Tom McGee's Blog

Without cramming a lot of backstory into a brief time, the way they do in science fiction TV shows, LF and I were fans of the Stargate SG1 series for a long time. So Friday night we tuned in with some interest to the newest contender in the series on SyFy, Stargate Universe.

[Note: The official website almost crashed Firefox in Vista. Not like making Vista slow down to a crawl is something you need teams of Chinese cyber-warfare researchers to do, pretty much just boot up your PC and you're all set. But anyway.]

The series kicks of with a bang. A slow pan of a mysterious ship from the outside, then travelling shots through the empty, gloomy interior. Follow the halls to a Stargate, which suddenly turns itself on and, with the signature bulb of water, opens to a host of soldiers and civilians who seem to be hurled through it from the other side. Battered, bloody sometimes, singly and in groups, suitcases, boxes of supplies, weapons. Some 80 of them all together make their way through, and their confusion over where they are is palpable. The rest of the two-hour premiere follows their first few hours trying to decipher the basic mysteries of the ship (such as, why is the oxygen disappearing) and filling in the hours leading up to the calamity they were escaping from.

I know there’s nothing new under the sun; but perhaps there’s something new under other suns? SGU contains a mix of character devices and plot twists borrowed from a slew of other TV shows and movies.

There’s the questionable scientist: Will Dr. Rush turn out to be Dr. Smith — poor social skills and evil — or Rodney McKay — poor social skills but a really great guy? Will the competing factions learn to trust each other and cooperate, the same way they did on “Star Trek Voyager”? Is the nerdy kid right out of “The Last Starfighter” or what? Are they going to play the mysterious ship they’re on and solve its puzzles the same way I used to play Myst? Will we be doing a crappy planet-of-the-week thing like “Lost In Space” or a cool one like “Star Trek TNG”? Will they flesh out the backstories of all the characters in quick flashbacks, like in “Lost”? Will the non-technical Senator meet an ironic demise like in “X-Men”?

Actually, that last one is answered in the premiere. As for the rest of the questions, we’ll have to see whether they draw on the best of these models, or the worst. There was enough good in the gritty premiere to make it worth my while to tune in again next Friday, though enough cliches to make me keep the remote handy.