still worked as a show because they core team still felt like a family. They remained close.

    In SGA the characters also feel like they are part of a close knit family. There is enormous prevailing mutual respect between the characters. Many of the interactions are endearing. You care about the characters. It gives you pleasure to see how they engage in good natured ribbing of one another. You see them acknowledge each others flaws without letting those flaws define their entire relationship.

    Stargate Universe is the opposite. The characters feel as if they are not close at all. Either they are not a family or they are a very very dysfunctional one. As such it’s not fun to watch anymore. It doesn’t give you that feel good feeling. You, or at least I felt uncomfortable, unsettled while I watched it. I was looking for a character or a relationship to really LIKE but the series wouldn’t let me. It only gave me reason after reason to be disgusted with the characters.

    Sadly I’m going to have to split this review into two parts because it’s getting late. So that’s it for part 1. In part 2 I’ll talk about specific aspects of the character relationships in Stargate Universe that are causing the story to breakdown and specific episodes that I deplored.  I’ll also draw comparisons between SGU and  Battlestar Galactica from which I feel the series gets a lot of inspiration. Lastly I’ll talk about my hopes for the future and how I think SGU can turn things around and become a series worth watching.

    Comments will be enabled on part 2 and disabled here so that we can keep the discussion in one place.